Symbolic Settings Reflected In Thomas Hardy’s Novels

Introduction – The Nineteenth-Century Britain – An Age of the Novel

1.1. Nineteenth-Century Britain and Its Readers

Under the strong social, cultural, economic and even political background of each era throughout history, people’s preferences in terms of literature have experienced a constant change. The British readership does but follow this pattern. Therefore, if a periodization is to be made, for each great period in the history of Britain there is an equivalent in literature; if the Middle Ages represent the time of fabliaux and of chivalric epic poems, if the Elizabethan Age marks an “unprecedented development of poetry and drama”, then the Victorian Age embodies the epoch in which the dominant literary genre was the novel.

Although emerged as a popular form of literature during the Enlightenment, when its main artistic purpose was to instruct and delight at the same time, the English novel did not reach a climax in its development until the nineteenth century, a period unanimously considered “the great age of the English novel”. The reasons behind the novel’s prevalence as a literary genre are closely interwoven and cannot be judged outside the historical background represented by Victorian Britain.

Conventionally, the Victorian Age overlaps with the reign of Queen Victoria, from her coronation, in 1837, to her death, in 1901. In literature, however, both the beginning and ending points of the period are stretched: “the period starts with the death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832, and sometimes goes up to 1914”. Britain in this period is generally considered at its most powerful and self-confident, having the reputation of a flourishing and calm era. It is known fact that Victorian Britain was the “workshop” of the world, the most developed industrial nation, that its trading position was stronger than any other country’s position. In many ways, it was an age of progress: railways and ships were built, great scientific discoveries were made and education became more widespread. One could easily say that a feeling of overall balance was reigning over the country.

In reality, however, balance was only apparent and the images of prosperous moralism and of powerful bourgeoisie would hide an epoch burdened with contradiction, discrimination and deeply-rooted confusion. Externally – the power of the Empire grew, inside the country’s borders – the big problems of an industrialized civilization were raised. The consequences of the Industrial Revolution that had begun a century before were mainly felt by the small producers, who were forced to turn to proletarianism; impoverished peasants crowded into industrial cities; the number of working women and children augmented. Overall, it was an age of extremes: “There were double standards in this society. Many writers used their works to show that although on the surface this was a successful society, below the surface there were many problems”. No other literary genre but the novel, “the most sensitive to the dynamism and change of the Victorian period” could possibly render all these paradoxes. Its proving able to record the contrasting aspects of an apparently stable society was one of the reasons that made the novel the dominant form during the period.

The audience for novels grew enormously during the nineteenth century. Although there are multiple reasons behind the widening of the reading public, the most relevant of them are linked to the concepts of social mobility and publishing industry. Given the development of industrial towns, a large number of families from rural areas moved to urban ones with the prospects of improving their condition. In the same way, Britain’s expansion as a colonial empire brought about a migration of people towards the newly conquered territories, which set the basis for the development of overseas readership; these phenomena of population’s dynamics created “new audiences with differing economic means and varying requirements”. Therefore, the Victorian readers, not confined within Britain’s continental boundaries only, were a heterogeneous mass when it came to literary preferences. The fact is incontestably proven by their keeping of diaries: “Victorians of all classes recorded their reading experiences in diaries and memoirs, and these documents testify to the amazing variety of the nineteenth-century literary diet”.

Nonetheless, the most crucial feature that allowed the expansion of the reading public was “the development of publishing, in the modern sense of the word”. In the evolution of the nineteenth century there were certain turning-points that gradually strengthened the publishing industry; among these, some were related to technology, others to literacy. The first half of the century – the time span in which the mechanization of printing and that of paper-making occurred – paved the way for publishing as we know it today. In addition to that, by the 1850’s, taxes on paper had been repealed and another technological development (although not directly linked to the book production process) had contributed to the affirmation of publishing: the railway, which provided “a reliable, fast, and cheap book transport and distribution system”. As far as the degree of literacy of the population is concerned, a defining moment was represented by the passage of the Education Act in 1870 and its adjacent founding of Board schools which created “a working class that read novels and Sunday (if not daily) newspapers”. With such a gluttonous audience, the breathtakingly multiplication of novels and of daily and weekly magazines towards the end of the century is not surprising.

Nevertheless, in the beginning of the century, reading was not an easily affordable luxury, due to the restraining principles of the long-established publisher-booksellers. Their keeping newcomers out of the trade and their producing of small, target-aimed editions prevented both the publishing industry from flowering and the reading audience from growing. Unavailability and high charges of new fiction would keep a great number of people away from reading. The situation was to change, however, by finding alternatives in circulating libraries, part-publication and serialization of the novels. All of these had a direct influence on the universe of the novel, having not only shaped the form and content of the Victorian fiction work, but also widened the audience. For a low price subscription, people could then borrow as many books as they wanted and the costs applied were far under those charged if they were to buy the same volume. Consequently, the novel was gaining ground as the first choice of the middle class.

The novel’s becoming the literary genre of the emergent middle classes meant its coronation as the literary genre of the century. People would read novels aloud, as a popular pastime in families, workplaces and concert halls, for what they seized inside the books were fragments of life they could identify with: “The great majority of borrowers from Mudie’s libraries and readers of serialized novels in magazines wanted to read about life as they thought they knew it”.

1.2. English Realism. The Traditional Victorian Novel

With the clear assertion that the novel was universally seen as the “chosen” genre by the nineteenth century audience, what is left to do is to have it mounted within the framework of literary currents. As far as literary directions are concerned, the first works of the epoch do not prove to be conspicuously different from the previous, romantic ones, since they follow the line imprinted by romanticism up to a certain point. Although elements of romanticism could still be traced in the first works of the nineteenth-century writers, throughout the years, realism progressively gained ground, becoming “the creators’ favorite mode of writing, gradually replacing the romantic one”.

Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, the Brontë Sisters, along with George Eliot represent the golden generation of novelists in the Victorian Age and they do not break away from the norm; most of their novels are eclectic, by manifesting tendencies of combining both realistic and romantic elements. Examples can be brought to light in each of those authors’ case: for instance, as far as Charles Dickens is concerned, the fusion that he creates between romantic and realistic elements stands as the defining feature of his novels; likewise, the novels of the Brontë Sisters are also the result of a successful blend of distinct elements. What is peculiar about their works is the addition of a third element, the gothic, depicted in the novels through images of irrational happenings.

Therefore, a clearly stated disjunctive line between romanticism and realism cannot be drawn, since the dates that mark the transition from one aesthetic direction to another are generally arbitrarily chosen. Nonetheless, the authorized voices in the field of literary criticism seem to agree on the same moment: the death of Walter Scott in 1832 not only marks the end of the romantic era in Britain, but also the debut of what is known as the English realism.

In order to understand the phenomenon of English realism, one cannot discuss the matter outside of a wider context. From the 1830s ongoing, throughout Europe, realistic tendencies came into prominence as a reaction to the idealist and romantic excess, to sentimentalism and to fantastic distortions. Inspired by the positivism and the scientism of the age, the new direction promotes the respect for the material, the study of the human being according to his behavior, in his own, proper environment: “The realistic writer not only provides an exact, detailed description of the mundane, but he is also an analyst of the phenomena in their own essence, an analyst who wants to render what is typical in the social and moral reality”.

It is common knowledge that by the 1850s, realism, with its source of propagation in France, had become widespread and had developed into the most practiced type of writing all over the European continent. Writers became aware of their status of objective, impartial witnesses of reality and they set offering a mirror-like image of the society as the purpose of their writing acts. The novel came to be perceived as a “mirror” held in front of the reality of the times: “The realistic novel is the modern novel that discards the traditional and the old and proclaims itself present-day… all the circumstances of life, the life of the author, the life of the contemporaries have become subjects for novels: the novel grows into the picture of human life”.

English realism coincided approximately with the Victorian era, which meant the height of the British Empire and of the Industrial Revolution. The new direction in literature, being preoccupied with ethic and social problems, seemed to fit perfectly in the background of the age; Britain was undergoing multiple changes and it were those changes in particular what the English novelists of the nineteenth century managed to illustrate in their fiction: “Able to capture and expose the social evils, sensitive to changes in the age, the Victorian writers managed to offer a complete and accurate view of a period perceived as stable and conventional in spite of its obvious dynamism”. The syntagm under whose meaning is comprised the universe of those times that the authors succeeded in sketching has come to be known as “the traditional Victorian novel”.

The concept of “the traditional Victorian novel” is at best “an academic flag of convenience” for various reasons, namely the problem of dates and the Victorian consciousness; that is – the matter whether the first readers of Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray or Hardy actually seen themselves as living in a Victorian period of time – is put under a question mark. The term “Victorian”, although first recorded in 1839, did not gain general currency until it had been used by the Edwardians. Nevertheless, nineteenth-century British people had a glimpse of awareness of their own importance, given by the progress of the empire: “they felt themselves to be the inhabitants of the 'modern' period”. This belief of the British in their own importance “was at its height in the middle of the nineteenth century, among the new middle class, which had grown with industrialization”. The novelist Charles Dickens, seen by critics as the spokesman and the conscience of the Victorian Age, nicely described this national pride. One of his many characters, Mr. Podsnap, believed that Britain had been specially chosen by God and “considered other countries […] a mistake”.

When it comes to the shape of the traditional Victorian novel, three rising tendencies are distinguishable, all determined by the so important world of publishing: part-publication, serializing and three-deckers. A great majority of the most renowned Victorian novels had their first pages published in parts, be they weekly or monthly. The first two tendencies not only shaped the actual physical form of the novels, but also their content and their readers’ longing for more: “Victorian literature was highly interactive” because it implied a sense of complicity between the novelist and its readership; by tracking the readers’ response to the novel, registered in the number of copies printed and sold, an author could make an intervention at any time. According to public taste, one could either change the plot line if the sales number went down, for the story’s not being successful enough, or follow the same pattern if it proved otherwise. It was the case of many a Victorian novelist, among whom Thomas Hardy included. Changing the flowing course of the action was what the author did with one of his most acknowledged novels, The Return of the Native. The ending paragraphs of the serial’s eleventh episode brought about the tragic deaths by drowning of Eustacia Yeobright and Damon Wildeve, some of the central characters of the novel. At that particular point, it would have seemed impossible for the novel to end happily; still, Damon’s widow, Thomasin, is contentedly married to Diggory Venn in the serial’s last episode. Nevertheless, this was not how the author had initially imagined the outcome of his novel; Hardy resorted to providing the novel with a happy ending in order to please the taste of the Victorian reading public and he justified his deed in a very peculiar footnote to the 1912 edition of the text: “The writer may state here that the original conception of the story did not design a marriage between Thomasin and Venn. He was to have retained his isolated and weird character to the last, and to have disappeared mysteriously from the heath, nobody knowing whither – Thomasin remaining a widow. But certain circumstances of serial publication led to a change of intent”.

The other tendency, embodied by the three-decker novels, implied stretching a novel’s action over three volumes, which resulted in lengthy, bulky works of fiction. This innovative publishing strategy was so popular, however, that the Victorians soon changed it into convention. Three-deckers had become an institution, the “triple-headed monster, sucking the blood of English novelists” who often had to commit to following the pattern when signing their contracts, in order for their works to be published. Nevertheless, there are voices who claim that these types of making the written word available for the masses while filling publishers’ pockets took something away from the aesthetic function of the novel and also restrained the field of novel writing to bluntly finding a “popular profitable formula” and replicating it until saturation.

