The Son’s Veto Study Guide

Thomas Hardy was born in a rural village near Dorchester, England in 1840. He came from working-class roots: his mother was a former housemaid, and his father was a stonemason. Hardy’s mother instilled a love for books and music in her son. He also had a close relationship with his strong-willed sister, who may have served as an inspiration for some of his female characters. In his youth, he was a successful student, learning Greek, French, Latin, and German, and he began to publish his writing when he was still a teenager. Like the protagonist of Jude the Obscure, Hardy was not able to attend college in spite of his intellectual successes, largely because of his class status. At the age of 21, Hardy moved to London, with virtually no wealth or possessions to his name, to find a job as an architectural apprentice. Even as he worked towards a career as an architect, he continued writing poetry and novel drafts. His experiences in this early period of his life—including the class discrimination that he faced, as well as the sexual discrimination faced by the women he was close to—strongly influenced the strain of social criticism that is found throughout his works. His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, was rejected by publishers because its critique of class inequality was too severe. In 1870, Hardy met Emma Gifford, a woman with intellectual and artistic aspirations who would later become his first wife. After a four-year relationship, Emma faked pregnancy to pressure Hardy into marrying her (similar to the character Arabella in Jude the Obscure). Their marriage was largely unhappy and filled with disappointment, until her death in 1912. Shortly after marrying Emma, Hardy experienced his major breakthrough as a novelist with the publication of Far From the Madding Crowd in 1874. Yet his success as a novelist came at a price: throughout the next two decades, he was constantly battling with publishers and critics, who disapproved of Hardy’s tendency to subvert Victorian social and moral codes. His final two novels—Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895)—were his most controversial; the harsh critical response to the latter novel prompted his abandonment of novel-writing altogether. However, this turn away from novel-writing was also an expression of his own preference for poetry and drama. He would spend the remainder of his writing career, up until his death in 1928, pursuing a productive writing career as a Modernist poet and a dramatist (the major work of his later career was The Dynasts, a Napoleonic drama). Two years after Emma’s death, at the age of 72, Hardy remarried to Florence Dugdale, a writer of children’s stories who was 39 years younger than Hardy. Until the end of his life, when he died of a heart attack, Hardy lived in the Dorset countryside, near his childhood home—the rural setting that, under the fictionalized name of “Wessex,” had given him the inspiration for so many of his literary works.

Hardy’s life coincided with a period of considerable social turmoil in Britain. The Industrial Revolution had brought about rapid urbanization and changes in the social class structure, including the formation of an industrial working class and the rise of the middle class. Old aristocratic distinctions were dissolving, but these were replaced by new forms of class division. Social discontent sparked some parliamentary reforms, such as the Reform Act of 1834, that eliminated some of the most anti-democratic vestiges of the English government. These reforms sparked movements for even more radical change, most prominently in the Chartist movement, which lasted from 1838 to 1857 and pushed for universal male suffrage among other democratic reforms. Working-class movements such as the Chartists often faced fierce repression from the government. At the same time that working-class activists were pushing for increased democratic representation and reforms to labor laws, early feminists were pushing for female suffrage and reforms to property and divorce laws. The tumultuous social changes and accompanying reform movements sparked by this period of industrialization in Britain provided the backdrop for the social critiques found in Hardy’s prose fiction.

“The Son’s Veto” explores similar themes as many of Hardy’s other prose works: the constraints imposed by class inequality and social convention, the limiting nature of marriage, and the contrast between rural and urban life. In Thomas Hardy’s later novels, such as The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, this critique of marriage becomes especially harsh—as in “The Son’s Veto,” marriage is portrayed as destructive of true love and freedom. Hardy’s prose fiction shared much in common with other British Realist writers who preceded him, such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot, who shared Hardy’s interest in social critique. Works such as Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch are particularly akin to Hardy in their realistic depiction of provincial life. The basic storyline of “The Son’s Veto,” in which an upper-class man develops a romantic attraction to, and eventually marries, a virtuous female servant, is similar to the premise of the novel Pamela by the 18th-century English writer Samuel Richardson, although Hardy’s treatment of the characters and plot is considerably different from this earlier work.