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).