audience too are observed observers, upon whom the seen event impinges incongruously with their circumstances.
The moment precipitates a crisis of class and shame, in effect revealing the social system upon which the heroine's life was unself-con-548- sciously built. Desperate Remedies establishes the pattern for Hardy's original sin that so many of his characters have to hide-the sin of class origins. Stephen Smith, Edward Springrove, Swithin St. Cleve, George Somerset, Christopher Julian, Michael Henchard, Giles Winterborne, Clym Yeobright, Jude Fawley- almost all of Hardy's male protagonists-live on the cusp of distinct classes and their fates are almost entirely bound up with their power to climb or their bad luck in falling, and, of course, with the community's understanding of their inherited and their achieved positions. The helpless Cytherea suddenly finds herself, as a consequence of the fall, in poverty, her father having failed in business and speculation. Parallel problems exist for many of Hardy's women, for example Grace Melbury, Ethelberta, and even Tess herself.
In Desperate Remedies Cytherea is in effect cast out of her community and her class by the fall of her father. Members of the community stare at her 'with a stare unmitigated by any of the respect that had formerly softened it.' Desperate Remedies, then, begins with the fear that dominates all of Hardy's books and most of his central characters: the fear of being an object of 'staring,' that is, of being shamed by losing social position and class status. That fear almost invariably is embodied through the «choral» figures in the community, who have traditionally been seen as one of the peculiar sources of Hardy's rural charm. What those characters say provides no mere echo of the choral function of various traditional literatures or touch of charming local color. They are formally and thematically essential to the narratives: they are the ubiquitous observers who satisfy the narrative compulsion to frame all actions through distanced observation, and even more fundamentally they are the bearers of the conventions of class and hierarchy so that it is their judgment that shapes the fate of the protagonists. To avoid the shame of being observed unawares by these people, and thus judged by them, Hardy's protagonists are driven to their often apparently mad attempts at evasion, those hopeless and frustrated and inevitably observed secret elopements, those disguises and evasions and pursuits that contribute so awkwardly at times to Hardyesque melodrama. These are the figures who shape the careers of characters like Henchard (whose fall is precipitated by the furmity woman's public exposure of him) and, in particular, of Hardy's heroines, who are of course especially vulnerable to judgments of the community-heroines like Elfride Swancourt, Lady Constantine Blount, and Sue Bridehead. -549-
The power of community judgment, which almost certainly means also the power of class distinction, drives Hardy's characters to the same sort of neurasthenic sensitivity to the possibility of being shamed, of being caught acting with impropriety, that characterizes Hardy's own evasively led and publicly protected life. In Desperate Remedies the nature of that fear is made explicit almost from the start. Its importance to the whole canon of Hardy's writing could, of course, barely have been guessed when it appeared in this first novel. But it provides a clue to all the rest:
Now it is a noticeable fact that we do not much mind what men think of us, or what humiliating secret they discover of our means, parentage, or object, provided that each thinks and acts thereupon in isolation. It is the exchange of ideas about us that we dread most; and the possession by a hundred acquaintances, severally insulated, of the knowledge of our skeleton closet's whereabouts, is not so distressing to the nerves as a chat over it by a party of half-adozen-exclusive depositaries though these may be.
Hardy's is a culture of shame rather than of guilt. It is not so much the sin or the crime that disturbs as the possibility that two or more of the community may be talking about us without our knowledge, sharing knowledge of our wrongdoings. The threat is precisely the kind that Alexander Welsh discusses as 'blackmail,' the power of which is not in the secret but in the dissemination of it beyond the blackmailer. The distinction between shame and guilt is crucial for a writer like Hardy, who feels himself bound to «respectability» at the same time that he recognizes both its arbitrariness and its power to damage and restrict. But in Hardy's construction of a character like Tess shame and guilt become aspects of each other, and the imposition of social convention on the 'natural,' as Hardy understood it, constitutes one of the major crimes of Hardy's world. Without adequate knowledge, Tess internalizes the judgments of society, as they will be enacted by Angel later in the novel. Hardy's narrator, especially in earlier novels, disguises his recognition of the arbitrariness of the conventional and the respectable and thus guiltily participates in the judgment of figures like Tess. But Tess, on the narrator's explicit account, has not sinned and should not be guilty. In describing Tess after her encounter with Alex, the narrator contrasts her sense of guilt with her extraordinary and beautiful harmony with 'the element she moved in.' 'Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing -550- under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of innocence.' Tess has absorbed her culture's assumptions and condemns herself, but in Hardy's world such guilt is mistaken. The true guilt belongs to those who are shamed by their acquiescence in arbitrary 'shreds of convention.'
