Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, on June 2, 1840, and educated in local schools and later privately. His father, a stonemason and builder, apprenticed him early to a local architect engaged in restoring old churches.
From 1862 to 1867 Hardy worked for an architect in London and later continued to practise architecture, despite ill health, in Dorset.
Meanwhile he was writing poetry, though with little success.
He then turned to novels, finding them more saleable, and by 1874 he was able to support himself by writing.
In the same year Hardy married his first wife, Emma Gifford, whom he met while on business in Cornwall.
Their marriage lasted until her death in 1912, which prompted Hardy to write his collection of poems titled Veteris Vestigiae Flammae (Vestiges of an Old Flame).
These poems are some of Hardy's finest, and describe his meeting Emma and his subsequent loss.
In 1914 Florence Dugdale became Hardy's second wife.
She also became his biographer after his death in Dorchester, on January 11, 1928.
Hardy is regarded as "the last of the great Victorians".
He was also a profound critic of Victorian society.
The world represented in his fiction becomes confusing and complicated.
Pessimism
Hardy's pessimism stemmed from his opinion that God and Nature were equally indifferent to the strivings and values of men.
Human desires for happiness seemed incompatible with the destructive law of life.
Hardy questioned the current moral and religious principles.
He did not believe in divine providence nor did he trust the laws of society.
Hardy could not accept God by mere faith.
His loss of faith led him to a pessimism which is reflected in his fiction and poetry.
Romance & realism
His fiction is rather a blend of romance and realism.
Realistic motifs in Hardy's fiction include:
description of rustic village dwellers;
childhood memories of the English countryside;
the decline of the English countryside
autobiographical elements.
Romance motifs include:
love, courtship and marriage - separated lovers who remain true to each other;
an intricate plot, including stories within stories - unexpected chance events;
hidden and mistaken identity.
Philosophical outlook
Hardy's outlook was shaped in part by his extensive but critical reading of the Bible, study of ancient tragedy, philosophical and scientific works, and in part by his rural provenance.
A pessimistic view of life
Brought up in a community with its own old rituals and traditions, Hardy viewed modernity and industrial change as a hazard.
He developed a pessimistic view of life, where fate or chance is responsible for human misery.
His view of life was thus largely based on the belief that man is a victim of fate and circumstances.
Meliorist
However, Hardy did not call himself a pessimist but he preferred to view himself as an evolutionary meliorist.
Meliorism is a belief that the world can be improved by human effort.
Darwin's influence
Hardy had been brought up in the tradition of Christianity but by the age of 27 he had lost his faith, mainly under the influence of Darwin's The Origin of Species, and he never regained it.
Darwin's work undermined the prevailing concept of the divine descent of man. As he put it later: “I have been looking for God for fifty years and think that if he had existed I should have discovered him.'
Blind unconscious will
Hardy viewed the universe (symbolised by desolate Egdon Heath in his novels) to be devoid of divine meaning.
In place of Christian God he put a blind unconscious will.
Determinism
Hardy questioned the moral and religious principles of Victorian society.
His pessimistic view of society is derived largely from the philosophy of determinism.
Hardy was a determinist who was aware that man's life is controlled by some inexplicable external force, which he sometimes calls the Fate of Circumstances (in The Mayor of Casterbridge), the President of Immortals (in Tess of the d'Urbervilles) or the Immanent Will (in The Dynasts).
Heredity & environment
Man is, according to him, determined by both heredity and environment. Hardy learnt from Darwin that natural order is indifferent to man's desires and aspirations.
As a consequence, he broke off the Victorian optimism and self-complacency.
Heredity & environment
Hardy adapted Darwin's ideas to his later fiction showing characters to be at the mercy of their environment, heredity and adaptability rather than more in control of fate.
Hardy's major fiction depicts the frailty of man in a malevolent or at least indifferent universe. His vision of life was certainly deterministic, pessimistic and tragic, yet it offered a possibility of positive morality for his readers.
Hardy's determinism
Pity and compassion are the foundations of Hardy's humanism.
There is also some room for personal (existential) freedom in Hardy's universe.
Existential freedom
Existential freedom is the fruit of individual responsibility and human dignity.
For him, man as part of Nature is subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, hence he is unfree; yet when man transcends his natural bondage, he may achieve personal freedom which means that he is free to make his own choices - but he will have to pay dearly for them.
Inspired by Darwin's biologism, Hardy showed that man is the only animal for whom existence is a problem which he has to solve by his own choice and from which he cannot escape.
Hardy's universe
Thus, we may infer that in Hardy's universe man can only be free when he is conscious of his condition and as long as he is ready to take responsibility for his choices, irrespective of the fact that they may be wrong.
Tragic vision
Hardy's characters serve as metaphors for his tragic vision of the human condition.
