Tag Archives: Thomas Hardy

Book review

Life’s Little Ironies by Thomas Hardy, 1894

I confess I’ve never been a particular fan of Hardy. I’ve not really worked out why, but I don’t think his novels have aged well, even if various film and television adaptations have postponed any risk of obscurity. I thought I would try some of his short stories to see if they could offer something different. Life’s Little Ironies is a collection put together by the author and his publisher shortly before Hardy published his last novel (Jude the Obscure) and went into self-imposed poetical exile. All the stories had originally been published in various Victorian magazines and this is reflected in their length and subject matter.

If you didn’t know this collection was by Hardy it would take a matter of seconds to work it out. The settings are very familiar – Melchester, Casterbridge, etc – and the characters are all eminently recognisable – honest, hard-working rural folk prone to making unfortunate choices. The theme that links the stories, we are invited to accept, is that they are sketches of ironic moments in people’s lives, although the irony is quite often hard to identify.

An Imaginative Woman opens the collection with the story of a woman who conducts an affair with a young writer entirely in her imagination, but does so so convincingly that her husband strongly suspects her of having cuckolded him. Ella Marchmill is bored in her marriage to an older, unsympathetic man, and when she finds out that the previous tenant of the seaside rooms they are renting was an author she admires, she begins to spin a fantasy in which they meet and run away together. Despite her tentative efforts to reach out to the writer they never actually meet, but she leaves enough clues behind her when she dies in childbirth to cause her husband to suspect that the child is not his and to reject him. Is this ironic? Contrived certainly, depending on “a known but inexplicable trick of Nature (whereby) there were undoubtedly strong traces of resemblance to the man Ella had never seen...” What trick of nature is that then? Surely the author’s convenient plot device trick?

The Son’s Veto is again quintessential Hardy. It’s a complex little tale of disappointed love, with the main character’s happiness being frustrated by the wishes of her son. (hence the title). The story is also about class, and how marrying outside of one’s class can cause complications. It’s a polished, densely packed story barely longer than ten pages, and one of the stronger, more complete tales of the collection.

For Conscience’ Sake is another tale in which the central character has left Wessex and returns to complete unfinished business, in this case driven by his conscience. Mr Millbourne left Wessex when he fled from a relationship, leaving the young woman alone and pregnant – “the old story”. Pregnancy out of wedlock is a theme Hardy returns to frequently, but here the protagonist is determined to right the wrong even though many years have passed. Sadly he learns that the past cannot be rewritten and some wrongs cannot be righted.

A Tragedy of Two Ambitions follows two dour young men trying to carve out a career in the priesthood. Their ambitions are frustrated by their drunken reprobate of a father. How they deal with him when his appearance threatens to ruin them is rather predictable but becomes a heavy burden for them to bear.

On the Western Circuit could easily have been expanded into a novel. It tells of Charles Bradford Raye a London lawyer who while travelling to courts in the Western Circuit (for judicial purposes England and Wales is divided into six or seven ‘circuits’ i.e. regions) meets Anna, a pretty young servant girl, something of a Hardy stereotype. Normally he would not have considered Anna a suitable wife, and instead pursues her for less honourable purposes, but while they are apart her letters persuade him she is far more educated and sophisticated than she actually is – her letter are drafted for her by her employer, Mrs. Edith Harnham, the wife of a wine merchant, who is attracted to Raye and uses these letters as a form of literary infidelity. Raye finds out too late that he has been fooled and accepts his fate with resignation. This is a variant of the Cyrano de Bergerac story in which someone falls in love with a false representation of their partner, although in fact the Hardy story actually pre-dates the French play. It is a sophisticated and complex story which once again features an out of wedlock pregnancy, euphemistically described thus: “she made confession that the result of her relations with her lover it would soon become necessary to disclose”. The story also pivots around class differences – Raye would never consider marrying his lover if he knew she was a barely literate working girl as it would seriously impede his career, as if eventually does.

