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Community membership and individuation in the major novels of Thomas Hardy: “A complexity of opposites”
Kerr, Anita Willsie, Ph.D.
The Ohio State University, 1993
Copyright ©1993 by Kerr, Anita Willsie. All rights reserved.
UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106
COMMUNITY MEMBERSHIP AND INDIVIDUATION
IN THE MAJOR NOVELS OF THOMAS HARDY
"A Complexity of Opposites"
DISSERTATION
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of The Ohio State University
By
Anita Willsie Kerr, B.A., M.A.
*****
The Ohio State University
1993
Dissertation Committee: Approved by
D-G. Riede
J. Phelan Advisor B.H. Rigney Department of English Copyright by Anita Willsie Kerr 1993 To Jeannette and Catharine
n ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I express sincere thanks to Dr. David G. Riede for his direction and critical insight throughout my research and writing of this dissertation. I also with to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Drs. James Phelan and Barbara Rigney, for their advice and guidance. Gratitude is expressed to Drs. John 0. Stewart and Linda L. Wiggins, to Terry Cairo and to Colleen Hammers for their support and encouragement. I give sincere thanks to Vida H. Kerr for enabling me to focus on the completion of this dissertation. To Bertha and Robert Willsie, I extend abiding gratitude for introducing me to literary studies and for their invaluable support and inspiration therein. To my husband, David C. Kerr, I offer my deepest thanks for his continued support, encouragement, and endurance throughout my graduate program, and most particularly for his faith in me and my endeavors.
m VITA
May 19, 1955 ...... Born - Jamestown, New York
1977 ...... B.A., The College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio
1982 ...... M.A., Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
1982-3 ...... Editorial Assistant, ASCP Press, Chicago, Illinois
1985 - 1990 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
1990 - 1991 ...... Graduate Administrative Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
1991 - Present ...... Lecturer, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: English
General Examination: Nineteenth-Century British Literature (David G. Riede), The Novel as Genre (James Phelan), Literature as Cultural Storage of Ojibway and Celtic Traditions (John 0. Stewart)
IV TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEDICATION...... ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... ; ...... iii
VITA ...... iv
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Return of the Native: An Earnest Attempt at Reassimilation ...... 22
1. The Detached Observation...... 23 2. The Community A p a r t...... 36 3. The Self in Isolation ...... 63
II. The Woodlanders: FalseIdentities and Community Membership...... 81
1. The Focus on A rtificiality...... 83 2. The Community Ingrown...... 91 3. The Self Sequestered...... 102
III. Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Beginnings of Community Redefinition ...... 119
1. The Critique of Social Convention ...... 121 2. The Community D ispersed...... 136 3. Victimization: The Self Fragmented ...... 156
IV. Jude the Obscure: TheEmerging Ascendancy of the Self . . . 180
1. The Didacticism that Masks Despair...... 183 2. The Death of the Wessex Community ...... 197 3. Abandonment:The Self in Alienation ...... 225
CONCLUSION...... 250
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 262 INTRODUCTION
Community in its broadest definition connotes a "unified body of individuals," yet such a definition cannot begin to describe the multiform manifestations of the ideal. Participation in a community brings, of course, both privileges and responsibilities. It carries both advantages and disadvantages, but total rejection of community is rare. For most individuals, at least partial membership in some form of community is desirable. Victor Barnouw’s definition of the term culture provides one way of discerning the meaning of community:
A culture is the way of life of a group of people, the configuration of all of the more or less stereotyped patterns of learned behavior which are handed down from one generation to the next through the means of language and imitation. The nub of this definition is the first clause: "the way of life of a group of people." (Barnouw 8)
A subset of culture, community occurs with the (willing) participation of individuals in common language and behavior. Seen in this way, community becomes the connection of individuals through their immersion in a given manner of living, with its attendant political, social, and psychological world views. For many participants, the significance, or even the very concept of community is not questioned. For those who
"belong," the view of community is considered, at best, through the comfortable smoke screen of complacency. In a very real sense, one who belongs can understand neither the full implications of community, nor the individual who does not belong. It is only when the individual’s
1 2 sense of community is disrupted by not belonging that the question of community becomes relevant to that person. If the rupture with community is involuntary, the question becomes paramount to the outsider’s view of both the self and the larger world view.
As intimated by Barnouw’s definition of culture, the identity of the individual, his or her sense of self, does not completely become absorbed by the communal identity; the two must co-exist and achieve balance to create the desired wholeness:
Just as man, as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. (Jung 24)
To gain an understanding of a given community, one must acquire
an appreciation of the selfhoods of the individuals it comprises. In
periods of stasis when the community, or the individual’s perception
thereof, are not threatened, there is little reason to question either
the need or the significance of community, or shared culture, but in
times of rupture when the perceptions of self and one’s world become
tenuous or unclear, community becomes the concern of all individuals
participating in a given culture.
The nineteenth-century brought a tremendous influx of new
perceptions, beliefs, and knowledge which individuals needed to
assimilate, reject, or somehow accommodate to their pre-existing
worldview. The person living during this era found it necessary to
undergo acculturation in the same culture to which he or she had been
born. At some point, one could find one’s self, suddenly perhaps, an
outsider. As a means of making sense out of an increasingly chaotic 3
world, it became necessary to redefine culture, one’s sense of
community. In discussing the history of sociological thought, Robert
A. Nisbet notes that:
The rediscovery of community is unquestionably the most distinctive development in nineteenth-century social thought, a development that extends well beyond sociological theory to such areas as philosophy, history and theology to become indeed one of the major themes of imaginative writing in the century. (47)
This refocusing on community, its definition, purpose, and form
became as well of utmost concern to individuals striving to regain
their sense of self and their sense of culture. Individuals living
during the nineteenth century were compelled constantly to reaffirm
their place and character in a society whose rigid class boundaries were weakening, ever so slightly, and whose ecclesiastical,
philosophical, and political assumptions were brought into question by
the increasing prominence of such groups as the Dissenters, the German
philosophers, and the adherents of Darwin and Marx. Their whole world
view, in short, was severely tested, making necessary a reassessment of
traditional notions about community.
In Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the
Nineteenth Centurv. Christopher Herbert compares the 20th century
sociological and anthopological definitions of culture, with the more
subjective, metaphysical understanding of the term popular in the 19th
century. Drawing on the romantic definition of culture as expressed by
"its first enunciators, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin,
Arnold ...", Herbert discusses how the term "culture" became a
"touchstone of value, almost a sacred word" (22). His quotation from
Durkheim’s The Rules of Sociological Method which was written in 1895, 4 illustrates the progression of the poetic definition of culture into the sociologic:
By aggregating together, by interpenetrating, by fusing together, individuals give birth to a being, psychical if you will, but one which constitutes a pyschical individuality of a new kind (Rules 128-9). (Herbert 16)
It is clear that for Durkheim, as for the "first enunciators," culture is still embued with the air of the sacred. An understanding of this definition, so widely accepted by Hardy's literary ancestors and contemporaries, is crucial to a study of his fiction because this understanding of culture necesarily forms the basis for Hardy’s own notions about community and the importance placed on community in his era.
Equally important for Hardy and his contemporaries was the accompanying reassessment of selfhood, and not surprisingly it was in the 1860’s that psychology became recognized as a separate science.
Although he writes from a 20th century perspective, Carl Jung provides a description of individual and communal reactions to change that is applicable, as well, to the Victorians’ turmoil:
Only when conditions have altered so drastically that there is an unendurable rift between the outer situation and our ideas, now become antiquated, does the general problem of our Weltanschauung ... arise, and with it the question of how the primordial images that maintain the flow of instinctive energy are to be reoriented or readapted. (The Undiscovered Self 71)
Standing somewhere between the romantic, metaphysical definers of culture in the 19th century, and the purely sociologic interpreters represented in the late 20th century, Jung further emphasizes the almost reciprocal relationship between the self and community, viewing the individual as a "social microcosm" whose "individual situation is 5 the same in principle as the collective situation." (75) Later, he writes in his autobiographical Memories. Dreams. Reflections that the:
... attainment of consciousness is culture in the broadest sense, and self-knowledge is therefore the heart and essence of this process ... the feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost. The greatest limitation for man is the ’self’... only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious. (324-5)
To achieve culture, then, requires knowledge and acceptance of the self that is the bounds of consciousness as well as knowledge and acceptance of the community by which the self is bounded. According to this view, the ideal of "Culture" comes into being when the discrete unities of the self and the community become fully integrated.
A similar interplay between the individual and community forms a vital part of Thomas Hardy’s novels, short stories, and poems. His
Wessex* scene becomes, to a large degree, a world self-sufficient and separate from the rest of nineteenth-century England. It is a community whose members are linked by the common experiences of a rural environment, dialect, and a world view arising, in part, from the ingrained character derived from their very separateness. For Hardy himself, the pull of the Wessex community was strong. A member of that community from birth, Hardy’s intimate knowledge of the "occupants of every cottage, the name of every field and every gate, the profile of every tree, the depth and temperament of every pond and stream"
(Millgate 30) and his strong affinity with the "folk" culture of Wessex
Hardy’s borrowing of William Barne’s "Wessex" as a literary replacement for Dorset suggests Hardy’s own detachment from real community insofar as the term represents his attempt to "[transform] a ’dream country’ into an actual, visitable place." (Millgate 361) 6 abutted sharply against his membership in the community of English upper-class society to which he aspired. His architectural studies and work in London, his first marriage, his literary successes, and perhaps above all, his aspirations brought about a partial, but nevertheless unalterable, severance from the original Wessex community. Hardy was certainly painfully aware of this, and the resultant tension expresses itself noticeably in his fiction as well as in the "borrowed" name
Wessex. The return of the native to his community must always fail, because the boundaries separating the cultures of the two communities can never be completely bridged, and the views of self required by each are, for Hardy, impossible to reconcile.
In Hardy's major novels, the attempt at reassimilation into the natal community is symbolic of an attempt to achieve wholeness on the part of the protagonist. These novels are tragic not only in that the reassimilation is never achieved, but more importantly in that the main characters are unable to become individuated, or whole. This failure to achieve psychic wholeness is expressed through the protagonist’s inability to reassimilate into the natal community and is representative of the larger, symbolic meaning that the individual and the community hold in Hardy’s work. For Hardy, the tension between the individual and his native community functions as the primary focus and can be seen to parallel the tension operating between the conscious and the unconscious of the individual psyche.
Hardy’s understanding of both the individual and the community was deeply influenced by his reading of the German philosopher,
Schopenhauer. Mary Ann Kelly writes: According to Schopehauer, the real world of phenomena is simply illusory, and an individual discovers who he is only after he has acted since will manifests itself before understanding. Individuals are merely manifestations of the blind, impulsive Will to live. ... In Schopenhauer, Hardy found a philosopher who attempted to explain (not merely justify) existence: consciousness was an evolutionary eror, and so, in a sense, was individuation, the separation of the individual from the mass. (62)
Schopenhauer’s notion of the "Immanent Will" fits neatly with Hardy’s essential fatalism, and the notion of "will [manifested] before understanding" is reflected over and over again in the multitudinous workings of circumstance and chance in Hardy’s fiction. In his documentation of the painful evolution of self-consciousness and
individuation beginning with Clym and ending with Jude, Hardy’s novels attest vehemently to his final accordance with Schopenhauer’s view of consciousness as an "evolutionary error".
The interpretation and integration of cultural definition, psychologic insight, and philosophic understanding magnify the community/individual conflict portrayed in Hardy’s major novels to the degree that it transcends any particular era or culture, ultimately speaking to a far wider audience than the Victorian reader. More
importantly, the interpretation and integration of these lines of
inquiry attest to Hardy’s stature as a writer.
While this theme of conflict recurs throughout the body of
Hardy’s work, four novels most poignantly highlight the tension between the individual and the community. The Woodlanders. The Return of the
Native. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. and Jude the Obscure all clearly focus on the workings of community, its impact on the central characters, and their irremediable roles of insider-yet-outsider. To a 8 large degree, it is the unreconcilable nature of this tension which ultimately leads to the characters’ downfalls. The earliest three of the novels all involve a departure from and return to a fixed, markedly self-sufficient community - and culture - on the part of a central character. In each case, the character either leaves the community with the intent of "bettering" himself or herself or is compelled to leave by the pressures exerted by a changing society, yet each ultimately chooses to return to rejoin the community of origin.
