Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

More than three-quarters of a century after Thomas Hardy’s death, the stamp he put on literature remains unmistakable. Just as readers talk about a Dickensian manner or a Conradian style, a Hardyesque outlook is instantly recognizable, where harsh circumstances seem to dictate what happens. Hardy’s world is rooted in nature and the countryside that he so lyrically describes, even as it is dying out and ushering in a colder, harder future. This state of affairs, which Hardy sums up with such authority, is evident in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which concerns the undoing of a pure-hearted woman. Though true tragedy is derived ultimately from character, Hardy’s fatalistic vision at times appears to dwarf individual actions. One early morning, on what will turn out to be a doomed trip to the market, Tess’s brother Abraham asks her about the stars:

If novels contain their own guides for interpretation, one can do no better when reading Hardy than to look toward these powerful scenes. Christianity and its parables no longer serve the old purposes of communion and faith—note the blighted apples on the tree—but the perception of this problem doesn’t seem to help much: The tree of knowledge yields only bitter fruit for Hardy’s characters. Or as Hardy himself points out, in a commentary on love and chance:

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour of loving.... We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible (p. 53).

These two excerpts not only proclaim Hardy’s philosophy but also display his two modes of narration: earthy storytelling and more abstract description. Life is hard, and love often plays cruel tricks, a state of affairs increasingly apparent to Tess. But to understand this state of affairs is no guarantee of satisfaction or even safety. A superior consciousness, especially in a woman, leads to alienation from one’s community, as in Hardy’s best-known novels: Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the d‘Urbervilles, and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure. In any event, Hardy always has a thesis to pursue, whether it’s the sorry state of matrimony or the plight of the rural poor. As a novelist, he portrays it through the predicament of real individuals. These depictions carry a brooding power, such as when Tess stumbles upon a grove with half-dead partridges and takes pity on them by breaking their necks: “Poor darlings—to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in the sight o’ such misery as yours! ” (p. 327). Is Tess, wounded as she is, simply identifying with the birds and putting them out of their pain? Is she the counterpart of the innocent Edgar in King Lear, who cries, “O gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am at the worst’?” when he spies someone even worse off? Is the scene Hardy’s way of foreshadowing the murder that will follow? The semi-allegorical style is at times poetic, sometimes heavily didactic, infused with nineteenth-century Gothic melodrama yet also intellectual and psychologically probing, a prototype of what would eventually come to be known as Modernism.

Hardy’s background suggests the dualities in the patterns of his fiction: the Victorian belief in social improvement versus a skepticism about the efficacy of reform; a love of the natural world versus the knowledge that nature is a mindless, impersonal system; and a nostalgia for previous eras despite the recognition that he himself probably would not have flourished back then. Born in 1840 and brought up in the rugged countryside of Dorset, which he turned into the Wessex of his fiction and poetry, Hardy became intimately acquainted with not just the local flora and fauna but seemingly every rise and bend in the region, or as Hardy mentions regarding Tess: “Every contour of the surrounding hills was as personal to her as that of her relatives’ faces” (p. 46). But Hardy went beyond the little village of Stinson near his home. The school he attended from age nine to sixteen was in Dorchester, 5 miles away, a distance that he walked back and forth daily. Thus, when he opens a scene with “It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours, attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they should be dried away to nothing” (p. 108), or describes how the “ripe hue of the red and dun kine absorbed the evening sunlight” (p. 128), the pictorial naturalism speaks with the authority of someone who’s done a great deal of traipsing through the southwest of England. In fact, Hardy also drew upon real towns and their citizens. Thus, Dorchester becomes Casterbridge, Marnhull is really Marlott, Sturminster-Newton turns into Stourcastle, Trantridge is suggestive of the real town of Pentridge, and so on. (See the Map of Wessex and the Index of Places in this edition.) Even during Hardy’s lifetime, commentators compiled descriptions and photos of “Hardy country.” Visitors still make pilgrimages to those towns and other landmarks, a surprising number of which have been preserved.

