Thomas Hardy: Life, Works, and Philosophy of the English Novelist

Questo appunto di Letteratura Inglese riguarda lo scrittore Thomas Hardy. L’appunto riassume la biografia dell’autore, presenta il suo pensiero, illustra le principali caratteristiche dei suoi romanzi e fa un breve accenno a tre opere importanti.

What was Hardy’s life like?

Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928) was a British poet and writer. He became famous for his novels that combined influences from the new Realist movement and the Romantic movement. The book that made him famous was "Far from the Madding Crowd". Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, in the English county of Dorset, which was to become the "Wessex" of his novels. It was a territory stretched across the southwest of England, thus recalling the ancient medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Hardy came from a modest family. He undertook architectural studies and moved to London to practice his profession, which he soon abandoned to devote himself to literature. In 1874 he married Emma Lavinia Gifford and settled in a country house, where he spent his entire life without any notable events. He quickly became an important intellectual and a successful novelist. "Jude the Obscure" is his last novel: it is also his most pessimistic work and it was little appreciated by Victorian readers. In 1914, two years after Emma's death, he married a second time to Florence Emily Dugdale, who was to become his biographer. He died in 1928 and was buried in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, alongside Charles Dickens.

Hardy’s deterministic view

Just like Émile Zola, Hardy was a Naturalist. He believed that man was influenced by the laws of environment and heredity. According to this view, men have no free will and live in a world ruled by instinct, genes and blood. They are involved in a Darwinian-type struggle for survival in the jungle of the modern world. Hardy’s works are full of considerations about life, death, man and the universe, in which he expresses a deterministic view. He became Atheist probably because he read classical authors and contemporary authors like Darwin, who wrote “On the Origins of Species”. In this work, Darwin states that while the strong survive, the weak perish, denying the existence of God. Hardy believed that chance had control over everything. He elaborated a pessimistic theory of his own according to which man was only a puppet in the hands of malicious forces which ruled the universe and delighted in tormenting and killing men. He also believed that Nature was indifferent to man’s destiny. So, man was a powerless victim of fate. Hardy worked out the idea of a predestination to failure, according to which men fulfill their destiny without finding any help in society, which oppresses and destroys them, or in love, which always leads to unhappiness. This is a naturalistic view, according to which men must submit to the laws of heredity and fate.

Features of Hardy’s novels

The features of Hardy's novels are:

• In his works, Hardy highlighted the hypocritical and moralist aspects of Victorian society.
• He almost always set his novels in the South West of England and his native county of Dorset.
• He stressed the importance of place: he described ruins, churches, towers, and monuments; he highlighted the importance of Stonehenge and was also interested in home interiors. Colours play an essential role in his descriptions.
• He used the omniscient narrator and his narrative technique anticipated the cinema somehow.

Hardy’s main works

Hardy's main works are:

• “Far from the Madding Crowd” (1874): “Far from the Madding Crowd” is Hardy’s fourth novel and his best-known work. The title refers to Hardy’s idea of the countryside: an almost idyllic world in which man and nature coexist in perfect harmony and in which any attempt to break this harmony ends in failure. The title is an intentional quotation from "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray. The novel is about the life and relationships of Bathsheba Everdene with her lonely neighbour William Boldwood, the young shepherd Gabriel Oak, and the soldier Sergeant Troy.
• “Tess of the d'Urbervilles” (1891): this novel describes a series of catastrophic events that happen to the protagonist, a humble country maiden whose parents wanted to defy Fate by attempting to change social class, thus breaking the balance between man and nature. The girl finds herself struggling to live.
• “Jude the Obscure” (1895): "Jude the Obscure" is Hardy's last novel. It was not well received by Victorian critics because of the social denunciation it contains. The novel tells the story of a young man on the fringes of society who is unable to belong to any class and is like a ghost in the eyes of people: he is "obscure" because he is neither seen nor heard by them. Victorian conventions are mocked and harshly criticized, although Hardy finds no solution for Jude, a powerless victim, which is in line with his philosophy. The novel deals with class, education, religion, morality and marriage.

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