Because of changed perceptions, both of self and of culture, the character is ultimately frustrated in his or her attempts at reassimilation, and tragically disastrous results occur. It is as though the process of adjusting and readjusting to radically different ways of life, and the accompanying fluctuating concept of self and others within and outside of the community result in a strikingly
’modern’ form of culture shock.
Jude the Obscure, the fourth novel to be considered in this dissertation and also Hardy’s last, presents this motif of return
(Casagrande 124) as well as an inversion of that pattern in that Jude’s ultimate disappointment comes not only from failure to reassimilate himself into his community of birth, but also from his completely frustrated attempt to become a true member of the community to which he aspires. He is, ultimately, the member of no community, which is to a very large degree his tragedy, as it was perhaps Hardy’s own.
Various questions arise regarding the role of community in The
Return of the Native, questions which a twentieth-century reader can answer only with a combined reliance on history and speculation. In 9 judging the significance of the interplay between community and self in novels with claims to realism, such as Hardy’s Wessex novels, one inevitably questions the connections between the fictional and the actual communities of Hardy’s experience.
Hardy’s presentation of the historical and social groundings of his fiction can be taken as a fairly accurate view of Dorset society in the first half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, his has been called
"one of the shrewdest sociological accounts of [the] passing] of the
Dorset Hardy knew during this period, the time of his youth" (Fowles.
Draper 7). The preservation of this knowledge forms an essential base of the novels, both for Hardy himself, on a personal level, and for his readership.
In the 1912 preface to the "New Wessex Edition" of The Return of the Native, for example. Hardy draws his readers’ attention to the setting he envisioned when writing the novel, noting that the events
"are assumed to have occurred ... between 1840 and 1850" (29). He further notes that Egdon Heath is a setting drawn from actual portions of Dorset heathland "united into one whole" (29). By stating so emphatically that the fictional time and place of the novel have their antecedents in historical and geographical England, Hardy clearly implies the factual basis for his narrative. Yet accompanying this factual grounding of his work is clearly a certain romanticized,
"wishful" element. Hardy himself commented that in his writings he drew largely upon the historical and social characteristics of Dorset as they were known in his grandparents’ time and in the days of his own youth. 10
By reaching thus into the past, however immediate, for his material. Hardy incorporates by necessity a grain of fictional
speculation into his portrayal of Dorset society. Given Hardy’s own deep affection for the Dorset of his youth and for the past, this fictional speculation on the nature of Dorset social history is clearly
idealized in his novels. In the introduction to the 1912 version of the
novels, he asserts his strict attempts to present a faithful record of
the period in Dorset history, striving to "correct tricks of memory"
and avoid "temptations to exaggerate" in order to "preserve for [his]
own satisfaction a fairly true record of vanishing life" (11-12).
There is enough fact, enough "truth" in Hardy’s narratives for
the twentieth-century reader to gain a sense of the social history of
Hardy’s experience and to reach an understanding of the ways in which
it finds a parallel in the view of community set forth in the novels.
Merryn Williams’ account of the factual basis of the social history
portrayed in Hardy’s works emphasizes Hardy’s underlying commitment to
present this social history as accurately as possible:
It was not possible for him to write propaganda, only to record facts as he felt them and knew them. There is a tradition that the characters in his books "were real people", and we have seen how these novels were built of the actual situation in rural Wessex; real villages, real towns, real history. (199)
Whether Hardy’s characters are grounded in the personalities of people
he actually knew is relatively unimportant here. What is significant,
however, is the notion that in spite of their inherent subjectivity,
his works at least partially represent the reality of Wessex life in
the 1840’s and 1850’s and that his characters behave in ways typical of
persons actually living during that era. 11
Hardy’s preoccupation with the Wessex region and the agrarian based communities which it comprises stems from his own childhood upbringing in Dorset and his abiding love for its culture, yet in
Wessex as a fictional world, the reflexive attitudes of a "returning native" become yet more the focus of his concern. It is, in the words of Ian Gregor:
...the most sensitive register of [Hardy’s] ’series of seemings’ [lying] in his shifting attitudes towards the adequacy of his imagined world. In his restless questioning of the idea of Wessex we find the force which continually determines the shape of his fiction ("Hardy’s World" 285)
The overriding preoccupation with the idea of Wessex as a community somehow separate unto itself appears in Hardy’s 1894 preface to Far
From the Madding Crowd:
... the recent supplanting of the class of stationary cottagers ... by a population of more or less migratory labourers ... has led to a break of continuity in local history, more fatal than any other thing to the preservation of legend, folk-lore, close inter-social relations, and eccentric individualities. (Gregor 286)
For Hardy, the "closed" community of his Wessex is threatened to the core by intrusions from the outside, for "legend, folk-lore, close inter-social relations, and eccentric individualities" are fundamental, necessary components of a cohesive, vital community. It is therefore significant that in the four novels in question, the central character who undertakes a return to the community is a very real threat not only to himself in terms of successful reassimilation, but also to the
"rustic chorus" which is Hardy’s Wessex.
Peter J. Casagrande notes in his article "The Shifted ’Centre of
Altruism’ in The Woodlanders" that the "return motif may well be said 12 to be the dominant motif of Hardy’s fiction" (124) and summarizes the
struggle encountered by the "returning natives" of several of Hardy’s major novels. For Casagrande, however, the character’s sense of self
is not the pivotal aspect of the frustrated return; rather, it is the marriage that ensues:
A former rustic ... returns to his native locale ... after a long stay in urban surroundings where he has advanced himself socially and intellectually. The homecoming causes discord, suffering and even death within the rustic community; for the homecomers’ acquired tastes and opinions clash with the more traditional views of family and neighbors, as well as with homely views within themselves which, long kept back, are freed upon return. This internal-external clash of values crystallizes around the choice of a mate ... In each case, the outcome of the marriage choice signals the ultimate significance of the return. (105)
Casagrande’s summary of the return motif is succinct and accurate, yet the choosing of a mate would seem to be but one of many ways in which
an individual attempts to rejoin a community. More importantly, such a view does not adequately explore the psychological - and sociological -
implications of the return and the ultimate failure of reassimilation
upon the psyche of the "returning native." The issue is not, as
Casagrande suggests, merely the discovery of an "appropriate
’particular emotion’ with which to portray the return of a native," nor
"a failure of imagination," nor yet "Hardy’s failure to comprehend
fully through his art the anomaly of life as a returned native" (124).
The larger issue is, rather, the character’s inability to deal with the forces destructive or threatening to community which come from without, and which are to a certain degree embodied in Hardy’s novels
by the "returning native" himself or herself. In the culture shock which accompanies the return, the central character loses a sufficient 13
sense of self to find a place in the original - and perhaps ultimately
for Hardy, any community. Through these "returning natives" Hardy
clearly points to their "inmost emotional and suffering vulnerability
[as] single figures isolated from one another and from the society
[community] which surrounds them" (Deen 218) as at least partially
responsible for their exclusion from the community.
The essential alienation of Hardy’s characters is significant in
that it is both cause and effect of their inability to remain in or
readapt to community. It is an alienation which is born of a lack of
self-knowledge, or self-consciousness:
... modern man can know himself only in so far as he can become conscious of himself - a capacity largely dependent on environmental conditions, the drive for knowledge and control of which necessitated or suggested certain modifications of his original instinctive tendencies. His consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around him... (Jung 80)
With the exception of Tess, and to a lesser degree, Clym, Hardy’s
"returning natives" have engaged in a denial of their "instinctive
tendencies," that is, for Hardy, those characteristics, occupations,
and world views upon which the Wessex idea of community is built.They
have become "split," as it were, in both consciousness and community to
the point that they can never ultimately embrace one community over the
other and they remain observers attempting to participate in community,
but never completely achieving acceptance. Essentially, these
"returning natives" remain alienated, caught in the breech between
self-awareness and knowledge of the world at large.
This alienation contributes heavily to the tension between
individuality and community that lies at the heart of Hardy’s thought. 14 a tension that underlies his representation of the conflict between rural and urban, ignorance and education, simplicity and sophistication, peasant and middle class, and past and present.
Hardy’s ambiguity as to which should take precedence, the individual or the community, is expressed through the sometimes detached, sometimes sympathetic portrayal of his protagonists as they struggle to join the desired community. This "return" to the community, therefore, becomes
Hardy’s metaphor for the basic human need for the experience of self- knowledge and self-validation, that is, for wholeness. The Return of the Native. The Woodlanders. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. and Jude the
Obscure are representative of Hardy’s gradual resolution of this ambiguity in their progressive movement from a focus on the primacy of community to a focus on the primacy of the individual.
The first three of the novels in question. The Return of the
Native. The Woodlanders. and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. illustrate markedly the inextricable connection between self and community. Clym
Yeobright has a clear affinity with Egdon Heath. As much as "Clym’s theoretical intelligence is juxtaposed with the practical and instinctive intelligence of the still-unchristened peasant community from which he has, to his considerable sorrow, been separated"
(Paterson 118), he yet carries with him a part of that community, a part shared in the connection to the Heath itself: he becomes a furze cutter. Unlike Eustacia, Clym understands no degradation in such menial labor on the Heath, perhaps because it is only in this labor that he comes closest to the community in that he shares the manual, heath-bound occupation of many of its residents. Similarly the humble 15 simplicity of furze-cutting serves as an appropriate manifestation of
Hardy’s view of Clym’s true self as the "natural man."
In The Woodlanders. Giles Winterborne and Marty South illustrate most clearly the connection between self and community because they neither leave nor clash with the woodland values of Little Hintock.
The central character, Grace, encounters the reflexive problem of reassimilation, yet her passive nature could be expected to readapt fairly readily. Were it not for the social (outside) forces which compel her father to influence Grace’s matrimonial tastes and her fascination with higher society, she would willingly have fulfilled her early intention of marrying Giles. As it is, Grace acts in contradiction to her true self, not only marrying, but finally staying
in a bad marriage with Fitzpiers.
The connection between self and community is equally noticeable
in Tess. where the heroine’s sense of self is almost entirely dependent
on the natural world around her. For Hardy, Tess seems to be Wessex.
Her sure sense of self is irretrievably shaken by the societal, not the
"natural" dictates, of the community of her birth. This tension
between Tess’s "natural" self and the self she understands in the light
of her recognition of society’s dictates is evident in the reaping
scene months after her return to Marlott from Tantridge:
... a field-woman is a portion of the field; she has somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself with it. (Tess of the D’Urbervilles 123)
It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise D’Urberville, somewhat changed - in the same, but not the same; at the present stage of her existence living as a stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that she was in. (124) 16
Hardy’s final novel, Jude the Obscure, presents, as stated earlier, an inversion of the "return motif." Although Jude does make periodic returns to his community of origin, his primary quest for community assimilation lies in another direction: he aspires to the academic community of Melchester. Commenting on the pathos of Jude’s plight, Leonard W. Deen notes that the society of the novel "has become so internalized that the outer social world appears almost entirely as a reflected and distorted image" and that "Jude is the logical development of a tendency towards the pathos of isolation and self-inflicted punishment clearly visible at least as early as Return of the Native" (218). It is as though Jude has come to the realization that the ideal community is one where the mind and body can exist harmoniously, and that such a community is not necessarily that in which an individual is born and nourished. It can be a community of his own choosing, a perfect meld of self and society. Jude is, of course, ultimately frustrated by the inevitable clash between his own
idealism and the intractability of the society of late Victorian
Britain. This pessimistic portrayal of Jude’s failed attempt to join the community of choice is perhaps indicative of Hardy’s hopelessness of ever truly regaining community in the face of a rapidly changing
Wessex and his despair that his character, Jude, will finally fail to
achieve a reconciliation with self through an understanding of the duality of his nature.
The study of such a view of the workings of community in these
four tragic novels of Hardy can best be undertaken through three
avenues of focus: narrative, environment, and character. The initial 17 area in which the tensions between community membership and exclusion may be regarded is in the narrative itself. In his biography of Hardy,
Michael Millgate notes the "attitude of uninvolved spectatorship which so often characterizes the narrative voice in [Hardy’s] novels" (42), citing as partial causes Hardy’s childhood of sickly dependence and the perhaps resultant quiet, non-participant nature of his early personality.*
To what extent does this narrative of "uninvolved spectatorship" affect the twentieth-century reader’s understanding of the novels and the view of community they provide? On what aspects of community and self does the narrator focus and how is this focus presented to the reader? Does the narrator focus on specifically nineteenth-century psycho-social concerns or do these concerns transcend period distinctions? Do these concerns of the psychological and sociological implications of community have anything to say to twentieth-century readers? To what degree is the narrator’s speech heteroglossic? The reader must question the ways in which the narrator may himself function as a "participant observer" and to what degree reflexivity influences both his presentation of the narrative and his feelings towards it. Lastly, how does the reaction to community and self differ on the part of Hardy’s narrator from the reaction of his characters, and how reliable can one assume these reactions to be?
