a brif history of english literature

8/2/2019 A Brif History of English Literature

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A Brief History of

English

Literature

Literary Terms and Criticism (third edition)

Practical Criticism

The Student' s Guide to Writing

Haw to Study a Shakespeare Play (second edition)

Dickens: David Copperf ield and Hard T i mes (New Casebook)

Eliot: Middlemarch (New Casebook)

Haw to Study a Navel (second edition)

Haw to Study a Poet (second edition)

Mari time Fict ion

War, the Army and Victorian Li terature

John Peck and Martin Coyle

Shakespeare: Hamlet (New Casebook)

Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice (New Casebook)

! Universitatea "Lucian Blaga" SIl :5I\J

BIBUO TECA CENTRAL.".

Nr. in". I t 8itO t 20 Ot)

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12 Victorian Li terature,

1876-1901

l1tomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was the most significant novelist in the last quarter of

the nineteenth century. He achieved fame with Far from th e Madding

Crowd(1 874), and went on to produce a series of novels, including Th e

Ret ur n o f t h e N a t iv e (18 78 ), T he M ayo r o f C a st erbridge (18 86 ), Th e

Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D'Urbervil les (1891) and Jude the Obscure

(1895). Prompted in part by the hostile reaction to the last of these

novels, Hardy then turned exclusively to poetry, which had always

been his preferred medium.

Hardy's novels are set almost exclusively in a tract of Southwest

England that he calls Wessex. The choice of location is significant.

George Eliot clearly has a finer and fairer mind than most ofher read-

ers, but the overall impression in her novelS'is that she writes from

the centre of a social and cultural consensus. Hardy, by contrast,

making use of Wessex, writes from the margins; there is consistentlya sense of standing outside and questioning established values. Other

late Victorian authors adopt different approaches, but a similar effect

is often achieved; there is a sense of disintegration, with a steady cen-

tre falling apart. By the end of the century there is, again and again, an

impression of social institutions - such as the family and marriage-

crumbling, and of authors adopting a sceptical attitude towards

conventional morality.

In the case of Hardy, such scepticism is apparent as early as Farfrom

the Madding Crowd, which tells the story of Gabriel Oak and the woman

he loves, Bathsheba Everdene. Bathsheba, however, marries the dash-

ing Sergeant Troy, who has abandoned Fanny Robin, the only woman

he ever really loved; she dies, along with their new-born child, in the

workhouse. Troy is not a man to be constrained by marriage; at odds

with his wife, he disappears. He is assumed to have drowned.

Bathsheba is now pursued by a gentleman farmer, William

Boldwood. She promises Boldwood that, if in six years there is no

indication of her husband being alive, she will marry him, but Troy

reappears with the intention of reclaiming his wife. Boldwood mur-

ders his rival. As for Bathsheba, she finally marries Oak. The novel,

therefore, ends conventionally, with marriage and social renewal, but

Hardy's novels, including Farfrom the Madding Crowd, actually place far

more emphasis on the failure of relationships, the breakdown of

marriages, and even divorce.

The implication is that the conventions and institutions society

has established in order to promote the well-being of that society are

simply at odds with the reality of what people are like. It is an aware-

ness that extends to the novel form itself: the novel as a genre relies

upon a number of plot conventions, such as a movement towards

marriage as a device for resolving and concluding the story, but

Hardy, characteristically, is likely to indicate a gap between the neat-

ness of a fictional convention and the untidiness of individual

actions. For example, at one point in F a r f ro m t h e M a dd i ng C r o w d

Bathsheba, as she starts to face up to the failure of her marriage, flees

from Troy and sleeps in the open air. The next morning, as she awak-

ens, she sees a ploughboy on his way to work and a schoolboy on his

way to school. There is a similar moment in George Eliot's

Middlemarch as the heroine, Dorothea, after a sleepless night in whichshe examines her life, looks out of the window and sees people going

about their daily business. It is a decisive moment in Dorothea's life:

she realises that she must accept her part in the general scheme of

things rather than focusing, selfishly, upon herself. The scene in Fa r

from th e M a d d i ng C r ow d could almost be described as a parody of this

moment. Bathsheba goes through the motions of the kind of charac-

ter-changing experience that heroines have in novels, but does not

change at all; she remains fickle, immature and self-absorbed. The

basis of her attraction to Troy was emotional and sexual, and there is

no indication that she is now going to start acting in a different, more

rational way.

