‘The Bride-Night Fire’: Hardy and the Voice of the Folk

The action of Hardy’s mildly scandalous early poem, ‘The Bride-Night Fire’ (1875), is easily summarised: Barbree, the heroine, is in love with a local youth, Tim Tankens, but is dependent on a cross-grained uncle who compels her to marry an older alcoholic neighbour, Tranter Sweatley. After the wedding-feast, whilst Barbree retires nervously to the bedroom, Sweatley accidentally sets fire to his house. Tim, alerted by the blaze, catches sight of a semi-naked Barbree cowering in the orchard, rescues her and takes her back to his own house, whilst the villagers can find no sign of the tranter, except for one bone. Barbree subsequently remains at Tim’s house but confines herself to his loft. Later, the possibility of scandal hinted at by a local skimmity-ride is countered by the couple’s marriage, on which occasion Barbree proudly declares herself to be still ‘a maiden’. As Norman Arkans observed in his analysis of Hardy and the ballad tradition, this material is characterised by ‘the presence of ancestral voices descended from more primitive, bardic voices spinning yarns, singing tales, weaving stories about plaintive lovers, mismatched couples, unfortunate wrongdoers’. This text, which Edmund Gosse claimed was based on a story told by Hardy’s paternal grandmother, is one of a handful of poems which exclusively concentrate upon the deployment of the Dorset dialect, a number of which echo the timbre and structure of the ballad form. The narrative conforms rather precisely to Vladimir Propp’s analysis of the formulaic way in which the folk-tale ‘presents … a misfortune at first and then the receipt of a helper who liquidates it’. It has been suggested that traditional balladry thrives best in a homogeneous feudal and agricultural society, and preferably in a border region, and further, that orally based texts ‘contain the traditional phrases and patternings intrinsic to the oral method of composition’. In utilising the Dorset dialect, however, Hardy was highly conscious as a writer that, as he phrased it, ‘a tongue which, though a regular growth and not a provincial corruption, is indubitably fast perishing’.In the south-west of England, he maintained, an increasingly centralised education system had ‘gone on with its silent and inevitable effacements, reducing the speech of this country to uniformity, and obliterating every year many a fine old local word’. The use of dialect was thus, in his quasi-Darwinian terms, ‘worsted in the struggle for existence, when a uniform tongue became a necessity’. Sue Edney has appositely observed how, in the work of Hardy’s mentor, William Barnes, the sense ‘of what was familiar and stable in the life of a small farmhouse is always underpinned by anxiety over change’,and that sense of anxiety is registered here not only in the authorial act of recording the ‘fast-perishing’ dialect but also in the disastrous fire at Tranter Sweatley’s. In his survey of dialect usage in Hardy, Ralph Elliott notes how, whilst in the fiction it is intermittently smuggled in as ‘a literary compromise’, in a few of the poems it ‘is more obviously a part of the poet’s exploitation of every register of speech with which Hardy was familiar’. By affixing the subtitle ‘A Wessex Tradition’ to his tale, Hardy indicates to a putative metropolitan audience that, in the words of Ruth Finnegan, ‘“the ballad society” is typically a “folk” and isolated one, based on oral transmission’, in a process characterised by what she designates ‘a highly formulaic style’. In his study of oral tradition, Albert Lord distinguishes between the illiteracy of the folk-singer and the work of ‘the literary poet’, and remarks,