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).
Friday, August 29, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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 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.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
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.
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.
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