Now that we have spent the last three weeks reading, discussing, and critiquing Hardy's major works, we recognize his complexity. He presents strong, positive female characters, but has them fail miserably. He glorifies Nature and rural life, but only tragic events befall those whose lives are tied to the land. Carpenter states, "Hardy becomes more, rather than less, puzzling the better we come to know him. There must be reasons for these contradictions."
Now that you know Hardy better what reasons can you find in the inherent contradictions of his works?
26 comments:
Thomas Hardy is a very contradicting man. He gives women power but takes them away with them choosing the wrong men who control and ruin their life. He says he doesn't believe in god but he is always taking about fate and destiny. That just doesn't make sense. Hardy also claims to be a evironmentalist but supports farming in all his works.
Hardy I feel is a hypocrite. He wants to show how fate controls our lives, and (like in JUDE and TESS) talks about religion, yet he himself is (at least slightly) athiest. However, his plot about a woman picking between two men and making the wrong decision is shown is JUDE, except, it's a man caught between the two women he loves instead.
Sometimes when reading Hardy's book you have to stop and think. Sometimes you say HOLD UP, because you don't know what is going on. But why does he make his books so contradicting, I think it is because if he wrote about everyday life as it truely happend it would be very boaring and no one would buy his books, so therefore if he makes complicated to understand, creative, and false representaion to acual life more people would want to by his books. I guessed it work sence we are all reading two of Hardy's novels
Most of Hardy's contradictions lie in his characters. Like Andrew said, Hardy creates volatile female characters who display sound minds and pure hearts, yet plays them like marionettes throughout his novels so that they make disconcerting choices and fail to notice seemingly obvious flaws. Perhaps he does this to appeal to all sectors of his audience, or perhaps he is a literary sadist and enjoys creating strong characters only to break them down in the end.
Thomas Hardy is something else. He creates these desirable women with pure hearts, minds and innocence. Gives them the power of choice of there marital partner based on there desire but, then punishs them for making the choices they make. Which completely contradicts the image he originally creates for us in the story. He tears these srtong remale chracters down. Which just puzzles me, he puts all this effort into making these women seem so independent but then just tears it away from them.
His ideas seem to contradict what he originally shows us in each story.
How could anyone marry this man...
Hardy may be very "complex" but to me he is showing that this world is a complex place. We all have a little difference of an opinion to make of every issue/situation that could be brought up, and differnet ways of handiling each issue/situation. If we dig deeper in the issues/ideas that Hardy brings up we may see a totaly different idea of what he is talking about. He does this to capture the readers attention, I know it gets me more into a book when I have to look at what the auther is saying and I get to analize it, instead of haveing it all explained to me. So I would have to agree with Jess Moore that the way he is writting helps capture all his audience.
Hardy's complexity advances throughout his novels in his characters and his idea of fate. He creates more complicated characters like Tess who follows the long fated journey leading to her death. Hardy's complexity could possibly come from his switch to the modern era of literature which is faced with different and more abstruse ideas.
The contradiction in Hardy's novels makes perfect sense. By using contradictions in his works, Hardy causes the reader to think critically about his works and to ask questions of his works. An example of this is how strong female characters fall into ruin in every novel. If they were strong, then they wouldn't fail. Maybe this just shows what Hardy thinks of just how in control humans are. Maybe he thinks that the strongest people aren't strong enough to escape fate.
I beleive most of you are missing the main point of Hardy's work. Most all of you say his work contradicts his personality and that he is a hypocrite. But aren't all of his works very negative and depressing. Maybe he is writing it because he doesen't beleive in it and he wants people to see life as he sees it, depressing.