Yet, living in the village of Higher Bockhampton near Stinson, Hardy grew up as many of the old rural ways were dying out: livelihoods, such as that of John Durbeyfield, described as a haggler or peddler; formerly independent businesses, such as inns, gradually taken over by franchises; and customs, such as May Day, a festival hearkening back to “when one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day” (p. 32); or simply the way John’s wife, Joan, makes a mirror in the country way, by hanging a sheet on the outside of a window. Taking longer to fade are attitudes, such as the timeworn view that a woman with a sexual past is “ruined”—but not a man.

Hardy only half regrets the vanishing of old ways. After all, the small rural towns of England in the mid-nineteenth century formed ^a world in which the family washing was never quite done, drinking was the sole pastime for many, and the death of a horse meant the loss of a livelihood. When Tess is down on her luck, she hires herself out first as a dairymaid, then as a reed-puller, and finally as a digger for swedes, or rutabagas. These jobs involve hard manual labor, as well as cooperation among workers. Hardy describes the tasks in the kind of detail that a novelist uses when the readership may be only half acquainted with its rural past: singing at cows to coax a greater yield of milk, or how to draw straw from corn stalks. If Hardy is able to place us in a bygone world, in fact he had the same transporting effect on his contemporary readers; most were far removed from rural life. At the same time, the rigor and plod of agricultural work forms a comment on the condition of the rural poor. As with Dickens’s novels, Hardy’s writings—including an essay from 1883 called “The Dorsetshire Labourer”—led to social change. Hardy, after all, was born into a world both more genteel and more barbarous than ours, with aspects that shock us today, even as ours, with its blatant sexuality, would shock people then. Hardy couldn’t directly refer to the rape scene between Tess and Alec in the forest, and what little he hinted at disturbed many of his readers. Yet our own society, so inured to erotic display, is more offended by social injustice. Unfair as Hardy’s world seems, his citizens observe a certain decorum and a sense of charity that partly compensate for life’s inequalities.

Like many other artists with vision, Hardy himself is poised between eras: the nineteenth century, with its old ways, fixed views, and trust in providence; and the twentieth century, with its progressive culture, powerful technology, and fading faith. In the middle of these poles is a lack of fixity and an insufficient attention to struggling individuals. It isn’t a particularly happy place, and anyone truly sensitive tends to feel alienated. As A. E. Housman (1859-1936) put it in one of his last poems: “I, a stranger and afraid / In a world I never made.” Moreover, even as country livelihoods are dying out, large-scale belief is also decaying. When Hardy wrote his novels, the slow erosion of faith often led people to stray from old tenets of morality and conduct, but nothing had replaced those old stays. In an earlier era dominated by the church, perhaps, people fit in better. By contrast, Hardy’s characters feel estranged from their fellow citizens—which doesn’t mean that family is the cure-all. To observe “Nature’s holy plan” (p. 31), a phrase from Wordsworth that Hardy uses sarcastically to describe the family unit, is to understand the tyranny of parents over their offspring:

If the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty, disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these half-dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with them—six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield (p. 31).

Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when, their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the harvesters (p. 109).

But Hardy should not be condemned as a hopeless doomsayer. He is simply reflecting what the eminent Hardy critic Michael Millgate termed “the ancient pessimism of the rural poor” (Thomas Hardy: A Biography; see “For Further Reading”). Hardy notes in the novel: “As Tess’s own people down in those retreats are never tired of saying among each other in their fatalistic way: ‘It was to be’ ” (p. 91). One could just as well quote Thomas Hobbes’s famous view of human life: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. In any event, Hardy’s depictions of existential anguish, pragmatic and based on the rigors of experience, serve to highlight humanity’s plight, to draw attention to perceived injustice. When his characters suffer social ostracism, readers are supposed to protest, as they did in great numbers. Labeled a pessimist, Hardy told an interviewer that he preferred to be called a pessimistic meliorist: someone who believes in improvement while remaining gloomy about how much can be achieved. His novels speak out against unfair labor practices, sexual hypocrisy, and other double standards.

