| Popis: |
The violence of critical response provoked by the publication of Jude the Obscure is well documented, and does not need to be rehearsed in detail here. As Millgate notes, those who disliked the novel “felt free to express themselves with open vituperation,”1 and two representative illustrations from either side of the Atlantic will serve to communicate the perspective of such critics. The anonymous reviewer for the New York edition of the Bookman states that the novel “is simply one of the most objectionable books that we have ever read in any language whatsoever … for in our judgment frankly and deliberately expressed, in Jude the Obscure Mr. Hardy is merely speculating in smut,”2 while Margaret Oliphant, in her Blackwood’s article “The Anti-Marriage League,” decries Jude’s “grossness, indecency, and horror” before paying Hardy the scant compliment of declaring “[t]here may be books more disgusting, more impious as regards human nature, more foul in detail, in those dark corners where the amateurs of filth find garbage to their taste; but not… from any Master’s hand.”3 The extremity of these comments harkens back to the sensation fiction debates of the 1860s, to which indeed Oliphant had also contributed significantly, in much the same way and with much the same vehemence, demonstrating both her longevity and her consistency (not to say prudery). |
