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.