To Please his Wife is a short tragic story in which a seaman chooses a wife unwisely, and pays the price. Another unhappy marriage ending in tragedy – not a collection of stories to cheer anyone up!

The Fiddler of the Reels. The concept of a fiddler with quasi-demonic powers, able to charm people into dancing manically or against their will, can be found in folk-lore. Hardy draws on this idea to weave a tale of a fiddler who uses his mastery of his instrument to be seduce young women. This folk element of the story is interwoven with an account of a local mechanic who, disappointed in love, leaves rural Wessex to go and work in London, his young lady having become besotted with Wat ‘Mop’ Ollamoor, the charismatic fiddle player. This happens at the time the great Exhibition of 1851 is on in London, and this event is described as more than a background to event, but as a central marker in the country’s history, as important as the Norman Conquest. Several years later he receives a letter from his young lady, asking for a second chance, but it is only when she arrives (by an open-carriage train) that he discovers she has a young daughter, the result of an affair with Mop: “I was so unlucky to be catched the first time he took advantage o’ me“. Nevertheless he accepts the proposed reconciliation, marries her and accepts the child as his own. When they eventually return to Wessex a re-encounter with Mop is inevitable, although the precise outcome is unexpected and troublingly ambiguous.

A Few Crusted Characters concludes the collection and is comprised of a series of recollections of local characters and the often mysterious events of their lives. The stories are told by the passengers on a stage coach – there is a nod to Chaucer in the structure of the work. Each has a slightly incomplete feel, as if they were drafts of intended longer works that had been set aside but kept just in case they were to be of any use, and are finally set to work here.

Overall, these stories don’t improve on Hardy’s status as an author, but neither do they diminish it. They didn’t make me want to rush back to the novel and they lack of variety in the subject matter and themes was a little disappointing. As an introduction to Hardy you could do a lot worse.

Life’s Little Ironies by Thomas Hardy, 1894

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Book review

Supplemental: A closer look at Alec D’Urberville

I wanted to take a closer look at the portrait of Alec D’Urberville in Thomas Hardy’s Tess. Alec is an archetypal rogue of fiction, one in a long line of roues that can be traced back to Robert Lovelace in Richardson’s Clarissa and beyond. These men are always attractive, but dangerous and amoral. Alec is largely a two-dimensional character. As early as Chapter 12 he tells Tess

“I suppose I am a bad fellow—a damn bad fellow. I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad, in all probability.” (77).

So one has to ask, is there anything else to him than a symbol of male oppression and sinfulness?

I’m going to look more closely at how Hardy represents Alec. When he first meets Tess he is dressed as a young country gent:

“The driver was a young man of 3 or 4 and twenty, with a cigar between his teeth; wearing a dandy cap, drab jacket, breeches of the same hue, white neckcloth, stick-up collar, and brown driving gloves” (52).

Earlier we are told he has “a well-groomed black moustache with curled points” which completes the picture – this is someone confident in his appearance and his attractiveness to the opposite sex, over-dressed for the role of driver. This establishes a template for virtually every time Alec appears – he is never recognised straightaway by Tess. Or to be more precise his identity is never immediately acknowledged by the narrator, usually because he appears in disguise.

If Tess and Angel are consistently characterised as Adam and Eve, both before and after the Fall, Alec is the tempter. In his multiple disguises he promises her riches or a better life.

“”About the children – your brothers and sisters,” he resumed. “I’ve been thinking about them”. Tess’s heart quivered – he was touching her in a weak place. Since returning home her soul had gone out to those children with an affection that was passionate.....if your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for them; since your father will not be able to do much I suppose”.

(Tess angrily rejects him, and in response )

“D’Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge, where he pulled off the long smockfrock and red neckerchief which had mainly disguised him”.

