Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-69). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Haifa, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thomas Hardy described himself as "churchy". Yet his later novels and poetry gave him the reputation of being an agnostic, an atheist and a heathen. He denied that there was any particular philosophy behind his work claiming that it was the result of impressions not convictions. However, I wish to show that Hardy's fiction and poetry expose specific religious beliefs and doubts, that gave rise to his notoriously pessimistic art. By investigating the themes of sin, atonement and salvation, as reflected in the Mosaic Law and the New Testament against Hardy's mature novels, and examining Hardy's concept of God in his poetry, I aim to show that Hardy rejected the miraculous and the doctrine of redemption but retained a belief in the Biblical premiss that the earth is cursed and that humanity is governed by the Biblical Laws which dictate the consequences of sin. Hardy depicts a universe in which humankind is cursed from birth, resides on a cursed earth and is denied the possibility of salvation or redemption. Hardy's profoundly pessimistic world view is a result of his inability to accept the Christian doctrines that offer man a means to rise above the curse of original sin. The characters and plots he created in his fiction were born out of doubt and despair. Consequently, his imaginative universe is permeated with doom and damnation. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

A close critical scrutiny of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass reveals that these texts are linked through their use of a chess metaphor, a device that symbolizes how the central female characters of these works become stalemated in their efforts to achieve autonomy. While the disparate but related paths these characters take can be likened to the predetermined progress of a pawn that travels the length of a chessboard to become a queen, what Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll all recognize is that this process of becoming is by no means a fulfilling one. Rather, it only serves to reveal how trapped Helen, Elfride, and Alice are within a game in which Victorian society designates them as players of only secondary importance. There is a general movement towards a more complex integration of the chess motif as we move from Brontë to Hardy and finally, to Carroll. Brontë’s incidental chess scene is reminiscent of Thomas Middleton’s use of a similar episode in Women Beware Women, and shows less sophistication than what Hardy or Carroll achieve because her moral realism lacks the creative touches found in either Hardy’s use of symbolic imagery or Carroll’s use of the fantastic and the unorthodox. However, Brontë juxtaposes her chess game with Helen’s discovery of Huntingdon’s infidelity to demonstrate how her heroine becomes trapped within a game that she is willingly coerced into playing. If Brontë suggests that relationships are like chess games played according to rules that seriously limit a woman’s ability to compete, Hardy goes to even greater lengths in using chess to show how his Wessex universe operates as its own evolving game environment, replete with obstacles and conflicts that prove catastrophic for a player as unprepared as Elfride. Indeed, Hardy’s allusion to Shakespeare’s The Tempest is critical in demonstrating how in matters of social game-playing, his heroine suffers from the unsatisfactory education she receives from her controlling father. Hardy shows greater sophistication than Brontë in using parallel chess episodes to comment on the progress of Elfride’s relationships, and he even refers to a specific opening system in chess, the Muzio Gambit, whose catalogue of moves prefigures Elfride’s romantic involvements with Stephen and Henry, as well as the unavoidable problems she encounters from the novel’s vengeful Black Queen, Mrs. Jethway. Unlike Brontë, Hardy recognizes that fate is not so careful about giving individuals what they deserve, and that a character like Elfride can pay a heavy price for her romantic misdemeanours. However, neither Brontë nor Hardy achieves what Carroll does in Through the Looking-Glass, a work that can be seen to follow in the tradition of Middleton’s A Game at Chess, and which not only incorporates the game but structures its plot on the solution to an unorthodox chess problem. If Brontë is to be celebrated for her honest portrayal of a woman who becomes trapped in a destructive marriage, and Hardy can be commended for showing how his heroine’s education in social game-playing undermines her relationships with men, Carroll’s genius rests in his ability to illustrate these kinds of experiences on a chess board through Alice’s dream of travelling across Looking-Glass land to become a queen. He does not simply give us the impression that a girl’s progress towards womanhood is like a pawn’s promotion in chess, but instead integrates these two concepts into a single experience. He also keeps the reader off guard by creating an unorthodox chess problem and a curious cast of characters, giving us a sense of being caught in a game of our own. The result of all of this is that we are drawn into Carroll’s games even as we view them as spectators, and the critical giddiness we experience in the process both helps us to share a sense of Alice’s predicament in her frustrated quest to find fulfilment, and allows us to appreciate the underlying thematic implications of the chess motif in the narrative. / Graduate

Thomas Hardy described himself as "churchy". Yet his later novels and poetry gave him the reputation of being an agnostic, an atheist and a heathen. He denied that there was any particular philosophy behind his work claiming that it was the result of impressions not convictions. However, I wish to show that Hardy's fiction and poetry expose specific religious beliefs and doubts, that gave rise to his notoriously pessimistic art. By investigating the themes of sin, atonement and salvation, as reflected in the Mosaic Law and the New Testament against Hardy's mature novels, and examining Hardy's concept of God in his poetry, I aim to show that Hardy rejected the miraculous and the doctrine of redemption but retained a belief in the Biblical premiss that the earth is cursed and that humanity is governed by the Biblical Laws which dictate the consequences of sin. Hardy depicts a universe in which humankind is cursed from birth, resides on a cursed earth and is denied the possibility of salvation or redemption. Hardy's profoundly pessimistic world view is a result of his inability to accept the Christian doctrines that offer man a means to rise above the curse of original sin. The characters and plots he created in his fiction were born out of doubt and despair. Consequently, his imaginative universe is permeated with doom and damnation. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

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The four poets in this dissertation--Hester Pulter, Anne Bradstreet, Thomas Hardy, and Robert Frost--write poems that resist domestic confinement. In these poems, houses become prisons from which the poet must enact an escape. Pulter, Bradstreet, Hardy and Frost--writers drawn from two sides of the Atlantic and two different centuries--are nevertheless linked by the urge to create poems that will provide doorways to less confined states of existence. They are also linked by the formal strategies they use for the attainment of such poetic release, and by the scale of their rebellion against enclosing structures. All four poets make claustrophobic domestic spaces the topic of their poetry, but rather than writing their objections into the unbounded space of free verse, they mimic the confinement of small rooms in the restrained dimensions of their poems. Rather than discard the enclosure of poetry, they accept its confinement. Their forms of release, then, are more pointed; they emerge at brief instances, as opposed to making wholesale departures. Instead of using their poems to create boundless spaces, unrestricted by walls and ceilings and floors, they use their poems to create rooms similar to those occupied by their personae. In poems such as these, poetic freedom is less absolute than relative to the extent of confinement, and it is made sweeter by the awareness of inescapable limits. / text

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Courtship and marriage are, perhaps, the most important of all the themes that run through Thomas Hardy's novels. In novel after novel he explores the intricate relationships of men and women and their attitudes towards marriage. To Hardy the struggles of human beings to keep, or even to understand, their marriage vows create probably the severest of all human dilemmas. [...]