Hardy & Pastoral Conflict

INDY CLARK'S BOOK is about conflict. It engages with Thomas Hardy's personal ambivalence related to profession and social class: is he a worker, a writer, or both? It presents the tensions between Hardy's approach to fiction and his approach to poetry. Most importantly, as part of its sustained discussion of the roles economics, imperialism, and war played in the Victorian revival of the pastoral, it presents the "dialectical relationship between literary convention and actual experience." The book's introduction offers a carefully historicized and nuanced engagement with pastoral as a term, and the book's pages offer similarly careful close readings of specific poems, alongside broader, more rapid glances at the fiction. The close analysis comes in the service of a rather straightforward thesis. Clark's goal is to show how Hardy does not reject pastoral wholesale, nor does he offer a faithful resurrection of classical pastoral. Instead, Clark writes, Hardy offers readers "an adaptation of the pastoral" that includes some "seemingly counter-pastoral themes." The breakthroughs within this book, then, lie not in its main claim but in its topic and focus. The study stands almost alone in its serious and sustained engagement with Hardy and pastoral poetry. Clark references Michael Squires's The Pastoral Novel: Studies in George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D. H. Lawrence (University of Virginia Press, 1974), as well as Merryn Williams's Thomas Hardy and Rural England (Columbia University Press, 1972), two books that offer comprehensive overviews of the pastoral elements of Hardy's Wessex fiction. The existing study that comes closest to Clark's project is Owen Schur's Victorian Pastoral: Tennyson, Hardy, and the Subversion of Forms (Ohio State University Press, 1989), but Schur's book dedicates three chapters to Tennyson and only two to Hardy. Therefore, in its subject matter alone, Clark offers an important intervention.

The first of Clark's four chapters, "Arcadia, Wessex, and the South Country," starts with a sustained reading of Hardy's "An Unkindly May" to demonstrate Hardy's awareness of pastoral conventions and his attempt to expand beyond them. Hardy's poem offers a dark, politicized landscape rather than a wholly idealized or romanticized one. The chapter also argues that, contrary to what Hardy himself suggests, there is a geographical coherence to Hardy's poetry collections that parallels the Wessex of his novels. Chapter two, "Landscape, Nature, and Work," figures Hardy as offering a kind of "Darwinian pastoral," as he leans towards an Enlightenment in his objectivity in approach to nature; however, "a Romantic 'projection of personal feeling' often breaks through." As with the dark landscapes presented in chapter one, Clark reads nature in Hardy's poetry as a "site of struggle"; this is, of course, an insight familiar to fans of Hardy's novels, but not always applied to his poetry. Chapter two also begins the book's sustained interest in work, especially the differences between rural and urban labor. In chapter two, Clark argues that Hardy seeks continuity between the emphasis on labor in his novels and the divergence from classical pastoral implied by the emphasis on work in his poems. A highlight of chapter two is Clark's reading of Hardy's "The Seasons of Her Year," in which Clark carefully outlines how "the poem's structural perfection is effective in calling forth its narrative opposite."

Chapter three, "What About the Workers?" gives more space to Hardy's fiction, which moves this part of the book closer to existing scholarship. The chapter argues that Hardy's prose—and Hardy's assessment of his own prose—belies any assumption that he foregrounds a genuine rural laborer within fiction addressed to a middle-class readership. In fact, Clark suggests, Hardy presents these readers with a vision of themselves; for example, few of his laborers are major characters in his fiction, and most of his laborers speak and act in a way that puts them above their supposed station. By contrast, Clark suggests, Hardy resists his middle-class readership more often...