It’s clear that ChatGPT’s interpretation of Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” is based on the premise that Hardy is a Pessimist and that his works consistently reflect that philosophy. I beg to differ with that opinion. Even though most of the people I personally referred Jude the Obscure to did find it depressing rather than inspiring, I saw it as a warning that helped me succeed where I might otherwise have failed. I used Hardy’s observations to make sure that I didn’t make the mistakes his characters made. Of course, I was also fortunate enough to live in a society that had managed to rid itself of many of the rigid social codes that dominate his characters.
It’s hard to deny that Hardy’s most famous novels focus on characters who seem doomed to end badly, no matter how hard they struggle against their environment and society’s arbitrary rules. It is depressing to see someone you empathize with end up like his characters do. However, I tend to see the novels as tragedies, not tragedies that focus on heroic heroes or royalty, but tragedies that focus on everyday people, people like you or me, and their downfall is no less tragic than that of a rich or famous character.
Although more critics see Hardy as a pessimist than a realist, It seems to me that Hardy is a realist, not a pessimist, and it’s not hard to find critics on the internet who agree with me that he’s a realist, if not an ameliorist. Let me cite a couple here.
In a post entitled “The Realist Mistaken for a Pessimist” Eric (I assume that’s his name ) argues that :
The standard academic line on Hardy is that his work shows the futile struggle of individuals against an indifferent force that rules the world and plays ironical tricks on frail humanity.
Rubbish. Hardy is just a realist. As he says of a poet in one of his short stories, “he was a pessimist in so far as that character applies to a man who looks at the worst contingencies as well as the best in the human condition”.
As a naive high school student, I had no idea what the “academic line on Hardy” was, but I’m pretty sure I had never encountered novels that focused on ordinary people who led such tragic lives before, and yet, when I thought about it, I had personally known people whose lives had turned out almost as badly.
Like most critics, Eric admits that most Hardy characters “suffer tragically” and are defeated by forces they do not control:
Coincidences often drive his plots and certainly his characters often (but not always) suffer tragically. But the protagonist in any Hardy novel is more likely to be in conflict with his own very human obsessions, or struggling with rigid and unjust social codes, than against some faceless fate ruling the universe. His characters aren’t railing against God but against followers of organized religion, not against the devil but against their own consciences.
Yes, he’s depressed at times over who will win these battles. Who isn’t?
Although Hardy’s focus on those most affected by economic turmoil and rigid, unjust social codes makes it appear that he is simply pessimistic, it’s hard to deny that he was realistically portraying the effects on members of the lower class during his age.
Perhaps the author’s view of Hardy depends on his own social standing and life experiences. One can certainly understand how Dr. Mahmoud Baroud, “an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature in the English Department at The Islamic University of Gaza, Palestine,” might find Hardy’s portrayal of human misery entirely realistic.
He begins his argument by admitting that Hardy’s view of life is:
… basically tragic. He is one of those who believe that life is full of hurdles which we cannot override. His novels concentrate on human sufferings and show that there is no escape for human beings. Pessimism runs like a dark thread through his novels.
and that
All these creations of Hardy’s leave in the mind, beyond a shadow of doubt, an immense sense of life’s sad uselessness. Such textual illustrations from his novels would invite us to say that there is no doubt that Hardy’s vision is bleak, somber and pessimistic.
One can almost believe that Dr. Baroud actually agrees with ChatGPT and critics who believe Hardy is a Pessimist, but he gradually shifts the argument to a very different view:
As one can observe in most of his novels, Hardy’s sympathy was always with the individuals from the working classes against the rigid conventions of his society and the church corruption. Most of the best and well known characters in his novels meet unpleasant ends – largely because they are unable to break out of social conventions, financial woe or other difficulties. This is clear in his choice of his ordinary heroes and heroines for his novels…
To me, the most important point here is that Hardy’s “sympathy was always with the individuals from the working classes.” His novels work because the reader either identifies with the main character or sympathizes with them. We empathize with them because we see the injustice of the system that victimizes them and realize that his portrayal is accurate.
Seen in this light, it’s difficult to see Hardy as a Pessimist, and we are more likely to agree with Hardy’s own view of his works:
Hardy himself was sadly offended by what he considered as invalid charges. He sought to justify his view of life on many occasions and in various ways. In defense of himself and in a conversation with
William Archer in 1904 (quoted in A Hardy Companion by F. B. Pinion) he said ‘…I believe, indeed,that a good deal of the robustious, swaggering optimism, of recent literature is at bottom cowardly and insincere…my pessimism, if pessimism it be, does not involve the assumption that the world is going to the dogs…On the contrary, my practical philosophy is distinctly meliorist… What are my books but one long plea against man’s inhumanity against man—to women—and to the lower animals?’(Mathur, 1982, 23) Hardy attempted a justification of his dark outlook when he declared that ‘the highest flights of the pen are mostly the excursions and revelations of souls unreconciled to life. Consequently he regarded himself as a ‘meliorist’ rather than a ‘pessimist.’
When I read these novels and “The Darkling Thrush” in high school I didn’t think that Hardy was too pessimistic; I thought he was exposing societal injustices that I had never thought about — and some of them were still in force when I was in high school.
I agree with Dr. Mahmoud Baroud when he concludes:
Hardy is not a pessimist – a misanthrope (somebody who hates humanity) like Hobbes. He is a pessimist like the classical writers who view Man simply as a puppet in the hands of powerful fate as can be seen in Greek tragedies. Simply he is gloomier than they are. Instead of causing in the reader a feeling of disgust and scorn for the shortcomings of his characters, he creates in them a feeling of deep sympathy. This is due to his profound sympathy for humanity.
Equally important, since he was describing life as it really was why don’t we also elaborate and suggest that his pessimism is mixed up with some sort of realism as well. One note which Hardy strikes repeatedly is his insistence on realism; his whole aim seems to have been to present the Truth regardless of the consequences.
If Hardy had written“A Christmas Carol,” which focused on a lot of the same problems that Dickens did, he wouldn’t have ended with a sentimental, but unrealistic, happy ending. In Hardy’s version, Tiny Tim would have died, and the father wouldn’t have been able to attend the funeral because he had to work unless he wanted to risk getting fired. Of course, his readers would have been outraged, and he might never have published another story. Of course, that seems unlikely because of how popular his early works were.