Postmodernism and the Novels of Hardy in Review

Even after the review of 1/28/26 I will, after a 6 month hiatus, have to reinvent an introductory review to what I am attempting in these blogs, inasmuch as putting some of the major female characters of Thomas Hardy through a postmodernist sieve and seeing what drains out.

My purpose is to apply early postmodernism to the early modernist novels of Thomas Hardy, especially in certain aspects regarding his female characters. Postmodernism as practicesd in the revolutionary 1960's, before the philosophy was even named, was a way of looking at the art of mopdernism that disavowed tradional views of structuralism and greatness. Rather than the traditional view that structure determines artistry and the users of structure determine greatness, postmodernism seeks to break down art into smaller units than large "isms" and rely more on immediate affect and the influence of mass cuture. Susan Sontag’s work reflects many of these concerns, particularly her rejection of rigid distinctions between “high” and “low” culture. In Against Interpretation, Sontag argues that critics often focus too heavily on uncovering hidden meanings and overlook the immediate sensory experience of art. This call for freedom against interpretation and the emphasis of immediate effect she calls “an erotics of art.” Like her French mentor, Roland Barthes, Sontag resisted simple labels, seeking to relate images and ideas to more immediate concerns of the viewer, the reader, the listener. Therefore the applicatyion of postmodernism to Modernist artistry, such as the novels of Thomas Hardy, is one of its primary concerns. Early postmodenrism arose concurrently with second wave feminism, so the application of the revolutionary method of these revolutionary times lends itself to concerns of the female, concerns which Hardy carried prominently.

In The Return of the Native, the early Eustacia Vye is passionate, restless, and deeply dissatisfied with life on Egdon Heath. She longs for escape, romance, and a more exciting existence, viewing Clym Yeobright as a possible route toward that freedom. In Jude the Obscure, the later Sue Bridehead is strikingly different from her earlier rebellious self. After suffering personal tragedy, she becomes fearful, religious, and submissive to conventional morality. Both women struggle against restrictive social circumstances, but their trajectories differ. Eustacia remains defiant and resistant, even though her fate is determined to have a tragic end in which her dreams of freedom from the heath are destroyed -- she can inevitrably never leave the heath, a place of magic and mysticism which she has symbolized throught the story. Sue, on the other hand, revels not in mysticism, but in the mind. She is ultimately psychologically defeated and retreats into the conventions she once rejected.

In the novels between these of memorable women doomed to tragedy by the circumstances surrounding the men they love lay several of Hardy's more memorable female characters:  Tess of the D'Ubervilles and Bathsheeba in Far from the Madding Crowd, for example. These characters are as fully relatable to any study of Hardy's modernism as the ones I have chosen. But I wish to juxtapose the early and late Hardy (if Jude can be considered late simply because it is his last novel--he would write for years more, but it was primarily poetryl). The dreaminess of Eustacia Vye and her connection to Nature contrasts to the World of the Mind that Sue Bridehead so desires to be a part of, with its callous regard for anythign outside thes realm of the intellect. That both of these women have their dreams crushed by love speaks not to the haphazard nature of sexual relations so much as to the way Victorian society sees love as a tool for determinism, devoted to crushing any other ideas underneath its universal foot.

Rather than concening the reader with artistic notions of characters and the things they symbolize, or creating golden arches of plot and theme, the Sontag/Barthes model proposes that the immediate reaction of the reader to the text, with all the inherent symbols the reader brings, creates a visceral and satisfying reaction devoid of artifices of interpretive models. Barthes explains how the reader does this in his small essays on popular culture such as "In the Ring" wherein narratives of art are looked at as extensions of basic visceral ideas that a reader may bring from such areas a professional wrestling and all its campy theater. Sontag likens this attachment to camp to a model of interpretation that goes againnst the very idea of interpretation itself, celebarating the freedom of the immediate moment. The application of the ideas of these early postmodernists to literay works of early modernism shows how such a rflection is necessary in our perception of literary criticism and popular philosophy of aesthetics and, indeed, ethics. The world of aesthetic and ethical philosophy has now, by the 2020s, moved into territories beyond postmodernism. But these movements are necessary to track, if only to provide an impetus for the tracking of further movement in these philosophical areas.

James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” – suggested topics for a 1000 word essay, and a brief note on Thomas Hardy.

