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- Title
CHAPTER SIX: DEATH AND TRAGEDY IN THOMAS HARDY'S THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE AND OSCAR WILDE'S SALOME.
- Authors
Ue, Tom
- Abstract
The late Victorian period marks a proliferation of works, like Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native and Oscar Wilde's Salome, that share, in common, a preoccupation with death as a narrative event that seems to raise further questions. This essay argues that The Return of the Native helps us to understand Salome better because, like the play, the novel spurs us to judge its characters—it privileges us with more information than any single character within it—and, more importantly, to rethink our judgments. The tragedies of both works seem to lie, at least as much, on characters' deaths as on the marked difference between what we know about them and how they are (mis)read and (mis)remembered by others. Hardy's focus on multiple characters in his novel helps to enhance and to deepen our appreciation for Wilde's play by reminding us that minor character's stories are not trivial, by spurring us to read their narratives more attentively, and by triggering us to analyze, more closely, their contributions to the story proper. Our process of reading Hardy's and Wilde's treatments of death and tragedy is central to both their literary projects and late Victorian aesthetics. Advocating a renewed formalism, and with particular focus on the deaths of Eustacia in The Return of the Native and the Young Syrian in Salome, this article analyzes the two works' investment of narrative interest in these two characters.
- Subjects
HARDY, Thomas, 1840-1928; RETURN of the Native, The (Book : Hardy); SALOME (Play); WILDE, Oscar, 1854-1900; LITERARY characters
- Publication
Dialogue (15749630), 2012, Vol 15, p87
- ISSN
1574-9630
- Publication type
Essay