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

Romance, Realism and
Place in Thomas Hardy’s
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Lecture 6
Romance and Realism
ACL2007
Dr Jenny Lee
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)
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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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
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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
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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:
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Use of coincidence to advance the plot, eg:
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the extent of the sleep-walking
the entire Stonehenge sequence, especially the police waiting until Tess wakes
up
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
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The rape takes place as Alec and Tess are lost in the woods. Her
vulnerability is linked to the unfamiliarity of the landscape:
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‘…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
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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 house
Short 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:
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‘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
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While Angel is sleep-walking, he carries Tess:
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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
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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:
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‘…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
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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…
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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…
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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
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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:
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Tess asks a solitary shepherd about the monument; he happens to know:
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‘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).
‘’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
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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:
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‘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 threshingmachine 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
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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
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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:
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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
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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:
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‘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
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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.
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