THOMAS HARDY
Thomas Hardy was born of humble parents at
Upper Bockhampton, near Dorchester, in Dorset, in 1840. As a boy he
learned to play violin, and he always loved music and dancing. He was a
voracious reader, and when he left school he was apprenticed to a local
architect and church restorer.
By 1862 he was working and
studying architecture in London,
and he began to write poetry at this time. He also read the works of Comte, Mill, Darwin, Schopenhauer, which helped shape
his thought.
He gained fame thanks to the novel
Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874.
Thereafter he devoted his life to writing. After his marriage, he settled in Dorchester and became a successful novelist and
distinguished man of letters.
His second great work of fiction
was The Return of the Native,
followed by a sequence of four tragic novels: The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and his last one, Jude the Obscure. The book scandalised Victorian public opinion
with its pessimism and immorality. Hardy decided to
give up fiction and to turn to his first love, poetry, with the publication of Wessex Poems, and his verse epic of the
Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts.
His first wife died in 1912; he
married again in 1914. He died in 1928, much honoured. His body was buried in
Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey.
As a writer Hardy
has been variously defined as a regionalist, a pessimist, a realist, a romantic
or a naturalist.
His regionalism is connected to
the limited area in which he set his works and which he called "Wessex".
In Anglo-Saxon times, Wessex
was one of the seven kingdoms established in Great Britain. Originally it
covered more or less all the south-western part of the country between the Thames and the south coast, including present-day Dorsetshire. What Hardy did was
to exhume the old name of his county and make it the imaginary setting of most
of his works. He himself, in the Preface to Far
from the Madding Crowd, justified the adoption of the word "Wessex"
by the need to give "territorial definition" and "unity of scene" to his
novels. So he applied it to a partly real, "partly dream-country", while
advising his readers that there were no actual "inhabitants of a Victorian
Wessex".
Wessex therefore became both a unifying element and
a link between past and present, proving the ideal setting for novels whose
major theme was the transformation of an age-old agricultural society under the
impact of modern industrial life.
Wessex also provided Hardy
with the rural landscapes which, like Wordsworth, he
had learnt to love when he was a child. Perhaps one of the greatest writers
about rural life in English, he describes the smallest details of nature, while
adding precise information on country tasks, seasons, crops, etc. The presence
of nature is an essential element in his works, since it not only provides a background
and a setting, but becomes an essential part of the story.
This total immersion in nature,
together with a belief that only in rustic life can men fully express their
passions, makes Hardy, in some respects, a Romantic. But while for the
Romantics Nature usually meant joy and consolation, for Hardy, over the years,
it came to mean something else. What at first had been seen as a mother and a
friend, finally turned into a hostile power, indifferent to man's destiny. Love, too, which is the basis of all his novels,
and which is another romantic theme, quite often ends in disillusion and
failure, destroyed by institutions like marriage or by society or even more
often by Fate.
This pessimistic view of life owed
much to the impact of intellectual and scientific movements of the time and to
the author's own studies after moving to London.
Here in fact, alone and isolated from his rural world, he began to spend whole
evenings reading such authors as Darwin, Schopenhauer, Mill, etc., who strongly affected him and
undermined his religious faith. He was also stuck by the new geological
discoveries which, against all traditional beliefs, proved that the world had
existed longer than man. This led him to reject Christian doctrine and the
Bible, and to work out a pessimistic theory of his own, according to which man
is an insignificant insect in a universe quite indifferent to him. Far from
being the beloved son of a providential Father-God, he is only a powerless
victim of an obscure fate, which blindly rules the universe and human destiny
and which delights in tormenting and killing.
This sense of fatalistic
determinism also reflects scientific studies of the time on human heredity,
which seemed to deprive man of all responsibility for his actions. This led
Hardy to work out the idea of a kind of predestination, according to which all
men fulfil their destiny without finding any help either in society, which
oppresses and destroys them, or in love, which often leads to unhappiness.
The evolutionary theory increased
Hardy's compassion for suffering people and for all living creatures. This is
why his characters, although failing in their attempts to improve themselves
and in their search for genuine love, maintain a stoicism
and a moral dignity of their own. Around them, and often opposed to them, moves
the "community", usually made up of country folk still living a fairly
primitive an life full of superstitions, rituals and beliefs in the
preternatural. In tune with their environment, they are almost an extension of
the Wessex
background itself and, like a Greek chorus, they comment on actions and events.
TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES
The most representative of Hardy's
novels is Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
PLOT
It tells the story of a young
woman, Tess,
the eldest daughter of a poor Wessex
pedlar, who finds out he is the descendant of a
famous ancient family, the D'Urbervilles. After the
death of their horse, the only family asset, Tess goes for help to a rich supposed
relative, Alec, who seduces her. A
child is born, who dies after a few months. Some years later, while working as
a milkmaid on a large farm, Tess
falls in love with Angel
Clare, a clergyman's son, who is
training on the farm, and accepts his proposal of marriage. Wishing to inform
him of her past, she sends him a letter, which, however, never reaches him.
After their marriage, on the wedding night, she confesses her past experience
to him, begging forgiveness. But Angel,
shocked and disillusioned, abandons her and goes to Brazil. Alone and poor, she becomes
a field worker, always hoping for her husband's return. But one day she meets Alec (who, in the meantime, has become an itinerant
preacher) and, driven by the distressed conditions of her family, becomes his
mistress, after Alec has renounced his
preaching. When Angel returns
regretful from Brazil,
she murders Alec in desperation. After
a brief happy period of concealment with Angel,
she is finally arrested (while symbolically sleeping on the sacrificial stone
at Stonehenge), tried and hanged.
FEATURES
The novel incorporates all the
fundamental features of Hardy's work:
- its
subtitle, A Pure Woman Faithfully
Presented, meaning that a woman, forced by circumstances to submit to and
use violence, can still be pure in heart, is an open challenge to the moral
conventions of the time;
- its inner structure is formed by antagonisms and conflicts:
prejudice versus feeling, culture versus ignorance, individual versus
community, human will versus destiny, etc.;
- its characters are variations on the same theme, i.e. man is
the victim of decisions and choices often forced on him by a kind of
predestination;
- the conclusion is tragic and melodramatic;
- the plot is imbued with fatalism and pessimism.
