Thomas Hardy

Many people claim Thomas Hardy had two great careers, the first being as a Victorian novelist and the second as a poet. His family was unable to afford him a formal education and he spent his early adult years as an architect. Hardy was obviously very aware of society’s class divisions, specifically his social inferiority. His family raised him as a Christian, however they did not attend the Church of England. It seems as though Hardy spent most of his life struggling with the existence of God, but did have a firm belief in a supernatural being that had greater control of his life than himself. As seen in many of his works, Hardy was highly pessimistic; he struggled with certain ideologies including class divisions, women’s inferiority, the corruption of the church, the evils of the industrial revolution, and a belief in a universe ruled by a tragic fate. Even though his works are dominated by these pessimistic themes, in a way, one must admire Hardy’s honesty and awareness of the social corruptions of his day.

Although it was not part of our reading, nor do I remember many details, I read Tess of the d’Urbervilles in eleventh grade.  Many of Hardy’s issues with society that our anthology recollects are familiar to me from his novel. For example, there were distinctions made about the dairy where Tess worked and the city, which may have been Hardy’s authorial input on Industrialization. In addition, there is the obvious issue that when Tess is raped she is seen as impure, which points to the double standard for men and women during this time period. Overall, the novel has an overarching theme of injustice—Tess is blamed for the death of prince and for her own rape.

This theme of some god or supernatural being out to fill our existence with injustice is again seen in Hardy’s poem, Hap. Specifically in the very first stanza, “If but some vengeful god would call to me/ From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,/ Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,/ That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”” (p. 1073).  We see right away that Hardy believes in a god, but it is probably not the same God Christians believe in. We also see not only that Hardy thinks this God is serving him an injustice, but that he thoroughly enjoys torturing Hardy. His words are so powerful, “thy sorrow is my ecstasy” and “thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting”.  It’s not as if the god is apathetic to whether Hardy is sad or happy, but that God actually loves when Hardy is in utter sorrow; total polar opposites!

In the second stanza, Hardy stated “steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;/ Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I/ Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.” (p. 1073).  We see again that Hardy thinks that the god is unjust. He doesn’t think he deserves the sorrow that he has been given. His word choice of “half-ease” is interesting in that he is at least half pleased to know that there is someone out there with control; someone more powerful than he has ultimate authority. Yielding control to someone other than oneself can be seen as both scary and freeing at the same time.  I think a theme that dominates almost all of Hardy’s works can be summed up in the question he asks in line 11, “And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?” (p. 1073). This idea that there is a being out there with ultimate control and power who doesn’t always make decisions based upon the worldly view of justice is a challenging and many times incomprehensible thought.