Previously in this series: How to tell if you’re in a Jane Austen novel.
You live in a city that is not exactly Oxford and is not exactly Dorchester, located in a county that is most emphatically not Dorset.
You make a terrible decision, fueled by the effects of alcohol, that casts an unremitting pall over the rest of your days.
You are a victim of erotolepsy and have been ensnared in a marriage not of your choosing by a manipulative scoundrel.
You are personally critical of Christianity in particular and of social institutions in general. This does you no good.
You have a favorite cow.
You have tried to kill yourself, and you have been stymied in the attempt. The actual cause of your death ten years later will be far more painful and drawn-out than anything you could have dreamed up.
You have a terrible secret. The man you love has an even more terrible secret. The man who loves you has no secrets at all; this is why you could never love him.
You saw a tractor once, and hated it.
Someone very interesting has just returned from Paris.
Your pure and radiant beauty is the worst thing that has ever happened to you.
You have been rejected on your wedding night.
A simple misunderstanding in the afternoon leads to three untimely deaths in the evening.
You have been left alone to face social consequences despite your intrinsic goodness.
You find yourself caught up in a battle between the desires of your own heart, the convictions of your untrammeled mind, and the expectations of your family. Your family wins, and it’s terrible.
You are hanged to death while you may or may not be pregnant.
You are more sinned against than sinning, even more to be pitied than censured. But you are still censured.
Someone very interesting has just returned from Brazil.
A minor enemy of yours, who you slighted in the long-distant past, is the ultimate cause of your destruction.
No matter how bad things get, you can always rely on the fact that no one you know will ever offer to help you.
Everyone in the world except for you is sexually repressed. This is the root cause of at least half of your problems.
Someone very interesting has just returned from America.
You add a bit of local color to a mildly ironic portrait of rural town life in the middle of the nineteenth century.
You have hastily married someone you know to be unworthy of you; your celestial imperiousness, love, wrath, and fervor had are thrown away on your milksop of a husband.
You are about to break your marriage vows for someone you know to be unworthy of you.
You have a mystical connection with nature that makes your horrible, undeserved death all the more tragic.
Tags: books, county wessex, games, how to tell what novel you’re in, rural despair, thomas hardy, tweaking the canon
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“You saw a tractor once, and hated it.”
OH GOD SO ME
This is it. This is the One.
I live in Dorset but not Dorchester, and I do have a favourite cow. He’s called Nigel.
This begs the question, what makes Nigel your favourite? Says a fellow cow appreciater of course.
He’s just a nice chap. Easygoing and pleasant!
More details, please! I realise that I may be falling here into the dangers of the bovine gaze but I would like to know Nigel’s colouration, size, etc.
I’ve just accepted the position of hangman at Casterbridge jail, so this post is most relevant to my interests.
Confession: About ten years ago, I suggested to a friend that he should read Jude the Obscure over summer vacation. He has never forgiven me.
I brought Tess of the d’Urbervilles to read on the beach for one of my family’s vacations when I was 14. I mostly just liked the cover and ignored my parents’ gentle suggestions of it maybe not being the best beach book.
And then I had to finish the damn thing, because I was stubborn and contrary and didn’t want them to be right.
I read Tess via Project Gutenberg when I was 16, while procrastinating at my summer job of programming a digital camera to take pictures of a laser (long story).
If not for Thomas Hardy, perhaps I would still be good at science.
Thomas Hardy is probably the real reason women are underrepresented in science. He can be blamed for so many of the world’s ills.
I had to read Tess of the D’Ubervilles as part of my university course, and I have hated Hardy’s idea of the pastoral since.
Okay, no. No. That’s the English student excuse. I hate Hardy. Screw him and his inability to comprehend human compassion. Or women.
I actually think Hardy was much better at understanding women than many of his Victorian counterparts.
I admit that he does portray women as relatively nuanced, whole human beings, but his stance on their exercising of sexuality and autonomy has always been frustratingly antagonistic to me. He recognises them as having agency, but (largely) punishes them for it. And, worse, he goes on and on and ON about it. ‘Wordy’ doesn’t even cover it.
Uh, yeah, you can tell I really enjoyed the Hardy portions of my education. I can’t believe he’s as lauded as he is for basically writing at great length and detail about unhappy people in the English countryside.
