Andrea Lewis and Dr. C. Jay Fox, English
Thomas Hardy was one of the most successful and significant writers in England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though his mother wanted him to pursue a career as an architect, Hardy gave up his position as a draughtsman while in his early twenties when he began to find more success as a writer. By his death at age 87, Hardy had published fourteen novels, several short stories and plays, and hundreds of poems.
Though a study of Thomas Hardy’s work can be effectively and fruitfully approached using several types of literary criticism, the historical and cultural context of Hardy’s literature is so significant as to render it impossible to ignore. The Victorian period was pervaded by an atmosphere of doubt that challenged the certainties of previous generations; faith was not categorically abandoned, but new questions in the spheres of science and philosophy crept in to irritate growing religious insecurity. Hardy was not unaffected by this atmosphere, and his poetry especially reflects various responses to his own crisis of faith.
Understanding that Hardy was greatly interested in the religious uncertainties common to his day, my research was concerned with Hardy’s depiction of the possibility of hope in the universe in The Dynasts, his epic-drama of the Napoleonic Wars. This text was selected for several reasons. Its very length and scope designates this work as one of significance; written in three parts, nineteen acts, and 130 scenes, The Dynasts depicts the wars against Napoleon within the context of an Overworld of supernatural Spirits. Its placement in Hardy’s career also merits attention, for this epic-drama was his first project after writing his last novel, Jude the Obscure. Hardy felt that poetry was a genre better suited to his desire to express unconventional opinions about the forces of the universe (The Life 302), though many critics note The Dynasts for the evolutionary meliorism contained in Hardy’s exploration of the Immanent Will and its designs.
Thomas Hardy is commonly regarded as an agnostic pessimist whose works reflect a dark and hopeless view of the world, but even a casual study of his poetry reveals a striking preoccupation with the nature of deity’s relationship to the rest of the universe. This persisting interest in matters of such religious and philosophical weight led me to approach my study of The Dynasts, which is not only a literary portrayal of the Napoleonic Wars but is also an exploration of deity’s role in the world’s history, with the suspicion that hope was still possible in Hardy’s depiction of the universe. The drama opens with the Spirits discussing the Will’s unconsciousness, which quickly ties the question of hope to the problem of consciousness. My research was therefore initially focused around questions such as these: Is the existence of a Will enough for hope to exist, or is hope only possible in the consciousness of that force? Is there a valid possibility that the Will can ever become conscious?
The first step in evaluating the possibility of hope in the Will’s consciousness is to acknowledge that the drama openly confirms the existence of deity in the first place. Both Spirits and humans frequently remark on the Will’s existence, and the older Spirits instruct the younger Spirits that all actions “do but outshape Its governing” (Dynasts I, I, vi, 36). With this presentation of the Will’s existence, however, comes problems of determinism. The Will is only seen six times in the drama, and each time this force is depicted as the transparency of a giant brain overlaid on the lands and peoples of Europe, unfeelingly directing the actions of all those upon the earth without opposition or impediment.
The sense of determinism embedded in the Will’s control accounts for the Spirits’ great sorrow in the Will’s unconsciousness. The Spirit of the Pities, ever sympathetic to human pain, declares thus: “But O, the intolerable antilogy / Of making figments feel!” (Dynasts I, IV, vi, 77). The consciousness that the Spirits desire of the Will is not of mere cognizance of action or existence, for the Will is shown to consciously cause even the smallest event, but an awareness of the pain which its actions cause but which it presently does not feel.
The only possibility for hope in this universe, according to the Spirits who guide our understanding of the human drama presented before us, is the possibility that the Will will at some point become conscious of this pain “till It fashion all things fair!” (Dynasts After Scene, 525). In examining the subject and structure of this epic-drama, however, I discovered that an even greater source of hope may exist beyond the possibility that the Will will grow in consciousness. The fact that this is a historical drama, the end of which is already known to the reader, promotes hope that the Will is in fact directing the events of the world to positive ends, in this case a victory over Napoleon. The structure of the tale, which involves the use of an Overworld of Spirits whose perspective reaches much farther than that of the humans they are observing, suggests that an even greater perspective would reveal that the Will has greater consciousness than that of which the Spirits are aware. A reevaluation of perspective therefore becomes the key to understanding the hope that is contained in Hardy’s depiction of the Will’s existence.
The results of my study of Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts have been valuable to my own literary education and life experience, but I feel that an understanding of the hope that can be seen in this epic-drama will prove valuable to Hardy scholarship as a whole. Hardy’s work may still contain elements of determinism and cynicism, but readers should remember that an evaluation of perspective is essential to understanding Hardy’s portrayal of deity’s relationship to the universe. Hardy, Thomas. The Dynasts. London: Macmillan, 1925.