Last Tuesday, the British writer Thomas Hardy would complete180 years-old, so this post is a tribute to him. He is one of the main realist writers and tried to expose the injustices and evil of the final of Victorian Era. This post is a summary of four articles. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy. The second was published at ngagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1868&context=etdarchive. The third was published at https://writersinspire.org/content/character-environment-thomas-hardys-fiction. The fourth was published at https://mantex.co.uk/thomas-hardy-greatest-works/
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot. He was critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining of rural people in Britain. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels such as The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex in Southwest England. Because Hardy's family lacked the means for an university education, his formal education ended at the age of sixteen, when he became apprenticed to a local architect. Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London in 1862. In 1870, while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St.Juliot in Cornwall, Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Gifford, whom he married in Kensington in 1874. Hardy was horrified by the destruction caused by First World War. He wrote to John Galsworthy that "the exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation for the world." Hardy became ill with pleurisy in 1927 and died in January 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife, the cause of death was cited as "cardiac syncope".
Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) contains complex and detailed interrogations of many Victorians values and of the capitalist culture of his time. This novel is a condemnation of the social, ethical, moral, religious, and political values held by the majority of Hardy's elite contemporaries in England. Studying the history of the literary and critical reception of Tess of the d'Urbevilles reveals the breadth and depth of Hardy's cultural criticisms. In 1998 John Paul Riquelme published a detailed study of the past one hundred years of literary analysis and critical history of this novel. "Tess has been a significant stimulus to thinking about moral values". Riquelme gathers a vast amount of Marxist, materialist and feminist literary analysis of Tess from the 1950s to the 1990s. Peter Widdowson's "Hardy and Critical Theory" published in the 1999 also explores in detail the evolution of critical approaches to the analysis of Thomas' literature over the past century. "a intellectual closely familiar with the literary debates of the second half of the 19th century. We may deduce feature of Hardy's involvement in these: one which casts him as ineluctably transitional between Victorian and Modern. It is apparent that Hardy is actually participating in the pan-European debate about Realism, and that he was opposed to a "photographic" naturalism, favoring instead a kind of "analytic" writing which brings into vie other realities obscured precisely by the naturalized version." Within Tess Hardy criticizes Victorian England's moral standards for continuing to validate and legiyimize this specific type of abuse and all other forms of domination and gender inequality. He has his heroine defy the prevailing societal views about the value of women and female purity. Hardy is careful to show us how Alec destroy his humanity in the process of victimizing Tess. As a member of the possessing class, Alec suffers from what Karl Marx calls "human self-alienation". Alec feels satisfied in this self-alienation, experiences the alienation as a sign of its own power. It prevents him from seeing the hypocrisy of his assertions. Only by simultaneously exploring all of Hardy's value judgments and social commentary within Tess can a reader understand the range of criticisms that Hardy raises about the late Victorian society in which he lived. The professor at the Yeshiva University in N.Y. Linda Shires wrote, "Tess of the d'Urbervilles is not only the richest novel that Hardy ever wrote, it is also the culmination of a long series of Victorian texts which identify and enact the alienated condition of modernity." The richness of the text is revealed by the fact that Hardy included complex critiques of a broad range of ideological conventions within Tess without the novel losing its passionate recounting of Tess's life. The time has come to shift from the tendency of micro focus to a holistic macro focus, so that we can recognize the trenchant social commentary in Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
The specific sense of place detailed in Hardy's fiction is very important as it provide a realistic, countrified backdrop against which his many characters live out their lives and struggle against their circumstances. Hardy's intense study and accurate portrayal of 19th century rural society in Dorset, presents a microcosm of human life through which Hardy intended to comment on the universal condition of human existence. Hardy classified his novels into three groups; the biggest section named 'Novels of Character and Environment' includes the Hardy's major novels such as: Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Far From the Madding Crowd. This classification clearly show us the importance he placed upon the interaction between human life and immediate surroundings, and the role of environment in determining the lives of the characters that inhabit it.
Thomas Hardy is one of the few writers who made a significant contribution to English literature in the form of the novel, poetry, and short story. He creates unforgettable characters and orchestrates stories which pull at your heart strings. Jude the Obscure is Hardy's last major statement before he gave up writing novels. Hero Jude is intellectually ambitious but held back by his work as stonemason and his dalliance with earthy Arabella. When he meets his spiritual soulmate Sue, everything seems set fair for success, except that she is capricious and sexually repressed. Jude struggles to do the right thing. This novel reveals the deep-seated social and sexual tensions in Hardy, himself a self-made man from a humble background.
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