Right, but I think that has to do with Victorian conventions of the time, especially within the context of the novels. Women have a lot more agency in his Gothic short stories because the genre gave him more leeway to do so.
(I…may have written a paper on this exact subject for my seminar thesis.)
Oh hey, I definitely see his work as a product of his time, and despite despising his work, I do see his value to the English literary canon. There’s definitely worse out there (don’t get me started on Samuel Johnson :|). Just really not gonna like it. I love lists like this on his work though 😀
And I was the kid who wrote about cyberpunk novels for her dissertation, so you can tell how much this era of literature inspired me ;___; I started Middlemarch 15 years ago and still haven’t finished it; that’s supposed to be one of the supreme realist masterpieces and nowhere near as depressing as Hardy. Literary fail. Tell you what, I can’t wait for the piece called “How to Tell if You’re in a William Gibson novel” *hint hint nudge nudge wink wink*
Are you *entirely* sure that you should be this proud about your dislike of classic literature?
Are you *entirely* sure you’re reading my posts right? I dislike Hardy, not the entirety of classic literature.
That was the first Hardy novel I ever read. And I’ve always felt like such a horrible person for reading the Horrible Tragedy at the end and going “um…the logistics…I don’t think I’m buying this as a thing that could go down the way you’ve described it.”
Also I was utterly convinced — I have no idea why, but I was — that Tess hanged herself in a barn at the end of her book. The ending, when I finally did get to it, came across as somewhat wacky. (Seriously, Tess hanging herself in a barn would have been a much better ending. I still think the book used to end that way, and I somehow ended up with the director’s cut of the book instead of the theatrical release.)
I thought that too. And my confusion only increased when I saw an adaptation on Masterpiece Theatre in, I think, the late 90s, where Tess’s murder weapon of choice was a butter knife.
I’m pretty sure you’re not actually his friend.
This is perfect. Every Thomas Hardy book is basically ‘everything is the worst.’
And then there’s Under the Greenwood Tree, which he must have been drunk while writing.
And that one is my least favorite.
If you are male, you are a mason or architect.
You are in a love triangle, if not quadrangle. At least one member of this will die.
The environment is as much as person as people are.
I feel like I wrote so many papers in college about that last point. Wheeee Hardy.
I didn’t know that an author could (seemingly) get such joy out of making their cast of characters miserable but then I had to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles during my freshman year of high school and was shown the proof.
You get drunk and gamble your wife and child away.
You are dragged into town by a mangy dog while in labor.
(I have waited my whole life for this!!)
Also, I’ve read literally all of his novels including both versions of that one that has two versions.
Clym really was a milksop of a husband.
Your overenthusiastic sheepdog chases all your sheep off a cliff. You are left destitute.
I misread that as “Your overenthusiastic sheepdog chases you all off a cliff” and I was all “Welp, that’s a short novel. Novella, prob’ly.”
Twitter novella!
Your fiance elopes with a no-good fiddler. Two years later, she shows up with a toddler. You marry your strayed-lamb love and adopt her sin-baby.
The fiddler comes back to town and kidnaps the toddler. Your wife cheers. You never see your daughter again and are miserable for the rest of your days.
A no-good FOREIGN fiddler.
A fiddler who curls his own hair and puts pomade in it. You KNOW he’s up to no good. But, alas, poor country bumpkin with straggly hair that you are, what can you do against his demonic charm?
W.B. Yeats once asked Hardy what he did about books that were sent to him for signature. Hardy led him to a room full of many hundreds of books, stacked high. “Yeats, these are the books sent to me for signature”
I have never heard this story! I love Yeats, and my Hardy seminar professor and I used to have passive-aggressive arguments about who was the better old poet. This delights me!
I read that in “Ex Libris” by Anne Fadiman
This is an awesome book and everyone should read it
Needs. more. furze-cutting.
BLIND furze-cutting. Blind from READING TOO MUCH.
And reddlemen
I love Thomas Hardy, and I love Diggory Venn even more.
There was a brief, terrifying second when I feared that I was the only person on the Toast who loved Thomas Hardy with the sort of love that can only be felt for someone who is truly unworthy of you, but THANK GOD, I do not need to rethink my life / websites I spend time on.
No, you are definitely not alone! I first read The Return of the Native as an impressionable, melodramatic teen, and I never looked back. DESPITE Jude.