When Hardy first wrote Far from the Madding Crowd, he might have received complaints about Bathsheba being too powerful for their time and that it is unreal for a woman to run a farm and be able to pick from multiple men to be her husband. In Tess, she doesn't really have a choice in the beginning when Alec rapes her. The right thing to do would be to marry Alec. Then, after she marries Angel, the truth comes out and things go bad because Tess did the wrong thing by marrying Angel. So I think that Hardy became more puzzling so that people wouldn't just complain about one book and not read the others. Each book is sort of different in its own way. One book has a powerful female)Bathsheba), another has a rather weak female(Tess), and another has a drunken male that bets his whole life away within the first 25 pages(Mayor of Casterbridge). He sort of writes a book about the different kinds of people in society in each of his books so that people can come to reality and see that those people do exist.
I believe that Hardy has so many ideas and plots in his head that he begins to contradict himself. Also all the factors surronding him in his life cause his contridictions. He wants to give woman a powerful role, but then takes this away from women by allowing them to make the wrong choice, almost conveying that women cannot make the best choices for themselves. Thus offending feminists who have read Hardy's work. Also he spends many many pages talking about how he doesnt believe in God, but then bases most of his works on Fate, and chance, which all lead back to God.
Think about it. Hardy thinks life sucks. He uses contradition to make life seem inconsistent and terrible. That's how he wants us to feel when we read his work: hopeless, empty, and like the lives of those in his books are pointless.
i have to agree with carly. perhaps Hardy is confusing to get poeple off his back? in far from the madding crowd Bathsheba is obviously a very strong female character which wasn't the case with many real women at the time the book was written. so by making most of his female characters fail only proves society correct and eliminates their questioning of his work.
I think hardy is contradicitng in a way because he gives the freedom of choice then takes it away. In tess she is given the right to choose who she will end up with. Alec rapes her and it seems as if her choice is taken away because she has to do the honorable thing to fit in with the times. She goes against it. Then when she decides to marry angel she decideds to tell him and the letter is lost. So he never finds out until she tells him the night of the wedding. Then when angel leaves she has to choice to go on living hoping he will come back by alec steps in and takes that chance away by having alec step in and keep asking her to marry him. So it always seems like they are given power by letting them make choices but all along it is fated for them so they really have no choices.
Reply to gettys favorite student yeah sometimes life is hard that is the way it is but are you trying to apply the same concept of misery loves company?? I agree in a way that he wants us to feel something but not in the way that is going to change our lives.
Hardy's "inherent contradictions" I find to be not contradictions at all but his way of telling a possible story of someone's life. Most all people in this world make a bad decision somewhere in their life; perfect stories where nothing goes wrong are unrealistic. Hardy enhances the situations a bit, with Angel going to Brazil and Tess killing Alec in Tess, but overall tells a more realistic story of tragedy that could happen to almost anyone by hapenstance. Hardy shows us the power of nature with the fire and lightning storm in Far and also the stregth of rural life and the teamwork it takes to run a farm. Someone has to take charge as Bathsheba does at the beginning but she makes a mistake like any person might and believes and marries the handsome man who flirts with her. The story told in Far is very realistic and although some of the stories told in his books may be a little far fetched they tell us of the victorian hypocrisy and some of the extreme examples of this.
Tragic events and failures happen to many people in this world by hapenstance and the rural life is not an easy one.
I do think Hardy is contradicting but he only portrays what he sees. The world around him was probably contradicting itself because of the clash between rural life and the new industrial era. He wanted the world to be rural but it was becoming something else and this is what makes his characters lifes turn into trajedy and his own point of views to become into something else. These contradictions were probably part of his point.
I completely agree with Lacie. Hardy is sexist and contradicting, he creates the scenes where the men and the woman are in a love "triangle" or in Far from the Madding Crowd it's more like a square. But he makes sure that the women are weak or are strong but are easily swayed by the men in their lives. I really dislike Hardy and his views of women. He wants to portray them, in a way, to be independent and capable of making the right choices, but then takes it all away with them making the wrong decision.
