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).