Confession: I also love Jude the Obscure. I am sorry.
ETA: This is like, in high school, when we read Wuthering Heights, everyone hated it but me. I had already read it. Multiple times. And loved it. Sorry sorry sorry.
I love Hardy, but Wuthering Heights suuuuuuuucks. Sorry sorry sorry!
I also love Wuthering Heights!
oh god, me too. I love that sorry bastard.
(and DIGGORY VENN <3 hi)
Diggory Venn is one of the hottest men in the English canon (along with Sidney Carton).
I just listened to AToTC a couple of weeks ago, and practically burst into tears at the first mention of Sidney Caron. No, Sidney! You’re too hot to die!
Something extremely unpleasant is happening to sheep.
I was thinking just today, ‘Wait, has The Toast done Thomas Hardy yet?’, so I can possibly predict the future. Both that and this piece are excellent.
You become pregnant with another man’s child by staring at his picture for too long.
When I have Mike Patton’s miracle-baby, this will be why.
I love everything you do. But I think there’s at typo in this one (delete the word “had”)
You have hastily married someone you know to be unworthy of you; your celestial imperiousness, love, wrath, and fervor had are thrown away on your milksop of a husband.
Read the Twitter link too fast and thought it said “You are about to break your marriage vows for Tom Hardy,” which sounded about right.
Your child is a symbol for what ails you; he is named Symbol for What Ails Me.
HA!
OH GOD the appearance of this piece and comments made me go literally fetal with joy that Toasties exist! I have loved Thomas Hardy ever since I was in Christopher Durang’s “The Marriage of Bette & Boo” in high school and encountered the line “In the novels of Thomas Hardy, we find a deep and unrelieved pessimism.” “Oh really?” thought my gothy teenage self. “That sounds AWESOME.”
ETA: I started a novel in my early twenties (LIKE YOU DO) that was basically Hardy fanfic, i.e. taking his characters (Jude, Tess, Damon Wildeve) and sticking them in a modern college setting. It was criticized in grad school for having too much sex and drugs. (Yeah, I went to the wrong grad school.)
Can there be TOO MUCH sex and drugs? In grad school, I mean.
Yeah, isn’t that the weirdest criticism? Sometimes I want to look up those folks from my workshop & send them a link to my slash fiction.
“You have hastily married someone you know to be unworthy of you; your celestial imperiousness, love, wrath, and fervor had are thrown away on your milksop of a husband. ”
<3
“Your pure and radiant beauty is the worst thing that has ever happened to you.”
It kind of is though. Give me cold and unapproachable beauty any day!
I’m considering this a birthday present because it justifies, to me at least, my extreme dislike of Thomas Hardy. Suck it, Tess! I’m glad you and everyone else in that book died.
“I’m glad you and everyone else in that book died” Yes, me too, but about Jude the Obscure. IF ONLY YOU HAD STAYED OBSCURE, JUDE.
Makes me think of that line summing up Housman in “The Invention of Love.” “Life’s a curse, love’s a blight, God’s a blaggard, cherry blossom is quite nice.”
Your life is terrible, but it could have been better if only you had done things differently. Your knowledge of this is your fiercest torment.
“It is a very common folly of human nature, you know, to think the course you did not adopt must have been the best” -Thomas Hardy
Someone – probably you – is lounging about on pagan sacrificial altars and/or UNESCO World Heritage sites.
In the future, everyone will be suicidal. You are ahead of your time.
You or someone you love or hate drowns in a weir.
Is there something in Hardy about wedding nights / bloody sheets? Or a sheet with a dick access hole so the wife can stay covered? Why the hell is that the first thing that popped into my mind when I thought of Hardy today?
Don't know about Hardy, but Rushdie's Midnight's Children has some of this.
Texts from Angel Clare? Pleeeeeeease?
Haha, good post.
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You have a primal fear of marriage, yet are somehow married to two women at once.
You are a poor and naive but good-hearted man. You fall in love with a hot chick but she marries the rich scoundrel who has 5 other mistresses and an illegitimate child. She abandons him. You die as a symbol of the violent forces of natural selection. She returns to her abusive husband. The greedy capitalists go on oppressing the poor. The End.
You have been caught in a man-trap.
I’ve read literally all of his novels including both versions of that one that has two versions…!!