Hardy as a Novelist

Name :Hetalba C Gohil

Paper :   405 A Study of an Author: Thomas Hardy

Sem  :4    M.A: 2

Topic : Hardy as a Novelist

Submitted to:

 

Dr, Dilip Barad

Dept. Of English

   

M.K. B.  Universty

Hardy as a Novelist

   
Hardy's Novels of Character and Environment convey a strong sense of fatalism, a view that in life human actions have been predetermined, either by the very nature of things, or by God, or by Fate.
Hardy dramatized his conception of destiny in human affairs as the Imminent Will. In his great novels — The Return of the Native, Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D'Urbervilles , and The Mayor of Casterbridge — Hardy saw man beaten down by forces within and without himself and sought to record man's eternal struggle with fate.


Wessex: Its Location

An understanding of Hardy's Wessex, its physical features, etc., is necessary for a proper understanding of his works, for this region forms the background to all that he has written. In some of his novels, as in the Return of the Native, it is a dominant over-character influencing both character and action.


"gives the reader a standard of normality by which he can gauge the . . . heights and depths to which the main characters rise and fall."

As a realist, Hardy felt that art should describe and comment upon actual situations, such as the heavy lot of the rural laborers’ and the bleak lives of oppressed women. Though the Victorian reading public tolerated his depiction of the problems of modernity, it was less receptive to his religious skepticism and criticism of the divorce laws. His public and critics were especially offended by his frankness about relations between the sexes, particularly in his depicting the seduction of a village girl in Tess, and the sexual entrapment and child murders of Jude. The passages which so incensed the late Victorians the average twentieth-century reader is apt to miss because Hardy dealt with delicate matters obliquely. The modern reader encounters the prostitutes of Caster bridge’s Mixen Lane without recognizing them, and concludes somewhat after the 'Chase' scene in Tess that it was then and there that the rape occurred. In Hardy's novels female principals differ from one another far less than do his male principals. The temperamental capriciousness of such characters as Fancy Day, Eustacia Vye, and Bathsheba Everdene arises from an immediate and instinctive obedience to emotional impulse without sufficient corrective control of reason.


Hardy a Realist and Not Pessimist


The fact is that Hardy was a thorough realist. Born and bred in a scientific age, he could not shut his eyes to the fact of suffering. Therefore, the cheap, blind optimism of poets, like Browning, who sang,


“God is in His heaven
all is right with the world.”

Failed to satisfy him. Rather, the brutal and ruthless struggle for existence which he saw being waged in Nature everywhere, the starvation, hunger, sickness and disease which stalks the earth, made him feel that God was not in heaven and all was wrong with the world. He claimed, and rightly, that his position was nearer the truth. Nor could he agree with the Romantic poets, like Wordsworth, who said that Nature had a “Holy plan” and that there was joy everywhere in Nature. How could it be so, when numbers of children were born to shiftless parents, like the Durbeyfields, to bring misery to themselves and to others? The world was already over crowded; there were already too many hungry mouths to be fed. Acutely conscious of this fact of universal suffering, he felt with his own Jude that mutual butchery was the law of nature. This is not pessimism, but realism. This state of affairs can be mended not by turning our backs to it, but by facing it squarely. He therefore taught:


“If a way to the better there be
It implies a good look at the worst.”
This is a perfectly sane and healthy view of life and no right-minded person can object to it.


Philosophy of Resignation, Not of Nihilism


Besides this, Hardy is not a Nihilist. Except in his last novel Jude the Obscure, he never advocates a rejection of life. Suffering, no doubt, is the universal law but human lot can be ameliorated a great deal through tact and wisdom and through wise social reform. It is a philosophy of resignation which he teaches. The Wessex rustics are resigned to their lot and suffer patiently. Joan Durbeyfield’s suffering is not so intense, because when faced with misfortune she again and again mutters, “It was to be”, and then goes about her way as usual. Elizabeth-Jane and Thomasine tactfully adjust themselves to their circumstances and so escape much misery.


Hardy a Humanist, and Not a Pessimist


The spirit of, “Loving-kindness”, Hardy advocates, should he the basis of all human relations. Much of human misery results from the imperfections of the First Cause, but much more suffering can be avoided if we are kind and sympathetic to each other. Instead of seeking refuge in nature and turning our back on life, we should rather turn to our own kind, for,


“There at least discourse trills around,
There at least smiles abound,
There sometimes are found,
Life-Loyalties.”

A poet who could write like this cannot be called a pessimist. Thomas Hardy is a ‘humanist” or what he called himself an, “Evolutionary meliorist.”


Hardy as a Landscape-Painter


Hardy’s keen powers of observation and word painting make him a notable landscape-painter. “If word-pictures could be hung on walls”, says Duffin, “Hardy’s nature pieces would fill up an entire gallery.” Hardy’s nature descriptions are fresh and accurate. They are not bookish, but based on first hand observation of the facts and phenomena of nature. He observes everything, nothing escapes his eye, but he selects only those details as are likely to serve his purpose. Thus in his nature descriptions he combines imagination with realism, fact with fiction. By the careful selection and ordering of material he lightens the significant aspects of a scene and renders it with greater effectiveness.


Hardy, a Specialist in Women


The touchstone of a novelist’s power is his handling of hi; female-characters, and Hardy is a specialist in the field. His male character: yield to his women, both in clarity and intensity. A number of bright and beautiful women, as glorious as the heroines of Shakespeare, move across the stage of the Wessex novels. Tess, Eustacia Vye, Bathsheba, Grace, Elfride, Sue, etc., are only a few of the portraits in the wonderful art-gallery of Thomas Hardy. It is an immense wealth of material that we find spread before us as soon as we enter the world. As Duflln points out, it is possible to divide the women of Hardy into four groups on the basis of the space devoted to their portraiture and of their personal significance in the action of the novel.