Life in Wessex
That Hardy titled his first collection of short stories Wessex Tales is an indication as to the prevalence and persistence of theme that runs throughout Hardy’s set in that part of England. Choosing to create the fictional village of Dorset in turn allows that setting to operation as a thematic microcosm of the entire surrounding geography. The result is that one gets a distinct feel for place when reading Hardy’s stories about the daily lives and those populating Wessex that reveals the distinct impact environment has on character and events.
Marriage
Among the events routinely taking place in Wessex are weddings and Hardy seems especially interested in the way the complexities of emotions that marriage brings on the relationship between two people. Hardy wrote his short fiction in that Austen-era where marriage about the expectations of society at least if not more than it was about actually finding love and that aspect is explored in relation to Wessex society in the aptly title “The First Countess of Wessex.” The ever-present danger of committing to marriage for all the wrong reasons, by contrast, lies at the heart of “On the Western Circuit.” Hardy’s comprehensive examination of marriage as a theme even covers the lighter side of its ability to complicated life in “The Distracted Preacher.”
Superstition and Folklore
Old wives’s tales, superstition, legends and tales of horror and the supernatural somehow manage to integrate perfectly into the collections of life and love in Wessex and beyond. Like Poe, Hardy seems to intuitively understand the effect of horror can be increased by surrounding the more macabre aspects with the trappings of normalcy. “The Withered Arm” is a perfectly realistic tale that is nevertheless dependent upon the belief in the folklore associated with touching the dead body of convicted criminal. Ghosts, witches and the use of magic all turn up in Hardy’s short fiction and it should not be surprising that this theme grows out of the setting. As a microcosm of rural village, Dorset is symbolic of every cloistered community shaped by ritual and rites from Druidic paganism to Christian witch-hunting. Hardy may not be the first author to spring to mind in comparison to Stephen King, but Wessex is really not all that all far removed from King’s Maine as a place where superstition and legends impact daily life.
