“Infinitesimal Lives” Thomas Hardy’s Scale Effects

Abstract

This essay demonstrates how inhuman scales—immense measurements of space and time—pose representational challenges for narrative forms. It focuses on Thomas Hardy’s efforts to represent scales that seemed outsized to the realist novel’s conventional focus on the daily lives of individuals. Narrating realities beyond the scope of realism, I argue, led Hardy to experiment with formal alternatives including romance and melodrama—genres associated with a mode of excess. Romances like Two on a Tower and A Pair of Blue Eyes accommodate the immense perspectives of scientific observation by shifting into a heightened mode of representation, producing distinctive “scale effects.” This essay ultimately proposes that questions of scale are key to rethinking the role of genre in Hardy’s works and Hardy’s status within the realist tradition.