1. Thomas Hardy
( )

2. 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.
Thomas Hardy

3. The Hardy cottage in Higher Bockhampton, Dorchester
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)
The Hardy cottage in Higher Bockhampton, Dorchester

4. 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’.
A contemporary edition
of The Return of the Native.

5. Far from the Madding Crowd
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

6. 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’.
Detailed, controlled language, rich in symbolism.
Use of metaphor, simile, personification.
Important role of the language of sense impressions.
Hardy and his dog

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.
Polemic attitude to religion: Christianity is no longer capable of fulfilling the needs of modern man.
A contemporary edition of
Tess of the D’Ubervilles

10. 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.

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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.