Not altogether a distinct figure

More Notes on Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Angel Clare is introduced in a rather ex-machina fashion. He appears out of the blue and out of place. For Tess, first he's a voice, that "murmured...behind the dun cow." And, when he finally appears, she is quick to note that "although he wore the ordinary white pinner and leather leggings of a dairy farmer...and his boots were clogged with the mulch of the yard...this was all his local livery. Beneath it was something educated, reserved, subtle, sad, differing"(111).

Later that night, he's half word of mouth, half shade. Tired out, Tess falls asleep only to be awoken sometme later by her bunk mates "whose whispered words mingled with the shades, and, to Tess's drowsy mind, they seemed to be generated by the darkness in which they floated"(113). Likewise for the narrator, "Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct figure, but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed, abstracted eyes, and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and delicately lined for a man's"(113). He is an assemblage of parts, not yet a whole.

Angel doesn't seem to inhabit forms or worldly postures of any kind. In his father's view, the "University as a step to anything but ordination seemed...a preface without a volume" (115). Yet, even without University, Angel still seems a preface without a volume. He's fond of the overarching abstractions that characterise a preface. He's yet to try his principles by assuming a position in the world and thereby giving his principles the flesh of experience.

In keeping with his last name, Clare lacks definition. He is sort of bodiless. In her initial encounters with him as a man, Tess still "seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather than as a man"(124). Not surprisingly, Clare rejects Christianity, a religion that marries the divine and the material in the most literal way. To be more precise, when stakes his claim against it, he explicitly rejects the literal interpretation of the resurrection, Article Four of the Church of England, that "holds that Christ was physically raised from the dead"(Dolin, 423).

However, Hardy's hardly lauding him or an unworldly attachment to principle. Angel is out of place in the world. True, he is attempting to gain a toehold in the real-world, but in doing so he seems often ill-prepared and uninformed, ruled by gross stereotypes. It takes him time. During his initial days at Talbothay's, "he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal, strumming upon an old harp which he had bought at a sale(117).

This material situation serves as a nice figure for Clare's past: alone, removed from the real, absorbed by word-world found in books, and, strumming a harp, in a comical pursuit of his name, his self as a word. During Tess's first days, he is still "in the habit of neglecting the particulars of an outward scene for the general impression" (119). Again, in a comic fashion, Hardy presents him as a symbol of himself, sitting apart, reading a true abstraction, a musical score, with only half an ear to the conversation of his housemates and fellow workers.

The literal music of Tess's voice distracts him from his musical score. The tone of Tess's voice captures his attention. And, with words that seem almost designed to appeal to his taste for living in his head, Tess gushes, "I do know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive"(120). Tess seeks necessary relief and benefit by doing so. She could use escape from her body. Angel's task would seem the reverse. Working on developing a profession at Talbothays, he's trying to find a way to marry his soul to a body with a purpose in the world.


Dairyman Crick 'finds' Tess's view novel. Crick stands in opposition to Angel. He is a man of the world. His truths don't come in abstractions, they come in stories, by doing, by following his profession. In part, he's not had time for abstract, deep thoughts like Tess's for he's "vamped o'nights these last thirty year, courting or trading, of for doctor, or for nurse, and never had the least notion o'that till now"(120). Angel looks to type and pattern; to run his farm, Crick must break down "partialities and aversions" between milkers and cows by "constant interchange"(121). He is happy, while Angel is melancholy. For Angel, "the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens gray" (120).

As Angel settles into Talbothays and engages in the day to day work of the dairy, he grows content. His experience at Talbothays begins a process back, to the time before it was necessary to take thought. His time at the dairy reintroduces him to nature; Tess, as the epitome of nature (in the narrator and Angel's mind) is the endpoint of the process. Without any of Hardy's reservations, Angel declares her "a genuine daughter of nature"(120).

Of course, in doing so, he's reverting to form: he is studying and typifying her. Moreover, his study works against her being genuine or natural; instead, conscious that Clare was regarding her [rather than interacting with her]," Tess begins to feel the "constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched" (120).

Clearly, Hardy pities the learned. Although never consistently, he expresses a certain level of contempt for Angel's education. The content and able Crick is offered as a contrast. Tess too joins in as a critic of education, one might even say, reflection of any kind. Specifically, she suggests to Angel the dangers of history, and wonders if it is "best...not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands' and thousands'(126). "Assisted a little by her Sixth Standard training," Tess the milkmaid has "feeling which might be called those of the age-the ache of modernism" (124). This serves to remind Angel that "what are called advance ideas are really in great part but the latest fashion in definition-a more accurate expression, by words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries"(124).

