THE PROVINCIAL OR REGIONAL NOVEL

Thomas Hardy
The Lament for the Rural Idyll
- Thomas Hardy’s literature – English in tone and content
- an English idyll, yet also signs of rural change
- the infiltrators represented as uncivilised, dangerous
- Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) - the new steam threshing machine of Flintcomb-Ash farm:
‘Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the
women had come to serve — a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels
appertaining — the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic
demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.’ (Chapter 47)
- The owner of the machine - his 'strange northern accent’, he has infiltrated the Wessex
farmland 'with which he has nothing in common' in order to 'amaze and to discompose its
aborigines' (p. 345).
- Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, features a mechanised seed-drill: ‘’It will revolutionize
sowing heerabout! No more sowers flinging their seed about broadcast, so that some falls by
the wayside, and some among thorns, and all that. Each grain will go straight to its intended
place, and nowhere else whatever!" (Chapter 24)
- Hardy’s allusion to the biblical allegory of seed sowing
- regional/provincial novel and industrial fiction – both attempts to evaluate the changes in
all aspects of the British identity and culture

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

- the son of a builder and master mason
- excellent formal education
- successful architect when he started writing
- never belonged to the labouring class, just distant observer
- born near Dorchester
- after high school apprenticed to a local architect
- worked at the architectural offices in London
- writes poetry, loss of Christian faith (Darwin)
- Desperate Remedies (1871)- his first published novel
- A Pair of Blue Eyes, Hardy's third novel – inspired by Hardy’s courtship to Emma Lavinia
Gifford (his first wife)
- lived at Max Gate on the edge of Dorchester
- Jude the Obscure (1895) – mixed (mostly negative) critical reception, dedicated himself to
poetry

his life and work

- Emma’s notebook 'What I Think of My Husband’ - her comments upon Th. Hardy, bitter
denunciations
- in 1914, he married Florence Emily Dugdale (1879-1937), a writer of children's stories
- Florence lived in the shadow of Hardy's first wife
- after Emma’s death, Hardy wrote love poetry with his first wife in his mind
- with Florence's help, he destroyed many of his letters and journals, & prepared two, quite
misleading, volumes on his life: The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas
Hardy

Hardy’s most famous prose works

-Desperate Remedies (1871)

-Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)

-A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)

-Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)

-The Return of the Native (1878)

-The Trumpet-Major (1880)

-The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)

-The Woodlanders (1887)

-Tess of the D'Urberville (1891)

-The Well-Beloved (1897) and Jude the Obscure (1895)

-collections of short stories: Wessex Tales (1888), Life's Little Ironies (1894), A

Changed Man and Other Tales (1913)

-intratextuality in Hardy’s works – e.g., some characters, 'The Dorsetshire Labourer' (essay) for social
commentary in Tess, Hardy’s poetry, 'Proud

Songsters', 'Tess's Lament'

