Thomas Hardy: The Novels

Norman Page

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781137608413
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350317697
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is designed to serve as a practical guide for students and others wishing to improve their skills in the detailed analysis and discussion of Hardy's prose texts. Its aim is to sharpen readers' awareness of the complexity and subtlety of Hardy's art by encouraging responsiveness to such aspects as language and style, imagery and symbol, descriptive and dramatic method and narrative technique. At the same time extracts are considered not in isolation but in relation to the overall purposes of a highly-organised text.

While the main focus is on four of Hardy's most-widely read novels, the twenty-four examples of close analysis cover six major themes that are relevant to all his fiction. There are also numerous references to his other writings in prose and verse. The second part of the book provides, in succinct form, essential background material, including an outline of Hardy's life and career and an account of the literary, historical and intellectual contexts of his fiction. As well as a guide to further reading, a chapter is devoted to samples of criticism illustrating a range of approaches to the chosen texts and representing the work of important critics past and present.

PART 1

THE NOVELS

Introduction

Hardy published fourteen novels, and this book is primarily concerned with four of them – though it should be said that many of the points made apply also to works not directly discussed here. In the first six chapters, the four texts will be considered from different points of view so as to illuminate various aspects of theme, ideas, style and technique. In each chapter, passages from the four novels will be used as starting-points. The analyses of these passages will draw attention to specific features that are characteristic of the text in question or, in many cases, of Hardy’s fiction as a whole. In this way, detailed analysis will often broaden into generalization, and at the end of each chapter there are suggestions of other passages that the student may wish to subject to similar analysis.

1

Writer and Reader

Introduction

Hardy grew up in a culture in which storytelling, especially by word of mouth, was a normal part of the pattern of daily life: from his grandmother, for example, who lived with the Hardy family for many years, he heard stories of the time before his own birth, and the ballads and songs of the region were another kind of narrative art with which he became familiar from his earliest years. On a different level, he acquired a close knowledge of the stories told in the Bible, and as soon as he could read his mother gave him books that included some of the popular novelists of the day as well as more serious fare.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the basis of Hardy’s art as a novelist should be the ancient role of the storyteller. But by the time he entertained ambitions to be a novelist, the English novel had reached a considerable degree of maturity and technical sophistication. The earlier traditions represented by such authors as Henry Fielding and Jane Austen, and the more recent achievements of (among many others) Charles Dickens and George Eliot, had created a genre that appealed to very large audiences and that had brought the primitive act of storytelling to a new pitch of complexity and subtlety. In material terms, it had also proved capable of making authors and their publishers rich: Dickens and George Eliot (both, like Hardy, from humble backgrounds) had made fortunes from their books, and Hardy in turn was to die a very wealthy man.

Reading Hardy’s novels, we become aware of the ways in which he conceived and defined his own role as storyteller. To a very important extent, these were influenced by the prevailing modes of publication – the distinctive methods by which fiction was marketed in the mid and late-Victorian period – and more will be said on this subject in a later chapter. For the moment it needs to be stressed that if Hardy had been writing at any other time he might have written novels of a very different kind, and of course the same is true of other writers of the period. Ultimately it was the constraints put upon the writer’s freedom by the commercial aspect of novel-writing that contributed largely to his abandoning of fiction in favour of poetry, which offered the writer a much greater degree of personal freedom. But for nearly thirty years Hardy pursued the novelist’s trade, and part of the interest in reading his work lies in considering how far he succeeded in effecting a compromise between what the genre and the market demanded and what he personally wished to express and explore. For, while his novels are in some respects representative examples of late nineteenth-century fiction, they are also in other ways, and on every page, uniquely and unmistakably Hardyan.

Anyone writing a novel has to make certain choices and decisions at the outset, concerning such matters as narrative point of view, the handling of time, the presentation of character, the use of settings, and so forth. In this chapter we shall consider extracts that exemplify the ways in which Hardy responded to some of these challenges. In deciding on a narrative point of view, for example, he is both conservative and highly original. All his novels use a third-person narrator: there is nothing resembling Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Dickens’s Great Expectations, in which the protagonist tells her or his own story, and certainly nothing like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, with their complex interweaving of first-person narratives. But within this traditional format, Hardy produces many original and distinctive effects, and the ‘voice’ of his narrators, those important though often elusive figures through whom the writer communicates with the reader, is not always easy to define. Related to this is the writer’s awareness of his audience and the kind of readers of which it consisted. This and other questions will be raised by the passages that follow.

