Thomas Hardy
Why read it then Just as books by sitelinkNeal Stephenson is a workout for the mind I think that Hardys books are a good workout for the emotion or what we on the interweb call the feels these days.
The initial plot trajectory from the moment Tess meets the obvious degenerate and proud of it Alec d'Urberville with his fancysports car dogcart and strawberries is predictable.
sitelinkNastassja Kinski As Tessadaptation
It is clearly telegraphed by the author and you just know it is not going to well for poor Tess.
After being turned into “damaged goods,” she puts up a brave face and soldiers on with her life, taking a minimum wage job as a milkmaid.
As luck or misfortune would have it she meets Angel Clare a nice young man who relentlessly courted her and she falls in love with to devastating effect.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a character study and also a social commentary of the time of Hardys writing.
The characterization of the main protagonists is quite complex, Tess herself starts off a naturally beautiful naïve girl who Hardy puts through the wringer and emerges no less beautiful in spite of spiritual damage.
The only truly indomitable thing about her seems to be her beauty, She makes a one poor decision after another and the goodness of her heart is eventually her undoing as misadventures are heaped upon her by the author shakes fist at Hardy.
As for Angel Clare, the romantic lead of this tale of woe, although he evidently a good man he is in some ways worse than Alec d'Urberville.
The devastation he wrought upon Tess on the basis of his selfrighteous conception of morality makes him entirely unsympathetic, While Alec is basically just a garden variety womanizer Angel is what Monty Python once described as a “silly bunt” if that makes no sense you may want to google it.
sitelinkGemma Arterton As Tessadaptation, again with the strawberry!
So as expected it all ends in tears, this novel is no less miserable than the mirthless sitelinkJude the Obscure if you want to read a relatively happy Hardy you may want to check out sitelinkFar from the Madding Crowd.
Thomas Hardys writing flows as beautifully as ever but if he was still alive today I probably wouldnt want to invite him to a birthday party.
I have sitelinkThe Return of the Native in my TBR though, Like Tess, I must be a sucker for punishment,
Anyway, highly recommended read this and you may never laugh again LOL!,
Note:
I read the audiobook version of this book, beautifully narrated by Davina Porter, got it really cheap from Amazon at sitelink.
! “Did you say the were worlds, Tess"
"Yes, "
"All like ours"
"I don't know, but I think so, They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbardtree, Most of them splendid and sound a few blighted, "
"Which do we live on a splendid one or a blighted one"
"A blighted one, ”
Tess of the DUrbervilles is themasterpiece by Thomas Hardy of Tess Durbeyville, her family bloodline long fallen from aristocratic heights.
The central themes are critiques of class and blood distinctions and of the sexual mores of the Victorian era, but its a novel, not a tract, as Tess becomes real for us from the very beginning.
The book was published more thanyears ago, and it has been reviewed thousands of times, so, while I wont reveal every major plot point, Ill also drop a spoiler here and there.
For instance, entwined themes about gender and class unite in the instance that Tess, whose family has fallen on hard times, approaches at her familys urging whom she thinks are the more affluent dUrbervilles for help.
She is hired by them as a dairy maid and because she needs the money she stays there and is taken advantage of by Alec dUrberville.
“But I don't want anybody to kiss me, sir!' she implored, a big tear beginning to roll down her face, and the corners of her mouth trembling in her attempts not to cry.
”
She is but sixteen, needs the money for her family, is confused about what she should do about this guys advances, and then is raped by him, which, in keeping with some of the history of mens treatment of women in the workplace, and as one chapter title makes clear Tess “pays for” in the loss of her job and reputation.
Not that Hardy makes this a mere victim story, though: “Let 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 believe.
”
Shes traumatized by this experience, but she's strong, Tess is, and she continues her honest work as a dairy maid.
And yes, theres a touch of nineteenthcentury melodrama in the book, but Tess is admirable, most of the time, at least, and Hardy doesnt sentimentalize the real challenges of poverty.
Tess meets an again wealthy son of another dairyman, Angel Clare, who seems like a good and liberal man for the times with respect to issues of class, who seems to really love her, and they marry, but he soon finds out she is not in fact a virgin, something many men but, in general, not women in the world seem to require or required for their marriages, and though he agrees that she is in the act “more sinned against than sinning” he worries her "want of firmness" in confronting Alec may indicate a flaw in her character and that she may no longer be the woman he thought she was.
Ugh, fail, Angel. Jerk! When he runs off to Brazil to brood about the situation, he leaves his wife destitute as her father dies soon after and they lose their home.
