Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

188 THE ENVIOUS MAN IN FICTION
progressive liberal of today, whose social philosophy agrees in many
respects with that of the novel's egalitarian dictator. Hence Bien, having
chosen L. P. Hartley as his subject, and unable to beat a retreat, could do
no better when faced with the subject of the last novel than ignore the
novelist's true and obvious intention and select peripheral aspects of the
story for his interpretation.
Now, in Hartley's novel cosmetic surgery performed on women's
faces, for the socially desirable purpose of avoiding envy among less
pretty women, is simply the most obvious means of de-individualization
(the satirist's whole onslaught being against utopian egalitarians who
believe they have achieved an envy-free society as soon as they have put
all citizens on an equal financial and educational footing). Peter Bien,
however, manages to see this as a critical attack on the medical profession:
Hartley, he declares, wishes to 'warn us of the not-at-all preposterous
role the medical profession is already playing as an instrument to
abridge our liberties! ,45 It is, of course, notorious that doctors and the art
of medicine can be misused by dictators and wielders of power, just as
other sciences and technology can be misused. And the doctor who
'Beta-fies' Jael's face, and who is, besides, the dictator's medical attendant,
is not shown by Hartley in a very attractive light. The hospital staff
in the novel are probably much like all others in average, overworked
hospitals throughout the world. But it is difficult to understand how a
literary scholar could manage to suppress the work's actual social
criticism, which concerns the mania for equality in face of potential
envy, and to set in its place an attack on the medical profession.
For Bien has occasion more than once to speak of Hartley's political
philosophy, which, in a number of novels and essays, invariably involved
the defence of the individual against the claims of the collective. Bien
quotes, for instance, an autobiographical note of Hartley's which clearly
reveals what impelled this particular author to demonstrate in one of his
later works that a dictatorship or totalitarian regime could make the duty
of non-provocation of envy in others the chief means of social control.
Hartley tells of his life-long aversion to all forms of state coercion. When
he was up at Oxford, from 1915 to 1919, Herbert Spencer, Mill and all
other champions of individualism had already been proscribed. The
45 P. Bien, L. P. Hartley, London, 1963; University Park (Pa.), 1963, p. 221.