Hardy has doubts as to the efficacy of education, especially as directed toward the finer qualities. On the one hand, he describes Tess as "being...though untrained, instinctively refined, her nature [crying] for his tutelary guidance"(181). Yet, in considering Tess's virtues, most especially as a potential wife, Angel concludes that she needed "no varnish of conventionality." Angel "[holds} that education had as yet but little affected the beats of emption and impulse upon which domestic happiness dependes"(165).

The "outdoor life" presents Angel with an opportunity to be "free from the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of belief in a beneficient Power"(118). Tess leads him out of the ghost world of his ideas and his learning. She resurrects him. One morning, walking in the early hours of daybreak, "the mixed, singular, luminous glow in which they walked along together to the spot where the cows lay...made him think of the resurrection hour"(130). As in numerous other places in the novel, Tess suddenly seems to undergo an apotheosis. She glows. She rises above the mists. For Angel, all other part of the world drop away, and he can focus but on her. In his eyes, "she was no longer the milkmaid, but the visionary essence of woman," and "he called her Artemis, Demeter and other fanciful names, half-teasingly"(130). She does not care for these names that "she did not understand"(130). Asserting the value of her reality, she responds, "Call me Tess"(130).

Joshua Ferris's "The Dinner Party"

In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Hardy makes mention of a certain line in the social scale above which "the convenances begin to cramp natural feeling"(128). In his wonderfully annotated edition of Tess, Tim Dolin defines the French term convenances as "conventional proprieties"(513).

The unnammed husband in Joshua Ferris's short story "The Dinner Party" (The New Yorker, August 11 & 18, 2008) tests Hardy's assertion. While he would seem to have little time for the social niceties, the proprieties (unless you're inclined to classify anger as a natural feeling), he's cramped and limited in his emotional expressions. Although he continually apologizes, he never lets off a vicious and misanthropic sarcasm that is initially kind of funny. However, lacking any sorts of limits, as it gradually reveals the depths of bitterness and hurt underlying it, his brand of sarcasm grows at once scary and boring.


While this man and his wife Amy prepare for a dinner party with Amy's best friend and her husband, Amy's husband bemoans the predictability of what is to follow. He finds the guests they're awaiting boring, conventional. The guests are coming to announce they're expecting a child and the host-husband, already aware of the surprise, sneeringly predicts "we'll take in the news like we're genuinely surprised-like holy shit, can you believe she's knocked up....and that's just the worst, how predictable our response to their so-called news will be"(81). His wife tells him that he should "suggest they have an abortion" and they could do so here with a little champagne, he jokingly but tellingly responds "that would shake things up...Delightful...I'm in."

At the outset, his wife seems a willing participant in his no-holds barred verbal bomb throwing: according to him, "she spoke to him in bad taste freely and he considered it one of her best qualities"(81). However, it quickly becomes clear that she can't keep up with him and her efforts to do so are forced. Indeed, as they prepare and then wait for their increasingly late 'guests' to arrive, a divide between the two becomes apparent. As she increasingly grows tense and critical of him, he reveals a child-like dependence on her. Yet, he can never lay off the barbs entirely. As with many insecure folks, it would seem constantly firing out becomes a method of self-protection.

The evening and the couple quickly go off the rails. A story that begins with a bitter but content couple preparing for an ordinary dinner party turns into the portrait of a marriage long in a free-fall and soon to crash. Amy's husband begins the evening dreading it will be all predictable. And, the evening turns out in a predictable fashion: predictable to the reader who can read this couple from a reader's distanced yet near and clear-eyed fashion. However, it doesn't turn out as he predicted. Although he might not have faced it, the end that comes on the evening of the story is predictable. He just didn't see it coming that night.

This is an interesting little piece. I believe Ferris intended to demonstrate the way huge fissures can be hidden just under the surface of the most seemingly amicable and ordinary marriages. To the extent that the couple's marriage appeared strange to me from the start, when the fissure reared its head, I was not that surprised at its presence. Still, challenging those who eschew the social niceties, the proprieties, that make society, even a society of two, possible, it provided a welcome conservative perspective on society and marriage.

