Fictitious Families

Abstract

Hardy’s narrative poem ‘Her Death and After’ (27) hinges on a fictive intervention which leads to the restructuring of family ties. The poem’s speaker raises his former lover’s daughter as his own, pretending that the child’s mother has made a deathbed confession identifying him rather than her husband as the father. The biological father’s indifference to the child after his remarriage and the adoptive father’s devotion to the daughter of his lost love combine to make the made-up family configuration more viable than the natural one. This father and daughter constitute one of the many fictitious families that populate Hardy’s world, in which ‘standard’ family relations seem outnumbered by those that are in some way irregular.