Tragedy and Thomas Hardy Literature

Many critics and commentators think of tragedy as a broad thematic concept that covers the majority of Hardy’s work (Wright, 2003; Brooks, 1971; Goodheart, 1957; Lawrence, 1936; Johnson, 1923). D. H. Lawrence (1936) comments that tragedy is a central concept in many of Hardy’s novels and places Hardy as a great writer of tragedy at the same level as Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy. The tragic approach to understanding Hardy’s work is very old. The first one to discuss it on tragic grounds seems to be Lionel Johnson. His book The Art of Thomas Hardy, first published in 1894, drew attention to the tragic elements in Hardy’s works. The assumption was that Hardy’s works reflect a sad tragic tone, an insistence on man’s unhappiness in modern world, and a preoccupation with the different facets of human experience. Johnson (1923) and Lawrence (1936) point out that his novels become dramatic representations of the sufferings of his heroes and heroines. The suffering of the characters, often allied to the difficulty of moving into a more modern world whose hostility is reflected in the painful coincidences in the plot, usually ends in the death of the hero or heroine.

Some regard Hardy’s novels as a representation of Classical/ Aristotelian tragedy (King, 1978; Brooks, 1971; Johnson, 1923), while others regard them as realistic/ Ibsenic tragedy (Spivey, 1954; Lawrence, 1936). These are briefly described below. Johnson (1923) argues that the interpretation of the novels and short narratives as tragedy suggests that Hardy shared the sense of Greek Aristotelian tragedy. He supports his argument that Fate determines the life of Hardy’s tragic characters, and that the tragedy of Tess arouses feelings of pity and fear in us (the role of F...

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...dy’s works represent a cry against the excesses of modern civilization and injustices of modern societies and thus claims that “Hardy was a Romantic tragedian without a stage for his tragedy” (1957: 225).

Recently, commentators on Hardy are more concerned with the forces of destruction and the atmospheric background of the novel (Kramer and Dalziel, 2004; Kramer, 1999; Watt, 1984; Sherman, 1976). They are more likely to approach his tragedy from the social point of view rather than being concerned with defining the exact nature of Hardy’s tragic effects. They take tragedy as a starting point for understanding the thematic concepts in his texts. The main assumption is that the search for the core of the novel’s tragic experience is much more important than investigating unities and other tragic formal elements. This is what they call the social tragedy of Hardy.