Thomas Hardy's Tragic Vision

Thomas Hardy’s Tragic Vision: Writing Towards Proto-Modernist Modes of Fiction by Nick Prentice A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements of the University of the West of England, Bristol for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education, University of the West of England, Bristol, January 2016 2 ABSTRACT This thesis offers a narratorial and textual examination of the tragic in Hardy’s fiction and uncovers how his tragic vision of a changing world led him into proto-modernist forms of writing. By first positing Hardy within his milieu and exploring the ideas, beliefs and attitudes that gave rise to his expression of the tragic, the thesis proceeds to conducts a close textual analysis of the fiction. His early psychological use of environment and the construction of metaphoric landscapes evoke a disturbing sense of place, in which individuals are diminished and displaced by nature. In this mode, Hardy’s agnostic, secular recasting of the tragic brings to the fore the material world, objects, animals and the non-human. Hardy’s experimental use of fetichism and the primitive and his animism intensify the tragic situation in the middle fiction. Here, there is also a pronounced satiric strain in the writing, elements of the absurd and use of ‘abstract imaginings’ through which Hardy expresses what he called ‘tragical mysteries of life’. The hybrid nature of the texts, with their fluid oscillations of mode, I argue, shapes the tragic effect and reflects Hardy’s experimental and recursive procedures during this period. The final concern of the thesis is the fragmentation of experience in the later fiction, which focuses upon Hardy’s depiction of the destructive forces of the unconscious and his use of shocks and interruptions in the short stories. The vision of isolated individuals failing to find fulfilment and connection with each other comes to the fore in these works. Hardy’s later and more radical experiments in characterisation present unstable beings that are read as simulacras; amalgamations of nerves and sensations. Such a recasting of the human reflects a vital proto-modernist aspect of Hardy’s writing, which subverts realist representations of the individual and anticipates the fractured, unstable characters of the modernists. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Contents 3 Acknowledgments 4 Chapter 1: Introduction 5 Chapter 2: The Shaping of Hardy’s Tragic Vision 18 ‘A Life Twisted of Three Strands’ 18 Shakespearean Tragedy 27 The Legacy of the Tragic 32 Darwin, Schopenhauer and Hardy’s Agnostic Imagination 42 Chapter 3: Experiments with Environment 53 Mind, Memory and Environment in the Early Novels 53 The Dream and the Reality of Wessex 62 The Hand of Ethelberta: Satire and the Social Environment 74 Reading Tragic Landscapes 81 Chapter 4: ‘Abstract Imaginings’ of ‘The Tragical Mysteries of Life’ 99 Isolation and Solitude 100 Marriage and the Absurd 112 Fetichism and the Tragic 119 Chapter 5: The Fragmentation of Experience 129 The Unconscious 130 Shocks and Interruptions: Hardy’s Foreshortening of the Tragic 139 Experiments in Character 151 Chapter 6: Conclusion 167 General Bibliography 172 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor William Greenslade for his time, continual guidance, expertise and advice throughout the writing of the thesis. Also of great value have been Professor Michael Davis’s comments and feedback, particularly in the area of consciousness in Hardy. In the later stages of the project, Dr. Gillian Ballinger’s close reading of the text and Professor Roger Ebbatson’s positive insights into the work have enabled me to complete the final revision. Thanks to you both. My gratitude also extends to the trustees and staff at the Dorset County Museum in Dorchester and those guardians of the Thomas Hardy collection who have allowed me access to manuscripts and primary sources. Thanks must also go to the dedicated members of the Thomas Hardy Society for their staging of so many inspiring lectures and events, not least the biannual conference that has proved to have been such an exciting scholarly forum in which to conceive and develop many of the ideas that have informed this thesis. On a more personal note, I am deeply indebted to my wife, Alice Prentice, whose editing and support have been essential in the realisation of this work. In addition, I am grateful to Geraldine Bennett, her mother, who provided me with a quiet space in which to work. Finally, I wish to thank my father, David Prentice and my now deceased mother, Bernadette Prentice, for their enduring belief in me and for passing on to me their love of the pastoral and Hardy. 