All of Hardy's major characters are romantic, impractical or sim-

ply disorganised in the management of their lives in the same kind of


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way as Bathsheba. A great many English novels focus on an individ-

ual coming into collision with society. In an Eliot novel, even though

the narrative is complex and has contradictory strands, the hero or

heroine tends to adjust his or her behaviour to achieve a working

relationship with society. Even Wilkie Collins, author ofTh e W o ma n

in White, who adopts a more sceptical attitude than Eliot and most of

his contemporaries, presents characters who by the end of the work

have usually established a secure, even conventional, niche in mid-

dle-class society. The typical Hardy hero or heroine, by contrast, withactions dominated by the heart rather than the head, cannot establish

a working compromise with society. It might be felt that this is mere-

lyan individual quirk on the part of Hardy, that he is a novelist drawn

to romantic, emotionally driven characters. But more is involved

than just the peculiar bias of Hardy's mind. Hardy's rejection ofestab-

lished patterns of social reconciliation in fiction is symptomatic of a

wider collapse of a consensus, and even the collapse of a confidence

in rational debate, that becomes apparent at the end of the nine-

teenth century. There is a widespread feeling that society cannot hold

together; that larger, disruptive forces are at work that promote a

fundamental instability.

Some of the ways in which Hardy establishes a different, late-cen-

tury perspective involve nothing more than a minor adjustment of a

literary convention; the consequences, however, can jJe substantial.

For example, Middlemarch starts with the name of the main character,Miss Brooke. Hardy nearly always holds back the names of his char-

acters; before being named, they are identified simply as men or

women engaged in some form of activity. The effect is to suggest that

there is something elemental about people that is more fundamental

than their social identity; a basic quality exists before, and quite sepa-

rately from, the rather limiting social identity that is imposed upon

them. In a rather similar way, Hardy frequently quibbles over the

naming of a place; often, as with Lower Longpuddle or Weatherbury,

in Farf rom the Madd ing Crowd , he provides alternative place names. Th.e

effect is to distance himself from the conventional social order; SOCI-

ety names people and places, but in doing so brings them under its

command. In Hardy's novels, there is consistently a sense that som~-

thing more is in evidence than just the imposed order of society. ThIS

stance necessarily has implications for the manner in which Hardy

narrates his novels. In distancing himself from the conventional

social order, he needs to stand outside the established discourse of

that social order; that is to say, certain ways of seeing and judging are

implicit in the omniscient manner of narration that we witness in

many realistic novels, but Hardy, choosing to remove himself from a

standard social outlook, must also detach himself from a conven-

tional narrative voice. There is, consequently, always a sense in a

Hardy novel that the narrator's voice is self-conscious, turning onitself, drawing attention to itself and frequently drawing attention to

the fallibility or partiality of its judgements.

This combines with a story in which, most commonly, the charac-

ters are not rebels by choice, but simply because their natures lead

them to be. Society, however, will not tolerate rebellion. As there is

no possibility of social reconciliation - no possibility, that is, of these

characters finding a quiet and complaisant role in the villages or

towns where they live - Hardy's novels almost invariably end with

the death of the major characters. Right through to the very end of

the novels in which they feature, they are estranged from society and

its dominant values. Far f rom the Madd ing Crowd , ending with a mar-

riage, is the exception. But it is still a novel that breaks with tradition.

The most obvious way in which it does this is in its emphasis on sex-

uality. The force of sexual desire is apparent everywhere in the novel,

even, for example, in something as trifling as a description of the first

day of June: 'Every green was young, every pore was open, and every

stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice.' It would be fair to say

that the most distinctive quality ofFar from the Madd ing Crowd , and the

thing that invests the novel with a joyous and exuberant energy, is

the way in which it rediscovers, and takes a delight in presenting,

aspects of sexual experience and feeling that the novel has, perhaps

throughout the entire Victorian period up to this point, been deny-

ing, sublimating or repressing. Sex in earlier Victorian novels is often

a dark and guilty secret; sex in Farfrom the Madding Crowd is dangerous

but exciting.

The freshness of Far f rom the Madd ing Crowd is, however, a quality

that Hardy cannot maintain. As his career as a novelist continues he

focuses in a far more critical way on the discipline and conformity


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The farmer's boy could sit under his barley-mow and pitc h a stone into

the office-window of the town-clerk; reapers at work nodded to acquain-

tances standing on the pavement-comer; the red-robed judge, when he

condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that

floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock, browsing hard

by; and at executions the waiting crowd stood in a meadow immediately

before the drop, out of which the cows had been temporarily driven to

give the spectators room.

the law, and a lack of tolerance and understanding are all apparent as

significant strands in the novel; Tess is the victim, and it is the society

that she lives in, together with the people, especially the men, in that

society who accept its conventional attitudes and morality that

destroy her life. As against the heavy hand of those who pursue,

abuse and condemn her, there is a consistent emphasis on Tess as a

free and natural spirit. But if Hardy presents Tess's sexuality as, essen-

tially, innocent, he is also aware of a vicious side to human nature,

something most apparent in the dark sexual instincts of Alec

D'Urberville.

