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Man As Alien: the Isolation Theme in Thomas Hardy

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Man As Alien: the Isolation Theme in Thomas Hardy Copyright by Samuel Irving Beilmyn MAN AS ALIEN: THE ISOLATION THEME IN THOMAS HARD! DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By SAMUEL IRVING BELLMAN, B. A*, M. A. The Ohio State University 1955 Approved by: Department of English ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the following publishers for permis­ sion to quote relatively long passages (in excess of 150 words) from, or otherwise use, copyrighted material: Harper & Brothers— Personality: A Biosocial Approach to Origins and Structure by Gardner Murphy. Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated— The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism by Stanley Edgar by man j and Iberaooracy in AmericaTby Alexis de Toquevilie, edited by Phillips Bradley* I have quoted frequently from Hardyfs official biography, published by The Macmillan Company— The Early Life of Thom­ as Hardy: 1840-1891 and The later Years of Thomas Hardy: 1892-1928, by Florence Emily Hardy. A number of people have lent their aid to this disser­ tation, in the form of information, advice, and constructive criticism, and I wish here to render my gratitude to them: Mr* Bernard Mlkofsky, a Slavlst at the Battelle Memorial Institute, Columbus, Ohio; Professor David Rife, of the In­ stitute of Genetics at The Ohio State University (all sub­ sequent individuals in this list are also affiliated with The Ohio State University); Professor Alvin Scodel, of the Department of Psychology; Professors Marvin Fox and anthony Nemetz, and Mr* John De Lucca, of the Department of Philos­ ophy; and Professors Claude Simpson, James Logan, Francis Townsend, Edwin Robbins, and J* R* Derby, of the Department of English* I am particularly indebted to my adviser, Pro- ii fessor Derby, for tv© many long months of encouragement, challenge, guidance, and patient understanding that pre­ ceded (and greatly facilitated) the completion of what seemed at times an endless work# To my wife, who has lived this “prelude to a more thorough, but future, study” with me through every one of its regular (and irregular) stages, I can only approximate my full measure of thanks by saying that Man As Allen is really her book# ill TABLE OP CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................ ii CHAPTER ONE. INTRODUCTION: THE ISOLATION THEME IN HARDY IN RELATION TO THE PERIOD IN WHICH HE W R O T E .................................. 1 CHAPTER TWO. THE ISOLATE AND HIS ENVIRONMENT: I. THE LIMITATIONS OF THE COMMONLY HELD VIEWS OP HARDY'S FICTIONAL WORLD ................ 68 CHAPTER THREE. II. THE "FIELD" THEORY AS APPLIED TO HARDY. A. GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE "FIEID".................................. 91 CHAPTER POUR. B. THE "FIELDS" OF HARDY’S ISOLATES. Superfluous Characters ............ • 114 CHAPTER FIVE. Unrealistic Characters ................ 191 CHAPTER SIX. CONCLUSION .......................... 265 BIBLIOGRAPHY....................................... 290 iv CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: THE ISOLATION THEME IN HARDY IN RELATION TO THE PERIOD IN WHICH HE WROTE Things move in cycles; dormant princi­ ples renew themselves, and exhausted principles are thrust by. There is a revival of the artistio instincts to­ wards great dramatic motives— setting forth that 'collision between the in­ dividual and the general*— formerly worked out with such force by the Per- iclean and Elizabethan dramatists, to name no other. Thomas Hardy, "Candour in English Fiction," 1890* As many are aware, the solitary figure is by no means uncommon in serious literature. One thinks of certain un­ forgettable characters in Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, the Ro­ mantics, the Russian masters, Dickens, Emily BrontS, Hardy, Butler, Conrad, Henry James, Mann, and Qide, to name only a few. T. S. Eliot, in commenting on Huckleberry Finn, men­ tions a number of other famous literary isolates who, like Mark Twain's character, appear to transcend their time and culture and to have something of the universality of Every­ man in the morality play: Huck Finn is alone: there is no more solitary character in fiction. The fact that he has a fa­ ther only emphasizes his loneliness; and he views his father with a terrifying detachment. So we come to see Huck himself in the end as one of the permanent symbolic figures of fiction; not unwor­ thy to take a place with Ulysses, Faust, Don 1 2 Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet and other great discov­ eries that man has made about himself*1 1T. S* Eliot, "Introduction" to The Adventures of Huck­ leberry Finn, Samuel L. Clemens (London:' tthe 'Cresset Press, ldeoV, p* ix. Since the end of the