Knight and Angel: the psychological problems of modern man and woman (II)

Abstract

Knight in A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Angel in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), from near the beginning and near the end of Hardy’s novel-writing years, are characters which reveal this continuing interest in the psychological difficulties faced by educated, thinking people and his awareness of the disturbance caused by, or perhaps consisting of, a conflict between reason and emotion. These intelligent characters which he creates are, of course, particularly open to the problem which he sees as an essentially modern one. He explores the nature of their disturbance and shows that both Knight and Angel, while being gravely handicapped by their failure adequately to come to terms with their difficulties, are not driven mad by them. In this, they differ from Clym and Sue, who are struggling with some of the same problems but with these two, he considers more extreme personalities who succumb at least temporarily to the pressures and retreat into mental illness. Sue, without the “ballast” that Clym derives from the Heath, is Hardy’s most extreme example of this kind of vulnerable personality. Knight and Angel are only moderately neurotic, but through them Hardy explores psychological problems which he felt were beginning to emerge in his day, and which were to become central in the work of the major psychological writers of the next century.