[hardy-l] Hardy's endings (was Tess's ending)

[Richard Nemesvari]

I might argue that there's a world of latitude in the idea that Hardy provides "what could be termed a happy ending" in nearly half his novels, and suggest instead that he is the master of the ambivalent ending, especially in his earlier texts.  Fancy Day marries Dick Dewy, but is left thinking "of a secret she would never tell" (i.e. that she came within an inch of throwing him over for the vicar), and the church musicians are finished.  I don't think there's any doubt about the unhappy (and macabre) closure of *A Pair of Blue Eyes,* with Elfride dead and Smith and Knight sharing a train with her coffin.  Bathsheba's marriage to Oak has produced all kinds of famously conflicting critical responses (leaving aside the madness and murder that make it possible), while Ethelberta's marriage to her supposedly-reformed, senior citizen roué of a nobleman isn't exactly celebratory.  In *The Trumpet-Major* Anne chooses to marry the inferior brother, while John goes off "to blow his trumpet until silenced for ever upon one of the bloody battle-fields of Spain," and Paula Power's final evaluation of her union with Somerset is "'I wish my castle wasn't burnt; and I wish you were a De Stancy!'" Then there's poor Lady Viviette Constantine, dying in the moment of her "amazed joy" as St. Cleve declares his fidelity, and I don't think anybody is going to argue that Pierston's situation at the end of *The Well-Beloved* (admittedly a later narrative) is especially successful.  I've left *Desperate Remedies* until the end because it has the most apparently positive conclusion (villains vanquished, hero marries heroine, etc.) but Hardy's use of sensation fiction conventions is so overdetermined in that text that there's more than a whiff of irony.

 

Hardy is simply not willing to leave his audience with the comforting sense of resolution provided by unproblematic happy endings, and it seems to me that that aesthetic is in place from start to finish.

 

 

Richard Nemesvari

Department of English

St. Francis Xavier University

rnemesva at stfx.ca

 

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