Thomas Hardy and Empire

The Representation of Imperial Themes in the Work of Thomas Hardy

Jane L. Bownas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317010449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Thomas Hardy is not generally recognized as an imperial writer, even though he wrote during a period of major expansion of the British Empire and in spite of the many allusions to the Roman Empire and Napoleonic Wars in his writing. Jane L. Bownas examines the context of these references, proposing that Hardy was a writer who not only posed a challenge to the whole of established society, but one whose writings bring into question the very notion of empire. Bownas argues that Hardy takes up ideas of the primitive and civilized that were central to Western thought in the nineteenth century, contesting this opposition and highlighting the effect outsiders have on so-called 'primitive' communities. In her discussion of the oppressions of imperialism, she analyzes the debate surrounding the use of gender as an articulated category, together with race and class, and shows how, in exposing the power structures operating within Britain, Hardy produces a critique of all forms of ideological oppression.

Chapter 1 Colonies and Colonizers

DOI: 10.4324/9781315551043-7

If I have insisted on integration and connections between the past and the present, between imperialiser and imperialised, between culture and imperialism, I have done so not to level or reduce differences, but rather to convey a more urgent sense of the interdependence between things. So vast and yet so detailed is imperialism as an experience with crucial cultural dimensions, that we must speak of overlapping territories, intertwined histories common to men and women, whites and non-whites, dwellers in the metropolis and on the peripheries, past as well as present and future; these territories and histories can only be seen from the perspective of the whole of secular human history.¹

In this chapter I look at direct references to the colonies in Hardy’s writings, examine the significance of these references and consider the contribution they make to the narratives in which they occur. I then consider the extent to which colonization, in the second half of the nineteenth century, may be considered as a process occurring within national boundaries, a domestic replication of the relationship existing between the metropole and its far-flung colonies.

Many of Hardy’s characters emigrate or move temporarily to the colonies or other distant countries, providing him with an opportunity to comment on the mores of the country which his characters are leaving. Some characters question the principles which had previously governed their actions, and realise that the moral certainties they had believed to be immutable are peculiar to a particular time and place in history and are not universal. It is important to stress that at this stage I am not ascribing to Hardy a particular attitude to colonialism but, rather, examining the use he makes of the colonies in his writings and what this might indicate about his views on humanity in general and about the current role of Britain in relation to her colonial possessions. It soon becomes evident that on the surface these views are not necessarily consistent, and that this inconsistency accords with Hardy’s apparent ambiguity on many important issues.

Constantly recurring themes in Hardy’s writings are the connectedness of mankind, the futility of war, the transitory nature of empires and the insignificance of human concerns when put into perspective against the vastness of the universe. Those distant, shadowy lands colonized by the British were used by Hardy to show that however strange and disparate they may appear to be, they form part of the same small planet, and that although the moral views of their inhabitants may be far removed from those of Victorian Christians, those views were equally valid and possibly more desirable. In the poem His Country, written shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, Hardy attempts to articulate these ideas, and it is worth quoting this important, if somewhat neglected poem in full:

I journeyed from my native spot

Across the south sea shine,

And found that people in hall and cot

Laboured and suffered each his lot

Even as I did mine.

Thus noting them in meads and marts

It did not seem to me

That my dear country with its hearts,

Minds, yearnings, worse and better parts

Had ended with the sea.

I further and further went anon

As such I still surveyed,

And further yet – yea, on and on,

And all the men I looked upon

Had heart-strings fellow-made.

I traced the whole terrestrial round,

Homing the other side;

Then said I, ‘What is there to bound

My denizenship? It seems I have found

Its scope to be world-wide’.

I asked me: ‘Whom have I to fight,

And whom have I to dare,

And whom to weaken, crush, and blight?

My country seems to have kept in sight

On my way everywhere.’²

Hardy provides a short summary for each verse, explaining how an Englishman travelling southward can discern no boundary between his country and the many others he visits on his journey round the world. In each country people labour and suffer, the suggestion being that this labour is carried out for the benefit of others, but as a patriot he loves his ‘dear country’, and finds that all those he meets have similar feelings about the places where they live. Writing about this ‘very remarkable’ poem in 1938, Amiya Chakravarty considers that the ‘wandering patriot’ discovers ‘how patriotism of the genuine kind admits the right to similar sentiments in other people, and thus makes for that real international understanding which is based on the recognition of common rights and a unity of aspiration’.³ In other words Hardy is making a plea for an alternative form of patriotism, which is not narrow and jingoistic and which recognises the common humanity of people worldwide. Hardy’s use of the word ‘denizenship’ is interesting and can mistakenly be seen as justification for British occupation of foreign lands. The word ‘denizen’, however, is not synonymous with citizen, and refers to a person who is admitted to reside in a foreign country, although not born in that country.⁴ The rights of denizenship therefore have to be given freely by the adopted country and not assumed as a result of occupation. As Hardy makes clear in the last verse, the traveller sees no enemies on his journey, no one whom he should ‘weaken, crush, and blight’. Interestingly, Bailey notes that when first published this poem had a final stanza:

‘Ah, you deceive with such pleas!’

Said one with pitying eye.

