TESS OF THE D’UBERVILLES – THOMAS HARDY

Published first as a serial in a forcedly bowdlerized version and restored to its present form as a novel in 1891, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is second only to his last novel, Jude the Obscure. “I have put in it the best of me” Hardy himself had said when he completed the novel Yet it raised a hue and cry amidst the Victorian critics and Hardy was so disgusted with the outcry that he gave up novel writing altogether soon after. As it was writing poetry had been his first love and he went back to it, but not before leaving for the world half a dozen powerful tragic novels that have earned for him the title ‘‘Shakespeare of the English novel”

Yet this last of the 19th century novelists a stalwart among English novelists by any standard, is still a figure attracting critical controversy. If the overtly sexual themes of Tess and Jude drew the wrath of the Victorian public, the lumbering-intractable, yet most powerful form of his novels draws the despair of modern critics. Despite his being called the Shakespeare of the English novel, F R Leavis denies him a place in the Great Tradition of the English novel. His chief objection is that Hardy does not experiment with form .Yet a critic like M. Kramer has given new significance to Hardy’s novelistic technique by pointing out how he has grafted both the classical and Shakespearean form of tragedy into the shape of the novel and Jean Brooks analyses how he has used his poetic talent to create lyrical, poetic novel, especially in Far from the Madding crowd and Tess. Obviously, the varying spectrum of Hardy criticism should be cautiously scanned by the modern reader, for Hardy is certainly a novelist with surpri­singly simple limitations, yet amazingly deep strength, both in points of theme and tech­nique. He was the most ‘instinctive” of I novelists, apart from D H. Lawrence, and his grip on life was strong, resilient, tender. Modern literary criticism too has to recognize its own limitations in front of such a writer

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840 and died on January 11, 1928, at the ripe old age of 88. Almost all of this life he spent in the neighborhood of Dorchester Country, an area which he has immortalized as Wessex in his novels. He was the son of a stone mason especially skilled in the restoration of churches, and himself was early apprenticed to an architect. Although he was doing well as a designer-architect. Hardy gave up that career in preference to being a writer. The readers should perhaps keep in mind this early training that he had in the art of structural designing, for Hardy’s plot constructions in his novels appears to show a real builder’s skill His first love was poetry but he took to novel writing as he could earn more money that way through magazine serialization. But it was the publication of Tess that the real monetary rewards came and ironically enough he stopped writing novels after the publication of Tess and Jude. Tess was in the making for about two years. There was first the truncated serial version and just two years later Hardy restored the trunk and limbs to their former shape and published the novel in 1891.

The story of Tess is set in the background of the land of little dairies, namely, the valley of Blakemore, and progresses through different, phases to the valley of great dairies, that is Talbothays, and then the agricultural fields of Flint comb Ash, and lastly, the stark, historic background of Stonehenge. The striking feature of the background of the theme of nature -its flux, reflux, its seasonal rhythms, its organic evolution, audits fecundity, sterility, rot, and decadence. The nature that is dealt with is both organic nature and human nature

The novel opens on a characteristic Hardy scene—a lone man walking along a ribbon like road close to the village of Marlott. The interaction between the cosmic forces and the human element—a perennial Hardy theme, is immediately suggested. The man is John Durbeyfield, Tess’s father, the feckless, shifty drunkard who has surprisingly discovered on that very day that he is the descendant of the ancient, noble family of the D’Urbervilles, now defunct and forgotten. With this signi­ficant beginning Hardy introduces one of the main themes in the novel, i.e., the theme of heredity. Parallel to the theme of natural evolution and decay in the organic world runs this theme of evolution and decadence in the human world. A large part of Hardy’s pessimism in Tess and Jude, derives from this idea that families deteriorate physically and morally as time passes and social changes take place in the society and environment around. Instead of progress there is decay, because at the heart of it all is the force of nature, and Hardy sees this force as being indifferent, if not malevolent, to all life This is an un-romantic but clearly Darwinian view that Hardy seems to take

When Durbeyfield learns on that fateful day about his noble ancestry he goes home extra drunk. The foolish consequence of this useless knowledge is the parents’ plot to send Tess to claim kinship with a neighboring D’Urbervilles family. They hope to win a good husband for Tess with the help of their kins-woman. When Tess reluctantly agrees to undertake this errand, it ends in her being trapped by Alec D’Urbervilles, the unscrupulous, worthless son of the blind and decrepit. Mrs. D’Urbervilles. The irony is the mother and son were not D’Urbervilles at all, but had simply assumed that name as upstarts. Tess is helpless against the importunate advances of this young man. From the very beginning the description that Hardy gives of Tess is significant. She is associated with the creatures of nature the birds, the flowers, the cat, the snake etc. She is a lushly grown daughter of nature, unaware of her own magnetic attraction. During the dance on May Day for instance, she is virginal and full of the promise of fruitfulness like the very spring. She is a true representative of nature and in her life is reflected the rape, the impregnation, the death the re-birth of the natural order.

