Thomas Hardy, “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”
1. Themes:
a) social structure– what social class does each character belong to and what does the book have to say about it?
b) the fallen woman – why does hardy subtitle the book “A Pure Woman”?
c) character and environment – what is the relation between them?
d) nature and Fate – what is the power of each?
Hardy once wrote that “a story must be worth the telling.” In what way does Tess prove that it is worth the telling?
2. Plot:
a) What is the significance of the novel’s division into “phases”?
b) What conflicts can you discern in the book and who is responsible for them – character or fate?
c) What is the role of accident and coincidence in the novel?
d) It has been claimed that Hardy’s novels and Tess in particular are almost tragic. Do you agree? Why does Tess suffer so?
There is a controversy among critics about Tess on two points:
1. Is Tess raped or seduced? Each answer significantly modifies our reading of the plot.
2. Is Tess a totally pessimistic novel or does it offer some room for optimism?
IV. HARDY: TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (1891)
THE subject of Tess of the D'Urbervilles is stated clearly by Hardy to be the fate of a "pure woman' '; in fact it is the destruction of the English peasantry. More than any other nineteenth-century novel we have touched on it has the quality of a social document. It has even, for all its high- pitched emotional quality, the kind of impersonality that the expression suggests. Its subject is all-pervasive, affecting and determining the nature of every part. It is a novel with a thesis & roman a th&se and the thesis is true. The thesis is that in the course of the nineteenth century the disintegration of the peasantry a process which had its roots deep in the past had reached its final and tragic stage. With the extension of capitalist farming (farming, that is to say, in which the landowner farms not for sustenance but for profit and in which the land-workers become wage-earners) the old yeoman class of small-holders or peasants, with their traditions of independence and their own native culture, was bound to disappear. The developing forces of history were too strong for them and their way of life. And because that way of life had been proud and deep-rooted its destruction was necessarily painful and tragic. Tess is the story and the symbol of the destruction. Tess Durbeyfield is a peasant girl. Her parents belong to a class ranking above the farm-labourers, a class "including the carpenter, the smith, the shoemaker, the huckster, together with nondescript workers other than farm-labourers; a set of people who owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to the fact of their being life-holders, like Tess's father, or copy holders, or, occasionally, small freeholders." 1 Already by the opening of the novel the Durbeyfields have fallen on hard times, a plight by no means solely due to the lack of stability in the characters of John and Joan. A further twist is given to their difficulty in making ends meet by the accident in which their horse is killed,^ It is her sense of guilt over this accident that allows Tess to be persuaded by her mother into visiting the Trantridge D'Urbervilles to "claim kin" with a more prosperous branch of the family. And from this visit (itself an attempt to solve the Durbeyfields* economic problems) the whole tragedy derives. In these opening chapters of the novel there is an immediate and insistent emphasis on historical processes, so that from the start the characters are not seen merely as individuals. The discovery by John Durbeyfield of his ancestry is not just an introductory comic scene, a display of quaint "character". It states the basic theme of the novel what the Durbeyfields have been and what they become. The landscape in the second chapter (it is far more effective description than the famous set-piece at the beginning of The Return of the Native) is described and given significance almost wholly in terms of history. The 'club-walking' scene, again, is contrasted with the May Day dances of the past and early pagan rites are recalled. Tess is revealed as one of a group, typical ("not handsomer than others" 1 ), and in the comparison between her and her mother the differences brought about by historical changes are emphasized. Joan Durbeyfield lives in the peasant folk-lore of the past, Tess has been to a National school. "When they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed." The sacrifice of Tess to D'Urberville is symbolic of the historical process at work. D'Urberville is not, of course, a D'Urberville at all, but the son of the nouveau riche Stoke family, capitalists who have bought their way into the gentry, and Tess's cry when she sees the D'Urberville estates "I thought we were an old family; but this is all new!” carries a world of irony. Tess herself does not want to go to D'Urber- ville's and when she does finally agree to go she dresses in her working clothes. But her mother insists on her dressing up for the occasion.
