By Jacqueline Dillion
This publication reassesses Hardy’s fiction within the mild of his lengthy engagement with the folklore and traditions of rural England. Drawing on extensive learn, it demonstrates the pivotal position performed within the novels via such customs and ideology as ‘overlooking’, hag-riding, skimmington-riding, sympathetic magic, mumming, bonfire nights, might Day celebrations, Midsummer divination, and the ‘Portland Custom’. This learn exhibits how such traditions have been lived out in perform in village lifestyles, and the way they have been represented in written texts – in literature, newspapers, county histories, folklore books, the paintings of the Folklore Society, archival records, and letters. It explores tensions among Hardy’s repeated insistence at the authenticity of his debts and his engagement with modern anthropologists and folklorists, and divulges how his efforts to withstand their ‘excellently neat’ different types of tradition open up wider questions on the character of trust, development, and social change.
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Extra resources for Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance
Example text
Indeed, many readers have interpreted this relationship in Freudian terms, including Kristin Brady, who notes that ‘Freud called overlooking ... ’29 But perhaps not insignificantly, it was ‘the evil eye’—not ‘overlooking’—that Freud described. It is important to recognise that Freud spoke in general, ‘universal’ terms, which diagnose the condition. Whereas the experience of the evil eye may manifest itself in similar ways, whether in southern Italy or in the West of England, Hardy’s descriptions 27 Francis Bacon, ‘Of Envy’, in The Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral, of Francis Bacon, ed.
Such a course of action was generally taken only after more accepted methods such as consulting a doctor or parson had failed to work. 31 This approach reflects a tendency in human nature to perform whatever ritual is necessary in times of personal desperation when ‘acceptable’ methods fail to work. It is difficult to pinpoint any one particular source of inspiration for the Susan Nunsuch scene, such as excerpts in Hardy’s ‘Facts’ notebooks or Literary Notebooks indicate with other practices like the skimmington ride.
Definitions of folklore have been established above, but a more practical way of distinguishing folklore from myth as it appears in Hardy’s writing70 is to ask whether characters in Hardy’s Wessex from among the ‘folk’ would recognise if the word or concept held any current meaning for them or their community. 1 (1984), 57–73; Steve Roud, The English Year (London: Penguin, 2008); and Hopkin, Voices of the People. 70 ‘Mythical method’ readings of Hardy have long been popular, and they are useful, in looking at the text in symbolic terms.