Hardy and the Imagery of Place

In the text that follows, I make two assumptions about the nature of Thomas Hardy’s fiction and poetry in general, both of which were articulated years ago by John Holloway in The Victorian Sage and both of which have been echoed many times since. The first is that though one looks in vain for a coherent general philosophy in Hardy’s works, it is clear that he does have something like a coherent imaginative vision, a consistent set of ways of viewing and presenting the world. The second assumption is that this larger vision is seldom, if ever, effectively expressed in abstract terms. What Holloway calls Hardy’s “considered view of the world” emerges instead from image, symbol, and the often symbolic or metaphoric narrative structures of the novels. ¹ It pervades the fiction and poetry, because in them it is more than simply issues or subjects that drive Hardy’s imagination, it is also what he once termed an “idiosyncratic mode of regard,” a way of looking at the world with the quality and characteristics of intuitive and imaginative insight, rather than a considered or abstractable philosophy. ² As critics have pointed out for some time, Hardy’s most instinctive mode as a writer is figurative, not analytic; his most habitual method is symbolism, not argument.

The symbolic dimension of Hardy’s fiction was not what attracted (or offended) his earliest readers and reviewers, who responded to the books most often in mimetic, formal, and moral terms. ³ But since at least Marcel Proust’s time, critics have become increasingly aware of the importance of the many recurring patterns, symbols, and images in the fiction and poetry. ⁴ It is now a given, for example, that there is more to the sword exercise and sheepshearing scenes in Far from the Madding Crowd than sensationalism and genre painting—the verdict of early reviewers. It is clear that Tess’s musings about life on a blighted planet (and similar feelings expressed by other characters in other books) represent more than quaint or “realistic” dialogue, that the rich descriptive writing is far more than “setting,” and that the repetitions of configurations of characters and events are meaningful. “Our response to the detail [in Hardy’s fiction],” says Holloway, “must be colored by our enduring sense of what is mediated all in all.” ⁵

The urge to discover “what is mediated all in all” has resulted in a succession of stylistic and phenomenological studies of the fiction and poetry in the past several decades, ⁶ each with a differing idea about which are the most important patterns in the carpet, all with a sense that, to borrow Dennis Taylor’s phrase, a “consistency of vision and coherence of sensibility” characterizes both poems and novels. ⁷ The critics’ object in most cases is, as J. Hillis Miller puts it, “to identify those underlying structures which persist through all the variations in Hardy’s work and make it a whole.” ⁸ My object, too, is to identify and explore one such common denominator: Hardy’s symbolic use of a highly personal sense of the relations among identity, community, and place.

The word “place” has come to mean a variety of things to students of the novel. At the simplest level it usually refers to a writer’s artistic use of a highly particularized physical environment, geographical region, or human community. Place in this sense has had many uses. One of them, of course, is the increased symbolic role played by “setting” in the gothic, romantic, and post-Romantic novel: the wildness of the heath in Wuthering Heights mirroring the inner turbulence of the characters, the riven oak at Thornfield Hall foreshadowing the fate of Jane Eyre and Rochester, and so on. The concrete details of physical places and communities also began to serve the Victorian novelists’ growing sense of the complex relations between individuals and history. In the nineteenth-century novel, the physical world was much more fully realized than in earlier narrative—factory and slum as often as village and heath—because there was less interest in timeless moral or...