| Summary: | Thomas Hardy was deeply influenced by his discovery of The Origin of Species when he was nineteen and his dark, favourite novel The Woodlanders, with its intricate web of woods and entwined destinies, is steeped in Darwinian metaphors connoting the struggle for survival as well as decline and decay (from trees and split branches to parasites, rotting moss or inadequate human beings), raising the problem of the failure to adjust and the breakdown of an archaic community faced with modern intrusion. Thus, Hardy borrows from Darwin (and Spencer), as shown by both theme and style, but he also diverges from him as his so-called « meliorism » actually retains but a shattering rhetoric of natural aggression, as if Darwinian evolution simply meant the nauseating struggle of self and other.
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