Families that shape us: Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy on inheritance and identity

By John Hubbard

What do Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy tell us about the influence of family? John Hubbard compares four classic novels to explore how personality, upbringing, work and social circumstances shape the people we become. While Austen emphasises inherited character and family relationships, Hardy is more interested in the transforming power of community, labour and changing social worlds.

John Hubbard is a retired English teacher and a National Trust volunteer guide at both Thomas Hardy's Cottage and Max Gate. He enjoys exploring the insights that classic literature offers into enduring questions about human nature, family and identity.

I am the family face;

Flesh perishes, I live on,

Projecting trait and trace

Through time to times anon…

                                Heredity by Thomas Hardy 1917

Philip Larkin, in his famous and darkly humorous poem This Be the Verse, suggested emphatically that the role of parents is to pass on and multiply faults and psychological damage, perpetuating misery from one generation to the next. Novelists, however, have space for a more subtle and varied exploration of family relationships. I want to outline aspects of family in four novels written by two childless authors, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, both of whom were deeply interested in the effects of upbringing and those transitional moments in life, usually occasioned by romance, in which a social repositioning of the individual is effected as marriage takes them into a different sphere. Of the two, Austen is more explicit in her engagement with the idea of heredity, whereas Hardy is more concerned with changing social contexts; a notion his own life experience made salient.

Pride and Prejudice

The five Bennet girls in Pride and Prejudice represent the strengths and weaknesses in various degrees of their two parents, whose marriage was probably ill-advised, but brought about by the absolutely commonplace fact of the strong personal attractiveness of the young lady at the time. Nobody would attribute a high degree of intelligence to the character of Mrs Bennet as depicted in the novel, and her unregulated emotions and tactless and embarrassing scheming contribute a sometimes painfully volatile thread. The scholarly and reflective Mr Bennet, on the other hand, deals with his marriage by a form of tactical withdrawal and possibly disloyal alliances with his two eldest daughters, who most resemble him in their sensitivity and containment, although Elizabeth has an undoubted touch of independent spirit which we could attribute to her mother; you may remember her muddy walk on a less than fine day which astonishes Miss Bingley. Mary is seen as having a superabundance of her father’s seriousness which she is perhaps seen as ‘performing’ to gain distinction among her siblings. The remaining three, who, in all fairness, Austen is presenting not as wholly foolish but simply lively, young and inexperienced, are at risk because of the lack of a stabilising maternal hand. They are rather indulged, and while Lydia does find a dashing husband in a manner that could have doomed her elder sisters’ prospects, Austen is blunt about the hopes for future happiness. So, within this group we see an understanding of the effects of not only character inheritance in mixed degrees, but also the effects of parental influence. Austen understands, too, the emotional difference between being in one’s teens and twenties, the ways romantic feelings are processed and directed, and the contrast between mere excitement and the depths of a serene affection.

Persuasion 

In Persuasion the central figure Anne Elliot appears to be destined to a single life in the bosom of an entirely unprepossessing family. Her father is a monster of vanity of both person and social position, her mother long dead. Her closest female advisor is Lady Russell, who admires Anne because she can see in her most clearly the qualities she loved in her mother, and it was perhaps an over-protective care for her that influenced Anne against a marriage with a naval officer whose promise was as then unfulfilled. Anne has two sisters whose character inheritance is dominantly that of their father: Elizabeth is not only acutely conscious of her position, but also lacks any trace of human warmth, which accounts adequately for her spinster status. Mary has married and has children, and the influence of her husband and in-laws, the more relaxed Musgroves, might in time, we feel, soften her self-regard, but she is extraordinarily selfish, and seems to value Anne only in as much as she may be of use with her lively children. The two Musgrove daughters have a sisterly relationship that Anne might well envy.

Austen’s observation of family relationships is acute, but she is also very good at depicting young children and the ways they may run out of control. One memorable example occurs when Anne is quietly rescued by her former admirer, Captain Wentworth, from one of Mary’s troublesome children. This swift and silent act of kindness marks the beginning of Anne’s reappraisal of his feelings for her as he re-enters her social circle. How people treat children, too, is a mark of their goodness: Admiral Croft, though in a very happy marriage, is childless himself, but wonderful at engaging the young with his jests and friendly humour. It is no surprise that Anne achieves a late-secured happiness, taken into the heart of the naval community rich in its practicalities and deep affections, while Elizabeth and her father continue their chilly life together.