" 'Very well; I suppose you know” replied Tess with calm abandonment. And to please her parent the girl put herself quite in Joan's hands, saying serenely, 'Do what you like with me, Mother'." Again the moment is symbolic. Tess, prepared to become, since change she must, a worker, is handed over by her mother to the life and the mercies of the ruling class. From the moment of her seduction by D'Urberville, Tess's story becomes a hopeless struggle, against overwhelm ing odds, to maintain her self-respect. After the death of her child she becomes a wage-labourer at the dairy-farm at Tal- bothays. The social degradation is mitigated by the kindness of the dairyman and his wife, but the work is only seasonal. Here however she meets and falls in love with Angel Clare and through marriage to him thinks to escape her fate. But Angel, the intellectual, turns out to be more cruel than D'Urberville, the sensualist. Angel, with all his emancipated ideas, is not merely a prig and a hypocrite but a snob as well. He understands nothing of the meaning of the decline of the D'Urbervilles and his attitude to Tess is one of self-righteous idealization. “My position is this,” he said abruptly. “I thought any man would have thought that by giving up all ambition to win a wife with social standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should secure rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks ' " And when his dream of rustic innocence is shattered he can only taunt Tess with: " 'Don't, Tess; don't argue. Different societies, different manners. You almost make me say you are an unapprehending peasant woman, who have never been Initiated into the proportions of social things. . . .' " Even at the moment of her deepest humiliation Tess is stung to the retort: " 'Lots of families are as bad as mine in that! Retty's family were once large landowners, and so were Dairyman Billett's. And the Debbyhouses, who now are carters, were once the De Bayeux family. You find such as I everywhere; 'tis a feature of the country, and I can't help it'." It is important (I shall return to this point) to give these passages their full weight because they emphasize the kind of novel this is. Such passages, read as 'psychological drama,' ring queer and unconvincing. Their function in the novel is to stress the social nature of Tess's destiny and its typicality. After Angel has left her the social degradation of Tess continues. At the farm at Flintcomb Ash she and the other girls (once again it is significant that Tess's fate is shared by Marion and Izz who have not, in the same way, 'sinned' morally) become fully proletarianized, working for wages in the hardest, most degrading conditions. The scene at the threshing is here particularly important, a symbol of the dehumanized relationships of the new capitalist farms. At Talbothays there had at least been some possibility of pride and interest in the labour as well as a certain kindliness in the common kitchen at which the dairyman's wife presided, Here there is nothing kind or satisfying and the emphasis on Marion's bottle is not casual, not just a matter of the individual 'character.' The final blow to Tess's attempts to maintain her self- respect comes with the death of her father and the con sequent expulsion of the Durbeyfields from their cottage. John Durbeyfield had been a life-holder. "But as the long holdings fell in they were seldom again let to similar tenants, and were mostly pulled down, if not absolutely required by the fanner for his hands. Cottagers who were not directly employed on the land were looked upon with disfavour, and the banishment of some starved the trade of others, who were thus obliged to follow. These families, who had formed the backbone of the village life in the past, who were the depositories of the village traditions, had to seek refuge in the large centres; the process, humorously designated by statisticians as 'the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns/ being really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery." It is the need to support her family, thus driven off the land, that finally forces Tess back to Alec D'Urberville. And when Angel, chastened and penitent, returns, the final sacri fice is inevitable. Tess kills D'Urberville. The policemen take her from the altar at Stonehenge and the black flag is run up on Winchester jail.
It is important for a number of reasons to emphasize that Tess of the D' Urbervilles is a moral fable, that it is the expression of a generalized human situation in history and neither (what it is generally assumed to be) a purely personal tragedy nor (what Hardy appears to have intended) a philosophic comment on Life in general and the fate of Woman in particular. If we read the novel as a personal tragedy, the individual history of Tess Durbeyfield, a great deal strikes us as extremely un satisfactory. In the first place there is (as has been noted frequently enough) Hardy's flouting of normal probability in his insistence on a series of the most unlucky chances. In Tess the most notable of these chances are the episode in which Tess’ s written confession, pushed under Angel's door, goes under the carpet and the moment when Tess, having walked from Flintcomb Ash to Emminster, overhears Angel's brothers talking about her and has not the heart to visit her parents-in- law. If either of these chance happenings had not occurred, all might easily have been saved. Again, in the broader realm of probability, is there really any adequate reason why Tess, at the end, should murder D'Urberville? True, she does not know the full extent of Angel's forgiveness, but at least she knows that he has basically changed. It is not perhaps any one of these manifestations of tragic improbability