A Laodicean

If pressed, most Victorianists would agree that a "real" Victorianist should have read every novel written by the Bronte sisters, Dickens, and Eliot.  Beyond that, things get more...selective.  When we ask if a Victorianist "knows" Wilkie Collins, we mean The Woman in White and The Moonstone--not The Black Robe, "I Say No," or any of Collins' myriad other novels.  Similarly, Anthony Trollope usually boils down to the Barchester and Palliser novels, plus The Way We Live Now and perhaps He Knew He Was Right; Mary Elizabeth Braddon's copious output reduces to Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd; and Mrs. Humphrey Ward...well, I'm not sure who's reading Robert Elsmere these days, but he or she is probably doing so under duress.  In other words, there's an academic mini-canon of sorts--the books one must read to be competent in one's field, or at least to avoid shame at the hands of David Lodge--and while Scholar X will no doubt venture into the uncharted wilds as her scholarship requires or curiosity inspires, she need feel no shame if she hasn't read Mrs. Henry Wood's The Channings or George Meredith's The Tragic Comedians. 

Oddly enough, one does sometimes feel a sense of shame when reading an indisputably great novelist's "lesser" works.  Homer may nod, but we still want to make excuses for him.  Perhaps the novel can be rescued as an "experiment," or an "anticipation" of future fiction (a difficult tactic when a late novel is at issue), or even as an "unacknowledged masterpiece."  It feels a little awkward to admit that, yes, a book is simply mediocre.  Take, for example, Thomas Hardy's A Laodicean.  As Jane Gatewood points out in the Oxford edition, this is an unstable novel: there are five distinct versions of the text.  (Gatewood reprints the first three-volume printing of 1881.)  Paula Power, modern daughter of an engineer, inherits the ancestral castle of the De Stancy family.  George Somerset, modern architect and son of a successful painter, falls in love with her--but so does Captain De Stancy, not-so-modern son of Sir William De Stancy, the man who lost the castle.  Captain De Stancy's suit is prompted by and gets a boost from his modern, evil, and illegitimate son, William Dare.  Along the way, we have Misunderstandings, Underhanded Deeds, and what must be the first photoshopped portrait in English literature.

As lesser Hardy novels go, A Laodicean is not quite the unmitigated disaster that The Hand of Ethelberta is--but I wouldn't advise recommending it to Hardy neophytes, either.  The version that Gatewood gives us is singularly under-developed: Hardy introduces theme after theme, then abandons them in frustratingly embryonic form.  Thus, Paula Power and George Somerset offer different models for shaping one's identity in relationship to the past (see: Tess of the d'Urbervilles), but inconsistently so; Paula is apparently a type of the "modern" woman (see: Jude the Obscure), but has no real moral or intellectual substance; Captain De Stancy finds himself undone by a buried domestic secret (see: The Mayor of Casterbridge), but there's nothing especially touching about it.   Hardy identifies the transformative potential of modern technologies like the telegraph, the railroad, and the camera, yet he fails to fully develop the contrast between such advances and De Stancyish medievalism--despite the pointed presence of a telegraph line coming out of the castle.  The too-obviously-named Dare has an intriguing obsession with chance, allowing Hardy to indulge in a brief knockoff of Daniel Deronda's famous opening, but he never works through the implications of chance for narrative, ethics, or characterization.  There are even bizarre moments of gender and erotic ambiguity involving Paula and Charlotte de Stancy, as well as Dare, but Hardy abandons ship as soon as possible.  Undsoweiter. 

A Laodicean achieves its greatest and most consistent success when it comes to representing social conventions as a series of theatrical gestures.  Gatewood notes the novel's indebtedness to melodrama, and Hardy's emphasis on performed instead of interior selves follows that genre's conventions.*  Somerset and the other male characters spend the entire novel attempting to decode Paula's simultaneously flirtatious and self-protective gestures:

"I--can I help you?" said Paula.  But she did not come near him; indeed, she withdrew a little.  She looked up the passage, and down the passage, and became conscious that it was long and gloomy, and that nobody was near.  A curious coy uneasiness seemed to take possession of her.  Whether she thought, for the first time, that she had made a mistake--that to wander about the castle alone with him was compromising, or whether it was the mere shy instinct of maidenhood, nobody knows; but she said suddenly, "I will get something for you, and return in a few minutes."  (83)

The narrator shares Paula's coyness.  Note how we slip momentarily into her mind ("became conscious") only to be abruptly pushed out of it again ("nobody knows").  The two explanations on offer for Paula's behaviors are contradictory: one refers to her feminine essence, the other to her self-conscious awareness of public opinion.  Is she naturally shy, or is she theatrical? Moreover, claims about her feelings or thoughts are usually cordoned off behind a barrier of qualifiers, like "seemed" (as here), "appeared," or "as if."  In turn, Paula's affections for Somerset wax and wane as she interprets his performance as a responsible professional and gentleman.  The characters spend the novel fighting through thickets of supposedly revelatory gestures, only to find that the selves behind the gestures remain opaque. 

Not a novel for undergraduates, then, and probably not a novel to read for pleasure.  On the Burstein scale of "good, fun, or interesting," the novel rates an "interesting" (as in, interesting to those with a prior reason to be interested in it), primarily for its use of courtship to reflect on the nature of selfhood. 

*--See, e.g, Elaine Hadley, Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-1885 (Stanford, 1997).