‘A full look at the worst’

Abstract

Hardy’s evolving paradigms of social change indicate a growing preoccupation with the latent tragedy within his protagonists’ lives. This tragic quality was, of course, always inherent in his writing. The ‘small bird that was being killed by an owl in the adjoining wood, whose cry passed into the silence without mingling with it’, and the duplicity of Fancy Day’s ‘secret she would never tell’ in Under the Greenwood Tree (pp. 166, 208) are subdued but telling prefigurations of the symbolism of trapped animals in Tess or the artful wiles of Arabella Donn and their consequence in Jude. But as Hardy’s instinctive recognition of his most powerfully felt themes grew surer, so his emphasis upon the origins of tragedy shifted. Hardy’s three definitions of tragedy in the Life all posit a fundamental incompatibility between a character and his environment, but this may result from one of many different tensions between the rival claims placed upon man by the forces of nature (including ‘human’ nature) and society: for man is both a natural and a social animal. Gradually, Hardy’s perception of a rift between the two influences grew clearer and starker. My purpose in this chapter is to identify and examine the methods which Hardy and Faulkner adopt to express the tragic ‘tendency of the age’¹ encouraging man’s alienation, and to look at what are perhaps the two writers’ darkest novels.

I was, perhaps, after all, a paltry victim to the spirit of mental and social restlessness that makes so many unhappy in these days

(Jude the Obscure, p. 345)

I’m interested primarily in people, in man in conflict with himself, with his fellow man, or with his time and place, his environment

(Faulkner in the University, p. 19)