Happy Ending

Woodlanders, it turns out, shares one of the most remarkable qualities of nearly all the other Hardy novels I've read - a great ending. Not a Hollywood happy ending, of course, but a dramatic, powerful one. And not a stupid surprise ending, which should lose its appeal after middle school, or a remarkable-coincidence ending, of which I never saw the appeal. Between the stars below are spoilers.

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The ending of Woodlanders is not just a "return to normalcy," as the jacket copy would have it, but a terribly piquant restatement of the book - Marty South, who has hung about the fringes of the book, emerges unexpectedly as the heart of the thing, making us think twice about all the thoughts of love and fidelity we have just finished reading. She seems a moral hero, but also a dupe, whose high-flown notion of love is as useless as it is harmonious with our higher yearnings.

The Shakespearian calamity that properly ends Return of the Native is a completely different sort of wonderful ending, dark and operatic, yet touched with realism. The extended denouement is slightly tedious, but in retrospect it provides a rather welcome catharsis after the high pitch of excitement reached at the climax.

The end of Tess of the d'Urbervilles is so quiet and just, and it is sadly delightful how Hardy gives the lovers a last little period of lovely happiness before she gives herself up. Again, totally different, totally effective.

Jude the Obscure's miserable, fitting ending, yet another completely different approach.

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How mature is this great variety and power! Many put Hardy in some rather confining boxes, but as this survey of his endings illustrates, he really did a lot of different things very well. I left off Far from the Madding Crowd, which has the worst ending of the great Hardy novels, but it was the first of the bunch, and if, as I argue, ending a novel is one of the hardest parts of writing it, one can excuse him for taking a book or two to get up to speed.

Hardy could well be labelled a moralizer, but at least his ethics were consistently in the right place, and what's more, he meant it and stuck to it. That's perhaps the most important thing about these "happy endings": they justify the novels as ethical statements. They are the final, necessary imprimatur of their high moral seriousness.

Perhaps we have outlived the era of moral seriousness in novel writing - perhaps if the debates touched on in Hardy's novels were still living I would be put off rather than moved by them. But it's certainly worth asking what the alternatives might be - humor, flippancy, snark, nihilism, amorality. Good so far as they go, but perhaps, finally, lacking in intensity and maturity if we are trying to create great art. There's a discussion to be had about the difference between a morally serious novel and a didactic or political novel, but I'll leave it for another time.

Just one more note: it occurs to me that it might be moral seriousness as much as anything else that lifts the two or three great Woody Allen movies above the rest of American cinema. For all Allen's cynicism, he allows a character in the final scene of Manhattan to remind us that we all still have the existential power of choice, which is not just an uplifting idea, or perhaps not uplifting at all, but a dare - a dare to be good and to do good.