Having acknowledged the general way of having a novel delivered to its audience, i.e. the novel’s form, content is the following feature to be dwelled upon. As far as subject matter is concerned, there are some themes which, by means of recurrence in many of the age’s novels, become prevalent. The traditional Victorian novel takes into discussion themes such as: the status of women in the Victorian society; social problems – urban poverty and the working class; ideas of progress – industry and empire; evolving attitudes, both Victorian and Anti-Victorian, in terms of culture, religion and science. Victorian values, which “came to be accepted as standard conduct during the Victorian era”, are also depicted in the traditional novel of the age: diligence, hard work, pragmatism, materialism, utilitarianism, morality, the sense of duty and responsibility. Another common theme in the traditional Victorian novel is the contrast between essence and appearance.

The traditional Victorian novel is based on a sense of public significance in which what matters most is the community. It may even be looked at like a network of social relations in which the characters are caught. The details of environment, of motivation, of circumstance, and of temporality with its cause and effect become the context for the exploration of human values and fate. In a Victorian novel, the emphasis tends to be on the individual, entangled in his or her social environment. Consequently, the themes and motifs in whose realization the novelists’ efforts are put circle equally around the ideas of individuality and social relationships.

In order to express the previously mentioned themes, the Victorian writers resorted to omniscience. The most common point of view in Victorian fiction, omniscience represents the implication of a third person, God-like narrator: “The omniscient narrator is the most important constitutive convention for the form of Victorian fiction”. The use of an omniscient narrator who gives the reader access to a character's thoughts, feelings and motivations is a highly formalized convention that produces a sense of psychological depth; the characters seem to have “lives” independent of the text itself. They, of course, do not; the sense that they do is achieved entirely by the fact that both the author and the reader share these codes of the real. The consensual nature of such codes is so deep that the reader forgets that he is in the presence of fiction. However, there are also authors who have written in the first person, Charles Dickens being one of them. In his case, the reader is either faced with the main character of the novel, or with a character performing the function of an observer.

Be it from the point of view of a third or first-person narrator, the Victorian novel wonderfully succeeds in reflecting the image of its age. The Victorian realistic novel, plainly mimetic in its beginning, made its transition towards complexity and a symbolic nature: “The ordinary reader may have had the illusion that what he was reading was a kind of journalism, a transcript of life as it was happening around him without the modifying effect of literary form and imagination. In fact, the great Victorian novelists often created complexes of symbolic meaning that reached far deeper that the superficial pattern of social action suggested to the casual reader”. In other words, what began as a rigorous rendering of the world was gradually transformed into a web of symbols and hidden meanings. For instance, in Charles Dickens’ novels, the characters depicted as recognizable people in everyday life are the possessors of very suggestive, symbolical names. Deliberately chosen, the names stand as a proof that the novel not only mirrors reality, but also has deep meanings, far from the surface level of the text. In addition to that feature identifiable in Dickens’ works there comes another one, traceable in Thomas Hardy’s novels, where Nature does not only represent the plain setting of the action. Written with a capital letter “N”, it symbolizes both shelter and repository for the characters, it reflects their moods and affects their behavior. All these lead to the conclusion that there was more to the Victorian novels than met the eye of the reader.

The traditional Victorian novel has been later debunked by postmodernist authors, who have criticized its conventional nature and the routine of the subjects approached. The British author John Fowles succeeds in re-creating “mid-nineteenth century England” and the prototypical Victorian novel by resorting to postmodernist techniques. By making use of the old Victorian pattern of fiction, the author proves once again the validity and strong structure of the traditional Victorian novel, which has overgone time and distance.

Symbolic Settings Reflected in Thomas Hardy's novels: Far From the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Return of the Native

3.1. The Concepts of “Setting” and “Symbol” in Relation to the Nineteenth-Century Novel

A novel should always be perceived as the summing up of various literary conventions playing equal parts in its construction. Therefore, concepts such as character, plot, theme, style and setting – the rocklike pillars upon which a novel is built – are seen as closely knit, fundamental components of fiction. Since the existence of one determines that of another, they are complementary elements: there would be neither plot without characters, nor theme without its being reflected by the novel’s plot; likewise, characters would not be able to act out the events in the absence of a proper setting. However, even more important than their interdependence is the way in which they bring one another into prominence. As far as this aspect is concerned, out of all elements of fiction, setting is the one that plays the most imperative role, given the fact that it influences both the characters’ nature and their actions, which considered as a whole, build up the plot.

In literature, in its most abridged definition, setting is presented as “the where and when of a story”. Thus, consisting of the geographic location and of the historical moment in time in which a narrative’s action takes place, the setting provides the novel with a background for the characters to exhibit themselves. The specific location, time frame and circumstance brought by the setting of a novel are the characteristics that bind everything into meaning and context. The immediate consequence of the harmonious binding together of literary elements is making the overall understanding of the novel easier, by revealing the characters’ nature and by depicting the theme through powerful metaphor.

Setting is a crucial component for assisting the story, going up to the extent to which it becomes a character itself. It sometimes happens that the main, general setting of a novel is of such great importance in the author and reader’s imagination that it can assume a status comparable to that of a character. Thomas Hardy’s Egdon Heath is an emblematic example of setting as character, the giant, overwhelming presence of the heath being constantly linked to the protagonists and noticed throughout The Return of the Native, the sixth famous novel of the Victorian writer.

Another important function of the setting is that of determining the characters’ nature. Very often, the way in which fictional characters behave not only depends on their personal traits, but also on the environment they come from. There are cases when the whole action of a novel relies upon the locale in which it is set. One could hardly imagine characters such as Gustave Flaubert’s desirous Emma Bovary or Thomas Hardy’s tempestuous Eustacia Vye belonging to the flamboyant setting embodied by nineteenth-century Paris. At least, not without a downright shift in the flowing course of action of the novel, since the tragic life and deaths of the two heroines are closely related with the circumscriptions of their provincial milieu. Setting may also augment or decrease the characters’ emotions, by directly affecting their dispositions and moods. What is more, setting can also function as the concrete, physical representation of a character’s own temperament, an emotional landscape with which a character’s personality traits may either beautifully resonate, or come into striking contrast.

Setting is created by use of language, thus the amount of details that are known by a reader is up to the author. It is the writer’s choice that of showing more or showing less, by unraveling or hiding particular elements of the setting. As one may without difficulty notice, the process of creation of fictional worlds depends mostly on the author. Nonetheless, one could not say that the result of the same process of sketching setting relies solely upon the creator, given the relation of complicity between author and his public. By performing the act of reading, a person becomes involved in the completion of the novel, considering the fact that he or she is invited to decode the hidden meanings of a particular setting.

Considered merely in its first function, that of creating a background for the characters to display themselves upon, the concept of setting becomes of paramount importance for the realistic works of fiction such as those dominating the British nineteenth-century. That particular period in the history of English literature is known for the veridical manner in which the reality of those times was depicted. Due to the emphasis laid on the accurate rendering of real life under the shape of a narrative, the sudden importance given to setting is of no surprise. Setting had come to gain such significance that categorizations of the novels could soon be made according to it. An illustrative example of one such classification is based on the binary opposition between urban and rural setting; henceforth, critics and literary historians admitted that a new kind of fiction, characterized by its regional or provincial setting, was clearly flourishing in the nineteenth century. The widespread tendency recorded in the novelists’ way of setting the action of a fictional work in a particular region or province resulted in what is nowadays known as the provincial or regional novel.

Apart from having their action plainly set in a location different from London, the works gathered under the syntagm of regional novel share several common features, namely that of setting the depicted territory apart from the general movement towards modernization. The grounds for the rural settings’ coming under the attention of the novelists resided in the changes caused by the historical processes of Great Britain’s modernization: both the imperialist expansion of trade and the Industrial Revolution have caused great stir within the country, modifying the very notions of space and time by which locality was constituted. The brilliant novelists of the century proved to be extremely sensitive to the above mentioned turnovers of the age, which destabilized the Victorians’ identity. Therefore, historical change, by means of modernization, represented “the condition through which the province or region became narratable: as an island or reef, in a rising tide of wholesale economic and social transformation”. By being placed in direct opposition with the much questioned idea of progress linked to urban areas, the regional novels’ rural settings became the very substance of the quickly vanishing traditional values whose collapse the great Victorian novelists did not fail to observe.

In this great movement of regional revival, Thomas Hardy played a central part by being one of the writers who sensed the magnitude of the changes that the age was undergoing. In his own preface to the 1902 edition of Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy describes the spirit of the era as “a break of continuity in local history”. In a letter to Rider Haggard from the month of March of the same year, changes delivered by progress were perceived by the novelist as far more harmful than any other thing to the preservation of folklore, old legends, eccentric rustic individualities and close inter-social relations:

But changes at which we must all rejoice have brought other changes which are not so attractive. The laborers have become more and more migratory…The consequences are curious and unexpected. For one thing, village tradition – a vast mass of unwritten folk-lore, local chronicle, local topography, and nomenclature – is absolutely sinking, has nearly sunk, into eternal oblivion… there being no continuity of environment in their lives, there is no continuity of information, the names, stories and relics of one place being speedily forgotten under the incoming facts of the next. For example, if you ask one of the workfolk… the name of surrounding hills, streams; the character and circumstances of people buried in particular graves; at which spots parish personages lie interred; questions on local fairies, ghosts, herbs, etc., they can give no answer; yet I can recollect the time when the places of burial of even the poor and tombless were all remembered, and the history of the parish and squire’s family for 150 years back known. Such and such ballads appertained to such and such a locality, ghost tales were attached to particular sites, and nooks wherein wild herbs grew for the cure of divers maladies were pointed out readily.

Needless to say, this belief of the writer is reflected in his so-called regional novels depicting stories of mid-Victorian provincial lives, novels which are marked by a transition towards a more pessimistic attitude.

Within the category of regional novels there can be made several separations thought of as very useful, given the fact that according to them one can determine the extent to which a novel is truly regional. In order for a novel to be considered thoroughly regional, its theme must itself become so: “In such novels the novelist’s deliberate intention is to depict the region, to explore its significance, its history, its contribution, its problems as a region”.

Despite the fact that “a strong tincture of regionalism” rooted in the area of Wessex can be efortlessly traced in the plots of Thomas Hardy’s novels, the author is not entirely a regionalist writer, due the universality of the themes approached. What Hardy succeeded in doing was adapting and subduing elements such as plot, characterization and most important of all – setting – so that they should serve his purpose, his strive for universality. The well-known setting that Thomas Hardy used as a background for the action of his novels is the region of Wessex. Covering a wide regional territory, this overall setting of Hardy’s prose works proves the author’s adherence to the category of regional novel writers. Thomas Hardy sought not the peculiar in this region whose name teems with ancient sonority, but what illuminated the universal values. These values could not be otherwise carried forth but by means of symbolism.

According to its definition, symbolism is the practice of using symbols to signify ideas and qualities by supplying them with meanings that are different from their literal sense. The etymology of the term ̔symbol̕ leads us to the language spoken in Ancient Greece: the word is derived from the Greek verb symballein and its noun symbolon which mean ̔to throw together̕, respectively ̔mark̕, ̔token̕, ̔emblem̕ or ̔sign̕. A symbol is whatever “object, animate or inanimate, which represents or 'stands for' something else”.