Hardy's critical vision of life was deeply rooted in his Hellenic and pagan sympathies.
His fiction also reflects the classical tradition of Greek and Roman influences on Western literature.
He often quoted the Romantic poets.
As a young man, Thomas Hardy was attracted to both Shelley and Wordsworth.
His interest in the English Romantics is reflected not only in his later poetry but also in the epigraphs to his novels.
Yet, Hardy distanced himself from Romantic and post-Romantic philosophy (faith in romantic love, Nature's divine presence, etc.).
Sexual energy or loving companionship.
Narrative strategy
Hardy adapted many narrative techniques from romance, melodrama and tragedy.
He was criticised by contemporary critics for clumsy style and plots based on implausible coincidences.
In Hardy's novels the narrator, or the imagined voice, who transmits the story to the reader, is not fully omniscient. Unlike a typical Victorian third-person narrator, the Hardyan narrator is rather a keen observer who informs the “less observant or less well-informed reader.
A Hardyan narrator knows all, but does not necessarily tell the reader everything he knows. In a way Hardy, along with Henry James and Joseph Conrad, anticipated the new narrative techniques of 20th century fiction.
Hardy's fiction is realistic on the surface but its hidden strata reveal its allegoric and symbolic message. Repeatedly using elaborate symbolic images in his novels, his characters are richly metaphorical and anticipate many complex characters of Modernist fiction.
Hardy had a particular empathy with the English language and his novels, as well as his poetry, contain a plethora of extraordinary words and expressions, which prove his love and mastery of the native tongue.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
In many ways Tess of the d'Urbervilles marks the turning point between the Victorian Age and the modern period.
The publication of the novel in 1891 shocked and dismayed the Victorian public with its presentation of a young, beautiful girl seduced by an aristocratic villain.
Hardy was strongly criticised for its covert eroticism and unacceptable social and moral message.
Initially, the book was rejected by editors who were not prepared to approve of Hardy's frank treatment of relations between the sexes.
When finally published, the novel provoked a storm of criticism.
An American reviewer wrote in 1892 in the Nation that “Tess is as profoundly immoral and dangerous book as a young person can read”.
The character of Tess Durbeyfield is the most generalised of all Hardy characters. Rosemary Sumner observed that “Tess embodies herself Hardy's vision of a perfect balance between the physical and the spiritual.”
The tragedy of Tess may be treated as an allegory or parable of the human condition.
In Tess, Hardy created a woman victimised and eventually destroyed by both a web of unpredictable circumstances and man-made injustice.
Tess is both a realistic and symbolic character. She is a symbolic martyr, a ritual scapegoat, a victim of both her sex and society.
Hardy criticises vehemently the Victorian double moral standard which permits condemnation of the victim of rape but spares the violator.
He viewed human existence as a tragedy at the individual's expense. It is apparent that destiny for Tess is predetermined by some unknown forces, but for a present-day reader these forces become quite obvious.
They are the conditions of social life in Victorian England and Tess's own personality, although Tess is little aware of them.
She feels that she has been cast into an alien and incomprehensible world.
She was born in the remote village of Marlott, far from the threats of the modern age, and is unprepared to cope with the dangers of the “new” people like Alec.
Although Tess has a “full zest of life” she cannot withstand the new order.
In this sense, Tess symbolises the old rural landscape which is brutally eroded by the industrial movement. But Tess is also a victim of individual human beings and of a repressive society.
Tess's conduct is incongruous with the requirements of institutional morality. She does so little to alleviate her suffering. She remains almost always passive throughout the novel.
This is an attitude of her class, one might deduce from Arnold Kettle's study of Tess, and one that renders her class all the more vulnerable in the face of social change.
In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy presented his disappointment with the effects of industrialisation and urbanisation on the rural community in the second half of the 19th century.
His father, Stoke, had bought the name in order to increase his status. Heredity factors are probably much less important for Hardy than socially conditioned ones. Tess's natural simplicity and beauty stand in sharp opposition to people tainted with moral corruption.
Tess looks upon herself as a figure of guilt; but she a daughter of Nature (this is best seen in the Valley of the great dairies; here she experience for the first time the pleasure of life (she is drawn into the wild garden to hear Angel playing the harp - a sense of physical intimacy with the natural environment); When Angel sees her asleep, she awakens in him this sensation of natural pleasure which he remembered from his early childhood;
Angel has double moral standards (in Victorian times men could divorce their wives for adultery, women could not); Angel feels that he has been deceived by Tess; (“You were one person, now you are another.
The woman I have been loving is not you.”); he thinks that the moral sin Tess committed is not only a sin against man but also against God.
The novel reflects the moral and ethical dilemmas of Victorian society; it also invites the reader to reflect what is the nature of good and evil.