Email this article Thomas Hardy’s ‘Impossible Monsters’: The Language of Desire in A Group of Noble Dames (1891)
Abstract
This article explores the semiotics of desire in Thomas Hardy’s short story cycle A Group of Noble Dames (1891). In its first section, it briefly contextualises the collection in terms of design and critical reception. The following section, focused on a selection of three emblematic stories, reads Hardy’s characters as embodiments of the ‘impossible monsters’ he mentioned in the first entry of his Literary Notes. This section, drawing on James Phelan’s rhetorical theory of characters and Charles Fourier’s The Passions of the Human Soul (1851), investigates the effects of certain mechanisms of desire (gaze, idealisation, fetishisation, reification, jealousy, vindication-torture) on the characters’ mimetic and thematic attributes. Furthermore, it points out how the characters’ pathemic conditions and actions are often driven by bovaristic obsessions and mediated desires that originate in sociocultural microcosms pervaded by rigid social conventions and conformism. In some cases, these mediated passions are triggered by artistic and literary objects such as statues, paintings, and works of literature that function as simulacra of amorous desire. A final section summarises the main points discussed in the article and provides insights for further reflection.
References
Bakhtin M.M. 1975, Formi vremeni i khronotopa v romane; trans. by Emerson C. and Holquist M. 1982, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics, in Holquist M. (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of Texas Press, Austin, pp. 84-258.
Barthes R. 1977, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Seuil, Paris; trans. by Howard R. 2001, A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments, Hill and Wang, New York.
Baudrillard J. 1972, Pour une critique de l’economie politique du signe, Gallimard, Paris; trans. by Levin C. 1981, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign Telos Press, St. Louis.
Björk L.A. (ed.) 1985, The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, Vol I, New York University Press, New York.
Brady K. 1982, The Sort-Stories of Thomas Hardy. Tales of Past and Present, The Macmillan Press, London/Basingstoke.
Fourier F.M.C. 1841-48, Oeuvres completes, Lib. Sociétaire, Paris; trans. by Morell J.R. 1851, The Passions of the Human Soul and Their Influence on Society and Civilization, Hyppolite Bailliere, London.
Fusillo M. 2012, Feticci. Letteratura, cinema, arti visive, Il Mulino, Bologna; trans. by Haskell Simpson T. 2017, The Fetish. Literature, Cinema, Visual Art, M. Bloomsbury Academic, London.
Gilmartin S. and Mengham R. 2007, Thomas Hardy’s Shorter Fiction, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Greimas A.J. and Fontanille J. 1991, Sémiotique des Passions, Seuil, Paris; trans. by Perron P. and Collins F. 1993, The Semiotics of Passions. From States of Affairs to States of Feeling, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London.
Hardy T. 1988, A Group of Noble Dames, in Collected Short Stories, Macmillan, London, pp. 205-374.
Hardy T. 1967a, General Preface to the Novels and Poems, in Orel H. (ed.), Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences, pp. 44-50.
Hardy T. 1967b, Jude the Obscure. Preface to the First Edition, in Orel H. (ed.), Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences, pp. 32-35.
Hayes T. 2020, Darkest Wessex: Hardy, the Gothic Short Story, and Masculinity, in “Victorian Popular Fiction” 2 (2), pp. 76-94.
Hillis Miller J. 1970, Thomas Hardy. Distance and Desire, Belknap, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Marroni F. 1994, The Negation of Eros in ‘Barbara Of The House Of Grebe’, in “The Thomas Hardy Journal” 10 [1], pp. 33-41.
Orlando F. 1993, Gli oggetti desueti nelle immagini della letteratura: Rovine, reliquie, rarità, robaccia, luoghi inabitati e tesori nascosti, Einaudi, Torino; trans. by Pihas G. and Seidel D. 2006, Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabited Places, and Hidden Treasures, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Phelan J. 1989, Reading People, Reading Plots, The University of Chicago Press, London/Chicago.
Purdy R.L. and Millgate M. (eds.), The Collected letters of Thomas Hardy. Vol. I: 1840-1892, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Sebeok T.A. 2001, Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics, University of Toronto Press, Toronto/Buffalo/London.
Sumner R. 1981, Thomas Hardy. Psychological Novelist, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke/London.
Weinstein P. 1984, The Semantics of Desire. Changing Models of Identity from Dickens to Joyce, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Full Text: PDF
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