The eye turns involuntarily

Notes on Hardy's Tess

There's a lot of watching and being watched in the opening chapters of Tess.

The narrator opens chapter II by minutely looking over the Vale of Blakemoor and then gradually telescoping downward. His is a view from a lofty, God-like perch looking over the valley that is Tess's home. Although 'he' claims that "It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the summit of the hills that surround it,"(12), it soon moves down and toward the human.

It would seem to be a masculine gaze focusing on the female. Even before the narrator's eye settles its focus upon women, it reads the landscape as female. Here as in other places in the novel, Hardy establishes a connection between landscape and the girl are one. The adjectives applied to the landscape could as easily be applied to the narrator's unfolding conception of Tess. The Vale of Blakemore is secluded, engirdled, untrodden(12); in it, "the fields are never brown and the springs are never dry"(12); like Tess, it "is of historic, no less than topographic interest"(12).

Eventually, the narrator's eye finds the women coming out for the Ceralia and among those, focuses on the younger ones "under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm"(14). This is an invasive eye. Although nobody seems to be about but him, the narrator notes the difficulty with which the young girls manage to "dissociate self-consciousness from their features" and tells us "they were genuine country girls, unaccustomed to many eyes"(14). It would apparently be his eye causing their discomfort. Other than the Ceralia participants, there is nobody about at the outset of the event. His self-confessed artist's eye comes to land on Tess: "To almost everybody, she was a fine and picturesque country girl, and no more," but he is among the discriminating few who "would look long at her in casually passing by, and grow momentarily fascinated by her freshness" (16). He ends up staring. Mesmerized, or so he would have it.

A similar vision opens chapter XIV. The godlike perspective of the narrator's vision is made explicit here. The passage begins with the description of an August morning over which the sun's God-like gaze rests. Like the sun's metaphoric gaze, as in chapter two, the narrator gaze is intent and voyeuristic. It looks at it's object without the consent or knowledge of the object. Here as at the opening of chapter II, it objectifies and excuses its concentration: looking at the young women reaping at the opening of chapter XIV, it claims to turn "involuntarily to the girl in the pink jacket, she being the most flexuous and finely-drawn of them all"(88). The narrator's gaze is sexual: Tess's "embrace" of a corn sheaf is "that of a lover;" it focuses on that "bit of her naked arm....visible between the buff leather of the gauntlet and the sleeve of her gown. It is also an artists: the naked bit of arm becomes "feminine smoothness" that is invariably "scarified by the stubble, and bleeds"(88). Hardy's gaze reduces the whole of a rural landscape, first to a woman reaping, then to just a bit of that woman, ultimately rendering her into an image for the central trope of the book: edenic feminity and its inevitable destruction in a blighted world.

Hardy's gaze is ostensibly in the service of 'saving' Tess. It sees beyond the surface and the material. It is recording a history with the intent of presenting her to the world as an instance of what the book's subtitle argues is "a pure woman." Yet, it often bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Alec's gaze. Like the narrator, Alec's eye goes where it wills; "there was a singular force in the gentleman's face, and in his bold rolling eye"(40). While Hardy literally establishes his position in relation to her by often viewing her from a height, Alec affects a more figurative mastery. Accompanying her about the yard on their first meeting, he at first puts food into her hand but ends by insisting on feeding her with his own hand, like a baby or a helpless farm animal. She is his art object and he is the artist that carefully controls it. During their walk, he opens by handing her flowers and directing her where to put them and "when she could affix no more he himself tucked a bud or two into her hat"(40). And, as the narrator does throughout the novel,Alec routinely looks at Tess without her knowledge. On their first meeting, during lunch, he "watched her pretty and unconscious munching through the skein of smmoke that pervaded the tent"(42). Throughout the novel, he is always watching her from behind a hedge or a corner or the draperies of his mother's bed.

When Tess eventually leaves Blakemore to take up residence in the Vale of Little Dairies, "the sense of being amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes upon her, sent up her spirits wonderfully"(103). The invidious eyes referred to are presumably Alec's?

In observing and describing Tess, the narrator often mentions what would seem two contradictory aspects of her bearing: her unconsciousness and modesty. Her modesty causes Angel to all but misses her till the end of their first encounter: "She was so modest, so expressive, she had looked so soft"(18). She is not woven into the social world with it's measuring eyes, and when she dances, she "enjoyed dancing a measure purely for it's own sake"(19). Ironically, far from drawing attention away, Tess's modesty draws it: "she seduces casual attention in that she never courts it"(88).

