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Groups of Novels
His first novel The Poor and the Lady was completed in
1868, but not succeeded in publishing. Then his first published novel
Desperate Remedies (1871) catered to the taste of bourgeois readers in order
to be recognized. This novel, full of complicated plots, deserves good
comments for the description of rural life in spite of imitating
Wilkie Collins, but Hardy,
as a critical realists, wrote serious novels that met hostility from
bourgeois critics and readers for containing critical presentation of social
reality, especially the best ones Tess of the D’Urbervilles and
Jude the Obscure
Hardy wrote prodigiously in his life, 14 novels in all
in different categories. The first category is entitled “Romances and
fantasies”
A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)
The Trumpet Major (1880)
Two on a Tower (1882)
A Group of Nobel Dames (1891)
The Well-Beloved (1892-97)
The second group is called “Novels of Ingenuity”
Desperate Remedies (1871)
The Hand of Ethelberta (1876)
A Laodicean (1881)
The third group, the most outstanding ones, is called “Novels of Characters
and Environment”
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)
The Return of the Native (1878)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)
Jude the Obscure (1895)
In the first category, A Pair of Blue Eyes is one of
Hardy’s early novels, dealing with a story between a pure, beautiful lady
and three men with the end of her failure in love because of her personality
and the traditional moral belief, and then the pair of blue eyes lost its
sparkle.
Most of the novels in the third category are tragic. In
his works, conflicts between character and environment lead to the tragic
fate of the characters, because men is powerless before nature and will be
punished by the environment if fighting again nature. His novels of
character and environment are characterized by sharp social criticism and
pessimistic belief in mysterious force and coincidence. These groups of
novels show to the readers the failure of battles of individuals against
society which ruins them finally, because Hardy was influenced profoundly by
a philosopher,
Schopenhauer and had the
philosophical idea of Immanent Will. This idea finds its expression in most
of his works. There are full of coincidence in the development of the plot,
for Hardy believed that chance is malignant force to develop a novel. Hardy
believed that novelists should exhibits the wheeling and whirling, the swirl
and the surge of men’s souls under the stress of circumstance and before the
problems of existence and he reveals the wheeling and whirling of men’s
souls in life’s turbulence, especially that of the small people, for Hardy
is capable of producing the desired tragic effect across social and class
barrier and the tragic stories of the small people in lower class add more
tragic effect to his novels. Hardy’s excellent representation of failure and
miseries of the victims caused by the environment and coincidence arouse
emotions of pity and fear. Hardy was influenced by the Aristotelian theory
of tragedy, the traditional method of folklore telling in his native land.
He is also interested in Darwin’s theory of evolution and Comte’s
psychology. With these theories, he presented truthfully the social
realities and his analysis of them. The cause of the tragedy is the
supernatural forces that rule one’s life. Hardy, in this way, is regarded as
a pessimist. However, Hardy labeled himself neither a pessimist nor an
optimist, for he believed that the world may be made better by rightly
directed human effort. In the 19th century, naturalism and determinism is
the main trend of literature world. With the development of industry and the
decline of the country’s life in Britain, pessimistic emotions overwhelmed
in novelists’ minds. Hardy loves patrol idyllic life and beauty of nature
but hates the corruption of bourgeois world. He believes that fate is not
predictable. Human beings are insignificant before Environment and the
mysterious force—Immanent will. Therefore,
naturalism and
determinism found their
expression in Hardy’s works. In this way, his novels mostly end with tragic
tone.
His novel Under the Green Tree is a love story between
a school mistress, Fanny Day, and a member of the church chorus, Dick Dewy,
setting in the picturesque rural areas. This novel gives vivid description
of rural people, the Mellstock musicians, whose thoughts, actions, habits,
feelings and rustic happiness are presented in detail and finally the love
adventure end in happiness. Meanwhile, Hardy made contrast between the fine
qualities of the simple rural folk and the wickedness and brutality of the
rich and the bourgeois civilizations. The note in this novel is not
pessimistic. It is considered as more a prose than a novel by some critics.
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