Thomas Hardy and the Question of Senescence

Abstract

Increasingly, the work of Thomas Hardy reflected his view of senescence as a condition, not of maturity or wisdom, but of loss and misery. In turn, his later fiction focuses on humankind’s struggle to reconcile itself to the ravages of time. More interesting still, Hardy’s narratives deal with the paradigm of old age through the modality of the grotesque, a cynical and derisive perspective that combines the tragic with the laughable. At the turn of the century, however, Hardy abandoned novel-writing to embark on a long and productive second career as a poet. Like his prose, his verse treats old age unsentimentally. Nonetheless, his poems admit the possibility that acts of artistic creation might themselves represent a kind of consolation for the depredations of old age, and his idiosyncratic “late style” is itself an indication of the freedoms that old age might bring, unfettered by the demands of readers or reviewers. Focusing on his final novels, Jude the Obscure (1895) and The Well Beloved (1897), and on his first verse collection, Wessex Poems (1898), this chapter analyses Hardy’s argumentative relationship with time and ageing as it emerged in his late prose and poetry.