D. H. Lawrence

Margaret Elvy

D.H. Lawrence: Being Alive: Selected Poems Edited with an introduction by Margaret Elvy D.H. Lawrence's strident and idiosyncratic evocations of sex, touch, Spring, flowers, nature, love, black suns, fish and other glories are gathered here in this new selection. British Poets Series. Bibliography and notes. D.H. Lawrence s poetry is far less known than his fiction. It is often loose, rather than fluid, and unstructured rather than free verse, and messy rather than well-defined. It is a poetry, as Lawrence stresses, of the moment, a poetry in the process of becoming, constantly dissolving. In the Foreword to his book Pansies, he wrote of that breathless transience, embodied for him in the life of a flower: the breath of the moment, and one eternal moment easily contradicting the next eternal moment. Only don t nail the pansy down. You won t keep it any better if you do. In the introduction to the American edition of New Poems, Lawrence wrote: Let me feel the mud and the heavens in my lotus. Let me feel the heavy, silting, sucking mud, the spinning of sky winds. Let me feel them both in purest contact, the nakedness of sucking weight, nakedly passing radiance. Give me nothing fixed, set, static. Don t give me the infinite or the eternal: nothing of infinity, nothing of eternity. Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now. The immediate moment is not a drop of water running downstream. It is the source and issue, the bubbling up of the stream. Here, in this instant moment, up bubbles the stream of time, out of the wells of futurity, flowing on to the oceans of the past. The source, the issue, the creative quick. There is poetry of this immediate present, instant poetry, as well as poetry of the infinite past and the infinite future. The seething poetry of the incarnate Now is supreme, beyond even the everlasting of the before and after. Lawrence s typical poetry occurs in poems such as Sicilian Cyclamens, Snake and Snap-Dragon, longish, loose poems with a lot space that allow Lawrence to explore his subject. Lawrence covers a surprisingly wide range of subjects in his poesie - far wider than, say, Robert Graves or Thomas Hardy or John Keats. Among poets, there is no one quite like him. Like every poet, he has his pet notions, and keeps hacking away at them: the river of blood of the Sons and Lovers era, the democracy of touch from Lady Chatterley s Lover, the Christological machismo of The Plumed Serpent lyrics, the hatred of labour, the love of all things Mediterranean, and the primacy of the body.

Selected Poems

Being Alive

'Jude the Obscure' is analysed employing up-to-date developments in gender, feminist and cultural studies. Sue Bridehead in reinstated as central to the novel, and to Hardy's bitter, polemical attack on the institutions of marriage, religion, education, sexuality, identity, gender and politics.

A Critical Study

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure

THOMAS HARDY'S TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES A detailed and incisive analysis of Thomas Hardy's classic 1891 novel, using the latest research in feminism, gay, lesbian and queer theory, and cultural studies. Illustrated. Bibliogaphy. Notes. www.crmoon.com Margaret Elvy offers a thorough reappraisal of Thomas Hardy's favourite heroine. Elvy incorporates much of recent Hardy criticism, in which Hardy has been reappraised in the light of materialist, psychoanalytic, gender, poststructuralist and feminist criticism. Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a novel of anger, a text which rages against time, God, industrialization, and social institutions such as marriage, Chrisianity, the Church, law and education. What does Tess Durbeyfield do that is 'wrong'? Thomas Hardy explains in the book: ' s]he had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.' Tess is forced, or is led, or falls into a complex situation by circumstances, confusions, innocence (or ignorance), bad communication and desire. She is 'made' to break 'an accepted social law': it is the same with Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure. Somehow, their very existence means transgressions will occur. Tess Durbeyfield transgresses society, goes against grain. She (unwittingly perhaps) places herself outside of society and the law. She learns that there are different kinds of laws, different sets of laws for different groups of people. She has to learn about social boundaries, and how to keep inside of limits. As it's a dramatic novel, Tess learns the hard way. She is seen to be transgressive. The education system fails her utterly, her mother and family also fail to protect her. Though she is proud of her education, it fails her utterly. A note in the Life, Hardy's autobiography, is usually cited in relation to Tess of the d'Urbervilles: ' w]hen a married woman who has a lover kills her husband, she does not really wish to kill her husband; she wishes to kill the situation.' The tragedy of Tess of the d'Urbervilles has been seen as a socio-economic destruction (Arnold Kettle); the result of commercial forces, in the Marxist model (Raymond Williams); the decline of the rural order (John Alcorn, Roger Ebbatson, Merryn Williams); the waste of human potential (Irving Howe); due to the sexual manipulation of two men (feminist critics such as Penny Boumelha, Kate Millett and Rosalind Sumner); or due to the heroine's own moral inadequacies (Roy Morrell); or as the breaking of social taboos (J. Lecercle), and so on.