What Hardy helped to spur, and was partly spurred by, was the questioning of set ways. Thus, Hardy’s novels reflect the birth of the social freethinker, the New Man and the New Woman: Angel Clare; Jude Fawley in Jude the Obscure, his eyes fixed on Christminster (Hardy’s stand-in for Oxford) and a living for a self-educated fellow like him; Sue Bridehead, who is independent enough to leave her husband; Eustacia Vye in The Return of the Native, out of place in Egdon Heath; and to some extent Tess herself, questioning why she is the one who suffers in a tragedy of mythic proportions. All are linked by an awareness that something is wrong, gone, or not yet arrived, just as they also have visions of change, though in certain ways they are still emotionally tied to a vanishing world.

For Tess, a great divide exists between the intellectual realization that she’s been wronged and the pulls of love and shame that almost rip her apart. That Alec d’Urberville has violated her is a sin she is forced to live with; that Angel Clare cannot love a woman so despoiled makes life unbearable for her; that she is the victim in this entanglement finally leads her to seek her own sort of justice—by committing an unredeemable act. Tess’s problem is half how society judges her; the other half is her own tortured consciousness. Her mother, who counseled her not to reveal the truth about her past, understands better than her daughter how society works. But Tess initially feels that she is somehow at fault, just as Jude the Obscure’s Sue Bridehead feels guilt at leaving her husband, whom she doesn’t love, and eventually returns to him as a sort of penance. This kind of shame is a product of social conditioning and not simply of human existence, yet society encompasses all but the most isolated of individuals, and the reader cannot simply nag Tess to ignore her training. As for culture and the human condition, the first can be ameliorated, as Hardy might put it, whereas the second cannot.

Hardy particularly inveighs against the double standards of the time. The social code was different for men and women in the improprieties allowed (and still is, in most parts of the world). In the late 1800s, the figure of the New Woman, spirited and with an emancipated vision, emerged; but as Hardy portrays her, she is all too often stuck with an old conscience. Tess cannot stop blaming herself or stop loving Angel, even as she acknowledges that Alec took advantage of her innocence; and Angel, for all his talk of social progressivism, is a hypocrite. Moreover, if Angel Clare is the New Man, serving humanity, not God, with his “intellectual liberty,” he is still hamstrung by old ideas of maidenly virtue. To this extent, he presents an odd parallel to Tess: They are both independent thinkers who can’t sever their emotional ties to social conventions. Yet Tess is pure and loyal, even as her girlish spirits are wrecked by Alec’s assault. As Hardy observes her afterward, no sooner does she feel cheerful than “cold reason came back to mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness of her momentary pride would convict her, and recall her to reserved listlessness again” (p. 105). Walking in nature, she feels herself “a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence” (p. 107). Hardy also dissects Angel:

The hard question is what can be changed and what remains unalterable. Modern psychology tells us that self-awareness is the first step to cure. Yet what Hardy’s characters learn about their situations doesn’t bring release but rather tortured consciousness, as Sophocles once showed in Oedipus the King. This is the tragic dimension of Hardy’s art, in which virtuous people are aware of what’s happening to them but are powerless to save themselves. The dilemma is partly situational—we live on a doomed star—and partly psychological: if only they could learn to live with themselves. Hardy plants emotional fixations in his characters: Tess’s adoration of Angel; Angel’s obsession with purity At times, Hardy will step away from the narrative action to comment, as if building a case history. Note how he describes his protagonist:

And here Hardy sums up Angel: “His affection itself was less fire than radiance, and, with regard to the other sex, when he ceased to believe he ceased to follow, contrasting in this with many impressionable natures, who remain sensuously infatuated with what they intellectually despise” (p. 286). In character analyses like these, Hardy acts as a precursor to Freud, whose write-ups of his patients function as psychological narratives.