‘Foreigners – not like us – are these;

Stretch country-love beyond the seas? –

Too Christian’. ‘Strange’, said I.⁵

It is perhaps easy to see why this ironic stanza was excluded. With the country on the verge of war, the sentiments expressed here were those generally accepted by the majority of the population, and Hardy’s mocking of these sentiments would not have been favourably received. It is also important to remember that the Great War of 1914–18 was ‘a war for the preservation of the empire, in the sense that if Britain had lost she could not have retained her empire’.⁶

The views expressed by Hardy in His Country on the interconnectedness of man and the unity of all those living on this planet are often accompanied elsewhere in his writings by astronomical imagery. This imagery is used to particular effect in relation to the colonies and other distant foreign lands. In the fore-scene to The Dynasts, earth is viewed from outer space by the various ancient spirits, and ‘the point of view then sinks downwards through space, and draws near to the surface of the perturbed countries, where the peoples, distressed by events which they did not cause, are seen writhing, crawling, heaving, and vibrating in their various cities and nationalities’.⁷ On two separate occasions in different novels stars are used to link characters at home and in the Empire, on both occasions serving to remind people at home in England that those abroad whom they would prefer to forget are in fact quite close to them when seen in relation to the vastness of the universe. These countries cannot be so distant and strange since their inhabitants can see some of the same constellations in the sky as those viewed from Britain.

In A Pair of Blue Eyes, when Knight and Elfride are beginning to fall in love, they walk out together under the night sky, and Elfride observes a bright star ‘exactly over me’. ‘Each bright star is overhead somewhere’, observes Knight, and continues to ponder the fact that the stars they can see will also be seen in the Cape Verde Islands, at the source of the Nile and over the North Pole — and, in particular: ‘that idle one low down upon the ground, that we have almost rolled round to, is in India – over the head of a young friend of mine, who very possibly looks at the star in our zenith, as it hangs low upon his horizon, and thinks of it as marking where his true love dwells’.⁸ The young friend in India is of course Elfride’s former lover Stephen, whom she is starting to forget. Words almost identical to Knight’s are used by Swithin St Cleeve in Two on a Tower, when he is walking under the stars with Lady Constantine: ‘You may possibly be interested in knowing, Lady Constantine, that that medium-sized star you see over there, low down in the south, is precisely over Sir Blount Constantine’s head in the middle of Africa’.⁹ As with Elfride, these words come at the point when Viviette is beginning to feel attracted to Swithin, and it is her husband Sir Blount who is the obstacle to their union. Although it may be true that both Stephen and Sir Blount have been conveniently placed in the colonies so that the relationships between Knight and Elfride and Viviette and Swithin may develop in their absence, there is clearly a larger authorial vision in evidence here. Hardy’s use of star imagery may be considered a cliché, but it does serve to indicate that these characters in distant colonial countries are still connected to the homeland by virtue of living on the same small planet in an immense universe.

It can be argued that astronomical imagery is also used by Hardy to explore a different and seemingly contradictory aspect of colonialism, namely, the fear which accompanies exploration of the unknown, whether it be the unknown recesses of universe or the unexplored areas of foreign lands. In Two on a Tower Swithin’s exploration of the distant recesses of the universe not only serves to emphasise the interconnectedness of mankind but also points to the vastness and mystery of unexplored worlds. His telescopic travels through the ‘yawning spaces’ of the universe is, in some sense, parallel to Sir Blount’s exploration into the heart of Africa. When Swithin looks through the telescope, ‘It was a peep into a maelstrom of fire, taking place where nobody had ever been or ever would be’ (TT, 6). The immensity of the universe fills Swithin with horror, the horror of the unknown: ‘horrid monsters lie up there waiting to be discovered … such monsters are the voids and waste places of the sky … those are deep wells for the human mind to let itself down into, leave alone the human body!’ (TT, 23–4). These reflections are made by Swithin shortly before his observation that one of the stars they are looking at is ‘precisely over Sir Blount Constantine’s head in the middle of Africa’ (TT, 25). It is tempting to draw a parallel between the horrors of the unknowable universe and the horrors imagined by the explorers of the unknown heart of Africa. Swithin’s fears find an echo in Marlow’s description, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness [1902], of Kurtz staring ‘with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe’ and of hearing his ‘whispered cry, “The horror! The horror!”’¹⁰ Swithin fears the enormity of the universe for the horrors he might discover there, but for Kurtz the horror lies in discovering the nature of his own psyche. Swithin says of the sky: ‘I also fear it for what I know is there, but cannot see, as one naturally fears the presence of a vast formless something that only reveals a very little of itself’ (TT, 46–7). Kurtz’s fear arises from the discovery of the ‘monster’ within himself, revealed when the veneer of ‘civilized restraint’ is removed as a result of living in alien surroundings, cut off from authority and tradition.¹¹ In the deep heart of Africa, Marlow also is ‘completely unnerved by a sheer blank fright, pure abstract terror, unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger … something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul’ (HD, 92). Hardy describes how, as Swithin and Viviette walked together, ‘they were oppressed with the presence of a vastness they could not cope with even as an idea, and which hung about them like a nightmare’ (TT, 47), just as, after the death of Kurtz, Marlow ‘remained to dream the nightmare out to the end’ (HD, 100).

In a journal entry written six years after the publication of Two on a Tower, Hardy observes that ‘apprehension is a great element in imagination. It is a semimadness, which sees enemies, etc., in inanimate objects’ (LW, 213), just as Swithin fears what he knows is there but cannot see, and Marlow’s fear is ‘unconnected with any distinct shape of physical danger’ (HD, 92). In The Dynasts, Hardy writes of

… ghastly gulfs of sky,

Where hideou...