350

He disappears from the narrative for a several chapters while Tess and Angel are falling in love at the dairy, only to return in dramatic fashion. At the end of chapter 44, coming back from an unsuccessful visit to Angel’s parents, Tess meets Alec preaching to a small crowd. He is a reformed man and has found god. She hears him before she sees him, and it dawns on her that the voice, preaching “a vehement form of the views of Angel’s father” is that of Alec. (305-6). From this point he begins to haunt Tess, seeking her out time and again. He next appears (314) as “a black speck” and is “perceived to be a man in black…in a semi-clerical costume” (my emphasis). He tracks her down to her cottage, and then pesters her while she works on a threshing machine:

“Just before the dinner-hour a person had come silently into the field by the gate, and had been standing under a second rick watching the scene, and Tess in particular. He was dressed in a tweed suit of fashionable pattern, and he twirled a gay walking-cane”. (327).

We don’t have long to wait before Alec resumes his persistent attempts to persuade Tess to resume her relationship with him. She returns home to Marlott where her mother has been taken ill. One evening she is working on the family’s small-holding when she becomes aware of someone working alongside her in the twilight:

“Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak to her. Nor did she think of him further than to recollect that he had not been there when it was broad daylight….by and by he dug so close to her that the fire-beams were reflected as distinctly from the steel prongs of his fork as from her own. On going up to the fire to throw a pitch of dead weeds upon it, she found that he did the same, on the other side, the fire flared up, and she beheld the face of D’Urberville. “

Alec’s demonic appearance, pitchfork and all, is re-emphasised. Once again he is in disguise – almost one might say in fancy dress:

“The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his appearance in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now worn only by the most old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled her as to its bearing. …

“A jester might say this is just like paradise. You are Eve, and I am the old Other One come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior animal. I used to be quite up in that scene of Milton’s when I was theological.”

349

Their penultimate meeting is in Kingsbere church, among the tombs of the ancient D’Urbervilles. Tess is looking round the old church, home to her ancestors:

“She musingly tuned to withdraw, passing near an altar-tomb, the oldest of them all, on which was a recumbent figure. In the dusk she had not noticed it before, and would have hardly noticed it now but for an odd fancy that the effigy moved. As soon as she drew close to it she discovered all in a moment that the figure was a living person; and the shock of her sense of not having been alone was so violent that she was quite overcome, and sank down nigh to fainting, not however till she had recognised Alec D’Urberville in the form.

(363).

What are we to make of this presentation of Alec? The references to his demonic appearance aren’t that hard to decode (!) but the narrator’s persistent failure to identify him on his first appearance in each scene is more problematic. Is this just a stylistic quirk, a way of allowing the reader to guess his identity before it is confirmed, giving the false impression that the reader is slightly ahead of the narrator in their understanding of the story? Possibly, but if this was all that is going on it would be quite a tired device. When a mysterious stranger appears in the Sherlock Holmes stories (by comparison) the real surprise is when it is not Holmes in disguise. We quickly learn that it will be Alec who appears out of the gathering darkness whenever someone appears.

With regard to his disguises and costumes, I think these are a way for the author to signal Alec’s instability and unpredictability, the mercurial nature of his character and his insincerity. He presents himself to the world in the way he wants to be seen, and when that character has served its purpose it is discarded. He may even be sincere in his presentation, but it is no less shallow and superficial for all that. It is this that makes him so dangerous.

Literature has worse villains than Alec D’Urberville, but it is hard to feel sorry for him when Tess finally extracts the retribution he has coming to him.

I’d be interested what any readers of this post make of Alec – is there more to him than the stage-villain with a curled moustache and a cloak?

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Book review

Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, 1891

I am not sure why my feelings towards the novels of Thomas Hardy are so ambivalent. It could be the fairly turgid poetry I was force-fed at school, dating from the period of his life when he gave up writing novels (apparently because of the hostile popular reaction to Tess and 1895’s Jude the Obscure). It could also be because Hardy is so often the “go-to” writer for film and television adaptations, so I have a pretty good understanding of what happens in his novels, meaning that they can feel over-familiar.