Whether Alec D’Urbervilles’ act on that fateful night at the Chase was seduction or rape, Hardy leaves in ambiguity. Tess’s body^: is her misfortune in any case and her real troubles begin from that incident.

After the birth and death of her puny, illegitimate child there is rejuvenation in Tess as the spring sets in. The next phase of her journey takes her to the valley of the Froom, a fertile pasture-land where large-dairies abound. She is employed by Dairyman Crick to milk the cows and she takes to the job like a duck to water. Her friendship with Angel Clare, the educated young man, learning to be an agricultural farmer, develops against this idyllic background of flowing milk and butter and cheese.

Angel Clare, with his idealization of Tess into a divinity for nature, is quite a contrast to Alec D’Urbervilles to whom she is the earthiest of creatures. Angel is a shadowy, thin bodied character in the novel and Hardy himself calls him more “Shelleyan than Byronic” He is attracted to Tess more because of what he is himself than for what she is. He is in love with the feeling of being in love with an abstraction of nature He has rejected the evangelical background of his parents and is in search of the true spirit of nature. But Angel has only succeeded in becoming an effete, indecisive young man, belonging neither to the world of religious morality of his parents, or to the healthy, uninhibited natural life at Talbothays.

When he sees Tess he looks upon her as the virginal pure woman of nature. With his own idea of her leading him, he courts her assiduously, as Alec had done earlier. Once again, almost against her will, Tess comes under the control of another man and this time agrees to marry him

Angel and Tess ironically enough, spend their first wedding night in an ancient D’Urbervilles mansion. The grim eyed ancestress of Tess look down upon her mercilessly as she once again makes an attempt to make, something of the life given to her. In her honesty, she confesses the incident of her past girlhood to Angel, after he has, confided about a similar experience with an older woman during his youthful days.

Angel reacts to Tess’s confession most unjustly, but characteristically. He is shocked that he cannot think of her now as his idea of the pure woman. Representing all the sexual inhibitions Victorian morality, he turns away from her. Although he is to an extent a rebel against such morality, Angel is not rebellious enough. It is true that compared with his two brothers and his own parents, from whom he has broken away in protest against their bourgeois attitudes to marriage and religion, his attitudes signify a more liberal thinking But like Clym Yeobright, the earlier Hardy hero of The Return of the Native, he divided in his own aims and lack the strength to carry them out to the end. The ingrained family morality, acting as subconsciously inherited influences, limits him from accepting Tess in his own independent way. The only course left to him is to part from her after that wedding night.

With a second chance for marriage ruined Tess is on the move again. The third .phase of her journey takes her to the more arid, chalky district of Flint comb-Ash. She hires herself out as an agricultural laborer. The reader cannot help noticing the steadily declining position of Tess as a worker. From being the inheritor of the blood of a noble family she descends into being a milkmaid and then further into being an agricultural laborer. Tess’s life by now has, become, as arid and barren as the land around her. In these sections, as in the earlier sections dealing with the descriptions of the lush pasture lands of the Froom valley, the reader should notice Hardy’s use of the natural background to reflect the heroine’s life and fortunes. She was like Eve seeking her Adam in the idyllic, paradise-like surroundings of Talbothays. But in the fields of Flint comb-Ash., she is no more than a rootless plant, engaged in the bizarre job of hacking off the rotten parts of the phallic shaped turnips. The land around Flint comb-Ash is also slowly coming under the onslaught of the machine. Especially in these sections Hardy keeps up working out the development and decline of the heroine’s fortunes in steady parallel with the back ground.           .           .

Hardy was essentially a product of the rural background. His closeness to nature is well known. At the same time, Hardy was also a thinker and philosopher. Although he does not use his knowledge of social theories in application to the human society around him as fully as George Eliot does still Hardy makes his own implicit comment on the development of the environment around his society. We do not find the over didactic tone or the authorial comment in many of his novels; nevertheless, he is clearly pointing out the nature of the evolutionary development of English society in the 19th century during the years of the Industrial evolution, and is implicitly revealing the value of this development in human terms.