The Mayor of Casterbridge and the Voice of the Hardyan Narrator

In the following extract, the narrative voice can fairly easily be defined:

The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very finest, remaining in Britain.

Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street, alley, and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome. It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier or other of the Empire, who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest for a space of fifteen hundred years. He was mostly found lying on his side, in an oval scoop in the chalk, like a chicken in its shell; his knees drawn up to his chest; sometimes with the remains of his spear against his arm; a fibula or brooch of bronze on his breast or forehead; an urn at his knees, a jar at his throat, a bottle at his mouth; and mystified conjecture pouring down upon him from the eyes of Casterbridge street boys and men, who had turned a moment to gaze at the familiar spectacle as they passed by.

Imaginative inhabitants, who would have felt an unpleasantness at the discovery of a comparatively modern skeleton in their gardens, were quite unmoved by these hoary shapes. They had lived so long ago, their time was so unlike the present, their hopes and motives were so widely removed from ours, that between them and the living there seemed to stretch a gulf too wide for even a spirit to pass.

The Amphitheatre was a huge circular enclosure, with a notch at opposite extremities of its diameter north and south. From its sloping internal form it might have been called the spittoon of the Jötuns. It was to Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly of the same magnitude. The dusk of evening was the proper hour at which a true impression of this suggestive place could be received. Standing in the middle of the arena at that time there by degrees became apparent its real vastness, which a cursory view from the summit at noon-day was apt to obscure. Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot for appointments of a furtive kind. Intrigues were arranged there; tentative meetings were there experimented after divisions and feuds. But one kind of appointment – in itself the most common of any – seldom had place in the Amphitheatre: that of happy lovers.

Why, seeing that it was pre-eminently an airy, accessible, and sequestered spot for interviews, the cheerfullest form of those occurrences never took kindly to the soil of the ruin, would be a curious inquiry. Perhaps it was because its associations had about them something sinister. Its history proved that. Apart from the sanguinary nature of the games originally played therein, such incidents attached to its past as these: that for scores of years the town-gallows had stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all, and that not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that. In addition to these old tragedies, pugilistic encounters almost to the death had come off down to recent dates in that secluded arena, entirely invisible to the outside world save by climbing to the top of the enclosure, which few townspeople in the daily round of their lives ever took the trouble to do. So that, though close to the turnpike-road, crimes might be perpetrated there unseen at mid-day.

Some boys had latterly tried to impart gaiety to the ruin by using the central arena as a cricket-ground. But the game usually languished for the aforesaid reason – the dismal privacy which the earthen circle enforced, shutting out every appreciative passer’s vision, every commendatory remark from outsiders – everything, except the sky; and to play at games in such circumstances was like acting to an empty house. Possibly, too, the boys were timid, for some old people said that at certain moments in the summer time, in broad daylight, persons sitting with a book or dozing in the arena had, on lifting their eyes, beheld the slopes lined with a gazing legion of Hadrian’s soldiery as if watching the gladiatorial combat; and had heard the roar of their excited voices; that the scene would remain but a moment, like a lightning flash, and then disappear.

It was related that there still remained under the south entrance excavated cells for the reception of the wild animals and athletes who took part in the games. The arena was still smooth and circular, as if used for its original purpose not so very long ago. The sloping pathways by which spectators had ascended to their seats were pathways yet. But the whole was grown over with grass, which now, at the end of summer, was bearded with withered bents that formed waves under the brush of the wind, returning to the attentive ear Aeolian modulations, and detaining for moments the flying globes of thistledown.

Henchard had chosen this spot as being the safest from observation which he could think of for meeting his long-lost wife, and at the same time as one easily to be found by a stranger after nightfall. As Mayor of the town, with a reputation to keep up, he could not invite her to come to his house till some definite course had been decided on.

(Chapter 11)

This is a passage wholly dominated by the narrative voice: not a single word of dialogue (that is, speech uttered by one of the characters in the story) is introduced. It has, indeed, something of the flavour of an essay or article, and it is only at the very end, when the name of Henchard is introduced, that it clearly emerges as part of a work of fiction. At first glance, therefore, one might be inclined to dismiss it as a kind of mini-essay introduced into the text of the novel, perhaps as padding. But closer examination reveals that there is some interesting variety even within the prevailing non-fictional material.

