Not everyone is a fan of Thomas Hardy. The Southern poet James Dickey found him old-fashioned.
When I briefly met Dickey some years back, he was plotting his escape from a PR woman. She had entrusted him to my care while she took a 15-minute break. During our desultory conversation, he asked if he could come to my house (“No”); he also asked who my favorite writer was. My mind was blank and I blurted: “Thomas Hardy.” The Wrong Answer bell immediately chimed on Dickey’s Favorite Writer Quiz Show as he said, “He was our grandfather’s writer.”
I have encountered many people with similar opinions of Thomas Hardy. Hardy is out of style: perhaps he was always out of style. Certainly, he struggled against the censorship of critics and many editors, who were severe about his “immoral” descriptions of sex, sexual harassment, rape, and unhappy marriages in the 19th century.
When I reread Tess of the d’Urbervilles this weekend, I was struck by the lyricism, the realism, and the sheer exhaustion of Tess’s struggles. Doom haunts the characters from the beginning. Hardy fans will not be surprised that the plot takes an immediate downward swerve. The novel opens with a minister’s telling Tess’s father, John Durbeyfield, that he is the last descendant of the aristocratic d’Urberville family. The wealthy buyers of the d’Urberville estate took the name, but the Durbeyfields have the blood. Ironically, this knowledge leads to the downfall of the Durbeyfields and the faux d’Urbervilles.
Through one of Hardy’s classic strokes of fate, the Durbeyfields lose their livelihood. Tess, pushed by her mother, reluctantly visits the d’Urbervilles, who offer her the job of looking after the poultry. The son of the house, Alec d’Urberville, flirts with her, stalks her, and rapes her after a dance. Tess moves home and has a baby, but after the baby dies she finds a job as a dairymaid miles from home. Most important, she meets and falls in love with Angel Clare, a minister’s son studying to be a farmer, who is so charming and handsome that all the the young women are smitten, even Tess’s two roommates. After much resistance, Tess agrees to marry Angel, but isn’t sure it is moral in the light of her past. When after the wedding he admits he has had sexual relations with a woman,T ess confesses her past, thinking he will empathize. As soon as he learns her history, he takes off for South America to learn more about farming. He leaves Tess a bit of money, but she struggles to make a living as a laborer on a farm. Will he be back?
Since I didn’t expect the struggling Tess to be a modern woman in Manhattan or London, I admired this book very much. But it has a difficult publication history. Because the first publisher didn’t read the book until the proofs had been printed, and then found the content offensive, he offered to pay Hardy for the manuscript with the understanding it would not be published. Hardy, who was well-respected and knew someone would publish it, suggested they cancel the contract without any payment. The novel went through many revisions, and there were wrangles with publishers. The harsh criticiscm of Tess and then Jude the Obscure depressed Hardy so that he stopped writing fiction. Think of the novels we might have had!
By the way, D. H. Lawrence wrote that Hardy was the most important novelist of the 19th century (or that was the gist; it’s been a while since I read Lawrence’s essays). Hardy’s influence on Lawrence is apparent. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is modeled on Hardy’s Two on a Tower.
And now Dickey is our father’s writer.
I wrote my master’s thesis on Hardy and Lawrence. I don’t, of course, remember what I wrote. But something I’ve always admired about both writers is their ability to write about women almost from the inside. It may be that neither felt the need to be confined by gender lines.
Thanks, Kat.
I do agree about their women! Hardy and Lawrence were both outsiders rebelling against convention, so perhaps that helped them perceive women differently. And both kept fighting censorship! And on and on it goes…
Alec seduces Tess. One reason for the disapproval of the novel when it was first published was Tess’s part in her own “downfall”.
In England Hardy is thought of more as a poet rather than a novelist, and as the dominant figure in twentieth century English poetry, via Edward Thomas, Auden, Betjeman and Larkin – all admirers and influenced by Hardy.
I agree Hardy is a great poet!
But It is a rape. She rejects his passes and is actually is asleep in the woods when he pounces.
“Everything else was blackness alike. D’Urberville stooped; and heard a gentle regular breathing. He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with her. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears.”
I’ve never really thought of Hardy as old fassioned, but then I read classics far more frequently than contemporary fiction. As for which one of the men in Tess is worse, they are equally awful, just in different ways. I was never fully convinced by Allek’s supposed conversion to Christianity, and wondered whether his desire to make amends was only skin deep. On the other hand, Angel is possibly the most hypocritical male character of Victorian fiction. There’s really not much to choose between them.
I love 19th-century novels! Poor Tess is at the apex of a triangle no one would want to belong to. She truggles to be independent, but the Fates are against her. Yes, Alex/Angel are very similar really.