Abstract
If Hardy’s greatest delight in life was his writing, his deepest personal sorrow was surely the want of intimacy and mutual disclosure in a marriage which at first had offered bright anticipation. It is not surprising, then, that although Clym Yeobright and Michael Henchard fall short of salvation elementally because they never discern the right spirit in which to work, most of Hardy’s characters seek — and fail to achieve — their restoration in idealised love. Predictably, love is the more badly bungled strategy of the two. Most candid people will admit to having mismanaged a romantic relationship somewhere along the line, but the problem transcends the psycho-semantic question: ‘How do we truly know what it is we love about another person when we say “I love you”?’ In Hardy’s world, as I suspect in our own, narcissism, born of the self-deprecating voice of the heart, is the essence of much that passes for love: I may admire in you the image of myself as you radiantly project it back, or, if you are moneyed or famous or quite good-looking, I may love the ego-enhancement you lend me along with your arm.
It is the incompleteness that is loved when love is sterling and true. This is what differentiates the real one from the imaginary, the practicable from the impossible, the Love who returns the kiss from the Vision that melts away.1
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Notes and References
Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1962), p. 239.
John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 141, 158.
Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1932), p. 228.
J Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 114.
Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved, edited by Tom Hetherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 16.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, edited by Scott Elledge (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 18.
Frank R. Giordano, Jr, ‘I’d Have My Life Unbe’: Thomas Hardy’s Self-Destructive Characters (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1984), p. 165.
D. H. Lawrence, Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Anthony Beal (New York: Viking Press, 1964), p. 192.
J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 141.
Ian Gregor, The Great Web: The Form of Hardy’s Major Fiction (London: Faber & Faber, 1974), p. 183.
Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (New York: Random House; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 350–1.
Thomas Hardy, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), II, p. 94.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, The Swinburne Letters, vol. 6, edited by Cecil Y. Lang (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1962), p. 91.
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, edited by Norman Page (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 11.
Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, edited by James Gindin (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), p. 109.
Thomas Hardy, ‘In Tenebris I’, in Variorum Edition of The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, edited by James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1979; New York: Macmillan, 1979), p. 167.
William Archer, Real Conversations (London: William Heinemann, 1904), p. 45.
Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969), p. 14.
Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: Service & Paton; New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), p. 182.
Katherine Anne Porter, ‘Notes on a Criticism of Thomas Hardy’, Southern Review 6 (Summer 1940), pp. 159–60.
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© 1990 Deborah L. Collins
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Collins, D.L. (1990). Fascination and Forgiveness. In: Thomas Hardy and his God. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11365-1_6
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