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).