We begin to realize just how complex Hardy's thinking really is as we get further into each of his works. In the beginning of the novels I've read, Hardy presents strong women. These women essentially have the power in their hands, the power to make decisions for the better-yet they do the opposite. He contradicts these appearances of the women as he slowly tears them down throughout the text. The manner in which he does this just so happens to be pretty consistent, a man, or multiple men. Suddenly these women are no longer strong, they're dependent and their emotions control their actions. They choose the wrong partner and are constantly paying for this mistake. For example, Bathsheba marries Troy, who then makes decisions about the farm, one of which almost cost her the farm itself. Instead of preparing for a storm that Gabriel had warned them of, he gets drunk in the barn with some buddies while Gabriel, being the good person that he is, saves Bathsheba. Had Gabriel not been looking out for her, she would have lost the life that she knew. She would have been in his situation, having nothing.
I believe that Hardy writes in such a complicated, contradicting manner as to prove the nature of humans. We are a cutthroat species where the desire for money, power and success are the driving forces for far too many human beings, but there are certain beings, like the ones in hardy's novels, that show the other side of humanity, and these characters seem to clash with the ones who have purely selfish desires. In these confrontations, the contradictions become more prvelent. Not to mention the characters themselves seem to be of a severely clouded and unsure mind, which does nothing but add to the chaos.
Thomas Hardy to me is one very confused man. He says one thing then thinks or does the other, very hypocritical. One thing I have noticed in what I have read is that he creates these irresistible women, of innocence, purity and intelligence. Then he gives them power, what the audience sees is that when these women he creates receive power they fail miserably, they ruin their lives. He builds them up with true potential only to knock them down and mock them, which contradicts the original story we are first presented with.
To understand the contradictions in Hardy’s novels, we must look to his past. His brilliant mind set him apart from the rustic world he came from, and it soon led him to attain fame with a different audience. But his roots caused him to feel disconnected from the intellectual society, and left him sorely out of place. Too brilliant for one life, too rustic for the other. Hardy himself was a walking contradiction. He was torn between worlds, and it shows in his progression as an author. The rolling English countryside that Hardy knew and loved plays the backdrop for tragedy and cruel fate. The heartbreaking events that unfold against the beautiful, rural life that Hardy glorifies are perhaps meant to parallel his own tragic story. He loved his home, but his inability to succeed there forced him to live a life he resented, with the people who he blamed for the decay of rustic culture. We can assume that his critics fueled his contradictory writing as well. Much like how Hardy struggled to write what he believed in and was censored by a strict society, his characters mimic his confusion. The protagonists often find themselves full of personal strength but helpless to the crushing power of an antagonist.
Quite simply, Hardy is a product of his life experiences, and so is his use of contradiction.
From what i've seen in the books i've read of Hardy's...Tess and Jude he likes to contradict a lot of what he says and believes, and to what i've seen a lot of people say so far, he's very hypocritical, even though he probably never noticed it. i've also seen what i want to call sexism (please correct me if i'm wrong). i think it's sexism atleast by how he takes the protagonist (an extremely irresistable woman or man) and gives them all the power in the world, and then when they finally need that power the most he takes it all away and basically turns what used to be a paradise into a living hell. and in most cases this happens with women seeing how only one book of his contains a male protagonist, giving me a sense of sexism. (once again please reply and give me your thoughts on this, i could be wrong)
I agree that Hardy is very contradicting in his views and how he portrays them in his writing but I think he had a purpose for it. He gave women power roles in his novels and had them fail, yet I think Hardy wanted his readers to understand that people with "power" don't always succeed and get what they want. Also in the time period Hardy wrote maybe he felt women would get power but society would never allow them to be happy or successful with it. As for Hardy stageing tradegies in the rural areas he was supposed to be celebrating, I believe he did this to show the despair and hopelessness of living in a rural area in his time period because Hardy believed rural areas were going to dissappear completely and they were currently suffering, so people needed to change that and embrace rural areas for happy plots to be set there.
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