I will refer to the narratational presence as "the narrator" rather than as "Hardy" because I want to call attention to the various ways in which the narrator presents the tension existing between the community and self. I believe that in Hardy’s fiction there is little distance between the implied author and the narrator, yet the narrator nevertheless remains a reliable spokesperson for Hardy’s beliefs and values. 18
The second area of consideration is that of environment, Hardy's representation of the community. By viewing community in terms of the varying cultures presented in the novels, one must consider the milieu as Hardy presents it. What are the natures of the significant communities in the novels and how adequate can one consider Hardy’s presentation of them to be? How are they defined within the novels?
Which, if any, of these communities are presented as being ideal? How close are the connections of the fictional communities with the communities experienced by Hardy’s contemporaries, as closely as can be ascertained a century later? How do the communities presented in
Hardy’s four novels function as social history? And finally, what is the connection between community and the individual in the novels; do these ever come into balance and, if not, which is given precedence?
Because of the humanistic nature of community, close scrutiny must also be given to the role and nature of character in the novels in question. Several key questions are useful to understand how character serves to portray the tension between community membership and partial or full community exclusion. It is first necessary, of course, to probe into the reasons why the central characters do not regain complete membership in the original community. What is it about their personalities, their perceptions, and their experiences before leaving the community, while away, and after their return that prevents them from reassimilating. Similarly, one must understand what motivates
Hardy’s characters to attempt a return to the community, and how they are affected by their failures, partial or full, to gain acceptance.
As a key to discerning the motivating forces for return, the 19 character’s sense of self is vital, as it is the relation of this conception of self to the unsuccessful attempt to belong fully to the community that is in question. In other words, is there a causal relation between sense of self and failure to reassimilate? And finally, what do the psychological states of Hardy’s characters add to our understanding of the novels as social history?
A study of Hardy’s characters in view of community must also consider the ways in which the central characters function as
"participant observers". What is the result? Does the fact that they undertake this role, consciously or unconsciously, influence their inability to rejoin the community? And to what extent does reflexivity affect these characters in their quest for community membership?
Finally, what does the heteroglossia of the characters’ speech reveal about their notions of community and self?
The goal of this dissertation will be to use these questions on the workings of narrative, environment, and character to reach a fuller understanding of the issue of community and self which lies at the core of these four of Hardy’s major novels. An approach to the novels by literary, psychological and sociological avenues will serve to emphasize Hardy’s prominence as both a writer and a social historian of the individual’s understanding of himself and his place in the larger community. 20 WORKS CITED
Victor Barnouw. Culture and Personality, ed. 4. Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1985.
Peter J. Casagrande. "The Shifted ’Centre of Altruism’ in The Woodlanders: Thomas Hardy’s Third ’Return of a Native’." English Literary History. 38 (1971), 104-25.
Leonard W. Deen. "Heroism and Pathos in Hardy’s Return of the Native." Nineteenth Century Fiction. 15 (1960), 207-19.
John Fowl es and Jo Draper. Thomas Hardy’s England. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984.
Ian Gregor. "Hardy’s World." English Literary History, 38 (1971), 274-093.
Calvin S. Hall and Vernon J. Nordby. A Primer of Jungian Psychology. New York: New American Library, 1973.
Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure. P.N. Furbank, ed. London: MacMillan, 1974.
— . The Return of the Native. P.N. Furbank, ed. London: MacMillan, 1974.
— . less of the d’Urbervilles. P.N. Furbank, ed. London: MacMillan, 1974.
— . The Woodlanders. P.N. Furbank, ed. London: MacMillan, 1974.
Christopher Herbert. Culture and Anomie. Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago UP, 1991.
Carl G. Jung. Memories. Dreams. Reflections. Aniela Jaffe, ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
— . The Undiscovered Self. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1958.
Michael Millgate. Thomas Hardy. A Biography. New York: Random House, 1982.
Robert A. Nisbet. The Sociological Tradition. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1966.
John Paterson. "The Return of the Native as Anti Christian Document." Nineteenth Century Fiction. 14 (1959), 111-27. 21 Merryn Williams. Thomas Hardy and Rural England. London: MacMillan, 1973. CHAPTER I
The Return of The Native: An Earnest Attempt at Reassimilation
Chronologically, the first of the four novels to be studied. The
Return of The Native is unquestionably the one which most readily comes to mind when one thinks of the problem of the individual’s failed
attempt to return to the community in Hardy’s fiction. Clym Yeobright
is the quintessential "returning native" and in him the myriad problems
of the attempt at reassimilation are particularly clear. Born and
raised on Egdon Heath as its "native son," Clym has received what
Hardy’s narrator calls an "early education," and by the promptings and
ambitions of his mother has moved away to become a citizen of the
fashionable, urban world of Paris and the diamond cutting trade. Thus
shedding all outward remnants of his Egdon upbringing and identity, or
so it would appear, Clym becomes an outsider to his native community.
When he returns to the Heath in Book Two, Chapter Three, he returns as
an outsider, and he is unknowingly self-deceived both in his concept of
the true nature of the community to which he returns and in his
understanding of self and his true role within that community. Because
of this unconscious self-deception, Clym’s attempts at reassimilation
are doomed from the onset.
22 23
1
The Detached Observation
The narrator Hardy employs to recount his story is crucial to our understanding of the tragedy of The Return of the Native, and functions significantly in three determining ways: 1) he effectively creates the community of Egdon by serving as the medium through which the setting and characterization are refracted, thus influencing the reader’s views of these two vital components; 2) he provides a fuller understanding of the implications of community and self for Clym as well as the sociohistoric significance of the novel through the relationship he maintains with the community; and 3) while maintaining an air of realism for the narrative audience, he allows the authorial audience to view the community as an artificial construct, thereby emphasizing the extent of the difficulty of attempting, let alone achieving, reassimilation.
Hardy’s third person, undramatized narrator exerts his influence over our perception of the physical community from the onset. His descriptiveness in portraying the natural setting of Egdon Heath creates the illusion of Wessex as a place, thereby establishing a sense of realism for this fictional community. The narrator’s emphasis of the particulars of Egdon as a natural setting also serves to create the atmosphere, or "personality" of the community. The opening passage of
Chapter One ensures the reader’s understanding of the Egdon community as one that is almost stiflingly self-sufficient and ingrown:
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as 24
Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which has the whole heath for its floor. (RN 33)
In this description, the narrator sets the somber tone that carries throughout the novel and influences how the reader perceives the Heath
both as setting and as character, thus creating certain expectations of
Egdon as a community. The emphasis on the dull, neutral tones of the
setting and the absence of any human being in this opening description cause Hardy’s audience to be unsurprised at the narrow and somewhat oppressive community which they come to know as the novel unfolds. It
immediately provokes the question of why Clym should choose to return from Paris to such a desolate and uninviting locale.
This opening passage is significant as well in the way that it exemplifies the narrator’s detached observer status in portraying community through the actions of its members. The narrator’s wry presentation of the activities of both peasant and intermediate class members remains equally non-judgmental and unimpassioned whether the event be as amusing as Christian Cantle’s fearful prattlings to his fellows on Rainbarrow, Susan Nunsuch’s determined fashioning of the wax figure, or Clym’s sorrow over his mother’s death. In this sense, the personality of the narrator parallels both the character of the Heath
on which his community is placed, and the character of the community
itself as one which is not entirely warm and accepting in its welcome
to the returned native, Clym, but rather greets him with indifference.
Although the narrator in The Return of the Native remains detached and equally distant from all characters, he does provide
inside views into the minds of a number of these personages, thus 25
allowing a fuller appreciation of the many facets of the Egdon community. Wayne C. Booth notes that "any sustained view, of whatever depth, temporarily turns the character whose mind is shown into a narrator." (164) This "shifting" of narration thus ensures that the
reader will experience the community from a number of perspectives,
giving both a fuller understanding of what the community actually is,
and providing information about the community and its members that Clym
does not possess. Seeing the community in this way makes the reasons
for Clym’s failed assimilation the more clear to the reader because it
emphasizes Clym’s misapprehension of his community.
Along with the description of the natural setting of the
community, the narrator’s colorful portrayal of the peasant faction and
its activities contributes to the creation of a realistic community in
the novel. In addition to the presentation of the visual scene
conjured up by the description of the bonfire festivities, for
instance, the detail provided by the narrator allows a clear, realistic
portrayal of the peasant group as people, rather than merely as
characters. Because the peasants are described so vividly, they
provide as significant a grounding for the community as does the
physical setting itself. And in a sense, of course, they are the
community.
Just as the detailed presentation of the Egdon peasants enables
the narrator to create an illusion of a realistic community, it also
serves to focus the narrative audience on the character of Clym, as it
throws his character into striking relief. Hardy’s narrator influences 26 the reader’s expectations in the narrative presentation of the protagonist, Clym, in the opening passages of Book Third, Chapter One:
The observer’s eye was arrested, not by his face as a picture, but by his face as a page; not by what it was, but by what it recorded. His features were attractive in the light of symbols, as sounds intrinsically common become attractive in language, and as shapes intrinsically simple become interesting in writing. (RN 191)
There is no emotion in this depiction of Clym’s physiognomy; rather it
is an almost clinical curiosity with which our initial view of Clym is presented. In the description of Clym’s face, the detachment and the
attempt at control on the part of the narrator are strikingly clear.
By bringing the audience to the eye-level of the "observer," the narrator subtly includes us as participants in the community, and our
initial view of Clym parallels, to a certain extent, that of his fellow
Egdonites. Moreover the implicit comparison of Clym’s face with a book
serves as an appropriate expression of the puzzle he presents to the
peasant faction of that community.
Booth states in The Rhetoric of Fiction that:
Commentary about the moral and intellectual qualities of characters always affects our view of the events in which those characters act. It consequently shades over imperceptibly into direct statements about the meaning and importance of events themselves. (196)
The description of Clym quoted above becomes strikingly significant
when viewed in light of Booth’s statements. In this introduction to
Clym’s physical appearance, Hardy’s narrator equates his facial
features with symbols, his face with a "record" rather than an entity
in itself with its own inherent identity. He suggests that Clym’s
face, and therefore his character, is less a discrete self than a
reflector, or recorder, that we must read in order to understand the 27 community surrounding him. The character of Clym can thus be seen as a prerequisite for the workings of community within the novel.
Throughout The Return of the Native, the narrator’s presentation of Clym as introspective, ascetic, and philosophical is in line with his delineation of the natural component of community, Egdon Heath, but is at odds with the view offered of the peasant faction of community, which is vibrant, earthy, and free from angst. This comparison suggests that Clym is able to achieve accord, and therefore reassimilation, with the natural aspect of his natal community, but not with its societal component. Like the heath, he is a solitary figure and because of his make-up cannot become sufficiently gregarious to take part fully in the human aspect of community. This is born out by
Clym’s integration into the heath as a furze-cutter and by his subsequent failure as an open-air preacher to its inhabitants.
The narrator’s relationship to the community presented in The
Return of the Native is detached, yet keenly knowledgeable of and sensitive to the interworkings of community and self. The general detachment of Hardy’s narrator parallels both the nature of Egdon Heath and Clym’s relationship to the social community and fulfills a vital function in the novel. More than serving as a vehicle for Hardy’s personal philosophy, it allows the reader to view Clym, his community, and his failure to achieve reassimilation dispassionately. It contributes to the novel’s realism by providing us a means of joining the narrator, and Clym, in the process of observer-participation.
Perhaps most important, this narrative detachment allows the audience 28 to understand and appreciate the critical function of Clytn’s sense of self as an obstacle to his reassimilation into the community.
The close observation of the Egdon community by the narrator reveals the depth of his knowledge of that community and its culture.