She writes to Angel:
"O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not deserve it, I have thought it all over carefully, and I can never, never forgive you! You know that I did not intend to wrong you why have you so wronged me You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to forget you.
It is all injustice I have received at your hands!"
We agree heartily with Tess here but in our present moment, more than a hundred years later, and completely and angrily disagree that she should keep committed to Angel.
Hes no Angel, in short, though in the end he does return, and while I wont reveal specifically what happens to them, and her, Hardys narrator says of them at the very end:
“'Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals in Aeschylean phrase had ended his sport with Tess.
”
If there is a moral to the story, it might be this, as Angel at one point observes:
“Distinction does not consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered among those who are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good reportas you are, my Tess.
”
Some people think
of the current metoo movement as the moment in history where some men seem to be finally “getting it” about women and equality/selfefficacy/assault but as you can see, feminist Thomas Hardy makes this point clear more than a century ago in his angry castigation of the Victorian period on issues of sex and class.
But if this seems to you from my retelling like just a feminist morality tale, you miss the way Tessie comes to life.
True, you cant stand how she refuses to give up on Angel Clare, who was a jerk to her, but she is a rich and complex and powerful character, in the main.
Her tale is a rich tragedy of a modest young workingclass woman, and the workingclass are the people Hardy wants to write about:
“The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.
” “A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who never had any strength to throw away.
”
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the dUrbervilles
On the opening page of Thomas Hardys classic Tess of the dUrbervilles, a semiimpoverished alcoholic and schemer named Jack Durbeyfield is met by a local parson, who calls him “Sir John.
” Uncertain as to why he is greeted in such a way, Durbeyfield demands an explanation, whereupon he is told that despite his current position at the bottom of the social hierarchy, he is a descendant of an illustrious and noble family.
With this information at the forefront of his mind, Jack Durbeyfield returns home, where he and his wife quickly hatch a plan to send their beautiful daughter Tess over to a nearby family with the dUrberville name.
The hope is that Tess can make a good impression on her “relatives,” thereby improving the familys position,
I mention this mainly to point out that Hardy is very quick to set the wheels of his famous novel in motion, starting a sequence of events that will climax quite abruptly somepages later.
It must be noted, however, that this is just about the only thing that happens quickly in Tess of the dUrbervilles.
While this is a very fine book, and well worth the read, it is also incredibly, sometimes frustratingly slow, In terms of pacing, this is glacial, moving only slightly faster than a threetoed sloth trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis,
Despite its prodigious even somewhat intimidating length, not a lot happens in Tess of the dUrbervilles, Unlike Charles Dickens, with whom Hardy shared a serialized style and penchant for inflated word counts, this is very selfcontained tale, There are no digressionary storylines, no large gallery of colorful supporting characters, Instead of sprawl, Hardy keeps us on a rather straight path, albeit one that is stretched to its limits, like a child playing with a rubber band.
Because of its paucity of eventful moments, Tess of the dUrbervilles is difficult to summarize without giving away all its secrets.
Suffice to say, the arc that Tess follows passes through two men: Alec StokedUrberville and Angel Clare, Both are immensely flawed, though for very different reasons,
Following an ambiguous incident with one of those men a scene that can be read as a seduction but is likely a sexual assault Tess is left as a “fallen woman,” her reputation tarnished, her prospects destroyed.
How she tries to move forward from that moment is Tess of the dUrbervilless central narrative concern,
Since saying anything more threatens to take us into the realm of potential spoilers, its probably best to confine the balance of my remarks to general observations.
First, Hardy has a marvelous sense of place, Tess of the dUrbervilles is set in fictional Wessex, a place closely modeled after the south and southwest of England those with a better sense of English geography have not found it hard to find the reallife analogues to Hardys madeup villages.
Over the course of his career, Hardy returned several times to Wessex, and he knows the place well, There is a keen observational talent on display here, as Hardy evocatively describes the rhythms of rural English life in the lates.
Whether its a May Dance or a summer harvest, a day at a dairy farm or a trip to market on an old wagon, you feel like you are there.
As to characters, there are no more than a handful of important ones, Most of the story told in the thirdperson omniscient, with a godlike narrator who likes to issue vague and portentous warnings flows through Tess, Angel, and Alec.
There are numerous secondary roles, but with the exception of Jack and Jane Durbeyfield immensely flawed yet strangely lovable, they are not super memorable.