5 CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION Hardy’s life-long commitment to what he described in the 1912 General Preface as his tragic ‘instinct for expression’ (Orel (ed.) 49) continues to generate a vast amount of critical interest, demonstrating just how deep and pervasive a force the tragic is in his fiction. However, somewhat surprisingly, his tragic vision of a world in transition has not been directly equated with his proto-modernism. In focusing upon some of the major advances and changes in Hardy’s experimental narrative techniques, this thesis examines how Hardy’s continual reconfiguring of the tragic energised his writing of proto-modernist modes of fiction. Hardy initially used the venerable genre of tragedy to make a place for himself in the literary world of his time. As many previous studies have argued, his use of fate, allusion and myth in the fiction is extensive and connects him to the ancients. However, more significantly, he dismantled those received ideas and forms of tragedy, opening them up and reinventing new secular and agnostic modes of the tragic. The growing satiric strain in his writing is also a force that subverts the conventional social codes inscribed within the power structures of tragedy. Underlining Hardy’s proto-modernism of the tragic is the pervasive vision of isolated individuals failing to connect with others and find fulfilment in an increasingly oppressive, materialistic world. As I elaborate upon in the thesis, Walter Pater’s vision of internal isolation and the impenetrability of the ego was a major proto-modernist influence upon Hardy’s vision of a changing world. For Pater, personality and the self were viewed as problematic filters of reality and experience was broken down into an often overwhelming multitude of diverse impressions and sensations. All this suggested to Hardy new psychological and effective ways of shaping his tragic characters. Therefore, Pater’s critique of the ego is a significant frame of reference between Hardy’s tragic vision and modernism. The fracturing of the self in Hardy is further reinforced through his foreshortening of the tragic in the short stories, a form of fiction that spans the gap between realism and modernism. Hardy’s use of shocks and interruption and the temporal compression and ellipses of theses narratives, create an impression of fragile human life that can be disrupted and terminated at any one moment. As we shall see, such a mode of the tragic anticipates the more disruptive and existential stories of Woolf and Joyce. 6 Proto-modernism is a vague term, mainly because of the diverse and eclectic nature of the literary movement of modernism, which covers a wide range of narrative styles and modes that overlap with realism. For instance the fiction of Conrad, Lawrence, Woolf and Joyce is unmistakeably pervaded by realistically framed characters and environments. Thus, for clarity, my argument focuses upon some of Hardy’s more experimental practices, for example, his mnemonic and psychological use of environment, the creation of symbolic and metaphoric landscapes and the deployment of an abstract realism and imagining that uncovers ‘the tragical mysteries of life’. Not least is his shaping of strange, perversely self- destructive characters in the later works, which is the final concern of the thesis. Aesthetically, character in Hardy is in a perpetual state of flux and not a fixed homogenous phenomenon. Instead of adopting a conventional generic and formal approach to tragic plot, character and setting, my critical method focuses upon the textual oscillations of mode that shape the tragic effect. Through satiric, surreal, farcical and absurd modes of writing, tragic meaning is continually being modified and reconfigured throughout the novels and stories. A primary purpose behind this reading is to uncover the versatile and expedient nature of the tragic rhythms that seem to pulsate through the texts. My emphasis upon textual vacillations, therefore, bears closer affinity with post-structural perspectives upon Hardy, rather than a generically and culturally encoded view of tragedy. Hardy’s writing procedure was highly recursive; he would frequently return to earlier projects and themes, reworking them in new ways. In parallel, he would often abandon a particular subject or expected line of interest to try something completely new; The Hand of Ethelberta is the creation of such a divergence. In his very first novel, Desperate Remedies (1872), Hardy demonstrated an experimental approach to the tragic that inspired a whole new way of writing fiction. There is, then, no continuous line of development in Hardy’s experiments with the tragic, a point which is reflected in the trajectory of the thesis. A general chronological direction is followed, addressing the early fiction and finishing with the later works, but within that patterning there are frequent retrospective excursions. Hardy’s exploration of the tragic is treated as an arc with intermittent spirals inscribed within it, or to use a motif that Hardy admired and to which he frequently referred, ‘a looped orbit’ which was Auguste Comte’s symbol of human progress (Orel (ed.) 127). Hardy was no positivist, but he often thought of his own literary procedure as a ‘looped orbit’, advancing forward with intermittent points of recoil.

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