Hardy

I came across a reference to Eustacia Vye recently and it took me back to my school days, when Thomas Hardy had taken hold of me. It was around the time when I had, had my fill of Jane Austen and I couldn't make sense of how the world she wrote about lent in any way to women empowerment. It was only later that I came to appreciate to some extent the fact that for her times she was a pioneer. For me Mr. Darcy was never the ideal man, it was Farmer Oak. 

It did amaze me how a man could bring to life a more multi-layered female character than a woman. Eustacia Vye was unlike any other heroine I had come across till that time. (I was still in school and my reading was largely limited to Victorian writers, Enid Blytons and lots of Archies, some Asterix and some TinTins ) She was flawed, she wasn't coy and the epitome of human ideals. I  loved how human she was. I think Return of the Native was the first of his novels that I read. And I couldn't help but feel that Thomas Hardy possibly inhabited a world which was far ahead of his times, but somehow he couldn't get himself to reconcile to this fact, and had to end all his novels tragically ( except Far from the Madding Crowd, where at least the hero and heroine ended up together). And his books dealt with pertinent issues that women (and men) have had to deal with. 

The wanderlust of Eustacia, her longing to see a wider world than the moors in which she lived, in contract to Clement's desire for a simple life. It also highlighted how a marriage can fall apart just on the basis of unmatched expectations. Most of Jane Austen books culminated in marriage and a happily ever after and there was no examination of what happened post, did Elizabeth enjoy keeping house for Mr. Darcy ?

In Far from the Madding crowd he examined prosaic love as he put it. I love what he writes about prosaic versus poetic love. And possibly why Farmer Oak will always be my favorite, someone who had the strength of character to support a woman who in some ways was his boss. He worked on her farm after all. It's been over 20 years since I've read the book, but the discourse on prosaic love has helped form my views on what love should be. 

Then there is Jude which deals with so many complex themes - class divide and how it determines your access to quality education, infidelity or rather extra marital affairs and incest (at least to me it was that since we've grown up considering our cousins to be our brothers and sisters). Tess deals with rape, Two on a Tower with a younger man falling for an older woman. I can't recall other books right now, and I haven't read Mayor of Casterbridge. 

But in essence his books fascinated me in a way no other  book had so far. Most of my reading till that point had been teenage adventure books, comics, some classics, PG Wodehouse and Mr. Holmes. His books opened an avenue to explore human emotions. His main protagonists, weren't heroes or heroines, they were just that protagonists. They felt real, they were human, they bled and they erred and usually ended up making a complete mess of their lives, if they did not end up dead. Which was the painful part of reading his books. Somewhere I felt that while he envisaged this world where the poor had access to higher education, where women could fulfill their desires and not be typecast as witches, where the relationship between an older woman and a younger man was not frowned upon or a farmhand was not raped by the rich landlord, he also felt hesitant to completely commit to it. He ended his novels in tragedy, which to me sometimes seemed to imply that the world he envisaged was not viable.  

Perhaps in our times some of the themes may seem dated and irrelevant, but for the times that he lived in and for the setting of his novels (good old Wessex) , his ideas do seem to be different and in some ways revolutionary. I think that's what drew me to his novels, the novelty of what he wrote and the fact that he was a pioneer. A lot of writers today perhaps write about more complex issues, but to be among the few voices of your time, I think that's what made him special. 

After passing out from school I never read another of his book, our school library had a huge collection of his works. I do feel the need to re-read and re-understand. I do wonder how much I must have missed, reading his books at the age that I did read them. I'm glad I came across that reference to Eustacia which brought about this chain of thought. Maybe time to pick up Mayor of Casterbridge!