By the time he wrote Jude the Obscure Hardy's outlook was very pes-

simistic. In his other novels there is always an impression of the tra-

ditional order of farm life, but in J u d e t h e O b s c u r e the hero, Jude

Fawley, begins his working life on a farm with a soul-destroying job

as a human scarecrow. Jude wants to advance in life, but his ambition

of attending university proves an impossible dream. He is trapped

into marriage by a farm-girl, Arabella, but then falls in love with his

cousin, Sue Bridehead, a married woman. She and Jude set up home

together and have two children, but Jude's child by Arabella, Father

Time, murders his half-brother and half-sister, and then kills himself.

Sue returns to her former husband, and Jude lives alone. The most

obvious aspect ofJude the Obscure is how the education system, class

barriers, religious and moral conventions and the divorce laws all

conspire against Jude.The characters to a certain extent, however, also create their own

misfortunes. At the centre of the novel are the nervous and highly

strung Jude and Sue, characters who do not belong in anyone place,

and who, when they move, do not embark on a journey with any

kind of clear goal. On the contrary, they move aimlessly from place

to place. This is a plot device - also used in Tess of the D'Urbervil les -

that works very effectively to convey a sense of alienated and dislo-

cated people. It is an idea of character that Hardy uses to good effect

in his poetry. Rather than focusing on a hero or heroine who can turn

the course of events, Hardy, as in his novels, focuses upon powerless

and defeated individuals in an enormous universe. In 'Drummer

Hodge', for example, a poem written in response to the Boer War,

there is an effect of bafflement, with a small character encountering a

that society imposes upon people; there is always a price that must

be paid if characters overstep the mark or choose to defy society's

rules. T h e M a y o r -of Casterbridge is the story of Michael Henchard, a

poor man who, having sold his wife at a country fair at the start of the

novel, rises in the social hierarchy to become the mayor in his adopt-

ed community. There is, though, an extravagant and ferocious

dimension to Henchard's personality, something that becomes

apparent when he resumes drinking after abstaining for many years.

This dangerous side to Henchard puts him in conflict with all those

around him, including his daughter. And, as there is no way back for .

him into the social order of Casterbridge, he dies, at the end of the

novel, an alienated and angry man. At one point, Hardy describes a

petty incident of vandalism:

The passage conveys a sense of the compactness of the town of

Casterbridge, and how the town and the surrounding countrysidemerge, but what is also conveyed is an altogether more disturbing

idea: it is as if the vandal who throws the stone goes on to steal sheep,

and is finally executed. Such indiscipline seems natural, but the other

side of the coin is that society has instituted a system oflaw and order

to regulate people, and this includes the ultimate sanction oftaking

the lives of those who step out of line.

In Tess o f the D 'Urberv i ll e s and Jude the Obscure Hardy is far more

indignant about the way in which social regulations and conventions

ruin people's lives. Tess of the D'Urb ervilles is the story of a country girl

who is raped by Alec D'Urberville, and then abandoned by Angel

Clare, the man she marries, when he discovers her sexual history.

Eventually Tess murders Alec, and the novel ends with her execution.

The aggressive nature of a male-dominated society, the harshness of


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world that resists both control and comprehension. In many of

Hardy's poems, there are similar feelings of loss, confusion, uncer-

tainty and pain.

But a far more disturbing and extreme quality is in evidence in J u d e

the O bscure. When Father Time kills the other children and himself, a

sense of something dark and irrational is exposed; it is as if, in the

wake of the kind of compromise that used to exist, something malig-

nantly destructive has appeared. This is more than an idiosyncraticperception on the part of Hardy. Generally in late nineteenth-centu-

ry literature there is a feeling of having moved beyond an old liberal

dispensation, and a fear of brutal, irrational forces that lie just below

the surface becomes evident. Repeatedly, texts from this period offer

an impression of probing into dark places, including the dark areas

of the mind. In brief, the sustaining fictions of an earlier generation

fail, and more troubling, disruptive ideas move in to take their place.

George Gissing, George Moore, Samuel Butler, Henry James,

Robert Louis Stevenson

In 1877 Queen Victoria was declared Empress of India. It is a moment

that might stand as the high point of British imperial self-confidence.

But just two years later, in 1879, William Ewart Gladstone, the former

prime minister, denounced the imperial policy of the Conservative

government. In imperialism there is always a sense of power beingabused, of the language of the conqueror silencing all other voices. At

the same time, the rise of a politics of empire, race and nation in the

late Victorian period can be seen as a sign of weakness: that in a chang-

ing world, there was a desire for simple answers and forceful action.

By the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, Britain's economic

lead over all other nations was beginning to fade. And not only was

there increasing economic competition, there was also a growing

sense of political, and even militcUy, tension between European coun-tries. In addition, at home there was a mounting awareness of social

problems and class hostility. For much of the Victorian period people

could focus rather narrowly on their own domestic concerns ~ a

secure environment, but by the end of the century this was becomlDg

more difficult. As old convictions collapsed. many united behind the

a brif history of english literature

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