The definition mentioned above draws attention to the fact that the shapes which symbolism can take are numerous. In most of the cases, a symbol is an object representing another in order for the second to gain a completely different meaning, by far much deeper and more significant. Not only objects are symbolic, but actions and gestures too. An event or word uttered by someone may have a symbolic value as well. Colours, likewise, are symbols that did not fail to be taken notice of throughout history. Imagine, for instance, the red colour and its swarm of significances. Firstly, it stigmatizes in all its shades; since Jewish intolerance was a fact in sixteenth-century Venice, every Jew leaving the walled foundry in which they were confined to live was forced to wear a red hat meant to mark him as a social outcast. In the same way functions the scarlet letter ̔A̕ worn by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne on her clothes: as a symbol of her sin, meant to turn her into the physical representation of the her society’s times’ worst failing. Secondly, in most of the world’s cultures, red is a colour standing for intense emotions and concepts through its being associated with fire, passion and love, power and prestige, warning or danger; red might be a sign of mourning in Africa, but an auspicious colour for brides in Asia. This whole demonstration having as starting point the commonplace notion of a colour serves as a proof for the premise that symbols are both culture and context dependent. Therefore, much of the symbolic meaning of an action or object will be understood according to where, when and how it is used.

Symbolism is one way through which an artist can add twofold levels of meaning to his work by combining an image with a concept. An experienced reader will be able to distinguish between the two levels of meaning implied by a written text. He or she will easily manage to tell the difference between the literal, surface level of a novel, on one hand and the symbolic, in-depth substance of it, on the other hand. It is certain that symbolism in the field of literature performs the task of evoking interest in readers, by offering them the favorable circumstances to get an insight of the writer’s vision of the world.

Since both the concept of setting and that of symbolism are inherently revealing even when taken separately, the combination of the two within the body of a single work of art will only result in a far more profound meaning waiting to be deciphered. The technique of using symbolic settings as backdrops for their novels was well-known to the nineteenth-century British writers who “under the pretence of offering their readers slices of real life […] fooled their public, reaching a reality far deeper than the surface one”. These authors’ epoch of turmoil played a significant part in the rise of the literary device embodied by a setting’s symbolism, since it proved resourceful enough to offer writers the first-hand material for their novels.

Thomas Hardy was not a stranger to the use of symbolic locale in his works. In many of his novels there is plentiful symbolism resorted to in order to reveal the characters’ nature or give them and the theme the touch of universality.

3.2. Analysis of the Symbolic Settings of Thomas Hardy’s Novels

3.2.1. Hardy’s Wessex

It is difficult or barely impossible for an experienced reader to think about the settings of Thomas Hardy’s novels without the name of Wessex crossing his mind. The two terms are so closely tied together that it seems that they might even overlap. The understanding of this particular term is undoubtedly important for the analysis of the novels’ settings. How did the obsolete name of Wessex come alive after thirteen centuries of oblivion? Hardy himself, in the Preface to the eleven years later edition of Far from the Madding Crowd acknowledged having revived the ancient name of Wessex once with the creation of the same novel, in 1874: “In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was in the chapters of ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, as they appeared month by month in a popular magazine, that I first ventured to adopt the word ‘Wessex’ from the pages of early English history, and give it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district once included in that extinct kingdom”. The author then continued to use that particular location as the general setting for most of his novels, short stories and even poems; many years after its first mentioning, Hardy also became aware of his fictional county’s commercial opportunity and took advantage of it once with the publishing of the new editions of his novels. He gathered his novels under this tutelary term and advertised them accordingly, by even providing his readership a Wessex map which strengthened the novels’ illusion of reality.

It was in the same 1885 Preface to Far from the Madding Crowd that the writer described how his Wessex was given birth to: “The series of novels I projected being mainly of the kind called local, they seemed to require a territorial definition of some sort to lend unity to their scene. Finding that the area of a single county did not afford a canvas large enough for this purpose, and that there were objections to an invented name, I disinterred the old one”. The title of the old, forgotten territory chosen by the writer dates back to the fifth century, when an Anglo-Saxon kingdom was founded in south and southwest England under that name; two centuries after, it had expanded to include the area which corresponds to that pictured by Hardy, but by the time of the Norman Conquest it had lost its identity.

Hardy’s exquisite interest in Wessex is not ungrounded. On one hand, it is explained through the characteristical passion for the past that thrilled the hearts of many a Victorian, Hardy making no exception, and on the other hand – through his origins, for the Victorian writer was born on the 2nd of June in Upper Bockhampton, in the parish of Stinsford, Dorset, the county which was to become the core of his novels’ Wessex. It is known fact that in one way or another, every novel that has ever been written carries within itself something of its author’s experience of real places and real people. As far as Thomas Hardy is concerned, although he never admitted that there had been any straight relation between his stories and his actual life, these two elements are remarkably close to one another. Their tight relation is before anything else noticeable in the author’s choice of topography and settings, because he sketched the Wessex of his novels being inspired by “the actual landscapes, towns, houses and roads of Dorset, Somerset, Cornwall, and Devon”.

Thomas Hardy’s beliefs and the pessimistic approach to life revealed in his novels are both understandable through his Dorset upbringing and inseparable from it. As a child, Hardy grew close to people who had a direct connection to the soil, whose subsistence depended on it. Without even imagining that they would become the spring of his inspiration, he would observe humble people working day and night on the heath, facing the winds and the weather for the wellbeing of their families. He became increasingly inspired by their folk legends and customs, by their fears and their superstitions; their native, inherent story-telling art, their dialect and natural sense of humor left a mark on young Thomas Hardy; the wonderful ballads that the people of Dorset used to sing at harvest, Christmas, birth or wedding celebrations were to become the melodious background accompanying the action of his novels. Like a dry sponge which is sunk into water, Hardy the child, although unknowingly, voraciously absorbed all of these details which later were to be skillfully used by Hardy the writer as the malleable material that his novels’ cores were molded from. Due to the fact that Hardy “mapped his personal psyche onto the landscape” of his Wessex, it was provided with a natural touch of genuineness, as if Wessex breathed life through all of its pores. The writer’s fidelity to life as it is presented in Wessex is worthy of high praise and it does receive it, in fact; J. Hilis Miller, for instance, considers that the settings represented by the Wessex landscape “are as close to reality as a mirror image or a photograph”. The exact truth, the notion of similitude between the real and fictional world is attained in Hardy’s novels through the depictions of the landscape and of the everyday world of rural workers of the region. The writer sensed the advantages that a fictional region like Wessex could provide and as a consequence, he concentrated a whole series of novels on its particular geographical area. This resulted in allowing scope for far-reaching fictional possibilities.

By having at once established a common setting such as Wessex for several of his novels, Hardy could have easily intermingled the characters like Trollope and Faulkner did and could have also created what is known as a sequel novel, given the fact that geographical names are so close to one another on the fictional maps of Wessex. Nevertheless, he opted for not doing so: “There is little overlapping between areas and practically no overlapping of characters”. The writer does not carry over the characters and specific setting of one novel into another, but with two special cases; except for Far from the Madding Crowd characters farmer Everdene and prosperous farmer Boldwood, whose younger selves are to be seen again in The Mayor of Casterbridge, and the mention of the Under the Greenwood Tree character William Dewy in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, no other character pervades any another novel. Thus, the fictional worlds are only linked to one another through their general setting, Wessex.

Although each novel is separate and complete in itself, the Wessex novels create a world even more comprehensive only when taken as a whole. It is only then when the writer proves that the situations he presents in his novels are characteristical for the entire world, for all places and times. Resorting to the use of symbolism and descriptions, through which Wessex was placed “in juxtaposition to the rest of the world”, Hardy demonstrated that the region was not only a simple, trivial district, but a true microcosm. In the idiosyncratic spirit of the Victorian Age, the world of the Wessex novels is built on binary oppositions that do not exclude each other, but coexist and give specificity to the subject. Rural areas highlighted by minimizing in aspect the urban ones, light versus dark atmosphere, nature and exteriors put against interiors and man-made buildings – all of these represent symbolical settings that change the reader’s perception of Thomas Hardy’s novels.

3.2.2. Urban Settings

Given the long-lasting life of Thomas Hardy, spreading over no more, no less than nine decades – for he was born when Queen Victoria was still young in her reign and died ten years after the First World War had ended – one could even say that the author inhabited both the past and the present of his times. As a writer, he grew up in the context of strongly-rooted realism, but he could see the first glimpses of modernism come into being under his own eyes. Having the chance of living both in the rural and the urban areas, Hardy “hovered on the margins of each, conscious of not being fully a member of either”. He experienced as much as one human being could do, living enough to face a wide range of radical changes, both intellectual and social. Despite the fact that he was aware of the benefits brought by those changes, Hardy was still reticent to many of them, questioning the notion of progress and lamenting the loss implied by it: “Although he knew that many of the social changes in his native Dorset were for the better, he nevertheless regretted the passing of some of the old ways of life and the end of the traditions and beliefs of his own youth”.

The above mentioned idea represents the starting point of a hypothesis according to which a constant opposition between rural and urban settings is trackable in all of Hardy’s Wessex novels. In the writer’s vision, cities are related to progress, whereas remote villages in the countryside stand for the endangered traditional values in need of protection. This is the main reason why special attention is paid to the elaborate descriptions of rural areas – be they heaths, crop fields, sheepfolds or dairy farms – and little or no more than vague depictions are made of the urban settings. From the same belief that links progress and urban locations to moral falling springs the author’s idea that it is of ill omen for characters to leave their natural environment in favour of an urban destination or of surroundings other than those to which they belong. In this way, Thomas Hardy makes use of all the possibilities offered by the setting of his novels, charging them with symbolic meanings.

An example of opposition between the rural and the urban world appears in Hardy’s 1878 novel, The Return of the Native. The entire action of the novel is set in the rural “vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath” which makes itself known to the reader under its many facets. However, another geographical location is mentioned in the novel: Paris. Although the action does not literally take place in the capital city of France, on the main character Eustacia Vye, dreaming of escape from her rural life, this alluring setting has an impact of paramount importance. If one can speak of absent characters, then undoubtedly the same can be said in the case of this novel’s setting: the readers are faced here with the altogether missing setting of urban Paris which greatly affects the whole flow of events.

Paris is what brings Eustacia closer to Clym: returning from her nocturnal meeting with Damon Wildeve on the heaths, she is told by her grandfather that young Clym Yeobright was to come back home the following week in order to spend Christmas with his family. Eustacia’s old grandfather, whose voice echoes those of all the inhabitants of Egdon Heath, refers to the cosmopolitan city as to a “rookery of pomp and vanity”. The negative implications of the words used place Egdon Heath in opposition to Paris from the very beginning and they also reflect the writer’s attitude towards the subject. Eustacia too is aware of this sense of clash between the two worlds, but in a different way: for her, the values are reversed; she is mesmerized by the the flamboyant, colourful universe of hustle that Paris embodies and thus she ranks it on a higher step than the burdening heaths she was inhabiting.

The chance of leaving Egdon Heath arm in arm with Clym Yeobright, destination Paris, was planted like a seed in Eustacia’s mind when she accidentally overheard the conversation of two villagers. Unknowingly, by talking about the young man’s arrival and about how he and Eustacia “would make a very pretty pigeon pair”, the villagers played a great part in determining the woman’s future course of actions. Given her fiery and wishful temperament, in her wish to escape from the monotonous Egdon Heath she sees a savior in Clym’s person: “A young and clever man was coming into that lonely heath from, of all contrasting places in the world, Paris. It was like a man coming from heaven”. Paris, therefore, becomes Eustacia’s notion of heaven. It is not, however, the same heaven as Clym’s.