Tess is the main attraction, and she is a compellingly frustrating protagonist, At times she is strong, proud, and fiercely independent, At other times, she seems to spontaneously lose her spine, becoming indecisive, selfpitying, and reactionary, About the only consistent thing about Tess is her inability to discern the motives of other people,
Frankly, there were stretches during which I really didnt like Tess, She often seemed to have selective, plotcontrived stupidity, in which she did something unfathomable simply to keep the dramatic wheels spinning, For instance, Tesss fluctuating relationship with honesty first she lies, then decides to tell the truth at the most inopportune moment imaginable belies all notions of common sense.
Yet, as is often the case for me, the very fact that I had such a strong reaction to Tess even if it was sometimes negative is a testament to how well she worked as a heroine.
Certainly, she holds center stage,
The final thing worth noting is Tess of the dUrbervilless modernity, at least in relation to itspublication date.
Railing against the conventional ethics of the Victorian Era, Hardy presents Tess not as a sinner, but as sinned against, not simply by men, but by a society that is almost pathologically obsessed with the sexual histories of women.
He attacks sometimes a bit pedantically the uneven morality that allowed men such as the libertine Alec to do as they pleased, but then sentenced Tess to a purgatorial existence for having transgressed the communal code of conduct.
Hardy is also scathing towards the hypocrisies of organized religion, devoting several wellconstructed scenes to showing menofthecloth choosing the abstract dogmas of theology over basic human compassion.
One of the important things I have learned when reading bricksized works of English literature is to have patience, If you start something like Tess of the dUrbervilles expecting or even hoping to breeze through it, you will likely be disappointed.
This is an incredibly slow burn, unfolding at an unhurried, even languid rate, A twentyfirst century editor would undoubtedly have pared Hardys manuscript down to three hundred pages, having everything coalesce around five or six crucial scenes, and excising the long passages in which Tess is doing nothing more than walking from one place to another.
This would have made Tess of the dUrbervilles more concise, more efficient, but it also would have greatly reduced the novels impact.
The emotional punch that comes at the conclusion of Tesss journey ultimately derives from following her for so long, and from spending so much time at her side.
.
felt a little like a man reading a very grim book, A Thomas Hardy novel, say, You know how its going to end, but instead of spoiling things, that somehow increases your fascination, Its like watching a kid run his electric train faster and faster and waiting for it to derail on one of the curves.
”
Stephen King, sitelinkWhen I was reading Kings sitelink I noted down this line because I was planning to read Tess of the d'Urbervilles soon and from its reputation and the two other Thomas Hardy novels that I read I expected that it will probably make me at least a little melancholy, if not downright miserable.
Why read it then Just as books by sitelinkNeal Stephenson is a workout for the mind I think that Hardys books are a good workout for the emotion or what we on the interweb call the feels these days.
The initial plot trajectory from the moment Tess meets the obvious degenerate and proud of it Alec d'Urberville with his fancy
sitelinkNastassja Kinski As Tessadaptation
It is clearly telegraphed by the author and you just know it is not going to well for poor Tess.
After being turned into “damaged goods,” she puts up a brave face and soldiers on with her life, taking a minimum wage job as a milkmaid.
As luck or misfortune would have it she meets Angel Clare a nice young man who relentlessly courted her and she falls in love with to devastating effect.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a character study and also a social commentary of the time of Hardys writing.
The characterization of the main protagonists is quite complex, Tess herself starts off a naturally beautiful naïve girl who Hardy puts through the wringer and emerges no less beautiful in spite of spiritual damage.
The only truly indomitable thing about her seems to be her beauty, She makes a one poor decision after another and the goodness of her heart is eventually her undoing as misadventures are heaped upon her by the author shakes fist at Hardy.
As for Angel Clare, the romantic lead of this tale of woe, although he evidently a good man he is in some ways worse than Alec d'Urberville.
The devastation he wrought upon Tess on the basis of his selfrighteous conception of morality makes him entirely unsympathetic, While Alec is basically just a garden variety womanizer Angel is what Monty Python once described as a “silly bunt” if that makes no sense you may want to google it.
sitelinkGemma Arterton As Tessadaptation, again with the strawberry!
So as expected it all ends in tears, this novel is no less miserable than the mirthless sitelinkJude the Obscure if you want to read a relatively happy Hardy you may want to check out sitelinkFar from the Madding Crowd.
Thomas Hardys writing flows as beautifully as ever but if he was still alive today I probably wouldnt want to invite him to a birthday party.