Despite these reservations I am slowly coming round to the uncontroversial view that Hardy is a wonderful writer. I have many more of his novels to read, but thus far Tess is to my mind his most successful novel – in fact one of the best Victorian novels ever written, up there with Dickens at his finest.

Set in rural Wessex at the end of the nineteenth century, as technology slowly transforms country life, Tess is the tragic tale of a young country woman who has the misfortune to have an ancient family name, Durbeyfield. Her parents believe this to be a corruption of “d’Urberville”, the surname of a noble Norman family. This seemingly unimportant discovery is the spark for Tess’s tragedy .

We first see her at a village May Dance, a traditional ritual to welcome the spring. The dance is joined by Angel Clare, on a walking tour with his brothers – he notices Tess but doesn’t speak to her and the incident is soon forgotten. Meanwhile, Tess’s parents hatch a plan to recover their family fortunes. They send her to visit Mrs D’Urberville, a rich widow in the nearby town of Trantridge, to “claim kin”. There Tess meets Mrs D’Urberville’s son Alec, who persuades his mother to offer her a job as a poultry keeper. Alec’s interest in Tess is apparent. Her parents are well aware they are exposing the young and vulnerable Tess to risk in sending her to work at Trantridge, but they openly encourage the idea that Alec might marry her.

Late one night, walking home from town Alec offers Tess a ride home. They reach a grove in a forest where he drugs and rapes her. The attack is only implied, but there’s very little ambiguity in terms of what happens. What happens immediately after the attack is less clear. The narrator fast forwards several months to a new section of the text, entitled “Maid no More”. Tess is returning home, pregnant, angry and ashamed. This is a novel of silences and ambiguity, not least here. Was Tess living with Alec as his lover, perhaps with a promise of marriage? The text gives only hints and we are left to fill most of the gaps . Tess’s mother Joan hints she was aware all was not well: “After all the talk about you and him which has reached us here” (81) and Tess is even more ambiguous, telling Alec “I made up my mind (to leave) as soon as I saw – what I ought to have seen sooner” – presumably that Alec had no serious intention of marrying her.

Tess has a complex publication history – it first appeared in serial publication in a magazine, and the publisher required Hardy to make a number of changes to the text to make it more palatable to late-Victorian mores. This gave Hardy the opportunity to test public reaction and make changes when the text appeared in novel form a couple of years later. The chapters in which Tess is “seduced” (as it might have been seen at the time) or more rightly attacked, were fine-tuned by the author to leave sufficient ambiguity as to the precise relationship – and degree of immorality – between Tess and Alec. Hardy wants us to be on Tess’s ‘side’. He portrays her as a victim of male depravity and the judgmental social attitudes of the time. The novel’s defiant sub-title “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented” emphasises Hardy’s close identification with his heroine.

Once she has left Trantridge, Tess gives birth to a sickly infant son, who only lives a few weeks. Just before he dies she baptises him herself with the name Sorrow, and then buries him in a “shabby corner” of the churchyard reserved for unbaptised infants under a homemade cross. These are some of the most heart-breaking moments of the novel, but more is to come.

Two years pass, and a wiser, sadder Tess finds a job as a milkmaid at a dairy, far enough away from her home village so her reputation as a ‘fallen woman’ can be left behind. There she meets Angel Clare again, now an apprentice farmer learning dairy management. Angel has rejected his father’s suggestion that, like his two brothers, he becomes a clergyman, although their theological differences seem obscure. In this bucolic paradise, Angel and Tess fall in love. At one point they wander into a wild party of the farm’s garden, a nascent Eden, and the author makes the comparison explicit:

“The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years”…”This spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light, which pervaded the open mead, impressed them with a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve”.