After about 1840 English society was undergoing a vast change as a result of the impact of the machine on all fronts of life especially was rural life changing as a consequence of this. The indifference, the harsh ness of the machine undermined all peace in the rural districts. By the time he came to write The Mayor of Casterbridge in 1886, Hardy was saddened by the awareness of this change. The old order was going and was giving place to a new order but one was not sure that the new order was any good. The passing away of Michael Herchard with his simple, hay-trussing ways and the advent of Donald Farfrae with his red threshing machine on the scene of Casterbridge signified the modernistic trend in The Mayor of Casterbridge.         

The progress of this trend is even more clearly seen in Tess. The threshing scene at Flint comb-Ash is a vivid description of this change. Tess is feeding the machine mechanically and the machine itself relentlessly swallows up all that she gives. Tess has come a long way from being the May Day dancer on the village green to being a victimized attendant on a monstrous-looking machine. The degeneration is in her as much as in the environment of the barren Flint comb-Ash.

Hardy in these scenes seems to imply that some inherent sterility and barrenness were in nature itself, hence the machine could take over easily. There is an evolutionary degeneration hi the forces of nature in the chalky districts. Similarly the old blood in Tess D’Urbervilles is attenuated dead. She is incapable of rejuvenating herself try as she might. She is doomed to a tragic end because she is essentially a creative of nature and not much more than that.                                               

Her victimization is emphasized by the advent of Alec on the scene. Alec is an outward image of the pressing natural order just as Angel is an image of the repressive Victorian morality, and neither of them helps Tess, just as the machine pits its demand on Tess, Alec also stands beside it and presses his demand on Tess. The little will power that this girl from an effete, old family has is finally broken down. Thus in spite of him Hardy seems to endorse a Darwinian idea of nature rather than a Romantic one. That survival is, after all the name of the game; that constant struggle to survive might undermine the more elevated human feelings of self-respect, resistance to evil, etc When Tess last succumbs to Alec and goes to live with him at Sand Bourne, after writing her pathetic letter to Angel wherein she cries out to her, the reader perceives the sorrowful state to which the human condition might be reduced which it is so dependent on its outside environment.

Tess’s story at last ends as it began, in loneliness and victimization. The last phase of the novel deals with the migration of the Durbeyfield family from its old habitat at Marlette to ironically enough, the ancestral town of the D’Urbervilles forbears, Kingsbury. The degeneration of the family is complete when they, literally strike up camp in the vaults of the D’Urbervilles ancestors for lack of better roots. And it is to Tess the turn to .save them, as they had once done before she is at last tempted to go with ‘Alec when he baits her with his help to her family in distress.

Thus when Angel appears on the scene after his wanderings in Brazil, it is too late for Tess. In her anguish on realizing how much Alec has been responsible for all this chaos, she takes his life. The violence and bloodshed with which she ends her own destiny is uncharacteristic of Tess the milkmaid the pure woman. But once again Hardy silently points out the effects of heredity in her case. According to a local legend, it was believed that one of her ancestors had committed a murder inside a coach. Tess’s act only raises one of the old ghosts of the family legend, Hardy appears to comment.

In her uncanny innocence after this act Tess attempts to join Angel at last. As fugitives from justice, they enjoy a belated honey moon in an abandoned mansion. But this state of passivity, his escape from the last action_s cannot last. They have to move on, and that moving on fur Tess is towards her death. In a significant last scene Tess is seen as a sacrificial figure lying on an abandoned altar at Stonehenge, to which lonely spot they have both come-in an effort to escape from law. The past catches up with Tess in the background of the Dravidian ruins of Stonehenge and the doom overtakes her. As Hardy observes in a memorable sentence at the end “Justice was done and the president of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.”

Critical opinion about Tess had concentrated upon Hardy’s emphasis of the degenerative force in nature. The novel is set in the Victorian background which was drastically changing as a consequence of the growth of industrial forces. Hardy seems to have arrived at the belief, in Tess, that it was because of the inherent lack of strength and depth in the rural atmosphere that industry could takeover so easily, when it came on the scene. John Holloway in an essay on Hardy emphasises this deepening pessimistic view of Hardy and believes that it is this disappointment which made Hardy give up the writing of novels dealing with the Wessex countryside. In scenes at Flint comb-Ash, for instance, he shows the dreariness and deadness of the natural back ground. The rot in human nature is also equally pessimistically exposed in scenes where John Durbeyfield, with his ridiculous claims of nobility, is seen to be under the influence of drink. Nature feeds on itself and the slow result is annihilation.

