Romance, Realism and Place in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Lecture 6Romance and RealismACL2007Dr Jenny Lee

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Overview

Thomas Hardy – biographical info. Hardy’s publishing context – including

literary, social and intellectual contexts. Aspects of realism and romance in Tess. Descriptions of place as a psychological

map of Tess’ mind and emotions. Romance, realism and modernism.

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Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Born and brought up in rural Dorset in south-west England. Father was a stone mason with a love of nature and rural life. Mother had a keen interest in storytelling and local folklore. Hardy saw but did not directly experience extreme rural poverty. Hardy’s formal education ended at the age of 16 after which he was

apprenticed as an architect. Immersed himself in self-improvement. Was exposed to intellectual life through his friend Horace Moule. Married socially ambitious Emma Gifford who supported his

decision to write full-time. Had a difficult, bitter, marriage and after Emma died, he remarried. Went to London for a while but moved back to Dorset.

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Hardy’s body of work

Prolific writer – 14 novels, short story collections, poetry collections, ghosted biography.

His prominent novels include: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) The Return of the Native (1878) The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) The Woodlanders (1887) Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) Jude the Obscure (1895)

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Hardy’s publishing context

Hardy wrote novels, as was common in the day, for publication in serial form. Often changed his own intentions of the text to anticipate market sensitivities, or in response to critics.

Hardy often kept chapters deemed too sensitive for serial publication for the volume version – for example the original serialised version of Tess included a fake wedding scene between Alec D’Urberville instead of the seduction/rape of Tess.

Abandoned fiction after Jude the Obscure in 1895– Despite some positive reviews Hardy was more sensitive to those critics who were morally outraged by it.

Although Hardy produced different versions of pivotal scenes and was sensitive to criticism, both Tess and Jude challenge the morals of the day.

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Literary/social/intellectual context Hardy’s life spanned from early Victorian era through to

post WWI England – a time of great change and strong reactions to any social changes.

Conflict between science and religion – Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) undermines religious authority. Hardy gradually abandons religious views.

Victorian class rigidity – Hardy felt pressure for people to remain in their own class. Was determined to bypass this and ascend socially.

Victorian gender and sexual values/hypocrisy. Greek tragedy – Speaks to the kind of pessimistic fatalism

that marks Hardy’s attitude and which is evident in Tess. Anti-realism: Fairy-tale, folktale, ballad.

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Realism and Place in Tess

The most obvious aspect of the realism in Tess is the historical reality of the places it is set.

Despite the place names being part of the invented universe of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, the novel takes care to map out its specificity.

Much has been written about how identifiable the places in Hardy’s Wessex and the southwest of England are.

The relationships between the towns, the forms of transport, the insularity, is realistically represented.

Further aspects that add to a realism reading: the observation of the class, the families, the lack of ‘happy endings’. The ‘interrupting’ narrative voice asks the reader to think ‘what if Tess

had done this, or that’, thereby jolting the reader out of the strong engagement that is typical of romantic texts.

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Realism, place and keeping secrets

Everyone is bound by the distance of these places – and the lack of fast transportation means that different people have different customs in different towns.

It’s very insular and everyone knows everyone else within a town.

Today – we could drive between these towns in a day. Tess’ world – everything is walking distance, so when

she thinks the past is going to discover her – it’s because she is bound to a small number of locations.

Her fear of being found out is realistic in that, the small number of people show up again and again. Hardy emphasises this fact by having the same people pop up in different locations.

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Romance conventions and place in Tess Superstition Symbolism Over-determined narrative – the plot seems ‘staged’ Nightmares and sleep-walking used as a pivotal scene/turning point – the

use of the unconscious to reveal ‘true’ or ‘real’ feelings Implausible events in ‘surreally described’ places, such as:

the extent of the sleep-walking the entire Stonehenge sequence, especially the police waiting until Tess wakes

up Use of coincidence to advance the plot, eg:

the one time Tess goes to Angel’s house, she hears his brothers and the woman Angel was ‘supposed to marry’ saying negative things about her – and they find and take her boots.

The psychic use of landscape descriptions, eg the ‘Cross-in hand’ monument that Tess and Alec have a conversation at, and is later described as ‘a bad omen’. The descriptions of place, including landscape, buildings and monuments, are used as a psychological map of Tess’ state of mind.

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The places of Tess

I’ll be looking at most of these places in terms of place and the way it mirrors Tess’ psychological state:

Vale of Blackmoor – her town Trantridge - The Slopes (name of D’Urbervilles estate) The Chase: the woods where she is raped Frome – rich valleys (Talbothays) – dairy Wellbridge – honeymoon house Flintcome-Ash farm – farm where she works while she waits for

Angel Emminster – Angel’s parents Sandbourne – town where Angel finds her Stonehenge – where Tess is arrested The other key locations are the paths between these places.

