Flight of Fancy: Characterization in Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree

Abstract

Critical interpretation of characters in Thomas Hardy's Under Greenwood Tree has endeavored to connect them to a located outside text, usually in social history, as rural types, or in Hardy's biography, as individuals author knew personally or through reminiscence or records. The evocative power of this minor masterpiece comes from its being a recreation of Hardy's childhood environment, of people and surroundings where he spent most impressionable years of his declares David Wright, who goes on to say that novel's theme (pointing to the main theme of Hardy's fiction) is the clash between agrarian and urban ways of life, between traditional rural culture and that of new metropolitan deracines.' Wright's approach epitomizes realist criticism by assuming that novel intends to mirror actual people in historical environment and by taking as its task discovery of how well that intention is fulfilled. Because he finds that Dick Dewy and Fancy Day are no Arcadians innocent of facts of life and their environment ... not a pastoral ideal but rural reality (18), Wright finds characters and theme significant and praiseworthy. Realist criticism has yielded a great deal of information and a powerful way to incorporate an understanding of novel into larger project of understanding interaction between individuals and historical forces. But Under Greenwood Tree affords a remarkable example of way a novel is as much about process of character creation as it is about characters themselves. It accounts for its construction of characters in ways quite removed from those uncovered by a realist model of mimesis resting on polarities like original and copy, real and fictional. From first chapter novel displays two methods of character creation: (1) a system of seemingly arbitrary attributes regulated by controlled difference, and (2) manipulation of rhetorical figures. Because these processes seem not to depend upon any re-