As for Tess herself, she remains a complicated individual, though based on a type that had become a novelistic cliché, a maiden wronged. Two tentative titles for the novel were The Body and Soul of Sue (an earlier name for Tess) and Too Late, Beloved! The sub-title of the novel, often omitted nowadays, remains A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented. In fact, the situation that swallows up Tess was not that uncommon, given what little power a country girl had in such a situation. Real-life models are thought to derive from several women Hardy knew: a physical resemblance here, a girl who worked as a dairymaid there, and a recalled incident concerning an illegitimate child. Still, Tess herself is a work of art by Thomas Hardy. She has some education and can speak above the local dialect, having passed the Sixth Standard at school. In addition, she has a temper, as she shows in the scene where Alec tries to scare her by riding furiously down the hill to Trantridge with her. Even when Alec rides with her to the forest, she does not succumb without full protest, though it takes love to complete her martyrdom. When the second advent of Alec causes her to miss a last chance at happiness, the vengeance she takes is swift and terrible. That Tess eventually kills for love, so to speak, bothered many contemporary readers. Yet as Hardy wrote in a December 1891 letter to H. W. Massingham, “the doll of English fiction must be abolished, if England is to have a school of fiction at all.”

As Hardy portrays her at the outset, Tess is a comely young woman of sixteen, though she retains a few childlike aspects. Yet as the eldest of seven surviving children, she has a caretaker role toward her siblings. As Angel sees her, she is like a daughter of Nature, a picture of such innocence that Hardy uses her as a stand-in for Eve, when she and Angel are the first persons up in the mornings at the dairy. Still, her mother describes her as an “odd maid.” She is also tried beyond her years and eventually becomes a creature of despair. For much of the novel, she vacillates between numbness and bitterness. Her refrain is “I wish I had never been born,” echoing the line the chorus utters in Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus: “Never to have been born is much the best.” Religion is of little comfort. Reflecting on her wretched state, she thinks of the opening verse from Ecclesiastes in the Bible, “All is vanity” :

She repeated the words mechanically, till she reflected that this was a most inadequate thought for modern days. Solomon had thought as far as that more than two thousand years ago; she herself, though not in the van of thinkers, had got much further. If all were only vanity, who would mind it? All was, alas, worse than vanity—injustice, punishment, exaction, death. The wife of Angel Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its curve, and the edges of her eyesockets perceptible under the soft skin, and thought as she did so that a time would come when that bone would be bare. “I wish it were now,” she said (p. 325).

Yet tragedy is universal, and Tess is by no means the world’s first victim. To a modern audience, her plight may even seem quaint, with readers assuring themselves that they would have told off both Alec and Angel in no uncertain terms. One must return to a time when virtue for an unmarried woman meant to be virgo intactus (literally, “an untouched virgin”). Just as important, one must project oneself into the mind of Tess, wracked by guilt over a crime she didn’t commit. As Hardy notes: “Let the truth be told—women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there’s life there’s hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to the ‘betrayed’ as some amiable theorists would have us beheve” (p. 130). Yet Tess has still to meet Angel and become love-struck over a man who marries and then rejects her. Perhaps she could straighten up from this cruel twist as well, but she won’t let herself. The ancient Roman fabulist Ovid put it best when he rewrote Virgil’s line “Love conquers all” to imply an experience more soul-rending than uplifting: “Love is a kind of warfare.”

In any event, something tortured resides in Tess. Though some commentators have termed such an outlook a type of female masochism, Tess derives no pleasure of self-denial from her experience. Rather, an aura of extreme humility hangs about her, to the point of irritating the reader—though less so in Hardy’s day, when proper comportment for young women dictated a modesty that we might deem repressive. In fact, to some extent, Tess resembles a saint, with an echo of allegorical figures like Chaucer’s patient Griselda, who endures myriad rejections from her husband before she is welcomed back. By the time Tess meets Angel for the last time, she has practically completed her self-abnegation. She has become like Job in the Bible, though Job remains a holy servant, whereas Tess finds no consolation in faith. Nor does she receive any reward, and reconciliation for her arrives too late.

