La science et le savoir obscur dans Jude the Obscure de Thomas Hardy

Abstract

The opening paragraphs of the short story The Fiddler of the Reels contrast past and present, Wessex and modernity, tradition and progress, revealing Hardy's view of science. His position is ambivalent, as the geological and temporal faultline may be seen as severing, but also connecting, two different kinds of world. As both link and division (« an extraordinary chronological frontier or transit-line »), the faultline is a trope for nostalgia as much as progress. Hardy was clearly attracted to the major scientific texts of his time, and Darwin's emblematic Origin of Species had a considerable influence over Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, but there is no denying that scientific discourse is revisioned by the writer's art. Thus the novels which bear the stamp of Darwinism are not naturalistic, biological treatises but tragedies, as the protagonists' fate is determined by the characteristics of previous generations — Tess's fallen ancestors, Jude's weary parents. So that Hardy's reading of life is imbued with a Neo-Darwinian obsession with heredity rather than with evolution per se. Genealogy, family characteristics, filiation are obsessions which shape Hardy's poetic and fictional universe.

Keywords

• conformity
• desire
• fault
• heredity
• modernity
• mutation