Would You Call Hardy a Pessimist? Justify Your Answer.

Hardy a Pessimist

Hardy’s conception of life is essentially tragic. He believes happiness is an occasional episode in the general drama of pain. He concentrates on human suffering and shows that there is no escape for human beings from the suffering.

 

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hardy gives the impression that human beings are helplessly struggling hard for existence but their hopes are thwarted by hostile power. Tess in the novel suffers a lot. She is very sensitive by nature. When the family horse is killed, she holds herself responsible for the accidents and feels the necessity of doing something for the family. She goes to the Trantridge estate, Meets Alec and is ultimately raped by him. It is a fault of her that she allows her chastity to be violated. Her another fault is that she fails to disclose the secret of her past to Angel before her marriage. She also lives with Alec as his mistress and later on kills him in cold blood.

Alec is the villain of the novel. He sets Tess’s suffering in motion. He is a thorough going sensualist who takes pleasure in girl hunting. When she goes to the Trantridge estate of the d’Urbervilles to work, he meets her for the first time and is very much attracted to her. Later on, he manages to rape her very cunningly. As a result she gives birth to a child and it died after a few days of its birth. After being deserted by her husband, she again meets him and he makes her to live with him as his mistress by convincing her that her husband would never return and by offering financial security for the family.

Angel Clare also increases the suffering of Tess. He represents society with its conservatism and its double standard-one principle for men and other for women. After their marriage, he tells Tess of his forty-eight hours’ dissipation with a woman in London and asks her forgiveness. She forgives him and tells him of her own misadventure with Alec and asks him to forgive her. But Angel is devastated by Tess’s confession of her seduction and the subsequent birth of her son and says; “O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to thy case” He refuses to live with her and leaves for Brazil.

Fate in the form of chance and coincidence plays a hostile role in the life of Tess. Early in the story, Prince, the horse of the Durbeyfield Family is killed in an accident and it is chance that forces Tess to seek employment at the d’Urbervilles household. Chance and coincidence play yet another impish trick on Tess, when she decides to visit Angle’s parents at Minster.

At the end of the novel Tess stabs Alec to death for deceiving her. She is arrested and hanged as a punishment for murder and Hardy says that “justice was done and the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess.” Hardy here means that the supernatural powers had deliberately been hostile to Tess and had been responsible for contriving all her misfortunes leading to her execution. Thus, Hardy presents a gloomy view of life. Hence he can be called a pessimist.