Thomas Hardy and The Poems of 1912-13
A Response To The Death Of His First Wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford.
Jun 3, 2009
The death of Emma, for Hardy, ‘emphasizes the distance between early love and later division’(1); their marriage had ultimately been an unhappy one and they had both, perhaps been equally unloved and unloving in the later years. The card accompanying the wreath that he laid on her grave said it all; ‘From her Lonely Husband with the Old Affection’.
Claire Tomalin, writing in her new biography about Hardy has written with reference to the poems themselves; that, ‘No one who knew him expected it, or could have expected it without understanding the width of the gap between his imaginative life and the day-to-day events going on around him.’(2)
It can be said that Hardy neglected Emma in pursuit of his writing career - he was a very busy man and worked very hard to produce his novels. This resulted in a relationship which very often spent it's time in the realms of Hardy's imagination rather than in real-life.
Emma the Obscure
Indeed, the Hardys’ marriage had taken on a facade in the later years - they often still holidayed together in England and Scotland and took trips to the theatre and even still went to church together, despite their differences in religious views. Tomalin notes in her biography that they kept cats and dogs and it may have been the case that ‘some of the tenderness that they failed to give one another went to the pets, providing an alternative form of bonding.’
This decorum was the face of a relationship which had in time been soured by religious beliefs (most notably during Hardy’s writing and publication of Jude the Obscure), mostly pertaining to the way marriage is dealt with in the novel- a hard blow for his wife of forty years.
Emma had always been involved in his work - she had wanted to become a writer herself, but never had the encouragement nor the drive to succeed. She had always discussed plotlines and characters with her husband, sometimes even acting as his scribe, writing out copies in her ‘fair hand’ to take to the publishers. It is little surprise then that she was quite upset to be completely uninvolved in the text of Jude, not reading it for herself until it had been published.
At that point then here we have Hardy’s wife of forty years reading a book which contained characters, whose lives could be a semi-autobiographical take on Hardy and Emma’s; given the religious and moral outcry that followed, Emma must have been devastated - she must have questioned her husbands feelings towards her, not to mention how embarrassed she must have been at the way in which the main character, Sue deals with marriage.
This was yet another void which was hollowed out between them, and by the time Emma died in 1912, they had become wholly estranged from one another. Hardy ‘did not consider , any more than most men would have done, that a childish impulsiveness and inconsequential manner, charming at thirty, might grate on him when carried to middle age.’(3)
References
1 Mahar, Margaret, Hardy’s Poetry of Renunciation, ELH, The John Hopkins University Press 1978, (pp307-303-324)
2 Tomalin, Claire, Thomas Hardy: The time-torn man, Penguin Books, London, 2007, (p.312)
3 Gittings, Robert, Young Thomas Hardy, Heinemann, 1975, (p.55)
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