Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)

Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928)

Features of his Novels

His Subjects

Hardy's subject is the same in most of his novels. In all his greatest works he depicts human feelings facing up to the onslaughts of a malign power. Accepting as he did the theory of evolution, Hardy saw little hope for man as an individual, and though his greatest figures have a marked individuality, Hardy's aim was to present MAN or WOMAN rather than a particular man or a particular woman. He was a serious novelist attempting to present though fiction a view of life, and one entirely different from that of his great contemporaries Tennyson and Browning. Most frequently his mood was one of disillusioned pessimism, excellently summed up at the end of "The Mayor of Casterbridge" by Elisabeth Jane "whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain". And yet Hardy was never quote certain of his philosophy; he hovered between the view of man as a mere plaything of an impersonal and malign Fate and man as a being possessing free will, in whom character is fate; until in "The Dynasts", he evolved the conception of the "Immanent Will".

His Treatment of his Themes

Hardy's preoccupation with his "philosophy of life " is seen in the way in which he intrudes himself into his novels to point an accusing finger at destiny or to take the side of his protagonists, and in the over - frequent use of coincidence, through which he seeks to prove his case. Too often his plots hinge upon a sequence of accidents which have the most dire consequences and, therefore, while he seldom fails to inspire in his readers his own deep pity for the sufferings of his characters he frequently fails to attain the highest tragic levels. Allied with this use of coincidence are a fondness for the grotesque or unusual and a weakness for the melodramatic. Yet he handles striking situations with great firmness of touch and a telling realism, and all his best novels contain individual scenes which are unforgettable.

His Characters

They are mostly ordinary men and women living close to the soil. The individuality of some is sacrificed to Hardy's view of life, but while he is, by more modern standards, not really deep in his psychological analysis, characters like Jude and Sue, Tess, Henchard and Eustacia Vye show considerable subtlety of interpretation.

Such figures as Gabriel Oak ("Far from the Madding Crowd") and Diggory Venn ("The Return of the Native") are finely realized, country types blending with the countryside to which they belong, while the minor rustics who are briefly sketched but readily visualized, are a frequent source of pithy humour, and act as a chorus commenting on the actions of the chief protagonists.

His Knowledge of the Countryside

In this Hardy stands supreme. His boyhood was spent mainly in the country, and he had an acute and sensitive observation of natural phenomena. As a unifying influence in his novels, The Wessex scene which he immortalized is second only to his philosophy. But nature provides more than a men background, often it is a protagonist in the story, an unfeeling, impersonal force exerting its influence upon the lives of the characters. Probably, the finest examples of Hardy's use of nature are in The Woodlanders and in The Return of the Natives.

His work

Hardy is among the leading novelists of the late Victorian era and one of the greatest poets of the early twentieth centuries. He wrote poetry throughout his career, but his first published work was in prose.

After the rejection of "The Poor Man and the Lady" in 1868, George Meredith suggested Hardy write a work in the sensationalist mode of Wilkie Collins. The result was "Desperate Remedies" (1871), a densely plotted novel of coincidence and intrigue, much concerned with class conflict, that some were to censure on moral grounds. Others had praised the rural scenes in Hardy's earliest work however, and on this hint he wrote "Under the Greenwood Tree". Here his amused but delicate sympathy with country people and his intimate knowledge of their ways of life create a gentle comedy of love and pastoral incident as Hardy shows the activities of the Mellstock choir and how Fancy Day eventually chooses the humble Dick Dewy as her husband..

Analiza: Tesuturile - tesutul epitelial, tesutul conjunctiv, tesutul nervos Eseu: Structura genomului la procariote

In "A Pair of Blue Eyes" (1873), Hardy returns to the ironically constructed novel of youthful love and class difference. The plot in which the young architect, Stephen Fitzmaurice Smith, commissioned to restore a church tower, falls in love with the vicar's daughter owes something to the circumstances of Hardy's first marriage to Emma Gifford. In the novel however, the hero's nerve fails him as the couple plan to elope. Elfride is pursued by the cold and literary Knight, Stephen's erstwhile patron, but when Knight learns of her earlier affair with Stephen he rejects her. At the conclusion of the work, both men travel down to Cornwall on the same train only to discover that Elfride's corpse has accompanied them in the baggage van.

Such "Satires of Circumstance" point to fundamental concerns in Hardy's fiction. The situation is grotesque while it also suggests a preoccupation with how passion and aspiration are constantly thwarted by the indifferent Immanent Will. As a young man, hardy had lost his faith amid the doubts unleashed by Darwin, and the scene in "A Pair of Blue Eyes" where Knight clings desperately to the sight o a cliff while a fosilized trilobite stares blindly across at him gives early expression to Hardy's view of man living in an uncaring universe that stretches back over aeons of time and inn which man himself is no specially favoured creation.

