Conclusion

The aims of this study have been to examine and attempt to illuminate Hardy’s representation of being in the world and his handling of issues pertaining to class and selfhood. Hardy modifies and dramatises the ways in which men and women mobilise or identify their experience of life. His fictional characters, and the subjects of his poetry, are to be seen as building meaning in a fluid and changing environment, both physical and mental. There is here a tension between the power of society and its individual members, which generates both the fiction and the poetry. From a Husserlian perspective we may see Hardy as being preoccupied by the dialectic between the perceptible world and the operation of human consciousness. Thus, this study seeks to illustrate ways in which Hardy’s writing orchestrates or expresses a social world which serves as a ‘horizon’ for the individual—Cytherea, Diggory Venn, Tess, Jude et al.—which they are then called upon to (mis) interpret. In this body of work, it is suggested, we may discern not only reflexive individual behaviour but also the complexities of class consciousness in the changing rural society of late-nineteenth-century England. In both fiction and poetry Hardy shows how humans in some sense create their own worlds. Alexander Düttmann argues that ‘modern life, dominated by the concept of “subjectivity”, is alienated from its historical origins in forms of rural life’. In philosophical terms Hardy’s characters in prose and poetry inhabit a ‘life-world’, but one which is now impacted upon by Victorian proliferation or confusion of private and public spheres, as is somewhat comedically in the representation of Hocbridge in Desperate Remedies: