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About the Author
Thomas Hardy was born in a Dorset village in 1840. Although he had a modest upbringing, Hardy found himself working successfully as an architect in London at the age of 22. He spent five years in London, but was eventually drawn back to Dorset because he did not enjoy the urban environment or the class prejudice he felt, mixing with the well-heeled of England’s capital city. Having returned to the countryside, he began to consider an alternative career as a novelist. By 1867, he had already completed a manuscript, but had no luck placing it with a publisher. Despite this, his ambition knew no bounds and he persevered securing his first publication in 1871. His first five novels were well received, and Hardy’s confidence in pushing the literary envelope grew steadily.
Under the Greenwood Tree
Most of Hardy’s work is set in a semi-fictional region called Wessex. The name comes from the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Wessex, which was eventually fragmented following the invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066. In his imaginary Wessex, Hardy gives many real places alternative names as if it were a kind of parallel universe. The first of Thomas Hardy’s 10 Wessex novels is Under the Greenwood Tree (1872).
The novel alludes to a time when English churches had West Gallery musicians to provide the music and song. They comprised singers and players of various string, reed and wind instruments. When the church organ was invented, these ensembles were phased out for various reasons. First and foremost, it was cheaper and easier to instruct a single organist than to maintain a choir. Secondly, West Gallery was deemed to be to colourful and uplifting by those with more pious protestant leanings. They preferred the more solemn sound of the congregation singing hymns with the organ as accompaniment. So it was that West Gallery choirs fell from favour, partly due to the Victorian idea of progress, partly due to the Victorian religious moral and ethical compass.
This process of change had occurred in Hardy’s own local church, so he used it as the axis for his story, creating the opportunity for him to invent a cast of characters. As well as the members of the West Gallery choir, there is the vicar and the organist, an attractive girl and the love interest of the tale. Employing a theme that sits at the heart of Hardy’s work, she is unaware of the potency of her beauty and her lack of certainty about her own desires leads her to become torn between two admirers. Ultimately, she marries the right man, but she has to hide a secret. This provides an element of tension at the end of the story, as well as leaving the girl imperfect in the mind of the reader.
Hardy’s preoccupation with pretty women, whom he sees as untrustworthy temptresses, appears to be a personal issue that would seem to have had something to do with real life experiences. Be that as it may, it lends itself very well to his novels, in which feminine beauty is depicted as a mysterious allure that leads men to behave in obsessive, peculiar and unexpected ways. This sets Hardy up with a reliable tool for creating plots that are as gripping as any literature written before or since.
It can be argued that Hardy was inadvertently responding to Darwinian ideas at that time, as he paints a picture of the human male responding to primal instincts that are ever present, despite any pretentions towards being civilized and removed from nature. Hardy’s men are controlled by their base need to procreate, even though they perceive it as a higher desire to possess. This simple truth exposes their evolved psychology, so that they become instinctual creatures, capable of spontaneous acts of love, lust, foolishness, anger, aggression and violence. They are cavemen in 19th-century clothing, unable to ignore their hormonal drives.
Hardy’s Later Works
His sixth novel The Return of the Native (1878) is widely regarded as the first modern novel, because it dared to examine themes that Victorian society brushed under the carpet – namely sexual desire and obsession. The central female character, Eustacia, is something of a femme fatale. She is distractingly beautiful, but her seductive manipulation of the male characters leads to her death and that of her lover Wildeve. The book caused a stir in polite society, but it raised the bar in terms of what a novel could achieve as a medium for comment on the human condition. Eustacia essentially saw herself as a special individual and her ambitions led her to behave in ways that the local community could not accept. She was vilified for her lack of ability to fit in and accept her lot in life.
In 1886 Hardy published The Mayor of Casterbridge. At a country fair, Henchard, Hardy’s tragic hero, auctions off his wife and daughter when he’s drunk. He spends most of his life repenting for this act and eventually becomes an upstanding citizen of Casterbridge. Throughout the novel, Hardy focuses on the importance of reputation and good character and demonstrates how the present is always haunted by the past and cannot be denied.
Hardy’s best-known novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, was published in 1891. Tess starts out as an innocent peasant girl, but embarks on a tragic tale that ends in her execution for murder. For Hardy, the story was an examination of how the individual can wind up in such desperate situations, even when their beginnings are much the same as others people’s. Like Eustacia, Tess is attractive and her ambitions lead her into scenarios that make her life ever more unsettled. The admission that people could be drawn by lust and desire to flout the rules of society came as a shock to the Victorian audience, but Hardy was also attempting to show what happens when rules are ignored. In essence, Tess is a victim of circumstance, but she is still allowed to make her own decisions. It is this interplay between the involuntary and voluntary that makes Tess’ story so tragic, and also explains why the book is regarded as a masterpiece of English prose.
Hardy’s Literary Legacy
In many respects the literature of Thomas Hardy is quintessentially English in tone and content. His stories are set in the deepest rural and bucolic southwest, where time attempts to stand still, preserving an English idyll that was worlds apart from the industrialization of the 19th century. For this reason his novels are described as belonging to the genre of ‘naturalism’.
Hardy was born and bred in Dorsetshire (now known simply as Dorset) and that is the epicentre of his constructed fictional world – one that is half imagined, half real, for he substitutes the actual names for places with alternatives conjured from his own mind. Hardy was primarily concerned with the innate nature of personalities in his literature. He ascribed each character with a personality type which largely predetermined their fate. While other authors, such as Charles Dickens, conveyed the idea that people can learn from their mistakes and change, Hardy showed the opposite. For Hardy, people never really learn the error of their ways and fate will deal them their hand in proportion to their level of selfishness, vanity, pride, foolishness, arrogance, unkindness or other failing. In some cases Hardy even resorts to having troublesome characters killed off or removed to prison in order to restore harmony. In this way he gives the more deserving the opportunity to alter their circumstances for the better.
One might think that Hardy was religious, given this moral and ethical filter, but he wasn’t particularly interested in religion. He was more taken by the idea of allowing his characters to express superstitions and supernatural beliefs. In this regard he was really adopting the view of the anthropologist, who remains necessarily impartial on matters of belief, so that they can study people with neutrality. His work is also filled with subtle allusions to Classical references, which he used to underpin central characters.
Hardy used to search for events reported in newspapers and often used them in his plots. It wasn’t so much that he lacked the imagination to think up ideas, but that he wanted to inject a sense of realism by introducing elements that simply would not have occurred to him. Real life can sometimes be stranger than fiction.
In Far From the Madding Crowd, published in serial form in 1874, Bathsheba is the beautiful female protagonist