HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE HO2042 6/27/02 "HARDY'S USE  OF FETISH"
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From: "Marta Rabikowska" <M.Rabikowska@slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk>
Organization: Glasgow University
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 2002 17:07:26 +0100
Subject: Fetish
 

Hi everybody, I wonder if anybody knows more about Hardy's use 
of a word "fetish" and "fetishistic". T.S.Eliot complained about 
Hardy's prose as being fetishist, Hardy himself used that word a 
few times in his Literary Notes. But what did he actually mean by 
that? I try to interpret that word as a metaphor of metonymy 
emerging from Hardy's realistic descriptions.  I did some 
investigation of Freud's use of the notion and I try to find out more 
how and when Hardy came across the category of fetish.  I would 
be very grateful for your comments and maybe directions where to 
look in further.
With rainy greetings from Glasgow,
Marta Rabikowska

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From: "schweik" <schweik@fredonia.edu>
Subject: Re: Fetish
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2002 16:39:37 GMT
 

In Marta Rabikowska's inquiry about
"how and when Hardy came across the category of
fetish," and what the term might have meant to
him, she mentions his mention of the term in 
*Literary Notes*.  In *The Literary Notebooks of
Thomas Hardy* I, ed. by Lennart a Bjork (London: 
Macmillan, 1985), pp. 67, 73-4, and 77-8, Hardy
made notes on Compte's division of mankind's 
"theological" stage into "fetishistic," "polytheistic,"
and "monothestic" parts.  That in *Tess*, Chapter xvi,
he speaks of Tess's rhapsody to nature as "a 
Fetichistic [sic] utterance in a Monotheistic setting"
suggests that he was using that term in what I take
to be Compte's sense--i.e., seeing magical properties 
in natural or man-made objects--the most primitive
of Compte's stages of mankind's intellectual development.

But Hardy's use of *fetish* in *Tess* in what seems
probably a Compteian way does not preclude other influences
on his use of the term there or in other places, and I 
hope that others on the Hardy-L will be able to suggest
still other sources and senses. 

Bob Schweik

Robert Schweik
schweik@fredonia.edu
schweikr@localnet.com

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From: "Patrick Roper" <patrickroper@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Fetish
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2002 19:58:15 +0000
 

There's this (about bell heather flowers) in Return of the Native, Chapter 
6: "'The spirit moved them.'  A meaning of the phrase forced itself upon the 
attention; and an emotional listener's fetichistic mood might have ended in 
one of more advanced quality. It was not, after all, that the left-hand 
expanse of old blooms spoke, or the right-hand, or those of the slope in 
front; but it was the single person of something else speaking through each 
at once."

Others will have a better insight than I, but it seems that here Hardy is 
using 'fetichistic' to describe the sense that the heath as a whole is alive 
and its various parts interconnected by an animus of its own.

I find it interesting too how Hardy comes up with an splendidly Donneian 
hypothesis, then distances himself from it by ascribing it to an 'emotional 
listener'.  Am I right in thinking this is rather typical of him?

Patrick Roper

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From: "Marta Rabikowska" <M.Rabikowska@slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk>
Organization: Glasgow University
Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2002 15:29:39 +0100

I would like to thank Bob Schweik and Patrick Roper for their 
replies regarding Hardy's use of "fetish". I still have doubts where 
was the border between sexual and poetic meaning of the word in 
Hardy's language. It was not typical to employ that word in 
literature at that time. I still cannot get through the material where 
Hardy could find that word and I wonder what made him apply it.  
Thank you very much for your interest. 
With best wishes,
Marta

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