I have sitelinkThe Return of the Native in my TBR though, Like Tess, I must be a sucker for punishment,
Anyway, highly recommended read this and you may never laugh again LOL!,
Note:
I read the audiobook version of this book, beautifully narrated by Davina Porter, got it really cheap from Amazon at sitelink.
! “Did you say the were worlds, Tess"
"Yes, "
"All like ours"
"I don't know, but I think so, They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbardtree, Most of them splendid and sound a few blighted, "
"Which do we live on a splendid one or a blighted one"
"A blighted one, ”
Tess of the DUrbervilles is themasterpiece by Thomas Hardy of Tess Durbeyville, her family bloodline long fallen from aristocratic heights.
The central themes are critiques of class and blood distinctions and of the sexual mores of the Victorian era, but its a novel, not a tract, as Tess becomes real for us from the very beginning.
The book was published more thanyears ago, and it has been reviewed thousands of times, so, while I wont reveal every major plot point, Ill also drop a spoiler here and there.
For instance, entwined themes about gender and class unite in the instance that Tess, whose family has fallen on hard times, approaches at her familys urging whom she thinks are the more affluent dUrbervilles for help.
She is hired by them as a dairy maid and because she needs the money she stays there and is taken advantage of by Alec dUrberville.
“But I don't want anybody to kiss me, sir!' she implored, a big tear beginning to roll down her face, and the corners of her mouth trembling in her attempts not to cry.
”
She is but sixteen, needs the money for her family, is confused about what she should do about this guys advances, and then is raped by him, which, in keeping with some of the history of mens treatment of women in the workplace, and as one chapter title makes clear Tess “pays for” in the loss of her job and reputation.
Not that Hardy makes this a mere victim story, though: “Let 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 believe.
”
Shes traumatized by this experience, but she's strong, Tess is, and she continues her honest work as a dairy maid.
And yes, theres a touch of nineteenthcentury melodrama in the book, but Tess is admirable, most of the time, at least, and Hardy doesnt sentimentalize the real challenges of poverty.
Tess meets an again wealthy son of another dairyman, Angel Clare, who seems like a good and liberal man for the times with respect to issues of class, who seems to really love her, and they marry, but he soon finds out she is not in fact a virgin, something many men but, in general, not women in the world seem to require or required for their marriages, and though he agrees that she is in the act “more sinned against than sinning” he worries her "want of firmness" in confronting Alec may indicate a flaw in her character and that she may no longer be the woman he thought she was.
Ugh, fail, Angel. Jerk! When he runs off to Brazil to brood about the situation, he leaves his wife destitute as her father dies soon after and they lose their home.
She writes to Angel:
"O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not deserve it, I have thought it all over carefully, and I can never, never forgive you! You know that I did not intend to wrong you why have you so wronged me You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will try to forget you.
It is all injustice I have received at your hands!"
We agree heartily with Tess here but in our present moment, more than a hundred years later, and completely and angrily disagree that she should keep committed to Angel.
Hes no Angel, in short, though in the end he does return, and while I wont reveal specifically what happens to them, and her, Hardys narrator says of them at the very end:
“'Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals in Aeschylean phrase had ended his sport with Tess.
”
If there is a moral to the story, it might be this, as Angel at one point observes:
“Distinction does not consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered among those who are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good reportas you are, my Tess.
”
Some people think
of the current metoo movement as the moment in history where some men seem to be finally “getting it” about women and equality/selfefficacy/assault but as you can see, feminist Thomas Hardy makes this point clear more than a century ago in his angry castigation of the Victorian period on issues of sex and class.
But if this seems to you from my retelling like just a feminist morality tale, you miss the way Tessie comes to life.
True, you cant stand how she refuses to give up on Angel Clare, who was a jerk to her, but she is a rich and complex and powerful character, in the main.
Her tale is a rich tragedy of a modest young workingclass woman, and the workingclass are the people Hardy wants to write about:
“The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.
” “A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who never had any strength to throw away.
”
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the dUrbervilles
On the opening page of Thomas Hardys classic Tess of the dUrbervilles, a semiimpoverished alcoholic and schemer named Jack Durbeyfield is met by a local parson, who calls him “Sir John.
” Uncertain as to why he is greeted in such a way, Durbeyfield demands an explanation, whereupon he is told that despite his current position at the bottom of the social hierarchy, he is a descendant of an illustrious and noble family.
With this information at the forefront of his mind, Jack Durbeyfield returns home, where he and his wife quickly hatch a plan to send their beautiful daughter Tess over to a nearby family with the dUrberville name.
