I read this book from cover to cover as if it were a detective novel, or maybe a Dostoevsky novel that would help me resolve how idealistic characters can actually come to terms with the world they live in and yet try to resist how the world of morality kills the life in us and brings us down. The author leaves the reader in suspense about how Hardy will eventually resolve the man-woman, flesh-spirit love tragedy. It is, in the final analysis, a defense of Hardy's female characters as well.So anyone who is perplexed and yet fascinated by Hardy's novels can not help but be spell-bound by this book. The reader will learn along the way that many intelligent critics have been lured into permanent self-deception about love and sexuality and they have ignored Hardy's working out his own evasions. At the same time the reader will learn that Hardy's evasions are his or her own and that there is another, third way, to resolve the struggle between flesh and spirit, reading and living, thinking and feeling.In order to solve the riddle of "flesh and spirit" the reader must follow the clues left by Hardy and the author until the end of the book.

Serious critical study of Thomas Hardy, that is still an excellent
book for the non-expert. An unusual interpretation which should spur discussions. An extremely well written book by a man who knows
his subject

A "PANZAIC" READING OF HARDY'S NOVELS

On the back cover of this book there is a descriptive publisher's blurb:

Wayne Burns' critical approach to Hardy's fiction has enabled him to present significantly new interpretations and evaluations of Hardy's novels. While some Hardy lovers may find Burns' criticism irreverent, or even outrageous, it is solidly grounded in the texts of the novels themselves, and will bear the closest critical scrutiny. Yet the book is so clearly written that it can be read and understood by anyone interested in Hardy's novels.

While these may seem like extravagant claims, they really are not. The book more than lives up to them. The one point that the publisher has not stressed is the radical nature of Burns' critical approach, which he identifies as Panzaic Contextualist. Although not a weakness, but a strength, ths approach may prove difficult for many readers to accept. Even after Burns' eleven-page Foreword and four-page Introduction, some readers may find Panzaic Contextualism unacceptable: it may seem too Lawrentian, or too Freudian, or too stark, or too much of a departure from accepted critical norms and practices.
But if these readers can put aside their theoretical objections they will discover (in Burns' first introductory chapter, entitled "Dulcinea as the Immaculate Sister) that he is presenting a verifiable scholarly interpretation of the ways in which the Victorians went about living and loving. As Burns explains:
For the Victorians, or at least for nearly all middle- and upper-class Victorians, the war between the flesh and the spirit was by way of being a holy war that had as its ultimate aim the elimination of the flesh from man-woman love relationships [...]. The conflict between the higher and lower forms of man-woman love is everywhere present in the writings of the Victorians. Indeed for many of them the higher form was not merely a moral or literary ideal: it was the love that, in their own lives, they often chose to place above, or apart from, the lower forms of love that they felt for their husbands or wives.

This general statement Burns develops in an extended analysis of the immaculate loves of Dickens and Mary Hogarth, Thackeray and Mrs. Brookfield, Mill and Harriet Taylor, along with, in fiction, the immaculate loves of the hero and heroine of Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth, finally to conclude:
Hardy [...] believed in the higher and lower forms of love. But not in the way his fellow Victorians believed in them-in part because of his growing up the son of a Bockhampton stone mason, in part because of his being as sensitive, and tormented, and courageous as Michael Millgate and his other biographers have shown him to be. As a beginning novelist, however, Hardy's greatest virtue may have been his ability to recognize the realities of his situation. He knew that, whatever he himself felt or believed, he had to comply with the demands of publishers and editors and readers-if he were to become "a good hand at a serial" and make a living by writing novels. And he did comply, though not without difficulties, as the following discussions of his individual novels will reveal. He presented the war between the flesh and the spirit on the farms and on the heath and in the woods of his mythical Wessex, always keeping within the prescribed moral boundaries, until, in writing Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, he threw caution to the wind-to write two of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century.

Here, in outline, is the critical argument that Burns carries through to Jude the Obscure. The early novels, including even those which have come to be considered classics (Far From the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native) Burns treats rather severely, primarily because they do not measure up to his Panzaic Contextualist standards. He recognizes the Hardyean virtues in these early novels-the interesting and charming heroines, the beautiful and sometimes powerful settings, the wonderful rustics. But he finds these aspects and qualities insufficient to overcome Hardy's melodramatic moralizing.
Burns is equally severe in his treatment of The Woodlanders. It is not until Tess, Burns demonstrates, that Hardy escapes from his moral chains-"choosing a forbidden subject, and treating it Panzaically. The differences between the ending of The Return of the Native, in which Clym is lecturing only on 'unimpeachable subjects,' and the beginning of Tess are so great as to seem inexplicable. It is as if Hardy has become a different novelist. As indeed he has." But it is not until Jude the Obscure, Burns maintains, that Hardy manages to give full artistic expression to his chosen subject-the never-ending war between the flesh and the spirit.
In Jude Hardy finally solved his immortal puzzle ["Given the man and the woman, how to find a basis for their sexual relation"] and in doing so created a great novel-only to discover that it was opening him up to criticism and abuse even more virulent than he had experienced following the publication of Tess. For Jude was attacked not only for its sexuality but for the views it expressed on women and marriage and society and the church. In the words of Patricia Ingham, "Contemporary society recognized a revolutionary when it saw one."But that was not what Hardy wanted to be. After The Well-Beloved he wrote no more novels and devoted himself to his poetry.

It is one of the finest critical studies of Hardy's novels that I have read; indeed Burns' chapter on Jude the Obscure may well be the first critical study to do full justice to that novel.
__Barry Tharaud, Editor, NINETEENTH-CENTURY PROSE