The Woodlanders

We tend to think of all nineteenth-century novels as having families teeming with children, but naturally circumstances prevail where that is not the case, and the solitary child and their fortunes is something that preoccupies Hardy in his late novel The Woodlanders. Two young women, although part of the same community but divided already by subtle gradations of rank through prosperity, form the main focus of the text. The only child of the wood and woodland product merchant, Grace Melbury is the focus of her father’s ambition; he sees that she is educated in a style far beyond the normal scope of her sylvan community. It had previously been his intention to encourage his daughter to marry Giles Winterborne, because of an historic rivalry between the fathers. Marty South, the daughter of the ailing John, is first seen completing her father’s piecework in the making of spar gads (small pointed rods or pegs used by thatchers) and silently assisting the man she loves, Giles Winterborne, in his work. It is typical of Hardy’s depiction of the complex connections within small communities that it is her father’s death that leads to Giles’s loss of his land and home, held on a ‘lifehold’ attached to him. Giles’s decline in fortune leads to his estrangement from the newly ascendant Grace and to her relationship with the interloper Dr Fitzpiers (a scion of an ancient landed family). In this novel, children are seen less as inheritors of personal character traits, but more as the embodiment of social status or social ambition. It is a world in which work matters a great deal, with its early risings, its physical demands, its specialist knowledge and skills passed down through generations of the same family on the same isolated spot. The new doctor, Fitzpiers, with no parents present, appears rather more free to make his mark and has a lively intellectual life and one that is also scientifically exploratory, but this novelty sows suspicion in the rural community in which he finds himself.

Giles and Marty are both intrinsically embedded in their community and work, and in their quality of observation of the woodland world about them; they are ideally suited. However, Giles cannot extinguish his affection for Grace although he has relinquished her, and when her marriage reaches a crisis and she seeks his help, he sacrifices his health out of a discipline of the strictest propriety to protect her reputation. He shows an acute sense of chivalry that the antecedents of Fitzpiers might have conferred on their descendant; instead the doctor is guilty of reckless infidelities, the final consequences of which leave Marty to speak a tiny eulogy over Giles, that Hardy makes a conscious echo of one we hear in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles

While, by contrast, Tess’s family teems (she is the oldest of the seven survivors of nine births to her mother Joan), one can identify several common features that The Woodlanders has with Tess of the d’Urbervilles: the tale of an old noble family connection; a child having to do a father’s work – this time Tess making a delivery with her father’s horse and cart because he is worse for drink, a disastrous journey that sets off a series of devastating self-sacrifices; and a marriage across a social gap. In this case, the gap arises from the practical value of work skills (Angel’s plans for his agricultural future, in contrast to his academic clergyman brothers, make Tess an ideal partner, her education derived from the fecund landscape of the dairy vale) and socially conditioned notions of the strictest propriety, and their different application to men and women. These strip Angel of the kind of chivalric grace that has attended him in his romantic dealings with Tess until their confessional wedding night.

Of all Hardy’s young heroines, Tess is the one whose appeal is most obviously sketched in sensual and sexual terms, which, on the one hand echoes the state of the natural environment to which she belongs, and on the other is something of which she herself is sufficiently unaware so that she is constantly at risk. When pregnant, a fact her mother takes in her stride, she berates her for not warning her of the dangers in men. The argument her mother makes is that it might have spoilt her chances in claiming kin with their false cousins, but also shows Joan’s social naivety in expecting a marriage to come of it. It is that misguided ambition which sets Tess off on a trajectory of various kinds of independent work, from feeding old Mrs d’Urberville’s poultry, which allows the seducer Alec close access to her, to the new start with the blissful dairy months with Angel at Talbothays, the bitter winter fieldwork at Flintcombe Ash, which leads finally the stylish indolence of a mistress whose anger at the distortions imposed on her life by her keeper transforms her into a murderess. Away from her family, Tess’s personality had secured her place in a community of similarly joyful or suffering working women. At her most troubled and miserable and endangered she is found alone.

Yet her story is framed by her family: on the journey which ends with the death of their faithful old horse she is accompanied by her younger brother Abraham and, looking up at the heavens as they travel before dawn, they speak of the nature of the universe and the sense they derive of living on a blighted planet because they can see how much of a struggle life is for their mother. At the story’s conclusion, Angel is not alone as he overlooks the city that is clearly Winchester, to see the black flag rise over the gaol as a signal that the capital sentence has been carried out. He is accompanied by Tess’s sister ‘Liza-Lu.          

Although observant, as the poem Heredity suggests, of physical perpetuations, Hardy is less interested than Austen in inherited personality traits. He is more concerned with the influences of communities, the narratives of the people who work in them, the types of labour available, and the aspirations that might reasonably be fulfilled. Both authors present social milieus with which they are familiar, but while Austen’s experience was mostly a socially stable one amongst a largely leisured class, Hardy’s change from grandson and son of rural stonemasons to architect to a member of the Victorian professional class was responsible for his emphasis on identity through work rather than through family, although family, as it had done in his own life, never loses its significance as a personal  affectional base.