Tess of the D’Urbervilles – take the journey
February 23rd 2008 04:25
Who says you can’t relive the past? All you have to do is pick up a Thomas Hardy novel and you’re there. I have just returned from such a journey, and believe me, Hardy’s 1800’s Wessex is alive and well.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, considered one of his finest novels, tells the ever-green story of love, lust and betrayal between the classes of 19th century England. Tess, a sweet, young innocent is sent to rich family relatives, the D’Urbervilles, in the hope of securing both money and prestige for her father. Already beautiful at so young an age (approx. 15) her cousin Alec immediately pursues Tess for less than honourable intent. Hardy puts it as ‘taken advantage of’, but in today’s eyes it would be called rape.
So starts the slow decline of Tess. From this point on, everything that happens to her; fallen woman, single mother, shame, sin, murder, is considered her own fault, whereas in reality her only fault is her innocence. Now, the issues in this story are many and we all know them. How guilt can tear a person in two, how double standards can run so deep, they are there without our knowledge and how forgiveness can lead to paradise (you can tell I’ve just read Hardy!)
This book is also a feminine activist’s playground and I’d make a bet more than one has spent considerable time grinding their teeth with the turn of every page. But my comments with this review will concentrate more on Hardy and the fluid portrait of English country life he brings to his novels.
Tess and Co. are great characters, vehicles to carry us forward and on to the stories tragic finish. But the countryside in which they live and falter is truly incredible. Hardy’s sense of place is absorbed by the reader through descriptive passages such as “Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which formed the boundary of the field rose against the pale opalescence of the lower sky.” And, one of my favourites from the threshing of the wheat … “From the west sky a wrathful shine – all that wild March could afford in the way of sunset – had burst forth after the cloudy day, flooding the tired and sticky faces of the threshers, and dyeing them with a coppery light, as also the flapping garments of the women, which clung to them like dull flames."
The impact of these passages is some what lessened out of context, but in the reading of the novel they come like shiny marbles among polished stones and are exactly why novels like Tess become timeless.
However, Hardy is not only descriptive. He ceaselessly relates the intricacies of village life, which is not always as it appears –simple, earthy, friendly or secure. Modern ways were slowly creeping in and things were changing. He patiently explains Old Lady-Day, which comes each year at the end of field work on the farms. This is when labourers are released and hands change, moving from county to county, farm to farm, constantly trying to better things for themselves and their family. “The Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the family who saw it from a distance, till by residence there it became in turn their Egypt also; and so they changed and changed.”
This of course had an impact on village life as workers moved on. Some were replaced, whereas in others the vacancies remained and the quality of the village suffered. Such as with Marlott, birth place of Tess. As the long-holdings on cottages fell they were acquired by agriculturists for workers cottages, displacing families not working the fields. And of course, if you had a fallen daughter, village eyes drew to your family first… “if only in the interests of morality.”
I really could go on about this book … it is one of my favourite classics. The only other book I can recall that gives me such a sense of place is Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The harshness and cruelty of life on the land coupled with limitations controlled by class distinction both feature strong in these greats, but it is the delivery that astounds and I would urge anyone serious about good fiction to have them on their list of books read.
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