Cancelled Words Morgan, Rosemarie
1992, 20020311, 2002-03-11
eBook
The manuscript of Hardy's first great novel Far From the Madding Crowd vanished shortly after its first publication. Rediscovered in 1918 it sheds remarkable new light on the whole of Hardy's work. ...The manuscript pages, some of which are reproduced here in facsimile, reveal Hardy's original composition in the novel, and the reluctantly `cancelled words' which were the result of a long struggle with Sir Leslie Stephen, Hardy's editor. Cancelled Words reveals the manner in which Hardy worked, his resistance to censorship, his obsessive attention to detail and precision, and the often concealed processes underlying his authorship. Ultimately, it serves to shape our understanding of the development of the modern novel.
This article considers Hardy's 'deleted' sheep-rot scene from Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), which focuses on Troy's surreptitious scheme to 'rot' his wife's flock of sheep to increase their ...market profitability. Sheep-rot, a dreaded nineteenth-century ovine disease, occurred when flocks grazed in low-lying, swampy fields: while the condition was fatal, in the early stages it caused its victims to fatten quickly without showing other symptoms. Troy's efforts to capitalize on the economic advantage of this stage - without regard to the animals' suffering or to the dangers posed by human consumption of diseased meat - eerily foreshadows the ambivalence shown by proponents of the factory farm today. While the chapter did not survive later drafts, Hardy recycled imagery from it for a scene depicting Bathsheba's night next to a swamp: in both instances the swamp is a literal (and not solely symbolic) unhealthy environment for its occupants. The fragment also links the swamp with the fern hollow where Bathsheba has her first romantic rendezvous with Troy. The linking of the two scenes - along with the implications of sheep-rot transposed into the human realm - demonstrates Hardy's ease in moving from the non-human to the human and raises questions of why he chose to use the scene with Bathsheba as the central figure instead of the sheep. So far, little scholarly attention has been given to the sheep-rot scene, but this essay will argue for its importance: the extent of Hardy's description of rot and the seriousness of the condition upon the sheep (who are repeatedly configured as creatures) add further import to the swamp's transcription to the scene with Bathsheba, gesturing toward moral obligation to non-human and human others.
This article discusses the use of musical elements in Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd and its 2015 Thomas Vinterberg adaptation of the same title. First of all, the author discusses ...the use of music in the novel, both in its linguistic composition and actual music playing. The idea is to present not only Hardy’s knowledge of and deep sensitivity towards various kinds of music, but also to show the complexity and symbolism of music in the novel. The second part of this article is devoted to an analysis of the musical elements in the latest film adaptation. Here, the author’s main goal is to present the choice of music and to prove by comparison with the novel that the filmmakers recognised the richness and potential of the music within Hardy’s work and applied that musical knowledge in the film without impoverishing its symbolic value.
Les horizons de Thomas Hardy Camus, Marianne
Cahiers victoriens & édouardiens,
06/2015, Letnik:
75, Številka:
75 Printemps
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Thomas Hardy’s fiction is generally regarded as concerned with the hopelessness of the human condition in an indifferent universe. But Hardy’s heroes are also clearly situated in the society of their ...time. This article will look at two of the socially determined patterns that contribute to the failure which they usually encounter in their quest for a horizon beyond the class and place where they were born : the inability to construct a horizon and the adoption of a horizon in simple reaction to the environment. The inability to construct a horizon will be analysed through Tess, whose future is destroyed by her status as a fallen woman and the characters of The Woodlanders, lured by their hopes of social betterment. The notion of a reactive horizon will be analysed through the protagonists of The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure. The heroes of Far from the Madding Crowd and Two on a Tower will be used to confirm the point a contrario.
The main purpose of this article is to try and overcome the time-worn polarity fidelity/betrayal by which the issue of film adaptation is often plagued. We would like to call viewer-response ...criticism the taking into account of the spectator's cultural, artistic and hermeneutic horizon of expectancy, which implies that the film adaptation of a literary text should be taken as yet another reading: “Le cinéma est une lecture” (Renaud Dumont). But it may also be argued that literary texts, in turn, contain a wealth of cinematic material, as David Lodge has shown in a ground-breaking article on Hardy. If film adaptation is a reading of its own, cinema may well be written into 19th century literary texts. A good case in point is John Schlesinger’s 1967 adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd (1874). Schlesinger's and Raphael's reshuffling of the textual economy and chronology, their introduction of replays and slow motions, especially during the Market-Place sequence where Farmer Boldwood (Peter Finch) is the key focalizer, is a means of highlighting optical devices and cinematic metaphors to be found in Hardy's text. A key scene is studied at length, that of Boldwood gazing at the Valentine on the mantel-piece of his dining-room, while so many (too many) clocks tick around the place. Schlesinger's reading and interpretation of the verb to strike and other time-related words to be found in Hardy's text thus amplify and distort the letter of the text (in which only one time-piece is mentioned), but also highlight and emphasize significant aspects of the novel, like ocular fascination and Hardy's ambivalent conception of time as striking death into human lives or, on the contrary, extending the freedom of space.
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