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Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy 352 / VICTORIAN POETRY ROSEMARIE MORGAN The focus in Hardy studies still veers toward the extratextual: biographical activities continue to flourish (as noticed here, in 2004), even branching out into an array of hybrid forms. There are several varieties of this in circulation. Roger Ebbatson, in "The Authorial Double: Hardy and Florence Henniker" (An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840-1920 [Ashgate, 2005]), certainly has something of a literary cross-breed in applying the device of the doppelgänger to Hardy's creative writing activity with Henniker. Ebbatson explains, "Whereas it [the double] is a literary strategy customarily employed to expand, deepen and disturb realist narrative and characterization, in Thomas Hardy and Florence Henniker's collaborative story `The Spectre of the Real' it is the figure of the authorial double which generates a fascinatingly unstable text" (p. 84). The doppelgänger device, whereby a character is self-duplicated, has produced protagonists as antithetical as Jekyll and Hyde, as self-alienated as Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, and as sinister, or troubling, as Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein. The divided self, in the world of psychoanalysis, theorizes a concept--or concepts--of splitting consciousness between ego, id, and superego. Whichever way you look at it, the doppelgänger is problematic. Ebbatson's http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Victorian Poetry West Virginia University Press

Thomas Hardy

Morgan, Rosemarie
Victorian Poetry , Volume 43 (3) – Sep 11, 2005
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West Virginia University Press
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Copyright © 2005 West Virginia University.
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1530-7190
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Abstract

352 / VICTORIAN POETRY ROSEMARIE MORGAN The focus in Hardy studies still veers toward the extratextual: biographical activities continue to flourish (as noticed here, in 2004), even branching out into an array of hybrid forms. There are several varieties of this in circulation. Roger Ebbatson, in "The Authorial Double: Hardy and Florence Henniker" (An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840-1920 [Ashgate, 2005]), certainly has something of a literary cross-breed in applying the device of the doppelgänger to Hardy's creative writing activity with Henniker. Ebbatson explains, "Whereas it [the double] is a literary strategy customarily employed to expand, deepen and disturb realist narrative and characterization, in Thomas Hardy and Florence Henniker's collaborative story `The Spectre of the Real' it is the figure of the authorial double which generates a fascinatingly unstable text" (p. 84). The doppelgänger device, whereby a character is self-duplicated, has produced protagonists as antithetical as Jekyll and Hyde, as self-alienated as Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, and as sinister, or troubling, as Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein. The divided self, in the world of psychoanalysis, theorizes a concept--or concepts--of splitting consciousness between ego, id, and superego. Whichever way you look at it, the doppelgänger is problematic. Ebbatson's

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Victorian Poetry – West Virginia University Press

Published: Sep 11, 2005

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