What characteristics can be attributed to the narrator – the storyteller whose ‘voice’ addresses us; and what can be learned about the implied readers of such a passage? The primary subject of the passage is the evidence still to be seen, in the area in question, of the Roman occupation of Britain, and in particular an important historical site on the outskirts of the fictional town of Casterbridge; but many readers, especially those familiar with the south-west of England and with Hardy’s earlier novels, would have had little difficulty in identifying Casterbridge with Dorchester (known as Durnovaria to the Roman settlers), and ‘the Ring’ with Maumbury Rings, a site on the edge of Dorchester containing the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre. The narrator is knowledgeable on the subject of local history and archaeology, and at first adopts the detached manner of one writing a guidebook or popular history. When a specialized term is used, its meaning is explained, on the implicit assumption that the reader is not an expert on the subject and may need a little help: ‘a fibula or brooch of bronze’.

Soon, however, a more personal note intrudes: the description of the skeleton of a Roman soldier in its grave is detailed and precise, but there is a rhetorical and even a poetic, rather than an objective and scientific, note in the reference to the body having lain for 1500 years ‘in his silent unobtrusive rest’. Precision and objectivity, again, mark the opening sentence of the fourth paragraph quoted, with its indications of the amphitheatre’s main physical features; but here, too, a poetic note is heard in the description of the scene at dusk, ‘Melancholy, impressive, lonely’, which would have been somewhat out of place in, say, an article in a journal devoted to local history or archaeology. A little later, the reference to a public execution in 1705 shows not the cool, dispassionate manner of the historian but a curious mixture of genuine horror (‘her heart burst and leapt out of her body’) and grim facetiousness (‘ever cared particularly for hot roast. . .’ is likely to strike us as a distinctly ‘sick’ joke). We know from various sources that the case referred to, involving a young woman called Mary Channing who had been found guilty of murdering her husband, was one that fascinated and horrified Hardy throughout his life.

To sum up, there is something decidedly unstable about the narrative voice: it makes no attempt at consistency of tone, but moves freely between objectivity and strong personal feelings, and between factual description and the evocation of atmosphere. The historical vision is panoramic, ranging from the Romans to the eighteenth century and the present day, but it is a very personal kind of history, imaginatively recreated in human terms rather than relying on documentation or excavation. This emphasis upon the human, and the continuity of human experience (a favourite Hardyan theme), leads naturally into the mention of Henchard, which in turn links this set-piece with the main narrative of the novel. A scene that has witnessed so many tragedies and so much suffering has a certain appropriateness as a meeting-place for the Mayor and ‘his long-lost wife’, whom he has treated so badly. An amphitheatre of this kind has been, among other things, virtually a place of human sacrifice, and the opening scene of the novel has recounted the way in which Henchard sacrificed his wife to indulge his own selfish desires.

The reader of the passage is assumed to have an interest in historical matters and also to possess a considerable amount of literary and historical information – of ‘general culture’, that is, as the period might have understood this concept, and as Hardy’s own schooling and self-education had exemplified it. Such allusions as those to ‘the spittoon of the Jötuns’ (the latter are giants in Norse mythology) and ‘Aeolian modulations’ (an Aeolian harp produced sounds by the action of the wind) imply a readership with some substantial educational background – in short, a bourgeois and to a large extent urban readership. Similarly, the mention of ‘the ruined Coliseum’ suggests that readers are likely to have visited Rome, or at least to be well acquainted with its ancient monuments through illustrated books and journals. All of this tells us something about the typical reader of the magazine in which this novel appeared for the first time, and the record of Hardy’s career as a novelist shows him both taking advantage of such an audience and hampered by the limitations of its taste and tolerance.

Another point, of a more general nature, is worth making here, since it is one it will be necessary to return to in the discussion of various passages. One aspect of Hardy’s powerful visual imagination is a preoccupation with both linear and circular shapes and movements, and with the relationship between the two. His broadly chronological narratives move forward, and his characters are often shown as moving in space as well as time; but there is also a strong element of circularity whereby stories and human destinies tend to return relentlessly to an earlier stage, individual lives moving in circles and the lives of successive generations repeating the experience of their forebears. Michael Henchard’s life will turn out to be precisely one such, and the Ring suggests symbolically that despite all his strenuous efforts to move forward and to put the past behind him, that past will persist and his experience will turn out to be circular rather than line...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Part 1: The Novels
• Part 2: The Context
• Index