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles

SEXING HARDY: THOMAS HARDY AND FEMINISM There are surprisingly few feminist analyses of the work of British novelist Thomas Hardy, and most do not get beyond vague notions of sexism and misogynism, in the Kate Millett and second wave feminist manner. Margaret Elvy's book, however, uses up-to-date research in the fields of cultural studies, feminist poetics, gay, lesbian and queer theory. This new, postmodern and incisive exploration of Thomas Hardy offers an exciting and radical reappraisal of the discourses of gender, desire, class, economy, socialization, identity and patriarchy in his fiction and poetry. This new edition of Sexing Hardy includes a new introduction and a new bibliography. EXTRACT FORM CHAPTER ONE: "THOMAS HARDY AND FEMINISM" Is Thomas Hardy a feminist? Are Thomas Hardy's works feminist? How much do his works reflect and bolster the patriarchal attitudes and beahviour of his era, and how much do they question them? What is the relation between Hardy and the feminists of his time? And what is the link between Hardy's works and the feminism of the early 21st century? Thomas Hardy's theme is what you might call 'Wessexuality', 'Wes-sex-mania', Wessexual politics. Hardy's works are sexist, patriarchal and masculinist, and yet they question notions of sexism, gender, identity, patriarchy and masculinism. A text such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles is 'traditional', and follows patriarchal codes and morals. Yet it also questions them, and offers a number of feminist critiques of late 19th century society. In his letters, Thomas Hardy proposed feminist views; he wrote to feminists such as the suffragette leader Millicent Fawcett that a child was the mother's own business, not the father's (Collected Letters, 3, 238). One can see these feminist sentiments in, for example, Hardy's treatment of Tess in her motherhood: she works in the fields just a few weeks after the birth, even though she is melancholy (she seems to be suffering a mild form of post-natal depression). Tess further subverts patriarchy by taking her child's baptism into her own hands. She goes against her father, the vicar, and the whole church with her self-made baptism. [...] Thomas Hardy's novels were not always received favourably by women critics and readers. Hardy's own views, expressed outside of the novels, did not always square with those of feminists of the 1880s and 1890s. The ideological gap between Hardy and the women critics and feminists of the late 19th century is illustrated by Hardy's remark to Edmund Yates (in 1891): 'many of my novels have suffered so much from misrepresentation as being attacks on womankind' (Collected Letters, I, 250). Hardy hoped that works such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles would redress the balance.

Thomas Hardy and Feminism

Sexing Hardy

THOMAS HARDY'S JUDE THE OBSCURE A study of the novel Jude the Obscure using contemporary feminist and literary theory. Illustrated, with notes and a bibiography. Jude the Obscure (1895), Thomas Hardy's last novel, is a sister (or brother) book to Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), before he turned to poetry and other forms of writing. The author attacks similar targets: the family, politics, religion, marriage, education and sexuality. Hardy was on fire when he wrote Jude the Obscure - it is a very angry work. Jude the Obscure, though, contains far more polemic and philosophizing than Tess or any of the earlier novels. The preaching and polemic threatens to undo the narrative, which is nevertheless 'realist', like other Thomas Hardy fictions. In Jude the Obscure, Hardy was stretching the novel to the limit, testing the boundaries of what is 'acceptable'. In Jude the Obscure, the things that say 'you shan't' are, variously, God, religion, education, circumstance, chance, nature, and marriage. All of the institutions and 'causes' reside inside the individual, which is what makes the problems they create so difficult to deal with for Sue and Jude. Patriarchy, culture and society are not in some 'out there' space, but in people. Hardy's thoughts on Jude the Obscure, as expressed in the Life and letters, include his desire for a novel about characters 'into whose souls the iron has entered'; a desire to make the story 'grimy' in order to heighten the contrast between the ideal life and the 'squalid real life'; the novel 'makes for morality', Hardy said; and ended up 'a mass of imperfections', a remark many artists have made of their work.

Margaret Elvy

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