Desperate Remedies
Desperate Remedies (1871) was Thomas Hardy’s first published novel. Written chronologically by date, from 1835 to the 1860s, the chapter title move the reader through “The Events of Thirty Years,” “The Events of a Fortnight,” “The Events of Eight Days” and so on. With every passing hour, day, week, year, Desperate Remedies leads its reader through the coming-of-age events in young Cytherea Graye’s life. At the time, Desperate Remedies, like most Victorian novels, was published serially, and its pace and chapter break-up seem to lend themselves to such a publication. Accordingly, this is a book one eases into slowly. It’s linguistic play, its setting, its character drama lend itself to being savored as it transports the reader from a rural village to a slightly gothic, nineteenth-century English manor house. By the last third of the novel, as Hardy has layered mystery upon mystery, misery upon misery, I found myself compelled to finish it quickly to see how he might resolve the many plot complications. And by the final days of the novel’s narrative, he had done just that; Hardy concludes Desperate Remedies on the side of love winning the day as characters find desperate remedies to the plots many twists.
When first we meet our heroine, Miss Cytherea Graye, we find her “an exceptional young maiden who glowed amid the dullness like a single bright-red poppy in a field of brown stubble” (9). For anyone who has previously read Hardy’s novels, it is clear that things will likely not go well for poor Cytherea. She is, after all, a young woman whose father and brother seem to lack in common sense, and therefore will likely be thrown to the mercy of fate and the diverse cast of characters with whom she will find herself bound. Even her name is tinged with a troubling history, a tragic romance shrouded in mystery. As Cytherea makes her way in the world she, of course, blunders, and even in this, his first published novel, Hardy emphasizes the gender double standards of his time by focusing on the difficulties and shame faced by women who have mis-stepped (or even appeared to do so). Desperate Remedies, like later Hardy novels, stresses the challenges faced by “a friendless woman who is blown about like a reed shaken with the wind” (253) and the reader mourns for the insignificant moments that come to haunt young Cytherea.
Cytherea ultimately finds herself in the employ of another Cytherea, whose past and motives are unclear even dubious. Gothic undertones of setting and mood nod to the thriller suspense genres at work, as Miss Graye acclimates to her new life as companion to the original Cytherea, known in the book as Miss Aldclyffe. The plot twists and turns through broken engagements, estrangements, blackmail, and mysterious connections between characters. Broken hearts and seedy back stories punctuate the narrative. The colors, seasons, and weather of the British countryside tend to mirror Hardy’s characters’ emotional experience and/or emphasize the mood. There is no shortage of melodrama interwoven with the suspenseful plot; a fact Hardy bemoaned in later life. But, unlike many of his later works (Tess of the d’Urbervilles certainly comes to mind), this Hardy novel resolves with his protagonist on this side of the grave; his cautionary tale in Desperate Remedies does not slay his heroine.
The language and writing in Desperate Remedies were by far my favorite part of this novel. My tabs of notable passages accumulated as Cytherea’s doom seemed all the more likely. I was, however, pleasantly surprised by Hardy in this story, as his cast of characters end in ways I affiliate more Jane Austen’s novels than Hardy’s (i.e. the villains end badly, while the heroes find a version of happily-ever-after). I left its final scene feeling less depressed about the state of humanity, the hopelessness of human connection, the failure of the world to assert the rights of women, than is often the case when reading Hardy’s novels. That said, Desperate Remedies deals with a number of subjects and themes to which Hardy returns again and again in his later works. His fascination with gender roles and double-standards, the naivety and vulnerability of young ladies, the allure of poetry to the romantic mind, the tragic fallout of romantic love, the desperation of love triangles, and the means of securing a woman’s (and her family’s) future by marrying a man of means. As is the case with his later works, then, Hardy’s first published novel embody both problematic and classically Victorian cultural elements in his character development, plot, and resolution.
In fact, Desperate Remedies includes a little bit of everything nineteenth-century: a touch of the gothic, a dappling of sleuthing and murder mystery, a doomed love triangle, a fallen lady, the evils of gin, and so much more. As with other Hardy novels I have read and loved, I appreciate those moments that Hardy makes so moving by perfectly setting to narrative moment: when lovers meet in the wood, parted by a stream and life’s challenges; when rivals face one another for the first time in the gothic light of a shadowy chapel; when an ice storm interrupts a misguided marriage. Hardy masterfully matches setting to mood time and time again in Desperate Remedies. Throughout these narrative elements, Hardy sprinkles proverbial statements. These didacticisms often challenge the Victorian standards of the time and often begin to build Hardy’s thoughtful, at times radical, gender theories. For example: “[T]he fact remains that, after all, women are Mankind, and that in many of the sentiments of life the different of sex is but a difference of degree” (192). There are many such adages embedded in Hardy’s first published novel, and they add to the quintessentially Victorian feel. The moralizing, even as it attempts to shift the morality of its time, feels prototypical of late nineteenth-century prose.
