3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One complaint regarding editor Norman Page, February 15, 2007
Far be it for me to argue with a professor emeritus at the prestigious U. of Nottingham, and a highly regarded literary scholar, but I have an axe to grind with Norman Page about a notation. Regarding this passage on page 81:
"It was a young hand, rather long and thin, a little damp and coddled* from her slopping."
Page says "the meaning [of coddled] is obscure - possibly `warm' or `heated' is meant."
Anyone who cooks would recognize the word as meaning waterlogged in warm-to-hot water, as in a coddled egg. Ann Avice is, after all, a laundress, so she would naturally have dishpan hands.
I'd send this note to the publisher, but I can't locate the company online.
Otherwise, this is one of Hardy's finest novels, different in many meaningful ways from his previous novels. It's a must-read for a lover of Hardy, possibly more autobiographical even than "A Pair of Blue Eyes."
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Neglected Hardy, April 20, 2010
Jude the Obscure is often called Thomas Hardy's last novel, but 1897's The Well-Beloved came two years later. The latter would be significant for this alone, but it has many other points of artistic and historical significance; also, though far from Hardy's best, it is quite good in itself. All fans and critics should read it, not least because it was the last novel one of the world's greatest writers chose to give us and almost his last piece of fiction.
The book has an interesting and complex publishing history. Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles was rejected by his chosen serial publisher on sexual grounds, and he chose to cancel the contract and submit another serial later. The trouble he continued to have with Tess convinced him that his next novel, Jude the Obscure, would also be rejected, so he put it aside and wrote The Well-Beloved as the serial replacement instead. As this suggests, it appeared at a very important point. It was serialized just as Tess, which catapulted Hardy to worldwide fame and ignited a firestorm of controversy, was published as a novel. Though undeniably lesser, The Well-Beloved indeed shares much with Tess and Jude, not least in thematic terms. All three paint an extremely bleak picture of domestic life, particularly marriage, and otherwise heavily criticize other Victorian society aspects, sexual mores especially. Jude parallels are especially strong; some of The Well-Beloved narrator's marriage critiques were slightly modified and used in Jude, and there are obvious similarities between the books' heroines and their married interactions. All this would make the book invaluable to hard-cores and scholars as a snapshot of Hardy's thought and artistic concerns of the time even if it had no literary merit.
The Well-Beloved is also of historical interest for reasons not directly related to Hardy. Most notably, it deals with contemporary concerns and events in a way Hardy had not previously done. A proto-feminist, he had long been concerned with women's issues, and the times were finally beginning to catch up. Modern feminism was beginning in earnest, as many 1890s novels - e.g., Kate Chopin's The Awakening - reflect in various ways. Hardy was of course no exception. He famously said in a contemporary letter that his goal was - I am paraphrasing - to destroy the doll in English fiction in order for England to have any kind of fiction at all. The Well-Beloved is an early attempt, certainly less overt than Tess and Jude but leaning in their direction. The three main female characters are certainly not models of current feminism but stand far above Victorian clichés as bold women with independent streaks, individual touches, and some clear merits. Hardy is famous for his heroines, and the book's three Avices are among his most overlooked. His novels had idealized women almost from the start but in a way very different from other Victorian writers, much less the social ideal. This has fascinated feminists and had a profound influence on later writers like D. H. Lawrence and Marcel Proust. The Well-Beloved is the epitome of this tendency. The Avices are not Hardy's strongest, most independent, or most conventionally appealing heroines but are his most idealized. They are almost otherworldly in their attributes and, most importantly, their significance. It is mesmerizing to see how he works them into his narrative, and those interested in his life and thought will appreciate them as a glimpse into the mind of a man far ahead of his time.
Though obviously tame by later standards, the book was also astonishingly frank about related sexual issues. In an era when statues were covered and it was not even socially permissible to mention legs or ankles, it referred openly to premarital sex and its consequences, treats marriage with a lightness remarkable even now, and has several instances of cohabitation. This is of great interest as a portrait of an era. Laughable as it now is, many thought the book nothing less than pornographic. One critic infamously accused Hardy of sex mania, saying "Mr Hardy has once more afforded a dismayed and disgusted public the depressing spectacle of genius on the down grade." Particularly amusing are the euphemisms Hardy was forced to use; for example, he refers to the actual rural England practice of sex between couples with marriage contingent on pregnancy as the "ratification of their betrothal, according to the precedent of their sires and grandsires." There is also a good deal of sexual symbolism; as always with Hardy, Freudians will have a proverbial field day. Yet, also as always with him, these elements never overwhelm the story. Hardy clearly had a didactic purpose by now but was never preachy and very rarely heavy-handed. He makes what he has to say arise naturally - forgetting to do so being a fatal sin that many writers, especially late in their careers, unfortunately commit. Hardy is notable for avoiding it and, here as nearly everywhere, should serve as a model.
