| H03073 "RETURN OF THE NATIVE - EDITIONS" 8/24/03 HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE |
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Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2003 14:24:10 -0400 From: Rosemarie Morgan <rosemarie.morgan@yale.edu> Subject: Re: The Mayor of Casterbridge - Editions and Illustrations > > Yes please! (says she, with delight) --t'would be of great interest to me > for my CUP piece on "RN: Text to Screen.*
Yay!
Rosemarie
> > What do you think Angelique and Rosemarie? Want to do the whole thing again > for *Return of the Native*? > |
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From: "Richard Nemesvari" <rnemesva@stfx.ca> Subject: Return of the Native Date: Sun, 24 Aug 2003 16:51:19 -0300
Ok Rosemarie, here are a few rambling observations of the bibliographical/analytical type about *Return of the Native.* In the Penguin "Note on the History of the Text" Tony Slade spends some time talking about the significance of the novel being serialized in *Belgravia: An Illustrated London Magazine.* The journal was originally established by John Maxwell and edited by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, the "queen of sensation fiction." Although the magazine had been sold to Chatto and Windus by the time Hardy submitted his novel, the journal's reputation for sensationalism was intact, and certainly *Return* has any number of sensational elements. It was therefore an appropriate venue for the text, if not quite Hardy's first choice.
Since I started working on Hardy and sensationalism I've been interested in what seems to me to be a consist pattern of "de-sensationalisation" which occurs in many of his revisions. My immediate *caveat* is that I haven't done the systematic collations needed to make this assertion with full confidence, but there is enough unsystematic evidence that it seems clear sensationalism played a significant role in Hardy's creative energy, from *Desperate Remedies* on, and that he tried to "reel it in" later. As his reputation grew, and he was given the chance to revise his texts, he moved them towards the culturally higher-status realist mode, although the sensational is never completely erased. Eustacia is in many ways a sensation fiction heroine, and Hardy's struggle to come to terms with his portrait of her may have had something to do with mixing this genre with the other forms working in the text.
Further, one of sensation fiction's goals was (obviously) to be "sensual" and to provoke the "senses," as Ann Cvetkovich has pointed out. This is partly what got it in so much trouble. A way to do this is to provide intense passages of description, which provide a kind of shorthand to the emotions within the characters. Braddon is quite good at this, but all it earned her were contemptuous dismissals because of her inability to deal with "real" psychology. Hardy is also good at it, in *Return* and elsewhere, and has been treated more kindly (he's also just plain better at it). Thus the often extremely "visual" element of a Hardy description is "sensational" in that it creates a sensual reaction in the reader, and this can, if done well, transfer effectively to the screen. The irony is that such descriptions can as easily be called "realistic" as "sensational," and thus tended to escape Hardy's deleting pencil while sensational plot developments got the cut.
A final link to sensationalism is the hullabaloo over the "Facts" notebook, which we have already discussed. Charles Reade, another of the leading sensationalists, used to take great delight, when accused of creating completely unbelievable plots, of pulling out of his voluminous files the newspaper story upon which his novel was based, and waving it in his critics' faces. That Hardy put together a similar "file" is only shocking to those who want to create sensational headlines of their own in order to generate "buzz" about a tv show. The rest of us need not be fooled that anything especially unusual is going on.
Richard Nemesvari Department of English St. Francis Xavier University rnemesva@stfx.ca |