This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291908399_Thomas_hardy_and_realism. The second was published https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgarticle=1117&context=eng_theses. The third was published at file:///C:/Users/Luciano/Downloads/2-5-22-396.pdf
One distinguished 19th century novelist was bold enough to observe that "realism", though much championed by the most celebrated fiction writers of the century, was "an unfortunate, and an ambiguous word". It had been, he continued, "taken up by literary society like a view-halloo". Plotting Thomas Hardy's realism is to see with unusual clarity the availability of the term for alternative meanings at the end of the Victorian period. He makes its potential visible as he proposes across his life alternatives versions for where the "real" for the literary writer, might lie. The subject of Hardy and realism is not straightforward. And we have Hardy's own warning about this: he was the distinguished novelist. In the period that saw the establishment of the novel as the dominant literary form in British culture, the Victorians gave powerful consideration to the idea of fiction as representing the real. They were theorists about and practitioners of imaginative prose that described itself, in one way or another, as representing the textures and experiences of lived life. Realism is, at least at the headline level, the imaginative counter of romance. Unlike realism, romance does not have its feet on the ground. Realism claims itself as a language of the earth. Realism lives with history and politics; romance with myth and fantasy. Realism, as a literary practice is habitually a discourse of the agnostic because it concerns itself with things empirically knowable; romance readily makes way for the theological, because it admits into its textures the nonoempirical, the extraordinary, the possibilities of what might be beyond the globe.
The industrial revolution and the agricultural revolution in the 18th century affected communities drastically. Hardy saw a direct relationship between historical processes and individual lives: both, like natural processes, were evolutionary; human character evolved as history evolved. The roles of education, morality and social mobility were also impacted during this time. Characters such as Tess and Jude were limited by their social position. They represent many characters in Hardy's novels struggling to survive in their ever-evolving world. Thomas Hardy wrote his novels in a time of great change and perhaps with great prupose. The literary critic Stanley Hyman writes, "hardy saw himself as time's surrogate not only in illuminating the past but in stimulating his readers to move into the future. His plots imitate the inoxorable movement of time, and his characters reveal varying degrees of ability to adapt to it. His novels not only express his view of the past and the present but attempt to restructure the responses of his readers in such a way as to accomodate them to the only future he believed possible. Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge demonstrates a successful moral evolution as he transcends egotism and return to natural morality. His daughter Elizabeth, is another example of successful evolution to natural morality. In Tess of the d'Urbevilles, Tess demonstrated both success and failure. Tess is at once the most natural and most human of Hardy's creations. Alec d'Urberville is a character who best represents the genteel, landed aristocracy who really places no value on morality. The great beauty of this and all literature I believe, is its timelessness. Although written in the 19th century, Hardy's Darwinian message is timeless. If one were to question whether Hardy was a successful character in light of this study, he would be successful. He not only evolved in his belief system, but used the novel to examine the new world and present his observation to society. He grew up in an age of change and was one of the first writers to discuss the ache of modernism.
Thomas Hardy was glad about the improvement of science, he enjoyed the advance done in global co-operation and comprehension. Truth should be told, he was a genuine organizer and a humanist. This response against the traditional prudery and fake assembled force in the succeeding decades till finally it formed into an revolt and achieved the end of Vistorianism. Following Hardy's novels is a confounding knowledge. In his novels he has fictionalized the key existential clashes of man with the enigmatic universe and the social order. The contentions and strains that definitely go to the truth of human presence are the central of his inventive work. He is an explainer of man's suffering and infinite distance. Like Shakespeare, Hardy demonstrates a consciousness of the unfeeling mindlessness of the states of human life. Most of Hardy's great characters are archetypal. They are engaged into a dual struggle against the forces of the universe and the irrational elements in social traditions. His characters transcend time and place. They are essentially true to life. For him Modernism, in the turn of the 20th century, failed in the cultivation of the fundamental human virtues of concern and kindness for others. Two world wars bears witness to this truth. His greatness consists in bringing to light the wealth of a life of the common people. But Hardy wrote about them more effectively than any English novelist. Hardy's works have some influence upon and affinities with writers such as John Fowles, William Faulkner, Ibsen, Zola and Dreiser. All these writers base the details of their narratives on ordinary life. Their works present the helpless subordination of the individual to peripheral forces. Like Hardy, they too are sympathetic to the individual whose identity and individuality are recognized. When we speak of morality in hardy, we do not mean that hardy wrote his novels to convey any moral lesson. Meanings are not single, but multiple. They are historical and social constructs. Any approach to life that does not respect pluralism in all walks of life is against the very nature of man.
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