The Decline of the Goddess: Nature, Culture, and Women in Thomas Hardy's Fiction.

Stark and apparently irreconcilable conflicts of interest structure Thomas Hardy's fiction - conflicts between worlds rural and urban, old and new, natural and social, male and female. Critical approaches to Hardy tend to take one or another of these oppositions as paramount. For feminist studies such as Penny Boumelha's influential Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (1982), Rosemarie Morgan's Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (1988), and the collection edited by Margaret Higgonet, The Sense of Sex (1993), the conflict between Hardy's male and female protagonists, and the ascendancy of the latter, have generated analyses of the novels as bloody battle-grounds of sexual desire and antagonism.

At its best this focus has contributed to our understanding not only of Hardy's often ambivalent and ambiguous narrative treatment of his female protagonists, but also of the contradictions within Victorian gender ideologies. The two monographs under review share the emphasis on Hardy's heroines, but to different degrees they rely upon a somewhat monolithic understanding of both Hardy's narrative voice and Victorian attitudes. Ellen Lew Sprechman (frequently) and Shirley A. Stave (occasionally) refer to the "typical Victorian heroine," from whom they distinguish Hardy's passionate, strong-willed women; implicit in their studies is a proto-feminist Hardy consistently battling Victorian gender orthodoxy. But …