The Framing of Hardy’s Wessex Tales

 

     Each of Hardy’s Wessex Tales is set in the past, just at the point of vanishing from living memory.  Several are placed in frames with a local resident recounting the narrative as part of local lore.  Those who would prefer a regionalist and realistic author might think his goal was to preserve vestiges of long Dorset tradition before they vanished altogether, and indeed Hardy does include certain geographically and historically specific details: the fear of a French invasion, the domestic manufacture of mead, and the coastal practice of smuggling, for instance.  Yet the stories’ appeal seems almost entirely elsewhere.  Though Hardy is generally considered a realist, this distancing is part of a contrary tendency.  Hardy’s unlikely short story plots favor heavy dramatic ironies and conclusions colored by his characteristic pessimism far more than they do the convincing reporting of detail.

     What is bleak in his narrative world, though, is in part occluded by the retrospective view, as nostalgia colors the narration.  His tone is further warmed in the framed tales by the pretense that the stories are being told, as in Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka or ghost stories told around a campfire, in an intimate social setting, simply to pass the time.  The irony, poetic justice, and, in some cases, surprise endings provide reader satisfaction in spite of the darker implications of Hardy’s world-view.

     “The Three Strangers” does present a vivid vignette of country life in the shepherd’s celebration of his growing family as well as implying certain assumptions about local conditions with the shocking harshness of penalties for arson and yet the suggestion that the hayrick burning may have been motivated by partisanship for the poor and thus to some extent supported by the population.  There is gentle humor in the host’s happy hospitality and the guarded frugality of his wife and, though the hangman plays a role, he is cheated of his victim. 

     Yet the principal impact of the story depends on unlikely coincidence and heavy dramatic irony.  The fact that a condemned prisoner and his assigned executioner are drinking at each other’s elbow unawares is surely the principal plot element that strikes the reader, placing the story close to the ironic twists that please readers of de Maupassant, O. Henry, and Saki.  This story does deviate from Hardy’s modern tragedies as it concludes with the escape of the guilty party, but the tone lingers in the concluding paragraphs with the death (in one case, the aging to “a sere and yellow leaf”) of everyone concerned.

     The slighter ”A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four,” the very title of which alludes to its semi-legendary character, arises from local history, but this supposed glimpse of Napoleon himself doing reconnaissance [1] really has little to do with the wars of Britain and France.  Like “The Three Strangers” the plot turns on a subterfuge, a strategic disguise and the story is told not for patriotic reasons but simply as a small marvel to be relished for its own sake.  When Solomon Selby launches into his narration, it is clearly as a performer wishing to amuse his audience.  He has assumed “his narrative smile,” indicating his readiness to relate an entertaining story, the literal truth of which is of little concern to anyone.   This tale, too, ends by recognizing the inevitability of mortality: for ten years the storyteller has lain “beneath a simple headstone.” 

     “A Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion” is likewise based on commonly known facts of history.  This story, too, clearly depends on dramatic irony and the most unlikely chance of Phyllis’s being misled by what she overhears her fiancé saying and then deciding not to meet her German lover.  Thus the story turns out badly for all and ends, as did the others, in the graveyard.  Hardy is drawn to incidents illustrating the myriad mischances of love in which history may play an accidental part. 

     In “The Withered Arm” his willingness to use superstitious elements to build a compelling story is given free rein.  The “spectre” whom Rhoda seizes, the effect on Gertrude’s arm, and the intervention of the folk healer are all inexplicable in rational terms, more decidedly preternatural than those to which Mrs. Radcliffe’s readers were accustomed.  Gertrude dies in distress, Rhoda survives, though “bent” and “haggard,” and Farmer Lodge lives a solitary life.  The bastard child is another sympathetic convict, one of whom evn the executioner says “if ever a young fellow deserved to be let off, this one does; only just turned eighteen, and only present by chance when the rick was fired. However, there's not much risk of that, as they are obliged to make an example of him, there having been so much destruction of property that way lately.”  This again, apparently, a crime thought to be the work of a radical just as in “The Three Strangers.”  Instead of graves, the story ends with a reference to Rhoda’s “sombre thoughts.”

