Abstract
As a writer closely attached to his native countryside of Dorset, Hardy was harshly exposed to the dramatic change and slow attrition in his rural environment. From that local vantage point, he proceeded to identify a graver dislocation as he voiced a cosmic concern for the fate of Western man in conflict between the old and the new at the advent of the modern world. Looming in his poetic imagination of the Wessex universe are the haunting images of the heath and the Oxford spires which are the focus for the traumas of change. Hardy absorbs into these two arresting images a debilitating malaise caused on the one hand by the physical realities of the invading industrialism on the contemporary scene and on the other by a spiritual ebbing of theology and metaphysics. These disturbing signs of mutated meanings create a moral discomfiture in Hardy which is serially reflected in his novels in what one might call a chronic crisis syndrome. This is the index of his englobing Decadence.
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Notes and References
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Novels of Thomas Hardy’ (1928), in The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948) p. 268.
See J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963).
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, Wessex edition, vol. 4 (London: Macmillan, 1912) p. 4. All parenthetical page references to Hardy’s novels are from this edition.
See José Ortega y Gasset, ‘The Dehumanization of Art’ (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1925; trans. Princeton University Press, 1948).
In his discussion of the femme fatale motif in Romantic literature, Mario Praz quotes Walter Pater’s celebrated description of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and comments on the affinity of its profile with femmes fatales of Swinburne, Flaubert and Gautier. It is indeed interesting that in the Pater passage, Mona Lisa’s ‘eyelids are a little weary’ and she is depicted as being a virtual culmination of Western culture from Greece, Rome and the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. To some extent, Hardy’s heroine also fits into this scheme; the accent in his case, however, would be on her weariness. See Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony (1933, rpt London: Fontana Library, 1960) p. 271.
As quoted in Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (London: Macmillan, 1962) p. 177.
In his discussion of the complex irony embodied in the symmetrical patterns of Hardy’s prose, J. Hillis Miller makes a pertinent citation of Proust’s commentary on Hardy drawn from Proust, La Prisonnière, Pléiade edition, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1954) pp. 375–6: he translates it as ‘the great writers have never written more than a single work, or rather, they have refracted across diverse milieus that unique beauty which they bring into the world … that stone-mason’s geometry in [his] novels.’ See J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) pp. 205–7.
As quoted in Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, pp. 272–3.
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© 1984 Suzanne Nalbantian
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Nalbantian, S. (1984). Thomas Hardy and the Chronic Crisis Syndrome. In: Seeds of Decadence in the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10450-5_5
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