Generally speaking, Hardy is viewed as a pessimist and all criticism is directed towards analysing his philosophy from this angle- It is of course, important for the reader to understand Hardy’s philosophical vision. Hardy himself kept denying that he was a pessimist. In a letter to one of his friends, William Archer, he wrote:

“My pessimism, if pessimism it be, does not involve the assumption that the world is going to the dogs On the contrary, my practical philosophy is distinctly meliorist. Whatever may be the inherent good or evil of life, it is certain that men make it worse than it need be. When we have got rid of a thousand remediable ills, it will be time enough to determine whether the ill that is irremediable out weighs the good”

One must try to account for this overwhelmingly sad vision of Hardy. The primary factor might be the circumstances of his early upbringing. He spent most of his lonely childhood around Dorsett country. His places of wandering included Edgon Heath. The rustic communities in the villages were entirely dependent upon the vicissitudes of nature for their living. The peasant fortitude, the fatalism of a people subject to the changes in the  natural environment, were deeply ingrained even in Hardy’s temperament from his early youth.

Further. Hardy’s own reading which he did extensively mainly in the fields of literature and philosophy, influenced his mental development. He was particularly interested in the Greek tragedy writers and Shakespeare- He was also influenced by the Bible—church going had been a regular feature for young Hardy and he was even included as a violinist in some church festivals. The Book of Job especially left its mark on his imagination, as is apparent in a work like The Mayer of Casterbridge. The idea of suffering as a necessary process for the improvement of the Spirit, which theme he saw in the suffering of Christ, also entered into the spirit of his own philosophy. Also contemporary poets like Tennyson were appreciatively read by him. For instance, the last few lines of Tennyson’s poem “The Lotos-Eaters”, where Tennyson refers to the indifferent gods reclining in  Heaven looking down upon human misery, is a recurring theme in Hardy’s vision of the universe.

Besides all these literary sources, Hardy was deeply influenced by some philosophers and social thinkers. The reader must remember the importance of the publication of a work like Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, for instance. Also, it was the time of writers like Julian Huxley and John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill wrote his essay on Liberty emphasizing the part played by the human will and energy in shaping one’s own destiny- The ideas of these thinkers generated a discussion in Hardy’s own mind about the part played by natural determinism, heredity, free will, chance, providence, etc. These intellectual ideas were superimposed on his beliefs imbibed from early upbringing. Thus a constant dialectic between different concepts about man’s destiny was set up in his mind. The reader has to notice that this dialectic is clearly present in his major novels. For instance, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy cannot decide whether to settle down in his endorsement of Novelist theory that character is destiny, or present Henchard’s ruin as being the result of the pressures of chance and circumstances and environment. Later, in Tess and Jude, he seems to lean more towards the pessimistic, tragic outlook of a man endorsing the destructive powers of the forces of nature outside man. Thus the reader must note the shifts and nuances in Hardy’s developing tragic vision through the course of his novels. To label him as a “pessimist” merely would be to miss the complex themes and philosophical ideas in his work-

As a consequence of the strong, overwhelmingly thematic concerns of his novels, critics tend to bypass the technical achievement of Hardy as a novelist. Generally, the opinion of the modern critics is that technical experimentation and achievement of formal excellence can be seen only in the 20th century novel. Strange as it may seem, Hardy, who is sometimes called the “Shakespeare of the English novel” is; denied a place in the Great Tradition of English novel by F- R. Leavis, the chief reason being that Hardy has failed to experiment with form. Even about Hardy’s best work, Jude the Obscure, Leavis only says that it is impressive “in its clumsy way”.

Yet, a modern critic like Jean R Brooks in her book Thomas Hardy: the Poetic Structure points out the symbolic meanings in certain scenes of less and the poetic patterns in some images and episodes in the novel. For instance, the death of the cart horse, Prince, in the earlier section of the novel can be seen as a forecasting of later event. Tess is responsible for killing him and realizing this she stands there in remorse, closing her hand over the hole in the horse’s skin from where blood is gushing out- This is symbolic of her own seduction by Alec and later, her killing of him in Sandbourne. There is also the scene where she is lying inside a mound of leaves; dry surrounded by the dying Pleasants. Like the birds, Tess is also to be seen as a hunted creature. Her breaking of their necks is like the breaking of her own neck at the gallows at the end of the novel.

