Thomas Hardy and the Gothic: Restructuring the Gothic Prison in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)

Abstract

This article explores Thomas Hardy’s engagement with the Gothic tradition, particularly in relation to the female monstrosity and imprisonment central to mid-Victorian Gothic realism. Focusing on Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), I demonstrate that Hardy purges the Gothic from the domestic space and disperses it into the natural world, restructuring the Gothic prison that haunts the tradition. By moving the Gothic into a less socially fraught place – the sublimity of nature rather than the psyche of the woman – Hardy also reconfigures Gothic female monstrosity. No longer a reflection of the repressed desires and passions of rebellious female characters, the monstrous in Hardy’s Wessex is linked instead to raging fires and destructive storms, presenting the Gothic as ever-present and occurring in the ‘open air’ of nature. Hardy neutralises the formerly imprisoning domestic space and introduces a new Gothic force as a source of anxiety: the burden of time. The focus on time and temporality in Tess of the d’Urbervilles reveals an increasing ambivalence towards modernity in Hardy’s later novels, as the suffering of the heroine through physical confinement is moved to entrapment by the ‘burden of time’ in the rapidly changing Victorian fin de siècle. As a result, the Gothic that enters Wessex takes on both a spatial and temporal quality – manifested in the natural world but linked to haunted pasts and haunting futures. Through a series of shifts in Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles – of Gothic repression removed from the female psyche and Gothic imprisonment unlinked from the domestic space – Hardy establishes a further linkage between the Gothic and time in the latter novel. As a result of this displacement of original Gothic tropes, Hardy’s work can be read as both radically feminist and deeply critical of modernity.