Not long after overhearing Sam and Humphrey’s talk, in her false beliefs of escaping the small community of Egdon Heath and of finding fulfillment somewhere else, Eustacia sets her heart on becoming Clym’s wife. Nevertheless, she is to be disappointed: because her husband’s dreams do not chime in with her own, their marriage is not a happy one for neither of them. What is more, their unsuccessful matrimony causes havoc in the lives of the people close to them. In one way or another, the Paris of Eustacia’s aspirations is the root of all adversities in the novel and this is how the location achieves its symbolic value. If it had not been for Eustacia’s longing desire to leave Egdon, her marriage to Clym would not have taken place, Clym’s quarrel with his mother would not have existed and the latter’s death would have been belated. Had not Eustacia been thoroughly dominated by her aim of living a Parisian life, three tragic deaths would have been avoided. Even though the action does not actually take place in the French capital city, its influence on the characters is immense and an undeniable negative symbolism is inevitably cast upon it.

The exotic setting of Paris is that one thing which brings Clym and Eustacia together and at the same time what tears them apart. From her first encounters with Clym Yeobright, Eustacia fails to realize that she is half falling in love with a vision. Not only do their goals and ambitions not correspond, but they are also completely different: Eustacia makes it known clearly that she despises her natural environment, whereas Clym finds relief in it – “I cannot endure the heath, except in its purple season. The heath is a cruel taskmaster to me.’/ ‘Can you say so?’ he asked. ‘To my mind it is most exhilarating, and strengthening, and soothing. I would rather live on these hills than anywhere else in the world’”. In addition to that, while she tries to bring to the surface the hidden Paris in Clym, the subject of her searches does everything in his nature to free himself of the burden; still, Eustacia ravenously imagines herself living in Paris, while rejecting everything connected to rural England:

‘At present speak of Paris to me. Is there any place like it on earth?’

‘It is very beautiful. But will you be mine?’

‘I will be nobody else’s in the world- does that satisfy you?’

‘Yes, for the present.’

‘Now tell me of the Tuileries, and the Louvre,’ she continued evasively.

‘I hate talking of Paris! Well, I remember one sunny room in the Louvre which would make a fitting place for you to live in- the Galerie d’Apollon. Its windows are mainly east; and in the early morning, when the sun is bright, the whole apartment is in a perfect blaze of splendour. The rays bristle and dart from the encrustations of gilding to the magnificent inlaid coffers, from the coffers to the gold and silver plate, from the plate to the jewels and precious stones, from these to the enamels, till there is a perfect network of light which quite dazzles the eye. But now, about our marriage-’

‘And Versailles- the King’s Gallery is some such gorgeous room, is it not?’

‘Yes. But what’s the use of talking of gorgeous rooms? By the way, the Little Trianon would suit us beautifully to live in, and you might walk in the gardens in the moonlight and think you were in some English shrubbery; it is laid out in English fashion.’

‘I should hate to think that!’

‘Then you could keep to the lawn in front of the Grand Palace. All about there you would doubtless feel in a world of historical romance.’ He went on, since it was all new to her, and described Fontainebleau, St Cloud, the Bois, and many other familiar haunts of the Parisians; till she said:

‘When used you to go to these places?’

‘On Sundays.’

‘Ah, yes. I dislike English Sundays. How I should chime in with their manners over there! Dear Clym, you’ll go back again?’

Clym shook his head, and looked at the eclipse.

‘If you’ll go back again I’ll- be something,’ she said tenderly, putting her head near his breast. ‘If you’ll agree I’ll give my promise, without making you wait a minute longer’.

Almost every dialogue between Clym and Eustacia follows the exact pattern, as if the two were not sharing the same communication code. A relationship based on such incongruities is inescapably doomed to failure. Therefore, the city of “grand shop-winders, trumpets, and drums”, as the rustics call it, becomes the insurmountable obstacle between the two lovers, a burden that Yeobright wants to get rid of in favour of Egdon’s simpler and slower life paces of a fading English rural past. Clym’s connection to the heath is suggested from the title of the novel – he is a native, he pertains to the heath as much as Eustacia does, although unknowingly.

Another of Hardy’s natives is Tess Durbeyfield, whom the author himself calls a “daughter of the soil” in the nineteenth chapter of the novel. Taking into consideration the strong connection between Tess and her natural environment, the tragic course that her life takes once she is forced to leave home is understandable. Because the Vale of Blackmoor was the world to Tess, every attempt of hers of leaving it brought her one step closer to personal ruin. Tess’s first attempts of leaving Marlott result in her seduction; eventually, her under pressure choice of venturing even further, reaching the resort city of Sandbourne, caused her ultimate downfall.

Once Tess is forced by circumstances to get reunited with Alec d’Urbervilles and become his wife, both of them head towards the city of Sandbourne, a place which had recently experienced an astounding growth. This urban setting is so far removed from every other location in which Tess had lived beforehand that it even seems unnatural for her name to be linked to it: “Where could Tess possibly be, a cottage-girl, […] amidst all this wealth and fashion?”. Hardy deliberately provides this section of the novel with such a stark contrasting setting. Tess’s collapse and the alteration of her emotions is suggested by means of contrast with the pomp and parade of the “pleasure city” of Sandbourne.

Tess is not the only character that does not belong to the thriving, fashionable Sandbourne. Once he arrives in the city, Angel Clare feels overwhelmed by the surrounding glittering novelty: “This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and its western stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its promenades, and its covered gardens, was, to Angel Clare, like a fairy-place suddenly created by the stroke of a wand”. Angel is both puzzled by and not feeling at ease with the imposing landscapes of Sandbourne.

All the information that Hardy provides about the environment of Sandbourne is crucial for the understanding of the characters. As a result, the description of this peculiar place is symbolical and it foreshadows Angel’s discovery of a different Tess, at The Herons. Had their re-encounter taken place in a different location than Sandbourne, Tess might have appeared to Angel as the same old one he used to know; but since they met in a site where their traditional values had been abolished by the new, where “lofty roofs, chimneys, gazebos, and towers of the numerous fanciful residences” had taken the place of the humble cottages and farms they used to know – it is of no surprise that Tess’s appearance is striking for him. When they meet at The Herons, Tess looks “not at all as he had expected to see her – bewilderingly otherwise, indeed.[…] She was loosely wrapped in a cashmere dressing-gown of grey-white, embroidered in half-mourning tints, and she wore slippers of the same hue. Her neck rose out of a frill of down”. A cashmere dress and matching shoes are not exactly how a daughter of Nature would look like. This is the main argument that leads to the conclusion that Tess comes to physically resemble the artificial place that she inhabits, wearing a mask of strength and assurance given to her by a more stylish and fashionable attire. Nonetheless, Angel’s reappearance manages to break the façade of strength displayed by Tess, whose return to Alex had only been forced by circumstances.

It was the circumstance of falling for the second and last time in the trap of the urbane and sophisticated Alec d’Urbervilles what had taken Tess away from her natural environment and had settled her in Sandbourne, in a stylish lodging house called The Herons. The name of the place has a highly symbolic value of which Hardy makes use in a clearly ironic way. One needs only to consult a dictionary of symbols and the hidden, ironic significances of the term will be brought to light. According to Michael Ferber’s Dictionary of Literary Symbols, herons stand for “nobility, freedom, and the beauty of nature”. However, the place gives neither nobility, nor freedom to Tess. First, although she lived at The Herons known as Mrs. d’Urbervilles, Alec’s rightful wife, the title she had gained through association with his name was of no worth – Alec only had false claims to a noble rank, since his father had used his large fortune in order to actually buy that lustrous family name. Secondly, being in an urban location and in Alec’s presence at the same time meant anything but freedom for Tess. Like a bird in a cage, she is basically entrapped by Alec in a world she does not belong to and this gives ground to the idea that whenever found in his presence, Tess can be identified with birds. The writer’s above mentioned description of Tess gives substance to the hypothesis. In addition to the attire that makes her seem birdlike, for her neck is said to rise out of a cashmere gown as “out of a frill of down”, Tess’s attitude also resembles that of a caught, tamed creature. Months before her second capturing by Alec, she was not as subdued a creature as when found in Sandbourne, emotionally defenseless. Last but not least, there is no beauty of nature for Tess at The Herons. The name of the place is but an ironic reminder of the long-distance times spent with Angel Clare in the luxuriant Valley of the Great Dairies: herons indeed were the birds that she and Angel would see in their long walks an Talbothays, the place of Tess’s spiritual healing. The Herons, through its name, becomes a symbolic setting of the novel.

Another urban setting associated with a character’s downfall can be found in Thomas Hardy’s first major literary success, the novel known under the name of Far from the Madding Crowd. If the writer provides the readers with an actual depiction of Sandbourne in the previously discussed novel, he does not do the same in the case of Far from the Madding Crowd where the situation is more similar to what happens in The Return of the Native: the city of Bath, just as Paris in the above mentioned novel, has a strong symbolic meaning even though it lacks an actual description or scenes whose action takes place there. The readers’ perception of Bath is constructed on its direct opposition with the rural environment, Weatherbury.

The description provided for Bathsheba Everdene’s natural world confirms the writer’s beliefs regarding the traditional and the new: “In comparison with cities, Weatherbury was immutable”. From the very beginning, this statement gives way to the general idea defining Hardy’s novels: an elemental character’s movement towards an urban location will only result in massive changes, both for the himself or herself and for the characters around. Therefore, the female protagonist’s journey to the city of Bath proves to be life-changing. Once she leaves her natural environment represented by Weatherbury, her life takes a turn for the worse. The city of Bath represents the setting of the final act in the drama of Bathsheba’s seduction by Troy.

Sergeant Troy’s perpetual chase after Bathsheba finally reaches its goal, although only own to circumstances, when she decides to follow him in Bath. Leaving Weatherbury with the full intention of breaking off her engagement to Troy, “alone in a strange city, […] grieved and troubled”, she ends up marrying him in order to avoid a scandal. This is only one example of how environment can influence a character’s decisions. One of the villagers, Cain Ball, sees the young married pair by chance; the portrayal of the couple that he gives Gabriel Oak and the other workers makes Bathsheba and her husband look as if pertaining to a different world than theirs: “Ay, and she wore a beautiful gold-colour silk gown, trimmed with black lace, that would have stood alone ’ithout legs inside if required. ’Twas a very winsome sight; and her hair was brushed splendid. And when the sun shone upon the bright gown and his red coat — my! how handsome they looked. You could see ’em all the length of the street”. Just like Tess’s urbane appearance, Bathsheba’s new attire seems not to fit her kind of natural beauty, but the environment instead. In both novels, by describing their garments, the writer suggests the power that the artificial, urban setting has upon the female protagonists.

3.2.3. Settings and Seduction

The settings of Thomas Hardy’s novels are symbolic in a multitude of ways which leave room for interpretation from the readers’ part. Among these numerous uses of the settings’ symbolism, of a substantial relevance is that of helping in deciphering the relationships between seducer and seduced. The writer’s descriptions of landscapes deepen the readers’ understanding of the different stages in which a seduced character finds herself or himself. There are certain elements in the descriptions of nature that help in foreshadowing the characters’ development or their eventual fall in the traps of the seducers. The writer uses a large body of metaphors and similes in order to create pictures of nature that change their shape according to the emotional states of the seduced. Also, the power that the seducers have upon the seduced ones reflects itself in the way in which mood and atmosphere are created.