Furthermore, a critic like Tony Tanner suggests new meanings in the novel when he brings out the significance of the color symbolism throughout the novel. Starting from the May Day dance, reference to white and red are repeatedly made throughout the novel. This can be seen as an underlying, consistently developed theme of Tess’s loss of virginity in the beginning, and the closing episode of Tess’s murder of Alec, and finally her own death at the end of the novel. Tony Tanner also points out the significance of the repeated journey patterns in Tess. Starting from the very first scene, where John Durbeyfield is walking alone along a strip of road, we have many instances where Tess is also shown as a lonely walking figure, a white spot on a vast expanse of sky and land. Such scenes vividly bring out Hardy’s idea of existence, of the place of man in this universe. A human being is an in significant speck in the vast concourse of the universe, at the same time it is this speck that lends motion and meaning to an otherwise dormant and inert nature.

Especially in Tess, the vision of the smallness of man signifies Hardy’s pessimistic philosophy From the beginning to end, the reader notices that Tess is being defeated, by forces within as well as forces without What was Hardy’s purpose in showing this miserable suffering of Tess, one may wonder, Was this a meaningful tragic vision ?

In his Note Books Hardy had once commented on the radical opposition that he saw at the heart of nature—the basic comic irony that was present in all aspects of life. To recall his own words, he had observed: “…the universal harshness—the harshness of the position towards the temperament, of the means towards the aims, of today and yesterday, of hereafter towards today”. Hardy seemed to believe that these opposite forces worked against themselves—birth, and death, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, constantly kept canceling themselves and their effects. In this way, Hardy is only making us see the basic tragedy of human existence—in one’s beginning is one’s end— the red ribbon on Tess’s white dress foreshadows the red blood on the white ceiling in the hotel at Sandbourne- This is Hardy’s overwhelmingly tragic vision showing us the mystery of existence, the working of the inexplicable forces or nature operating in an external cycle of creation and destruction.

Hardy thought of himself as “an English poet who had written some stories in prose” His first love was poetry and later, when he gave up writing novels in 1898 after the completion of Jude, he returned to the writing of poetry, and for nearly thirty years, till the end of his life, he kept at lt« But he has ¹ somehow not yet achieved the same fame as a poet as he has a novelist. At ihe time of writing novels, he seemed *o have continued to write the poetry into the novels. Thus there h a lyrical quality in many of his novels like Ths Woodianders and Tess. There are multiple levels of imagery in these novels which is reminiscent of the characteristics of

poelry«                                                        ■

1q the same way, bis other talent as dcsignet-cvrchitect bas alsc influenced the structuring of his novels- The contrivances of plot and story element are a striking feature of Hardy’s technique. Incidentscoincidence* and episodes are manipulatedby the omniscient narrator to a very greatextent, more than by any other novelist- liiisfeature of careful, overcareful, .. plottingmight perhaps also be attributed to nis earmtraining as architect.       ^J

But more signiiicaotly than that the plotting reflects Hardy’s philosophy. His belie? in chance, providence, accident and late asi determining factors in human destiny is also’ a reason for that meticulous plot’ structure.} Although the device appears rather heavy handed from modern critical standards, within Hardy’s tjciional world the! technique has its owu powerful momentum, coniributiag to the buiiding up of tragedy-

•The plot und structure, needless to say, have also been influenced by Haidy’s practice of having his novels published serially before bringing them ou?. in book form The placing of climax at strategic points aud the develop merit of events might seein more mecbaoicftl and, contrived as p. result of this practtOO of seriali&atioD.

Tcss is one of Hardy’s most popular novels. The modern reader will have xo place him in the context of .Victorian fiction and take note of the achievement of Hardy at being a novelist withia the Victorian cooven* tion, yet breaking out of its bondp in uoyeij like Tess and Jude, thematically if not lor-mally.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.     Richard C- CatperUerj ■ Thomas Hardy,Twayue’s English- Authors Stirics (NewYork, 1964),

2.     Albert J. Guerard, Thomas. Hardy : The

Novels and Stories, (Oxford University, Press, 1949)-Hardy A Collection of Essays, ■ Twentieth Cootury Views (Prcr>ticc-H’aU Englcwopd Cliffs.. NJ.,, 1963).

3.     Jhon Hotloway, The Victorian Sage. Mac-millan : 1953;

4.     Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy (Weidenfe’d& Ni col son, 1966)

5.     Curl Weber Hardy of Wessex.

6 Thomas Hardy : The Tragic Novels in the Casebook Series, ed by R. P. Draper

7.’ .J.T. Laird, Shaping o/Tessofthe D’Urben-villes, (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1975).

8. T- B. Tomllnson, The English Middle-Class Novel, MacroUtan Press> 1916.

9 Jean R. Brooks : Thomas Hardy : Tbe Poetic Structure