Thomas Hardy’s Architecture: Fragments of a Lost Aesthetic

The paper examines the ways in which Thomas Hardy’s abandoned career as a draughtsman and assistant architect (1856-1873) carries over into his literary work. Taking as its case study Hardy’s late works, the poetry and the novels written in 1880s and 1890s, it focuses on the role descriptions of spaces play in his writing. The aesthetic tension between architectural restoration and preservation in the 19th century, as exemplified by theoretical writings of Viollet-le-Duc and John Ruskin, is used to consider the role of the past in novels like A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure, as well as Hardy’s poetry. Destabilizing restoration’s structural and symbolic integrations, creating a poetics of fragments, distance and absence, Hardy’s writing can be seen as a literary endeavor that not only proclaims, but performs preservation. Places of his fictional world present the past. The surfaces work as records; on them, the entire past is held in synchrony and orientation requires affective resonances between disparate moments that render any past potentially personal and any sedimentation of human history meaningful. The country of Wessex, the integrated space of many Hardy’s works, can thus be imagined as an infinitely thin layer of narrative situated in space, guarding against modernity’s transformations by claiming the absent co-presence of another, invisible world