Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex Heights”

Thomas Hardy’s “Wessex Heights” gives me an impression similar to that of Dante’s Inferno.  Not that Hardy is traveling through the gates and levels of hell, but rather, he is mentally reminiscing the different gates and levels of His hell.  His heaven if you may call it is at the peak of Wessex, named “Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly.”  He describes this place as being “if [shaped] by a kindly hand” for “thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when [he] stands” (1073).  Hardy hints that this may be the very place that he was born and may be the place he will die:  “I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be” (1074).  This may very well be the place at which he calls home, or heaven, for he further contrasts his journey into the “lowlands” and his negative encounters with reality.  In the second stanza, he describes the lowlands as a place without “comrade” and much less a place with a “lone man’s friend.”  “Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I” meaning he is out of place.  He is different from them and does not belong.  However, he still recognizes his heaven since “mind-chains do not clank where one’s next neighbor is the sky.”  Here, he is referening to Ingpen Beacon/Wylls-Neck, for it is here that his mind is free to roam than locked as if “chains [that] clank.”

Continuing on his journey, he meets “phantoms” that track him in “detective” ways who say “harsh heavy things” with “wintry sneer” and “tart disparaging.”  In this place, he is scrutinized and treated with low respect.  He feels that he is being judged and dissected like an object by a “detective.”  It almost feels that he is not even treated as a human.

“Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self…”  This line makes me think that he is “acting” to please and satisfy the wants and desires of others.  To be someone he’s not.  He feels as if he is living a lie, an illusion to himself.  However, he “is not now” as he acknowledges his mistake in the third person view as he ironically scrutinizes himself:  “I see him watching, wondering what crass cause can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this, who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.”  Hardy's skillful metaphor of the character's past to that of a pupil in a cocoon portrays the entrapment of his true self.  Here, “chrysalis” is used to identify his past self as someone who has not awakened or that he has not fully become himself until now, and that only in time will he hatch into a butterfly, free of his “crass[ness],” free of his cocoon's "clanging... chains."

Hardy’s eccentric style is representative in this piece in that he not only is aware of his surroundings, but most importantly, he looks deep into himself to identify his own problems and restrictions.  The following two lines are relevant to explore this theme:

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there’s a figure against the moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;

Here, the “figure against the moon” is he, a mere reflection off the water.  And it is himself because “Nobody [can] see it but [him].”  Only he is disturbed by his own unhappiness.  If he was like the rest of the people in the “Plains,” then it would be alright.  However, because he is different, his own presence there leads to his dissatisfaction and “out of tune” heart.  In fact, the rest of this stanza is the implication of himself and his mind’s cry:

There’s a ghost in Yell’ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night,
There’s a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin-lipped and vauge, in a shroud of white,
There is one in the railway train whenever I do not want it near,
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

I interpreted the “ghost” to be the thought of himself in the past when he used to be in the "Plains".  He was living “out of tune” “falsely” to himself.  It’s only his horrible reflection of his “false” self that he sees as a “profile” that says what he would not hear.  He speaks and acts opposite to what he truly is.

In the next to last stanza, he gives an account of his betrayal of love.  “[As] I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers.”  The girl has moved on to something better while he still loves her to the “fullness that she herself even did not know.”   Thus, the love was one-sided, and may be due to his inability to grasp her for he was but a “thought” in her life.  In the end, it is time that “cures [his] heart” and frees her from his thoughts, which is quite contradicting in that it still remains as the words laid out here serve as evidence of that.  I feel it’s something that he will live with as long as he has memory of it.

The last stanza ends where he started, in which he snaps back to reality (or dream) where he is now free (“I know some liberty”) from the “lowlands” criticism and his own falseness (“ghosts then keep their distance”).  It is here that he can “think, dream, and die on” as he wishes, even in the face of “crises.”

This story is interesting in that it shows Hardy’s travel through life, the people he meets, and the realization of his own imperfections.  He realizes and scrutinizes himself, for not being true to what he really thinks and who he really is.  I think that reaching the "crest" is not literal in meaning, but rather figuratively expressing a state of mind that the character has acheived, such that now he has reached a heaven where he can be true to himself and his mind can rest against judgement.  Somewhere along his journey, he was able to change, and disregard other’s thoughts and opinions.  It is himself that that brought upon the pains of his mind, the dissatisfaction with scrutiny.  Scrutiny will always follow him, but at least now, they no longer affect him, now that he has come back to the “crest” in which he is liberated in thought and mind.

In addition, the author's use of the setting is symbolic of his character's state of mind.  The “lowlands” and “Plains” are the sufferings, dissatisfaction, and negative effects of reality on him.  The “crest” represents the realizations he made that frees him from these effects for it is in the mind that happiness can be found.  This brings me back to one of my favorite quotes from Shakespeare:  “Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  Personally, I interpreted this story to be an expedition of the mind and its final destination to be liberation from mental sufferings attained through changing of perspective towards external inputs and the acceptance and content of oneself.

(All references not identified are from the text page 1074)