Inside the pair formed by Bathsheba and Francis Troy the roles are delimited from their very first symbolic encounter. On a narrow path leading through a fir plantation, at night, when passing each other by, Bathsheba’s dress gets pinned to the ground by Troy’s boot spur. In the dark, the woman struggles to free herself; once Troy lights Bathsheba’s lantern and observes her beautiful features, he flatteringly praises them and delays in untangling the gathers of the dress. The setting of this meeting which has such a great impact on the female protagonist is described as following by the writer:

Her way back to the house was by a path through a young plantation of tapering firs, which had previously been planted some years earlier to shelter the premises from the north wind. By reason of the density of the interwoven foliage overhead it was gloomy there at cloudless noontide, twilight in the evening, dark as midnight as dusk, and black as the ninth plague of Egypt at midnight. To describe the spot is to call it a vast, low, naturally formed hall, the plumy ceiling of which was supported by slender pillars of living wood, the floor being covered with a soft dun carpet of dead spikelets and mildewed cones, with a tuft of grass-blades here and there.

The fact that their encounter happens in the heart of darkness is not coincidental. Bathsheba wanders the premises of her farm carrying a darkened lantern in her hand, so she cannot be seen. Her wandering in such darkness without any source of light might stand for her unawareness as far as the deceiving sergeant is concerned. The night is said to be “the time of unseen dangers” and this is what Troy actually represents, although Bathsheba fails to notice it. An otherwise strong person, Bathsheba develops an all too sudden weakness for Troy by falling for his charming surface from the moment she first sees him, when he lights the lantern. Discussed in relation with the lighting of the lantern, the heavy darkness might also symbolize Bathsheba’s lack of experiencing such deep emotions, even though she had been courted before by both Gabriel Oak and Boldwood. After a whole life of complete emotional darkness, a false light is lit before her eyes and what she sees is the deluding image of Troy, a handsome man in brass and scarlet. Dazzled, Bathsheba inevitably falls in the sergeant’s trap. His ironic line becomes symbolic because it foreshadows the effects of his charms: “You are a prisoner, miss; it is no use blinking the matter”. In addition to the pitch darkness of the night into which Bathsheba plunged like into a maze, another element in the depiction of the setting enhances the idea of her being trapped. By comparing the narrow path to a low-ceiled hall, a stronger feeling of captivity is attained. Although she is found in the middle of nature, in the fresh air of the night, Bathsheba is still a captive.

The protagonist’s later encounters with Troy make the two become increasingly intimate: first, on the hay meadow Troy gives his watch as a present to Bathsheba, then the mask of pride and distance she was wearing cracks when hiving the bees together; finally, their closest meeting takes place in The Hollow Amid the Ferns, the place of Bathsheba’s yielding and the name of the novel’s twenty-eighth chapter. In a reckless act, Bathsheba accepts Troy’s invitation to watch him practice his sword-exercises. This makes room for Troy’s plans of seducing Bathsheba to come into being. She sets towards their meeting point at eight o’clock in a “midsummer evening, whilst the bristling ball of gold in the west still swept the tips of the ferns with its long, luxuriant rays”. The time of their meeting is symbolic: eight o’clock in a summer day is the moment of sunset, of twilight, embodying the dividing-line which both joins and separates opposing principles. A setting sun represents the death of the day; applied to the novel, the sunset suggests Bathsheba’s passing towards a darker episode of her life, since her further association with Troy will bring her nothing but misery.

The entire setting of the scene is comprised of many symbolic elements. As one could easily notice, the temporal frame was but the first element to add further meaning to the understanding of the novel. The symbolism of the place chosen by the writer for the scene is also relevant, by proving to be obviously erotic: “although there is no direct reference to any physical contact beyond a kiss, Hardy’s account of Troy’s ̔strange and glorious performance̕ is one of the most sexually charged and sexually provocative scenes in nineteenth-century fiction”. Even before reaching their meeting place, Bathsheba seems overtly restless, disquieted: “She was now literally trembling and panting at this her temerity in such an errant undertaking: her breath came and went quickly and her eyes shone with an infrequent light”. In addition to Bathsheba’s physical reaction which can be easily linked to sexuality, the place of their appointment also looks seductively inviting: the hollow, a naturally dented area on the surface of the ground, is “floored with a thick flossy carpet of moss and grass intermingled, so yielding that the foot was half buried within it”.

The first hint to Bathsheba’s downfall is represented by her actual physical descent into the pit in the middle of the ferns; standing on the bottom of the hollow, Troy embodies both her physical and spiritual temptation. Ferns are not involuntarily chosen: according to their Victorian interpretation, they stand for magic and the fascination it implies. This is particularly the effect that Troy’s sword exercise has upon Bathsheba – she is spellbound, both afraid and thrilled at the same time. The impact of the exercise is revealed by the writer by means of symbolic description; a demonstration of prowess, the daring thrusts and cuts of the sword in the hot summer air seem to build an actual cage around Bathsheba, suggesting once again her status – she is captured and seduced by Sergeant Troy:

Beams of light caught from the low sun’s rays, above, around, in front of her, well-nigh shut out earth and heaven – all emitted in the marvelous evolution of Troy’s reflecting blade, which seemed everywhere at once, and yet nowhere specially. These circling gleams were accompanied by a keen rush that was almost a whistling – also springing from all sides of her at once. In short, she was enclosed in a firmament of light, and of sharp hisses.

The bold act of kissing Bathsheba before leaving represents the certainty that Troy has as far as her entrapment is concerned.

Bathsheba’s seduction resembles that of Tess Durbeyfield in certain aspects. As it is the case in Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess’s seduction happens gradually, following clearly distinguishable steps determined by her encounters with Alec; furthermore, the time and place of the characters’ meetings are highly symbolic, no element used in the descriptions is ever cast adrift by the author. Symbolic imagery is brightly used in order to highlight and distinguish the various emotional states of the heroine as her relation with her seducer deepens. What is more, topographical titles are also symbolic; leaving her native Marlott in order to claim kin, Tess reaches the territories of the district known as The Chase, a term which actually summarizes her time spent at the d’Urbervilles manor. The manorial home of Tess’s seducer also bears a symbolic name – The Slopes. The deviation from the right position implied by the word’s inherent meaning makes reference to Tess’s future downfall.

When she first visits the d’Urbervilles estate, Tess is stunned by the novelty of the place which she would usually associate with antiquity. The outer appearance of the house and its premises gives room to interpretation; the exteriors are all painted in different shades of red which might imply an equivalence between the location, its owner and their potential association with passion and sexuality: “The crimson brick lodge came first in sight[…] Tess thought this was the mansion itself till, passing through the side wicket with some trepidation, […] the house proper stood in full view. It was of recent erection – indeed almost new – and of the same rich red colour”. Four chapthers after, further details are added to the sketch of the manor, pointing to the fact that it was “overrun with ivy”. The presence of this particular plant recognized for its plural symbolism enables two interpretations. The first one, based on the sexual connotation of ivy, makes the plant’s function resemble that of the red dye of the manor: it helps in depicting the location as one associated with passion, sexual attraction and seduction from its owner’s side. Taking into consideration the plant’s other symbolic value, that of embodying a “feminine symbol denoting a force in need of protection”, one can come to the conclusion that it hints at Tess’s defenselessness and vulnerability in Alec’s immediate presence. In this particular way, settings prove to have paramount importance; very often, a change in Tess’s psychological state determined by Alec’s influence is doubled by an immediate change of the face of nature, which is stylistically achieved by the writer who creates symbolic imagery through a large body of metaphors and similes, or by means of symbolic actions.

Such a symbolic, foreshadowing action is the one taking place on Tess’s first return from Trantridge. During her visit there, she had been bedecked by Alec with rose buds and blossoms to which she did not object: “she obeyed like one in a dream and when she could affix no more he himself tucked a bud or two into her hat and, and heaped her basket with others in the prodigality of his bounty”. In the van that lead her from Chaseborough to Shaston, ashamed of “the spectacle she presented” to the other passengers, for she had “roses at her breast; roses in her hat; roses and strawberries in her basket to the brim”, Tess stealthily proceeds to remove the more prominent flowers with which she had been embellished by Alec. However, by accident, “in looking downward a thorn of the rose remaining in her breast accidentally pricked her chin”. Behind Tess’s seeing the incident as an ill omen stands the writer’s strong will of ensuring his meaning. Tess’s being pricked by a thorn is but a small scale parallel of what was about to happen to her on the foggy night in The Chase, on behalf of Alex d’Urberbilles. Therefore, the action becomes symbolic because it foreshadows the seduction, while the writer skillfully disguises and asserts his meaning at the same time.

Whenever Tess is found in the presence of Alec d’Urbervilles, the atmosphere created by the writer is characterized by thinner or thicker mist, according to the different stages of the seduction process. Alec is first introduced to the readers as a handsome young man, smoking and he is continually linked to the image of smoke throughout the novel; it is in the same day, that of Tess’s first visit at The Slopes, when Alec watches Tess’s “pretty and unconscious munching through the skeins of smoke that pervaded the tent”. Smoke becomes the concrete, physical shape that the blurring of Tess’s moral vision takes. Alec pulls the strings in a game of seduction that Tess enters unknowingly, without recognizing in it her possible ruin: “behind the blue narcoting haze was potentially the ̔tragic mischief̕ of her drama”.

As Tess’s relationship with her seducer becomes more intense, one can notice a meaningful gradual growth of fog, mist and smoke imagery. The overall obscurity of the region of her seduction, comprised in the adjective grey is indicated from the moment of Tess’s second departure from home, when the writer places her natural environment and her destination point in evident opposition: “behind, the green valley of her birth, before, a grey country of which she knew nothing except from her first brief visit to Trantridge”. The fog imagery increases in magnitude, however, as the night of her ruin approaches, in order to symbolize Tess’s plunge into a crescent state of confusion. The writer’s descriptions of misty atmosphere reach the point of greatest intensity and force when he outlines the circumstances of Tess’s pilgrimage to the three-miles distant “decayed market-town” of Chaseborough.

Similar to Bathsheba Everdene’s scene of seduction, that of Tess Durbeyfield is also depicted as beginning at dusk, a time of transition from a previous stage to a totally conflicting one: “It was a fine September evening, just before sunset, when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines, and the atmosphere itself forms a prospect without aid from more solid objects, except the innumerable winged insects that dance in it. Through this low-lit mistiness Tess walked leisurely along”. This portrayal of foggy atmosphere is but a prologue, a shallow description of what is to happen once the night falls. Walking unhurriedly towards her own collapse, Tess reaches the house of a villager where Saturday-night gatherings were usually held. Duskiness is once again the word that best describes the atmosphere at the hay-trusser’s house, where the fervent dancers’ turbulent feet moves caused a “floating, fusty debris of peat and hay” in which the participants surrendered their reason to the utter confusion of instinct. The scene becomes once more symbolic, given the association of the almost heathen dances reminiscent of lost fertility rites, with their topographical location, the proximity of England’s primeval forest, The Chase: “Of the rushing couples there could barely be discerned more than the high lights – the indistinctness shaping them to satyrs clasping nymphs – a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity of Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing”.

Having already grown increasingly restless at the hay-trusser’s place, Tess is happy when the crowd finally decides to head home. Outside the building, however, the atmosphere is even heavier that inside of it, due to the darkness of the night which doubles the fog. In this particular episode of the novel, the writer resorts to an even more powerful symbol, the moon, in order to foreshadow Tess’s downfall. When she and the group leave the party together, the three-miles walk back home seems to represent no danger – she has both the company of her acquaintances and the protective moon above, whose light would show them the right path. Nevertheless, once she enters a conflict with the women of the group and she is forced by circumstances to continue her way home aside Alec only, the safeguarding power of the moon appears to be diminished, leaving Tess exposed to her seducer’s attack. Dictionary entries of different sources seem to coincide when it comes to the association of the moon with virginity or chastity, virtues frequently attributed to it “partly through its connection with virgin goddesses and partly because its light is cold”. The qualities of the Greek godess Artemis, the protectress of virgins, are passed on to the celestial body who therefore becomes a protector as well. After having taken into consideration this symbolic value that the moon has, a difference of perception is irrefutably traced in the two descriptions of Tess’s walk towards home: when she was surrounded by folk, the dry white road they were taking was “made whiter[…] by the light of the moon”; however, once she was forced to leave them in favour of Alec’s company, fog “became general and enveloped them. It seemed to hold the moonlight in suspension”. Furthermore, interpreting the moment which preceded Tess’s wrongdoing by her seducer, the heroine’s vulnerability can be unquestionably linked to the absence of the moon: “by this time the moon had quite gone down, and partly on account of the fog The Chase was wrapped in thick darkness”.