The intimacy of this knowledge gives the impression that the narrator is somehow writing from within the community he describes. To the degree that the narrator seems part of the Egdon community, his identity becomes that of the author’s second self. Just as there are parallels between the character of Clym and Hardy his creator, so are there connections between the narrator’s voice and Hardy’s own. These connections are clearly born out of Hardy’s experience with all parts of the Wessex community he has fictionalized here: his origins within the peasant community, his affinity with the natural surroundings, and his membership in the intermediate class afforded him by his adult status as a writer.
In addition to these communal, natural, and social elements of
Hardy’s experience that so emphatically imform his fiction must be added another. The overbearing role of fate in human life was a view held by many members of the peasant class in general, but particularly
by Hardy’s family. Indeed, fatalism so permeates Hardy’s fiction that
its significance in the protagonists’ attempts at reassimilation and
individuation cannot be discounted.
In The Return of the Native, fate affects the lives of all the
major characters. The circumstances of Tamsin’s wedding, the
misdirection of the coins, and most particularly Mrs. Yeobright’s visit
to Clym’s cottage all conspire to cause the tragic events of the 29 novels. Because of these manifestations of "fate", Mrs. Yeobright,
Eustacia, and Wildeve lose their lives and Tamsin suffers widowhood, a circumstance which in her case leads to greater well-being. Most significantly, however, Clym loses an essential component of himself - his capacity for emotion - and as a result his ability to achieve either full community membership or to approach a sense of individuation remains stifled.
The chapter in which the implication of fate’s intervention becomes most clear is appropriately titled: "A Conjunctive and its
Result upon the Pedestrian." Hardy’s use of such a casual word as
"conjunctive" for such a far-reaching act of fate emphasizes the extent of his fatalism. The word "pedestrian" is significant as well, for it symbolizes not only Mrs. Yeobright, but also the other characters as they walk on the road of life.
In this chapter wherein Mrs. Yeobright misinterprets the meaning of the closed door of Clym’s house, her conversation with the child
Johnny Nunsuch convincingly conveys the narrational preoccupation with and deference to the workings of fate.
’Tis a long way home, my child, and we shall not get there until evening.
I shall, said her small companion. I am going to play marnels afore supper, and we go to supper at six o’clock, because father comes home. Does your father come at six too?
No: he never comes; nor my son either, nor anybody.
What have made you so dosn? Have you seen a ooser?
I have seen what’s worse — a woman’s face looking at me through a window pane. ... If they had only shown signs of meeting my advances half-way how well it might have been done! But there is no chance ... (RN 306) 30
The resignation implicit in Mrs. Yeobright’s words is an effective illustration of fatalism that pervades the novel. No one comes to settle the dispute, to ease the lonely woman’s emotional pain, or to give her adequate medical treatment. Because of the overriding function of fate, "there is no chance."
Hardy’s vision of the reality of fate and the awe with which he views it extend to his narrator’s presentation of the many
"conjunctions" in the novel. In the narrational description of Mrs.
Yeobright’s deathbed on the heath, for example, fate is concretized in the symbol of the adder, the creature whose bite causes her demise. In the futile attempt to cure the wound by folk-medicine, the peasant Sam displays the adder to be used in the remedy:
The live adder regarded the assembled group with a sinister look in its small eye, and the beautiful brown and jet pattern on its back seemed to intensify with indignation. Mrs. Yeobright saw the creature, and the creature saw her: she quivered throughout, and averted her eyes. (RN 315)
In this passage, the narrator uses this somewhat overbearing symbolic treatment of the adder to emphasize the notion that fate ultimately controls human beings’ lives, and that is does so with malign rather than beneficent intent. When she looks fate in the eye and discerns the extent of "its" antipathy, Mrs. Yeobright can only
"[avert] her eyes." As the narrator suggests, the recognition of the crushing role of fate that Mrs. Yeobright acquires in this visual interchange is what truly kills her.
In addition to their perception of fate as the prime determination of human lives, other close parallels in view of community on the part of author and narrator exist, as well, throughout 31
The Return of the Native. Both possess a heightened awareness of and
appreciation for the sublimity of nature. This respect for the
beauties of the natural world is evident throughout most of Hardy’s work, and is most prominent in The Return of the Native in the narrator’s description of the heron rising out of the heath, refracted
here through the character of Mrs. Yeobright:
While she looked a heron rose on that side of the sky and flew on with his face towards the sun. He had come dripping wet from some pool in the valleys, and as he flew the edges and linings of his wings, his thighs, and his breast were so caught by the bright sunbeams that he appeared as if formed of burnished silver. Up in the zenith where he was seemed a free and happy place, away from all contact with the earthly ball to which she was pinioned; and she wished that she could arise uncrushed from its surface and fly as he flew then. (RN 309)
The acute sensitivity to the heron’s beauty and the implicit connection between its existence and that of the humans below as displayed in this passage enhance the reader’s acceptance of the natural setting as a forcefully real component of the community of Egdon.
A second connection between author and narrator inThe
Return of the Native is the detailed focus on folk events, such as the maypole celebration at the novel’s end. Hardy’s notebooks and writings are rich with anecdotes and scenes depicting the many Wessex folk festivals and his emphasis on their role as punctuating the community finds expression in the narrator’s vivid, almost joyous, presentation of these festivities in the novel. Such traditional events as the
Mummer’s party at Bloom’s End, the Guy Fawkes bonfire celebration and the maypole celebration serve to bind together both intermediate and peasant components of the community as well as to ground their existence in the larger scheme of things. 32
Yet even in his description of these traditional communal events,
Hardy’s narrator remains keenly aware of the divisions which separate the classes, undoubtedly a preoccupation of Hardy’s throughout his life. Although the intermediate and peasant classes do come together in the community festivals, there yet remains an unbridgeable distance between them. Arising, perhaps, out of this recognition is a certain ambivalence towards the community on the part of the narrator, as though he cannot decide with which faction he wishes to align himself, intermediate or peasant. This uncertainty is portrayed, to a large degree, by the shifting of narration between characters, which serves the dual purpose of allowing us to experience a variety of reactions to and angles of participation in the community as well as signifying the narrators - and Hardy’s - about which is the truest component of community, and therefore the one with which he wants to be aligned.
Similarly, the community represented in The Return of the Native fulfills parallel functions for author and protagonist. For both, the community entails the same acute appreciation of and longing for the rural, more natural setting as it does for the narrator. Hardy’s renunciation of his architecture career in London and his subsequent return to Dorset is strikingly similar to Clym’s return from Paris to
Egdon.
An even more significant parallel is this act of return itself, particularly since both Hardy and Clym have undergone important changes in self during their experiences in urban societies. Hardy’s careful separation of his family associations in Dorset and the upper-class society in which he moved as a writer would seem to indicate that he 33 was aware of this changing self. Clym, on the other hand, remains oblivious to such distinctions.
Finally, both Hardy and Clym look to the natal community to verify crucial aspects of the self by means of preserving a personal past. Hardy’s writings functioned very clearly for him as an historical record of the time in which his parents lived and in which he lived as a child. Accompanying this recording of social history is a very apparent nostalgia for a culture which, by the end of the century, would be irrevocably lost. The community in The Return of the
Native afforded Hardy the opportunity of not only recording that lost age, but of somehow preserving for himself that culture of his childhood which had vanished with it.
The extent of the biographical parallels lies outside the focus of this discussion, yet it would be remiss to ignore the similarity in author’s and protagonist’s relationships to their mothers. For Hardy,
as for Clym, the return to the natal community provides close contact with that most central figure of childhood. In the development of
selfhood for both returning natives, maternal influence was a major determinant and one whose force remain undiminished throughout the
sons’ lives. In this sense, a return to the community serves metaphorically as a return to the womb with its attendant nurturing and
protection from the world without.
Hardy’s portrayal of the community in The Return of the Native is
fairly realistic, yet because of the narrative style he employs to
present that community, it remains for the authorial audience
essentially an artificial construct. The fragmentation of the 34 representative social groups, although essentially sound historically, is nevertheless rather forced in the novel to the extent that one wonders if the Egdon community is one whole, or two separate communities superimposed on one geographical area. Equally strained is the significance placed on the folk events which punctuate the community. Because these are so emphatically described at the expense of much description of more everyday occurrences, the resulting picture of the community has an air of artificiality.
Perhaps most artificial, however, is the portrayal of the community as isolated, both in time and in space, from the rest of
English society. Much of this quality of isolation is conveyed through the portrait of the heath as a character whose visage, like
Clym’s, is both singular and solitary. In this sense, Egdon Heath functions very much like a dream-scape that has no tangible connection with a global geography.
This tinge of artificiality that covers Hardy’s otherwise
realistic portrayal of community in The Return of the Native is far
from detrimental to our perception of community and selfhood in the
novel. Rather, it highlights the difficulty inherent in Clym’s
attempted reassimilation by emphasizing the impossibility of remaining
unchanged once outside of the community, or within it for that matter.
Just as Hardy’s presentation of the Egdon community contains shades of
artificiality, so does Clym possess a deluded view of the community to
which he returns. He sees that community, in other words, as something
other than what it really is, and he sees himself with an equally
distorted vision. 35
It is in this aspect of portraying the community and the protagonist’s relationship to it that the parallels between author and narrator become most crucial. Ultimately, Hardy is able to employ his narrator to so effectively convey the sense and understanding of
community because he himself has been a member of a community closely
similar to the one he describes in the novel, has left and although he
has returned to that community as an adult, yet remains in some way
irretrievably out of it. He possesses, in short, both the desire for
and the detachment from that community to present Clym’s dilemma with the most artistry and realism. He is able to see the community as it
actually is, and as the returning native wants to view it. Hardy
conveys this immediacy and understanding to his narrator who, in turn,
allows the narrative audience to participate in the same disappointed
attempt at reassimilation as does Clym. 36
2
The Community Apart
The community to which Clym returns is, as Hardy defines it, a complex one. In its broadest sense, the community of The Return of the
Native is Egdon Heath: the human, animal, insect, and plant life bound by this specific locale; yet it is more than that. It is an entity which comprises the natural, the spiritual, and the social. It is a climate which influences the philosophies and actions of its human inhabitants. This specific tract of land that Andrew Enstice terms one of Hardy’s "enclosed landscapes" (x) fits that definition closely. It is truly a "world self-sufficient and self-centered, in which all characters, buildings, and events are chosen and described by their close dependence on each other" (x).
Physically, Egdon Heath is most notably an uncultivated expanse of land upon which a collection of villages is scattered. In an agricultural sense, the heath is barren, yet Hardy is emphatic that in a natural sense it is far from barren. Animal, insect, and vegetable life permeates the heath and images of these abound in the novel. Many of Hardy’s most lyric passages document the biological life of the heath and he emphasizes the inextricable connection between this
"lower" form of life and the meaner, most basic qualities of human life through The Return of the Native, as Merryn Williams notes so
insightfully:
Yet it is also a "place perfectly accordant with man’s nature ... like man, slighted and enduring". The heath can be humanised by people who respond to it fully; the 37
eventual survivors are those who have been slighted and yet have the strength to endure. (136-7)
Hardy uses the intermingling of humble beasts and humans to create many of the most powerful and significant scenes in the novel: the shaggy heath croppers look on unperturbed while Venn and Wildeve gamble with others’ fates; Clym works among the animal life of the heath without disturbing them, and Mrs. Yeobright watches with envy the graceful freedom of the heron as it soars above her. This continual, everyday juxtaposition of human and animal life with its implications of the interconnectedness of human and "sub-human" forms of life is essential to Hardy and to his notion of the community of Egdon Heath.
Community comprises not just human life nor solely animal life, but exists as an inextricable combination of the two.
In its spiritual or psychic qualities, Egdon Heath is old, isolated, and "weird" in tone. Perhaps the most significant of these characteristics is that of isolation:
As with some persons who have lived long apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities ... Civilization was its enemy ... (RN 35)
This isolated quality of Egdon Heath, and of the community to which
Clym returns not only indicates a society and accompanying world-view at far removes from the civilized, intellectual sphere of worldly
Paris, but it also implies either that Clym is in some way, unconsciously or unconsciously, seeking solitude and/or isolation, or that he completely misapprehends the community of his birth.
Reassimilating to a community whose primary characteristics are those of isolation and solitude would seem to be challenging, at best, and 38 would appear to invite the inevitable tragedy. Leonard W. Deen views
Egdon Heath symbolically, indicating "man’s unchangeable place in nature," as a "[measure of] each character’s acceptance of his earthly fate." (209) It is thus an environment which invites, or perhaps even requires self-scrutiny and self-understanding only in its own harsh terms. In this sense, the heath, which serves as the literal and figurative ground of the community, is the catalyst to self-knowledge, or at the very least to self-acceptance.