Ultimately, Desperate Remedies exists as Thomas Hardy’s first publication of fiction, after his failure to publish poetry when he worked young architect. (It is worth noting that his protagonist is also a young architect who once wrote poetry, as in another early novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes.) For any fan of his later fiction, this is, therefore, a necessary read. As with all great writers’ early works, I found it is fascinating to observe Hardy’s early treatment of themes he develops in greater detail as his prose matures, and to recognize the narrative styles he chose to abandon.
A Few Great Passages:
“It was that stagnant hour of the twenty-four when the practical garishness of Day, having escaped from the fresh long shadows and enlivening newness of morning, has not yet made any perceptible advance towards acquiring those mellow and soothing tones which graces its decline” (9).
“But to attempt to gain a view of her—or indeed of any fascinating woman—from a measured category, is as difficult to appreciate the effect of a landscape by exploring it at night with a lantern—or of a full chord of music by piping the notes in succession” (11).
“[D]on’t love too blindly: blindly you will love if you love at all, but a little care is still possible to a well-disciplined heart. May that heart be yours as it was not mine [. . .] Cultivate the art of renunciation” (15).
“To him [Owen] humanity, so far as he had thought of it all, was rather divided into distinct classes than blended from extreme to extreme. Hence by a sequence of ideas which might be traced if it were worth while, he either detested or respected opinion, and instinctively sought to escape a cold shade that mere sensitiveness would have endured” (17).
“As is well known, ideas are so elastic in a human brain, that they have a constant measure which may be called their actual bulk. Any important idea may be compressed to a molecule by an unwonted crowding of others; and any small idea will expand to whatever length and breadth of vacuum the mind may be able to make over to it” (24).
“From having already loved verse passionately, I went on to read it continually; then I went rhyming myself. If anything on earth ruins a man for useful occupation, and for content with reasonable success in a profession or trade, it is the habit of writing verses on emotional subjects, which had much better be left to die from want of nourishment” (47).
“But the vivacity of spirit which had hitherto enlivened her, was fast ebbing under the pressure of prosaic realities, and the warm scarlet of the geraniums, glowing most conspicuously, and mingling with the vivid cold red and green of the verbenas, the rich depth of the dahlia, and the ripe mellowness of the calceolaria, backed the pale hue of a flock of meek sheep feeding in the open park” (69).
“A great statesman thinks several times, and acts; a young lady acts, and thinks several times” (153).
“Their faces came almost close together: one large flame which still lingered upon the ruins outside, threw long dancing shadows of each across the nave till they bent upwards against the aisle wall, and also illuminated their eyes, as each met those of the other” (201).
“Reasoning worldliness, especially when allied with sensuousness, cannot repress on some extreme occasions the human instinct to pour out the soul to some Being or Personality, who in frigid moments is dismissed with the title of Chance, or at most Law” (202).
“The helpless flatness of the landscape gave her, as it gives all such temperaments, a sense of bare equality with, and no superiority to, a single entity under the sky” (242).
“But what was love without a home? Misery. What was a home without love? Alas, not much; but still a kind of home” (244).
“Everything in the place was the embodiment of decay: the fading red glare from the setting sun, which came in at the west window, emphasizing the end of the day and all its cheerful doings, the mildewed walls, the uneven paving stones, the wormy pews, the sense of recent occupation, and the dank air of death which had gathered with the evening, would have made a grave a lighter mood than Cytherea’s was then” (247).
“O, if people only knew what a timidity and melancholy upon the subject of her future grows up in the heart of a friendless woman who is blown about like a reed shaken with the wind, as I am, they would not call this resignation of one’s self by the name of scheming to get a husband. Scheme to marry? I’d rather scheme to die!” (253).
“But ah, [. . .], it is difficult to adjust our outer and inner life with perfect honesty to all! Though it may be right to care more for the benefit of the many than the indulgence of your own single self, when you consider that the many, and duty them, only exist to you through your own existence, what can be said?” (264).
“When lanced by a mental agony of such refined and special torture that it is indescribable by men’s words, she [miserable woman] moves among her acquaintances much as before, and contrives so to cast her actions in the old moulds that she is only considered to be rather duller than usual” (270).
“It seems to be an almost universal rule that a woman who once has courted, or who eventually will court, the society of men on terms dangerous to her honour cannot refrain from flinging the meaning glance whenever the moment arrives in which the glance is strongly asked for, even if her life and whole future depended upon that moment’s abstinence” (306).
“Of all the ingenious and cruel satires that from the beginning till now have been stuck like knives into womankind, surely there is not one so lacerating to them, and to us who love them, as the trite old fact, that the most wretched of men can, in the twinkling of an eye, find a wife ready to be more wretched still for the sake of his company” (332).
“Where the person suspected of mysterious moral obliquity is the possessor of great physical and intellectual attractions, the mere sense of incongruity adds an extra shudder of dread” (374).
“There’s no such thing as a random snapping off of what was laid down to last longer. We only suddenly light upon an end-thoughtfully formed as any other-which has been existing at that very same point from the beginning, though unseen by us to be so soon” (406).
Bibliography:
“Desperate Remedies.” https://www.hardysociety.org/oxo/37/desperate-remedies/, September 1, 2020.
Hardy, Thomas. Desperate Remedies. Simon & Brown: 2013.
