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).