Thomas Hardy: the last Phase of the Victorian Realistic novel

Thomas Hardy: the last Phase of the Victorian Realistic novel

Although Hardy creates a fictional universe based on the conventions of Realism, with a

documentary precision, addressing contemporary issues, his vision assumes tragic as well as

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ironic, poetic undertones. The typical Hardyesque novel seems a labyrinth, trapping characters

in a world of determinism, pessimism, religious skepticism. This vision reduces plots to a

melodramatic level, the human b 737b15h eing allowed only a marginal position. His novels are set in a

fictional world that abounds in signs of ill-omen, accidents, unhappy coincidences. His fiction

suffers a strange distortion of the mundane world, abunding in powerful archetypal situations

(the scapegoat in The Mayor of Casterbridge, the night journey, the dying god, the rebirth

theme). After Jude the Obscure's unfavourable reception, Hardy decided to revert to writing

poetry.

Thomas Hardy can be seen as a poet and novelist at the same time. He was born at

Dorset, the Wessex of his novels, on June 2, 1840. He became acquainted with Schopenhauer's

work, which had an impact upon his outlook. Before his first great novel, Far from the

Madding Crowd (1874), he had published Desperate Remedies (1871), Under the Greenwood

Tree (1872) which was a great success. It was followed by the masterpiece The Return of the

Native (1878). Next he published The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the

D'Urbervilles, in 1891, Jude the Obscure in 1895. According to his own classification, his

novels divide themselves into 1) Novels of character and environment, such as The Mayor of

Casterbridge (1886) 2) Romances and fantasies, The Well-Beloved (1892), Two on a Tower

(1882) 3) Novels of ingenuity, Desperate Remedies. Hardy challenged Victorian

conventionalism, so his novel Jude the Obscure was received with hostility by the authorities

of the day because of its pessimism and the treatment of new subjects. It was a denial of

Victorian conformism and respectability. He put an end to novel-writing and began to publish

poetry and drama.

Hardy's artistic vision has often been associated to philosophical scepticism, Darwinism

as well as to his love for rural Wessex, which gave his novels a local flavour. His works are

often set against a background of immemorial traditions and customs with ancient monuments

such as Stonehenge, creating an impression of man's struggle with natural forces, with fate or

his own instincts. He showed harmony of view with Huxley, Spencer, Comte, Hume, and

defined his ideas as « evolutionary Meliorism », based on the attempt of perfecting life. There

is an affinity between his view and Schopenhauer's concept of the immanent or blind Will. His

chief fictional techniques are often described as his use of coincidence, symmetrical

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positioning of characterization, archaic and sometimes awkward vocabulary, while his

distinctive stylistic signature lies in the picturesque.

Man's struggle and the conflict between instinct and reason take place in a world

dominated by omens, unhappy coincidences, accidents. He has been compared to the Greek

dramatists. As in the Greek tragedy, Michael Henchard's downfall (in The Mayor of

Casterbridge) is brought about by a flaw in his nature, although he doesn't intend or enjoy

doing harm. The background suits his nature, suggesting some of his predispositions :

« Man's character is his personal destiny or daimon ».The novel has a dramatic intensity, a

Shakespearian grandeur, especially in the description of the wild Egdon Heath (the same

atmosphere will be recreated in ample descrition of the heath scorched by the sun and plunged

into darkness in The Return of the Native). Themes of guilt, sin, resposibility and remorse are

typical for his fiction.

Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a Pure Woman renders the basic themes of Hardy's work,

from concrete physical details to the social, cosmic forces shaping human existence. From

the beginning of the novel, the relationship man - collectivity - cosmos is apprehended. Tess's

destiny comes to the reader as an accumulation of omens which are interpreted in terms of folk

superstition, myth and dramatized through symbols. Hardy's village is not idyllic, it is rather

the cradle of fatal conflicts, destructive passions. Fate is ascribed the role of a cruel and

capricious force that plays with the lives of mortals. There are mythical, irreducible conflicts

between man and his fate. Human beings appear to be crushed by a superior force: first of

nature, then of society or by the characters' own errors. Highly poetized descriptions of

personified nature take a symbolic, active part in the dramatic unfolding of events (for

instance in the last but one episode of the novel, describing "the sacrificial altar" of

Stonehenge, the Celtic temple dedicated to the sun). The novel also has a closely-woven pattern

of unfortunate incidents and folk superstitions.

