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 Thomas
Hardy’s work is often depressing: children die, the good suffer,
and the honourable are usually ruined. But the misfortunes of his
characters are only half the story. What really makes Hardy depressing,
and remarkable, is his treatment of weather and landscape.
The bulk of Hardy’s fiction
is set in Wessex, a thinly veiled version of his native Dorset.
The countryside is gloomy and inhospitable, and the heath seldom
blossoms in the bleak Wessex climate.
According to 'Return of the
Native', sunshine is a rarity: "The July sun shone over Egdon….
It was the one season of the year, and the one weather of the season,
in which the heath was gorgeous."
 The
inhabitants of Wessex are rural folk, and they depend on the land
for their living. Even the townspeople rely on it. In the market
town of Casterbridge (in 'The Mayor of Casterbridge'), the shop
windows display the tools of the trades on which the community depends:
scythes and reap-hooks, churns and milking stools, bee-hives, hay-rakes
and ploughmen’s leggings. And when weather threatens the harvest,
the townsfolk turn out in force to help save the crops. It’s
a reminder that their fragile society is entirely at the mercy of
the elements.
 Hardy
emphasises the link between people and the elements with his use
of the ‘pathetic fallacy’, making the weather mirror the thoughts
of his characters. 'Far from the Madding Crowd' offers a few fine
examples. Sergeant Troy woos Bathsheba in the blazing sun, Fanny
treks hopelessly through the snow, and Gabriel’s intimate (but unproductive)
talk with Bathsheba after a rainless thunder storm.
The variety of weather in
Wessex is phenomenal, and you might think that 19th Century Dorset
must have had a very peculiar climate indeed. But Hardy wasn’t representing
Dorset’s conditions realistically, he was exaggerating for artistic
effect.
As he wrote in one of his
notebooks, "Art is a disproportioning of realities to show more
clearly the features that matter."
However, Hardy wasn’t manipulating
the weather merely to form a melodramatic backdrop to his characters.
In Wessex, the weather controls the characters, and that fact reflects
Hardy’s deepest beliefs. The
ideas of scientists such as Darwin and Huxley had had a profound
effect on Hardy. Their theories had rendered the idea of God redundant.
Hardy became an agnostic,
but a look at his writing shows how his outlook remained essentially
spiritual. His novels and poems are full of imperfect substitute
gods with names like ‘The Imminent Will’, ‘King Doom’, or ‘The Supreme
Mover’. These forces manifest themselves through nature and the
weather, oppressing the land and dealing out harsh justice.
In Casterbridge, Michael
gets his comeuppance when the weather conspires against him. The
harvest weather is bad until he buys all the ruined grain at high
prices. Then the weather improves and he can’t sell it back, bankrupting
him.
That is Hardy’s Wessex. A
land where mankind stands alone against the elements. And it seems
to be a pretty miserable place if you don’t have an umbrella.
Related links:
Weather in Literature:
The Modern Novel
Shakespearean Storms
Thomas Hardy
The Romantic Poets
Mark Twain
Daniel Defoe
Oxford University's
English Faculty
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