Reading Thom Gunn's letters persuaded me to pick up Thomas Hardy for the first and likely not last time despite the author's ruinous take on love at first sight. Tess of the D'Urbervilles consistently elevates the spiritual over the carnal. Not only Jesus died for our sins; the young title character might as well have, although she isn't particularly religious and her life is nearly a decade shorter than his.
Tess, eldest child of a struggling family, remains very much an exemplary country girl despite her modest education. Just as her drunken father discovers he is related to an aristocratic family whose name has been appropriated by a 19th-century merchant, Tess falls for the aptly named Angel Clare, also the name of Art Garfunkel's first solo album (dreadful, just like Hardy's character). Unfortunately, Angel doesn't ask her to dance during a festival in which she and other bonneted maidens celebrate the arrival of spring before disappearing for two years. Their rural setting is key to understanding Hardy's mindset. He sexualizes the natural world in lyrical descriptions perhaps because writing about what happens between men and women in their bedroom was still off-limits in 1891.
Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings.
Mrs. Darbyfield, Tess's singing mother, pushes her to call on the phony D'Urbervilles who maintain an imposing estate within walking distance of their hovel where she can't ever seem to finish the laundry. Tess reluctantly agrees and soon finds herself in the clutches of Alec D'Uberville who arranges for her to maintain his blind mother's aviary. Mrs. Darbyfield would like nothing better than to marry off Tess to Alec, but Tess repeatedly discourages his attentions although she soon comes to enjoy her new life, and she's quite good at making the birds sing. After Alec saves her from an attack by drunken villagers jealous of her beauty, Hardy remains coy about exactly what happens next.
But as the second "phase" of the serialized novel--"A Maiden No More"--begins, Tess returns home, pregnant, in a deep funk. Her mother is furious and her father is ashamed but her siblings are delighted to see her. Tess self-christens her baby Sorrow before it dies and outsmarts a local vicar to facilitate a church burial. It's unclear if Alec knows that he has fathered a child with Tess but there's no doubt that he's consumed by the girl he doesn't consider marrying because of her inferior social status, the first of many ironies in this almost Gothic novel, given the fact that she, not Alec, is actually descended from the cursed D'Urberville blood line (at one point, Tess actually steps into one of their concrete coffins).
Tess leaves home a second time, this time finding employment as a milkmaid on an idyllic dairy farm where Angel Clare, an "enlightened" pastor's son, is apprenticing because he is far less enamored of the church than his older brothers. Although Angel doesn't remember his earlier encounter with Tess, he soon falls under her spell as surely as the cows she milks so proficiently. He proposes marriage; Tess refuses because of her surprisingly well-kept secret and encourages him instead to court three other milkmaids who also are completely besotted by Angel.
Nevertheless, he persists, and Tess finally agrees to wed after many sleepless nights, before and during their engagement, shortened by his desire to seek his agricultural future in Brazil. After rejecting her mother's advice to keep her mouth shut, Tess tries to confess but loses her nerve and reveals to Angel instead that she's actually a D'Urberville, another stop on Hardy's irony train. While Angel has professed disdain for aristocratic families--the ostensible reason she hasn't told him previously--he revels in the idea that Tess's genealogy will make her more acceptable to his parents.
But Tess can't catch a break. When Angel confesses that he has had a sexual past on their wedding night, she seizes the opportunity to tell him her own truth. Hypocritically, he shuns her before they have consummated their marriage but divorce is out of the question. Off he sails to Brazil and she once again returns to a life of ever increasing self-sacrifice with her family. By this time, Alec has become an itinerant pastor, tutored by Angel's father, preaching a kind of English fire and brimstone. But once Alec encounters Tess again, he experiences a kind of conversion and does everything in his considerable power to make Tess his own. She eventually succumbs, to tragic effect for both.
It's hard for the modern reader to interpret what happens during the last phase of the novel. Hardy himself explicitly acknowledges history's sweeping changes in two concise sentences, early in the book.
Between the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore, dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter, with her trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an infinitely Revised Code, there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily understood. When they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed.
While reading Tess, I felt as if it were the Victorian and New Millennium ages being juxtaposed. When rationalizing their need to marry sooner rather than later, Angel says this to the hardworking Tess, whose employment at the dairy farm is about to end:
. . . since you will probably have to leave at Christmas, it is in every way desirable and convenient that I should carry you off then as my property.
Thus far, Angel's behavior has been impeccable in the moral sense (he steals only a kiss from Tess), especially in comparison with Alec's. But here, for the first time, I said "Whoa!" Is Hardy reflecting his own view of marriage or is he setting up Angel--who clearly thinks of his wife as damaged goods after her subsequent confession--for his fall from the reader's grace?
Or at least mine. By the end I found myself a lot more sympathetic to Alec than Angel who, when all is said and done, abandons his wife. Sure, Alec preys on Tess again by helping her family and insisting that her husband will never return but it's also equally clear that Alec's feelings about Tess are as strong as those she holds for Angel who never once writes to his wife during their year-long separation. Isn't it possible that Alec--who does far more materially for Tess than Angel ever did--has atoned for his original sin?
Of course it's also possible that Hardy has created in Angel a sympathetic character for his times who hasn't quite escaped the social mores of pastoral England even though he takes great pride in thinking for himself. Hardy alludes to his own more sophisticated world shortly after Tess has refused Angel's first proposal, while they're delivering milk to the train station in a horse-drawn wagon.
They crept along towards a point in the expanse of shade just at hand at which a feeble light was beginning to assert its presence, a spot where, by day, a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the dark green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between their secluded world and modern life. Modern life stretched out its steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what it touched had been uncongenial.
Of course their "secluded world" is also a place where nobody bats an eye about the sexual exploitation of very young women. When Hardy, already a successful novelist, first submitted Tess his publisher rejected it, not because the title character is a 16-year-old girl whose own mother views her primarily as a meal ticket but because the novelist had treated a "fallen woman" sympathetically. No wonder Roman Polanski chose to adapt the novel! Released in 1980, Tess starred Nastassja Kinski who was 17 at the time he filmed it. And Jeffrey Epstein would have had a field day Talbothays, the dairy farm which employs numerous underage milkmaids in addition to the despoiled yet saintly Tess!
