Notion of the Pastoral in Thomas Hardy’s Eg...

Notion of the Pastoral in Thomas Hardy’s Egdon Heath

Author Name : Nilanjana Sinha

ABSTRACT

During the time Thomas Hardy was writing, quite a many in the Victorian England had begun to participate in a growing reactionary against the pretensions of pastoral literature. Often times, the discomfort arose from the issue of ethics and aesthetics being interlaced to feature artificialities in writings which projected a view of the pastoral as a haven free from the complexities and corruption of city life, contradictorily. The freshness of Virgil’s translations, Spenser’s Calender, and Marvell’s Garden, in turn purified and reinforced by biblical interpretations sought to caterto the pleasure of urban readership.However the artificialities could no longer correspond to the realities of the nineteenth century fuelled by industrial encroachment and the subsequent despair. The pastoral did miserably and when writers like Hardy dwelled deeper into the genre, the wilderness only presented itself as an enigma of the human condition.In Hardy’s The Return of the Native, the notion of pastoral becomes evidently rural, untameable and actual, and is structured around impulsive characters who accelerates the ambiguity of realism and romanticism in the heath.

This paper seeks to explore the notion of the pastoral and its disappointments, focusing on the Egdon Heath in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native.

Keywords: Aesthetics, Artificialities, Ethics, Pastoral