Thomas Hardy's 'The Hand of Ethelberta'

Started reading Thomas Hardy's 'The Hand of Ethelberta in mid-December and finished it a couple of weeks ago, so I read it in roughly a month.  Read most of it while regulary travelling on a tram to and from work in Warsaw, and during a couple of return Warsaw-Zamosc (in Eastern Poland) mini-bus journeys.

In August last year, I read 'Desperate Remedies', Hardy's first published novel, and, for me, there was just too much intrigue in it, although it was quite exciting to see it all unfold towards the end of the novel.  In contrast, 'The Hand of Ethelberta' seemed to be developing into a similar intrigue, but unravelled itself of most of the major intrigue early on after about 100 pages or so (with Christopher Julian's discovery of Ethelberta's lower-class parents and many siblings).  After this, the novel turns into an enjoyable farce/comedy of manners.

In the Penguin edition I have, I also clearly benefitted from reading Professor Tim Dolin's Introduction to the novel.  This immediately placed 'The Hand of Ethelberta' alongside 'Desperate Remedies' and 'A Laodicean' (which I've just started reading) as one of Hardy's "honourable failures" or "wooden spooners".  Having now read 'The Hand of Ethelberta', I find myself returning to Professor Dolin's Introduction to further reflect on the novel.

In conjunction with Dolin's Introduction, I can see that 'The Hand of Ethelberta':

* pokes mickey-taking type fun at upper-class, London dinner parties and other gatherings as a "satire of life in high society" with its "inflexible social codes  . . .  ritual gatherings, society gossip  . . .  pattern opinions
 . . .  mechanical social world  . . . empty imitation and repetition  . . .  inherited rules of conduct to individuals" which is incompatible with genuine human authenticity/individuality

* does not contain any of the fully "doomed heroes and heroines fatally alienated from their (mostly rural) environments" that appear in Hardy's great tragedies ('Tess'; 'Jude'; 'The Mayor of Casterbridge'; 'The Woodlanders'; 'The Return of the Native' etc.)

* does not really allow the reader to see who Ethelberta Petherwin (Berta Chickerel) really is, as she is constantly hidden behind "her own multiple identities"

* unusually shows a young woman, (Ethel)Berta bearing the responsibility for (and sacrificing her own happiness) for fulfilling the role of being "the patriarch of her family"

* is essentially "a story of forsaken identity and compromise", as, through her marriage to the old rascal, Lord Mountclare', Ethelberta must more fully forsake her lower-class family identity, for them to thrive better socially, with her own life amounting to no more than an artificial lie (with the real Ethelberta never revealing herself)

* may be viewed as being somewhat autobiographical, as like Hardy himself, Ethelberta makes her way in higher-class society through writing and disguising her lower class background

* may be viewed thematically as containing a central tension or contrast between "artificial" and "authentic" existence e.g. between Ethelberta and her lower-class family members, especially her sister Picotee

* may be viewed as an accumulative critique of a "woman who will not drop her public facade", remaining a "stubbornly superficial creation" throughout the novel

* may be viewed as a satire of "slavish social convention" being used to cover up "the emptiness of existence" and to negate freely created (authentic) individual experience that can give meaning to life (in this sense, the novel reads something like existenstialist philosophy).

* is a warning against filling one's self with "conventionality" as it essentially amounts to becoming what wider society prescribes one should be

Besides the above, I have a few thoughts of my own that are kind of independent of Professor Dolin's inspirational Introduction.  The first is that for me, Lord Mountclere is more than just a mere old rascal, as, near the end of the novel, his servants seem to genuinely lament the loss of his party-like/drunken benevolence/vitalism which is stripped from him by Ethelberta's regimental regime of orderliness.  In other words, I felt forced to sympathise with Mountclere and his servants having their sense of drunken fun ripped away from them by Ethelberta.

I also felt some sympathy towards Christopher Julian and his sister Faith.  In a world where human fate is fair-minded, Christopher would've surely married Ethelberta, but life is often sadly not like that.  Still, there seems to be some kind of resolution for the earnest-minded Christopher as he looks to be in the process of winning (Ethelberta's sister) Picotee's hand at the conclusion of the novel.  For me, Picotee may be viewed as a kind of 'Ethelberta in embryonic form', thankfully, without the crippling social pretensions.  As for Faith, yes, she's a background character, but, still, I get the sad sense that this is a young woman who allows life to simply fly by without doing anything adventurous or substantial to build up an authentic life-story (she seems to just want to be with others without seriously developing herself).

Finally, I've got to say that I enjoyed some of the colloquial language in the novel, especially that used in Hardy's 3rd person narrative form.  For example, I would never have dreamt that the word "toss-pots" would turn up in a Hardy narrative, but it did.

Thus, all in all, 'The Hand of Ethelberta' was a surprisingly good read, nothing like anything I've encountered in Hardy before, being unusually sandwiched chronologically between 'Far from the Madding Crowd' and 'The Return of the Native' in the Hardy canon.