It is Tess's innocence that leads her to guilt rather than shame. Hardy's characters often are not truly disturbed by the fact of their transgressions, while invariably they are almost overwhelmed by the possibility that their private indiscretions will become public matter. Hardy regularly invents grotesquely implausible plots that place his characters in technical jeopardy without ever compromising their innocence, but then has them act as though the technical transgression constitutes a deep moral violation. In Desperate Remedies Cytherea acts as though after marrying Manston she would be entirely compromised by any intimacy she might have with him even if she did not know at the time that he was already married to someone else. Lady Constantine behaves similarly in Two on a Tower, and Elfride Swancourt's kiss of Stephen Smith is sufficient to destroy her life. These extravagances in the early novels anticipate Tess's fate and Sue Bridehead's convincing and maddening modern neurosis of guilt in Jude the Obscure. In every case, the crime is not in the commission but in the power of social shame to create among the innocent destructive guilt. In all of these case, questions of sexuality, guilt, and shame are bound into questions of social hierarchy and respectability.
Hardy's revulsion from the arbitrariness of class hierarchy is built into almost every novel, as characters cross the boundaries (most strikingly in The Hand of Ethelberta) or are merely by virtue of bad luck dropped from the aristocracy to the agrarian poor, or by virtue of Hardyesque work and discipline (necessarily always with a trace of luck) are raised into the middle class. The reversals in their most extreme forms shape the narratives of several of Hardy's least successful novels, in which the overtness of the theme apparently damages his power to control it fully. In A Laodicean, for example, Paula Powers occupies the DeStancy mansion, bought by her rich industrialist father, and is almost corrupted by the attractions of the class she has dispossessed. Lady Constantine falls in love with Swithin St. Cleve, who is not only several years her junior but whose parents work menially on her estate. In A Pair of Blue Eyes Stephen Smith is first accepted as Elfride's lover because he is thought to be from good family and then rejected because -551- his father is a 'rural mechanic,' although in fact he is wealthier than Elfride's father. But Hardy's revulsion in no way diminishes either his aspirations to join the system effectively or his shame at being no graduate of Oxford.
The guilt driving Hardy's novels is not the guilt of transgression, with which he shows himself to have enormous dramatic sympathy-in Henchard's overreaching, in Ethelberta's social deceits, in Jude's dreams of scholarly achievement. It is rather the guilt for feeling shame, for being, in spite of himself, bound by the very conventions and social discriminations, the very arbitrariness of class distinctions and hierarchies, that all of his best energies are driven to expose and denigrate. His very dissatisfaction with novel writing had much to do with the compromises forced upon him by conditions of the publisher's trade, by the fact, that is, that he had to write for money. As Harry Knight tells Elfride, 'It requires a judicious omission of your real thoughts to make a novel popular.' His sensitivity to observation is exacerbated by his fears not only that his real thoughts will be detected but that he has in fact deeply compromised himself. The complex publishing history of Tess, with its acquiescence in the bowdlerizations necessary for serial publication for money and its further revisions for the Wessex edition, suggest how thoroughly compromised Hardy was in the matter of making money and staying respectable. Hardy seems to have been both ashamed and guilty for being so.
Sexual energy, in particular, which almost all of the novels and their protagonists struggle to contain and disguise, is a danger here. It is dangerous because there is very little sign that the novels endorse the shame the protagonists, particularly the women, feel when this energy is aroused, crossing classes and disrupting the lives of everyone from Boldwood to Jude, from Bathsheba to Tess. Sex becomes a great leveler in that it guarantees exposure of the arbitrariness of class distinctions. But desire also leaves one vulnerable, forces one to take risks. The major figures in these novels are shamed by their desires, constrained therefore by the conventions, invariably caught out in their efforts at respectability and disguise, and driven to betrayals (often self-betrayals) as a
