<i>Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy</i>, by Roger Ebbatson

Thomas Hardy, in his 1912 preface to Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), explains that he seeks to portray “the landscapes of a partly real, partly dream country.” He refers to Dorset, which he memorably calls Wessex, retrieving the historical Saxon name for his nineteenth-century fiction and readers, purposefully mixing past and present. In his latest book, Roger Ebbatson explores Hardy’s handling of landscape, perception, modes of being, and the social world, showing how in both poetry and fiction Hardy explores the complexities of human perceiving. Overall, whether presenting the sea, the cliffs, sheep-filled pastures, a cemetery, a garden, or a bustling community of Wessex, Hardy encourages readers to perceive in multiple ways rather than through the merely realist act of looking. Ebbatson’s preface takes pains to alert us to the “paradoxicality” (vii) of Hardy’s entire corpus, as this nineteenth-century/proto-modernist author remains engaged with a dialectic between “the perceptible world and the operation of human consciousness” (141). Unlike some critics who have focused on Hardy and landscape alone or on Hardy, class, gender, race, and other social constructs, Ebbatson argues that the social world is itself a “horizon” against which the individual character creates, interprets, and misinterprets life (141).Ambiguity, paradox, and indeterminacy are key elements in Ebbatson’s reading of Hardy’s oeuvre. As in his earlier Landscape and Literature 1830–1914: Nature, Text, Aura (2013), Ebbatson here draws on both social theory and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who (like Hardy) notes how the sense-perceived world retains “a past in the depth of the present” in the moment of vision (qtd. viii). This study thus joins a recent spate of articles and book chapters on Hardy that read his work through phenomenology, ecocriticism, and nature studies, or as a satire of scientific systems by critics such as E. Auyoung, Marie Bertrand, E. Pearl Brilmeyer, Isabelle Gadoin, Jayne Hildebrand, and Bruce Johnson.The analysis here is wide ranging in ten very short chapters. Ebbatson offers separate discussions of the poems “The Bride-Night Fire” and “Beeny Cliff,” the short story “The Withered Arm,” A Pair of Blue Eyes, and The Hand of Ethelberta, while referencing other Hardy texts. He also includes a comparative chapter on lesser-known novelist and nature writer Richard Jeffries. A key scholar of landscape and Hardy, as well as a lecturer for the Hardy Society’s 130th anniversary of Tess of the d’Urbervilles in 2021, Ebbatson includes three chapters on that novel.Notably, Ebbatson’s textual interpretations remain rooted in allusions to and quotations from multiple theorists and literary critics. An early twenty pages, for instance, offer references to more than a dozen theorists’ ideas and words, from Marx to Adorno, Heidegger to Propp, Benjamin to Žižek, and others. This immense, sometimes impenetrable, coverage offers an experience of reading unlike most. One navigates to find the author’s declarative statements or chapter linkings while concurrently learning about or being reminded of many theorists’ and critics’ voices and moving within and between Hardy’s texts. The reading experience is itself dialectical rather than straightforward. A reader who knows both Hardy’s fictional and poetic texts and critical theories, from phenomenology to kinds of Marxism to historical materialism to aesthetic theory, will benefit. But so will a reader who wishes to locate Hardy’s works in varied, related, intellectual contexts. Other readers may feel lost amid multiple points of view, which are sometimes represented by a short quotation only rather than a full explanatory context.It is worth noting that Hardy also wrote in his 1895 preface to Far from the Madding Crowd for the Osgood McIlvaine and the Harper edition: “[T]he appellation which I had thought to reserve to the horizons and landscapes of a merely realistic dream-country, has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from” (vi). He proceeds to ask his readers not to seek a “Victorian Wessex.” Rather, he advises, remain with the impressions and dialectics of his fictional world (or art’s aura, as Walter Benjamin would phrase it) to retain any sense of a rural past, even as both characters and readers feel they must move forward and onward in time and space.The movements in Hardy’s literary texts, Ebbatson argues, are countervailing in the sense that Hardy locates the sensing self not as a mere receiver of a view but as an embodied agent within a scene, or he shows landscape as a property of the mind. Although Ebbatson does not mention Hardy’s self-illustrations for Wessex Poems (1898), his argument recalls the well-known, puzzling image of a pair of spectacles on a meadow paired with “In a Eweleaze Near Weatherbury.” That image stresses ambiguity, placement, and multiple possible meanings. In the image, human glasses appear over a landscape. They seem to have been placed or dropped on the meadow. Yet the spectacles can be viewed variously: as a human imposition on landscape or as used by the landscape itself to see, as if placed on its temples and nose. Or perhaps it is both. The past and present are also mixed, as readers/viewers initially feel the urge to construct some realist, temporal narrative. Were someone’s glasses lost? Placed there? But as the glasses are not human sized in relation to the land, one quickly leaves realism behind, while concurrently reading the image with/against the poetic text, to ask: Is it a dream, a nightmare, an authorial comment for the reader about the landscape, vision, and one’s mind, a metaphor?Importantly, Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy notes the processes of modern technology and economics that Hardy shows as increasingly invading not only Wessex but also human consciousness. Modernity’s changes distort rural life, including a marginalizing or eliminating of rural dialect. Such destabilization affects human roles, actions, language, and relationships, which is especially notable in the late novels such as Tess or Jude the Obscure. One example provided are the ways in which Tess explores and exploits the spoken word in the heroine’s ambivalence about her mother’s dialect, which prior critics have also mentioned.Ebbatson concludes that while Hardy’s characters may gain a degree of freedom from modern changes, they also increasingly succumb to confusion, instability, and a form of wandering that indicates a sense of homelessness and loss. Several of the most interesting discussions within chapters concern Hardy’s response to the impact of specular and ocular technologies—for instance, the use of the telescope in Two on a Tower or photography in chapter 3 of A Laodicean. Careful to cite critics before him, Ebbatson studies these in conjunction with the problematized perceiving subject experiencing moments of focalization in poems such as “On the Esplanade” and “The Riddle.” Equally important are the chapter 7 reminders of the portrait scenes in Tess—scenes with Angel Clare that recall how Tess is herself a surface or a canvas, “beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer and practically blank as snow” (chapter 11), on which patriarchal patterns get drawn. These are as critical as the famous sign-painter scene. Ebbatson also usefully reminds us that these are anticipated by Elfride’s and Stephen’s visit to Endelstow House in A Pair of Blue Eyes and Paula Power’s and George Somerset’s experiences of portraits in A Laodicean. Chapter 11 also fascinates for its references to windows, scenes of looking, and the framing of experience in Hardy’s poetry, from “The Face at the Casement” to “Outside the Window” to “We Sat at the Window.” Ultimately, Ebbatson suggests, Hardy’s poems themselves are literary windows where the separation between inside and outside and between presence and loss blurs. With numerous references and examples, then, Ebbatson presents not only a review of theoretical positions and a strong history of Hardy criticism but also the importance of attending to Hardy’s irony, satire, and demythologizing as he explores what we might call “fragmented beingness” in an ever-changing world.