lingue

Thomas Hardy 1840 - 1928

Hardy was born near Dorchester, in Dorset, a county in southwest England that roughly corresponds to the "Wessex" of his later novels. He was apprenticed to an architect and then went to London to work. There he decided he would be a writer.

He married Emma Gilford in 1874 and the settled near Dorchester, where he was to life for the rest of his life. However, it was rural Dorset that inspired his fiction, with all its historical remains. Hardy reinvented the term "Wessex", which means 'land of the West Saxons'.

His first works, as Desperate Remedies, already feature all the elements that would recur in all his later fiction: the setting, an unspoiled countryside peopled by simple folk, and a central theme, love. His next novel, Far from the Madding Crowd was successful enough to enable him to devote himself full time to writing. After this work, Hardy produced twelve other novels, as The Major of Caterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. Hardy himself classified them as "Novels of Character and Environment", to stress the two elements that he thought shaped man's destiny.

Hardy was often criticised for the pessimism of his novels. His late prose works, Tess and Jude, also earned him accusations of immorality for their nihilism, lack of religious beliefs, and frank treatment of sexual relations.

This hostile reception persuaded Hardy to give up writing fiction and concentrate on poetry: from 1896 he published only verse. After the death of Emma, he married Florence Dugdale and received a series of public honours.

● Themes.

A constant theme is man's struggle with the indifferent, impersonal forces, both inside and outside himself, which control his life.

Hardy refused any belief in a providential universe. In contrast with the facile Victorian optimism based on progress, Hardy adopted from Arthur Schopenhauer the idea of an "Immanent Will", a universal power indifferent if not hostile to the fate of man.

Hardy didn't belong to the Realistic School: for Hardy, the forces at work on man are natural rather than social.

● Language & Style.

Hardy's novels provide accurate portrayals of rural life, real landscapes and fine reproductions of the Dorset dialect. His style has been seen as uneven (irregular) and his plots as relying too much on improbable or exaggerated events.

● The Cinematic technique.

The so-called "cinematic" novelists anticipated movies, rather than being influenced by them. Novelist cultivated the camera-eye and camera movement, moving into their subjects, from the city into the street, from the streets into the house, etc. it was as if their realism anticipated the cinema. Both novel and film are able to shift their point of view between an "omniscient" or impersonal perspective and the perspective of a particular character without sacrificing realistic illusion.

Among Victorian novelist, Thomas Hardy exploited a freedom within his verbal medium and anticipated the cinema in the choice of some techniques.

Texts:

● "The Woman Pays" (From Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

● "The Cinematique Technique" (From Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

● The last paragraph of Tess of the D'Urbervilles

AESTHETICISM

The term Aestheticism, or the Aesthetic Movement, is used to refer to a movement in the arts, visual and literary, according to which beauty and the sensual pleasures were emphasised and art was used to celebrate them in a highly polished style. This movement spread all over Europe during the last part of the nineteenth century. Its major representatives were on the theoretical side Walter Pater, and on the artistic side Oscar Wilde.

Walter Pater (1839-94) had an extraordinary influence on a whole generation of young writers, including Oscar Wilde. Pater argued that one of life's pleasures was art, which should not have any moral basis or purpose: it was good in its own right, an end in itself. This is summed up in Gautier's slogan "l'Art pour l'Art" (Art for Art's Sake), implying that art was to be free of all moral and didactic restraint. Although Pater did not mean that pleasure had to be immoral, his doctrine was read as a reaction against Victorian standards of morality.

As the century progressed this attitude was taken to extremes by some French writers who came to be called Decadents because of their life-style and 'immoral' writings: Baudelaire, Mallarmè, Verlaine, and Rimbaud. These writers were also known as Symbolists.

The Decadents theorised the use of drugs and immersion into any sort of sensual and/or forbidden pleasures.

Privacy