The hope is that Tess can make a good impression on her “relatives,” thereby improving the familys position,
I mention this mainly to point out that Hardy is very quick to set the wheels of his famous novel in motion, starting a sequence of events that will climax quite abruptly somepages later.
It must be noted, however, that this is just about the only thing that happens quickly in Tess of the dUrbervilles.
While this is a very fine book, and well worth the read, it is also incredibly, sometimes frustratingly slow, In terms of pacing, this is glacial, moving only slightly faster than a threetoed sloth trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis,
Despite its prodigious even somewhat intimidating length, not a lot happens in Tess of the dUrbervilles, Unlike Charles Dickens, with whom Hardy shared a serialized style and penchant for inflated word counts, this is very selfcontained tale, There are no digressionary storylines, no large gallery of colorful supporting characters, Instead of sprawl, Hardy keeps us on a rather straight path, albeit one that is stretched to its limits, like a child playing with a rubber band.
Because of its paucity of eventful moments, Tess of the dUrbervilles is difficult to summarize without giving away all its secrets.
Suffice to say, the arc that Tess follows passes through two men: Alec StokedUrberville and Angel Clare, Both are immensely flawed, though for very different reasons,
Following an ambiguous incident with one of those men a scene that can be read as a seduction but is likely a sexual assault Tess is left as a “fallen woman,” her reputation tarnished, her prospects destroyed.
How she tries to move forward from that moment is Tess of the dUrbervilless central narrative concern,
Since saying anything more threatens to take us into the realm of potential spoilers, its probably best to confine the balance of my remarks to general observations.
First, Hardy has a marvelous sense of place, Tess of the dUrbervilles is set in fictional Wessex, a place closely modeled after the south and southwest of England those with a better sense of English geography have not found it hard to find the reallife analogues to Hardys madeup villages.
Over the course of his career, Hardy returned several times to Wessex, and he knows the place well, There is a keen observational talent on display here, as Hardy evocatively describes the rhythms of rural English life in the lates.
Whether its a May Dance or a summer harvest, a day at a dairy farm or a trip to market on an old wagon, you feel like you are there.
As to characters, there are no more than a handful of important ones, Most of the story told in the thirdperson omniscient, with a godlike narrator who likes to issue vague and portentous warnings flows through Tess, Angel, and Alec.
There are numerous secondary roles, but with the exception of Jack and Jane Durbeyfield immensely flawed yet strangely lovable, they are not super memorable.
Tess is the main attraction, and she is a compellingly frustrating protagonist, At times she is strong, proud, and fiercely independent, At other times, she seems to spontaneously lose her spine, becoming indecisive, selfpitying, and reactionary, About the only consistent thing about Tess is her inability to discern the motives of other people,
Frankly, there were stretches during which I really didnt like Tess, She often seemed to have selective, plotcontrived stupidity, in which she did something unfathomable simply to keep the dramatic wheels spinning, For instance, Tesss fluctuating relationship with honesty first she lies, then decides to tell the truth at the most inopportune moment imaginable belies all notions of common sense.
Yet, as is often the case for me, the very fact that I had such a strong reaction to Tess even if it was sometimes negative is a testament to how well she worked as a heroine.
Certainly, she holds center stage,
The final thing worth noting is Tess of the dUrbervilless modernity, at least in relation to itspublication date.
Railing against the conventional ethics of the Victorian Era, Hardy presents Tess not as a sinner, but as sinned against, not simply by men, but by a society that is almost pathologically obsessed with the sexual histories of women.
He attacks sometimes a bit pedantically the uneven morality that allowed men such as the libertine Alec to do as they pleased, but then sentenced Tess to a purgatorial existence for having transgressed the communal code of conduct.
Hardy is also scathing towards the hypocrisies of organized religion, devoting several wellconstructed scenes to showing menofthecloth choosing the abstract dogmas of theology over basic human compassion.
One of the important things I have learned when reading bricksized works of English literature is to have patience, If you start something like Tess of the dUrbervilles expecting or even hoping to breeze through it, you will likely be disappointed.
This is an incredibly slow burn, unfolding at an unhurried, even languid rate, A twentyfirst century editor would undoubtedly have pared Hardys manuscript down to three hundred pages, having everything coalesce around five or six crucial scenes, and excising the long passages in which Tess is doing nothing more than walking from one place to another.
This would have made Tess of the dUrbervilles more concise, more efficient, but it also would have greatly reduced the novels impact.
The emotional punch that comes at the conclusion of Tesss journey ultimately derives from following her for so long, and from spending so much time at her side.
.