Hardy's Fables of Integrity

In this fresh reading of seven of Thomas Hardy's major novels, Marjorie Garson argues that his fiction is shaped by a pervasive anxiety about the body and about bodily disintegration. Taking as its starting-point the many somatic images and metaphors within the novels, the book uncovers a subtext about the threat of bodily and psychic dissolution which shapes both Hardy's powerful depiction of nature and his ambivalent treatment of women.