Architecture and Thomas Hardy's Narrative Technique.

 Architecture has proved to be an extraordinary source of symbolism and narrative experimentation for the English novel. Moll Flanders, Pamela, the Gothic fiction and, very especially, Wuthering Heights

epitomize the interconnections between architecture and fiction. Among the major English novelists, Thomas

Hardy (1840-1928) is the only one who received formal training in architecture. Born in Dorset to a family of

masons and musicians, Hardy articled with John Hicks, a Dorchester architect, at the age of sixteen. After a

five year period training in London, he returned to  Dorset and became Hicks?s assistant in church

restoration. Nevertheless, only his second novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872-3), and ten years later Two on

a Tower are reminiscent of this activity. His most remarkable novels, on the contrary, are concerned with

the rural environment of Southern England, which he renamed Wessex, with its provincial/rustic houses and

its historical buildings. Hardy?s hero(in)es are usually country people who tragically struggle for

happiness and dignity against the deterministic forces of nature and fate. Since character and action

constitute the pivotal matters of his Wessex novels, the rest of the narrative elements ?including space and

monuments, or nature itself? is subordinate to them. The architectural constructions usually stand as

powerful symbols which help both to understand the tragic confrontation of the hero/ine with the forces of

destiny or nature and to add a cosmic dimension to  their predicaments. In this paper I would like to show

how the art of architecture is used by Thomas Hardy in his novels, with special attention to The Mayor of

Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). However, since the ?Ut Architectura Poesis?

perspective has seldom been subject of scholarly discussion, there is a lack of a substantial theory or

appropriate methodology to examine the relationship between both arts. In devising a procedure for such an

analysis, I shall start by considering how Hardy solved  spatial problems and how his major novels were

structured. This will be illustrated by his creation of Wessex as a fictional Victorian space, the narrative

setting, the roads and the houses that link the lives of the characters, his cinematic vision, his particular

use of nature (considered both as a cosmic, universal stage and as a source of symbolic literary      “ornamentation”), and the parts of the novel as the fictional events unfold. This latter aspect

will provide the second step of my analysis. It is significant that the main turning points in the plot of

his Wessex novels are marked by the presence (or absence) of monumental or architectural elements. This

discussion will lead us inevitably to regard more complex issues dealing with the meaning of architecture literary arts and criticism.