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"A good horror has its place in art": Hardy's gothic strategy in Tess of the d'Urbervilles.(Thomas Hardy)(Critical essay)

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From: Studies in the Humanities
Date: 20051201
Author:Mustafa, Jamil

Thomas Hardy's enduring fascination with things loosely defined as "Gothic"--ruins, graveyards, ghosts, corpses, curses, ancient pagan rituals, and psychic phenomena (1)--is among the most intriguing yet least appreciated aspects of his life and art. As a boy, Hardy relished William Harrison Ainsworth's Old Saint Paul's (1841), a Gothic romance featuring a disguised noblewoman, a pair of grave robbers, and a seduced heroine who is first duped into a false marriage by a villainous aristocrat and then dies of the plague. The mature Hardy declared Ainsworth's shamelessly sensational ...

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