I've been reading the novels of Thomas Hardy. Some of them are familiar old friends, like Jude the Obscure and Return of the Native; some I've read so long ago that they're new again (Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd); and then there are a few that I know I've never looked at before, such as The Woodlanders, Under the Greenwood Tree, and, the one I just finished a half a second ago, A Pair of Blue Eyes.
Blue Eyes is an early novel (1873), moderately autobiographical. In it, young Stephen Smith is an apprentice architect of working class origins (as was Hardy) who woos Elfrida Swancourt, a maiden of a higher station. He has a rival for Elfrida's hand in a former teacher, elegant and prudish Henry Knight.
It's safe to say that this is a novel only for confirmed Hardy enthusiasts. There's little in it that Hardy doesn't do better later on.
On the other hand, Blue Eyes contains one rather wonderful piece of melodramatic excess. Elfrida and Knight go hiking on a dangerous cliff and Knight slips and gets himself into an awkward position, hanging on six hundred and fifty feet above the ocean. His foot "was propped by a bracket of quartz rock, balanced on the edge of the precipice." She's clinging to him and they're both stuck. Knight is ever the gentleman. "Clamber up my body till your feet are on my shoulders: when you are there you will, I think, be able to climb on to level ground." "What will you do?" asks Elfrida. Knight answers that he will wait "whilst you run for assistance." But just their bad luck, there's no one around. And so the chapter comes to a cliffhanging close (the novel was originally published in serial form in Tinsley's Magazine).
Several minutes and several pages of reflection pass. At last, Elfrida reappears, her form "singularly attenuated." She carries a bundle of white linen.
Jumping jiminy, holy moly, I say, -- the girl has removed her underclothes.
She tears the linen into thin strips, knots them, and forms "a perfect rope, six or seven yards long." Knight 'clambers' up the rope, and is saved. But by surrendering her undergarments, Elfrida has, as Hardy delicately puts it, "absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her exterior robe or costume." Goodness gracious me, the poor dear is clad only in her "outer bodice and skirt." So, of course, to spare everyone further embarrassment, she runs away as fast as her little legs will carry her.
Poor struggling Thomas Hardy has wrestled Mrs. Grundy to a draw.
Good thing Elfrida was clothed in sufficient unmentionables to construct a rope seven yards long. Suppose Knight had been down there couple more yards and she had to remove her "upper bodice." Would she have done so, or would she have let Knight plummet?` Hardy arranges it so that Elfrida can defy social norms, but not to the point of actual nudity. Hardy is bold, but not too bold.
I suspect that if Hardy had his way and wasn't enchained by the humbug prudery against which he struggled all his life, he would have stripped Elfrida to the skin. How would Henry Knight have responded? Probably keeled over from the shock.
What would Elizabeth Bennet have done in the same situation? Removed her underclothes to save her suitor? Probably not. The most likely answer: Jane Austen would never have let her go out walking near a cliff with a gentleman.
That's funny.
Have you read Persuasion? There is an episode in which a young lady goes walking with a man on the harbour wall at Lyme Regis in windy conditions. The hero holds out his hands to help her jump down from the wall and "the sensation was delightful to her" - so she climbed back up to jump down again. That time he failed to catch her and she sustained a serious injury. Presumably just punishment for her unseemly behaviour.
Posted by: Sarah Finch | October 27, 2018 at 09:06 AM