122-130

For a while they enjoy an innocent courtship, but Angel’s proposal of marriage puts Tess in a difficult situation – would he still want to marry her if he knew of her former ‘relationship’ with Alec? Tess chooses the worst possible option – she tells him after they marry. Unable to overcome the Victorian concept that brides must be virgins (“maids”) , Angel is appalled, and rejects Tess, although seems unable to decide what to do next. In a doom-laden scene he carries Tess while sleep-walking (sleep carrying?) to a nearby church, and places her in a tomb. Foreshadowing anyone? To bring an end to the torture of indecision Tess suggests they separate, saying she will return to her parents. Rather melodramatically Angel leaves the country and goes to Brazil to seek his fortune. Things accelerate from this point. Alec reappears in Tess’s life, and further misfortune dogs her. The novel’s famous ending scene finally comes almost as a relief to the tortured Tess.

This is a rich, rewardingly complex novel. It is awash with symbolism and foreshadowing. As early as page 35 we are told that Tess’s “face was dry and pale, as though she regarded herself in the light of a murderess”. The novel is suffused with religious references, as well as a multitude of direct and indirect quotes from nineteenth century and earlier poets, and of course Shakespeare. The novel opens with an epigram from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and thereafter includes mentions from Much Ado, Lear, Measure for Measure, Hamlet, As You Like It, The Rape of Lucrece, and of course, Romeo and Juliet, to mention the few I spotted (one of which, “He suited the action to the word” (page 62), a reference to Hamlet, Act 3 scene 2, was not spotted by the otherwise exhaustively detailed footnotes provided in the Penguin Classic edition!)

While some critics have found the male leads in the novel to be two-dimensional, Tess is in many ways a modern heroine. She is strong-willed and does more than anyone could ever humanly expect to avoid her fate. If she makes mistakes it is hardly surprising given the lack of role models and support she has in her life. When there is finally no escape she takes matters into her own hands – even the pious Angel seems to accept without judgement her decision to end her relationship with Alec in the way she does.

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Book review, Mayor of Casterbridge, rural traditions, Thomas Hardy

The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy, 1886

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Authors of classic works of literature tend to gain a reputation in popular culture – Lawrence is raunchy, Dickens is long-winded and a bit preposterous, Joyce impenetrable, Pinter full of pauses, and Shakespeare “difficult”. Sometimes these reputations are justified; more often they are cliches that are dispelled as soon as one reads the author concerned. But they are astonishingly pervasive, and sometimes damagingly so. Tell a student that Shakespeare is difficult often enough and sooner or later they will believe it. I am sometimes guilty in falling for these stereotypes and I did with Hardy. Based on the evidence of a reading of the undeniably bleak ‘Jude the Obscure‘ (which I can’t believe I reviewed six years ago!) I accepted the idea that Hardy is depressing, slow, and that his characters invariably come to an unfortunate end.

‘The Mayor of Casterbridge‘ confounded many of those expectations. It is fast paced and packed with incident. But literary clichés don’t come from nowhere and most have some truth in their origins. True to his instincts Hardy ensures that this novel’s protagonist and his family are never able to escape completely the consequences of the fatal decision taken in the opening chapter. That decision, as you may know, is made by the eponymous Thomas Henchard, then a lowly agricultural labourer. In a fit of drunken anger Henchard decides to sell his wife and child. Wife sales were by this time a well-established form of divorce, in particular in rural communities. It was widely believed that they legalised the process of separation. The ‘purchaser’ was usually the man that the wife had left her husband for. The sales were conducted publicly on market days. In other words they were akin to a piece of theatre, in which the old relationship was formally dissolved, and the new recognised and legitimised. The Wikipedia entry on wife sales is highly recommended by the way. All the textual indications are that the wife sale in ‘Casterbridge’ is not like this at all, but a spontaneous decision, done in a drunken fit of anger, regretted thereafter, and that the buyer is a stranger. In other words not an informal rural divorce at all, but a vicious form of spousal abuse in which the wife and child were treated as the husband’s property to be bought and sold.

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