Tess D´Urberville (1891)

Fiction

Hardy’s books must be one of the reasons writers decide to write. You cannot call yourself a bookworm without reading on off his books. Tess made me cry, it made me angry but I was so enthralled by the story and the writing to see tears welling up in my eyes. I hated the ending but i can’t get everything I want in life. ( )

I don’t know when I’ve read a sadder book.
Hardy weaves an intricate plot involving a small cast of characters whose lives repeatedly intersect. At times, the coincidences were too Dickensian for my taste, such as when Tess decides against knocking at the door of her in-laws, despite walking a long half-day to get there. On her way back to her farm of servitude, she hears a familiar voice preaching a revival service in a barn. Yep, it’s Alec, the indulgent not-really cousin, her seducer, now converted years after a rebuke by her father-in-law (who neither knew that he was Tess’s father-in-law, nor the role this wastrel had played in her life, therefore indirectly in the life of his son). It only added to the over-neatness of this incident that it took but a few criticisms of conventional faith that Tess had picked up during her courtship to shake Alec’s conviction and have him throw over his faith.
Still, this book incorporates much of what made me like Thomas Hardy’s writing ever since enjoying Return of the Native in high school (one of the few assigned books I actually read back then). Hardy loves Nature, although he is no sentimentalist. His nature, like Tennyson’s, is red in tooth and claw, leading him to reject the naivety of superficial Christianity. Still, he loves nature. As “Phase the Third” opens, it takes an entire chapter to record what Tess observed as she travelled, much of the way on foot, to a dairy farm to resume her life. I suspect more than one contemporary reader will grow impatient, but I savored it.
Paralleling this love of nature is his detailed description of rural life and of the “workfolk” whose way of life was already passing as he wrote, lending his prose an elegiac tone.
Hardy was notorious for rejecting the common Christian conception of God of his day. He is decidedly anti-church. Yet his prose is drenched in the Bible. So I began wondering which Bible characters might stand behind this tale. In The Mayor of Casterbridge it was clear within a few pages that it would be a retelling of the story of David and Saul. With Tess, I was more than a quarter-way through and had almost given up the game when Hardy gave it away of his own accord. In chapter 20, as Tess and Angel stroll through the violet dawn at the dairy farm in the days of their growing acquaintance, Angel imagines they are Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, yet unaware, as the author notes, that it is Magdalene at his side. Yet Tess cannot be reduced to Mary Magdalene — that is the reduction made by those who, unlike Jesus, judge her. She is the embodiment of the feminine in all its facets. She is a Magdalene who encompasses mother Eve and the Madonna. In a reversal of a common pattern, in which a woman is either virgin or whore, it is the men in this story who are halves of a dichotomy: Alec, all Id, and Angel, a nearly-disembodied spirit.
Hardy is one of my favorite authors, but I feel he overplays his hand at times, culminating in the climax at the Stonehenge, where Tess lays down to sleep on what the author explicitly identifies as the sacrificial altar — her fate had been repeatedly foreshadowed, beginning in the opening chapter with its May dance. There are other instances where he spells things out in case the reader is too dull to have noticed what a clever writer he is (the inhuman, ethereal morality of Angel, Alec as the serpent in paradise to Tess’s Eve). In a way, drawing attention to himself as the artificer somewhat attenuates his indictment of the cruelly indifferent God who allowed this to happen, for the one who created Tess and determined her fate is none other than Hardy. It proves difficult for this author, who is the god of the universe he creates, to mimic his indifferent First Cause without tipping over into the malevolent. As I turned page after page, I wanted to rescue Tess, not so much from Alec and Angel, but from the author who created her. In a way, this is praise of a powerful work of art. ( )

Hardy is such a talent that though we know any tale of his is likely to be grim, we cannot but help gobbling it up. I have spent years telling myself that I'm not doing exactly this simply because I'm not reading the most dire, namely "Jude the Obscure". I'm simply trailing around the drain as I slowly begin to read of the more unfortunate souls. "They are not Jude!" I strenuously remind myself. Ah, yes. They are, however, giving him a run for his money.

Tess is a character to love, despite all you fear from Hardy in his abuse of her. I was drawn to her and that will, naturally, lead to nothing but dashed hopes. I kept reminding myself loudly "this is Hardy! Don't imagine for a second that this is Laura Ingals Wilder!" Good advice, if it's bothered to be taken.

Reading Hardy and expecting that everything will turn out all right is like watching Winslet and DiCaprio in "Titanic" and expecting that the boat comes to harbor with only very smutty graffiti on its hull. This book is enjoyable nonetheless. Which worries me. Jude cannot be far behind. ( )

I've seen a few adaptions but I finally sat down and read the actual book and it is amazing. I've been reading a bunch of Hardy lately and I am so struck by how well he writes women characters. They have so much agency, even though they are imbeded in the system that was already past in the time Hardy was writing. It was a hard read, knowing that it was just getting worse and worse for Tess no matter what. But of all the men who mess her over, I think I am most angry about her useless father. If he could possibly act like a reasonably responsible adult even a small percentage of the time, the compounding tragedies would have no starting point. What a brilliant book.