『숲사람들』의 양식 실험

Abstract

To evaluate experiments of different literary modes in Thomas Hardys The Woodlanders will contribute to a fuller understanding of the novel and of Hardys later fictional development as well. This paper aims to analyze pastoral and melodramatic elements we find in the text, and to prove how Hardy succeeds in manipulating these two conventional modes for creating a life-like portrait of Hintocks social life. Melodramatic elements we see in Graces reconciliation with her husband, Edred Fitzpiers, have often been taken as anti-climatic flaws, but on closer examination we find them to be effective means for depicting Graces precarious life on the borderline. Despite her heartfelt mourning over her dead lover, Giles Winterbourne, Grace is finally won over to her estranged husbands side. However, Hardy shows the limitations of Grace- Fitzpiers by introducing melodramatic mode that exactly corresponds to the couples narrow outlooks on life, which, in turn, strengthens dominant realistic mode portraying tragic clashes between opposing ways of life. It is hard to deny that the demise of the world of Giles-Marty is rendered with certain notes of elegiac pastoral, but roles of pastoral elements in the novel are much more complex and delicate. When Grace was separated from her husband, pastoral diction and troupes dramatize her romantic idealization of Giles which is not completely false but far from being trueto- life. What is more important, with the aid of modified pastoral atmospheres, the common peoples labouring reality is vividly foregrounded against the upper-class ethos of Grace-Fitzpiers, which leads to Hardys most impressive poetic achievements in his fiction. In conclusion, we can say that literary experiments employing different modes — pastoral, melodrama, comedy, and realism — in The Woodlanders contribute to presenting a truly Sophoclean tragedy of Hintock people as the narrator asserts.