As for the others in the novel, they range from duty-bound souls to churls and rascals, with some in between. One of the joys in reading Hardy is encountering regional characters, such as Mrs. Rolliver, who illegally serves liquor at her off-license establishment under the pretext that it’s a private club; or Dairyman Crick, whose Sunday finery is comically at odds with his farm clothes. Three of the dairymaids at his farm, Marian, Izz Huett, and Retty, form a cross-section of the rural labor force; they are also a trio in love with Angel Clare, as well as Tess’s confidantes. And since personality comes not just from environment but also from heredity, it’s edifying to see the two adults who reared the protagonist. Tess’s father, John Durbeyfield, an old-fashioned peddler, hearing that he’s a descendant of the d’Urberville line, boasts that his family mausoleum has the best skeletons around. As for his wife, Joan, who passes on rural songs, sayings, and other lore, she too represents a vanishing past. Hardy is also fine on country eccentrics, such as the religious sign-painter who inscribes a biblical verse on a stile that seems to speak directly to Tess. Hardy’s country folk are his equivalent of the chorus in classical Greek drama, echoing the popular ethos of the day. They caution against intemperance even as they fall into it. They work hard and feel keenly. They are the stuff of life, the people Hardy grew up with in Dorset.

The style in which Hardy delineates his people and their predicaments is admittedly somewhat melodramatic, but smells of reality. Tess is a powerful mixture of love and disunity, Gothic overtones and allegory, but with a whiff of psychology that transcends stereotypes. Yet the term realism is slippery, as Hardy himself observes in his 1891 essay “The Science of Fiction” (reprinted in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice), where he claims, “Realism is an unfortunate, an ambiguous word.” So many eras of artists have claimed that their style—Renaissance, Romantic, or Modernist—accurately represents the real world. A more balanced claim would be that there are myriad ways of getting at reality. Hardy had many models upon which to draw, from Greek drama to medieval allegory, Romantic verse, and Gothic novels. When Alec is identified by the red coal of his cigar at a dance, when he is linked to the image of a serpent, or simply when he calls himself “a damn bad fellow” (p. 97), Hardy imbues him with the aspects of the devil. In a later scene between him and Tess, Hardy rigs the effects: “The fire flared up, and she beheld the face of d’Urberville” (p. 406). Just in case the reader misses the supernatural associations, when Hardy arranges Alec’s death his blood pools in the shape of an ace of hearts.

Admittedly, such imagery can seem contrived at times. Yet Hardy is also adept at fusing naturalism with symbolism, so that the representation is simply a piece of life with a haunting suggestive force, and this technique is one early hallmark of Modernism. One scene that many readers recall long after they finish the novel describes a host of small field animals doomed by a mechanical reaper, a fearsome vision of automated death that presages the eventual destruction of the countryside. Yet the massacre is occasioned by a harvest that will feed the human populace, and the harvesters themselves administer the killing blows with sticks and clubs. This type of symbol is more open-ended than metaphors that employ direct equivalence, and moreover seems to appear not because of authorial contrivance but rather because life itself throws up odd parallels. Similarly, when Tess gathers the buds called “ladies and lords” (from Jack-in-the-pulpit flowers), the act coincides with Angel’s discussing the pastoral life in ancient Greece, which puts Tess in mind of her similarity to the Bible’s forlorn Queen of Sheba. While Angel continues to talk of book-learning, she peels each bud to see whether inside it is a “lady” or a “lord” and concludes “There are always more ladies than lords” (p. 155)—which functions as a more profound comment on the English pastoral and women’s marital prospects than any lecture on Greek history. Love also has nastier repercussions, epitomized in a tale told by Dairyman Crick about a girl’s angry mother who goes after an errant man with an umbrella and then squeezes him in a butter churn: a half-angry, half-comic sexual metaphor.

