Summary & Analysis of "Hardy's Moments of Vision"

Summary:

One of the pieces of criticism I read and chose to focus on is called "Hardy's Moments of Vision" by Virginia Woolf. Reading her piece helped me a lot because she put into words some of the things I was also feeling about Tess, but didn't know exactly how to state them. Woolf highlights many of the things that make Hardy's novels great pieces of literature, namely that he has these 'moments of vision' that make up for the other less great parts of the story. She calls Hardy's 'moments of vision' "those passages of astonishing beauty and force which are to be found in every book he wrote" (401). According to Woolf, these moments are gone as suddenly as they appear, but they leave a profound effect on readers nonetheless. She also talks a lot about the kinds of characters Hardy writes, and how they are less like individuals and more like types. She, however, does not see this as a negative thing. Woolf does admit that Hardy has some faults in his writing, but she says, "If we are to place Hardy among his fellows, we must call him the greatest tragic writer among English novelists" (405).

Analysis:

It was clear throughout reading her piece that Woolf had a lot of respect for what Hardy was doing with his writing. I especially liked the way she described Hardy's characters because that was a big point we all debated about in class. We agreed that we wanted to see more of Tess's individual thoughts, feelings, and motivations--especially during the important parts like the murder scene--but Hardy does not give that opportunity to readers. In fact, in many parts of the story I found myself wanting to hear a little more directly from Tess just how she felt about things, but she was always a little distant. In Woolf's piece, she argues that Hardy does this sort of thing with all of his characters because they are supposed to represent more of a type of person than a real, individual one. She states that his characters are "eternal," and says, "We meet them over and over again in the novels, and they always have something typical about them, more of the character that marks a race than of the features which belong to an individual" (402). Taken altogether, the characters in Hardy's novels are supposed to give off more of a hazy impression than have specific characteristics, so it would make sense then that we aren't always able to hear Tess's thoughts. If this is what Hardy is indeed doing, it would seem that Tess and Angel and Alec and everyone are kind of symbols for something bigger about life, than just there to tell a story about a woman who has a tragic end. The part I struggled with in the novel was that it's obvious Hardy has a lot of bigger ideas about society and life in general he's trying to express through Tess, but it's difficult for me to pin down exactly his intentions when he's only giving these hazy and incomplete impressions and types of characters instead of more specifics.

Summary & Analysis of "Critical Reception of Tess of the D'Urbervilles"

Summary:

I loved reading the critical reception for Tess of the D’Urbervilles because I’m still a little unsure how I feel about the novel overall, and it’s interesting hearing how others during that time period reacted. Many of the reviews were positive; for example, the reviews called it “a most moving presentment of a ‘pure woman’” (The Pall Mall Gazette), “not only good, but great” (The Athenaeum), and “one of [Hardy’s] most powerful novels” (The Spectator). Others are not so positive, such as The Saturday Review, which states, “It matters much less what a story is about than how that story is told, and Mr. Hardy, it must be conceded, tells an unpleasant story in a very unpleasant way” or the correspondence between Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, in which Stevenson writes, “Tess is one of the worst, weakest, least sane, most voulu books I have yet read.” James simply replies that Tess is “vile.” My favorite piece to read of all of these was the interview with Thomas Hardy. He defends the character of Tess by saying, “I consider that she was to all intents and purposes a pure woman till her last fall” (388). I liked getting the author’s own opinion about Tess, despite all of the critics against both him and her.

Analysis:

The most compelling piece to me was the one from The Illustrated London News by Clementina Black because she recognizes that Tess of the D’Urbervilles is not going to be popular according to most of the public, but that this fact reveals more about society’s opinions rather than reflecting a lack of talent of Hardy’s part. She states, “The conventional reader wishes to be excited, but not to be disturbed; he likes to have new pictures presented to his imagination, but not to have new ideas presented to his mind. He detests unhappy endings, mainly because an unhappy ending nearly always involves an indirect appeal to the conscience.” She goes on to say that Tess of the D’Urbervilles is “a challenge” for readers (383). In other words, the reason readers were reacting so negatively to the novel was because Hardy was challenging their traditional notions about something controversial like women’s purity. Readers of the time were disgusted with the character of Tess and hated the ending of the book, but Black points out how they just wanted a simple, happy ending like what they were used to. Tess of the D’Urbervilles makes readers really think about tough questions in life, which is one of the reasons I liked reading the book so much. Black sums up the novel nicely by saying, “Its essence lies in the perception that a woman’s moral worth is measurable not by any one deed, but by the whole aim and tendency of her life and nature” (383). This statement led me back to thinking about Angel. He seemed like such a free and progressive thinker , definitely not someone who would go back on his love for Tess because of one aspect of her past. However, that is exactly what Angel did, which is why I think I almost dislike him more than Alec in a way. Angel recognized eventually that Tess is so much more than just her past ‘misdeeds’, but he already broke her heart before he realized it. I think the outcome in the end could have been much different if he would have just behaved differently. But, then again, Tess’s fate was meant to be (as Hardy says) and maybe nothing could have changed her actions.