Many authors have noted the Darwinian implications of The Return of the Native and the harsh, inexorable, elemental nature of the heath indeed invites such an interpretation. In his discussions of Darwin’s influences on Hardy’s fiction, Roger Ebbatson notes that:
Darwin regarded isolation as a key factor in production of new species on a limited scale. As Hardy read this with regard to his imagined Wessex he saw that isolation would tend to an inbred intensity of emotional interdependence; people so "insulated get charged with emotive fluid like a Leyden jar with electric". (20)
The implications of this Darwinian view of Egdon Heath are twofold: for the community itself, and for Clym’s character, which will be discussed at a later point. A community whose "emotionally interdependent" members are both "insulated" and "electrically charged" is not stable, but rather an extremely volatile one. It is not to a peaceful, self contented community that Clym returns, but to one whose psychic state is in a constant state of flux, of evolution. Like the natural world, the community of the heath will not, can not remain stagnant, and has most likely evolved, even if only imperceptibly, during the period of
Clym’s absence, a fact of which he is tragically unaware. 39
Sadly, Clym’s love for the primal, elemental character of Egdon
is so strong that it prevents him from regarding the human community of the Heath in any different light. Egdon Heath’s dual role as a "symbol of man’s unconscious and as actual physical nature" (Meisel 78) is
significant in that Clym is blind to the evolving nature both of his own self and of the community to which he returns. He either does not realize, or can not accept, that he is no longer the same person who left Egdon for Paris, nor is the Heath the same community that he
remembers from his boyhood.
Noorul Hasan writes convincingly about what he sees as the
"mythologisation of the heath ... [as] essential to Hardy’s creation of
a cultural artefact" (44). "Mythologisation" implies timeless
endurance, a quality with which Egdon Heath is well endowed. Hardy makes clear that a fundamental aspect of the community, Egdon Heath,
escapes a definite limitation of time:
On Egdon there was no absolute hour of the day. The time at any moment was a number of varying doctrines professed by the different hamlets, some of them having originally grown up from a common root, and then become divided by secession, some having been alien from the beginning. (RN 154)
Just as Egdon escapes the constraints of the diurnal time, so does it
also exist separately from any sense of chronological time. Although
Hardy states in his Preface to the novel that "the date at which the
following events are assumed to have occurred may be set down as
between 1840 and 1850 ... (RN 29) he, in fact, creates an Egdon which
seems to escape even this vague chronology. It has an aspect older than
the ages, its beginnings only dimly perceived in pre-history, its
future equally unknown. Isolated from the "civilized" world, the 40 community of Egdon is isolated as well from the Western concept of time, its inhabitants thus propelled into a sort of limbo existence.
In this world, the "busy outsider’s ancient times are only old; his old times are still new; his present is futurity" (Williams 131).
The adequacy of Hardy’s presentation of this multiform community of Egdon must be called into question in order to assess fully its implications for the failure of the protagonist to reassimilate. A look at the presentation of the community in its physical, psychic, and social attitudes is again telling. Critics’ reactions to Hardy’s portrayal of the physique of Egdon Heath range from pronouncing it
"bathetic" (Bloom), "melodramatic," and "over-drawn," to "sublime."
Certain of Hardy’s descriptions of the Egdon wilds do go beyond the expected perception of the natural environment. Egdon Heath is certainly portrayed as "larger than life" both as a tract of land and as an entity which has been "mythologised" as critics such as Noorul
Hasan and Avrom Fleishman suggest. In this sense, the natural world of
Egdon Heath is not "realistically" painted. The heightened sensitivity of nature, and hence the Heath, which Hardy brings us, however, serves
a vital function in the creation of community in The Return of the
Native, for without it, the impact of the natural and psychic aspects
of the setting would be severely diminished. The ageless, solitary
qualities of the natural community become palpable as we see, feel, and
hear the characteristics of the Heath:
Throughout the blowing of these plaintive November winds that note bore a great resemblance to the ruins of human song which remain to the throat of fourscore and ten. It was a worn whisper, dry and papery, and it brushed so distinctly across the ear that, by the accustomed, the material minutiae in which it originated could be realized 41
as by touch. It was the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes, and these were neither stems, leaves, fruit, blades, prickles, lichen, nor moss.
They were the mummied heath-bells of the past summer, originally tender and purple, now washed colourless by Michaelmas rains, and dried to dead skins by October suns. So low was an individual sound from these that a combination of hundreds only just emerged from silence... (RN 81)
In this single excerpt of Hardy’s presentation of Egdon Heath, we receive a clear view of the environmental aspect of community in the novel. The voice of the Heath as conveyed by the wind is "plaintive",
"ruined" and old. It is a voice which can be touched by those
"communicants" of the Heath and in which the voices of all such
inhabitants of the Heath - human and "vegetable" alike - combine. It
is a sound in which the individual is effaced to silence and in which only "a combination of hundreds" finds a barely audible voice.
Moreover, this voice knows not the constraints of time, but survives each successive dying cycle of the years. Through descriptions such as this. Hardy clearly depicts the natural community to which Clym returns.
What then, of his portrayal of the social elements which form a vital part of the community of The Return of the Native? How clearly do we understand the implications of the social structure of the Egdon community as Clym finds them? The social aspect of the Egdon community
parallels the variety of its natural life. Its villages are
"scattered", and the cohesiveness of its inhabitants in a social sense
is thus marginal, at best. Of those who dwell in this isolated,
fragmented society Hardy notes: "In name they were parishioners, but
virtually they belonged to no parish at all" (RN 145). John Paterson 42 writes convincingly of the religious implications of this quality of the heath-dwel1ers ("The Return of the Native as Anti-Christian
Document" 123) yet there exist as well additional implications for the nature of the heath community.
Just as the heath dwellers do not function as faithful communicants in the liturgical life of the parish, so do they also fail to achieve a close-knit social aspect to their community. Rather, they remain fragmented, isolated in their villages, and in their view of social class, for in terms of class, the Egdon community is as fractured as are the villages and parishes.
Simply put, Egdon society comprises two classes: the peasant class, ignorant and steeped in tradition, who are seen primarily in terms of the heath and as labourers thereon; and that "higher" class which so interested Hardy, the class which John Paterson calls the
"gentility of the heath" ("The ’Poetics’ of The Return of the Native,"
214) - the Yeobrights, the Vyes, Venn, and Wildeve. As Merryn Williams notes, Hardy’s focus is on the members of this class:
His real preoccupation is with the ’interesting and better informed class’ which he describes in some detail in less—the independent, intermediate class to which all his major characters tend to belong. ... [This group] was more responsive to the pressures of education and industrialism than the ordinary labourers, and more likely to have an indigenous culture. (115)
The focus in The Return of the Native clearly is on the more
"interesting and better informed class" and the characters of this class do prove to be "more responsive to the pressures of education", yet it is difficult to say that they have an indigenous culture, or sense thereof, while the common-folk of the heath do not. They have a 43 strong sense of class, of "who they are", yet in The Return of the
Native it is the heath labourers who seem to have the more indigenous culture. Ironically, in his misguided attempts to better the lot of these heath labourers, Clym fails to recognize that, in many ways, their sense of community and culture is stronger than that of his own class.
Often relegated to secondary stature, the peasant faction of the community is seen by some to be merely of minor, "background" importance, yet critics such as Handlin and Woolf see this peasant class as fulfilling a much greater role in the environment of the novel. Virginia Woolf notes that "... it is not the part of the peasants in the Wessex novels to stand out as individuals. They compose a pool of common wisdom, of common humour, a fund of perpetual life" (259). No other passage in The Return of the Native illustrates these elements of "common wisdom," "humour," and "perpetual liveliness" more delightfully than does that detailing the bonfire celebration:
The vagary of Timothy Fairway was infectious. The turf- cutter seized old Oily Dowden, and, somewhat more gently, poussetted with her likewise. The young men were not slow to imitate the example of their elders, and seized the maids; Granfer Cantle and his stick jigged in the form of a three-legged object among the rest; and in half a minute all that could be seen on Rainbarrow was a whirling ofdark shapes amid a boiling confusion. (RN 58)
The friendly banter over Christian Cantle’s superstitious weaknesses which precedes the dancing, the spunky "second childhood" of Granfer
Cantle, and the wild abandonment of the dance all reveal the social life of this peasant component of the Egdon community. Yes, these peasants may rightly be seen as stereotypical characters, yet they are not entirely without individuality. 44
In a very real sense, the peasant component of the Egdon community is the only faction which comes close to achieving the close- knit, self-accepting interdependence of true community. They know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, understand each other’s singularities of character, and are able to come together easily as a group.
Individually and collectively, they compose a crucial part of the community of the heath. It is in this most crucial part that we gain the clearest insight into the Egdon community as it truly is, for the society of the heath, that is the peasant component, represents the very heart of the Egdon community. Perry Meisel comments that "the barrenness of the soil on the heath exposes the community ... with the bonfires ablaze, the community functions at its most primitive level to the discerning spiritual eye" (77). In contrast to the soil on which they live, the peasant society is abundantly alive, blazing like the bonfires, primitive and elemental, completely sufficient unto itself.
The failure to recognize its true qualities is paramount to Clym’s tragedy.
The education of the peasant class on Egdon Heath is notable for its absence. These are people steeped in superstition and folklore, retaining much of the primitive nature of the culture of pre-history.*
The humorous character of Christian Cantle illustrates the superstition and ignorance of the Dorset laborer quite well. Cantle, described as
Merryn Williams notes the realism of this presentation of peasant ignorance in Thomas Hardv and Rural England: "In fact the country [Dorset] was one of the most backward in England, in the sense of being one of the poorest and least industrialized, and this partly accounts for the survival of many of the old customs and superstitions which Hardy records. (IIO-III) 45
"a faltering man, with reedy hair, no shoulders, and a great quantity of wrist and ankle beyond his clothes" (RN 52), displays his ignorance in his "painfully circular eyes " (RN 53) and the passive way in which he allows superstition to dominate his life. For Christian Cantle, the old adage "No moon, no man" (RN 52) not only excuses, but promulgates his fearful timidity. His singular, almost caricature-like appearance and intense fearfulness make him an apt representative of the ignorance of the less-well-off component of the Egdon community.*
Egdon’s peasants, therefore, are essentially isolated from nineteenth-century society by their ignorance of the knowledge and accepted world-view of the era. They are so entrenched in the dark ignorance of Egdon Heath that they can function only in the confines of their class. Hardy does not stipulate that the Egdon peasants are more ignorant or superstitious than the peasants in his other novels, but he does certainly suggest a darker side to their ignorance. The intense flames of the bonfires, the "demoniac measure" of the dance upon
Rainbarrow, and the voodoo-like activities of Susan Nunsuch, exemplify the dark qualities which appear time and again in the peasant faction.
A glance at the speech of a representative of the Egdon peasant community, Timothy Fairway, further reveals the nature of this class, the interworkings of its members, and the relationship existing with
In discussing young Cantle’s place in what he sees to be the anti- Christian nature of The Return of the Native. John Paterson writes that Christian Cantle is noteworthy in his "... relationship to the pagan community of peasants, and, specifically in his separation from that community. Up to a certain point, of course, his Christianity is, like that of his country brethren, rooted in primitive superstition." ("The Return of the Native as Anti-Christian Document" 125) 46 the intermediate class and results in a clearer view of the meaning of community for this social group. Fairway’s words, drawn from the bonfire event discussed above, are particularly significant in that they occur during one of the most notable "community events" in the novel, particularly for the peasant class. In this scene, the group gathered around the bonfire notices and comments on the distant light of Eustacia’s signal bonfire:
"To be sure, how near that fire is!" said Fairway. "Seemingly, I can see a fellow of some sort walking round it. Little and good must be said of that fire, surely."
"I can throw a stone there," said the boy.
"And so can I!" said Grandfer Cantle.
"No, no, you can’t my sonnies. That fire is not much less than a mile off, for all that ’a seems so near."
"Tis in the heath, but not furze," said the turf-cutter.
