27th June 1984

Eroticism in the Victorian novel

Reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles – for the first time as it happens – I am struck by the power with which the Victorian novelists rendered sexuality.  I felt this on reading Middlemarch, where Casaubon’s dried-pod sterility and Rosalind’s kittenish charms are rendered with almost unbearably exquisite suggestiveness.  Knowing nothing of what happens when the lights go out, one knows everything and feels that the comprehensiveness of the images thus evoked would only be diminished by the addition of further more concrete detail. 

Hardy is of course less subtle but inordinately more powerful.  The strawberry which Tess eats from Alec’s fingers would be totally boring in the world of Playboy, but in the world of the Victorians it is utterly electric.  The Victorians knew, of course, that eroticism has more to do with repressiveness than with any other single thing.  (Hardy, incidentally, is probably the most inept of all the great writers.  The sheer mediocrity of most of his prose is quite flabbergasting – and yet the power of his novels is unique, and there is something uniquely moving about almost every word he writes.  One should read his books not as novels but as prose ballads, bearing in mind that it is the most moving singers who most often sing out of tune.)

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