Tess's future tragedy is foreshadowed by an episode early in the book - the death of

Prince, the family horse: "The pointed shaft of the cart had entered the breast of the unhappy

Prince like a sword and from the wound his life's blood was spouting in a stream and falling

with a hiss into the road". Tess immediately put her hand upon the wound "with the only

result that she became splashed from face to skirt with the crimson drops". In this scene we

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can almost see Tess's whole life; the death of the horse is a blow to the precarious economic

situation of her family and foretells its gradual degradation.

Dorothy van Ghent believes the subject of this novel is mythological as the human

opposes "preternatural, inimical powers". However, there seems to be no ascent and cathartic

purification in Hardy's novels which leave the reader frustrated and having a sense of the

injustice perpetrated. There is rather a devastating projection of man's marginal position in

the universe, being crushed by both fate and society. We may therefore consider that Hardy's

novels belong, using Frye's terminology, to the mythos following that of autumn or tragedy,

namely to the mythos of winter, which joins satire and irony. Strong individuals with strong

untameable souls are contradicted by strong social forces, the forces of history or human

civilization. According to the definition given by Frye to tragic irony, the mythos of winter

reduces tragic situations to mere "comedies of the grotesque". The primaeval Wessex, Hardy's

region of the mind, is the garden of Eden after the fall.

In Jude the Obscure, we are presented with the story of the downfall of a man

animated by scholarly ambition, by humanitarian ideals, a man who believes in values of

spiritual emancipation but ends up discovering they are hollow and false. Hardy described his

work as "a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit", his attempt being "to point at the

tragedy of unfulfilled aims". The intellectual aspirations of the young Wessex villager Jude

Fawley are crushed by his own sensuality, his passion for Arabella Donn, the embodiment of

instinctual desires and of his weakness, the inclination to drinking. The play of

circumstances also took its toll. He cannot bear the burden of earlier mistakes and besides,

he has too many passions in conflict with one another. He views himself in a larger context,

being aware of his social disadvantages and finally goes through a downfall. The novel

foreruns 20th century literature through the density of psychic life images, of introspection, of

inner torments and the description of a hostile society.

The heroic element decreases as the ironic increases. The archetypal orders of

existence that Frye revises in his "Anatomy of Criticism", the third essay, as the divine, the

human, the animal, the vegetable, the mineral - they are all present in a distorted manner in

Hardy's fiction. At the divine level, we are offered representations of hell and of the ungodly

villains that occupy the godly position: they are called Time, The President of the Immortals,

Little Father Time (in Jude the Obscure, he strikes an ominous note by killing Sue and Jude's

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children and himself). At the human level, the characters are engaged in a relation of

annihilation, trapped. Marriage appears as a destructive machine in most of Hardy's novels and

short-stories (e.g. Life's Little Ironies), as a social institution ruined by conditions in

contemporary British society. But all institutions cooperate in Hardy's fiction for the

destruction of man: the institution of learning in Jude the Obcure (a parody of Oxford

university, fictionally called The University of Christminster, where Jude aspired to study in

order to become a bishop or a scholar), the Christian earthly church in Jude and Tess, the

professions in The Mayor of Casterbridge, the city versus the countryside. The vegetable world

is more often than not symbolic of modern hells as in The Return of the Native or Tess. The

city offers the embodiment of a fortress that hides villains, such as Alec D'Urbervilles, "the

city" (the French "ville") being set in opposition to the "field" in Alec and Tess's names,

respectively. Plot contrives against the character, giving it an archetypal value (in Frye's terms).

The characters are destroyed by their natures as well: Tess's wild, passionate heritage, Jude

Fawley's vulnerability, his tragic flaws, Michael Henchard's former mistake (of having sold,

in a fit, his wife and children to a sailor - his morally improved character after the incident as

well as his temperance and virtue didn't mean the end of his sufferings and eventually he

ended up alone and alienated).

There is no doubt that Hardy's reliance on the workings of chance and cosmic irony

dealt a blow at Victorian complacency. Unlike Thackeray or George Eliot, who were

committed to a "normal" world and avoided extremes of social behaviour, Hardy's novels

introduced the tormented hero, later re-discovered by authors such as J.Conrad,

D.H.Lawrence, Camus.

Homework

1. Read Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and comment on the impact of rural

nature.

2. The archetypal/mythic/cosmic dimension of Hardy's fiction.