“A Merciful Man”: Thomas Hardy et la pensée de l’(in)humanité

Abstract

This paper approaches the subject of Hardy as a thinker of humanity through his response to what was often the inhuman treatment of animals. Registered in scenes like the pig-killing chapter in Jude the Obscure, later reprinted by the Victorian Society for the Protection of Animals under the title “A Merciful Man”, Hardy’s work reflects a deep-rooted biophilia. This was in part shaped by his immersion in the latest thinking of his age. From Darwin, in particular, he took a sense of kinship with all living things, and a profound appreciation of the richness and diversity of life. At the same time, Hardy instinctively recoiled from any form of cruelty. This was, however, a moment in history when animals were made subject to unprecedented new levels of exploitation and manipulation. Nor was the inhumanity of this kind of treatment – this process of instrumentalization – confined to non-humans, as Hardy underlined in novels like Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Whilst Hardy’s own thoughts were not always fully worked out, even when, as in novels like The Hand of Ethelberta, his imagination conjured extraordinary scenes of animal suffering, his later work suggests a growing willingness to censure cruelty, and an expansive sense of what might be meant by humanity and humanitarianism. Notwithstanding his own pessimism about the trajectory of human “progress”, and its apparent pursuit of the material at the expense of the moral, this forms an important (if sometimes neglected) aspect of his work.