Other comparisons are less graceful, such as when Tess baptizes her dying baby, christening it “Sorrow.” Still, allegories are not always heavy-handed; moreover, they can shift ground, depending on perspective. For instance, after Alec’s spiritual conversion, Tess moves from a pure woman to a temptress, an embodiment of the Flesh—at least to Alec. The most satisfying allegories are drawn from human nature, an endless repository of material.

For his plotting, Hardy borrows large-scale patterns from melodramatic authors like William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-1882), a Lancashire novelist who wrote Gothic narratives in English settings. An underlying intent is to present a lesson.

One of Hardy’s writing techniques is to start with a description of the land, as in the portrait of Marlott—“a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the summits of the hills that surround it” (p. 17)—and then focus on the figures in it, in this instance the May Day celebrants. The move from panorama to close focus is a standard element in Romantic poetry or in cinematic art, for that matter. But this descriptive mode is only one part of a novelistic craft that, for all its sensuous lyrical passages, is as solidly constructed as a house. At age sixteen, Hardy became an apprentice architect, and his prose shows evidence of that skill. His plots are built upon cause and effect, with an occasional divergence into coincidence, a borrowing from Victorian melodrama—as shown in the very section tides of Tess: “Phase the First,” “The Woman Pays,” and so forth.

A study of Hardy’s letters and literary journal shows that he read and admired a wide variety of authors, from the Greco-Romans to Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), though with some disdain for the magazine fiction of his time, which he considered too straitlaced and insincere (see his 1890 essay “Candour in English Fiction,” reprinted in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice) . He has an autodidact’s zeal for displaying erudition combined with a country man’s love of his native experience. To put it another way: At times Hardy is a hybrid of earthiness and Henry James. For instance, when Tess reveals her secret shame to Angel, Hardy records that “each diamond on her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad’s” (p. 268), but after: “When she ceased the auricular impressions from their previous endearments seemed to hustle away into the corners of their brains, repeating themselves as echoes from a time of supremely purblind foolishness” (p. 271). This type of literary impressionism doesn’t quite trust its readers to infer from discrete particulars and therefore includes the anticipated effects, as well. The fiction of Conrad works similarly in that regard.

In his preface to the Wessex edition of Tess in 1912 (see below), Hardy states his intent to be not aggressive or didactic but merely representative, giving more impressions than convictions. In his 1888 essay “The Profitable Reading of Fiction” (in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice), he claims that “the didactic novel is so generally devoid of vraisemblance as to teach nothing but the impossibility of tampering with natural truth to advance dogmatic opinions.” This declaration is apt, but advice that Hardy didn’t always follow On the other hand, many writers put forth dicta that represent their aesthetic ideals rather than what they themselves always follow, and the student of literature would do well to heed D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) in his cautionary words: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale.”

Tess was originally published serially in the Graphic, the Fortnightly Review, and the National Observer. Family magazines were squeamish about anything sexually indecorous and forced Hardy to alter accordingly, from deleting the implied rape scene to having Angel use a wheelbarrow to carry the milkmaids over the ditch rather than hoist them over himself The serial format and the structure it encourages also theoretically allow the author to make alterations according to audience reaction, but in fact Hardy had the manuscript ready before even the first installment was published. The first edition of Tess was published in three volumes in December 1891, followed by a second edition in 1892, then one in 1895 with many earlier cut passages restored. The prefaces that accompany each edition serve in part to defend the author against charges of blasphemy and indecency: the crude way Alec treats Tess, for instance, or Hardy’s caustic mention of “the President of the Immortals” (see p. 465), which is in fact a reference from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. But as Hardy is at pains to make clear in 1891, Tess is “an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things” (p. 3). A year later, in his second preface, still defending himself, he maintains that “a novel is an impression, not an argument, and there the matter must rest” (p. 6). In any event, the enduring value of the novel rather than a few critical detractors eventually decided the issue, and the Wessex edition, uniform with the rest of Hardy’s work, accorded the novel canonical status. As Hardy notes, it includes a few additional pages that were excised from the manuscript, mainly having to do with the description of female anatomy in chapter X. This edition of the novel is a reprinting of the 1912 Wessex edition.