     Hardy’s characters seem never to be able to sort themselves out into satisfactory relationships.  In “Fellow Townsman” Barnet’s mésalliance is contrasted with Downes’ happy marriage.  When Downe’s wife dies, he is stricken with feeling of guilt and frustration, but then his thoughts turn to Lucy whom he had once rejected as inferior.  As it happens, the more fortunate Downes asks her first, leaving Barnet unsatisfied in another narrative in which love is for the main character elusive.

     Likewise in “Interlopers at the Knap” Farmer Darton is hesitant to marry Sally and, after dithering, selects the indigent Helena when her husband dies.  This choice turns out to be unsatisfying and, after Helena dies, he attempts unsuccessfully to renew his relationship to Sally, but she will not have him then.  Once again, the windings of fate seem not only inevitable but hostile to the protagonist’s happiness.

     In the final story of the collection, “The Distracted Preacher,” a Methodist is sent to a remote town where he is attracted to Lizzie, but their relationship founders when he discovers that she assists the local smugglers.  Here again is a genuine element of local lore and some mild humor at the upright minister’s shock at finding many of his parishioners including the woman who has claimed his interest are complicit in illegal activity.  An endnote following the story informs the reader that the happy ending in which the couple do wed and move away from the site of the bride’s misdeeds was forced upon the author by editorial mandate, though he would have preferred that Lizzie marry “Jim the smuggler” and emigrate with him to Wisconsin which he says is “corresponds more closely to the true incidents of which the tale is a vague and flickering shadow.”  Here, for once, Hardy’s pessimism was overruled by commercial considerations. 

     Hardy might be said to have viewed fate as hostile rather than indifferent as his denouements are so often characterized by frustration and pathos.  The author’s existential anxieties after he had abandoned his Christian upbringing are doubtless an influence as is his ambivalent relationship with his first wife and her death shortly before the publication of The Wessex Tales.  His radical politics may have caused him to feel further alienated.  Life, in Hardy’s view. Tends to deal most people a bad hand.  Art can be in some degree redemptive, as the Greek tragedians knew.  Just as ancient Athenians were reassured by the artfulness in which the dreadful circumstances of human life were portrayed, Hardy knew he could depend on the reassuring conventions of story-telling to please his readers and sell his work.  Perhaps more significantly, he sought thereby to convince himself and his readers that the disorderly and often depressing succession of human experiences must make in the end some sort of sense, even if life ends with death.  Relating the incidents of lived experience can still serve to pass an idle evening around a warming fire with our fellow mortals, and, for the moment, we are diverted, though author, narrator, and readers find themselves all in the same slowly sinking boat.    

 

 

 

1.  I was reminded of the similarly mysterious appearances of George Washington in Cooper’s The Spy. 

2.  His wish to retain some measure of the supernatural is clear is his interest in spiritualism and even in seeking, as some do today, metaphysical solace in the physics of relativity.  Several critics have analyzed the Hardy’s use of Gothic conventions.  See James F. Scott, “Thomas Hardy's Use of the Gothic: An Examination of Five Representative Works,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Mar., 1963) and Thomas Hardy and the Gothic: Restructuring the Gothic Prison in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Negeen N. Nikravesh, “Thomas Hardy and the Gothic: Restructuring the Gothic Prison in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Victoriographies, Volume 13, Issue 1.

Frances Trollope: The Triumph of Snobbery

 

 

I used the 1949 Borzoi edition edited by Donald Smalley with excellent introduction, notes, and index.  How nice to see such a volume from a trade publisher!  Parenthetical notes provide page references to this edition, some of these providing the source for several successive quotations.  For the convenience of those with other editions, I append a list of the page numbers cited in parentheses matched to the chapters in which each quotation may be found.

 

     Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) fed British curiosity about the United States.  Her book sold well, ameliorating for a time her chronic financial straits.  She shared with her predecessor Capt. Basil Hall who had published Travels in North America in 1829 and her follower Capt. Frederick Marryat whose Diary in America appeared in 1839 a satirical view, mingling more or less informative descriptions with lampoons of American behavior calculated to flatter Old World readers.    

