ABSTRACT
It would be no exaggeration to contend, as did one recent critic, that “Marriage is the material of nineteenth-century British fiction” (Psomiades 53), and in his fiction Thomas Hardy took full advantage of the possibilities for both comedy and tragedy that arise from this material. Despite Hardy’s later reputation as a critic of the institution, the majority of his novels follow the conventions of the romance plot, tracing the social and emotional complications of men and women as they attempt to balance the dictates of their hearts with their culture’s expectations for domestic stability. As iconoclastic as his own views may have been, Hardy’s fiction generally satisfies the widely held view that “the success of repeated pressures to coax and nudge sexual desire into conformity with the norms of heterosexual monogamy affords a fine way of closing a novel and provides a satisfactory goal for a text to achieve” (Armstrong 6). Nearly all of Hardy’s novels end with a marriage or the implicit promise of a marriage, even if few of these unions are unqualifiedly satisfactory and several portend at best a barely tolerable co-existence between husband and wife.1
