Well, my dear readers, we have reached the end of a great journey. This was my first experience reading Thomas Hardy, and I must admit it was not as horrible as I originally thought it would be. At the start of the story, I was expecting a volume of long, complex sentences put together to create as sad and hopeless an image as possible; and while this was what I got, it still ended up better than expected. This is mainly due to the fact that Hardy’s merit as a writer is indisputable, despite his nontraditional approach to storytelling.
Hardy is very much like Jackson Pollock in a way. At first glance, Pollock’s paintings look like he handed a brush to a pigeon mid flight and just let art take place. At closer inspection, however, his paintings are indescribably captivating and contain something that brings honor to the artist in a way that parallels that of Van Gogh.
Hardy, using his medium of pen on paper, allows his phenomenal craftsmanship to tell a story of sorrow and general depression. As he puts it, in the lives of his characters “happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain” (243). Yet as his readers we are not meant to be repulsed by these sorrowful events. Instead, we should appreciate the happy times when they happen, but more often we should look for the beauty in the sadness of the story.
The beauty of depression is a concept toward which Hardy shows extreme interest. The world he crafts is one steeped in history and beautiful geography, yet beneath all of this beauty, there remains an underlying sense of foreboding. This ominousness slowly proves true, as one character after another is shown that there is nothing but disappointment and death behind the world’s beauty.
Within this world of sadness and depression, Hardy allows his characters to grow. Elizabeth-Jane, for instance, starts off the story as a naive, unintelligent, subservient girl whose own mother thinks it would be “folly to think of making [her] wise” (17). By the end of the story she has become a strong woman who maintains kindness while still refusing to put up with the nonsense of anyone around her.
This transition is started by the death of her mother. Then, Henchard pushes her out of his house and she begins to lodge with Miss Templeman, who she later loses. One tragedy after another befalls Elizabeth-Jane, until finally she makes the remark to her father “‘I don’t quite think there are any miracles nowadays’” (216).
Only in a world of darkness could a character like Elizabeth-Jane be grown from the girl she started out as, and only Hardy could craft her journey. It is his storytelling that makes Hardy so unique. None of his characters are safe from death or misfortune, yet as a reader we do not feel that any of their lives have been devalued. Each death shows us a new part of Hardy’s dark universe and teaches us as much as any of their actions did when they were alive.
So while Pollock is the king of organized chaos, Hardy is the commander of death and misfortune. It is through their selected means that art unlike any other comes into this world and gives both creators the unparalleled merit that they so deserve.
