The character Hannah Jarvis from the play Arcadia by Tom Stoppard is one of the most significant ones because it is through her character in which the tensions between the Romantic view point and the Classical viewpoint are played out and eventually resolved. Hannah is a very strong-minded intellectual who prides herself on her research to the point where she sacrifices human contact for it. Her main goal is to find out the identity of the the elusive hermit of Sidley Park, who lived in the hermitage there in the early 19th century. Hannah begins as an anti-romantic, no-nonsense girl dedicated to finding out the identity of the Sidley hermit, and ends up not only completing this goal, but also realizing that emotion and reason must exist together.
In the struggle between emotion and reason, Hannah feels that reason trumps emotion everytime. This feeling is conveyed by a speech Hannah makes to Bernard in which she uses the garden as an example of the decline from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period. She says, "There's an engraving of Sidley Park in 1730 that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the age of reason " (Stoppard 27). She then expresses her disdain for Noakes' transformation of the garden when she says, "By the time he'd finished it looked like this (the sketch book). The decline from thinking to feeling, you see " (27). The fact that she sees the switch from Classicism to Romanticisim as a decline makes it clear that she values reason over emotion, and furthermore sees thinking based on emotion as an overall silly concept. It seems that Hannah did, at one point, experience love but has decided to pursue better things as reflected in the quote, "Chaps sometimes wanted to marry me, and I don't know a worse bargain. Availiable sex against not being allowed to fart in bed " (63). Hannah's rejection of love or knowledge of love has left her unaware of her own self. She fails to realize, as Chloe does, that emotion and sex and love do play a part in knowledge and reason.
