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