eighteenth century, the theme of estrangement of the individual from society has become pe­ culiarly important in literature* This leitmotiv, running all the way from the Gothic tales and the poems of the Ro­ mantic poets to present-day detective fiction and chroni­ cles of the decadent South, is only the literary manifesta­ tion of the general condition of fragmentation to which Western man has been susceptible since the Industrial and French Revolutions awakened him to new modes of social, economic, and political living and thinking. Very few of the numerous Isolates in the literature of this period drew on enough facets of their personalities to harmonize satis­ factorily with the groups they found themselves in. De­ spite efforts at compromise and reorientation, the Isolate found the gate strait and the way narrow, and would not have been likely to share the utilitarian optimism of Emer­ son's maxim on isolation: Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults* As no man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended against it, so no man has a 3 thorough acquaintance with the hindrances or tal­ ents of men until he has suffered from the one and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same. Has he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to entertain himself alone and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.2 2Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Compensation," 1841. During the Victorian period in England (roughly, 1832 to 1901), the idea that man is more an isolate unto himself than a closely-knit part of society became far more current and far more deeply embedded in the national consciousness than it had ever been before. Matthew Arnold's lines, Yes.' in the sea of life enisled, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone.3 3bTo Marguerite— Continued," 1852. might be taken to represent one of the dominant philosophi­ cal views of what Taine would have called the English race, moment, and milieu. Among those most deeply affected by this view of man's unenviable position was Riomas Hardy, the "last of the Victorians.” In his fifteen novels and forty-five short stories (all written during Victoria's 4 reign), as well as in bis numerous volumes of poetry, there recurs the Image of a rootless Individual lost In a world (to paraphrase Arnold's "Dover Beach") without Joy or love or light or certitude or peace or help for pain* This dis­ sertation will deal with Hardy's use in his fiction of the theme of isolation. Before we can understand Hardy's vari­ ations on this theme, however, we must first make a brief survey of the period, in order to see what sort of milieu produced the pervasive awareness of man as an isolate* Victorian England ought properly to be studied against the wider background of nineteenth-century Europe and Amer­ ica, for a number of important circumstances made the life of the average Englishman of a particular class somewhat like the life of his nearest counterpart in Prance, Russia, or the United States, to name no others* Thus the isola- tlon-llterature of nineteenth-century England might well be compared with certain contemporaneous literary works of these other countries* Since space will not permit so ex­ tensive a treatment, however, we will refer to these other matters only in passing* The most perplexing question to answer about Victorian Isolation is, where did it have its ultimate origin? Did it really begin with the lonely romantic heroes in Shelley, Byron, Coleridge (and Goethe and Pushkin)? With the late eighteenth-century Gothic mystery novels or William God- 5 win’s novel of 1794, Caleb Williams? With the eighteenth- century "graveyard” poets: Parnell, Gray, Blair, Young? It is difficult to stop at any one literary genre or peri­ od, because there is likely to be an antecedent genre or work hardly less characteristic of isolation-literature. Before the "graveyard” poems there was Hamlet. Before that there was Everyman. The list may be multiplied indefinite­ ly: Piers Plowman. The Wanderer. Ecclesiastes, the Greek tragedies, the legends of creation. One suspects, in short, that Victorian isolation-literature cannot accurate­ ly be traced to individual literary works. An examination of the thought of representative Victorians, however, leads to the surmise that certain important developments since the sixteenth century produced, during the Victorian peri­ od, a set of circumstances capable of making man's lot far worse (or, depending on the point of view, far better) than it had ever been before. The fundamental traditions in social organization, re­ ligious thought, and political regulation which had molded the lives of Englishmen for centuries were in a state of upheaval. Fortunately for the sanity of the nation, the English Constitution (unwritten but nonetheless
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