In "Far from the Madding Crowd"Wessex becomes for the first time Hardy's great imaginative domain. His account of the loves of Bathsheba Everdene- her relationship with the dashing Sergeant Troy, with the luckless Boldwood and finally with Gabriel Oak -is distinctly sensational in its plotting, and Hardy achieves such fine effects in this mode as the moment when lamplight suddenly reveals to Bathsheba the presence of Troy himself. The grotesque and the pathetic merge in the scene where water from a gargoyle washes away the flowers the repentant Troy has placed on Fanny Robin's grave. It is the integration of such action with the seasons however that gives the novel its satisfying resonance. The ageless cycles of the life of the land and the relation of the human passion to the turning year are excellently achieved. Hardy's Wessex - his evocation of the life and landscapes of the West Country and of Dorset in particular- place is characters against a universal setting. Generations appear to have brought man into some unity with such a world, and no passage in the novel more clearly shows Hardy's deep response to this than the twenty- second chapter, describing the place occupied in the lives of these people by the great barn.

In "The Return of the Native"(1878), Hardy's remarkable ability to fuse the local with the cosmic shows aspects of nature that are altogether more narrowing and malign. Egdon Heath is timeless and indifferent nature itself, enduring rather than picturesque, chastening rather than kind. It crushes or subdues to its own wisdom those who live there, and for Hardy, the heath is nature itself as modern man must see her. Those like Clym Yeobright who are disillusioned by "the defects of the natural laws "come to love the heath precisely for its reflection of their own disenchantment. In this they are late Victorians wracked in a world where "old- fashioned revelling in the general situation grows less and less possible.

Science and agnosticism reveal an inimical world where man must either endure or, as with Michael Henchard in "The Mayor of Casterbridge"( 1886), become the victim of his own character as its energies weave his fate.

Michael Henchard, Hardy's "Man of Character", is his creator's most heroic figure. Henchard is at once both agent and victim in a plot where remorseless tragic coincidence provides far more than sensationalism. "The Mayor of Casterbridge" offers one of Hardy's most elaborate examples of his changing the natural order and proportion of events to show how, in an indifferent universe, man is trapped by his character, his past and the far-from-benevolent march of progress. This last eventually replaces Henchard with the thin and bloodless Farfrae, the accountant and man of the machine. But if the plot has an almost Sophoclean inevitability, "The Mayor of Casterbridge" achieves at its climax especially something of the grandeur and pathos of King Lear. Henchard's death inspires both pity and awe. Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane arrive too late, and Abel Whittle's account of the hero's death and the reading of his will are moments unbearably poised between rustic simplicity and an annihilating, universal despair.

Tess D'Urbervilles

The novel is considered one of the supreme achievements of English fiction. The tragic passions of an obscure country girl perfectly integrate Hardy's abiding concern with love thwarted by an implacable universe and the ruthless dislocation wrought by class. The landscape of Wessex, evoked with great poetic power, relate the particular to the universal with consummate mastery, while the narrative also allows Hardy to engage with contemporary issues of religion and morality.

The day of  Tess's wedding to Angel Clare shows how perfectly these themes are fused with high drama. Tess and Angel have courted each other trough a long summer of heady pastoral luxuriousness. Nature pulses through them and all the world. But the wedding itself takes place in the dismal greynness of New Year's Day and, on their first evenings man and wife, each confesses to an earlier affair as the fire glows with a 'Last Judgement luridness. Tess, in particular, tells her husband of her seduction by the feckless Alec D'Urberville, a supposed aristocratic relative whose child she bore. Though nature does not condemn her for what has happened, memories of a child's eternal damnation, and in little ceremony of her own devising she christened the baby Sorrow before burying it in a scne of the utmost pathos.

It is restorative power of nature that brought Angel and a revived Tess together. Though Angel has discarded most of the Christian beliefs in which he has been reared (his progress to agnosticism was that of many intelligent young Victorians) he is horrified to discover that hi wife is not, in his opinion, a 'pure' woman. His love freezes under the withering spectre of conventional morality and he departs for Brazil. With Ange gone, Tess endures the purgatory of winter farm work until her family is all but ruined by death of her foolish father. In order to support them, Tess, flawed by her 'reckles acquiescence in chance', returns to the worldly and rootless D'Urbverville. Her love however is still for Angel: 'She tried to pray to God, but it was her husband who really had her supplication. Her idolatry of this man was such as she herself almost feared it to be ill-omened'. That fear is justified.

Angel returns in chastened humanity, and Tess herself, hysterically grieving, murders D'Urberville and rushes to give herself to the one man she loves. The great closing scene at Stonehenge - Hardy's symbol of an ancient and malevolent natural world of human sacrifice - is one of supreme achievements. As the policemen take Tess away to trial and execution, so we see how, in this brutal and implacable world, '"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.'