that we are likely to jib at, but rather the combination of them. Mr. J. I. M. Stewart, in an interesting essay, has stated the problem. "Always in Hardy It is certain that the incidence of fatality within the general operation of chance will be higher than we are commonly prepared to accept of its being in nature. Why does he thus so often seem to play against his characters with loaded dice; why does he darken the sky with his arrows when Elfride Swancourt and her many successors are fighting for life? The universe of his novels is one of a determinism slightly modified to meet the needs of tragedy, the individual will being conceived as having its measure of freedom during certain moments of equilibrium in the universal Will, within which it is comprised (the image is Hardy's). It is thus still a neutral universe. Why then does the screw turn so frequently and so disastrously as it does?" Now if we read the novel as a detailed particularized study of an individual life it is clear that this turning of the screw does constitute a serious weakness. What it amounts to in Tess is that we must regard the characters and Tess herself in particular as having less than normal luck and more important less than normal human resilience in the situation in which they find themselves. Is not Tess, after all (admitting her superiority of sensitiveness), a good deal less shrewd and worldly-wise than a peasant girl of her age might naturally be assumed to be? Is not her very sensitiveness a little false? (Could she, for instance, have afforded bearing in mind the conditions of Flintcomb Ash to be merely hurt and unprotesting when Angel's brothers take away her boots when they find them in the ditch?) Such considerations are, if the novel is a realistic psycho logical study, entirely relevant. But they seem to me, in fact, no more relevant than the criticism which says of King Lear that Lear's conduct in the first act is unlikely or that the Gloucester sub-plot is ill-planned because the existence of two such cases of filial impiety within so small a circumference is improbable. Tess is not a novel of the kind of Emma or Middlemarch. It does not illuminate within a detailed frame work particular problems of human conduct and feeling. Its sphere is the more generalized movement of human destiny. Once we recognize that the subject of Tess is the destruction of the peasantry many of the more casual criticisms of the book are seen to be rather wide of the mark. There is the question, for instance, of Alec D'Urberville. Many readers are antagonized by his presentation as what amounts to the stock villain of Victorian melodrama, the florid, moustache-twirling bounder who refers to the heroine (whom he is about to seduce) as "Well, my Beauty. , . ." Is this not a character who has stepped direct out of the tenth- rate theatre or "She was poor but she was honest?” It seems to me that almost the whole point about D'Urberville is that he is indeed the archetypal Victorian villain. Far from being weakened by the associations of crude melodrama he in fact illuminates the whole type and we understand better why the character of which he is a symbol did dominate a certain grade of Victorian entertainment and was enthusiastically hissed by the audience. It is the very typicality of D'Urberville that serves the purposes of the novel. The treatment of Christianity in the book has a similar relevance. The conversion of D'Urberville is not in itself necessary to the plot of the novel (his rediscovery of Tess could easily have been contrived some other way). Hardy's object here is clearly to heighten the association, implicit throughout the book, of the Christian faith and Tess's down fall. The man with the paint-pot who regales Tess with the assurance that THY DAMNATION SLUMBERETH NOT at the moment of her betrayal turns up again with the converted D'Urberville. Is the comment fair to Christianity? The question is not relevant. Hardy is not attempting an estimate of the total validity of the Christian philosophy. His subject is the destruction of the peasant Tess. It is the place of religious influence in that destruction that is his concern. And in the pattern of the novel the Christian church is seen as at best a neutral observer, at worst an active abettor in the process of destruction. It is not, historically considered, an unreasonable comment. At best a neutral observer, at worst an active abettor: the phrase applies to a good deal more than Hardy's view of Christianity. One of the aspects of Tess that we tend to find peculiarly unconvincing if not repulsive is the sense of the loaded dice to which Mr. Stewart refers. It emerges in its least palatable form in passages of the book most obviously intended as fundamental philosophical comment. There is the famous episode, for Instance, in which Tess, driving the cart to market, speaks to her little brother of the stars:
" 'Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?’
'Yes.'
'All like ours?'
'I don't know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound a few blighted.'
‘Which do we live on a splendid one or a blighted one?'
'A blighted one.'
'Tis very unlucky that we didn't pitch on a sound one, when there were so many more of 'em!'
'Yes.'
'Is it like that really, Tess?' said Abraham, turning to her much impressed, on reconsideration of this rare information. 'How would it have been if we had pitched on a sound one?'
'Well, Father wouldn't have coughed and creeped about as he does, and wouldn't have got too tipsy to go this journey; and Mother wouldn't have been always washing, and never getting finished."
'And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and not have had to be made rich by marrying a gentleman?'
'O Aby, don't don't talk of that any more!'
