Hardy and Decadence

Abstract

A pervasive theme of Hardy’s writing is how things decay, yet how fully and abruptly they are alive. A haunting question is how they survive. Intellectual pressures are emotional pressures too, and for Hardy the implications both of evolutionary theory and of entropy bore in on the life of his fiction and his poems. They are often expressed as a struggle between individuality and energy. Hardy’s career as a writer developed alongside the emergence of the Decadent or fin-de-siècle movement in Britain, but he is not often set in a close relation to Decadent writing of the 1880s and 1890s. If we listen to some of the voices by which he was surrounded in the later part of his career we can hear resonances in his poetry and his fiction that we may otherwise miss. We can hear, too, the degree to which new scientific ideas about sound-waves, survival, and the ether of the universe unexpectedly gave Hardy ways out of the impasse of human mortality and decay.