THOMAS HARDY

(1840-1928)

BIO

• southern England:  Dorsetshire (“Egdon Heath” in books)

• taught violin, architecture as child

• *1860s:

  • intellectual ferment --> Darwin, Browning poetry rivaled Tennyson’s, John Stuart Mill (On Liberty) urged individualism of thought & decision

  • TH:

    • moved to London as an apprentice

    • fell violently & unhappily in love (several times)

    • lost his faith in God

    • wrote poetry, acted, wrote fiction

    • *uncertainty (love, God, self--own goals)

FICTION:

• submitted to serial publications ($$ for bills)

  his fiction = poetry-like:

• TH:  resolved to keep his fictions “as near to poetry in their subject as the conditions would allow”

• fearless accuracy of depiction

• vivid rendering

• emotional power

• à made readers uncomfortable

• TH:  “to intensify the expression of things”

• 1874:  married

• 1885:  built home in Dorset

• 1877:  spent but a few months in London, rest of time in Dorset

•  **London society = TH “vibrating at a swing between the artificial gaieties of a London season and…”

•  **Dorset = TH “the quaintness of a primitive rustic life”

STYLE

NOVELS:

•  1874:  Far from the Maddening Crowd

•  1878:  The Return of the Native

• 1885:  The Mayor of Casterbridge

•  1891:  Tess of the D'Urbervilles

• 1895:  Jude the Obscure

  • (*last novel, due to its bitter critical  reception)

• ** Dorset countryside =

  • “Wessex”

  • the Anglo-Saxon kingdom

• ** NOT

  • middle-class

  • London

• ** BUT

  • peasant class, working class:

  • farmers, milk maids

  • stonecutters, shepherds

•  like George Eliot in her novels

• BUT not from the distant perspective of a London intellectual

•  the textbook:  “Hardy's rustics are not the object of analysis or sentiment. Nor is his subject the middle-class race for success.  Driven by instinctive emotions they do not fully recognize, his people act with a power that seems to place them outside conventional moral judgments” (516-17).

UNIVERSE =

•  controlled by a “seemingly malign fate”

•  that pushed the characters toward a tragic ending

• no assistance from the “conventional theological assumptions of the day”

• ** = a rejection of middle-class morality, values

STYLE

• POETRY:

• 1898: 1st volume of poetry

• 29 years - 900 lyrics

• *poetry =

  • wholly independent of conventional, contemporary poetic style:

• TH “My poetry was revolutionary in the sense that I meant to avoid the jewelled line....”

• book:  “Instead, he strove for a rough, natural voice, with rustic diction and irregular meters expressing concrete, particularized impressions of life” (517).

• simple language and simple style

  • no affectations

  • no romanticism

  • no rhetoric

•  “The Man He Killed” (1902)

  • war

•  “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?” (1914)

  • witty satire, irony

•  “In Time of ‘Breaking of Nations’” (1916)

  • Jer. 51:20, WW1

SHORT STORIES:

•  Wessex Tales (1st collection of short stories)

• with “The Withered Arm”:

• 1818-1825:

  • period of unrest

  •  riots by peasants

STYLE

HEATHS:

• “Egdon Heath” amalgamation of many heaths

• high, rolling stretches of uncultivated land

•  coarse grass

• low shrubs

• **largely unchanged since prehistoric times

•  Roman road

• Celtic burial mounds

• from opening of Return of the Native:

  •  “a place perfectly accordant with man's nature--neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man, slighted and enduring; and with colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony.  As with some persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance.  It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.”