We tend to reject such an episode on two grounds: in the first place we are not convinced that any peasant girl would talk like that, in the second the philosophy implied (and the whole organization of the book makes us give it the weight of the author's full sympathy, if not assent) is not calculated to win our support. The world as a blighted apple is an image too facile to satisfy us, even though we may recognize the force of Tess's pessimism. I think it is important, however, to emphasize that even in this passage the pessimism is given a very explicit basis in actual conditions. It is the kind of life her parents lead that drives Tess to her feelings of despair and it is the sentence about her mother never getting finished that in fact saves the scene. For here is no pretentious philosophy of fatality but a bitterly realistic recalling of the actual fate of millions of working women. The scene just quoted seems to me to give a most instructive insight into the kind of book Tess of the D'Urbervilles is. It is not, it has already been emphasized, a 'psychological novel'; the presentation of Tess's actual thoughts in this episode is not at all convincing. Nor is it a symbolic statement on the level of Wuthering Heights. Hardy does not penetrate to the profundity of Emily Bronte's understanding of the processes of life and when he goes in for philosophical generalizations the result is often embarrassing. And yet this novel, with its queer cramped literary style, and its bogus 'Aeschylean' philosophy, gets hold of something of life and illuminates a phase of human history with an extraordinary compulsion and an insight of oddly moving delicacy. What Hardy got hold of was not, I think, quite what his conscious mind believed. In the scene we have just discussed the intention (as opposed to the total effect) is to concentrate into the image of the blighted star a whole world of philo sophical significance. Hardy took his philosophy of the Immanent Will very seriously and undoubtedly saw Tess as the victim of "the President of the Immortals." A pessimistic and determinist view of the world in which man (and, even more, woman) is at the mercy of an unyielding outside Fate is the conscious philosophy behind the novel. The sub-title "a pure woman" is indicative of the kind of significance Hardy gave to his story, and there is no doubt that this conscious philosophy affects the book, in general for the worse. It is responsible, for instance, for the literary 5 quality which mars the final sentence. It is responsible for our sense of loaded dice. And it is responsible ultimately for the psycho logical weakness such as the idealization of Tess, for the characters are made too often to respond not to life but to Hardy's philosophy. And yet Tess survives Hardy's philosophy. When (Hardy) remarked that had he known what a stir Tess was going to create he would have made it a really good book he probably meant that he would have gone over the grammar, and would have inserted more of those references to mythology or painting that he believed an important means of toning up a literary style” because his imaginative understanding of the disintegration of the peasantry is more powerful than the limiting tendencies of his conscious outlook. As a matter of fact I do not think we ought to sneer too securely at Hardy's philosophy. No doubt it is, like Tolstoy's, an unsatisfactory philosophy and yet also, like Tolstoy's (the views of history expressed in War and Peace and The Dynasts are worth comparing) it emerges from a passionately honest attempt to grapple with real problems of quite overwhelming difficulty. Hardy at least did have a philosophy (which is more than can be said for most of his contemporaries) and there was more basis to his pessimism the pessimism of the Wessex peasant who sees his world and his values being destroyed than can be laughed away with an easy gesture of contempt. For the odd thing about this strange and moving novel is that although so much about it has a note of falsity the manipulation of the plot, the character-study of Tess herself, the inadequate, self-conscious, stilted writing the total impression is not false at all. Part of the achievement is due undoubtedly to the always effective and often superb evocation of the natural background. This is a special triumph of Hardy's and one which in the novels we have previously discussed had hitherto scarcely been attempted. Such a description as that of the dawn at Talbothays may perhaps best be compared with the descriptions of London in Oliver Twist. In neither case is the word 'descriptive,* with its cold suggestion of an objective backcloth, adequate. "They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily in that strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early, here. Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came the skimming, which began at a little past three. It usually fell to the lot of some one or other of them to wake the rest, the first being aroused by an alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival, and they soon discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep through the alarm as the others did, this task was thrust most frequently upon her. No sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed, than she left her room and ran to the dairyman's door; then up the ladder to Angel's, calling him in a loud whisper; then woke her fellow-milkmaids. By the time that Tess was dressed Clare was downstairs and out in the humid air. The remaining maids and the dairyman usually gave themselves another turn on the pillow, and did not appear till a quarter of an hour later. The grey half-tones of daybreak are not the grey half-tones of the day's dose, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and light which is the drowsy reverse. . . At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl. Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters, out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at the side of the mead ; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of puppets by clockwork. They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level, and apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows in detached remnants of small extent. On the grey moisture of the grass were marks where the cows had lain through the night dark-green islands of dry herbage the size of their carcases, in the general sea of dew. From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which the cow had rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of which trail they found her; the snoring puff from her nostrils, when she recognized them, making an in- tenser little fog of her own amid the prevailing one. Then they drove the animals back to the barton, or sat down to milk them on the spot, as the case might require. Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like a white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like danger our rocks. Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and hang on the wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails subdividing the mead, which now shone like glass rods. Minute diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess's eyelashes and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover Tess then lost her strange and ethereal beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes scintillated in the sunbeams, and she was again the dazzingly fair dairymaid only, who had to hold her own against the other women of the world." The atmosphere evoked in such description is not an embellishment to the book, but an integral part of it. We cannot think of Tess and Angel except in the context of such scenes any more than we can think of Sikes outside the context of the London which has made him. We believe in Tess, just as we believe in Sikes, because her relationship to her world is so successfully conveyed. When Hardy begins theorizing, discussing in abstract terms Tess's plight, we become uneasy; when he presents her to us in the misty dawn at Talbothays we feel no need to question her authenticity. She is a peasant girl and she is splendid, heroic even, and we know what Hardy means when he talks of "a pure woman." The unconvincing moments are those when to make a 'point’ Hardy allows his own, inadequate ideas to weaken his profound instinctive understanding. Such a moment arises when, just before Tess's confession to Angel, he too is made to confess a sexual lapse. Now Hardy can convince us that Angel is a prig and a hypocrite but he simply cannot convince us that the Angel he presents to us in the novel would be quite so morally obtuse as to see no affinity whatever between his confession and hers. He might well convince us that a man only slightly less morally aware would be thus blinded (heaven knows the situation is common enough). He might even convince us that Angel himself would be capable of putting a youthful indiscretion into a separate compartment of his mind and there burying it. But to ask us to believe that the Angel we know (and one is not claiming of course any very admirable qualities for him) would within a few minutes of confessing such a lapse of his own respond in quite the way he does to Tess's confession is simply asking us to stretch our credulity beyond its limit. And the reason for it all is obvious. Hardy is determined at all costs to make his point (fair enough in the abstract) about male hypocrisy on this sexual matter. He is determined to get in another blow on behalf of his pure woman. But, because the moral point is unconvincingly realized in this particular scene between these particular characters, the blow rebounds. It is not, of course, a fatal error (there are far graver difficulties in the book) but I quote it to illustrate the battle going on throughout Tess between Hardy's ideas and his understanding. It is the inadequacy of his ideas that gives much of the book its oddly thin and stilted quality and which leads, in particular, to the unsatisfactory manipulation of chance which, more than anything in the novel, arouses our suspicions as to its validity. For the loading of the dice is an admission not so much of cunning as of impotence, a desperate gesture which attempts through artificial stimulation to achieve a consummation otherwise unobtainable. Hardy's understanding, his deep instinctive comprehension of the fate of the Wessex peasants, told him what had to be said, but his conscious philosophy did not give him adequate means always to say it. Hence the unduly long arm of coincidence, hence the half-digested classical allusions, hence the psychological weaknesses. Whereas from the social understanding emerges the strength of the novel, the superb revelation of the relation of men to nature, the haunting evocation of the Wessex landscape not as backcloth but as the living challenging material of human existence, and the profoundly moving story of the peasant Tess. It is easy enough to list the imperfections of this novel. What also needs explanation is its triumph, epitomized in that extraordinary final scene at Stonehenge. There is nothing bogus about the achievement here, no sleight of hand, no counterfeit notes of false emotion. The words of speech have not quite the ring of speech nor the integral force of poetry; the symbolism is obvious, one might almost say crude. And yet this very clumsiness, the almost amateurish manipulation of the mechanics of the scene, contributes something to its force, to its expression of the pathetic and yet heroic losing battle waged by Tess against a world she cannot successfully fight and can only dimly apprehend. The final mood evoked by Tess of the D'Urbervilles is not hopelessness but indignation and the indignation is none the less profound for being in completely intellectualized. Hardy is not a Shakespeare or an Emily Bronte. His art does not quite achieve that sense of the inner movement of life which transcends abstractions. He is constantly weakening his apprehension of this movement by inadequate attitudes and judgements. But in spite of this weakening Tess emerges as a fine novel, a moral fable, the most moving expression in our literature not forgetting Wordsworth of the destruction of the peasant world.