     Trollope deployed modesty tropes to deny her ambition to do anything beyond a journalistic recording what was before her eyes.  How could a lady like herself be expected to critique economics or even to write a professionally florid rhetoric?  Though this pose is faux naïf considering her constant wry irony and arch commentary, she did sketch recognizable features of American life which have little changed since her day. 

     She repeatedly stresses Americans’ obsession with money, noting how pursuit of wealth is the universal goal and the sole index of success.  She showily deplores this single-minded fascination with money which leads naturally to a philistine indifference to the arts.  She readily concedes American “activity and perseverance in all kinds of speculations, handicraft, and enterprise, which promise a profitable pecuniary result.”  An Englishman who had long lived in the United States tells her he never heard an American conversation which did not include the word “DOLLAR” (her capitalization).  “This sordid object,” she goes on, “must inevitably produce a sordid tone of mind,” which she proceeds to prove by examples Yankee sharp dealing.  (301)   

     A critic might note that much of the world is likewise chasing after prosperity, but for Mrs. Trollope life in the United States was next to unendurable, though she spent more than three years in this country.  According to her, much of the landscape was literally under a miasma, resulting in chronic “ague and fever.” (33)  Cincinnati in particular she found “far from healthy.” (84)  Walking in woodlands, she finds not beauty but “congeries of leaves that have been rotting since the flood” which “infect the air.” (42)  She describes small farmers as living in barbaric isolation like Polyphemus suffering material want and a total lack of social relations, all of which they accept gladly simply in order to avoid ever saying, “God save the king!” (49-50)  “Never,” she says, has she seen “human nature reduced so low.” (21)

     Whether rural Americans were in fact different from peasants in any part of the world is surely questionable.  However, Trollope did accurately identify two central contradictions at the base of this country: the treatment of native peoples and of Africans and their descendants.  She refers to Indian policy as “base, cruel, and most oppressive,” “treacherous and false almost beyond belief” (221) and denounces the “avarice and intemperance of the white men” in dealing with the aboriginal tribes. (330)

     On the issue of slavery, she had come to America considering this “peculiar institution,” as Calhoun called it,  “essentially wrong,” (186) a sentiment she shared with many of her fellow-countrymen since the United Kingdom had turned from being the greatest engine of the slave trade to its greatest opponent.  Treating people as chattel, she realized, “strikes painfully against every feeling of justice, mercy, or common humanity.” (246)  Anti-slavery motifs are prominent as well in her novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836).

     Yet her attitude toward the monstrous institution is ambivalent, consistently muted and often undercut by her own words.  She makes light of her own sentimental sympathy for the first slave she encounters, musing “How very childish does ignorance make us!  and how very ignorant we are upon almost every subject, when hear-say evidence is all we can get!” (9)  Presumably with little experience of the treatment of field workers, she declares that “the condition of domestic slaves . . . does not appear to be bad.” Their owners often give them “much kindly attention.”  Not only are they “tolerably well fed, and decently clothed,” “rarely exposed to the lash, and . . . carefully nursed in sickness,” they receive these benefits in spite of the fact that their mode of living “seems a matter of great indifference to them.” (245) 

     She praises the “sedulous attention” with which underlings look after her in slave states, (185) making a dramatic contrast her experience of free American hired help whom she finds impossible, “poor wretches” tormented as by “a sore, angry, and wakeful pride.”  She concluded that her servant was miserable because she had “heard a thousand and a thousand times that she was as good as any other lady, that all men were equal, and women, too.” (53-4)

     Thus the root of America’s problems is, for Trollope no mystery.  She traces all of the country’s ills, its deficiencies in the arts and education, its vulgarity, so repulsive to her finer sensibilities, to the democratic form of government.  In her view “common sense” revolts at the “mischievous sophistry,” that “false and futile axiom” “all men are created equal.”  For this fatal national foundation she blames Thomas Jefferson whom she rightly labels a hypocrite for his keeping slaves (and with them engendering children). (71)  His “hollow and unsound” doctrines “would make of mankind an unamalgamated mass of grating atoms.” (316)

     However, her political point is misleading.  In fact her fundamental criticism is less political than social and aesthetic, though the causes are mingled since for her Americans’ disagreeable manners arise from their ill-advised system of government. 

