Diamond in the Rough

 “Tess of the d'Ubervilles” by Thomas Hardy, 1891

Jane Austen and her cohort make Thomas Hardy a paragon of modernity, in spite of his language.  Austen's archaic stories, along with the Brontës, wittingly expose the foibles of the 19^th century gentry, touch on feminism, but end up being happy period romances.  They are the fodder for countless BBC Masterpiece and PBS period pieces like Downton Abbey, Sandition and Bridgerton. On the other hand Hardy, while having an advantage as to when he wrote, makes relentless fun of religion, marriage, wealth and royal titles, points heavily at the oppression of women and finds his heroes and heroines among the working-class or peasantry.  Romances turn into their opposite. This book is an excellent example. 

Tess is a poor but comely farm girl in Dorset, England whose lazy and drunken father can't make it to the county fair to sell his bees.  In monetary desperation, she takes on the task.  On the way to the fair in their rickety wagon Tess falls asleep, as it is 4 a.m. in the morning.  As she is sleeping her wretched, palsied horse is killed by a speeding mail cart.  To atone for her guilt at this ruinous accident, she consents to work for a family called d'Uberville – a wealthy family who have stolen the name to escape their past.  Oddly, her father has just been told by a local parson that he is actually a d'Uberville, although come far down in station.  So Tess's position with them as a poultry-minder seems to fit, as they are ostensibly relatives.  Tess fears what may happen if she does work for them however, as there is a wealthy and young 'cad' who lives at the manor – a fake Alec d'Uberville himself.  He is the kind of sweet-talking, mustache-twirling ponce the upper-classes produce on a regular basis.  And there is the rub, the rack and the ruin.

This Bantam© Classic has a glossary of old Dorset dialect and unfamiliar English words used by Hardy, which is a treat, as you'd have to search deeply for each one without it.  The language is thick, old-fashioned and descriptive, in the style of that period.  But it usually comes around to a real punch at the end. There are some wonderful turns of phrase and jokes here, along with nature and sun worship. Hardy set all of his stories in Dorset and Wessex, as he spent most of his life there.  The land, villages, weather and dales – representative of the great Nature – are also characters. The book is packed with references to Shakespeare, the Bible, English poets and ought, reflecting the author's good old-fashioned education.  Because of this some passages are well nigh thrice-readable.  

For his last three books – The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Ubervilles  and Jude the Obscure  - Hardy was pilloried by the conventional powers-that-be and stopped writing fiction.  Running through this book is a sly, anti-conventional Pagan philosophic dagger which they objected to.  Here is one of its' class-conscious lines:  “The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.”  He was too radical for the Victorian capitalist elite of his time. After this Hardy switched to poetry, which might say something about the ethereal lightness of that branch of literature. 

Not always romantic...

The cottagers and work-folk play a role – their fondness for drink as a respite from their labors; their kindness and gossip; their superstitions and ignorance; their servility to their 'betters'; their energy and dancing; their jealousies and over-powering emotions.  At one point he fondly calls them 'philosophers' and “nymphs and swains.”  Here is one humorous observation of a group of girls going to a church class:  “...their rosy faces court-patched with cow-droppings...” (In the English royal court, they 'patched' their faces with colorful make-up.) Descriptions of their work threshing, milking or turnip digging are not ignored.  He likens the depopulation and evictions in rural areas to the work of a great machine. In other words Hardy is more grounded in the real social world than any romantic flights of fancy or religious nonsense.  This makes him a modernist. 

There is always a hero of sorts to rescue a young and handsome woman from iniquity.  Nature and a powerful rurality have no truck with social norms, but for Tess, Dorset's nature is of little help. And so the reappearance of a young man, Angel, a parson's son who has broken with the church and is trying to learn farming.  He learns on the same large dairy farm as the newly-hired milk-maid Tess. Will their relationship prosper through a torturous courtship?  Will this ostensibly open-minded, middle-class young man handle the truth?  Will his Bible-thumping family approve? 

You know the answer.  The young man predictably goes through terrible twists in response to Tess, the ‘scarlet’ woman. Both men haunt her, even after the eviction of her family. It goes Gothic, and ends badly, but also well.

Hardy’s text here is marred by the narration’s emotional ‘thickness’ which goes on for far too many pages. The story is at times slow moving and overly-detailed.  Yet it is really a simple story of rural backwardness, religious intolerance, male chauvinism and class idiocy prevailing over love, conditions which still exist in many places.  

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Jude the Obscure” and “Far From the Madding Crowd” (both by Hardy); “Peterloo,” “Independent People” (Laxness); “The Making of the English Working Class” (Thompson); “Marxist Criticism of the Bible,” “Citizen Tom Paine” (Fast); “Class – the New Critical Idiom,” “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “The North Water,” “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty). 

And I bought it at May Day’s used / cutout book selection!

Red Frog

September 10, 2022