THE COMMON SINNER: MOTIF AND METAPHOR IN THE FICTION OF L. P. HARTLEY

ROBERT C PETERSEN, Purdue University

Abstract

The relatively modest critical reputation of the late Leslie Poles Hartley (1895-1972) derives in large part from limitations inherent in the methodologies thus far brought to bear upon his fiction. The Freudian analyses, the generic treatments, and the thematic and historical discussions of his novels by various critics are complementary, but these approaches fail to analyze in sufficient detail Hartley's integration of realism and Judeo-Christian symbolism, and thereby fail to give adequate weight to the development of his moral vision, the most significant aspect of his contribution to modern letters. This study focuses upon the artistic means by which Hartley articulates that vision in those novels which are central to an understanding of his work and upon which his reputation will depend. The introductory chapter uses his first novel, Simonetta Perkins (1925), and his critical essays, chiefly those reprinted in The Novelist's Responsibility (1967), to define his moral outlook and to propose the hypothesis that, throughout his career, Hartley was engaged in defining a pattern of action which reconciles for his fictional protagonists the rival claims of love and justice. Chapter Two argues that the fusion of literal action and Judeo-Christian imagery which occurs during the "epiphanies" of Eustace Cherrington in Eustace and Hilda: A Trilogy (1944-1947) directly embodies the moral and spiritual values Hartley's fiction postulates. Chapter Three deals with The Boat (1949), The Go-Between (1953), and Facial Justice (1960), in which Hartley examines the moral growth of protagonists whose emotional isolation is breached by a cathartic confrontation with self; and Chapter Four examines My Fellow Devils (1951), The Hireling (1957), and The Harness Room (1971), in which he dramatizes the catalytic effect of love on both his withdrawn, immature focal characters and the generally lower class, generally Lawrentian, males who bring them to a greater sense of life. As the concluding chapter indicates, Hartley's first three novels--Eustace and Hilda, The Boat, and My Fellow Devils--are those in which he establishes the themes and techniques on which he works variations in later books. Hartley's subject is love, in all its varied forms, and he uses it both to indict the moral irresponsibility of individuals and to bring them to a sense of human fellowship. Without suggesting that his books are about religion in the theological sense, it is clear from Hartley's preoccupation with the subject of morality that his novels cannot escape religious connotations. His fiction reflects certain constant ethical and spiritual concerns: the conflicting claims of private and public duties, the function of conscience in human interaction, and the need for self-sacrificial action to resolve moral problems. Hartley's major concern is with a process of moral growth within the protagonist of each of his novels; the means by which he embodies this development derives largely from the epiphanic technique of the Eustace and Hilda trilogy, and his novels are a set of variations on themes central to his work since Simonetta Perkins. Hartley is a novelist in whose fiction symbolic meaning and literal statement are virtually identical, and his books are religious in the sense that they argue for the existence of a transcendent system of values which can free a man from moral uncertainty.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

British and Irish literature

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