A Greek tragic vision of fatalism
looms large in all Hardy’s novels, especially the latter ones. In the opinion
of Bonamy Dobree, “there is no denying, nor any need to deny that the thread of
which the Wessex novels and poems are woven is a dark one of pessimism.” Hardy
perhaps believed in Sophocles’ famous saying that “chance rolls our lives and
future is all unknown.” Hence, David Cecil rightly says, “a struggle between
man on the one hand and on the other hand an omnipotent and indifferent fate,
shows Hardy’s interpretation of human situation.” In the preface to his famous
hovel ‘Tess’, Hardy himself quotes the famous saying of Gloucester in Shakespeare’s
King Lear:
“As
files to the wanton boys, are we to the gods
They kill us for mere sport.”
The
recognition of some other than human forces as operating on man’s affair,
controlling his action and baffling all his attempts to attain fulfillment of
his desire is stressed from the very beginning of Hardy’s novel ‘From the
Madding crowd’. In fact, in the novel, the malignant fate represents itself in
and through the cruel working of chance, co- incidence, natural phenomena, time
and conceited egotism of the fair sex, which in spite of all their trivialities,
have significant bearing on the course of action of the characters.
