I'd Have My Life Unbe: Thomas Hardy'S Self Destructive Characters

WHILE READING, teaching, and writing about Thomas Hardy over the past decade and a half, I have continually wondered at his emotional capaciousness and his technical versatility. He has been described by critics as a pessimist, a meliorist, a tragedian, a humorist, a realist, a romanticist, an antiromanticist, a symbolist, a love poet, a poet of despair, an agnostic, and a writer with a theological obsession. In the playful words of his own brief poem, he describes himself as "so various":

All these specimens of man,
So various in their pith and plan,
Curious to say
Were one man. Yea,
I was all they.

An undeniable gothic strain in Hardy's nature led him to play with the terrible realities of suffering and death; still, we should not underestimate the seriousness of his preoccupation with suicide. For him, the desire never to have been born was far more than a traditional poetic trope, while the wish to have his life "unbe" seems to have recurred often and been very powerful at certain stages. His self-destructive characters are drawn from deep within his own experience, as Hardy's spring of vitality, never overflowing, seems early to have run dry.

Over the next two decades, Freud elaborated his concept of a "death instinct," locked in ceaseless struggle with the instinct of self-preservation (the archetypal conflict between Eros and Thanatos). Freud's complicated explanation of suicide as transposed murder formed the basis for later refinements about the psychic energy needed for self- destruction. 9 The theory was given its fullest elaboration in 1938, when Dr. Karl A. Menninger applied Freud's concept of the death instinct to the study of suicide (in his book Man against Himself) and identified three components in the suicidal act: the wish to kill (aggression), the wish to be killed (submission), and the wish to die. Menninger acknowledged that these three, usually unconscious motives of suicide "are complicated by extraneous factors--social attitudes, familial patterns, community customs, and also by those distortions of reality incident to an incomplete personality development." Yet he insisted that neither these factors, nor heredity, suggestion, or maladjustments, can explain suicide, which is due to self-destructive tendencies "first appearing long before the consummation of the critical act."

The earliest notable contribution of the new analysts of the mind occurred in 1910, when the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society met to consider the "epidemic" of suicides among high school pupils. The ambitious inquiry, however, though conducted by some of the ablest professionals in the burgeoning field, did not yield the desired results. Sigmund Freud, the society's chairman and organizer of the symposium, admitted at the end of the session that no clear light was cast on the main problem of how the powerful life- preserving instinct is overcome.

Durkheim's diagnosis evokes such representative Victorians as Wilde, Pater, Arnold, Clough, Tennyson, Ruskin, and Housman--all disturbed by the "collective melancholy," and some victimized by it.

The concept of collective melancholy is an instance of Durkheim's "collective representations," which, in a given society, constitute the "collective consciousness." These representations exist outside the individual consciousness, on which they operate coercively. They are determined directly--not through the thoughts and emotions of individuals, but in permanent expressions and written law, works of art, literature, and statistical averages. The collective representations operate in ways suggestive of Hardy's idea of an "Immanent Will," although Hardy gives greater emphasis to man's "physical" bondage.

Gittings gives the most convincing account of Moule's impact on Hardy, who in adolescence was particularly susceptible to Moule's winning personality and responsive to his tutorial skills. Hardy's skeptical, critical turn of mind was fostered by Moule and the magazine to which he introduced Hardy in 1857, the Saturday Review. Though it is impossible to estimate exactly the effects of Moule's depressive nature and suicide upon Hardy, Gittings' final assessment demands serious consideration.

The certainty is that, from the time of the death of Moule, Hardy never portrayed a man who was not, in some way, maimed by fate.

Her resolution upon departing shows the firm judgment of the complex woman she has become since her "liberal education" (as the narrator terms it). "On one point she was resolved: there should be no more d'Urberville air-castles in the dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be the dairymaid Tess, and nothing more". Unfortunately, she is as incapable of being just a dairymaid as Jude is of being simply a stone mason; and for all the wisdom of such a resolve, it is simply impossible for one with her emotional nature and intellectual potential to achieve.

Like Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot Mill on the Floss, Tess could not "decide" to give herself--could not, that is, give rational assent to Alec's lovemaking; and she could not, with her overly civilized conscience, go through the act pleasurably and without tears. But in Hardy's brilliant discovery of a technique for registering her complex psychological state, Tess drifts into sleep as Maggie drifts down the river. When she is "taken" by Alec, her physical exhaustion and mental quandary permit a decision that she can neither condone nor evade.

Jude the Obscure provides a synthesis of Hardy's modern ethical insights. Hardy explored the situation of man in the modern world--an alienated, isolated consciousness confronting the void created by the absence of God. Man's search for meaning becomes a search for himself, for he alone is able to impose meaning on the disordered universe. But his quest for self-realization requires freedom of will and action, freedom of choice, and freedom from the various enslaving elements within himself and his environment.

The vision of man projected in the novel through Jude Fawley resembles the existential personality described by the Russian theologian Nicholas Berdyaev, a type of character who appears in the works of the great existentialist authors:

"Весь мир ничто по сравнению с человеческой личностью, с единственным лицом человека, с единственной его судьбой. Человек переживает агонию, и он хочет знать, кто он, откуда он пришел и куда он идет. Ещё в Греции человек хотел познать самого себя и в этом видел разгадку бытия, источник философского познания. Человек может познавать себя сверху и снизу, из своего света, из божественного в себе начала и познавать из своей тьмы, из стихийно-подсознательного и демонического в себе начала. И он может это делать потому, что он двойственное и противоречивое существо, существо в высшей степени поляризованное, богоподобное и звероподобное, высокое и низкое, свободное и рабье, способное к подъему и падению, к великой любви и жертве и к великой жестокости и беспредельному эгоизму. Достоевский, Киркегардт, Ницше увидели с особенной остротой в человеке трагическое начало и противоречивость его природы."

A cluster of images in the novel pertains to paganism, and their importance for Jude's character is considered by Norman Holland, who demonstrates that, latent within him, Jude carries the seeds of paganism. Fawley, who earlier aspired to become a Christian clergyman, undergoes a spiritual crisis and parts company with his doctrines. He rejects the ideals of Christianity, heavenly bliss and reward in the afterlife, to search for worldly bliss in the present life. Jude is converted to Sue's pagan views at the same time that Sue is converted to Christianity. This exchange of positions between Jude and Sue gives a symmetrical structure to the plot but, more importantly, it symbolizes the novel's rejection of Christian self-denial and its affirmation of pagan self- assertion.

BECAUSE OF PUBLIC EVENTS Which made marriage and divorce the chief topics of discussions when Jude the Obscure appeared, some reviews of the novel and much subsequent scholarly comment have been preoccupied to an exaggerated degree with those issues and other "problems." There is, of course, a legitimate sense in which Jude can be considered Hardy's anatomy of modern civilization and its discontents, but for all its concentration upon the ills and problems of contemporary life--the need for reforms in education and in the church; the social problems of marriage, divorce, and repressive public opinion; and the spiritual problems of modern alienation and "unrest"--Jude is essentially the story of an obscure man's life.

In one of the strangest scenes Hardy ever fashioned for bringing two lovers together, Eustacia articulates her desperation when Clym discovers her after the mumming. He asks why she joined. "To get excitement and shake off depression," is her response. To his question, "What depressed you?" she answers simply, "Life." Some readers may find in her brief response a pretentious young woman's efforts to impress the worldly diamond salesman. But her answer may also reveal the completeness of her alienation: she is alone, with a sense of entrapment, on hostile Egdon Heath--without hope for future satisfactions, an egoistic victim of melancholic depression.