Psychological Approaches to Thomas Hardy

I begin with a brief sketch of the dominant psychological approaches to Hardy’s life and work, suggesting that the practice of thinking about Hardy in psychological terms has persisted for over a century. ¹ Ideally, this study would extend to the new waves of cognitive literary studies and historicist recuperations of Victorian psychology, but these twentieth-century modes of analysis have not yet fully demonstrated their potential for producing useful readings of Hardy. As Dale Kramer wisely observes, Hardy’s ‘works tend to test the validity of matured theories more than they offer early opportunities for theoretical display’. ² Notable recent work on psychology in Victorian Studies has focused on the emotions, on amnesia, on mesmerism and on George Eliot’s fiction, and not much on Hardy. ³ Though Hardy’s reading is well documented and his influences much studied, he has not yet been understood as participating in the literary articulation of late Victorian and early twentieth-century brain science. The bulk of this chapter therefore lays the groundwork for a historicized psychological approach to Hardy, addressing Hardy’s creative response to the psychology and neurology of his own time, observing the changing imagery of brain and nerves he employed in over a half century of writing, and documenting the likely sources of Hardy’ s knowledge.