"It is too much what I feel": The Roots of Thomas Hardy's Melodramatic Imagination

Abstract

My dissertation aims to explore how the melodramatic mode influences Thomas Hardy’s representation of human experience in four of his major novels. In particular, this study will be conducted through the perspective provided by the American literary critic Peter Brooks in his work The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), which especially analyses the mode of excess in Honoré de Balzac’s and Henry James’ fiction. This analysis aims to investigate how the manichean conflict between Good and Evil of traditional stage melodrama acquires a new meaning in Hardy’s novels, especially representing the universal human struggle between individual desire and the need for self-abnegation and restraint. The first chapter examines Hardy’s personal views on the subject and purpose of good fiction, focusing on his outspoken rejection of realism and his unconventional treatment of the narrative material if compared to late Victorian literary theories. It will also provide a brief outline of Brooks’ critical investigation of the melodramatic genre, particularly in relation to Balzac’s and James’ novels, which will be employed as the main frame of reference for the following sections. The second chapter will be devoted to the analysis of Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), in which Bathsheba Everdene’s troubled relationships with the male protagonists help to define this novel a ‘melodrama of triumph’. The following chapter on The Return of the Native (1878) will instead give emphasis to the unique relationship between the characters and their natural surroundings. This section will especially explore the affinity between the notion of the sublime and the melodramatic mode in relation to the extreme personality of Eustacia Vye, her approach to the heath and her insatiable hunger for passion. The last two chapters will investigate Hardy’s late novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) respectively, calling attention to Hardy’s employment of the melodramatic mode in order to enhance the tragic experiences of the two protagonists. The influence of the ‘melodrama of defeat’ will prove to be for Hardy a great resource for his exploration of characters’ development, particularly in relation to Brooks’ notion of the ‘resacralization of experience’.