     In part of course Trollope’s attitudes are national ones, arising from British pride and suggesting the superiority often claimed for Europe over the young country, reinforced by British rivalries in the Revolution and the War of 1812.  Her argument for a stratified, even a semi-feudal, society is one that many, including some Americans, would have made in her era.  The issue of democratic reform was certainly much discussed in the United Kingdom. The Reform bill of 1832 had expanded the franchise by fifty percent, but, as a net worth of £10 remained a requirement, more than four-fifths of the male population still could not vote, and agitation continued, sometimes violently repressed.   Those favoring more progressive political ideas often looked across the Atlantic, while those defending the status quo found negative examples in the same place. 

     While hers may have seemed the voice of the ordinary respectable Briton, her own class status was more unstable than her readers probably suspected.  The daughter of a clergyman, she had been well-educated and made a middle-class marriage to a barrister, yet she was never wealthy, and, when her husband proved a failure both in his law practice and his attempts to farm some leased property, the family found themselves in serious financial straits.  More than once they were evicted, with sheriff’s agents dragging their belongings to the street.  Following the American sojourn, the Trollopes moved permanently to the Continent to escape debt collectors and imprisonment.

     Frances Trollope soon realized that she would be more likely than her husband to generate a decent income, and her residence in the United States was part of a scheme to launch a business on the Western frontier.  Though the shop did not last long, her book turned out to be her salvation, proving so popular that she was able to continue writing and in  fact to support herself with her pen, eventually publishing something like a hundred volumes and in her later years enjoying a prominent position among the English expatriates in Florence. 

     Frances Trollope, though, disclaimed political theory.  “I am in no way competent to judge the political institutions of America, and, if I should occasionally make an observation on their effects, as they meet my superficial glance, they will be made in the spirit, and with the feeling of a women, who is apt to tell what her first impressions may be, but unapt to reason back from effects to their causes.”  (47)  Nonetheless, she thought a tour of the United States would be enough to cure any English radical of sedition.  (44)

     With such decidedly anti-democratic attitudes, she seems an unlikely emigrant, but she arrived under the influence of Frances Wright and, less directly, Robert Owen, whose principles were nothing short of radical.  Her horror at the sight of the ramshackle Nashoba Commune (which she had referred to as Miss Wright’s “estate” [14]) arose not from Wright’s egalitarian ideals which entailed utopian socialism, free love, and rejection of Christianity, but the “desolation” (27) and lack of fresh food.  Apart from the expectation of making money by establishing a business on the Western frontier, she had liked the idea that her children could be educated at her friend’s school free of charge.  Though she ridicules Owen and others associated with the New Harmony Commune such as William Maclure and Mme. Fretageot (10) and found even her dear friend Frances Wright in the wilds of America to have nothing whatever in common with “the Miss Wright I had known and admired in London and Paris” (27), she seemed to feel no reservations about casting her lot with them. 

     If her class pride served her poorly in Nashoba where she rebelled against a diet of corn bread and rain water (28), it likewise proved her undoing in Cincinnati.   Without going into the details that biographers have recorded, it is sufficient here to say that she stumbled from one project to another, meaning to earn her living by her taste.  She became involved with the Western Museum, an institution that mixed natural history exhibits with side show attractions, becoming a key figure in designing one of its more popular exhibits, a room-size view of Hell populated by wax figures of the damned.  This show ran for twenty-five years, often the prime support of the Museum.  Another exhibit that appealed to the taste of the town was the “Invisible Girl,” voiced by her son Henry, posing as a spirit who would speak to paying visitors.  Located at the end of a spooky corridor, the “Invisible Girl” supported the Museum for decades. 

     Saying that Cincinnati needed a dome, Trollope invested her family’s limited resources in constructing on Third Street an exotic edifice which included Moorish and Egyptian decoration as well as a dome.  In a city where livestock ran in the streets, e she meant to establish a cultural center with a coffeehouse, an “elegant Saloon” for refreshments, a bar room, an exhibition gallery, and a ballroom, as well as a bazaar for upscale goods.  Perhaps she was not as sharp a trader as she describes Americans as being, but her entrepreneurial effort was unsuccessful, and the establishment closed.  She continued to try to make her artistic judgement marketable.  She staged musical and dramatic events, always thinking that she could be the missionary, bringing fashion and beauty to a benighted region.