Where do Hardy’s sympathies lie? Certainly he raises significant social issues, and for all his protestations against didacticism, most readers become exercised about the moral questions involved and engage with Hardy’s arguments. In many ways, Hardy may be considered a proto-feminist, despite some stereotypical pronouncements about women. As he describes Tess, for instance: “It would have denoted deficiency of womanhood if she had not instinctively known what an argument lies in propinquity,” and he refers to the “intuitive heart of woman” (p. 289). But in the areas where it counted, such as giving women fair treatment, Hardy held liberal views. The social code that shames Tess after Alec impregnates her, for instance, is a double standard that clearly doesn’t apply to males, let alone men of a higher class. The most poignant instance of such unfairness is Angel’s inability to accept Tess’s sexual past, though he’s committed a voluntary indiscretion of his own.

Like many writers before him, John Milton included, Hardy also has a less than rosy view of marriage: two individuals yoked together under the law and chafing under the constraints. Hardy demonstrates this prickly truth in the recriminations of a wife whose husband has been a clumsy dancer: “You shall catch it for this, my gentleman, when you get home!” (p. 80). He also shows it in scenes from Joan and John Durbeyfield’s glum household. Hardy’s own marriages, first to Emma Lavinia Gifford and later to Florence Dugdale, may have had something to do with the gloomy marital scenarios in his fiction. But Hardy has a point to make about society, not merely a personal grudge. Marriage confers only social respectability, with all too often hypocrisy beneath. For instance, Tess’s mother tells her to say nothing about her past, and later calls her a fool for telling her husband. Given the society in which they live, she may well be right. The inexorable rules of logic and nature are what Hardy respects and sometimes fears, but he feels no such regard for cultural dictates. Tess herself at one point is ashamed for feeling despondent over her condition, “based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature” (p. 327). The division between natural and social law is a theme that Hardy repeatedly exposes in his novels, whether it involves a man who deserts his wife in The Mayor of Casterbridge or a woman who dies in childbirth, her unacknowledged stillborn baby buried with her, in Far from the Madding Crowd. Hardy’s characters suffer keenly, but the novels at least point toward the possibility of a kindlier spirituality in place of the hard old verities.

To this end, Hardy depicts some cruel absolutes but by implication espouses relativity and all it represents. With Tess as a vehicle, Hardy declares: “Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized” (p. 347). He goes even further in declaring that what one knows and feels forms the substance of one’s life, “for the world is only a psychological phenomenon” (p. 106). Though this view stems partly from Hardy’s reading of philosophers like Schopenhauer, its appearance in a nineteenth-century novel was as daring in its way as the sexual material that offended some readers: showing Alec’s feeding Tess a strawberry, his hand at her mouth, for instance, or presenting a heroine who has a child out of wedlock.

These novelistic choices of material and focus have much to do with Hardy’s singular outlook: an iconoclastic slant looking downward. He learned self-reliance at an early age. Educated in the classics, he shows in his writing not only Greek and Latin references but also a classical temperament, unsparing and unsentimental. His agnosticism was based on hard observation and lack of consoling inference. For him, the religious worldview no longer served its old purposes of explanation and consolation. In his well-known poem “Hap,” he blames crass casualty, or mere happenstance, for slaying joy in the world. In Tess, when one of Hardy’s rural eccentrics paints a biblical verse on a stileboard, the authorial voice declares, “Some people might have cried, ‘Alas, poor Theology!’ at the hideous defacement—the last grotesque phase of a creed that had served mankind well in its time” (p. 100). Later, when Tess is staying late to help harvest a field, the moon appears like “the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten Tuscan saint” (p. 114). Clearly, for Hardy, the old sacred order has decayed. Yet Hardy at times nourished a belief in fatalism, and sometimes in a world force deemed the immanent Will, borrowed from Schopenhauer. Like James Joyce (1882-1941) and other artists brought up in a faith that they later rejected, Hardy still uses religious props for symbols, but without the undergirding belief, and with a mix of polytheism and Judeo-Christianity.