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Trantridge - The Slopes

Physical locations are linked to Tess’ psychic state: It’s the first time she’s ever left the vale, when she goes

to the D’Urbervilles. Whole sequence is focused on strange landscape, she feels vulnerable.

‘Rising still, an immense landscape stretched around them on every side; behind, the green valley of her birth, before, a gray country of which she knew nothing…’ (62)

After this they go down hills at top speed, and Alec uses her fear of the speed to get a kiss.

Note the difference in the way her home vale is described: ‘this fertile and sheltered tract of country…’ (11).

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The rape and the landscape

The rape takes place as Alec and Tess are lost in the woods. Her vulnerability is linked to the unfamiliarity of the landscape: ‘…a faint luminous fog, which had hung in the hollows all evening,

became general and enveloped them. It seemed to hold the moonlight in suspension…’ (82).

The fog represents the danger that had been lurking in her interaction with Alec, and was now enveloping them.

Also note - unless Tess is catching a ride with someone, she is on foot.

Incident of the rape – she needs Alec’s help to get out of an uncomfortable situation.

Alec’s ability to move with comfort through the place means that she gets trapped with him. The way he travels between places – with more ease than Tess - demonstrates the power difference between the two.

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Frome – Talbothays dairy

Similar to the Vale of Blackmoor. The physical similarity between the two places mirrors the fact that she feels relatively comfortable here. It is a valley, there is green grass, cows being milked.

It is a place of hard work, but there are images of nourishment, comfort. That’s where Tess is able to rebuild herself from her first tragedy.

Culminates in her accepting Angel’s proposal.

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Wellbridge – honeymoon houseShort sequence but very important: House is transitional, not properly prepared, their luggage hasn’t

arrived, it’s alienating and strange. Angel and Tess never get unpacked or settled.

This mirrors what is going to happen between them. There’s no reason for the house not to be properly ready, but Hardy has made the choice to make it so to parallel the fact that Tess and Angel are not properly prepared for their marriage.

The house and weather are described in threatening ways: ‘Out of doors there began noises as of silk smartly rubbed; the restful

dead leaves of the preceding autumn were stirred to irritated resurrection, and whirled about unwillingly, and tapped against the shutters’ (265).

This description is before Tess has confessed – but she’s anxious about doing so.

The house, the portraits, the weather changing, are all described in ominous ways.

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Sleep-walking

While Angel is sleep-walking, he carries Tess: across the river over a fence up some steps into the ruined Abbey-church places her in a stone coffin He kisses her and then lies down

It’s Victorian gothic romance literature at that point – definitely more romance than realism.

The fact that his unconscious actions betray what’s on his mind, the ‘truth’ of the situation is also an aspect of romanticism.

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Flintcome-Ash farm Here the descriptions of landscape are symbolic of Tess’ Purgatory. It is

described as a ‘starve-acre place’ (346). The swede field where they hack – everything is bleak, with a sense of threat:

‘…the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of skin. The sky wore, in another colour the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface of the former like flies’ (346-347)

Compare the lushness of the first two farms; this is utter desolation. Purgatory is a place very like hell, where you suffer, but there is the possibility

of redemption through suffering, rather than suffering forever (like in hell). Oxford English Dictionary: ‘a condition or supposed place of spiritual

cleansing, spec. in the Roman Catholic church, in which the souls of those who have died in the grace of God suffer for a time to expiate venial sins or to atone for mortal sins for which they have received absolution’ (2419).

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Emminster

Tess walks for nine hours to reach Angel’s parents at the vicarage (358).

This is the culmination of her suffering and humiliation. On her walk, she passes Froom Valley and the narrator

states: ‘Yet it was in that vale that her sorrow had taken shape, and she did not love it as formerly. Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolised’ (361).

The narrator at times directly tells the reader that the landscape is described in terms of what it symbolises for Tess.

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Emminster continued…

Tess does all this to get to the vicarage and it’s empty. As she waits at the door this description is given: ‘The wind was so drying that the ivy-leaves had become wizened and gray, each tapping incessantly upon its neighbour with a disquieting stir of her nerves’ (362).

This description employs pathetic fallacy. Hardy relies on this technique often when he is describing place.

Penguin dictionary of literary terms and literary theory – pathetic fallacy: ascribing human feelings to the inanimate. Ruskin coined the term and was derogatory about it. He said it applied not to the ‘true appearances of things to us’, but to the ‘extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion of contemplative fancy’ (1992: 692).

However, many writers use pathetic fallacy – although some more subtly than Hardy.

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Emminster continued…

Tess then hears Angel’s brothers and sees Mercy (the woman Angel’s family had wanted him to marry).