The remaining part of the eleventh chapter of the novel is characterized by an evident accretion of the hazy, misty imagery, culminating in complete darkness. When Alec leaves Tess alone resting on a bed of dead leaves, in order for him to find out their whereabouts, the atmosphere is depicted as growing so hazy that “webs of vapour[…] formed veils between the trees”. As he returns, the entire surrounding nature and the pervasive fog merge into darkness. By means of dramatic contrast, Hardy creates one of the protagonist’s most emblematic pictures. Sustained by the subtitle of the novel itself, the image of Tess as a pure woman is built in opposition with every element of the setting, the heroine bearing the single sign of life and light in the utter blackness around: “The obscurity was now so great that he could see absolutely nothing but a pale nebulousness at his feet, which represented the white muslin figure he had left upon the dead leaves. On the background of such a pitch-black night symbolic of spiritual error, Tess’s white attire stands for the purity and innocence that are to be spoilt. This is only one of the many situations in which Thomas Hardy makes use of the contrast between light and darkness with the view of creating a symbolic setting for his novel.

3.2.4. Light versus Darkness[shelter and repository]

3.2.5. Setting as Images of Heaven and Hell

A finding already become classic with Thomas Hardy’s critics is that of the symbolic imagery moulded according to a character’s innermost emotions. The writer is very much interested in elaborating complex pictures of nature which must be regarded as pure expressions of a character’s sense of reality. In other words, the detailed images of nature in Hardy’s novels are not only meant to build a realistic frame for the story, but also to reflect the lives of the protagonists with their ups and downs. According to the particular stage in the development of the characters, natural surroundings may either simulate their tormented lives, or mirror their merriment and exhilaration. Consequently, one can divide the descriptions of nature that the writer provides the novel with into images of paradise and images of hell.

Such images of heaven and hell are wonderfully sketched in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a novel in which the author takes great interest in creating particular descriptions of landscape which coincide with and comment upon a singular human character, that of Tess Durbeyfield. Nature is presented from numerous changing vantage points: it can be definitely beautiful and kind at a certain time, or harsh and cruel at another, but always reflecting Tess’s emotional state. After her unwanted seduction and the loss of her child, although returned to the native land of Blackmoor, the vale of innocence, she cannot stay there for long. She only abides there for a period of time long enough to regain emotional balance, and then decides to head towards a different land in search of a new beginning, for “she could not bear to look forward into the Vale” any longer. Tess’s decision to leave Marlott for the second time – in the hope of restoration and of escaping her past – is doubled by its correspondent in nature: “A particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of germination was almost audible in the buds; it moved her, as it moved the wild animals, and made her passionate to go”. Spring is the season of renewal, hence Tess’s departure happening “on a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May” is not fortuitous, but rather symbolic of the promise of spiritual restoration. This particular restoration is implied by the very title that the third phase of the book bears: The Rally.

As she is presented wandering along the paths that lead to Talbothays, the writer provides a great number of descriptions of the long-sought-for Valley of the Great Dairies. The rich descriptions of the new natural surroundings not only reveal the physical beauty of the region, but also suggest the potential emotional healing of the heroine in that particular place: “the new air was clear, bracing, ethereal.[…] Her hopes mingled with the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as she bounded along against the soft south wind. She heard a pleasant voice in every breeze, and in every bird’s note seemed to lurk a joy”. As Tess’s stay at Talbothays prolongs, the seasons develop and summer takes the place of spring. Summer is said to represent “maturity, the full flowering of a man’s powers” and in relation to the novel, it suggests the fullness and ripeness both of the landscape and of Tess herself. The following descriptions of the natural surroundings are noticeably evocative of beauty and fertility, suggesting an elemental relationship between the human beings and nature. The setting of the first scene that brings Tess and Angel Clare close to one another seems to recommend a comparison between the blooming garden at Talbothays and the Garden of Eden:

The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.

Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden's sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound.

The atmosphere created by such abundance of vegetation and vitality, where the natural flow of time and spatial references no longer matter, is indicative of the Garden of Paradise. The author strengthens this idea and makes the comparison complete by repeatedly labeling Angel and Tess as the primordial couple of humankind: “they seemed to themselves the first persons up of all world[…]The spectral, half-compunded, aqueous light which pervaded the open mead, impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve”. This is but the first in a series of references to the Garden of Eden. Hardy describes Tess as similar to Eve on another occasion, when waking up from an afternoon nap, she regarded him as “Eve at her second waking might have regarded Adam”.

Apart from suggesting the couple’s identification with the inhabitants of the original garden, the setting of the scene is also constructed on images which clearly hint at the awakening of Tess’s sexuality. The overall backdrop provided by the writer for this particular episode of the novel – mid July, plants in full growth, rising temperatures, rises in the water levels – could only anticipate the stage of maturity of the protagonists’ feelings towards one another: “Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate” If Tess is a daughter of the soil, then the strong connection between her and the earth will undoubtedly make the changes that occur in nature have an echoe in the woman’s senses and attitude. Nature in its ripest season might be considered not only to mirror Tess’s actual state of bliss, full fertility and predisposition to love, but also to reflect her pass and foretell her future. Therefore, the surrounding luxuriant flora leaving sticky stains on her arms and attire might have a twofold interpretation: the sliming herbs around her may suggest Tess’s anterior association with Alec, the one who stained her reputation, and to the same extent – the misery that is to be experienced by the woman at Angel Clare’s hands. Angel’s refusal to understand Tess’s former fall as something beyond her fault, added to his eventual leave to Brazil bring Tess to a long and both physically and emotionally agonizing journey through the lands of Flintcomb-Ash. The newly introduced setting of the novel is created by associating a series of apocalyptical images which lead to the categorization of Flintcomb-Ash as Tess’s hell and place of exile.

The features of the region towards which Tess is pushed by circumstance are inherently encompassed in its topographic name; derived from the adjective ̔flinty̕, the location’s name proves entirely worthy of the traits implied by the term: Flintcomb-Ash is a stern, harsh place set in a slight depression where the place of abundant verdancy is taken by stone only. In addition to this, the fact that the place is said by the narrator to be nothing else then “the remains of a village” is enhanced by the second part of its name, Ash. Tess is, therefore, thrown into a world “almost sublime in its dreariness”, a world in which, unlike at Talbothays, sterility and austerity prevail: “There was not a tree within sight; there was not, at this season, a green pasture—nothing but fallow and turnips everywhere, in large fields divided by hedges plashed to unrelieved levels”. Indeed, the location resembles the “starve-acre place” that Marian was talking about and an image of hell on earth, at the same time. Two are the ̔devils̕ that Tess encounters in the hell of Flintcomb-Ash: the physical burdens brought about by the harshness of work and her tormenter, taskmaster Groby. In the collective imagination of the farm laborers, the taskmaster was seen as the devil himself, the one that cannot be named: “farmer Groby—or, as they called him, he”. Caught in between the two ̔devils̕ and added to Angel’s abandonment, the afflicted emotional life of the heroine brings her on the brinks of self-ruin.

Flintcomb-Ash surely represents a place of the damned-on-earth, according to the descriptions that the writer provides for it in the forty-second, forty-third and forty-fourth chapters of the novel. Just like the damned souls made to resist ceaseless, icy rain in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy depiction of Inferno, the farm workers among which Tess is also found are asked to work strenuously in poor weather conditions:

They worked on hour after hour, […] not thinking of the justice or injustice of their lot.[…] It was so high a situation, this field, that the rain had no occasion to fall, but raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind, sticking into them like glass splinters till they were wet through. Tess had not known till now what was really meant by that. There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is called being wet through in common talk. But to stand working slowly in a field, and feel the creep of rain-water, first in legs and shoulders, then on hips and head, then at back, front, and sides, and yet to work on till the leaden light diminishes and marks that the sun is down, demands a distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.

The natural environment depicted by Hardy at this particular stage in the development of the novel’s action is designed to mirror the female protagonist’s tormented live; the surroundings reflect both Tess’s lack of choices with respect to her current position and her insignificance as a human being in the grand scheme of things: “the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without features[…] The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness;[…] So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface of the former like flies”.

The features of the new landscape are the exact opposites of the images of luxuriant paradise represented by the Talbothays Dairy garden, “that happy green tract of land where summer had been liberal in her gifts”. The meandering waters of the Valley of the Great Dairies are replaced here by aridity or frozen rain, beatitude by sorrow, rich vegetation by stone: “The swede-field[…] was a stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground of the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets—the outcrop of siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes”. Tess’s green, sunny, romantic paradise of Talbothays cannot be regained unless it is first lost. Flintcomb-Ash, hence, takes the place of Tess’s lost heaven, objectifies her loss her completes the painting of the two opposing worlds existing in the novel: paradise and hell.

3.2.6. Symbolic Time Frames

After having taken into consideration the different locations in which Hardy placed the action of his novels and after interpreting the symbolic values of those particular locations, special attention needs to be paid to the temporal dimension implied by the notion of setting. It is not only the topographical details what can add symbolic implications to the understanding of a novel, but the specific aspects related to time and its flow too. Thomas Hardy is one of the novelists who considered that temporal relations played a crucial part in the construction of a novel. He sensed the degree of specificity that a symbolic time frame can add to a novel and seized it. Consequently, upon closer perusal, readers might be pleasantly surprised to discover how the hourglass that counts the days and hours in Hardy’s novel is not only a mere measuring instrument: it accompanies characters through their development, defines their choices of action and at times it even justifies them, being known fact among Hardy’s critics that his novels “have a seasonal pattern, the changing relations of the characters being matched by the progression of the seasons”.

There are certain generally acknowledged features related to the time frame of Thomas Hardy’s novels which add specificity to the works through their inherent symbolism. Among these features one can mention the existence of particular stages in the development of the characters constantly doubled by changes in the weather brought by the flow of time, of key actions of the novel taking place at highly symbolical moments in time, and of a certain circularity given to the novels by setting their beginning and ending at approximate times of the year. One of the novels which provide many examples of such features is Tess of the d’Urbervilles, whose action follows the succession of seasons, beginning with the picture of the crucial meeting between Tess’s father and the local parson on an evening in late May, and ending on a bright and warm July morning, with Tess’s execution. After presenting the readers Tess’s entire summer at The Chase, a place which becomes symbolic of her time spent there, the writer makes a chronological leap of a few weeks, bringing the action in late October. The scene taking place on a Sunday morning is relevant for the interpretation of time because it proves the point of time’s cyclical repetition: “History repeats itself cyclically and the present moment does not exist alone. Like in real life, it is surrounded by the other dimensions of time, permeated by them”. It is Tess’s gloomy present that is permeated with recollections her past seduction: as she goes up the incline, she associates the place with her wrongdoing, for the incline is the same on which she had been so wildly driven by Alec d’Urbervilles earlier in June. The place is the same, nonetheless the person and the time are no longer those four months before and their change can be noticed in the manifestations of the weather, which reflect the character’s emotional state: the green world of the summer months is now “half-veiled in mist”. From this moment, the writer performs another chronological leap comprising the whole period of Tess’s pregnancy and places the action in August. The ailment and death of Tess’s child and her brief stay at home during the winter represent the epic material for the fourteenth and fifteenth chapter of the novel. The third phase of the book and the following chapter are opened by an observation on time: Tess’s second departure from home matches the beginning of a new season, spring, which suggests the potential of regeneration and spiritual prime of the character.

