THE THOMAS HARDY
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DIRECTOR: ROBERT SCHWEIK
© 1999-2004
TRAGEDY OF A LIFE WITHOUT CHRIST
DESCRIPTION:
Address: http://www.faithalone.org/journal/1997i/Townsend.html
Contact: Unidentified(mike@faithalone.org)
Date:
07/01/04
The text of a partially documented article titled "Thomas Hardy: The Tragedy of a Life Without Christ" by Dr. James Townsend, Bible Editor, Cook Communications, Elgin, Il, in the Journal of the Grace Evangelical Society, Vol. 10:18 (Spring, 2000). The article--whose central thesis is that "Thomas Hardy the agnostic is a parable of the tragedy of a life without Christ"--is divided into the following parts:
COMMENT:
"The Biblical Hardy" includes a tabulation by James Townsend both of general Christian and specific biblical allusions in nine of Hardy's major novels--drawing in part upon Marlene Springer's Hardy's Use of Allusion (1983)--as well as a summary of Julian Moynahan's article on the Saul-David references in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1956). "The Unbiblical Hardy" contains dubious and simplistic speculations, such as "I suspect that every Hardy biographer would concur that some mysterious romantic attachment was at the root of bitterness in Hardy's life" and "something very unaccountable and suppressed in Hardy's relationship with women seems necessary to account for his turning sour on life." These seem in part to have been influenced by a Lois Deacon article of 1976 which repeats claims made by her in Providence and Mr. Hardy (1966), a book she co-authored with Terry Coleman. Many of her more far-fetched claims--"extravagant suppositions" would more accurately characterize them--are now generally judged to have not been based on convincing evidence: see, for example, the appendix to Robert Gittings' Young Thomas Hardy (1975) for an analysis of them. Townsend was impressed enough by one of G. K. Chesterton's crude jibes about Hardy's attitude toward god to paraphrase it, and he indulges in other gross distortions in the article. For example, his simplistic claim that "Thomas Hardy was the obverse to Robert Browning's optimism: All's wrong with the world!" is a statement equally inaccurate for both Browning and Hardy. Such crude simplifications are made as part of the author's effort to covince his readers that Hardy was unhappy because he had "forsaken his evangelical roots." And throughout he quotes selectively from Hardy's writings, often using expressions made by Hardy's characters in particular dramatic situations, or by his narrators or speakers in reference to dramatic situations, by way of providing supposed "evidence" for Hardy's settled views. There are no references to such recent studies as Timothy Hands' Thomas Hardy: Distracted Preacher (1989) and Jan Jedrzejewski's Thomas Hardy and the Church (1996), nor does the author make any serious effort to grapple with the compexities of Hardy's ideas or of his mental states.
SUMMARY:
Of possible interest as an example of a late twentieth-century evangelical Christian perception of Hardy.