Abstract

This dissertation traces the similarities and differences between Thomas Hardy's and D. H. Lawrence's treatments of nature and sexual love. Writing in a post-Darwinian era, in their nature descriptions and in their depictions of characters who live "in tune" with nature, both Hardy and Lawrence tend to depict nature as an omnipotent but unconscious and unmoral force that, tragically, rules human life according to non-human considerations. Thus both writers insert a distance of motive and purpose between the human and the natural, and therefore a dualistic metaphysic is discernable in their novels, which are based on an interplay between a principle that represents uniquely human capacities and desires and a principle that represents strictly natural impulses and realities. These two principles are essentially the same as the "Will" and "Idea" of Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher whose works both Hardy and Lawrence read and were influenced by. For Hardy, the two principles are irreconcilable, and therefore, in the novels Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, the characters' attempts to fulfill both their strictly natural and their uniquely human propensities in a sexual love relationship are inevitably defeated. The same is true in Lawrence's first three novels, but Lawrence, struggling against the tragic influences of Darwin, Hardy, and Schopenhauer, sought to reconcile his dual principles by "moralizing" and "spiritualizing" his natural principle. He accomplishes these imaginative goals in his "Study of Thomas Hardy," where he relocates both nature and divinity from the outside to the inside, placing both his natural principle and his godhead inside the human individual in such a way as to create a "natural" religion of selfhood. He then provides a fictional rendition of his triumph over tragedy in The Rainbow. Thus, whereas Hardy's novels constitute a sustained nineteenth-century lament over the loss of a personal god, Lawrence's early works constitute a visionary twentieth-century search to recover a religious relationship between humanity and the universe