Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

The incline was the same down which d'Urberville had driven her so wildly on that day in June.  Tess went up the remainder of its length without stopping, and on reaching the edge of the escarpment gazed over the familiar green world beyond, now half-veiled in mist.  It was always beautiful from here; it was terrible beautiful to Tess to-day, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing, and her views of life had been totally changed for her by the lesson.  Verily another girl than the simple one she had been at home was she who, bowed by thought, stood still here, and turned to look behind her.

John Durbeyfield, town drunk, happens to discover one day that he is actually the descendant of a once-great family, the d'Urbervilles, of whom a few still-genteel relations remain.  Hoping for monetary advancement, Durbeyfield sends his young daughter Tess to make the acquaintance of their cousin, Alec d'Urberville.  Alec's interest in Tess is not entirely that of a friendly relative, and Tess must repeatedly deflect his crass come-ons.  Then, one evening, while she is captive in his carriage, he rapes her.  Hardy, with his usual circuitousness, never quite says this--but the second chapter is called "Maiden No More." 

Tess of the d'Urbervilles is the story of the consequences of rape.  It would be nice to think that it's a record from the foreign nation of the past, and that Tess' experience would be different today, and maybe it would, but in degree and not in kind.  Like many rape victims today, Tess is thrown together again and again with her violator, unable to break free. Like many rape victims today, she is blamed--explicitly and otherwise--for her rape, including by the love of her life, Angel Clare, whose rigid humanist morals are unable to tolerate what he perceives as Tess' indiscretion.  Tortured by male attention, she mutilates her own face:

As soon as she got out of the village she entered a thicket and took from her basket one of the oldest field-gowns, which she had never put on even at the dairy... She also, by a felicitous thought, took a handkerchief from her bundle and tied it round her face under her bonnet, covering her chin and half her cheeks and temples, as if she were suffering from toothache.  Then with her little scissors, by the aid of a pocket looking-glass, she mercilessly nipped her eyebrows off, and thus insured against aggressive admiration she went on her uneven way.

D'Urberville is one of the slimiest villains I think I've ever read about.  His constant wheedling of Tess, his feigned care, contrasted with his claims to be so inflamed with passion that he can't resist himself, are both reprehensible and recognizable.  True, Hardy leaves some space for the reader to interpret Alec's actions as a seduction, but it seems to me that Hardy's structuring of the power differential between the two figures--he is wealthy and powerful, she neither, and of course if she resists he may abandon her in the woods.  But Angel, the good man whose moral code is so inflexible, is more frustrating and maybe more repulsive.  Angel takes a voyage to South America to get rid of the sticky moral situation that is Tess, only belatedly realizing his error:

During this time of absence he had mentally aged a dozen years.  What arrested him now as of value in life was less its beauty than its pathos.  Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism, he now began to discredit the old appraisements of morality.  He thought they wanted readjusting.  Who was the moral man?  Still more pertinently, who was the moral woman?  The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

Moral realizations in Hardy's novels are always a step too late, sometimes comically so--it seems like lovers are always a moment too late or early to reunite with each other--but I guess we should take Angel at his word and judge him by this intentions and not his achievements.  But his obtuseness is pretty angering.

What about Tess?  She's not as interesting as the male principals--smart, pretty, humble, etc.--but much of her identity is tragically consumed by her victimhood.  She's a sister in spirit to Jude the Obscure: neither can seem to catch a break, and both are so dogged by systemic unfairness and outright cruelty that they begin to internalize it. Hardy clearly loves her, sometimes to a fault, and subtitles the novel "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented."  Like Angel Clare, he's more arrested by pathos--pity--than beauty, and Tess is certainly a figure of pity.  There's no place for Tess, partly because of the backward moral climate of her surroundings.  But the pathos comes not only from the cruelty of a rotten society but from a cosmic unfairness:

Care had been harsh toward her; there is no doubt of it.  Men are too often harsh with women they love or have loved; women with men.  And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the harshness of the posititon towards the temperament, the means toward the aims, of to-day towards yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day.

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature.  It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against this fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death.  Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be light.

I have found diminishing returns with Hardy's novels, I think.  I really loved Far from the Madding Crowd, but The Mayor of Casterbridge exposed a lot of the artificiality and overwroughtness of Hardy's writing that I hadn't noticed in Crowd.  Jude the Obscure was very good, and as heart-rendingly bleak as its reputation, but suffered from the same flaws.  I didn't really enjoy The Return of the Native much at all, because Hardy's bloviating and melodrama seem discordant with such a cramped and narrow story.