It is an unconsciousness on her part that seemingly compells attention. Thus, in the lunch scene cited above, she "unconsciously munches" and Alec watches mesmerized. Likewise, after being decorated by Alec on their first meeting, she rides home in a carriage with other passengers "with an inward and not an outward eye"(44). When someone finally tells her "you be quite a posy...Then she became aware of the spectacle she presented to their site".

I return to the narrator's observation of Tess and the girls in the Ceralia. According to the narrator, these girls experience "a difficulty of arranging their lips in this crude exposure to public scrutiny" and their "self-consciousness...showed that they were genuine country girls, unaccustomed to many eyes"(14). What draws eyes is an unconsciousness that promises a genuine or natural self. Yet, this eye inevitably would seem to "corrupt" that genuine expression to the extent it's dependent on the object's unconsciousness.

Alice Munro's short story "Deep-holes"

A confession: when I first started reading the famous Canadian short story writer Alice Munro, I persisted. She has such a reputation. I was young and intent on appreciating what is appreciated. At first, I didn't always find I appreciated. Munro is plain-spoken and one of the least sentimental writers imaginable. I bend toward fireworks and melodrama. With time, I grew tired of some of my early enthusiasms, and this allowed me to see the wonderful way Munro shaped stories. I admired her honest realism. I grew to like the way she often genuinely surprised. However, I didn't really appreciate them till they began talking to me. Sometimes they laughed at me. Sometimes they chastised. Many began to fascinate me: I found with time that they were increasingly reflecting my life.

Her latest story, "Deep-holes" (The New Yorker June 30th, 2008 New Yorker) is no exception. As recently pointed out by Sarah Statz Cords in her wonderful book blog The Citizen Reader, sometimes one read things one "wants to keep to oneself...books [that] have to do with personal topics that, well, are just too personal." "Deep-holes" is such a story.

It is about a son who grows radically and, on the surface, mysteriously estranged from his family. Although a bit of a loner, the boy, Kent, is basically ordinary when he goes off to college one day, eager to pursue a career and science. Then, suddenly, although sort of a snobby loner, he decides to temporarily drop out to work at Canadian Tire and hang out with the guys for a couple months. However, he then just literally disappears altogether. He eventually sends a cryptic letter home, full of cliche-ridden bits of spiritualism and self-help cant. He declares that he can't live like his parents and preaches to them:

...we are given a chance to live in a way that takes in the spiritual and the physical and the whole range of the beautiful and the terrible available to mankind, that is pain as well as joy and turmoil. This way of expressing myself
may seem over-blown to you, but one thing I have learned to give up is intellectual pride fullness--

Munro humorously stops the parents' reading of the letter here. The father figures he's deprived of sex and high on drugs. The mother wonders if she didn't plant the seed for his self-isolation. She remembers when her son was
bed-ridden, recuperating from a terrible injury, and she and her son became infatuated with the idea and study of small, desolate islands. Desert islands are her preoccupation, ostensibly tokening a state of mind that perhaps distanced the sone as a child? In reality, they probably speak to her sometime desire to escape her rather vulnerable and helpless love of her family. Whatever the case, guilty and still loving him, she remains open to her son and when he returs in self-grandizing, prodigal-son fashion, she agrees to met him.

To her hurt. They unite later. The son is still blazing a bizarre new-age style path, equal parts self-abnegation and fully living in the present. On the surface, one might say he is striving for some type of ethical or spiritual perfectionism. However, this quest seems to originate and end in a self-loathing misanthropy, a childish cry for attention that seems always on the verge of a tantrum. The son seeks to be holier-than-thou because he hates thou so very, very much.

Munro seems to write often if not sympathetically about religion. Her perceptions are always acute, as here where she sees in religion a misanthropy that often tries to hide itself in a self-abnegating asceticism. The latter is supposed to be a pathway to God; Munro suggests it is often pursued by those seeking to flee themselves and their humanity.

