THOMAS HARDY

(1840-1928)
HARDY
 English poet and author of the naturalism
movement
 Author of Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of
D’uberville, and Jude The Obscure
 Eldest sibling of four
 Father was a builder and stonemason
INFLUENCE IN WRITING
 Hardy's fictional Wessex is based upon the
environs where he grew up and loved so
much and where he lived and worked for a
large part of his life.
 He always had a dream to be a poet and was
well connected emotionally to his
environment through interaction and
observation.
FAMOUS WORKS
 Tess of D’Uberville- A brilliant tale of
seduction, love, betrayal, and murder, Tess of
the d'Ubervilles yields to narrative convention
by punishing Tess's sin, but boldly exposes this
standard denouement of unforgiving morality
as cruelly unjust.
 Jude the Obsure- It tells the tragic story of
Jude Fawley, a kid from the country whose
aspirations to university scholarship are
thwarted; his socially unacceptable love affair
is also a disaster. **Seen as his most
important work.
CRITICISM
 Tess and Jude received many criticisms upon
publication, for in examinations of the fallen
woman, sin, the class system, and the
vagaries of religion and marriage,--".... a
marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it
becomes a cruelty to either of the parties--
being then essentially and morally no
marriage...." they shocked Hardy's Victorian
readers' sensibilities.
CRITICISM
 His tragic characters lives' earned the labels
"immoral" and "obscene".
 Hardy muses in his Preface to the 1912
edition of Jude about a bishop who burnt a
copy of his book "probably in his despair at
not being able to burn me.“
 The controversy drew much attention to the
novels as well, and they were soon being
read in Europe and North America.
 Never wrote another book, turned to plays
and poetry instead.
VICTORIAN ERA
 “Repressed” and “prudish”
 time of prosperity, broad imperial expansion,
and great political reform
 many artistic styles, literary schools, as well
as, social, political and religious movements
flourished
 Stretches through the reign of Queen Victoria
(1837-1901)
NATURALISM
 Naturalism can be deduced as something
pertaining to reality.
 This is definitely so because naturalism is
actually a development in literature that is
meant to reproduce the everyday realities of
life.
 This is in opposition to past movements such the
Surrealism or Romanticism, wherein idealism
and symbolism are the lords of creation.
 Literary naturalism portrays the nature of
human beings through detached and objective
study based on scientific principles.
NARTURALISM
 Focus on how humans live their daily lives,
not only through the influences of
environment and heredity, but also with the
guidance of their passions and instincts.
 Mainly focuses on characters from the lower
classes or the middle classes and the fiction
that usually evolves around the common and
seemingly boring existence of somebody with
whom most people can relate to.
NATURALISM
 Characters usually have acts of passion or
violence.
 The usual attempts of the main characters of
these novels when it comes to exercising
their freedom, which are hampered usually
by forces that they could not control, are
also perceived as a common occurrence in
the daily lives of everyday people.
HIS WORK
 His novels deals with issues concerning women in
this time period and their hardships. The book also
explores ideas such as fatalism and determinism.
 Fatalism- is the view that we are powerless to do
anything other than what we actually do.
 Determinism-human actions affect the future,
although that future is predetermined.
 The idea of a blind, arbitrary fate is a central
theme in Hardy's fiction. Although this fate is
blind, it is not neutral but almost always cruel. It
is a force that brings suffering and feels no pity or
remorse.