 

The first three paragraphs describe the small Swiss village in which Baldwin spent two winters. It is an isolated village far from the distractions Baldwin is trying to avoid. The isolated people of the village had, when he first visited it, never seen a black man. They knew about black people as being from Africa. Therefore, when the children of the village first saw him, they pointed fingers and yelled, “Neger! Neger!” The idyllic isolation is thus contrasted with a xenophobic prejudice.

 

Paragraph four investigates why his non-reaction to the name-calling, his pleasant nature or what he calls his “smile-and-the-world-smiles-with-you routine” did not work to alleviate stress, despite the fact that “there was certainly no element of intentional unkindness.” The villagers questioned what sort of human he was. For instance, it was difficult for them to believe he was American, since black people came from Africa.

 

Paragraph five begins the investigation of Baldwin’s innate rage at the situation. He knows there is no unpleasantness meant by the villagers. He is pleasant to them. But there actions are an inevitability of history. “Joyce is right about history being a nightmare—but it may be a nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” This is now presented as a first step toward the idea of inherent racial rage.

 

Paragraph six presents a further example of the villagers’ unknowing belittlement of others based on race.  This was the idea of the largely Catholic villagers trying out a system (imposed upon them from the church) of “buying’ African natives for the purpose of converting them to Christianity.” This includes a Lenten festival in which two children in blackface perform the roles of Africans. Baldwin reports on the solicitude of acquiring six to seven natives per year, something the villagers express with a sense of pride. Again, though, Baldwin has to suppress an immediate inner discomfort.

 

Paragraph six compares the conversion to Christianity of the Africans to Baldwin’s father’s conversion to Christianity. Here the sense of inherent rage comes out. Baldwin’s father did convert, and did so with fervency. But he could never get over an anger at those who converted him while all the while they treated blacks in such an un-Christian like manner.  Starting with those who went to Africa to gather potential slaves for commerce, the Caucasian world had behaved in a most sinful manner. Yet all the while, as a historical group, the whites professed a Christian superiority, one tat had persisted throughout the history of blacks in America.

Paragraphs seven and eight further describe the inevitability of the social milieu of whites as they move in a world in which they are inheritors of the grand traditions of the Western world while the black man is firstly seen as the African watching his conquerors roll into their world. Par 8 begins, “The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable.”

 

The essay goes on for 10 paragraphs at least to investigate the American race problem as a continued examination of how Western culture could have done to black humans what it did when capturing Africans and bringing them to America. The whole of the race problem even to the present day is described by Baldwin as “the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself” (par. 14).

 

Par 16 is a description of the black man at the Cathedral of Chartres. His view of the cathedral is different than the traditional Western view. Caucasians wonder at the beauty of the cathedral, its aspiring towers and its glorified windows.  But the view of the disenfranchised is defined by their notice of the bottomless well depicted for the outsiders, the heretics being hurled to death and the gargoyles jutting out of the stone “to say that God and the devil can never be divorced.” The Christian myth gives the disenfranchised the status of the punished.

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What does Baldwin have to do with Thomas Hardy? When asked, literature scholars would say that Hardy most influenced D.H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, John Fowles, and Theodore Dreiser (see the chapter headings of Casagrande, Peter J. Hardy’s Influence on the Modern Novel, Barnes & Noble Books, 1987). I have worked, in my blogs, to establish A.S. Byatt amongst the major children of Hardy also.

I have also worked to establish the reading of literature as a sense of immediacy. So in taking a short memoir of Baldwin and dissecting it into small fragments without necessarily pointing to a narrative between those fragments, I establish a type of literary reading.

Eustacia Vye, in The Return of the Native, has an ironic tug between her connection to the natural world of the moors and the elegant lifestyle to which she aspires. Perhaps this tug of irony is what motivates Baldwin also. Only whereas with Eustacia, the irony comes with desire, with Baldwin it comes with rage. Both are elements of class difference, both are elements of identity with which the characters are born. Baldwin quotes James Joyce as noting that all history is a nightmare. All these authors, taken in the world of theie circumstance with each idea they present, display immediate and tragic ironies, the nightmares of the individual caught in the nightmares of history..