"Deep-holes" is a wonderfully shaped mystery story, shaped like a bar-bell. The mystery is what might have happened to cause an ordinary boy to fall off the ordinary. Munro's story is beautifully structured. It opens with a carefully detailed scene and ends with one. The scenes take place in the course of afternoons, in what might be thought of as fictional real-time. Between these two scenes, Munro telescopes a good number of years in a relatively sparse number of paragraphs. This telescoped section of story unfolds like time-lapse photography, and while it is full of details essential to plot and some to explaining the meandering of that plot, In this section, all sorts of things come to the fore and lurk in the background, that might account for the son's state at the end of the story, yet it is ultimately the two scenes that book-end this long sequence which Munro sees as essential to each other. A relatively brief moment, an event, disproportionately and indelibly stamps a future.

Aided by her story's form, Munro gives the opening sequence acquires a seminal force. It is an ordinary story. The family went out on a picnic. They picnic amid some dangerous rock formations. Kent, a nine year old, disobeys, goes off to pee, falls in a hole and badly injures himself. Despite the tragic accident, he ultimately recovers, and what strikes one on the first reading is the ordinariness of the event and the family. It is only after encountering the closing counterpart do we see the force of the event, the bizarre strands that composed it.

Somewhere along the way, I thought I had read or heard that Munro was retiring with her last collection, The View from Castle Rock. However, a stream of short stories continues to appear in The New Yorker. I read them all. Back when I read her based on her reputation and struggled with them. I wasn't sure I like them. Now, I read her for the insight and find I struggle with them and am still unsure if I 'like' them. I would never miss one. I'm vain and never pass a mirror without looking in it.

The last grotesque phase of a creed

Notes on Hardy's Tess
I continue to be intrigued by Hardy's conception of "social machinery," and the notion that it should read and respond to some type of plan. Sometimes it seems Hardy thinks of this plan as divine and sometimes as inhering in nature. Or, at least, that's where he looks for it. Possibly rhetorically?

Religion would seem to be a part of what Hardy might include as social machinery.
However, in Tess, he often casts it as an antiquated and inadequate piece of machinery. Indeed, to borrow religious rhetoric, in "Tess," by Tess (as a character), religion fails to address her situation. If any piece of social machinery should be able to recognize and promote the purity of Tess and condemn and ostracize a "coarse element" like Alec, it would be religion. But, it fails to; blind and absent it fails to provide nurturance or solace.

Hardy expresses its failure and distance from reality in the scene where Tess encounters the text-painter on her journey home from Alec's(79-80). Tess watches the mysterious text-painter as he paints out a message in a scene that vaguely echoes Daniel 5:1-31. The text-painter's message is from 2 Peter and speaks of the certainty of punishment for sinners. Obviously, to Tess, walking back from being raped,the words are wildly out of synch with the world of her experience. Remembering that Tess is natural to the point of being seen as part of the landscape at points (opening of chapter XIV), it is worth noting the way Hardy describes the way in which the red letters stand out and apart from their surroundings; "Against the peaceful landscape...these staring vermilion words shone forth"(79-80). Naturally, Tess rejects them. As they clash with the landscape, They also clash with her experience. In the end, when the text-painter asks if she will stay while he paints another text on another wall, Tess declines.

However, like the narrator, Tess can't break the habit of religion; she still looks to it, partly out habit and, perhaps, partly in hope. As she move away from the text-painter, she can't help but look back, and see him begin painting his next text, the seventh commandment forbidding adultery. Still, ultimately and emphatically, Tess keeps walking, exclaiming, "Pooh-I don't believe any of it."

This isn't her final walk away from Christianity. Like Hardy, she would seem to want to save elements. After the death of her child, she takes on the role of priest to christian it when the official priest of her village refuses. She still attends church, but she's attracted largely by the music and the emotion. Although she would like to know about it, she has a precarious grasp of it's doctrinal content. Still, she's absorbed her church's judgements. When out walking alone in the twilight, she still imagines "a wet day [as an] expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other" (85). However, Hardy sees Tess's reading as "a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fantasy, a cloud of moral hobgoblins...that were out of harmony with the natural world, not she"(85).


