The politics of language in the novels of Thomas Hardy : with specific reference to Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure

Abstract

This thesis is a study of the language of Hardy's novels in relation to their socio-historical context, and with specific regard to Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. The focus of the inquiry is a consideration of the politics of Hardy's representation of dialect speech and `literary' or `ordinary English'. I begin by arguing that the highly problematic definition of dialects at the time Hardy was writing, necessitates a new theoretical approach to `Wessex dialect'. I propose a reading of the language of Hardy's novels as a complex intersection of contemporary modes of representation, which are re-presented as internally and mutually contradictory discourses. In Chapter One, I use this theory to show how the convergence of discourses in the sign of `Wessex dialect', in the context of narratives of rural working-class life, reveals the politics of contemporary modes of defining dialect speech as being outside the norm of `literary' or `ordinary English'. Chapter Two offers a new reading of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which relates the narrative of struggles for representation of class and gender to discourses in the language of that novel. I go on to place Tess Durbeyfield's ability to speak `dialect' and `ordinary English' in the context of the development of a new elementary education system in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, before considering the struggle for working-class access to education in Jude the Obscure. The final chapter shows how discourses in this novel produce a radical critique of the concept of a homogeneous, discrete, `literary language'. I conclude that the language of Hardy's novels constitutes a site of ideological conflict, which reveals the politics of representation of dialects and the language of literary texts as signs of social and cultural identity.

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