Medievalism in the Last Novels of Thomas Hardy: New Wine in Old Bottles

Medievalism in the Last Novels of Thomas Hardy: New Wine in Old Bottles Shannon L. Rogers Pennsylvania State University WHILE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to classify Thomas Hardy as a medievalist in the same sense as William Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites, or Tennyson , it is clear in much of his prose that throughout his career he maintained an intellectual and literary interest in the period. References to matters of medieval interest are evident in his letters and notebooks and his career very nearly begins and ends on a medieval theme. Every one of his novels contains some element of medievalism, whether architectural, spiritual, or literary. His eighth published novel, A Laodicean (1881), is perhaps his most conspicuous "medieval revival" work, focusing on a thoroughly modern woman who inherits a fascination with an old aristocratic family along with their castle. It is in his last novels, however, the two most passionate in their social criticism, that the medievalist urge is most deeply, if symbolically, expressed. In fact, the medievalism of these novels presages a growing nostalgia about the period which would creep into both his poetry and his drama, The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall. Ironically, it would be the outbreak of the Great War that ultimately drove Hardy to a deeper longing for the medieval past as a safe haven from progress.1 Symbolic of his unique position as a novelist closing the Victorian period and opening the modern, Hardy's interpretation of the past has an urgency and a somber tone expressive of the "ache of modernism" his later characters experience. As John Goode has noted, "Hardy is compelled to confront the disintegration of human individuality in a society which does not belong to the past."2 In the Wessex of Hardy's novels, a nostalgic longing for a glorious past is a destructive urge that prevents characters from adjusting to the present and, therefore, from evolving to meet the demands of the future. 298 ROGERS : HARDY In keeping with the Victorian period's medieval obsession, Hardy finds a use for the idealized medieval past, but with a different theme from many of his contemporaries and predecessors. For the most part, Hardy deliberately avoids romantic notions of knights and fair maidens, legends of Crusades, and past glory. His use of the past is instead a means by which to illustrate the ceaseless progress of time. In the ruins of old castles and old manners, so unsuited to the modern world, he demonstrates not only the looming presence of history, but the changes in human society which have rendered the Victorian an entirely different being from the inhabitant of the medieval world. Thus, the past cannot and should not be resurrected. While Hardy believed it was appropriate and necessary to preserve the past in the form of ancient architecture and histories, he maintained that the future is inevitable. To superimpose illusory medieval emotions or traditions on the present would result only in misery. Conversely, a weak façade of "modern" philosophy, built on no firmer foundations than a desire to be progressive, would be unable to endure the challenge that modern life brings. As Angel Clare and Sue Bridehead both demonstrate, vaguely understood modern ideas are ultimately less fitted to modern realities and more damaging to the psyche than any strict and unwavering adherence to past traditions. In the end, it is characters like Arabella Donn—who neither ache from the pains of progress nor long for the past but accept the changing world on its own terms—who are the most successful. As early as his second published novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Hardy was evoking the pastoral world of Wessex which would dominate his later novels. This world is shaped by the landscape and the rural inhabitants who represent a way of life already dying in Hardy's day. Many of their traditions, superstitions, and even husbandry techniques had changed little since the Middle Ages. In this way, Hardy's novels are an elegy to a world of the past, one medieval in many ways. R. J. White has described Hardy as capturing the English countryside, "Putting on record a history which he had lived on...