RE-EXPLORING HARDY’S PURPORTED PESSIMISM FROM JUNGIAN PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Thomas Hardy is one of the last novelists of the Later Victorian Period. Being a versatile and prolific writer, he tried his hand at writing poetry, short story, and novel successfully. Having read the works of agnostic and atheistic philosophers, he developed a belief that there is some malevolent, hostile and vindictive cosmic force that is determined to oppose man. This force is relentlessly committed to frustrating his plans and schemes. He opines that this antagonistic force is ill-disposed and inimical to those in particular who assert their authority and want to get their own way. This belief made Thomas Hardy produce a copious amount of work speaking of his pessimistic perspective on life, rendering him conspicuous for critics and expositors. This research paper aims to re-explore the purported doom and gloom in Hardy’s works from Jungian viewpoint. That is to say, this delve is an endeavor to ascertain the cause of his literary pessimism, employing a lens what Carl Gustav Jung conceives as "The Shadow." As regards the trail of pessimism in Thomas Hardy's literary endeavors, countless volumes of primary and secondary body of knowledge apropos of matter have been delved deep into, involving his autobiography, biographies, and critical commentaries written on his works. A meticulous read of these volumes has led to the discovery that Hardy's perusal of the leaves of the works of his contemporary English Naturalist Charles Darwin, the gloomy Teutons Eduard van Hartman and Arthur Schopenhauer and Greek tragedians, Shakespeare and his contemporary agnostics impacted Hardy's spiritual and moral compass. Critics believe that pessimism, agnosticism, and atheism originating from The Victorian Intellectual Revolution caused Thomas Hardy to become pessimist, determinist, fatalist, agnostic and ultimately atheist viewing life, religion, universe and God in a pessimistic light. Furthermore, other elements that triggered his pessimism, involve circumstances of his intimate life, to be exact, his ephemeral yet amorous alliance with his betrothed Tryphena Sparks, and his failed marriage with his first wife Emma Lavinia Gifford. The pessimism resulting from Hardy's study of the works of all the aforementioned contemporaries, religious intellectuals, German philosophers, the influence of scientific development, and his failed intimate relationships with the aforementioned two women, became repressed in his unconscious, which later on manifested itself in his works such as Jude the Obscure and A Pair of Blue Eyes featuring people, their state of affairs, their faith resonating with Hardy himself, his own life circumstances, his own religious beliefs and with that of those associated with him in real life. In plain, this paper establishes it for a fact that literary Naturalism and Antihumanism of Thomas Hardy is inextricable from his personal and philosophical doctrine manifesting itself in the Magnum opus, unbeknownst to Hardy.