Summary & Analysis of "Women, Energy, and Middlemarch"

Summary:

The piece of criticism I chose to read is written by Lee R. Edwards and is called "Women, Energy, and Middlemarch." Edwards discusses how the issue of energy is shown throughout Eliot's novel, especially in regard to the female characters. She specifically focuses on the characters of Dorothea and Rosamond, saying that, even though the two are definitely opposites, they both have this energy that readers can feel in the book. Edwards feels that both women have this strong energy, but that both are unable to become what they really want to (and probably could become) due to the fact that they are female. For Edwards, Dorothea is the biggest disappointment of the novel because she shows so much promise in the beginning of really becoming someone who could affect the world. By the end, she is merely a wife and mother, only able to do what she's passionate about through her husband. Edwards is not happy with the fact that Eliot has Dorothea marry Will Ladislaw, but she states, "The objection is not that Dorothea should have married Will but that she should have married anybody at all" (628).

Analysis:

I chose to write about Edward's piece because I truly agreed with everything she said regarding the female characters. As readers, we have to acknowledge that the Victorian age was a different time period and that women just couldn't really have independent lives, but I still found myself hoping that Eliot would end the novel with Dorothea doing great things as a reformer. Even Rosamond has goals--even though they are just to move up in society--but she too cannot do anything without the help of a husband. Edwards is exactly right in pointing out how Dorothea is such a great character. She says, "I saw in Dorothea an endorsement I had found in no other book I had read of energy and social commitment on the part of a woman in combination, as I believed, with the promise that these qualities did not render the possessor either a social misfit or a danger to herself or others" (624). In other words, Edwards (and I too) believed that Dorothea was going to be a new kind of female character not defined by the males in her life. When she marries Will, she gives up her own dreams and settles on being a wife. It's true that she has realized that she loves him, but it's hard to swallow as a reader because he gets to have the career that Dorothea always wanted herself. It makes me wonder if there were any other options for Eliot in regards to the female characters. I find myself wishing that the novel could have been written just 50 years later so maybe there could have been different opportunities for both Rosamond and Dorothea. It seems like Eliot had pretty modern opinions, but ultimately let her novel continue to reflect the status quo of the position of women during the Victorian period.

Summary & Analysis of "Contemporary Reviews of Middlemarch"

Summary:

I chose to read four contemporary reviews for this post. I read "Middlemarch" by Sidney Colvin, "George Eliot's Middlemarch" by Henry James, "George Eliot" by Joseph Jacobs, and "On Middlemarch" by Leslie Stephen. Colvin's review was written in 1873 and has a lot of good words to say about Eliot as a writer. He talks about how Eliot had 'two worlds' she dealt with: the first world is everything Eliot experienced in her own personal life, and the second world is her reflection on that experience. Colvin argues that this ties into the way Middlemarch is written because he sees a contrast between the 'matter' of the piece--the antiquated characters, setting, and plot in general--and the 'manner' in which Eliot writes about them--which Colvin argues is quite modern. James' review was written in 1873 also, but his review is more critical than some of the others. James claims Middlemarch is a "treasure-house of details, but an indifferent whole" (578). He praises Eliot for her characters and acknowledges her superb writing, but also believes she missed some opportunities in the novel (which I'll talk more about in my analysis). Jacobs' short review was written in 1891 and basically talks about the morals and ethics at play in Eliot's novels. He calls Middlemarch "a criticism of life" (581), and argues that Eliot's sense of morality is what sets her novels apart from anyone else's in the Victorian era. Stephen's review was written in 1902 and found both positives and negatives in the novel. He argues that the 'moral' of Middlemarch "would apparently be that the desirable thing is to do your work well in the position to which Providence has assigned you, and not to bother about 'ideals' at all" (585). However, Stephen argues that in spite of this message, Middlemarch is still "clearly a work of extraordinary power, full of subtle and accurate observation" (586).

Analysis:

Henry James' piece was the most fascinating piece of criticism to me because I really respect him as an author already, and he brought up many interesting points about the novel that I hadn't thought about in much detail. He calls Middlemarch "at once one of the strongest and one of the weakest of English novels" (578), and it seems like he believed that the novel had so much potential, but ultimately fell short. One of the issues he took with the novel is how Eliot has a tendency to "make light of the serious elements of the story and to sacrifice them to the more trivial ones" (579). When I read that statement, I knew exactly what James meant because there were many times in Middlemarch where I wanted to (for example) spend more time in Dorothea's mind, hearing her thoughts about her disastrous marriage or see more of Fred and Mary's relationship. These are big issues, but they get the same amount of coverage as smaller details that don't seem to have much importance to the overall themes of the novel. However, I could see the reason Eliot might be doing this on purpose. Middlemarch is supposed to be a comprehensive view of life in a small town, which involves both large issues and small, seemingly unimportant issues. As readers, we really are getting a complete picture of what life is like for the different characters, and Eliot makes the 'big stuff' just as important to the characters' lives as the 'small stuff.' James also has a big problem with the character of Ladislaw. He states, "The figure of Will Ladislaw is a beautiful attempt, with many finely-completed points; but on the whole it seems to us a failure. It is the only eminent failure in the book." He goes on to state, "We have not found ourselves believing in Ladislaw as we believe in Dorothea, in Mary Garth, in Rosamond, in Lydgate, in Mr. Brooke and Mr. Casaubon" (580). James points out how Eliot intended Ladislaw to be the hero and Dorothea the heroine, but how Lydgate is the true hero of Middlemarch. I agree with James about the character of Ladislaw. He is one of the few characters in the novel that I just can't really connect with and don't feel any sympathy for; he just doesn't feel real. Lydgate, on the other hand, comes alive in the reading for me, and I love the section on page 182 where Dorothea and Lydgate come into contact with another after Casaubon's heart attack. They are both great characters that stand out, and I agree with James when he states that he wanted Lydgate and Dorothea to be the ones to end up together. Instead of that, however, Eliot has Lydgate get into an unhappy marriage, which makes sense for her purpose of showing the many disappointments in life. James points this out when he writes, "The author has desired to be strictly real and to adhere to the facts of the common lot, and she has given us a powerful version of that typical human drama, the struggles of an ambitious soul with sordid disappointments and vulgar embarrassments" (581). Ultimately, then, Middlemarch is an extremely successful novel despite the small flaws James illuminates.

Summary & Analysis of "Background Information on Middlemarch"

Summary:

The pages of background information I read were pages 528-538. The background information mostly consisted of letters George Eliot wrote to people such as Dr. Clifford Allbutt, John Blackwood, and her author friend Harriet Beecher Stowe. There were also various collections from her personal writings and journals. One of these concerns the meaning of the word 'form' in regards to art and poetry; another is about how to judge an author's worth; the third is simply titled "Story Telling" and are Eliot's ideas about how a story needs to be told.

Analysis:

The last two pieces I mentioned, "Judgements on Authors" and "Story Telling", were the most interesting to me to read. I thought they were interesting because they were ideas directly from Eliot's mind on issues that pertain to literature and writing, which were obviously her areas of expertise. She wrote that in deciding an author's worth, "It requires considerable knowledge of what he has himself done, as well as of what others had done before him, or what they were doing contemporaneously; it requires deliberate reflection as to the degree in which our own prejudices may hinder us from appreciating the intellectual or moral bearing of what on a first view offends us" (537). I thought this comment was interesting given what we've been talking about in class about how some of the novels of the Victorian period offended readers. For example, we discussed how a lot of the public didn't like Mary Barton or Charles Dickens' works because they dealt with themes and ideas that readers didn't want to face (i.e. poverty, prostitution, and violence). Many novels, including these, couldn't be fully appreciated in their time because the public had too many prejudices to recognize the novels' good points. According to Eliot's view, readers have to put that aside in order to decide which authors and novels are great. In "Story Telling" it was interesting how Eliot states that stories are more interesting that do not just start at the beginning and end at the end; instead, she talks about how (for example) introducing a stranger into the plot and then slowly revealing his backstory to the reader is much more exciting. I thought that was funny since that is essentially what she is doing with Lydgate. He is a newcomer to the town of Middlemarch, and it takes awhile for the narrator to say something along the lines of, 'If you want to know a little bit about Lydgate's past, listen up!' Eliot asks, "Why should a story not be told in the most irregular fashion that an author's idiosyncrasy may prompt, provided that he gives us what we can enjoy?" (538). This remark clearly stems from Eliot's preferred way of telling a story since the telling of her story is completely different and innovative for its time. She weaves so skillfully between all of the characters' lives, and (even though it can be a little confusing at times) it keeps me interested about what kind of characters I'm going to encounter next.

Summary & Analysis of "Class Antagonism and the Sexual Plot in Mary Barton"

Summary:

The piece of criticism I read is called "Class Antagonism and the Sexual Plot in Mary Barton," written by Deborah Epstein Nord and published in 1995. Nord discusses how two of the major themes of the novel (class antagonism and women's sexuality) at first seem like they don't really interact with each other and exist separately from each other. However, Nord points out how the two work together to bring about the turning point in the book and change Mary's character. She states, "The connection between Barton's fear for his daughter's chastity and his murder of Harry Carson, the man who threatens that chastity, is one of the elements in the novel that fuses the plot of class antagonism with the sexual plot" (571). The two themes come together at this point because Harry represents all the evils of the upper class and has been horrible to the workers, but he also treats women horribly and doesn't care about ruining their innocence, so to speak. Nord argues that John Barton has a double purpose in murdering Harry: obviously because of the economic situation, but also to preserve Mary's chastity. The turning point in the novel, according to Nord, occurs when John murders Harry. She says, "Mary is transformed from the passive subject of discussions of her sexual virtue and proper role to the active agent of her own fate" (572). In other words, all of the issues fueled by the class antagonism build up into the explosion that is the murder, which in turn allows Mary to have agency for the first time, tying back into the sexuality theme.