A few larger questions remain. If Hardy was unhappy in his own age, where did he seek solace? Though the past was more secure, “when faith was a living thing” (p. 138), that state derived from mass conformity. Yet Hardy mentions “the chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline of belief in a beneficent Power” (p. 147). The future bodes even worse. In Jude the Obscure, a child called Little Father Time obsesses so much about overpopulation that he kills himself and his siblings.

Hardy’s lifetime (1840—1928) was a period of dislocation, both good and bad. Many ideas in Hardy’s work derive from Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), and Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), among other scientists and social engineers. To cite one instance in Tess: Hardy is concerned with so-called devolution, as in the degeneration of lineage from the aristocratic d‘Urberville to the lower-class Durbeyfield. As Dairyman Crick describes it, Angel harps on the subject of old families who have come down in the world, including, for an authorial “in” joke, the Hardys (see p. 156). On the other hand, those like the current d’Urbervilles, who bought out a family name, are merely rich opportunists.

Regarding the events that befall Tess, as with the doomed lovers in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, one can point to all the old causes: family, fate, and fortune. To tie these factors together may simply be to note that character is destiny, as so memorably captured in Greek tragedy. Does this mean that Hardy’s outlook is essentially tragic? In Tess he mentions “the tragic mischief” of Tess’s drama, stating at Tess’s first meeting with Alec, “Thus the thing began” (p. 53). The theme of belatedness runs throughout Hardy, with missed chances and grave consequences. As Angel tells Tess, “This hobble of being alive is rather serious” (p. 153). Yet worse than misfortune is the desolation that follows, to the point of numbness: apathy on Tess’s part and neglect on the part of others. Perhaps the cruelest words in nineteenth-century literature occur in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, in which Jude Fawley wishes for someone to guide him, “But nobody did come, because nobody does.” Or, as Hardy puts it in Tess: “The world’s concern at her situation—was founded on an illusion” (p. 113). Hardy’s poem “Tess’s Lament” dwells principally on his heroine’s early sense of self-blame—“And it was I who did it all, / Who did it all; ’Twas I who made the blow to fall / On him who thought no guile”—and subsequent wish for oblivion—“I cannot bear my fate as writ, / I’d have my life unbe” (see The Complete Poems).

Yet something abides in Hardy’s characters: the human spirit. In a poem written during World War I, “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations,’ ” in quest of some everlasting truths, Hardy depicts what will last after the strife:

The poem places its faith in human endurance and in the perpetual events of sowing, reaping, and love to start the cycle again. Transcendence does not appear much in Hardy’s work, but then neither does it occur often in life. Nonetheless, there are moments, such as when a host of nighttime revelers, tipsy with wine after dancing, head home with moonlight halos cast on all, when humanity seems one with nature. Such is life; such is Hardy’s vision. Or as Hardy states during Angel’s change of heart near the end: “No man can be always a cynic and live” (p. 398).

David Galef has published nine books: the novels Flesh and Turning Japanese; two children’s books, The Little Red Bicycle and Tracks; two translations of Japanese proverbs, Even Monkeys Fall from Trees and Even a Stone Buddha Can Talk; a work of literary criticism, The Supporting Cast; an edited anthology of essays called Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading; and, most recently, the short-story collection Laugh Track. In addition, he has written more than seventy short stories for magazines ranging from the British Punch to the Czech Prague Revue, the Canadian Prism International, and the American Shenandoah. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Newsday, the Village Voice, Twentieth Century Literature, The Columbia History of the British Novel, and many other places. His awards include a Henfield Foundation grant, a Writers Exchange award from Poets & Writers, and a Mississippi Arts Council grant, as well as residencies at Yaddo and Rag-dale. He is a professor of English at the University of Mississippi, where he also administers the M.F.A. program in creative writing.