The Framing of Hardy’s Wessex Tales

 

     Each of Hardy’s Wessex Tales is set in the past, just at the point of vanishing from living memory.  Several are placed in frames with a local resident recounting the narrative as part of local lore.  Those who would prefer a regionalist and realistic author might think his goal was to preserve vestiges of long Dorset tradition before they vanished altogether, and indeed Hardy does include certain geographically and historically specific details: the fear of a French invasion, the domestic manufacture of mead, and the coastal practice of smuggling, for instance.  Yet the stories’ appeal seems almost entirely elsewhere.  Though Hardy is generally considered a realist, this distancing is part of a contrary tendency.  Hardy’s unlikely short story plots favor heavy dramatic ironies and conclusions colored by his characteristic pessimism far more than they do the convincing reporting of detail.

     What is bleak in his narrative world, though, is in part occluded by the retrospective view, as nostalgia colors the narration.  His tone is further warmed in the framed tales by the pretense that the stories are being told, as in Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka or ghost stories told around a campfire, in an intimate social setting, simply to pass the time.  The irony, poetic justice, and, in some cases, surprise endings provide reader satisfaction in spite of the darker implications of Hardy’s world-view.

     “The Three Strangers” does present a vivid vignette of country life in the shepherd’s celebration of his growing family as well as implying certain assumptions about local conditions with the shocking harshness of penalties for arson and yet the suggestion that the hayrick burning may have been motivated by partisanship for the poor and thus to some extent supported by the population.  There is gentle humor in the host’s happy hospitality and the guarded frugality of his wife and, though the hangman plays a role, he is cheated of his victim. 

     Yet the principal impact of the story depends on unlikely coincidence and heavy dramatic irony.  The fact that a condemned prisoner and his assigned executioner are drinking at each other’s elbow unawares is surely the principal plot element that strikes the reader, placing the story close to the ironic twists that please readers of de Maupassant, O. Henry, and Saki.  This story does deviate from Hardy’s modern tragedies as it concludes with the escape of the guilty party, but the tone lingers in the concluding paragraphs with the death (in one case, the aging to “a sere and yellow leaf”) of everyone concerned.

     The slighter ”A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four,” the very title of which alludes to its semi-legendary character, arises from local history, but this supposed glimpse of Napoleon himself doing reconnaissance [1] really has little to do with the wars of Britain and France.  Like “The Three Strangers” the plot turns on a subterfuge, a strategic disguise and the story is told not for patriotic reasons but simply as a small marvel to be relished for its own sake.  When Solomon Selby launches into his narration, it is clearly as a performer wishing to amuse his audience.  He has assumed “his narrative smile,” indicating his readiness to relate an entertaining story, the literal truth of which is of little concern to anyone.   This tale, too, ends by recognizing the inevitability of mortality: for ten years the storyteller has lain “beneath a simple headstone.” 

     “A Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion” is likewise based on commonly known facts of history.  This story, too, clearly depends on dramatic irony and the most unlikely chance of Phyllis’s being misled by what she overhears her fiancé saying and then deciding not to meet her German lover.  Thus the story turns out badly for all and ends, as did the others, in the graveyard.  Hardy is drawn to incidents illustrating the myriad mischances of love in which history may play an accidental part. 

     In “The Withered Arm” his willingness to use superstitious elements to build a compelling story is given free rein.  The “spectre” whom Rhoda seizes, the effect on Gertrude’s arm, and the intervention of the folk healer are all inexplicable in rational terms, more decidedly preternatural than those to which Mrs. Radcliffe’s readers were accustomed.  Gertrude dies in distress, Rhoda survives, though “bent” and “haggard,” and Farmer Lodge lives a solitary life.  The bastard child is another sympathetic convict, one of whom evn the executioner says “if ever a young fellow deserved to be let off, this one does; only just turned eighteen, and only present by chance when the rick was fired. However, there's not much risk of that, as they are obliged to make an example of him, there having been so much destruction of property that way lately.”  This again, apparently, a crime thought to be the work of a radical just as in “The Three Strangers.”  Instead of graves, the story ends with a reference to Rhoda’s “sombre thoughts.”

     Hardy’s characters seem never to be able to sort themselves out into satisfactory relationships.  In “Fellow Townsman” Barnet’s mésalliance is contrasted with Downes’ happy marriage.  When Downe’s wife dies, he is stricken with feeling of guilt and frustration, but then his thoughts turn to Lucy whom he had once rejected as inferior.  As it happens, the more fortunate Downes asks her first, leaving Barnet unsatisfied in another narrative in which love is for the main character elusive.

     Likewise in “Interlopers at the Knap” Farmer Darton is hesitant to marry Sally and, after dithering, selects the indigent Helena when her husband dies.  This choice turns out to be unsatisfying and, after Helena dies, he attempts unsuccessfully to renew his relationship to Sally, but she will not have him then.  Once again, the windings of fate seem not only inevitable but hostile to the protagonist’s happiness.

     In the final story of the collection, “The Distracted Preacher,” a Methodist is sent to a remote town where he is attracted to Lizzie, but their relationship founders when he discovers that she assists the local smugglers.  Here again is a genuine element of local lore and some mild humor at the upright minister’s shock at finding many of his parishioners including the woman who has claimed his interest are complicit in illegal activity.  An endnote following the story informs the reader that the happy ending in which the couple do wed and move away from the site of the bride’s misdeeds was forced upon the author by editorial mandate, though he would have preferred that Lizzie marry “Jim the smuggler” and emigrate with him to Wisconsin which he says is “corresponds more closely to the true incidents of which the tale is a vague and flickering shadow.”  Here, for once, Hardy’s pessimism was overruled by commercial considerations. 

     Hardy might be said to have viewed fate as hostile rather than indifferent as his denouements are so often characterized by frustration and pathos.  The author’s existential anxieties after he had abandoned his Christian upbringing are doubtless an influence as is his ambivalent relationship with his first wife and her death shortly before the publication of The Wessex Tales.  His radical politics may have caused him to feel further alienated.  Life, in Hardy’s view. Tends to deal most people a bad hand.  Art can be in some degree redemptive, as the Greek tragedians knew.  Just as ancient Athenians were reassured by the artfulness in which the dreadful circumstances of human life were portrayed, Hardy knew he could depend on the reassuring conventions of story-telling to please his readers and sell his work.  Perhaps more significantly, he sought thereby to convince himself and his readers that the disorderly and often depressing succession of human experiences must make in the end some sort of sense, even if life ends with death.  Relating the incidents of lived experience can still serve to pass an idle evening around a warming fire with our fellow mortals, and, for the moment, we are diverted, though author, narrator, and readers find themselves all in the same slowly sinking boat.    

 

 

 

1.  I was reminded of the similarly mysterious appearances of George Washington in Cooper’s The Spy. 

2.  His wish to retain some measure of the supernatural is clear is his interest in spiritualism and even in seeking, as some do today, metaphysical solace in the physics of relativity.  Several critics have analyzed the Hardy’s use of Gothic conventions.  See James F. Scott, “Thomas Hardy's Use of the Gothic: An Examination of Five Representative Works,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Mar., 1963) and Thomas Hardy and the Gothic: Restructuring the Gothic Prison in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Negeen N. Nikravesh, “Thomas Hardy and the Gothic: Restructuring the Gothic Prison in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), Victoriographies, Volume 13, Issue 1.