"’Tis cleft-wood, that’s what ’tis," said Timothy Fairway. "Nothing would burn like that except clean timber. And ’tis on the knap afore the old captain’s house at Mistover. Such a queer mortal as that man is! To have a little fire inside your own bank and ditch, that nobody else may enjoy it or come anigh it! And what a zany an old chap must be, to light a bonfire when there’s no youngsters to please." (RN 56)
Fairway’s words clearly indicate his status as a member of the peasant class, particularly in his use of dialectic abbreviations and words such as "cleft-wood", "knap", "anigh", and "zany", yet his knowledge
(or assumptions thereof) of the location and composition of the fire, the easy way that he asserts that knowledge, and its apparent acceptance by the others in the group indicate that his is a slightly higher status in the community than that of the other speakers. Their 47 apparent comfort with Fairway as a spokesman allows the reader to view his words as representative of their class.
In addition to possessing an understanding of the make-up of
Eustacia’s bonfire. Fairway is able to point accurately to its distance from the community of speakers, representing in part his thorough knowledge of the heath. That this distance is not merely physical is equally clear to Fairway, for he notes the differences in class and notion of community embodied in the far-off fire. He refers to Captain
Vye by his title , not by his name, and describes both his personality and manner of interaction within the community as peculiar. It is in
Fairway’s condemnation of the solitude of what he thinks to be the
Captain’s fire that his understanding of community is most clearly visible. Why should one choose to light a bonfire when "there’s no youngsters to please", and more particularly when that fire is so positioned "inside [the] bank" so that others, i.e., the community, are excluded. For Fairway and the social class which he represents,
"community" signifies the acceptance and inclusion of others; it is participation, not solitude.
As strongly as he embraces the community of his fellows. Fairway seems to have the peasant’s mistrust of the world outside that community, represented by Eustacia’s distant bonfire, for he notes that
"little and good [can] be said of that fire." It is significant that
Fairway’s prophetic comment is realized by the novel’s end, thus emphasizing the value of belonging to and staying within the community.
The "intermediate" class element of the Egdon community seems dull and almost lifeless by contrast, yet it too indicates a telling 48 quality of the complex community that is Egdon. The families that constitute this middle class also greatly resemble Hardy’s description of the Egdon villages: scattered. Although there are certainly others living on or near the Heath, the only members of this class which figure in the novel are the Yeobrights, the Vyes, and Wildeve, with
Venn the reddleman intermittently on the fringes. Not insignificantly, these representatives of Egdon’s intermediate class inhabit the edges of the Heath itself, symbolizing their partial involvement with its natural life and, more importantly, with its heart’s blood, the peasant class. As a class, this intermediate class is somewhat detached within its own membership, certainly from the social life of the peasants, and from the untamed wildness of the Heath itself. It is noteworthy that two important intermediate class characters, Mrs. Yeobright and her niece Thomasin, know no fear of the Heath. This fearlessness lies partially, of course, in freedom from superstition, but also perhaps from lack of understanding of the Heath’s true nature and the influence it exerts on its inhabitants. As a man born to this very class, Clym shares in its detachment, a fact of which he is characteristically unaware.
Unfortunately, apart from a few isolated aspects, we see fairly little of the cultural personality of the Yeobrights, Vyes, and
Wildeves. Mrs. Yeobright’s Christmas party, which actually takes on more the character of its peasant guests, provides our principal insight into the "culture" of this intermediate class. We never truly gain any intimate understanding of this aspect of the Egdon community.
Although its members function less stereotypical1y than do Egdon’s 49 peasants, they are no more "real," and the culture of their particular class is not only less colorful, but also less palpable.
There are only three intermediate class inhabitants of Egdon who possess any higher education: Clym, Eustacia, and Wildeve. Yet notably, not one of the three is able to realize his or her potential.
Clym relinquishes his career as a diamond seller, fails to achieve his dream of educating poor children, and emerges in the end as a preacher of vague and ambiguous philosophies which touch but barely those whose minds they are intended to illuminate. In spite of her Budmouth upbringing and lady’s education, Eustacia achieves only a desultory, romantic, and insubstantial existence, while Wildeve’s lack of success in his engineering career leads only to his role as a publican in a remote, provincial tavern. Each is isolated from the role to which he or she was educated, and more importantly, lacks an understanding of either the cause of, or the remedy for that isolation.
The other representatives of the middle class on Egdon Heath possess, certainly, a modicum of education. Mrs. Yeobright and Tamsin are adequately prepared to manage capably their middle-class households and fulfill their responsibilities therein. Captain Vye has retired from his sea-faring career, and like Mrs. Yeobright and Tamsin, asks for and receives nothing higher. They are educated sufficiently to perform their occupations, yet each in his or her own way is somehow lacking in understanding. Mrs. Yeobright lacks understanding of her son’s true nature; in the beginning at least, Tamsin is naive to the ways of the world outside Egdon as well as to certain aspects of human nature, and Captain Vye has no knowledge whatsoever of how to 50 participate in a non-marine society, and more specifically, how to meet the needs of his rebellious granddaughter.
Once again, an analysis of the speech of a representative character provides insight into the phenomenon of community within the novel. As much as Timothy Fairways functions as a representative speaker for the peasant class, so does Mrs. Yeobright serve as spokeswoman for the Heath’s intermediate class. Her conversation with the peasant community gathered round the Guy Fawkes’ bonfire is significant for what it reveals about her class, its relationship with the peasant faction, and its ultimate view of community.
"I am glad to hear that your son Mr. Clym is coming home at Christmas, ma’am," said Sam, the turf-cutter. "What adog he used to be for bonfires!"
"Yes. I believe he is coming," she said.
"He must be a fine fellow by this time," said Fairway.
"He is a man now," she replied quietly.
"I am sorry to stop the talk," said Mrs. Yeobright. "But I must be leaving you now. I was passing down the Anglebury Road, towards my niece’s new home, who is returning to night with her husband; and seeing the bonfire and hearing Olly’s voice among the rest I came up here to learn what was going on. I should like her to walk with me, as her way is mine."
The smooth cadence and measured tones of Mrs. Yeobright’s speech
reveal her to be quietly self-assured. She knows no doubts as to her
position in the community, the superiority and snobbishness of which is
clearly evident in her distinction between the connotations of the word
"fellow," used by Fairway, and "man," her own designation for her son. 51
Her relationship with the members of the peasant faction is
friendly, yet aloof. She is sufficiently attentive to note that she
has "[stopped] the talk," and sufficiently polite to apologize for so doing, yet implicit in her action is her wish to exert her social position to influence a member of the group; she intends that Oily
Dowden will accompany her across the wilds of Egdon Heath. Indeed, her request is posed more as a command, "I should like her to walk with me," and as such it is received, for Oily is quick to leave the festive companionship of her group with the answer, "Ay, sure, ma’am. I’m just thinking of moving."
In spite of her clear distinction between the classes and her
accompanying behavior towards the peasant group, Mrs. Yeobright is not entirely without a sense of the community. She realizes and accepts that the community of Egdon Heath is composed of both the peasant and
intermediate classes and makes an attempt to understand this community
as a whole. She comes to the bonfire group not only to enjoin one of
its members to serve her as an escort, but also to "learn what’s going on" and she does engage in conversation with them, brief though it is.
Mrs. Yeobright seems to possess, in short, a partial understanding of the nature of the Egdon community, although she remains only a partial
participant in its wholeness.
The community which Hardy sets forth in The Return of the Native
is colorful in a subdued way, is unquestionably both aesthetically and
philosophically intriguing, yet is far from what one would call
"ideal." The factors which prevent any "rapprochement" to the ideal
are precisely those which serve as basic characteristics of the locale 52 and the inhabitants of the community: isolation, with its accompanying fragmentation and ignorance, and an air of doomed tragedy. The members of both significant classes within the novel, those of the peasant and those of the intermediate class, suffer alike from these ills.
Hardy’s eagerness to preserve the classical unities in The Return of the Native, the general detachment of his narrator, and the sense of timelessness which pervades the novel all contribute to the isolation implicit in the Egdon community. As noted previously, the locality of
Egdon Heath is removed from the commercial, social, and educational centers of England. Apart from Wildeve’s public house and the furze- cutting enterprise in which Clym joins the peasant class, there is little evidence of the commercial side of life. Diggory Venn sells his reddle, although we never see any of his transactions, and Clym dreams of setting up a school. Nevertheless there is none of the daily concern of bread-winning which makes up so colorful a part in The
Woodlanders. Tess. or Jude. This lack in The Return of the Native creates a sense of isolation from the on-going business of society at large. We see no interchange between the inside and the outside in commercial ventures, with the result that the Egdon community seems divorced from the commercial doings of the world. The apparent rupture between the two is keenly manifested by Clym’s break with the Parisian diamond trade. When he returns to Egdon, no trace of its aspects accompany him.
Socially, Egdon is isolated as well, both externally and internally. That is, it is isolated as a community apart from other communities and its own members are isolated from each other within the 53
Egdon community itself. It is significant that the one-time outsiders,
Wildeve, Captain Vye, and Eustacia, as well as the one-time exile,
Clym, bring with them no social connections. It is as though once they become inhabitants of the Heath, all previous social ties with the outside world are severed. Eustacia longs for the lively, fashionable society she experienced in Budmouth, yet she seems to know no tangible connections to it socially.
The social isolation in the community is paralleled by that within the intermediate class, and to a certain extent, by the isolation of the classes from one another. Apart from the necessary familial responsibilities there exists no social interchange between the Yeobrights, Vyes, or Wildeves. Always conscious of the other, yet rarely interacting, they effectively create no society of their own.
The only social gatherings that occur in the novel are those which involve the peasant class and which revolve around their lifeways: the
Guy Fawkes Day bonfires, the Christmas gathering at the Yeobrights, the
East Egdon dance, and the Maypole celebration. Even when the members of the intermediate class participate in these activities, which they all do to some extent, the events retain their peasant flavor and remain principally the festivities of that class of laboring people.
The fragmentation of the Egdon community which results in the relative isolation of its members joins with the separation, or stratification, of the classes to compound the isolation experienced by the members of the Egdon community. Merryn Williams views this stratification as resulting from occupation, and attempts to place
Clym’s role in this self-imposed fragmentation of the community. She 54 notes that the members of the intermediate class to which Clym belongs:
... consider themselves to belong to a higher class than those who work on the heath. Clym’s attitude is less exclusive, but in the end he finds his vocation, not by working with these people, but by becoming a preacher. ( 118)
Clym’s failed attempt to break down the boundaries of class and thus diminish the air of isolation within the community is significant not only for what it reveals about his character and the nature of social class in Victorian England, but also for its indication of the slowness of change inherent in the community of Egdon Heath. It is as though just as social and occupational conventions are slow to change on
Egdon, so too is its innate quality of isolation. This slowness to change is partially due to the educational component of the Egdon community. The peasant class is prevented from overcoming and casting aside its superstitions just as the intermediate class is prevented from "doing anything" with the education they possess, thus ensuring the isolation of the entire community.
The second aspect which illustrates the extent to which the Egdon community falls short of the "ideal" is revealed through the intermediate class, most particularly through the principal characters themselves. Each of these, Clym, Eustacia, Wildeve, Mrs. Yeobright, and Tamsin, fails to achieve a truly fulfilling existence. Each one is doomed, as it were, to a more or less tragic encounter which will forever alter his or her life and subsequent views of the world. And in some manner, the tragedy of each is irrevocably linked to the 55 community of which they are a part, for "...[Egdon] had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities" (RN 35).
The tragedy of Clym’s life is multifold, and will be discussed in greater depth at a later point. Simply put, he lacks a certain sense of self and purpose, and attempts to reinsert himself into a community to which he is not really suited. And in so doing, of course, he ensures the ultimate tragic altering of "the destinies of at least
[five] people" (RN 295).
As Merryn Williams has suggested, much of Clym’s tragedy revolves around his mischosen and misguided occupations (124). Just as he was ill-suited for the diamond trade in the French capital, so too is he ill-suited for either teaching or preaching on Egdon. Elsewhere, among a people less superstitious and less prosaic, he might function well in these professions. As it is, however, his theories and well-intended attempts at bringing knowledge to his fellows are lost on the Egdon populace. The occupation does not fit the community. Only as a furze- cutter does Clym truly assimilate himself, occupationally, into the community of the Heath. Perhaps this is his true vocation. What is significant, however, is that the vocations Clym does choose do not fit with his upbringing, his experience, his marriage - and most importantly - with his community. Through Clym’s occupational misfortunes, the limiting pattern of the Heath community is clearly seen.
