Introduction

Abstract

The publication of Thomas Hardy’s verse drama The Dynasts (1903– 08) confirmed for many of his critics that his characters were ‘helpless impersonal agents of the clockwork thought of a blind and unreasoning It’.¹ This conviction grew steadily throughout the early and middle years of this century until by 1965 the critic Roy Morrell could quite reasonably assert that Hardy’s pessimism or fatalism was ‘no longer something one questions’ (Morrell, 1965, p. ix).² During the 1970s and 80s critics turned their attention away from the issue of cosmic indifference to focus on the role of the social process in determining the lives of Hardy’s characters, paying special attention to Hardy’s women. Hardy criticism in the 1990s has been marked by an increasingly sensitive and complex response to the issues of freewill and determinism informed by feminism, post-structuralism and a mutually supportive liaison between the two theoretical responses. It is now anachronistic to label Hardy as a crude pessimist.³