The anti-realism of Thomas Hardy's fiction

Abstract

Hardy is much more dated than almost any other of the great English novelists. His plots strike contemporary taste as melodramatic, overly schematic, and discomfortingly didactic, even as the stuff of a penny-dreadful. (Tess is not only seduced and/or possibly raped by a villainous rake, but in the course of the novel, suffers the loss of her illegitimate child, abandonment by her beloved husband, and the extremes of poverty before she is ultimately forced back to the bed of her hated seducer, whereupon she plunges a knife into his heart.) Many of his characters, too, seem absurdly old-fashioned, improbable types - take the instance of Tess's seducer, Alec, who with his curling moustache, his "bold rolling eye," and opening address to our heroine ("Well, my beauty... ") seems a dead ringer for the stock villain of Victorian melodrama Can anyone deny the truth of Joy Boyum's statement? Aren't the majority of Hardy's novels full of contrived, sensational and melodramatic episodes? Consider his last novel, Jude the Obscure - certainly not one of the 'minor' novels, but what on earth does Hardy mean when he makes Little Time kill his innocent brothers and sisters and hang himself in such a grotesque manner? Doesn't the overt melodrama of the scene irritate the reader's sense of reality and undermine his/her suspension of disbelief? How could a great writer base Sue's psychological collapse on an episode which might very well be regarded as the cheap sensationalism of magazine stories? Couldn't he have brought about the heroine's neurotic return to orthodoxy by means of a more plausible and realistic set of events? Isn't the sensationalism of the episode the easiest way out rather than the more artistic means that a writer could employ? Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is in a number of ways comparable to Sue and both protagonists find themselves in a psychological trauma, but the Russian writer manages to bring about Anna's downfall in a much more credible and realistic manner. Melodramatic events are not always as harsh and grotesque as those in Jude the Obscure, but they nevertheless occur throughout his novels and short stories. F. P. Pinion says of Hardy's first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady: The story was improbable, and Macmillan questioned whether the scene in the church at midnight, or the retraction in public of an award of an institution could have happened. Desperate Remedies, his first published novel, is well-known for its intricate and melodramatic plotting. This kind of sensationalism was the reason behind Macmillan's refusal to have it published; William Tinsley was in fact one of the few publishers who would accept such fiction.