Thomas Hardy and the Tragic

Though Ibsen in his social realist plays and playwrights such as Shaw who were influenced by him take an anti-tragic view of the world and the human situation, as I have argued, certain novelists contemporary or nearly contemporary with them implicitly contested that view, notably Hardy whose fiction has often been categorised as tragic. However, critics have tended to regard the tragic, particularly as manifested in Hardy's last two major novels, as flawed because it is seen as lacking the sense of the inexorable associated with classical tragedy. From this perspective Hardy can be accused of manipulating the plots of his novels in order to impose his own subjective, pessimistic vision on the world. A particular worry is that a recurrent feature of his fiction – seemingly trivial events bringing about consequences that are far from trivial – creates a disproportionality that offends against the dominant critical view, influenced by Aristotle's Poetics, that in authentic tragedy the catastrophic outcome is produced by necessity and not governed by chance and coincidence. It can also be argued that the tragic is alien to the novel as a form: whereas classical tragedy observed the unities and was written in verse – thus eliminating or at least suppressing the contingent, the random, the quotidian – the realist novel in the nineteenth century could not be reconciled with such formal conventions and inevitably would situate the tragic action in a social context that potentially could undermine it.