Thomas Hardy's Idiosyncratic Posthumanism and the (Im)possibility of Entanglement

Drawing upon Karen Barad’s theories of agential realism, this contribution explores the way in which, in a selection of works, Thomas Hardy attempts to debunk a hegemonic cultural model based on the “Self-Other dialectics”. In their post anthropocentric spirit, Hardy’s writings call into question hierarchical relationships that deny equality and mutuality; they problematize gender identities built upon relations of power, and they equally recognize the intimacy and the vital interconnection between human and nonhuman animals. Hardy’s post-human approach functions as a redefinition of the sense of the self in relation to those that exist on the other side of the dualistic divide described by Val Plumwood, including both human beings marginalized by virtue of gender, and the nonhuman entities excluded because lacking those human features that make humankind ‘exceptional’. Thus, Hardy’s narrative and poetry quietly but effectively displace anthropocentrism, offering instead a strong sense that of our being is in symbiosis with other species. To this extent, therefore, Hardy’s work suggests a new materialism before the fact, in which entanglement with nonhuman agentialities becomes a touchstone of many of the most moving and important passages in his novels and verse. In her analysis of Tess of the d’Urbevilles, The Hand of Ethelberta and of the poem “Heiress and Architect”, this contribution examines the way in which three female characters suffer the effects of a patriarchal society, whose logic of domination depends on a dualistic divide between encultured, rational male, and instinctual, feminised nature. On the one hand, these female figures embody the entangled nature of human existence, as itself an animal life, constitutively connected to its more-than-human environs, but on the other, and through his presentation of their widely differing fates, Hardy asks the important and awkward question – what comes of that entanglement, when it is used by society as an excuse to oppress those it deems inferior by virtue of those self-same entanglement? In his portrayal of these female characters, however, Hardy presents entanglement as a kind of curse, a part of life’s trials, over which women must find some way to triumph if they are to survive or thrive.