 |
Thomas Hardy | Article View | |
||
|
On the File menu, click Print to print the information. | ||||
| II. | |
Early Works: Novels |
Hardy anonymously published two early novels, Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). The next two, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), written in his own name, were well received. In the latter he portrayed his beloved Dorset as the imaginary county of Wessex. Some lesser works followed, including The Hand of Ethelbertha (1876) and A Laodicean (1881), as well as The Woodlanders (1887) and two volumes of short stories, Wessex Tales (1888) and Life's Little Ironies (1894).
Along with Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy's best novels are The Return of the Native (1878), which is his most closely knit narrative; The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886); Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891); and Jude the Obscure (1895). All are pervaded by a belief in a deterministic universe and are influenced by the ideas of Charles Darwin, whose The Origin of Species (1859) Hardy read in 1862, and by the physics of the 17th-century philosopher and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton. In Hardy's bleak world-view the fate of the individual is occasionally altered by chance, but human will invariably loses when it attempts to challenge the forces of necessity. Hardy argued that his belief in determinism was a comfort as much as a curse: “Pessimism,” he said, “is playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it, you may gain.”
Through intense, vivid descriptions of the heath, the fields, the seasons, and the weather, Hardy's Wessex attains a physical presence in the novels and acts as a mirror of the psychological conditions and the misfortunes suffered by the characters. In The Woodlanders, for example, “The bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead born child”, while at the beginning of The Return of the Native, Egdon Heath is described and personified in great detail:
It was at present 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 withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some people who have long lived a past, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.
Hardy tended to view his characters with irony and sadness: the critic G. K. Chesterton wrote that he “became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot”. In Victorian England, Hardy did indeed seem a blasphemer, particularly in Jude the Obscure, which treated sexual attraction as a natural force unopposable by human will. Although he enjoyed the admiration of the London literary world, he was annoyed by reviewers' constant references to his “pessimism”; and criticism of Jude the Obscure was so harsh that he announced he was “cured” of writing novels and determined to return to writing poetry. He wrote in his journal at the time: “I can express more fully in verse ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion—hard as a rock—which the vast body of men have vested interests in supporting ... If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have left him alone.”
