[Hardy-l] Father Time

[Richard Nemesvari]

I would argue that Father Time acts as kind of unsublimated, extreme
symbol of alienated modernity, so that instead of a character he becomes
more of an emblem.  As such he is a fitting finale for the anti-realism
that characterizes Hardy's fiction, since Hardy provocatively refuses to
provide anything like the psychologically rounded personality that is
required by that aesthetic.  To this extent, therefore, I'm pretty much
in full agreement with Jackie on what I would describe as the
intentionally disturbing strangeness of this figure.

I have a much harder time, however, with Pauline's idea that Father Time
"instigates" the tragedy, let alone that he dies "in damnation," or that
he is the "product of a crime" because he is a "bastard."  These are all
ideas that the novel quite explicitly rejects, since they are part of
the social ideology through which "the letter killeth," and thus are
being didactically attacked by the text.  What drives Father Time to his
murder/suicide is his despair at the fact that the whole family will be
thrown into the street the next morning, because Sue isn't "really a
married woman" (Jude, OUP, 320).  What "instigates" this horror is a
self-righteous morality based on propriety rather than charity
(caritas), a morality propagated by a Christianity that has lost any
claim to ethical authority.  What does it mean to be a "true Christian"
in this context?  And then of course there is Jude's rousing rejection
of the very idea of bastardy.

"'The beggarly question of parentage--what is it after all?  What does
it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by
blood or not?  Al the little ones of our time are collectively the
children of adults of the time, and entitled to our general care.  That
excessive regard of parents for their own children, and their dislike of
other people's, is, like class-feeling, patriotism,
save-your-own-soul-ism and other virtues, a mean exclusiveness at
bottom.'"  (Jude, OUP, 264)

The appearance of "save-your-own-soul-ism" in that list is telling.
Little Father Time is not a "metaphor for the tragedies that society
would suffer through secularization"--he is a warning about what will
happen if the outmoded creeds of Christianity continue to hold
disastrous sway in a world that desperately needs a new moral discourse.
And of course Sue's own ghastly self-immolation through the "fanatic
prostitution" (Jude, OUP, 349) of returning to Phillotson, a return that
is socially/religiously sanctioned, drives this point home with one more
grotesque example.

Just to wrap this up--one of Hardy's great skills is his ability to use
emblematic, verging on surreal, figures like Father Time to connect with
specific cultural issues of his day.  For a very strong exploration of
this see Sally Shuttleworth's essay "'Done because we are too menny':
Little Father Time and Child Suicide in Late-Victorian Culture" (_Thomas
Hardy: Texts and Contexts_, ed. Phillip Mallett, Palgrave, 2002, pp.
133-155). 


Richard Nemesvari
Department of English
St. Francis Xavier University
rnemesva at stfx.ca