The Victorian Novel: THOMAS HARDY

His fictional world is one that lacks the comfortable shapes and contours the old
theology. The Church of England as still firmly rooted in a rural society, much as its buildings
are part of the Wessex landscape, but its authority has been withdrawn and its physical
structures are seen not as now incapable of holding, framing, and interpreting a grand, but
essentially discomforting idea of the universe. The universally negative relationship related in his
novels bears “nihilism” and it is responsible for his “inverted, decadent, late medievalism”.
Hardy’s Wessex is the Garden of Eden after “the fall of man into historical relativity”, man has
been delivered in the hands of a clockwork destructive mechanism. (“Tess of the
D’Urbervilles” - 1891) is generally regarded as his TRAGIC MASTERPIECE. It is the story of
INNOCENCE and SOPHISTICATION, of MAN and NATURE, of HISTORY and ITS
RELATION TO THE PRESENT, concentrated on the fate of a simple country girl whose
parents’ chance discovery of their descent from a once noble line sends her to seek the assistance
of a degenerate supposed relative to whom she surrenders before parting from him in disgust. It
is a piece of gratuitous savagery, and contributes to produce in the reader a feeling of plain
anger, frustration and resentment. MAN DOMINATING WOMAN. In his novels, the world
is disintegrated, tragic situations are reduced to mere comedies of grotesque, nature is
dominated by the wheel of fate, human life is presented as mere unalleviated human bondage.