     As with others clinging to gentility by their fingertips, for Trollope social forms became exceedingly important.  All she had was her education, her wit, her taste and refinement which she emphasizes at every opportunity.  To her democracy’s worst sin is its ugliness.  Her recoil from her crude surroundings is the sign of her superiority.  Ignoring the brutal lives of English workers at the time, she is horrified at their American cousins.  To her it is the “higher” human wants (45) which cannot be satisfied in the United States due to the people’s “lack of refinement.” (47).   It is civilized leisure that she looks for in vain.  “I never saw people who lived so much without amusement as the Cinncinatians”; it is a “triste little town,” (74) she says, deploying her French as evidence of her own cultivation.   She wonders encounters a German woman who laments, “They do not love music.  Oh no!  and they never amuse themselves, -- no, and their hearts are not warm . . .they have no ease.” (266)  She wonders how, in such a barbaric place, taste might ever be formed.  “How can a correct and polished style, even of speaking, be acquired?” (328)  Alas, she concludes Americans have certainly “not the same besoin of being amused.” (339)

     Her fundamental objections are matters of taste.  She attacks America for its want of “polish” (46) and “chivalry,” “the unbought grace of life.” (257)  Though an American can satisfy animal wants “profusely” and “at a very easy rate,” “there is no charm, no grace.”  “I very seldom during my whole stay in the country heard a sentence elegantly turned, and correctly pronounced from the lips of an American.”  (45) 

     With almost shocking ease, she looks past the monstrous historical inequities to conclude that the single most offensive aspect of American life is the men’s “incessant, remorseless” use of chewing tobacco.  (16)  To her the habitual use of this “loathsome herb” has literally deformed the faces of Americans’ lips, lending them a “remarkable peculiarity.” (234)  Adding to the Americans’ grotesque appearance is the sprawling posture in which they dispose themselves over chairs and other furniture, sitting in “the most unseemly attitudes” (226) even in settings where greater gentility might be expected such as the theater or even the Congress. 

     When her fellow passengers on a riverboat are not “gambling and wrangling,” (17) they eat dinner with a “total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured, the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter the mouth, and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth with a pocket knife.” (18-19)  She finds her  steamboat accommodations worse than “the apartment of a party of well conditioned pigs.” (16)

     Just as the problem with democracy in her view is not so much that it is unworkable or unjust as that it produces ugliness.  Similarly, she is horrified at fundamentalist religious practices, describing with horror, revivals, camp meetings, and prayer sessions in private homes.  She finds the religious enthusiasm he observes in America to be “frightful” (80) and “detestable” (81).  A service makes her “sick with horror” (172).  To her the guarantee of respectability offered by a national church more than compensates for any loss of freedom of conscience.  She simply finds American spirituality to be in poor taste.     

     For a good portion of her career Frances Trollope might have seemed a prisoner of her class identity, stubbornly looking for something in the United States that the country did not offer.  Everywhere she looked, the sights of the Western frontier disgusted her.  She was attracted to a life-style she could often not afford and, while ridiculing the taste of Cincinnatians who could not appreciate true works of art, she nonetheless curated shows of hokey magic and wax figures to try to turn a profit.  Yet her snobbery triumphed in the end.  It was specifically her distaste for the rough raw life she saw around her that made her Domestic Manners of the Americans a best-seller, and launched her on a very productive and sufficiently profitable writing career and landed her eventually where she had always wanted to be, in a fashionable set of her fellow-countrymen in the prestigious and highly artistic city of Florence. 

    

 

 

 

 

The following list identifies the chapter in which each of the cited page numbers is located in the Borzoi edition.

14 II

16 II

17 III

18-19 III

21 III

27 III

33 IV

42 IV

44 V

45 V

46 V

47 V

49-50 V

53-4 VI

71 VII

74 VIII

84 IX

186 XVII

221 XX

226 XX

234 XX

246 XXII

257 XXIII

266 XXV

301 XXVIII

316 XXIX

328 XXIX

330 XXIX

339 XXX