Analysis:

Even though everything Nord argued about the interplay between class antagonism and sexuality is really interesting, a smaller issue she brings up really caught my attention. Nord talks briefly about the character of Esther, who is one of the most interesting characters in the novel I thought. While readers during Gaskell's lifetime would have been horrified by Esther's character, Gaskell tries to redeem her a little bit. Nord points out, "By playing the card of the dying child, Gaskell reclaims Esther from her status as pariah and situates her within the framework of parental devotion and bereavement that weaves classes together in the novel and binds John Barton and the elder Carson to the author herself" (570). So, even though Esther is a prostitute, we are still supposed to have sympathy for her and see her similarly to Barton and Carson (and even Gaskell) who have lost children themselves. Nord stresses the similarity especially between Esther and Barton and discusses how they both become lost wanderers, outcasts from society, who die and are buried in the same grave. The aspect of Nord's criticism that made me think the most is how she points out how Gaskell must have understood that Esther's identity as a prostitute is clearly a "role created by society, not decreed by nature or by some higher morality" (570). In other words, Esther wasn't the horrible 'fallen woman' the other characters (and probably readers of that time) thought she was; in reality, her circumstances put her in that situation. The opposite of that role is shown when she goes to visit Mary and puts on the 'costume' of a middle class mechanic's wife. Esther is able to switch between roles, which suggests that Gaskell meant for there to be much more to her character than just a lowly prostitute living on the streets. In the end, Esther's character is redeemed somewhat and able to die in her home surrounded by her family, her daily struggles finally put to rest.

Summary & Analysis of "Contemporary Reviews of Mary Barton"

Summary:

I chose to look at two different reviews for this blog entry. I read Charles Kingsley's review from Fraser's Magazine and W.R. Greg's review from the Edinburgh Review. Both of these reviews were published in April of 1849. Kingsley wrote about how he thought Mary Barton should be "read aloud from every pulpit, till a nation, calling itself Christian, began to act upon the awful facts contained in it" (381). He states that people only need to read this novel if they are wondering why members of the working class are behaving in an 'abhorrent' way, why they are murdering, drinking, taking opium, and why they hate law and order. Kingsley believes Mary Barton shows precisely why the working class was behaving in such a way, even to the point of turning their backs on God. He praises Gaskell for her realism. W.R. Greg also praises Gaskell for the realism of the novel, but his praise is short-lived. He claims Mary Barton is "calculated...in many places, to mislead the minds and confirm and exasperate the prejudices, of the general public" (383). Greg also claims the novel is filled with "false philosophy and inaccurate descriptions" and even "exaggerations" on the part of Gaskell when describing relations between the workers and the masters (383). His review is interesting because he critiques the character of John Barton, argues that the working class only have themselves to blame for their poverty by not saving their money, and ends with the statement that "their fate and their future are in their own hands, and in theirs alone" (390).

Analysis:

For my analysis, I really want to focus on W.R. Greg's criticism, with specific emphasis on how he blames the poor for their own misfortune. After reading Mary Barton, it is clear to me that the majority of the horrible things that happen to the characters are not their own fault, but the fault of the society and system in which they live.The discussion in class in which we outlined the characters' misfortune due to their economic situation also helped illuminate this for me because almost everything bad we listed happened because of their poverty. Greg tries to argue that the members of the working class could be just as well off as their masters, saying that he truly believes that "wealth and independence could speedily become the rule instead of the exception" (388) among these people. Looking at the situation from a sociological point of view, you just can't blame the poor for these issues; it's a complex topic that cannot be explained away by those in the upper classes saying that they should just try harder to save their money. Greg's whole attitude toward the poor reminds me of the Poor Law Amendment of 1834 that we discussed briefly in class. Public assistance is supposed to help those in need, but during this time, the poor were instead characterized as 'idle' and 'dissolute,' and thus were blamed for their poverty more than actually helped. I was surprised that nowhere did Greg use the argument that God chooses some to be poor in their lifetime, while their true reward will come in heaven (which is another common argument for not helping the poor). He adopts a similar attitude, though, that the poor are just poor and nothing is going to change unless they decide to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. While Kingsley shows compassion and sympathy for the characters of Mary Barton (and the members of the working class in general), Greg only questions their work ethic.