Of course, cramped and narrow is half the point.  Eustacia Vye, the beautiful and tempestuous heroine, wants badly to leave Egdon Heath, the blandest and most barren stretch of the Wessex countryside and live life on a larger scale.  She thinks that she has found her ticket out in the figure of Clym Yeobright, the native of the title who has returned from studying in Paris.  They fall in love--there is a nice scene where Eustacia takes place in a Christmas masque, trying to spy on this intriguing newcomer without herself being scene, though Yeobright sees through her costume with the benefit of some sort of kismet--but after they marry, she becomes disillusioned.  Yeobright, for his part, only wants to found a provincial school in his homeland, not sweep his bride away to the Continent:

But do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life--music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that are going on in the great arteries of the world?  That was the shape of my youthful dream; but I did not get it.  Yet I thought I saw the way to it in my Clym.

Complicating this story is Eustacia's former lover Damien Wildeve, who has recently married Yeobright's cousin Thomasin.  (I didn't know this was the female version of Thomas, but I like it.)  Typically, Wildeve's former passion for Eustacia is rekindled when she becomes attached to Yeobright, which causes all sorts of problems and misunderstandings.

The plot is confined mostly to this love-square, with Yeobright's disapproving mother added, and Diggory Venn the "reddleman," who has long been in love with Thomasin.  A reddleman travels around selling the pigment that is used for marking sheep, and consequently is often covered in red himself, and has a strange mystical presence because of it.  Venn himself is sort of otherworldly.  His love for Thomasin drives him, not to undermine her marriage to Wildeve, but to endeavor tirelessly to reconcile their relationship that she might be happy and not dishonored.  His inherent goodness is a contrast to the underhandedness of Wildeve, the self-absorption of Eustacia, and even to the well-intentioned foolishness of Yeobright.  He's the best part of the book, and an powerful reproach to the idea that "good" characters are boring and "evil" characters the most interesting or complex.  The Return of the Native could have used more of him.

Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

"...You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude.  And a tragic Don Quixote.  And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened.  Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!" -- Sue Bridehead

When Jude Fawley is a little boy, his schoolmaster advises him, "Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can."  It seems like a particularly banal and childish piece of counsel, but it turns out to be the most humane moral code Jude will ever encounter in a universe where kindness seems to have no moral value whatsoever.

Jude's dream is to elevate himself, despite his poverty, to the ranks of the learned, and as a boy he studies his Latin and Greek assiduously.  As is commonly the case, his ambitions are derailed by sex.  He falls for a girl named Arabella Donn, who, not wishing to let Jude go, seduces him and tricks him into marriage with a made-up pregnancy.  Hardy describes their marriage this way:

And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly believe, fell, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preceding weeks.  What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they swore.

Jude's foil in this is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, whom he meets long after his marriage has crumbled and Arabella has run off to Australia.  He falls for Sue, who falls for him, but not before she has married the same old schoolmaster, Phillotson, to assure her position as a teacher.  Phillotson, true to his advice to the young Jude, releases Sue from her bonds, but this remarkable act of kindness fails to change the material reality of Jude and Sue's existence, which is defined by the marriage bonds which they have made but cannot shake.

As Sue tells Jude, "There is something external to us which says, 'You shan't!'  First it said, 'You shan't learn!'  Then it said, 'You shan't labour!'  Now it says, 'You shan't love!'"  The external thing which says You shan't is the moral code which values the bond of marriage over human kindness.  For most of the book neither Jude's nor Sue's spouses assert any claim to them, but the pair are roundly denigrated for their scandalous relationship, chased out of work and home.

 Jude the Obscure caused quite a controversy in its day, one which may seem quaint compared to modern attitudes of marriage, but I think Hardy's contemporaries were right to see that the book savages much more than marriage itself: It criticizes the value of the Christian moral framework, which Hardy sees as elevating doctrine over simple kindness and love.  Not too subtly, he emphasizes this by having Jude and Sue chased off a job restoring a monument of the Ten Commandments.

But the highest tragedy of Jude is that Jude, though he ultimately abandons his religion, cannot escape his own moral snare.  At one point he stands before a gathered crowd and offers himself as "a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story":

"However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten.  It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses--affections--vices perhaps they should be called--were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should really be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country's worthies."

