Friday 19 July 2024
The tragedy of Hardy
My mother-in-law used to work in Eastwood, the birthplace of D.H. Lawrence. During the early part of her working life, she encountered a few elderly Eastwood residents who had known Lawrence and the Lawrence family and didn’t think much of the man behind the novels. Apparently he wasn't highly regarded locally.
In this D.H. Lawrence quote, he writes about Thomas Hardy and what he calls the tragedy of Hardy. Yet this is also the tragedy of Lawrence, his inability to inhabit the security of established convention and perhaps his failure to find beyond it what he hoped to find.
This is the tragedy of Hardy, always the same: the tragedy of those who, more or less pioneers, have died in the wilderness, whither they had escaped for free action, after having left the walled security, and the comparative imprisonment, of the established convention. This is the theme of novel after novel: remain quite within the convention, and you are good, safe, and happy in the long run, though you never have the vivid pang of sympathy on your side: or, on the other hand, be passionate, individual, wilful, you will find the security of the convention a walled prison, you will escape, and you will die, either of your own lack of strength to bear the isolation and the exposure, or by direct revenge from the community, or from both.
D.H. Lawrence - Study of Thomas Hardy (1914)
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5 comments:
To my shame, I've never read Lawrence beyond a couple of short stories. I vividly remember some feminists at university saying he was the only male writer who had perfectly understood women.
That's probably what stopped me reading any further.
My mother, a keen reader of middlebrow and highbrow fiction, approached me, holding an orange Penguin paperback by the corner and at arm's length. "Bet you can't finish it" she said. And she proved right.
"It" was Lady Chatterly, of course.
Sam - I've read quite a lot of his output. He's very quotable in the way he writes, often very poetic and insightful, but he comes across as not quite engaged with the real world. As if he couldn't work out a personal standpoint which wasn't too isolated. If I remember rightly, he expressed some extreme political views of the George Bernard Shaw type too.
dearieme - that's one I never read even though I've read quite a few others. Can't remember why, but I couldn't get into it for some reason.
"I couldn't get into it for some reason."
Oh you naughty boy.
dearieme - not me guv, honest.
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