Genealogy and Fiction in Hardy : Family Lineage and Narrative Lines

To my mother, Patricia Murphy O'Toole, and in memory of my father, Thomas Joseph O'Toole, who together taught me to value family and to love literature Contents Note on Editions and Abbreviations ## Acknowledgments My greatest debt is to Elaine Scarry, who advised the dissertation that preceded this book and who has continued to offer unstinting support. Her patience and generosity are as remarkable as her insight. I am also deeply grateful to Barbara Johnson and Philip Fisher for their incisive comments and advice. Special thanks are due to Deirdre d' Albertis for patiently reviewing many parts of the manuscript, for offering astute commentary and suggestions, and for providing fellowship from the earliest to the latest stages of this project. My colleagues at McGill have provided a supportive community within which I am privileged to work. I particularly wish to thank Kerry McSweeney for his good counsel, and Maggie Kilgour and Brian Trehearne for good meals and good movies. Thanks also to the graduate students in my 1996 seminar whose energy and insights helped reinvigorate my own reflections on Hardy. Finally, I thank my husband, Martin Stevenson, for his support and his patience, for allowing me to turn his sun room into my writing room, and for choosing Hardy country in which to propose. Tess O'Toole uncovers Hardy's career-long fascination with the points of intersection between genealogy and fiction and argues that this relationship fuels much of his writing. Hereditary patterns are the product of narrative compulsion; the circulation of the family story is necessary to reproduce the history it records. As well as analyzing Hardy's characteristic treatment of family history, this volume revises existing accounts of genealogical narrative, and in its conclusion considers the presence in other nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels of motifs foregrounded in Hardy's work.
Across most of Hardy's novels, as well as a number of short stories and narrative poems, O'Toole (English, Magill U., Montreal) draws connections between his investment in genealogical themes and his interest in the power of narrative. She argues that his texts illuminate key structures of genealogical narrative, revises existing critical accounts of the genre, and identities the practice of narrative jamming as a formal equivalent to the incest that so often appears in the family history novel. A version of one chapter has appeared previously. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or. Tess O'toole. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 189-192) And Index.