See how entangled, in Jude's mind, are poverty and rectitude: a good man knows his place, in wedlock and in penury.  Jude has forgotten his schoolmaster's advice, but we have not, and are forced to ask ourselves, which is the better path--to "be kind to animals and birds," or to "be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig?"

It is easy to see why Hardy found the response to Jude so personally draining, and never wrote another novel.  Giving his readers the choice between human decency and old-time religion, many of them said we'll take the old-time religion, thank you.  Doubtless Hardy must have felt much like Jude.  And yet, I would argue that Jude might have been more nuanced.  A happy marriage is simply a concept that does not exist in this novel; though we laugh at the innkeeper who is suspicious of Jude and Arabella's relationship until he recognizes her "flinging a shoe at his head" to be "the note of genuine wedlock," it isn't clear to me that Hardy's opinion is very different.

Jude presents us with a handful of really gut-wrenching set-pieces where Hardy provides enough pathos to make nuance unnecessary.  In between them, I admit I found parts of it tedious and artificial.  Hardy's natural long-windedness is effective when accompanying real agonies, but does little for Sue's long campaign of mind-changing and sexual frigidity.  Did Far from the Madding Crowd suffer from the same flaws, which show as well in The Mayor of Casterbridge?  Probably so, but I'll take it over those two anyway.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Very often, as his hay-knife crunched down among the sweet-smelling grassy stems, he would survey mankind and say to himself: "Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world: while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!"

Spoiler alert!

The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a scene of remarkable cruelty: Michael Henchard, drunk on rum, sells his wife and daughter at a county fair. The book immediately fast-forwards eighteen years to the point at which Henchard, still distraught at his actions, has become a profitable businessman and mayor. When his wife and daughter return to find him, it presents him with, he hopes, an opportunity for redemption.

As it happens, at that same moment Henchard has made a purchase of bad grain (ohmygod there's so much in this book about grain) which prompts this exchange:

"But what are you going to do to repay us for the past?" inquired the man who had before spoken, and who seemed to be a baker or miller. "Will you replace the grown flour we've still got by sound grain?"

Henchard's face had become still more stern at these interruptions, and he drank from his tumbler of water as if to calm himself or gain time. Instead of vouchsafing a direct reply, he stiffly observed--

"If anybody will tell me how to turn grown wheat into wholesome wheat I'll take it back with pleasure. But it can't be done."

This is a bit on the nose for me, but it sets up the B-story, in which Henchard hires a young Scotsman named Donald Farfrae to run his grain business. Farfrae, as it happens, has invented a process that turns "grown wheat into wholesome wheat" and so offers Henchard a different kind of redemption.

But redemption is elusive. Henchard's wife soon dies, and leaves him with his daughter, who does not know she is Henchard's offspring. To make matters worse, his wife leaves him a letter that confesses she's not actually his, but that their daughter died in infancy and she named her next daughter after the first. Feeling cheated, he spurns her at the same time that his reliance on Farfrae turns to jealousy, and they become bitter rivals.

Casterbridge is a story about a man who works tirelessly to redeem himself, but cannot get out of his own way. As his place in society declines, he blames bad luck and the machinations of Farfrae, but cannot see that his pettiness, viciousness, and pride are what unravel his successes, just as they severed his marriage. After the sale he imposes a 21-year tee-totaling sentence on himself, but alcohol is not to blame for his powerful vices.

I did not find Casterbridge to be a success on the order of Far From the Madding Crowd (though the jacket erroneously calls it his "first masterpiece"). The prose is comparatively muted, and without the high-toned whimsicality of Crowd it is difficult to ignore how over-plotted it is. But it had me by the end, where Henchard, destitute, estranged from his "daughter" Elizabeth-Jane (who has married Farfrae!), has died and left this as a will:

MICHAEL HENCHARD'S WILL

"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave.
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name.

Jesus.

Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

Probably some one man on average falls in love with each ordinary woman. She can marry him: he is content, and leads a useful life. Such women as you a hundred men always covet--your eyes will bewitch scores on scores into an unavailing fancy for you--you can only marry one of that many. Out of these say twenty will endeavour to drown the supposed bitterness of despised love in drink; twenty more will mope away their lives without a wish or attempt to make a mark in the world, because they have no ambition apart from their attachment to you; twenty more--the susceptible person myself possibly among them--will always be draggling after you, getting where they may just see you, doing desperate things. Men are such constant fools! The rest may try to get over their passion with more or less success. But all these men will be saddened. And not only those ninety-nine men, but the ninety-nine women they might have married are saddened with them. There's my tale. That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race. --Gabriel Oak


One of the strongest impressions one receives when reading Far from the Madding Crowd is awe at Hardy's vast knowledge. The story is crowded with offhand allusions to poetry, the Bible, and to Greek mythology, some of which are absurdly obscure. These vary in subtlety, but none is so plain as the name of the heroine, Bathsheba Everdene. Just as King David, having seen Bathsheba sunbathing from his roof, was overcome with a lust which engenders violence, Bathsheba Everdene cannot help but become the object of obsession.

She has three suitors, and together they form a catalogue of the ways men fall in love with women: The first is Gabriel Oak, a patient and pragmatic shepherd who is refused by Bathsheba at the beginning of the book. The second is Mr. Boldwood, who owns the farm adjacent to Bathsheba's, and his love is more along the obsessive King David line, madly begging her for a promise of marriage and allowing his own farm to go to ruin. The third is a young soldier named Frank Troy, whom Hardy describes thusly:

He spoke fluently and unceasingly. He could in this way be one thing and seem another; for instance, he could speak of love and think of dinner; call on the husband to look at the wife; be eager to pay and intend to owe.

Troy is a scoundrel, engaged to another girl, and his attachment to Bathsheba is short-lived, but she is charmed by him and allows herself to descend into Boldwood-like love-madness on his account.

Meanwhile, Gabriel exhibits an actual devotion to Bathsheba by toiling unceasingly on her farm. He solves every crisis: He cures the sheep when they are sick; he puts out fires; when a drunken Troy refuses to cover the hay-ricks for the coming storm, Gabriel does the work of ten men single-handed. He is a shepherd in the Christian sense, and like his analogues in Count Belisarius and The Good Soldier he performs this imitation of Christ before a backdrop of religious confusion and ignorance. Hardy plays this for laughs:

"How did Cain come by such a name?" asked Bathsheba.

"Oh you see, mem, his pore mother, not being a Scripture-read woman, made a mistake at his christening, thinking 'twas Abel killed Cain, and called en Cain, meaning Abel all the time. The parson put it right, but 'twas too late, for the name cold never be got rid of in the parish. 'Tis very unfortunate for the boy."

But there is a very serious sense that religion provides little of the necessary wisdom of living. Instead, Gabriel's pious devotion is a product of the simplicity of country life, which forms a kind of religion. Hardy notes that the barn on Bathsheba's farm resembles a church with transepts:

One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied. Unlike and superior to either of those two typical remnants of mediaevalism, the old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time.

Gabriel's constancy is the constancy of the earth, the constancy of the country farm. He is opposed in this by Troy, who represents the fickleness of the modern city, and who nearly drives the farm to ruin (a ruin presaged by his name, a city synonymous with destruction) by neglect of his duty both as farmer and lover. We want desperately for Bathsheba to return to Gabriel's offer of marriage, though the years pass and he seems unlikely to renew it, resigned to laying down his life in quiet service.

Hardy has a terrific style that thrives on grammatical tension. He will overload you with winding, circuitous sentences and absurdly elevated vocabulary before delivering a short summary statement of incredible power. The effect is like the inflating and popping of a great balloon, or being spun in a funnel until expelled violently from the tip:

Above the dark margin of the earth appeared foreshores and promontories of coppery cloud, bounding a green and pellucid expanse in the western sky. Amaranthine glosses came over them then, and the unresting world wheeled her round to a contrasting prospect eastward, in the shape of indecisive and palpitating stars. She gazed upon their silent throes amid the shades of space, but realized none at all. Her troubled spirit was far away with Troy.

And, because two points make a line, here is another:

Hence Bathsheba lived in a perception that her purposes were broken off. She was not a woman who could hope on without good materials for the process, differing thus from the less far-sighted and energetic, though more petted ones of the sex, with whom hope goes on as a sort of clockwork which the merest food and shelter are sufficient to wind up; and perceiving clearly that her mistake had been a fatal one, she accepted her position, and waited coldly for the end.

How wonderfully this maps Bathsheba's inner thinking: We are taken through the labyrinthine course of one who clings to their own reasoning to find comfort, only to emerge from such pondering into an inevitable and nearly ineffable truth: Bathsheba, having chosen wrongly, is alone.