Hardy's Heroes and Heroines as Elemental Characters

Thomas Hardy himself divided his works of fiction into groups delimited by the features they shared. In his General Preface to the 1912 edition in which he brought together the Wessex novels, the author confessed that his best known works were to be gathered from that moment on under the syntagm Novels of Character and Nature. Only by hearing or seeing the terms that enter the construction of the syntagm, one can easily make a connection between it and those elements of the novels on which the emphasis is laid: character portrayal and setting. Therefore, in each of the Novels of Character and Nature, the writer deals with human concerns which are given prominence by nature, which comprises more that landscape. Contrary to his contemporary fellow writers, Thomas Hardy did not use direct techniques of characterization, but rather chose to reveal character by means of setting and symbol. In each of the three novels submitted to analysis, nature imagery has an essential role by helping to establish character – only in relation to it a character’s basic adherence to the natural or civilized world is elucidated. Nature also plays an important role in suggesting or reflecting a character’s psychological state at a particular moment in the development of the action.

The protagonists of Thomas Hardy’s Novels of Character and Nature are elemental characters which bear that name because of their close connection with the elements of life: “They are in harmony with the rhythm of the seasons; they know the phases of the moon; and they are at the mercy of wind, rain and fire”. According to Martin L. T. Bergbusch, Hardy’s elemental characters whom he names rustics can be divided into two categories: the minor and the major rustics. Also known as members of the same rural community, the minor rustics are the truly regional characters of the novels and they have their folklore in common, as well as their customs and superstitions. The minor rustics are easy to identify through their dialect, which provides the novels with a touch of a regional dye. Joseph Hilis Miller’s opinion on Hardy’s rustics comprises best their quintessence and it is worth being mentioned, for according to American critic:

His rustics do not so much act as talk. The function of their talking is to express a verbalization of the world which is so completely taken for granted that such characters can hardly be said to be individualized or conscious at all. Certainly, their qualities of individuality and consciousness are very different from those of the main characters. The community speaks through the rustics, speaks for its collective memory and collective interpretation of the world. Scenes of echoing stichomythic dialogue between such characters often take place in the warm cosiness of a tavern. Such a scene is appropriate. The rustics are passive, static, without longing for anything beyond the daily repetition of agricultural tasks which have been repeated for so many generations that they have a ritualistic fixity. Their voices, as the collective wisdom speaks through them, have a semiconscious, dreamy quality, like a man talking in his sleep or like a medium possessed by a spirit. The rustics speak continually of the past and keep it alive in a language which is embodied memory, haunted by years gone by, a language as nostalgic, musing, or reminiscent as Hardy’s own voice in many of his poems.

From Hilis Miller’s definition of the minor rustics, one can reach the conclusion that the features shared by these characters bring them so close to one another that they seem to form a single, collective character whose wise voice resembles that of the chorus in Ancient drama, commenting on the action of the main characters; in The Return of the Native, for instance, the members of the rural community are so effectively tied to their native area that as a group commenting the news related to Clym, they are referred to as the heath: “Something being expected of him, he had not been at home many days before a great curiosity as to why he stayed on so long began to arise in the heath”; therefore, the local people are so close to the heath that it comes to echo their thoughts. The thorough absorption of the minor rustics into their natural environment enables them with the ability to read nature’s signs as if it were speaking a human language; consider, for instance, all the superstitious interpretations that the dairy men make in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In all Wessex novels, the rustics participate in the same kind of work and have occupations that condition their lives: they are furze-cutters in The Return of the Native, dairy people and farm laborers in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and sheep-farmers in Far from the Madding Crowd. Their superstitions, customs and dialects form the cultural background for all the novels and for the experiences of the main characters. They also play an important part in reflecting the writer’s account on the relation of man to the universe: given the fact that the peasant’s deepest instinct is that of seeing “a blank purposelessness and futility in the universe”.

The second category is that of the major rustics, characters whose experiences are seen as having universal, archetypal value and who are usually the novels’ protagonists, sharing several basic traits such as “endurance, patience, fidelity, fertility, pride, and stubbornness”. This type of rustics become archetypal because of the passions that drive them: “The fact that Hardy’s elemental characters are actuated by simple, elemental passions in relation to destiny, they are given a gigantic and universal character”. Despite the fact that he has portrayed both male and female elemental characters, Hardy somehow managed to make himself known for the latter, the image of the heroine he depicted in his novels being that of the passionate woman. Tess Durbeyfield, Bathsheba Everdene, Eustacia Vye are only few of the female characters which are sketched according to that pattern; none of the three protagonists embodies the ideal image of the Victorian woman, the angel of the house, but quite the contrary: “These women are not the paragon of chastity that the set image of the Victorian women requires and by way of their lifestyle they become part of nature, elemental figures, driven by the same energies that lead to the growth of plants and animals”.

A skillfully sketched portrait of such an atypical woman is that of Bathsheba Everdene, the female protagonist of Far from the Madding Crowd.

Eustacia Vye, the heroine of The Return of the Native shares with Eustacia Vye the same passionate temperament. Hardy describes Eustacia’s physical or personality traits in terms of the natural world’s objects, very often those encountered on or related to the heath. Throughout the novel, Eustacia is associated with all four basic elements of nature, but out of these, with fire in particular, in order to evidentiate the heroine’s wild and uncontrollable nature. Almost the entire seventh chapter of Book First is dedicated to Eustacia, from whose description the status of modern, unsubmissive woman can be assigned to her:

Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity.[…] She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, had she handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government.[…] To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow: it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow. Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could always be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she would instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. If, in passing under one of the Egdon banks, any of its thick skeins were caught, as they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft of the large Ulex Europaeus- which will act as a sort of hairbrush- she would go back a few steps, and pass against it a second time. She had Pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light, as it came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their oppressive lids and lashes.

This comprehensive depiction of Eustacia is particularly telling: just like the heath, she has a wild and untamable nature and carries dark mysteries deep inside her soul. The light reflected by her eyes is not that of a compliant, obedient Christian woman, but of an unyielding, relentless one, who often rebels against convention. Eustacia’s physical appearance is nothing but the physical, concrete manifestation of her predominant personality features. Eustacia’s resemblance to the heath itself suggests that although spectacularly beautiful, both of them are tragically, dangerously harsh. Despite the fact that she claims to loathe it, out of all characters of the novel and except for Clym, Eustacia is perhaps the closest to the heath. She seems at ease whenever found on the vast waste of land, but restlessness and nervousness can be sensed in her actions whenever she is indoors. She wanders the paths across the heath by herself, without any fear. In the dead of the night, the heath offers her shelter and it keeps both her and Wildeve safe from the curious eyes of the locals: “the shades of the hills kept us almost invisible in the hollows”. She is so close to the elements of life and to the environment, that along with Wildeve, in their secret nocturnal meetings, they seem an organic, integrated part of the heath: “Their black figures sank and disappeared from against the sky. They were as two horns which the sluggish heath had put forth from its crown, like a mollusk, and had now again drawn in”. Eustacia’s intimate relation to the heath, going as far as identification, as well as the trapped character of her passion transform the character into a “splendid romantic figure”.

Nevertheless, the essence of Hardy’s depiction of Eustacia Vye and the key to decipher the protagonist’s character resides in the following paragraph: “Assuming that the souls of men and women were visible essences, you could fancy the colour of Eustacia’s soul to be flame-like. The sparks from it that rose into her dark pupils gave the same impression”. This description of Eustacia’s fiery temper is only the first in a series of other wordings which hint to her intimate connection with fire, the basic element of life. Fire is said to be associated with “the concept of superiority and control”, both notions being traceable in Eustacia’s personality traits. She is superior to the other villagers both by nature and by social status, she is beyond their comprehension and her peculiarity is what makes her stand out from the crowd and become the talk of the town. In the beginning of the novel, when Eustacia is depicted as the first person that emerges at Rainbarrow’s top, the highest location on the heath, a clear suggestion is made that she stands above any other character. Eustacia is either loathed or worshipped, but never ignored and this is a proof of her superiority. The interest that the locals take in Eustacia’s outlandish personality go as far as to consider her a witch: while Christian Cantle only comes down to talking of Eustacia as of a “lonesome dark-eyed creature” involved in witchcraft, Susan Nunsuch takes actual course of action against Eustacia. In her struggle of proving Eustacia’s allegiance to the world of black magic, the superstitious Susan first pricked the woman with a long stocking-needle, when she saw her at church “so as to draw her blood and put an end to the bewitching” of her child, then she went as far as creating a wax figure, a voodoo doll of Eustacia used in an odd ritual meant “to counteract the malign spell which she imagined poor Eustacia to be working”. There are inhabitants of Egdon, however, that admire the lady portrayed as queen of the heath: Grandfer Cantle, for instance, never utters a bad word about Eustacia, what is more he defends her in front of other less knowing locals and praises her beauty; it is for certain that young Charley the mummer sees Eustacia as such a superior, almost intangible being that when the chance appears for him to gain closeness, he makes the most of it by claiming to hold hands with the lady at Mistover Knap for at least a few minutes.

Except for superiority, fire might also symbolize “passion of any sort, any warmth of feeling”. Eustacia Vye is, indeed, the passionate heroine of the novel, one whose ambitions are introduced by the writer as following: “To be loved to madness – such was her great desire”. Furthermore, the writer makes use of recurrent allusions to fire meant to suggest the protagonist’s ardent and impulsive nature: when she and Damon talk about Thomasin by the bonfire on the fifth of November, noticeably jealous, she is said to cry “with quick passionateness”; likewise, when she receives the visit of her mother-in-law, the woman’s allusions to an outside marriage liaison of hers with Wildeve result in Eustacia firing up “all too quickly”, crying with “passionate tears in her eyes” and eventually culminating in “her face crimsoning, and her eyes darting light”. Eustacia’s inflammable nature is suggested throughout the novel. Given her fiery temper which could only be annihilated by an opposing principle, water, it is not surprising that she finds her death by drowning in the end of the novel, either willingly or by accident. Paradoxically, the heath whose absolute queen and goddess Eustacia is even though she confesses to abhor it, becomes the source of her tragic damnation, a death that Eustacia herself anticipates in a conversation with Wildeve: “Tis my cross, my shame, and will be my death”.