In the face of this disharmony, Hardy would seem to suggest it's time for a new religion better answering what we know of the world through stories such as Tess's. Rather radically for his time I suppose, Hardy offer of this points to his rejection of religion as true, eternally and inalterably. Instead, as evidenced by his phrases and locutions, he presents it as constructed, the present religion as much as earlier ones. Describing a hazy August day, he writes of the sun having a curious, sentient personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression"(86). And, from this exigency, almost as a function of language, Hardy continues "His [the sun's] present aspect...explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a saner religion never prevailed under the sky"(86). Suggesting the contingency of Christianity, a young version of Angel wonders if "it might have resulted far better for mankind if Greece had been the source of religion for modern civilization, and not Palestine"(158). More blatantly, in reference to the pronouncements of the text-painter, Hardy damns them as "a hideous effacement-the last grotesque phrase of a creed that had served manking well in it's time"(80).

Is Tess offered as a potential founder of such a religion? That would be pushing it. However, it is clear that she has a certain confidence before the God preached to her. After christening her child, "she had no uneasiness...reasoning that if Providence would not ratify such an act of approximation she, for one did not value the kind of heaven lost by the irregularity" (96). Ultimately, she is capable of the holy, is capable of establishing a divine connection, originating in the antiquity, the authenticity and the sincerity of her religious impulses. When christening the child, her thanksgiving "poured forth from the bottom of her heart" (95), and her "ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her facing a glowing irradiation." Her sacred fervor is convincing to her siblings "who gazed up at her with more and more reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning"(95).

Our sense of order

Notes on Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Reflecting on Tess's situation, Hardy writes of "the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things"(43. At some level, there is a note of sarcasm in the remark. However, I'm not really sure whether sarcasm does justice to Hardy's reading of Tess's story. Hardy notes how "Nature does not often say 'See!' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to a happy doing; or reply 'Here!' to a body's cry of 'Where?' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome outworn game"(43).

Hardy laments such "anachronisms" and speculates as to whether they might "be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along"(43). While he rejects the possibility, his speculation is based on a couple of intriguing assumptions. First, that the world is ordered according to some design or plan, and secondly that it is the goal of society to read that plan and order itself accordingly. In Tess, Hardy continually reminds that society has failed to do so.

In Tess, Hardy continually notes discords between Nature and the Social, Nature and Propriety. Thus, the milkmaids Marian, Izzy, Retty and Tess recognize the "futility of their infatuation" with Angel Clare "from a social point of view...its lack of everything to justify its existence in the eye of civilization (while lacking nothing in the eye of Nature)"(147). Likewise, Tess is tortured by the irony that while Angel

really did prefer [her] in a cursory way to the rest, she who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the homilier ones whom he ignored.(148).

When Tess returns home after the assault by Alec, her mother stoically advises, "Well, we must make the best of it, I suppose. 'Tis nater, after all, and what pleases God"(82). Of course, the blame for much of what has occured might be more properly laid at her own door. Hardy is surely chastising those who proceed without care or forethought and attribute the consequences to God, or nature.

With conditions, Hardy believes in the virtues of nature, or the natural. Part of Tess's virtue or charm for Hardy is her connection to nature. On the nature versus art binary, Tess is virtous to the extent to which she is artless.
Her innocence attracts; however, while attractive, the villains of the novel can't let it alone or nurture it properly. She begins to suffer when others impose art upon her. On the morning she sets off to Alec's, "to please her parent the girl put herself quite in Joan's hands, saying serenely 'Do what you like with me, mother'"(49). After re-working Tess's appearance in the interests of advancing what she sees as Tess's (and her own) best interests, Joan steps back to observe the effect "like a painter from his easel"(50).

Likewise, while presumably drawn to Tess because of her innocence and freshness, for Alec, Tess is an object that requires addition, or art. Like an artist poring over a work, he seems to be constantly gazing at her as an object. Soon upon their initial meeting, Alec is decorating her, gathering rose blooms for her to put on her person, and when "she could affix no more he himself tucked a bud or two into her hat"(42). Afterward, "he watched her pretty and unconscious munching through the skeins of smoke," while she "innocently looked down at the roses in her bosom" (42).

So, while Tess is pure and natural, there doesn't seem to be a social machinery in place that would develop, preserve, or nurture her as such. However, for Hardy, the question might even be larger. Closing out the first book of the novel, he asks:

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why the coarse appropriates the finer thus, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.(74)

The last phrase again points to Hardy's uncertainty as to their being a natural order to things, suggesting that the order we seek and wish for comes from within us and is not met with in nature. This uncertainty in Hardy is made most prominent in the passages detailing Tess's time after her return from Alec's home. For the most part, to avoid judgemental eyes, she spends her time indoors, only venturing out for long walks in the evening. During these rambles, she imagines that "midnight airs and gusts...were formulae of bitter reproach" and "a wet day was irremediable grief at her weakness"(84).

