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

[Richard Nemesvari]

I think Tony does well to pair *Far From the Madding Crowd* and *The
Return of the Native* as examples of the complexities of Hardy's
conclusions, because both reveal/expose the investment
nineteenth-century fiction has in determining happy endings by
evaluating concluding marriages.  Thus Bathsheba's eventual "proper"
marriage to Oak, and Thomasin's eventual "proper" marriage to Venn
("proper" in the sense that the texts' rhetoric seems to imply the
correct mates eventually find each other), provide an apparent return to
stability after extremely destabilizing plot twists.  It is for this
reason that Boumelha can argue for a "more or less happy ending" in her
Penguin introduction to *RN*, despite the terrible events that must
occur to bring it about.  But for me those destabilizing events provide
the excess that can't be compensated for by the marriages.  Thus
Boldwood's murder of Troy and eventual confinement in a madhouse, and
Eustacia's accident/suicide followed by Wildeve's death seem like quite
intentional subversions of the closure-through-marriage trope.  The
ambivalence of Hardy's endings arises from our uneasy sense that we are
being given the ending we supposedly desire, but that the author is also
prompting us to recognize the insufficiency of both that desire and the
trope providing it.  So I think *FFMC* and *RN* are different sides of
the same coin, in that Hardy is trying out variations on a theme, but
that by the time he gets to *RN* he's becoming less satisfied with even
the experimentation - thus his addition of a footnote attempting to
revoke the closure he actually provides.  Of course eventually he
chooses a full-on confrontation with the trope, in the disastrously
unredeemable marriages of Tess and Angel, Jude and Arabella, and Sue and
Phillotson, but by that point he has left ambiguity (of this type at
least) far behind.

 

 

Richard Nemesvari

Department of English

St. Francis Xavier University

rnemesva at stfx.ca

 

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