Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) Performer - Culture & Literature Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella, Margaret Layton © 2012 Thomas Hardy 1. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) • Born of humble parents at Upper Bockhampton, near Dorchester. • When he left school, was apprenticed to a local architect and church restorer. • Read the works of Comte, Mill, Darwin, which helped shape his thought. • The philosophy of his works echoes Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, with the Immanent Will which makes notions of free will illusory. Performer - Culture & Literature Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy 2. Hardy’s works • Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) • Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) • The Return of the Native (1878) • The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) • The Woodlanders (1887) • Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) • Jude the Obscure (1895) • Wessex Poems (1928) Performer - Culture & Literature The Hardy cottage in Higher Bockhampton, Dorchester Thomas Hardy 3. Features of Hardy’s novels • Interest in the life of the peasants in an age of decline and decay of peasantry. • Nostalgia for the pastoral and patriarchal way of life. • Deterministic view, deprived of the consolation of divine order. • Man’s life controlled by hostile, cruel fate, ‘insensible chance’. Performer - Culture & Literature A contemporary edition of The Return of the Native. Thomas Hardy 3. Features of Hardy’s novels • Superb sense of place: description of ruins of churches, towers, walls, but also important monuments like Stonehenge. • Love of detail to strengthen the final effect a naturalistic approach. The 1967 film version of Far from the Madding Crowd Performer - Culture & Literature Thomas Hardy 4. Hardy’s style • Use of colour strongly linked to emotion and experience, especially connected with natural landscape. • Victorian omniscient narrator, which sometimes becomes obtrusive. • Use of cinematic techniques similar to the ‘camera eye’ and the ‘zoom’. Hardy and his dog • Detailed, controlled language, rich in symbolism. • Use of metaphor, simile, personification. • Important role of the language of sense impressions. Performer - Culture & Literature Thomas Hardy 5. Hardy’s Wessex The Wessex of the Novels & Poems in Hardy’s own drawing In Hardy’s major novels there is the progressive mapping of a semi-fictional region, the south-west corner of England and his native county of Dorset. Performer - Culture & Literature Thomas Hardy 6. Why Wessex? The Wessex of the Novels & Poems in Hardy’s own drawing By Wessex Hardy meant the old Saxon kingdom of Alfred the Great. Wessex transcends topographical limits combining the imaginative experience of the individual with a sense of man’s place in the universe. Performer - Culture & Literature Thomas Hardy 7. Hardy’s themes • The difficulty of being alive. • Nature Indifferent to man’s destiny, sets the pattern of growth and decay; implies regeneration, expressed through the cycle of seasons. • Criticism of the most conventional, moralistic, hypocritical aspects of Victorian society. • A contemporary edition of Tess of the D’Ubervilles Polemic attitude to religion: Christianity is no longer capable of fulfilling the needs of modern man. Performer - Culture & Literature Thomas Hardy 8. Jude the Obscure (1895) Jude Fawley: •a boy from a poor village; •wants to become a student at the University of Christminster; •works as a stonemason and studies in his free time; •marries Arabella Donn; •has a son, Father Time. •moves to Christminster after the end of his marriage. Performer - Culture & Literature Thomas Hardy 8. Jude the Obscure (1895) Jude Fawley: •meets his cousin Sue Bridehead; •decides to live with her, though refusing the institution of marriage; •has a second son and a daughter •lives the scandalous relationship with the disapproval of the narrow-minded people of the university town; •loses his job and experiences poverty. Performer - Culture & Literature Thomas Hardy 8. Jude the Obscure (1895) The novel follows the Victorian convention of placing an orphan at the centre of the story. But: •denies him the possibility to fulfill his hopes; •takes him from defeat to defeat. The tragedy of Jude is one of: •frustration; •loneliness; •uprooting. •Jude is obscure because he does not exist for others. Performer - Culture & Literature Thomas Hardy 8. Jude the Obscure (1895) Jude the Obscure represents a departure from the Victorian novel for: •its portrayal of weakened vitality and despair; •the bleak urban setting deprived of dynamism; •the sense of anxiety and self-destruction; •the impossibility for the narrator to explain and interpret things. Performer - Culture & Literature