Regarding Tess's reading of "natural phenomenon," Hardy maintains that "the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were"(84). This would seem to suggest that there is no such thing as nature outside of our conception of it. However, Hardy can't quite put aside a conception of innocence that presupposes a reified reading of Nature. When "walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, [Tess] looked upon herself as a figure of guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence"(85-86). Hardy corrects her, claiming "she was making a distinction where there was no difference"(86).

Nor does Hardy seem to ever give up on the idea of their being some sort of natural order to the world. Or, maybe, he never gives up his conviction that there should be. If he doesn't agree, he's certainly in profound sympathy with Tess when she contemplates the world and her horrible situation in it, and looking out at stars tells her brother Abraham, "They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our Stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and
sound-a few blighted." Abraham asks how she'd characterize their world. Tess replies, "A blighted one"(31).

The Well-Judged Plan of Things?

Notes on Tess

Innocence doesn't make...a good story. So, whereas Hardy is fascinated by Tess's freshness, by her being "a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience"(15), it is hard to see where that goes as a story. It can only serve as an opening of a novel.

Even as an opening, it is hardly plausible and Hardy struggles to pull it off. Even youthful, fresh Tess, "a genuine daughter of nature"(120), has had experience. She clearly has a loving connection with her father and has experienced the disappointments and shame often attendant upon such connections. She has experienced the loss of two siblings to whom she was close (37). And, although Tess loves her, her mother causes her pain: "As she grew older, and began to see how matters stood, she felt Malthusian vexation with her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many little brothers and sisters" (37). Tess is the adult in the family. She worryies for their welfare and attempts to scheme around the mayhem brought about by her thoughtless and immature parents whom she's forced to parent.
Tess is untinctured by experience of the romantic kind. She is "heart-whole as yet"(19) at the time of the fateful dance where she and Angel cross paths. Does innocence have a story? Perhaps, here's where it would've begun according to Hardy. Or, if not a story, here's where her unique self in its freshness, its wholeness, would have met "a...man, the exact and true one in all respects-as nearly as human mutuality can be exact and true"(43). Here, Hardy hedges: does he believe in a human mutuality exact and true?

Such mutuality would seem dependent on their being a larger plan or pattern in place. Of such a pattern, Hardy expresses a sceptically nostalgia. After Alec and Tess first meet, he quite dourly concludes, "Thus the thing began." After the mention of human mutuality above, he goes on to lament how "[i]n the ill judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say 'See!' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing"(43).

Yet, Hardy has a troubled relation with nature. Although he often portrays it as beneficient, as in synch with human thought, emotion and purpose, at other points, he decidedly rejects these attractive notions. Writing of Wordsworth, Hardy quips, "Some would like to know whence the poet whose philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his verse is pure and breezy, gets his authority for speaking of 'Nature's holy plan'"(24).


So, is there a plan? Yes and no. Of Angel and Clare, he writes of there being "two halves of an approximately perfect whole" that do "not confront each other at the perfect moment." If the perfect whole had met at the perfect moment, innocence would come to some perfection; Tess as natural would have received the finish of Angel's 'tutelage; Tess as a "second Eve" would have come to some perfection of the human. A certain logic would suggest these things but it's hard to conceive of Tess as more perfect without her struggle and pathos. These allow expression of her valor. Does Hardy agree? Hard to say. As he puts it at one point, circumstance, fate, conspire against Tess and Angel. They fail to come together till after the perfect moment and out of this "maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes-what was called a strange destiny"(44).

Fascinated by her freshness

Notes on Tess of the D'Urbervilles

I just finished Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I am re-reading it and am struck by some of the following.

Nostalgia permeates the book, from the opening chapters. Not only is the present day seen as a diminution of the past, but as the exception. Folks had lived better for many, many, many years previously until the present, a diminished moment. This is symbolically expressed by the Vale of Blackmoor which Hardy claims "till comparatively recent times...was densely wooded"(13, of the Penguin Classic Edition of the first edition, edited and notated by Tim Dolin. All future references are to this edition). Although long-standing features of the landscape have changed, older customs persist, such as the innocent and beautiful May-Day celebration that opens Chapter II. Of course, it is the last of its kind, and, without males initially, carried out in an incomplete fashion. Still, for Hardy, it survives from "days before the taking of long views had reduced emotion to a monotonous average"(13).

