Thomas hardy (1840-1928)

Hardy is an outstanding representative of the 19th-century realism in England, “the last of the Victorians”. In his works Hardy lived in the past yet in many ways he was ahead of his times. He was a feminist, critical of social conventions that could make marriage a prison for a woman; he was modern enough to take an unsentimental, un-Victorian view of life, love and religion. His masterful evocation of life in the rural south and west of England and his rather fatalistic point of view, outside the mainstream of Victorian intellectual life, combine to produce some of the most memorable novels of the age.

Hardy was born in Dorcherster, Dorsetshire, in the south of England into the family of a stonemason. At 16 he became apprenticed to an architect. At 22 he went to London and worked under Sir Reginald Bloomfield, who specialized in Gothic architecture. He also attended evening classes of King’s College. At 27 he returned to his native countryside, worked as an architect for several years, got married to a local girl and settled near Dorchester in a house that he himself had designed. The first story that he published was a success and in 1874 he gave up architecture and began to live on the income from his novels.

Hardy first became famous with Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). It is a simple love story set up in an apparently untroubled village peopled by simple and rather amusing peasants. It is his “happiest” novel. The other novels are more tragic. Hardy criticizes philistine complacency and false morality reigning in society. But he does not believe in any radical changes. According to Hardy, mankind is under the sway of an arbitrary mysterious force, which predetermines the fate of people and plays havoc with their lives. Hardy’s novels are almost all tragic love stories and the lovers are tragic heroes and heroines of a timeless, classical kind.

The most important group of his novels Hardy is called Novels of Character and Environment. They are also known as “Wessex novels”. The scene is laid in what Hardy called Wessex, using the ancient name for Dorsetshire, Wiltshire and some other peculiarly English southwest counties. The novels truthfully depict the impoverishment and decay of small farmers who became hired field hands and roamed the country in search of seasonal jobs. Hardy was pained to see the deterioration of the patriarchal mode of life in rural England. This was one of the reasons for the growing pessimistic vein in his novels.

The Wessex theme begins in Far From Madding Crowd. The scene of is the prosperous farm of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene. The story tells of three loves for her on the part of three different men: Gabriel, her loyal shepherd, a wealthy neighbour and the handsome, wayward Sergeant Troy.

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is the second of the great “Wessex novels”. It shows the downfall of a respectable man, Henchard, the Mayor. The story has a country-town setting. Henchard has been called Hardy’s grandest hero but one with a fatal weakness of character for which he is judged by Nature and brought down.

In Woodlanders (1887) Hardy represents the turning of the seasons both comforting and painful. The novel testifies an increase in Hardy’s pessimism. The hero, Marty South, does not tempt Fate. He only wants to be happy – and for this he is judged.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1890) is the summit of Hardy’s work, and one of the saddest novels ever written. The novel depicts farm-life such as it was in Dorsetshire in the early Victorian days, and tells the story of a noble-minded country girl, Tess Durbeyfield (of the d’Urbervilles). The tragedy of her life has social motivation, but Hardy sets down her ruin to the forces of fate.

The subject of Tess is stated clearly by Hardy as, the fate of a ”pure woman”; in fact it is the destruction of the English peasantry. More than any other 19th-century novel it has the quality of a social document. It is a novel with a thesis, and the thesis is that in the course of the 19th century the disintegration of the peasantry reached its final and tragic stage. With the extension of capitalist farming the old yeoman class of small holders or peasants with their traditions of independence, was bound to disappear. Tess is the story and the symbol of the destruction. There is an insistent emphasis on historical processes already in the opening chapters of the novel. The discovery of John Durbeyfield of his ancestry is not just a comic scene. It states the basic theme of the novel – what the Durbeyfields were and what they have become. They have fallen on hard times, their horse is killed in an accident and the sense of guilt over this accident allows Tess to be persuaded by her mother into visiting the Trantridge D’Urbervilles to “claim kin” with a more prosperous branch of the family. And from this visit the whole tragedy derives. The sacrifice of Tess is symbolic of the historical process at work The D’Urbervilles are in fact the nouveau riches Stoke family, capitalists who have bought their way into the gentry. When Tess sees their estate she cries out: “I thought we were an old family; but this is all new”. The cry carries a world of irony.

From the moment of her seduction by Alec D’Urberville, Tess’s story becomes a hopeless struggle against overwhelming odds to maintain her self-respect. After her child’s death she becomes a labourer at a dairy form. She falls in love with Angel Clare and through marriage to him thinks to escape her fate. But the intellectual Angel turns out more cruel than D’Urberville, the sensualist. When his dream of rustic innocence is shattered he abandons Tess and her degradation continues. With the death of her father the Durbeyfields are expulsed from their cottage: John Durbeyfield had been a life holder. The need to support her family forces Tess back to Alec D’Urberville. And when the penitent Angel returns Tess kills Alec. The policemen take her from the alter at Stonehedge and the black flag, signifying an execution, is run up on Winchester jail.

For Hardy country life is not merely a setting for his characters. From his standpoint the unity of Man and Nature in rural life is the only way to true morality and happiness. His love of nature and simple people combined with a keen eye for exact and concrete detail heighten the realistic effect of his descriptive passages. Although it is Under the Greenwood Tree that Hardy called “a rural painting of the Dutch school”, this definition suits many passages in his other novels as well. In Tess he describes with great precision harvesting: every participant, either living or inanimate, receives an appropriate share of the writer’s attention: the mist, the sun, the cottages, the reaping-machine and its attendants, the field animals that are put to death as the wheat falls, the sheaf-binders and the heroine of the novel toiling among them. Such passages reveal the extreme richness of Hardy’s vocabulary.

An architect by profession, he gave to his novels a design that was almost architectural, employing each circumstance in the narrative to one accumulated effect. The final impression was of a malign Fate functioning in men’s lives, corrupting their possibilities of happiness, and beckoning them towards tragedy. But while he sees life as cruel and purposeless, he does not remain a detached spectator. He has pity for the puppets of Destiny. It is a compassion which extends from man to the earthworms and the diseased leaves on the trees.

Jude the Oscure (1895) is Hardy’s only novel with a contemporary setting. Jude Fawley, a self-educated stonemason is anxious to better himself and his decidedly “modern” cousin, Sue Bridehead. Jude is a working-class intellectual whose ambition is to study at Oxford. Disappointment is inevitable. His attempts to escape from obscurity brought the gods down upon Jude’s head. Sue’s “advanced” opinions about the needlessness of a formal marriage brought the critics down on Hardy’s head. Hardy’s last novels – Tess and Jude - were given a hostile reception by the public. It discouraged the author to such an extent that he ceased writing prose altogether. By that time he had written 14 novels.

In the late 90s, almost at the age of 60, he turned entirely to poetry. He achieved great masterly in the field of philosophical lyrics. In his philosophical lyrics Hardy treated mainly the same problems as those of his prosaic works. Wessex poems (1898) and Winter Words (1928) are written in the rhythm of old ballads and folk songs. Hardy presents the memories and reflections of a past long gone. The Dynasts (1904, 1906, 1908) is an epic drama of Napoleonic wars, the logical extreme of Hardy’s philosophy. The events are related to longer-term history, so what seems to be major happenings and great men are reduced in size and importance: men are no bigger than ants and all their work is the building of little hills.

In the last years of his life Hardy was awarded honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He is buried in Westminster Abbey and remains one of the best-loved English writers.