One of the brothers says, ‘Ah! poor Angel, poor Angel! I never see that nice girl without more and more regretting his precipitancy in throwing himself away upon a dairymaid…’ (364).

They find and take her walking boots (more bad luck – Hardy really wants the reader to sympathise and understand why Tess went back to ‘purgatory’).

The whole time, they are walking up a hill and Tess has been trying to overtake them but they overtake her. The hill is used to show suffering piled upon suffering.

Tess’ march back (nine hours’ walk again) is plodding, not full of hope, with tears on her face.

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Walking back

Who does Tess see? Alec – who is supposedly reformed and a preacher (not exactly realistic, considering how Alec has been represented so far).

They have a conversation at a cursed place, which predicts the future. This is where realistic landscape falls away and is replaced by almost a

dream-scape and passages that approach surrealism: ‘At length the road touched the spot called ‘Cross-in-Hand’…a negative beauty of

tragic blackness. The place took its name from a stone pillar which stood there, a strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in any local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand’ (378).

Tess asks a solitary shepherd about the monument; he happens to know: ‘’Tis a thing of ill-omen, Miss. It was put up in wuld [sic] times by the relations of a

malefactor who was tortured there by nailing his hand to a post, and afterwards hung. The bones lie underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil…’(380).

As Tess suffers more, she becomes so identified with the narrator of the novel that the landscape takes on the crises and the strangeness of the story. (Earlier, the narrator makes the separation clearer).

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Flintcomb-Ash

At Flintcomb-Ash the work is also outdoors but contextualised by a grimmer reality – the encroachment of the modern urban economy on lived experience and land use in rural areas.

We observe the domination of mechanised farming in the form of the threshing machine which alienates the workers from the rhythm and moods of the pre-industrial milk farm. The machine is made demonic: ‘Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the

red tyrant that the women had come to serve – a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining – the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves’ (325).

In the background is Alec’s threatening presence. He is aligned with the machine – both of them part of the new industrialised world.

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Sandbourne Angel comes back to Tess; she murders Alec. Dramatic pivotal turning points in the text are not described – they’re

‘off-stage’: we don’t see Tess’ child die, don’t see the rape, don’t see the murder.

Hardy is asking people to judge Tess on her life and background, not these events – this is why he shows us so much work; what it’s like to thresh, milk a cow, etc.

Hardy is pacing the novel in this way to show that this is what is important. These dramatic incidents change things, but these things happen off stage for a reason. He doesn’t want readers to focus on these incidents. That’s why it’s paced in this way – this is why you might find it difficult to read, as a modern reader.

Also – due to the conservatism of Hardy’s time, he probably didn’t want to show the rape for fear of reader/publisher reactions, however because he doesn’t show other dramatic events, it still seems like a deliberate story-telling choice.

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The mansion

Once the murder takes place, the descriptions become surreal. You could argue that Tess was on drugs in this section. However, we are not shown this, so we assume she is not.

Surreal descriptions of dreamlike places. A week in an abandoned mansion.

Opposite of where they first went on their honeymoon – the place of suffering, this other mansion is the place of paradise for Tess.

The place of fulfillment (last section is called ‘Fulfillment’). This last section happens quickly:

They find and stay in the empty mansion Tess reveals the sleep-walking incident to Angel They are busted by the caretaker They leave the mansion, walk and stumble upon Stonehenge

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Stonehenge This is an ancient pre-Norman, pre-Christian place. In

the past, heathens sacrificed to the Sun at Stonehenge (481).

The place is grandiose, famous – and they just stumble across it. Tess sleeps on a sacrificial stone.

Hardy is saying – Tess has suffered, she is going to be a human sacrifice. It’s telling that when Hardy wants to show that someone is being sacrificed, he lays her on a slab, in an ancient temple, where others were sacrificed.

Angel asks the police to let her sleep until she wakes up: ‘Soon the light was strong, and a ray shone across her

unconscious form, peering under her eyelids and waking her’ (482).

This scene is incredibly symbolic, and romantic.

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Realism, romance & modernism The resolution of the romance and realist tensions in such a symbolic place

as Stonehenge is in itself a romantic gesture. Yet there is more to the alignment of place and self than a simple romantic

reading. The mirroring of descriptions of place, landscape, houses, monuments to

Tess’ psychological state is a strong argument for Tess to be considered a precursor to the formal experimentation of the modernist text.

Hardy is refiguring the landscape to reflect Tess’ psyche. The next step (Joyce, Woolf) is to actually reconfigure the language, the way the story is told, the voice of the narrator, to reflect the psyche and circumstances of the main character – what is considered to be modernism.

Tess is a work that reveals that these categories or ‘movements’ are limited, and not every writer can be assigned to a particular movement, especially one like Hardy whose work and life span a period that contains a large amount of change in both society and literature.

Literary movements do not have a definite starting and stopping period.