A nostalgia fueled by more bodily passion infuses the chief subject of the novel, the young woman Tess. Looking over the women participating in the May-Day celebration, he notes a few middle-aged and elderly women in the train"(14). He admits, "In a true view, perhaps [Hardy's always hedging; things perhaps seem], there was more to be gathered and told of each anxious and experienced one." Yet, presumably not after stories enriched by experience, he decides to "let the elder be passed over here for those under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm"(14). He settles upon Tess, the " mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience"(14). This is a novel that looks back or seeks an 'innocence' from which human's fall away as they age.


Naturally, as a figure of innocence, Tess has a child-like quality to her. Hardy can't make her a child without losing his interest. The child has to be simultaneously adult, and with Tess as Hardy paints her, "Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still"(15). In fact, in a creepy fashion, the only adult feature of Tess is her body, "her bouncing handsome womanliness"(15). She is innocent, untouched, even by the gaze of the men about her; instead, a small minority, mainly strangers, would look long at her in casually passing by, and grow momentarily fascinated by her freshness"(16). But, most men "she was a fine and picturesque country girl, and no more"(16). Her beauty is not of a variety to attract the common notice. As fascinating as her freshness is potentially, it is not an obviously apparent quality. It's seeming elusiveness protects Tess from the harm of ego. Tess is "heart-whole as yet...little divining when she saw...those girls who had been wooed and won, what she herself was capable of in that kind"(19).

Hardy continually defines her anew throughout the book, but often in the negative. She is described as having "an unpractised mouth and lips"(126). "Though untrained," she "is instinctively refined" and thus "her nature cried for his tutelary guidance"(181). The words and qualities traditionally attributed to admired women are never quite right for Tess; so, while the milkmaids at Tolbothays might call her "pretty," Hardy will not, "prettiness being an inexact definition of what struck the eye in Tess"(112). And, regarding the "charms...he beheld in this idyllic creature," Angel observes "unsophistication was a thing to talk of; but he had not known how it really struck one until he came here [Talbothays]"(203).

Furthermore, as she is rendered, a substantial part of Tess's appeal lies in her being supposedly half-formed. Very early on, Hardy describes her as "a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience" and, focusing on the part of her that will infatuate Angel(150), her mouth as "hardly... yet settled into its definitive shape"(15). Even at the point when she sets out for Talbothay's dairy,after the assault by Alec, Hardy has her as "only a young woman of twenty, one who mentally and sentimentally had not finished growing."

Yet, for Hardy and Angel, her greatest appeal lies in her pure connection to Nature, or as Angel puts it, Tess is a "genuine daughter of Nature"(120). Drving home this point, Hardy repeatedly identifies her with natural elements, animals and trees. Sometimes, these likenings occur in short order; Tess listens to Angel's harp playing "like a fascinated bird" but moves toward it "stealthily as a cat"(122). Later, after a nap, "she was warm as a sunned cat"(169). She and her fellow milkmaids going out to the mead to milk "drew onward to the spot to where the cows were grazing...the bevy advancing with the bold grace of wild animals"(173). Then, sometimes he puts a bit more 'down to the earth' and likens her to vegetation. Upon settling at Tolbothays, she is the "sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its sowing [which now] had been transplanted to a deeper soil"(129). Like the narrator, Angel too likens her to a plant, telling Tess that she is not likely to have any more experience in the world than a "wild convulvus out...on the garden hedge"(177).

Moreover, rather marvelously, Hardy would connect her a prelapsarian time. Thus, she is Eve in a number of spots: walking with Angel in the twilight as if they were Adam and Eve"(130); during a sensual moment with Angel, she looks at him "as Eve at her second waking might have regarded Adam"(170).

At points, Hardy suggests her religious views partake of the pagan. Angel goes so far to conceive of her as a pagan deity. According to Hardy, she is one of those women "whose chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature." Such women "retain in their souls far more of the pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized religion taught their race at a later date"(104).Viewing her in the twilight, Angel mistakes her features for "those of a divinity who could confer bliss"(130). Indeed, at one point, noting her "automatic [Christian] orthodoxy," Angel "had been prone to slight [it] when observing it practised by her...because of its obvious unreality amid beliefs essentially demonistic"(164).