 

 

Looking Back at Hardy's Heroines

Nick Harris blog 1/28/2026

Looking back at the novels of Thomas Hardy from a post-post-modernist POV – or even something that has emerged after PPM with the AI revolution – readers can certainly ask what their purpose is in picking up the book in this day and age. Discounting a literature-for-literature’s sake reasoning, which is, in effect, just as good as any, we can, as I have championed in many blog posts, see a relevancy to the world in terms of its symbols of behavior. The wrestling of Roland Barthes becomes evident in the fights for understanding of the English countryside inherent in many of Hardy’s works. Specifically, I tend to focus on certain female characters in the novels. I keep going back to the image of the entrance of Eustacia Vye and how she gets tangled in the bushes on the heath creating a spinning sort of dance in her relationship with the earth as she struggles effortlessly to free herself. The constant struggle of Tess shows this dance as she claws her way to an imagined heaven which never comes. Sue Bridehead’s struggle toward emancipation fits in with this model, though she gives in to the struggle by going back to her husband after too many tragedies. Her position as the female pagan wrestler may have to go  instead to Arabella in Jude the Obscure, as Arabella is the true antagonist of the heath, a pagan trickster, in the story. Though she has none of the Pagan elegance of Eustacia Vye, she still shows seductive beauty. Arabella leads Jude into his first kiss, then fatherhood, then abandonment.

I tend to focus on these women, these muses, these fates, as they spin their way to a desperate end that defines the arc of their character. As Kathleen Blake points out about Tess, Hardy paints a central woman character as a symbol of purity. Indeed, the subtitle of Tess defines her as a Pure Woman. Hardy equates the beautiful with the ethical from the beginnings of Tess. Blake writes, “Hardy suggests connotations of the word ‘pure’ that critics had missed. (Blake, 205.) Here Blake quotes Hardy, “They ignore the meaning of the word in Nature, together with all aesthetic “ (claims upon it, not to mention the spiritual interpretation…. (Hardy, viii). The movement of the concept of purity toward a goal in line with the natural world makes Hardy see the role of the woman as a link to the beauty and the ethics of Nature. Blake writes, “Hardy moves the meaning toward a new realism, that of the archetypal, ideal, generic” (206). Blake moves Hardy’s women toward the Mythologies of Barthes, the archetypes of natural beauty and ethics.

Eustacia Vye was an early central hero of a Hardy story and laid the foundations for those to come. John Paterson writes that Hardy meant to be classical in his structure of The Return of the Native, but he became sidetracked by “infiltrations of romantic sympathy altogether foreign to the tragic vision of things” (134). The passion of eruptive feelings was symbolized in Eustacia Vye, it was her charm and her explosive undoing. The link she held to the Natural world of Hardy’s fictional natural paradise, Egdon Heath, is emphasized from her first appearance. She cannot shake the beauty and the arrogance of the Natural World.

 

But she tries. Eustacia wrestles to become an aristocrat, even thought hat would spell the undoing of her as a symbol of the Natural world. This irony is mirrored in the quality of purity in Tess, a purity that only achieves itself through her supposed sins with the young man Angel, her eventual flight from him to a devilish aristocracy, and her return to him in murder and a symbolic pagan sacrifice. Sue Bridehead and Abigail in Jude the Obscure both show a dichotomy within their personalities. They each have a search for freedom, a natural beauty all its own. But their search ends in tragedy involving responsibilities to children, children who act in ways that perplex them and take them down. In trying to proclaim their Natural state of being, Sue and Arabella realize their failure and run back to the restrictions of their youth, Sue to her husband, and Abigail to her world of trickery as she rejoins Jude just before he dies.

The purpose of reading these heroes of their various stories becomes a search for beauty and truth through gender and its relation to Nature. Hardy’s passion, it’s influence on later novels (such as those of D,H, Lawrence and the myriad of his disciples that still inhabit our literary world) becomes a focal point of purpose in picking up one of his novels. The Aristotlean equation of beauty and ethics shines through here and edifies the reader to her/his own reflections on these mindful topics, qualities that define a person’s inner personality.

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Blake, Kate. “Pure Tess:  Hardy on knowing a Woman,” in Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy: The Novels. Ed. Dale Kramer. G.K. Hall, 1990, 204-218.

Paterson, John. “The ‘Poetics’ of The Return of the Native,” in Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy: The Novels. Ed. Dale Kramer. G.K. Hall, 1990, 133-140.