Eustacia is misplaced in the community by her temperament.
Although one questions whether she would find fulfillment, let alone, happiness in any setting, such is certainly not possible on Egdon 56
Heath. Her moods, romantic fancies, and entire mode of being are utterly foreign to the Egdon mindset. While the cause of her own tragedy is very clearly her own nature, it is without doubt compounded by the character of the community to which she has been relegated.
Through Eustacia’s tragic encounter with the Egdon community, we see its close-minded, prosaic, and confining qualities made manifest, as well as the isolation it imposes.
Damon Wildeve is as occupationally misplaced as Clym and as temperamentally ill-suited to Egdon as Eustacia. He is equally unresponsive to his role as publican as to his role as husband and he requires a stimulation of which Egdon is incapable - and undesirous -of providing. Wildeve thrives only on change and Egdon’s face appears changeless to the impatient observer, its slow evolution so tied to the revolving cycles of the seasonal changes of the earth, seemingly frozen in a prehistoric outlook.
Mrs. Yeobright laments her fall in status in having married
"below her station", yet as a middle-class housewife, she has successfully adapted to the life of the heath. Interestingly, she is never considered to be an outsider as Eustacia and Wildeve are, even though she is not born to the Heath. It is, sadly, in her maternal role that Mrs. Yeobright’s tragedy occurs. Having diligently reared
Clym in a manner to ensure that he will better himself and get on in the world, her pride in life lies not only in her own accomplishment, but specifically in Clym’s career in the fashionable world of international diamond trading. Willing to accept for herself the limiting existence imposed by membership in the Egdon community, she is 57 unable to accept such a life for her son. This, combined with her displeasure at his marriage, ensures that the killing rupture with her son will occur. In this manner, Mrs. Yeobright’s tragedy moves beyond the personal tragedy of a mother "repulsed" by her son to a larger tragedy that illuminates the harsh, inexorable nature of the heath.
Her death on the hot lonely expanse reveals this strikingly.
The remaining principal character experiencing a tragic encounter within the Heath community is Tamsin. A simple though intelligent country girl, Tamsin encounters tragedy not by marrying a faithless man who dies while fleeing with another woman, but in the resultant loss of her own, once undiminished joy-in-life. The bouncing girl of the novel’s beginning is replaced by a woman who has been wronged and whose view of life is now tempered. Her evolution to this state is representative of that quality in the heath which always suggests the tragic.
Egdon Heath represents the forces of the unconscious in that it symbolizes limitlessness and liminality; it is a nebulous entity in which raw, elemental energies are at play. For Hardy the unconscious realm is unrestrained, and he focuses most on its darker aspects.
Egdon Heath therefore represents what is often called the shadow
archetype. The powerful energies of the shadow are not negative in
themselves, but rather have the potential for either evil or good. In
Hardy, they follow the former. Egdon Heath as representative of an
unconscious dangerously dominated by the shadow is an environment of
isolation, fragmentation, and tragic negativity where even the ability
for feeling is replaced by a void. 58
In this portrait of a less-than-ideal representation of the society of Egdon Heath, Hardy suggests a curious connection between the community and self, and it is not always clear to which he gives preference. Throughout most of the novel, these two concerns seem to be at odds, vying for superiority much in the same way that an unmatched pair of horses may pull and strain at the yoke. Passages such as those describing the peasant festivities on Rainbarrow, the
Yeobrights’ Christmas gathering, and the dance on the green highlight the communal concern and illustrate the positive functioning of the shadow, thus seeming to give preference to the community, Hardy’s metaphor for the unconscious. Interspersed with these celebrations of community, however, are the presentations of the dark, menacing aspects of the heath, both set in opposition to passages emphasizing consciousness as portrayed by the selfhood of the major characters, of whom Eustacia is a notable example. The opening portions of the renowned "Queen of Night" chapter focus sharply on the self as preeminent:
Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to be entirely in her grasp for a while, had she handled the distaff, the spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favours here, of contumely there,and the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas, the same captious alternation of caresses and blows that we endure now. (RN 93)
The imperious, unconcerned self-consciousness which is Eustacia is manifestly clear in this passage. Hers is the unconcern of the 59
Greek gods towards mankind, and consequently, towards the community.
In Eustacia, the characteristics, talents, and shortcomings of the individual are exemplified, not those of the group, and indeed
Eustacia’s actions consistently bear out this preoccupation with the self.
Intense as this portrait of the self is, and as unabashed its presentation in The Return of the Native. Hardy turns fairly quickly to its opposite, the focus on the collective, the community, of which an individual such as Eustacia is but a part. He pauses in his "Queen of
Might" description to note that:
But celestial imperiousness, love, wrath, and fervour had proved to be somewhat thrown away on netherward Egdon. Her power was limited, and the consciousness of this limitation had biassed her development. Egdon was her Hades, and since coming there she had imbibed much of what was dark in its tone, though inwardly and eternally unreconciled thereto. (RN 94)
Hardy intimates here that the celebration of the individual, of selfhood, and particularly of self-absorption, are incompatible with
"netherward Egdon", and hence with a closed, self-sufficient community.
Community, thus, "limits the development" and eventual power of a realized selfhood. Of all the major characters who perform in The
Return of the Native. Eustacia Vye is assuredly the one with the most fully defined and unashamed sense of self. Yet she, who would seem to epitomize the self for Hardy in the novel, cannot function in the Egdon community; indeed it is her Hades wherein the qualities which comprise her self are blackened, controverted, and turned ugly. Hardy would seem to be saying, in short, that a fully developed selfhood is incompatible with true participation in community. Seen in this way. 60
Eustacia is not a tragic character because she retains her sense of self until the end. Her desperate act of suicide functions, paradoxically, as a final act of the "survival" of the self. Rather than "erode" into the relatively selfless member which the community of
Egdon demands, she puts herself irrevocably beyond such immolation.
Clym, however, functions very differently in the novel. It is clear from the beginning that his sense of self is much more fragile and unformed than Eustacia’s. He has just given up his career to return home and take up a career, the nature of which is fairly nebulous and idealistic, at best. He is not the self-centered, nor self-knowing individual that Eustacia is. Rather, he is the sort of person to whom "things happen" and his attempts at directing his own future are relatively futile. The grain of individuality, of selfhood, which Clym possesses upon his return from Paris is slowly crushed and eventually fails to germinate as he becomes more and more subsumed by the Heath. Hardy illustrates this merging of Clym’s self with the Egdon community most emphatically in "The Closed Door" chapter where he depicts Clym immersed in the cutting of furze:
This man from Paris was now so disguised by his leather accoutrements, and by the goggles he was obliged to wear over his eyes, that his closest friend might have passed by without recognizing him. He was a brown spot in the midst of an expanse of olive-green gorse, and nothing more. (RN 273)
Clym appears here much as a member of the animal world of the
Heath. His humanity is disguised by the hides of animals and the goggles which shelter his injured eyes contribute to his singular, inhuman appearance, giving him the visage of some giant insect. They serve as well to make his individuality unrecognizable to even "his 61 closest friend," and make dim Clym’s own vision of the world and hence his understanding of his own selfhood. Most significantly. Hardy presents Clym to us here as a mere "spot of brown," the nature of which is entirely compatible with the vegetable coloring of the surroundings in which his individuality is completely obscured. His identity has become so fused with the Heath that, to outward appearances, of his separate self, there is "nothing more."
This deterioristic view of the self is unexpected in a writer of the late nineteenth century who saw the accepted worldview apparently turned upside down by the publication of Darwin’s theories. In The
Evolutionary Self. Roger Ebbatson discusses the ways in which Hardy was influenced by the theory of evolution, but "extrapolated from The
Origin of the Species what Darwin did not say", that:
...evolution brought unhappiness because human beings had attained a degree of intelligence which nature never contemplated when framing her laws, and for which she consequently has provided no adequate satisfactions.(17)
The lack of any "adequate satisfaction" in life is apparent for those members of Hardy’s focal, intermediate class: the Yeobrights, Vyes, and Wildeves. These are the characters touched by tragedy, not the members of his peasant class, an apparent commentary by Hardy of the letter’s less highly evolved status.
Hardy states directly in his "Queen of Night" portrait of
Eustacia that her nature is incompatible with the Heath and she herself recognizes that she can only achieve happiness if she leaves the Egdon community. Clym, however, does not possess this understanding; he returns to the community in an attempt to find happiness in this membership. By the novel’s end, it is clear that any 62 experience of true happiness has been destroyed for him, and the satisfaction that his career as an itinerant preacher may bring him is surely questionable. In Ebbatson’s view, Clym is "both victim and agent of evolution, [embodying] that fatal split of the modern self in its search for wholeness and authenticity." (56) As both of Hardy’s endings to the novel make clear, that search remains unfulfilled for
Clym.
Clym’s failure to achieve either reassimilation into his native community or true self-knowledge makes us question again Hardy’s preference for community or self. Indeed, Perry Meisel has seen the
"fictional worlds" of the novels of Hardy’s "first phase", in which he places The Return of the Native, to "center around the community rather than the individual" (22-23). But as much as the Egdon community does create a major portion of the setting for the novel and so provides a significant impetus for the actions of the protagonist, Clym, it is difficult to see that Hardy clearly emphasizes the community over the individual. The Return of the Native stands, I believe, more as an embodiment of Ebbatson’s notion of the modern self; that is, the self as "split." While the community stands prominently in the foreground of Hardy’s novel, it is the struggle of the individual to achieve
selfhood, as seen through the characters of Clym, Eustacia, Mrs.
Yeobright, and Tamsin, that becomes the reader’s focus. Whereas Meisel
states that in The Return of the Native the "journey into self has
begun" (68), I would assert that it is already well under way, having
begun to a lesser degree in earlier novels such as Desperate Remedies
and Far From The Madding Crowd . 63 3
The Self in Isolation
Peter J. Casagrande illustrates beautifully the close connections between the "two returning natives," Clym and Hardy, in his book. Unity in Hardy’s Novels, and indeed it is difficult to ignore the obvious parallels between Hardy’s experience and that of his character.
Whether an attempt at honesty or as a mask Hardy once assessed Clym as
"the nicest of all my heroes and not a bit like me" (Fowles. Draper
183). Regardless of the side one chooses on the presence or absence of autobiographical precedence for Yeobright, Clym can and does exist as a personality distinct and separate from his creating author. Viewing his attributes and the ways in which they allow or prevent him from participating in the community of Egdon permits a clearer understanding of what community means for Hardy and why membership therein is so elusive for his protagonists.
With the possible exception of Jude, Clym is undoubtedly the most introspective of the four protagonists to be studied here. The attributes which most quickly come to mind when one thinks of Clym are
"thoughtful," "unworldly," "ascetic" and strangely "detached." The reader learns of the scholarly, introspective side of Clym’s nature through the comment of one of the Egdon peasants long before his character’s appearance in Book Two. That "Clym Yeobright is becoming a real perusing man, with the strangest notions about things" (RN 132) is one of our first impressions. The operant words in this description are "becoming" and "strangest notions," as they signal a change and a 64 distinction from what the community, of peasants at least, considers to be the norm for one of Clym’s social class. Whatever Clym’s role in the community may have been as a child, it is already perceived as an outsider’s, even before the attempt at return is initiated. These words indicate that, consciously or not, Clym is turning away from the mindset of the community.