Tess of the D'Urberville (1891) - Historical Background
- like most of Hardy's novels, Tess is set in and around Dorset (Wessex - a semi-fictional
region)
- real Dorset - agricultural region
- in Hardy’s time – undergone considerable economic and social changes
- society structured by class relations and social mobility
- by the 1890s, it had just been through a long-term depression brought about by shifts in
the global economy
- a result of the depression - employment declined, wages fell
- appalling conditions of the Dorset agricultural labourers
- late 19th century rural (and urban) society - structured by mobility, insecurity, separation
- Tess's constant journeying and movement from farm to farm
- describes continuous process of change, not a static, idealised world
- Hardy - not always accurate in terms of detail
- interested in the economic context and the impact of social and moral concerns of his
period on people
Literary Background and Genre of the novel
Hardy’s literary antecedents:
- the Romantics, realists (G. Eliot), the 'rural' authors of his day
- like Romantics – hellish vision of nature, but places it within a modern context
- the Baedeker guides
- Hardy sometimes slips into the stereotypical portrayal or describes panoramic views of
Wessex that seem as if coming from a Baedeker guide Genre
- naturalist novel
- realist novel
- a love story
- elements of pastoral genre (pastoral romance)
- a tragedy
- an allegory of man’s progress through the world
Thomas Hardy’s Philosophy of Life
- Hardy’s conception of life – influenced/shaped by his critical reading of the Bible, study of
ancient tragedy, contemporary philosophical and scientific works, and by his rural
environment
The Bible
- devout reader of the Bible (though an agnostic in later years), Biblical allusions in his novels
(some 600, the highest number in Tess)
Castigation of religion
- Hardy’s loss of faith led to the pessimism that permeates his fiction and poetry
- the universe (symbolised by Egdon Heath in his novels) – devoid of divine meaning
- the old Christian religion practised in churches is redundant in the modern world
- ’Hardy’s castigation of traditional religion is an integral part of his social criticism’ (Lennart
A. Björk)
- Hardy’s attitude to religion – complex/contradictory: religion - grossly institutionalised, lost
its original value (that was based on compassion), but also believed the church was an
important social institution
Hellenic and pagan influences
- Hardy’s critical view of life - rooted in his Hellenic and pagan sympathies
- his Wessex novels/stories - a vision of an old, rustic England that was essentially pagan
- Angel in Tess embodies the ideas of Hellenism and paganism, (Matthew Arnold’s hope for
cultural regeneration of England through Greek revival)
- Hardy advocated rural and Hellenic paganism as an alternative for Christianity
Early influences
- ’a born bookworm’- read classical authors (Homer, Horace, Ovid, Virgil), Shakespeare, J.
Milton, and contemporary authors
- Hardy's tragic vision greatly influenced by the reading of Aeschylus and Sophocles
- ’The President of the Immortals has ended his sport with Tess’ – a paraphrase of a sentence
in Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound
- contemporary intellectual debates - the controversy between science (Darwin) and
Christian orthodoxy
- natural order is indifferent to man's desires and aspirations, broke with Victorian optimism
and self-complacency
- the works of the French radical reformers and philosophers, Charles Fourier, Hippolyte
Taine, and Auguste Comte
- John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen and hisThe Science of Ethics (1882)-
developed an ethical view based on Darwin’s theory of evolution
- Hardy questioned the established moral and religious principles of Victorian society
- his pessimistic view of society - the philosophy of determinism - man determined by both
heredity and environment
Pessimism
- tragic coincidence and the irony of fate
- a reaction to Victorian optimism
- sources: popular Calvinism, Darwin's theory of natural selection, Schopenhauer's
philosophy, and traditional folk fatalism
- Hardy - life controlled by fate, blind chance, heredity, and environment
- differences Hardy and Emil Zola’s biological determinism Chance
- Hardy’s favourite fictional devices: chance, mishap, accident
- chance becomes a universal symbol of Hardy's personal philosophy
Evolutionary meliorist (??)
- viewed modernity and industrial change as a hazard
- he was ‘an evolutionary meliorist’:
‘I believe that a good deal of the robustious, swaggering optimism of recent literature is at
bottom cowardly and insincere. My pessimism, if pessimism it be, does not involve the
assumption that the world is going to the dogs. On the contrary, my practical philosophy is
distinctly meliorist. Whatever may be the inherent good or evil of life, it is certain that men
make it much worse than it need be. When we have got rid of a thousand remediable ills, it
will be time enough to determine whether the ill that is irremediable outweighs the good.’
An existential point of view
- deeply concerned in his novels with existential questions
- Hardy’s world – lacks the stability and confidence of Christian belief, man is both a
perpetrator and a victim
- his view of life foreshadows the existentialism of twentieth-century writers
- man is unfree, but when he transcends his natural bondage he may achieve personal
freedom - the high price he has to pay for it
Tess of the D'Urberville (1891)  A brief note on the text
- turned down by different publishers on moral grounds
- finally came out as a weekly serial in 1891 in five books (with some parts removed from the
text), do not correspond to the seven phases of the novel
- he continued working on the text - ‘definitive’ version in 1912

Tess of the D'Urberville  Characterisation

- seven phases reflect the pattern of Tess’s short life
- Tess as a medieval morality play - a psychomachea (??)
- a poem by Prudentius, 'Psychomachia', c. 400, in Greek means 'a struggle or fight for life'
- Angel (virtue) and Alec (vice) seem to fight for the soul of Tess

Tess
- a problem for critics, complex fictional character
- possible to read her character/the novel in a variety of ways
- Tess is modern rather than Victorian character
- our eye always drawn to Tess:
Among the other binders she is 'the most flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them
all' (Ch 14, p.138).
'The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular, the red lips thinner than it is usual in a
country-bred girl' (Ch 14, p. 138).
- Tess elevated but also belonging to base nature
- compared to 'a bled calf'; 'her breathing now was quick and small, like that of a lesser
creature than a woman' (Ch 58, p. 487)
- her animality - to make her appear vulnerable, but also to highlight her sexuality
- Hardy does not condemn Tess, ‘pure woman’

Alec and Angel

- compared to Tess, more schematic, one-dimensional characters
- contrast Angel/Alec, sometimes they echo each other’s actions
Themes
- Loss and the Inevitability of Suffering: characters- under control of an external force that
conspires against them – 'The President of the Immortals'
- Tess- snared by the past, doomed from the outset:
'a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the
surroundings than that fly ‘. (Ch 16, p. 159)
- the past determines the present
- Tess tries to capture and live just for the present:
'Don't think of what's past!', said she. 'I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who
knows what tomorrow has in store? ‘(Ch 58, p. 480)

The Natural and Conventional:

- the relationship of humanity to nature
- complex theme within which nature and convention are juxtaposed
- people take pleasure in the world around them:
'Some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the

twigs. It was unexpanded youth, surging up anew after its

temporary check, and bringing with it hope, and the invincible

instinct towards self-delight'. (Ch 15, p. 151)

- yet nature is cruel: 'the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing'. (Ch. 12, p. 123)
- nature as a presence and as an idea
- nature - in the form of seasons helps add structure to the novel
- is used as the norm against which characters and
situations are judged
- also, as a pressure or force that acts on the characters:
'A particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of

germination was almost audible in the buds; it moved her, as it

moved the wild animals and made her passionate to go ‘. (Ch 15, p. 150)