The first group of quotations below comes from Lawrence’s ‘Study’, the
second group from a recent book, Robert Langbaum’s Thomas Hardy in
Our Time (London: Macmillan Press, 1995). How far and with what reservations
or additions do you agree with any or all of these?
Lawrence
‘His [Hardy’s] feeling, his instinct, his sensuous understanding, is, however,
apart from his metaphysic.’ [see especially pp 2 and 9]
‘Normally, the centre, the turning point, of a man’s life is his sex-life, the
centre and swivel of his being is the sexual act.’
‘The final aim of every living thing, creature, or being is the full achievement of
itself.’
‘Man has a purpose which he has divorced from the passionate purpose that
issued him out of the earth into being.’
‘They [Hardy’s characters] are people each with a real, vital, potential self . . .
and this self suddenly bursts the shell of manner and convention . . . and from
such an outburst the tragedy usually develops. For there does exist, after all,
the great self-preservation scheme [society], and in it we must all live.’
Langbaum
‘Hardy and Lawrence are post-Darwinians . . . There emerges from Lawrence’s
analysis of Hardy’s people a new diagram of identity as a small, well-lit area
surrounded by an increasingly dark penumbra of unconsciousness opening out
to external, impersonal forces. This leads to a system of judgement which
condemns the attempt to shut out the darkness and live imprisoned in the well-
lit ego.’ (pp. 5-6)
‘But George Eliot seldom carries psychology to the depth where it obliterates
moral choice. Hardy goes farther than George Eliot and Lawrence goes farther
than both in letting the characters’ unconscious desires have their way against
social and moral restrictions.’ (p. 10)
‘Hardy’s explanations [for his characters’ actions] are in the deep psychological
manner overdetermined — which is to say that they are all partly valid, yet no
one of them is the complete explanation. . . . Sue’s fear of sex is always the
deeper motive beneath her apparent ones. Yet she subscribes . . . to an abstract
ideal of free sex.’ (pp. 13-17)