« The disease of feeling » : Thomas Hardy et l’évolution excessive

• Main Author: Laurence Estanove
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès 2010-03-01
• Series: Miranda: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone
• Subjects: Darwin; evolution; consciousness; knowledge; poetry
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/543

The influence of Darwinism and evolutionism on Hardy’s work needs no further demonstration. Yet when dealing with man’s fate in a godless world, Hardy comes to distance himself from Darwinism, not by contradicting evolution theories, but by exploring their limits. For Hardy as for many artists of the same period, in the process of evolution, it is consciousness which can distinguish man from other beings. If, for such thinkers as Bergson, man is the ultimate stage in evolution, for Hardy, that very last stage is certainly not an achievement: « the human race is too extremely developed for its corporeal conditions, the nerves being evolved to an activity abnormal in such an environment », he wrote in 1889. Man has therefore gone through an additional stage in his evolution, an unexpected and painful phase —«the disease of feeling » ('Before Life and After'). In Hardy’s work, evolution is problematic insofar as it is excessive, leaving man disconcerted by the extent of his knowledge, rather than proud of his intellectual superiority, in the paradoxical unhappiness of both god-like understanding and yearning for ignorance, or even objectification.