Related and at least as important is the book's central idea - that a man can have an ideal "Well-Beloved," perhaps more spirit than real, that manifests itself in individual women, causing the man to love them with a slavelike passion, but can switch to another woman without warning. It may last for days or years, and there may be long periods between, but the man is as loving and faithful as possible when it is there yet loses all interest as soon as it goes, causing an endless cycle. Many saw this as a mere ploy to exploit the "sex mania" Victorians seemed obsessed with, and it is now easy to assume Hardy was simply using it as a euphemism for unpopular ideas now considered commonplace. However, this sells him very short as both artist and thinker. It is in many ways the coalescence and culmination of various ideas pursued throughout his career. On one level, as noted, it is the apex of his female idealization. On another, perhaps more subtly, it is another instance of the fatalistic streak that increasingly dominated Hardy's fiction and became even more overt in his poetry. Based on Percy Shelley's "One shape of many names," the evil force inhabiting tyrants throughout history that enslaves the masses, it is Hardy's way of dramatizing what he later called "Love the Monopolist" and is another manifestation of what he eventually termed the "Imminent Will" - the blind force, slowly gaining consciousness, that rules the universe. Men have no control over The Well-Beloved; they can neither resist it nor make it stay. Some may still say this is a convenient way of skirting moral issues, which Hardy surely realized to his convenience, but he would not have thought in such simplistic terms.
As this suggests, the book has a fantastic quality distinctly opposed to Hardy's usual realist/naturalist fiction, and he indeed classed it with his "Romances and Fantasies." Other novels in this category - e.g., A Pair of Blue Eyes - have a similar air of unreality, but this is alone in being essentially allegorical. Hardy is famous - or infamous, depending on whom you ask - for complex plotting and exploitation of melodramatic coincidence, but this exceeds all others in being so implausible that it is almost impossible to accept at face value. His denouncers always assume that he lacked the skill to plot without relying on such things and that he uses them for shock value - in short, that he is amateurish. In fact, though, anyone who knows anything about him is well aware that it was very conscious artistically and philosophically - Hardy's way of dramatizing a universe where people are no more significant than any other element and just as much the prey of fate's "purblind doomsters." This is especially so here; Hardy had jotted down the Well-Beloved concept several years prior, also exploring it in contemporaneous poems, and thought of the book as a "fantastic little tale." Adding to the sense of unreality are light-hearted chapter titles that poke fun at the events and protagonist in a way Hardy never did elsewhere in fiction and rarely in poetry.
The Well-Beloved is in fact what no other Hardy novel is - an allegory. Hardy's painstaking attention to realist detail and some of his other characteristics make him an unlikely allegorist, but he succeeds admirably. The subject also ties the book to its era - the artistic ethos, shown by works like Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray to be a hot topic. The book is subtitled "A Sketch of A Temperament," and so it is - Hardy's depiction of one kind of artistic temperament, perhaps what he saw as the ideal or even the only one. The sculptor protagonist, Jocelyn Pierston, symbolizes all artists, The Well-Beloved symbolizes his muse, and his attempts to translate them into sculpture symbolize how artists transmute muse into art. All this is fairly obvious; the real interest comes in how Hardy shows the process' effect on everyday life and how the two play off of, and often conflict with, one another. Fantastical as it is, many see the novel as one of Hardy's most autobiographical, and there is much to support this. Those interested in his life and techniques will thus find much to engross them, but the important thing to focus on is his general point. Hardy unfortunately never formally formulated his aesthetic theory to the degree of many other Victorian writers, and this, his most purely aesthetic novel, may be the closest he ever came; fans and critics will want to read it for this alone.
Thankfully, though, there is far more. Different as it is from his other works in many ways, there is also much to attract fans. Chief among these is a profound sense of place. Perhaps no one equals Hardy in not only describing settings so realistically that verisimilitude is astonishingly vivid but also in making them an integral part of the story; setting for him is never mere...
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