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If it is true that the two grimmest words in the English language are Thomas Hardy, then thankfully we have Bernard Paris to give us a captivating intellectual remove from the woefulness beneath which Hardy grinds us down.
When I received a copy of Paris's slim volume, which was well before I had any notion of preparing a review for publication, I did something I had never done before and may never do again (unless Paris writes another book, which I hope for). Before looking the book over, let alone reading it, I decided to first read or reread the three novels of Hardy that Paris explicates. We are talking about Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Jude the Obscure. Truth is, I plugged earbuds into my iPhone and listened to the books. Why would I read/listen to such painful novels in sequence? The answer is simple enough: I am something of a Bernard Paris groupie. If he writes about characters in literature, I want to read that literature to see what Paris has to say.
I became acquainted with his work and with man about the same time, in the 1970s. By that time Paris had published books and articles about characters in literature utilizing the theories of neo-Freudian analysts, especially the theory of Karen Horney (e.g. Paris, 1965, 1974, 1978). During the 70s I had become well-schooled in the work of Horney and in applying her approach to clinical practice. I shared with my colleagues—and not only those at the Horney Institute—an unfortunate disdain for the application of psychoanalysis to literature. Paris, through his excellent scholarship, came to earn our considerable regard. He founded the International Karen Horney Society, published an invaluable biography of Horney (1994), and edited her work on the therapeutic process (1999) and her writings on culture, gender and psychoanalysis (2000). In his 15 books of literary criticism, Paris ultimately demonstrated the remarkable applicability of Horney's psychoanalytic theory to understanding ch