Not only Bathsheba Everdene and Eustacia Vye are passionate heroines; Tess Durbeyfield is also ruled by strong feelings and intense emotions and she probably embodies Thomas Hardy’s most skillfully created elemental character, out of all novels. The reason behind Tess’s prominence as an elemental character might stand Hardy’s different treatment of nature in the novel. Unlike in his other works, where nature imagery functioned as a means of asserting one character’s basic allegiance either to the natural or to the civilized world, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles the writer is interested in creating images of nature that correspond with a single individual, the heroine. Serving the purpose of clarifying the main character’s experiences, natural imagery gains even more importance that in other novels of the writer. In in the process of creating Tess, Hardy has employed a variety of pictures of nature in order to suggest her oneness with the natural world. He began by identifying the young and innocent Tess with her native ground; if the aloofness of the heath is what pushes Eustacia to such desperate acts, the uniqueness and isolation of the wonderful Vale of Blackmoor where “the world seems to be constructed on a smaller and more delicate scale” might represent the reason behind Tess’s innocence. Tess’s tight connection with the elements of nature is undeniable; the emotional changes experienced by Tess at her departure from the native, secluded Marlott and her subsequent seduction have echoes on the surface of the natural world. In addition to that, Tess’s stay at Talbothays provides details regarding the natural world which straightly follow the insight into the heroine’s character. Since the chapters that analyze the relation between the main character and the Trantridge and Talbothays landscape have been already discussed in a previous section of the paper, further comment will be made upon the following episode in the development of the action: the period ensuing Tess’s consent to marry Angel.

The first impression that Tess leaves on Angel Clare at The Great Dairies proves once again her powerful association with the natural world and represents the basis for Angel’s high regard of the young milkmaid: as he sees Tess for the first time, the parson’s son does not fail to observe “What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature” she is. Their following encounters take place in nature’s bosom, where Tess feels mostly at ease. In one of her conversations with Angel, Tess even admits to never having been afraid of the wild and open spaces: “Oh no, sir… not of outdoor things; especially just now when the apple-blooth is falling, and everything so green”.

One clear way in which Tess’s status of elemental character is strengthened is through the continuous description of her traits in terms of the objects of the natural world.

The details about the natural world which directly follow this

insight into Tess's characmr are merely an extension–or better, an

externalization, a word picture~-of the heroine's psychological state.

In plainest terms, the observation that "the trees were just as green as

before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever," and

that "the familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief,

nor sickened because of her pain" is Tess's interpretation of the world

Clym Yeobright is probably one of Thomas Hardy’s best illustrated male elemental characters. He is that particular native referred to in the title of the novel, a title which clearly hints at his Egdon origins and, consequently, at his powerful connection to the natural world of the region of Wessex. Ever since he was a boy, the people of the Egdon have been associating Clym’s name to the heath itself: “Clym had been so inwoven with the heath in his boyhood that hardly anybody could look upon it without thinking of him”. Clym, just like his father who came of a humble family, is characterized by an inborn love for simplicity and its adjacent rejection of the sophistications of life: “I cannot enjoy delicacies; good things are wasted upon me”. Unlike Eustacia, whom he considers ambitious, he thoroughly lacks that particular quality. Working in Paris as a diamond establishment’s manager, Clym had lived among well refined and ambitious people; had he shared this personality trait with those of the circle, he would have sought hard to achieve wordly success. However, as soon as he leaves his provincial environment for the extravagant city of Paris, Clym realizes the futility of his departure and considers giving up cosmopolitan success in favor of a more significant calling on his native land, be it not understood by the others:

I’ve come home because, all things considered, I can be a trifle less useless here than anywhere else. But I have only lately found this out. When I first got away from home I thought this place was not worth troubling about. I thought our life here was contemptible. To oil your boots instead of blacking them, to dust your coat with a switch instead of a brush: was there ever anything more ridiculous?[…] Well, as my views changed my course became very depressing. I found that I was trying to be like people who had hardly anything in common with myself. I was endeavouring to put off one sort of life for another sort of life, which was not better than the life I had known before. It was simply different.

Clym’s return to Egdon, generated both by his lack of ambition and his inherent love of simplicity, represents the driving force of the novel. Each character of the novel responds to Egdon in dissimilar ways: an integrant part of the heath, Clym loves his native ground to the same extent to which Eustacia despises it; the heath embodies the source of Eustacia’s misery, “her Hades” and the spring of Clym’s happiness at the same time. Clym completely rejects the flamboyant culture and civilization that Eustacia longs to discover. Eustacia fiercely wishes to leave, whereas Clym fiercely wishes to stay. This particular mismatch represented by their attitudes towards their natural surroundings creates the greatest gap between the two protagonists, the one that is insurmountable. Eustacia places Clym on a pedestal of illusions and fails to see him as the native he really is, almost an extension of the heath, its bare essence:

If anyone knew the heath well it was Clym. He was permeated with its scenes, with its substance, and with its odours. He might be said to be its product. His eyes had first opened thereon; with its appearance all the first images of his memory were mingled; his estimate of life had been coloured by it; his toys had been the flint knives and arrow-heads which he found there, wondering why stones should ̔grow̕ to such odd shapes; his flowers the purple bells and yellow gorse; his animal kingdom the snakes and croppers; his society its human haunters. Take all the varying hates felt by Eustacia Vye towards the heath, and translate them into loves, and you have the heart of Clym.

What is peculiar in the construction of Clym’s character is the mixture of features: he embodies both the author’s opinion of the modern man and an elemental character at the same time. All of the general features of an elemental character are traceable in Clym: he is endowed with endurance and fidelity to his native ground, he is patient, proud and stubborn. Clym employs all of these traits in serving his purpose of becoming a “schoolmaster to the poor and ignorant, to teach them what nobody else will”. However, his idealism and unpractical nature are precisely the source of discrepancy in Clym’s construction as a character: his ideal is that of a modern man who is able to understand, but unable to act properly. He is aware of his superiority to the common people of the heath and of the fact that much was expected from him, thus he sets the education and improvement of the the heath folk as his own critical mission. Both Clym’s mother and the people of Egdon are doubtful of his plan, which they regard as unfeasible and less desirable than his promising life in Paris. Clym’s visionary idealism leads him towards self-ruin because he fails to realize that the heath folk are not yet prepared to respond positively to the changes considered by him. Clym engages all his fidelity, stubbornness and endurance in reaching his modern, yet not understood goals; in fact, the stronger the opposition he encounters, the more persistent he becomes, going as far as turning into a martyr: “Yeobright loved his kind. He had a conviction that the want of most men was knowledge of a sort which brings wisdom rather than affluence. He wished to raise the class at the expense of individuals rather than individuals at the expense of the class. What was more, he was ready at once to be the first unit sacrificed”. Nevertheless, between his modern and his elemental sides, the scales are tipped in favour of the latter. Found throughout the novel, the multiple descriptions of natural surroundings in which Clys feels entirely at ease stand as a proof of the prevalence of his elemental facet to the detriment of his modern one. An illustrating example of the easiness and contentment rejoiced by Clym when he is found in the middle of nature is the beautifully achieved fragment depicting his routine of working as a furze-cutter:

Though frequently depressed in spirit when not actually at work,[…] when in the full swing of labour he was cheerfully disposed and calm.[…] His familiars were creeping and winged things, and they seemed to enroll him in their band. Bees hummed around his ears with an intimate air, and tugged at the heath and furze-flowers at his side in such numbers as to weigh them down to the sod. The strange amber-coloured butterflies which Egdon produced, and which were never seen elsewhere, quivered in the breath of his lips, alighted upon his bowed back, and sported with the glittering point of his hook as he flourished it up and down. Tribes of emerald green grasshoppers leaped over his feet, falling awkwardly on their backs, heads, or hips, like unskillful acrobats, as chance might rule; or engaged themselves in noisy flirtations under the fern-fronds with silent ones of homely hue. Huge flies, ignorant of larders and wire-netting, and quite in a savage state, buzzed about him without knowing that he was a man. In and out of the fern-dells snakes glided in their most brilliant blue and yellow guise, it being the season immediately following the shedding of their old skins, when their colours are brightest. Litters of young rabbits came out from their forms to sun themselves upon hillocks, the hot beams blazing through the delicate tissue of each thin-fleshed ear, and firing it to a blood-red transparency in which the veins could be seen. None of them feared him.

At a closer reading of the passage, one can easily notice how all the elements of nature seem to cooperate in order to fulfill the same task, that of completely and irreversibly integrating Clym into their one being. Given the fact that he was already considered a product of the heath, the overall movement of the pulsating natural world towards the assimilation of Clym might be seen as nature claiming back its earned rights. The fragment is replete with verbs, adjectives and adverbs whose inherent meaning suggests closeness: the sound of humming bees is intimate to Clym, furze-flowers and the typical amber-coloured butterflies of Egdon Heath surround him from all sides, as if catching him in a passionate embrace, flies buzz around him without even distinguishing him from the general natural environment, and the larger wild creatures approach him without any fear as if he were one of theirs. According to J. Hilis Miller, elemental characters are so close to nature that “they seem to have grown naturally from it and to have remained part of it”; Clym seems to perfectly prove the critic’s point of view, because his alikeness with the natural world is so powerful that it goes as far as complete equivalence. When Clym’s mother decides to visit him with the view of a possible reconciliation, watching from afar, she cannot distinguish between her son and the heath: “he appeared of a russet hue, not more distinguishable from the scene around him than the green caterpillar from the leaf it feeds on”. Further in the same chapter, the writer proves once again Clym’s status as a character that is close to the elements of nature, by means of comparing him to a “mere parasite of the heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a garment, entirely engrossed with its products, having no knowledge of anything in the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss”. Clym Yeobright’s outright unification with the natural world suggests the definitive breach between him and the flamboyant world of Paris he had once belonged to.

In this novel, which Hardy places

among ‘Novels of Character and Environment’, his fidelity is to environment

in the widest sense; evident in his minute delineations of nature

and rural occupations, his ear for the natural rhythms of dialogue and

dialect, his alertness to humour, and his detailed descriptions of interiors

of houses, the church, and the gallery where the choir sits. Such places,

subject to repeated human activity, achieve value as the site of ritual.

“It was a sunny afternoon at the beginning of summer, and the moist hollows of the heath had passed from their brown to their green stage. Yeobright walked to the edge of the basin which extended down from Mistover and Rainbarrow. By this time he was calm, and he looked over the landscape. In the minor valleys, between the hillocks which diversified the contour of the vale, the fresh young ferns were luxuriantly growing up, ultimately to reach a height of five or six feet. He descended a little way, flung himself down in a spot where a path emerged from one of the small hollows, and waited. Hither it was that he had promised Eustacia to bring his mother this afternoon, that they might meet and be friends. His attempt had utterly failed. nature as shelter

He was in a nest of vivid green. The ferny vegetation round him, though so abundant, was quite uniform: it was a grove of machine-made foliage, a world of green triangles with saw-edges, and not a single flower. The air was warm with a vaporous warmth, and the stillness was unbroken. Lizards, grasshoppers, and ants were the only living things to be beheld. The scene seemed to belong to the ancient world of the carboniferous period, when the forms of plants were few, and of the fern kind; when there was neither bud nor blossom, nothing but a monotonous extent of leafage, amid which no bird sang.” 202 when he returns from his mother la fel

setting as time

“On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with the element she moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness” p. 75 tot 75 darkness

3.2.4. Light and Darkness

The technique of using the striking contrast between light and darkness serves symbolically both the themes and the settings of Thomas Hardy’s novels. In each of the three novels submitted to analysis, the imagery of light and darkness is used not only in order to create atmosphere, but also to reflect profoundly and uniquely a character’s innermost emotions.

It is the heath, however, the setting which has the most ponderous presence in the novel. In making up Egdon, Hardy used recollections from his early childhood which, taken as a whole, were transformed into the idealized variant of a past rural England, unsullied by the modern paces of life. This is, nevertheless, only the first image under which the heath is said to function. The second and even more important role of the vast waste of land known as Egdon Heath is its capacity of delivering further messages, essential in the understanding of the text. Since Thomas Hardy is acknowledged for the powerful symbolism and vivid, intense evocation of atmosphere used in his novels, Egdon Heath embodying Nature in its fullest becomes more than just a mere setting.