A Study of Author Thomas Hardy

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A Study of Author Thomas Hardy

Introduction:

First of all, literature makes variety kind of concept to understand and to come out with new idea that one must be learning of and make impact on the society. Here is genius writer Thomas Hardy, who expanded the Victorian era and showed the realistic picture of it. To study the writer one has to study all the elements which writer is writing in his work. He uses make kind of concepts like pessimism, an overwhelming feeling of irony, naturalism, feminism. These all makes impact on the writing part and other things like Thomas Hardy is showing is about fate and chance, dignity of the person. Thomas Hardy portrays woman characters in a contrasting way. One cannot identify that Hardy is with the women character or he is showing the harshness and punishing women on the targeting on Victorian period. Thomas Hardy’s masterpieces of novel is Under the Greenwood Tree 1872, A Pair of Blue Eyes 1873, Far from the Madding Crowd 1874, The Return of the Native 1878, The Mayor of Casterbridge 1886, Tess of the D’Urbervilles 1891, Jude the Obscure 1896. In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and after a great amount of negative criticism erupted from the publication of his novel Jude The Obscure, Hardy decided to give up writing novels permanently and to focus his literary efforts on writing poetry. All the facts show that Thomas Hardy gives major elements in his works and shows realness of the time.

Thomas Hardy’s technique of writing:

He is writing in such a way that reader finds lots of description and information about particular work. His using of memories, future techniques like “what will be?” that excitement gives his charm of writing. He is using situations in right place right time that can make effort to observe. He writes in specific location that also shows his novel’s location and that is Wessex area. Thomas Hardy’s harmonious plot makes reader more comfortable with it and it gives spark to read Thomas Hardy.

Major themes of his writing:

Thomas Hardy is using various kinds of themes like man’s importance against greater forces of nature, of society, of his impulses and targeting on the desire of love. One can also find out themes like Pessimism, sadness, waste and frustration, naturalism, use of irony etc. like many of these themes we find in Hardy’s Far From The Medding Crowd and Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

“Pessimism in Thomas Hardy’s Novel”

In the early 1860s, after the appearance Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), Thomas Hardy bravely challenged many of the sexual and religious conventions of the Victorian age, but he soon adopted the mechanical-determinist view of universe's cruelty, reflected in the inevitably tragic and self-destructive fates of his characters. In his poems Hardy depicted rural life without sentimentality? his mood was often stoically hopeless. Fate plays a major role in many of Hardy's novels; both Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge contain various instances where its effects are readily apparent. Moreover, Hardy's novels reflect a pessimistic view where fate, or chance, is responsible for a character's ruin. The center of his novels was the rather isolated and history-freighted countryside around Dorchester. Hardy's writing novels of “Wessex,” the historical, Anglo-Saxon name he gave in fiction to his native Dorset, from this time until 1895. Thomas hardy gives element of pessimistic approach that how Bathsheba Everdene meets three shooters and how her thoughts get effected with all three person and herself as well. But one remarkable comment over pessimist approach that; R.A. Scott James observes: “Hardy did not set out to give us a pessimistic philosophy.. Hardy is pessimistic about the governance of the Universe, but not about human beings.”

Fear and Fascination in Thomas Hardy’s novels:

It was the end of the Victorian era, and Hardy was torn between his desire to portray women as capable and intelligent, while preserving his own essentialist ideas. Through his novels, Hardy offered his women a voice reflecting the anxiety and ambiguity of their changing role in society. One of his most successful heroines, Bathsheba Everdene, best articulates women’s difficulty in expressing themselves. In her effort to dissuade Farmer Boldwood from his marriage proposition as a business transaction, Bathsheba exclaims, “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in a language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs”. This point suggests tragic outcome of most of his fictional female characters, harshly punishing woman for their open defiance of Victorian society. Hardy throws the picture of realness with harsh reality premarital sex, rape, illegitimate children, adultery, and divorce.

Gender in Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd:

Thomas Hardy represents female gender which women were seen as ‘the weaker sex’. Because these opinions were considered the norm, oftentimes they shone through in an author’s writing. The question comes that how Hardy really felt about woman?. If we look at Bathsheba’s character, does Hardy sympathize with her? Or is he using her to show what a Victorian woman should not be? The young Bathsheba Everdene exhibits unusual qualities for a female character in a Victorian novel written by a male author. She is, more or less, the protagonist of the story. Emily Constable says, “The salvation of a discouraged, ruined, or crippled man by the female heroine appears in several Victorian novels written by women.”

Conclusion:

These all the aspects suggest his mind map of writing and giving the realistic picture of Victorian time. And he has done that with greater effect. It is also rightly observed that many people view Thomas Hardy to be a feminist writer because of his strong female characters. Bathsheba Everdene, the female protagonist in Far From the Madding Crowd, is no exception; however, there are some instances where the reader may question how Hardy considers women and their privileges. Victorian England was not exactly rational when it came to the female gender. It is fair to say that these opinions most likely influenced Hardy’s writing, along with many other writers of his time. Hardy could have written Bathsheba as a rebellion to the Victorian opinion of the woman, but he also could have written her to show how deceiving and destructive a woman could have been at that time.

Reference Links:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31463.Far_from_the_Madding_Crowd
https://archive.org/details/thomashardyacrit010428mbp
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Hardy

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Kaushal Desai