Role of Optimism over Pessimism in the Novels of Thomas Hardy: Mechanism of Chance and Fate

Abstract

Thomas Hardy is mostly acclaimed as a pessimist novelist whose plots are full of tearful tragic tales. In all his novels, the adverse situations come from the uncertain conditions of the role of the chance that emerges based on the characters’ psycho-analytic states and eccentric impulses, financial variations and barriers, irregularities of social status and standards, communal, cultural and ethnic misunderstanding, lack of trust in the marital relationship, thrust and lust of sexual pleasure, historical attitudes and backgrounds, highness of royal families, and religion egoism on the unmatched unities of action, place, and time in the Victorian modernity that forces all the characters to survive a life full of sufferings and misfortunes throughout the plots. But this paper has a fresh approach to explore the philosophy of optimism in Hardy’s novels that how the male and female characters, despite facing the irony of fate and chance, have a shining line of hope, faith and love in their lives. He accepted the fact that humanity goes forward from darkness to light, from despair to hope and from pessimism to optimism. He was endowed with optimism as he always hoped for advancement and betterment in every sphere of life. He valued certain outstanding basic values like hope, love, affection, sympathy, kindness, gentility, and selflessness. A humble effort has been made in the present paper to trace out these ‘good things in the bad things’ in the novels of Thomas Hardy. Hence, it can be seen that Hardy has been proved as the surveyor of human spectrum in all its aspects, at times striking a note of discord, but on the whole presenting a case of doing the mechanism of accidentalism for the robust optimism over pessimism in his novels.