That Clym is an unworldly man with a tendency to asceticism is evident in his decision to leave a successful Parisian career to return to Egdon as a school teacher. These attributes find a physical expression in his countenance as well as in his actions. While
Eustacia first notes Clym sitting within the settle at Bloom’s End, the narrator remarks upon the singularity of his appearance:
The face was well shaped, even excellently. But the mind within was beginning to use it as a mere waste tablet whereon to trace its idiosyncrasies as they developed themselves. The beauty here visible would in no long time be ruthlessly overrun by its parasite, thought, which might just as well have fed upon a plainer exterior where there was nothing it could harm. Had Heaven preserved Yeobright from a wearing habit of meditation, people would have said, " A handsome man." Had his brain unfolded under sharper contours they would have said, "A thoughtful man." But an inner strenuousness was preying upon an outer symmetry, and they rated his look as singular. (RN 162)
That Clym places the spiritual above the physical is clearly evident in this description of his face, most notably by the emphatic contrast between its beautiful form and the outer manifestations of his personality. Rather than a handsome man, Clym is portrayed as
"idiosyncratic", obsessively "thoughtful", and "meditative" to the degree that it appears that his mind is attempting to burst through the troublesome confines of his cranium. The intensity of Clym’s makeup leaves little wonder that "[his] look suggested isolation" (RN 163). 65
Clym is not a social misanthrope, however. He responds with good humour to the realization that the mummer he meets at his aunt’s party is a woman, he converses freely and easily with the inhabitants of the
Heath, and his attempts to reconcile his mother and his wife are sincere, if misguided. And significantly, the ostensible reason for his return to Egdon is philanthropic:
Yeobright loved his kind. He had a conviction that the want of most men was knowledge of a sort which brings wisdom rather than affluence. He wished to raise the class at the expense of individuals rather than individuals at the expense of the class. What was more, he was ready at once to be the first unit sacrificed. (RN 196)
Clym’s tendency towards asceticism and self-sacrifice is in keeping with the barren nature of the Heath. In this sense, the bleak, poverty stricken environment of Egdon would seem to be the natural environment for a man like Clym. Indeed, Hardy is emphatic about the connection between Clym and the Heath. In Book Three, Chapter Two, he tells us that "If any one knew the heath well, it was Clym ... His estimate of life had been coloured by it" (RN 197). It is as though the drab colors of the Heath and the subsistence living it requires of its peasant dwellers have caused Clym’s view of the world to be forever cast in those tones.
Bruce Johnson’s interesting discussion of the connection between
Clym and the Heath focuses on the paradox implicit in that connection.
He notes that Clym "is the true child of the heath____ ; yet he is also Hardy’s embodiment, in this novel, of all that is modern" (Bloom
120). Just as he views Clym as the quintessential "modern man,"
Johnson’s perspective on the role of Egdon Heath is that it "[provides] ballast for the harassed new mentality" (112). Clearly, Clym does 66 possess a mentality that is much more progressive than that of his fellow inhabitants of the Egdon expanse. That he is so woefully unaware of this discrepancy constitutes one of the major factors at work in his failure to reassimilate. Hardy tells us that:
In consequence of this relatively advanced position, Yeobright might have been called unfortunate. The rural world was not ripe for him. A man should be only partially before his time: to be completely in the vanward in aspirations is fatal to fame. (RN 196)
Clym is unfortunate in a multitude of ways; not only are his aspirations "fatal to fame," but they are also fatal to the well-being of his mother, his wife, his cousin, and ultimately, one could argue, to himself.
In spite of Clym’s misfortunes, he is in some way a survivor. He does not lose his life on the Heath, and although his philanthropic dreams are abridged, they are to a certain extent realized by the novel’s end. Merryn Williams’ comment that "the eventual survivors are those who have been slighted and yet have the strength to endure" (136-
7) is a fitting description of Clym. He is slighted and he does endure, but not as a "whole" man. Physically, he loses the acuity of his eyesight and he is forced to take on the humbling, back-breaking work of the furze cutter, and the death of his mother causes a similar death in his spirit which makes its mark on his outward appearance:
"Endurance and despair, equanimity and gloom, the tints of health and the pallor of death, mingled weirdly in his face" (RN 334). What survives is the shell of a man, a man too empty emotionally and spiritually ever truly to participate fully in the experience of community. 67
These attributes that define Clym, his introspection,
unworldliness and asceticism, his philanthropy, the dull tones of his
vision, his modernity, and his only partial survival all take him
beyond the pale of community as Egdon defines it. He is too unlike
either the peasant or the intermediate class factions of the Heath to
ever achieve reassimilation into his natal community.
In addition to these discordant characteristics of Clym’s nature
is his most fatal trait: the lack of self-knowledge. This inability to
understand himself manifests itself in three fundamental choices that
Clym makes in the novel: his choice of returning to the Heath rather
than remaining in Paris; his choice of occupation; and his choice of marriage partner. The first of these choices, that which forms the
basis for the novel, reveals Clym’s lack of self-knowledge in that it
highlights his misapprehension of the natal community and the wants and
needs of its inhabitants. Clym’s view of Egdon’s peasant dwellers, in
particular, is clouded by his misguided and ineffectual philanthropy.
He recognizes the backwardness of the community, yet fails to realize
the means of bringing it forward. Similarly, he cannot see that his methods of bringing education and enlightenment to the community will
be unsuccessful because of his own lack of strength as a leader. In
short, he does not possess adequate knowledge of the needs and wants of
those he desires to help.
Looking at the situation through the sociologic perspective of
George Herbert Mead clarifies the significance of this misapprehension.
Mead’s view posits that "the ability to see the world through the eyes
of the other ... helps us recognize ourselves. ... thus we can be 68 unique only by being part of our community" (Hansen 20). Because Clym cannot see Egdon, or indeed the world, through the perspective of his fellow Heath dwellers, he is unable to fulfill his philanthropic dreams and, most importantly, he is unable to view himself through their eyes, thus lacking a vital component of self understanding, a component necessary for successful reassimilation.
The time which Clym has spent in Paris has advanced and separated him from his native community and its beliefs and worldview, yet he seems unaware that he is not the only one who will necessarily have changed during the period of his absence. To Clym’s eyes, the Heath community is identical to the one he knew as a boy, a community to which change comes slowly, almost imperceptibly, yet which always remains volatile in nature. In his scheme of enlightening Egdon’s inhabitants, Clym overlooks the slowness to change, and much of his personal tragedy evolves from his failure to remember its volatile character.
Given his nostalgic view of the Egdon community, one must question Clym’s perception of himself: does he see himself as fundamentally unchanged, identical to the person he was during his boyhood? Again, Mead’s approach proves helpful. In his discussion of
Mead’s premises, Donald Hansen notes:
... Mead anticipated the autobiographical message of Thomas Wolfe: you can’t go home again. But he also told us why: In our memories we can return to the past, but we always return as a new self, a self quite different from the self we were then. (23) 69
As do all of Hardy’s "returning natives," Clym thinks that he "can go
home again," but his ultimate failure to do so is predestined by his
lack of recognition that he must go home as a "new self".
Clym’s second unfortunate choice concerns his occupation.
Although Clym abandons his first choice, the diamond trade, this
occupation has actually placed him in a locale more accordant with his mind, for it is in Paris that he is able to "become acquainted with
ethical systems popular at the time" (RN 196). It would appear that it
is in Paris where his mind flowers and where his idealism is born.
Sadly, he is unable to perceive that "netherward Egdon" is unsuited for
his educational ventures, so he leaves this mentally stimulating
environment for one where too much education breeds distrust, or at
best, skepticism.
As previously discussed, the teaching scheme is doomed from the
onset not only because of Egdon’s slow receptiveness to new ideas, but
also because Clym lacks the fundamental understanding of the "other"
required for the success of such a venture. Because he has never
experienced the Egdon of his proposed peasant students and because he
is unable to see this experience through their eyes, Clym’s success as
their teacher would be doubtful. Clym’s vision of Eustacia as a
teacher of little children serves as a glaring example of the
impossibility of this plan. Not only does he lack sufficient awareness
of his own nature, but also that of his spouse.
Similarly doubtful is the success of the career as preacher which
Clym adopts at the novel’s end. Absent from the changes wrought on him
by his personal tragedy is the one which would make him most suited to 70 enlighten his listeners: he is still unable truly to understand the needs, wants, and mindset of those whom he would reach. Rather than being tempered by tragedy, Clym has been hardened by it.
Philanthropist though he may be, he is still caught in a fundamentally egocentric search for self-validation, as the pitiable text of his closing sermon betrays: "And the king said unto her. Ask on, my mother: for I will not say thee nay" (RN 423).
Finally, Clym’s inability to choose wisely is clearly reflected in his choice of Eustacia as a marriage partner. This choice indicates, certainly, that he does not truly know her, but it also conveys his lack of self knowledge. That he has still not achieved a clear sense of self is evident at the close of the novel when, still trying to atone to his dead mother, he thinks of proposing marriage to his cousin Tamsin. Clym’s emptiness of self is evident in the glimpse into his thoughts that Hardy’s narrator provides us: "He had nothing to lose by carrying out a dead mother’s hope. But he dreaded to contemplate Thomasin wedded to the mere corpse of a lover that he now felt himself to be" (RN 409). The use of the word "felt" rather than
"knew" in the second sentence is significant: even at this point,
Clym’s understanding of himself is no more than a feeling.
Clym’s lack of self understanding is readily apparent in his speech. In his conversation with Timothy Fairway, that spokesman for
Egdon’s peasant class, much is revealed about the returning native’s perception of himself, the Egdon class structure, and the community itself. Shortly after returning home, Clym comes across one of
Fairway’s "Sunday-morning hair-cuttings": 71
Marching up, and looking critically at their faces for a moment, [Clym] said without introduction, "Now, folks, let me guess what you have been talking about."
... We were wondering what could keep you home here mollyhorning about when you have made such a world-wide name for yourself ...
"I’ll tell you," said Yeobright, with unexpected earnestness. "I am not sorry to have the opportunity. I’ve come home because, all things considered, I can be a trifle less useless here than anywhere else. But I only lately found this out. When I first got away from home I thought this place was not worth troubling about. I thought our life here was contemptible. To oil your boots instead of blacking them, to dust your coat with a switch instead of a brush; was there ever anything more ridiculous? I said."
... Well, as my views changed my course became very depressing. I found that I was trying to be like people who had hardly anything in common with myself. I was endeavoring to put off one sort of life for another sort of life, which was not better than the life I had known before. It was simply different."
...I would ... try to follow some rational occupation among the people I knew best, and to whom I could be of most use. I have come home; and this is how I mean to carry out my plan. I shall keep a school as near to Egdon as possible ... But I must study a little at first, to get properly qualified. Now, neighbours, I must go."
"He’ll never carry it out in the world," said Fairway. "In a few weeks he’ll learn to see things otherwise."
If 9 lis good-hearted of the young man," said another. "But, r,for ray part, I think he had better mind his business." (RN 194-5)
Clym’s lengthy discourse to the group of peasants exemplifies many of the attributes of his character just discussed, particularly his introspection, his misguided philanthropy, and his lack of knowledge either about the "others" which comprise his natal community or himself. 72
Clym’s introspection is immediately discernible by his "critical look" into the faces of the group whose company he is joining. He looks at them more as subjects to be studied than persons with whom he will converse, and he goes on to tell them a condensed history of his mental journey to his current view of Egdon and his vocation therein.
That this introspection is ingrained and ongoing is abundantly clear in his penultimate statement, "But I must study a little at first."
Just as evident in this speech as his introspection are Clym’s strong philanthropic leanings. He is searching for more than a
"rational occupation", but for one which will enable him to be "a trifle less useless" and educate the ignorant of Egdon Heath. Fine as these attributes of introspection and philanthropy are in themselves, they also perform the less worthy function of masking Clym’s unconscious ignorance of others and of himself.
The unconscious condescension that Clym bears towards the peasant group is immediately recognizable in the narrator’s words "without introduction," indicating that Clym feels sufficiently superior to the group to preempt the politeness of an introduction. Indeed, his discussion of his previous views of Egdon life as "contemptible" is hardly one which would fall favorably on the ears of his listeners. In his parting words, the use of "neighbours" by one of the intermediate class to the lower class is equally condescending.
That Clym is lacking in understanding of the essential nature of those to whom he "could be of most use" is abundantly clear throughout this passage. In addition to ridiculing their way of life, he intimates that he is like them, that he has more "in common" with them 73 than with his associates in Paris. While to some extent this may be true, the very fact that Clym has received an education and a cosmopolitan experience outside the community places him irrevocably beyond the Heath dwellers’ "sort of life." That he is unaware of this difference prevents him from ever using this outside knowledge to achieve a real understanding of the community of his birth. There is a sad irony, which escapes him, in his comment that the Parisian life and the Egdon life are "simply different."
Of equal significance is the masking of self-knowledge implicit in Clym’s words. Initially, Clym’s language here indicates egocentrism
(he naturally assumes that the group is talking about him). A closer look, however, reveals the precariousness of his sense of self.
Seemingly unaware of the significance of what he is saying, Clym admits his feelings of uselessness, the search for identity exemplified by his earlier casting off of an Egdon identity and subsequent attempt to "be like people" in his Parisian experience, and his current, almost desperate attempt to "be of use" to his natal community. That he comes home again to find himself would seem to indicate that his uncertainty of self has its roots in childhood and has plagued him his whole life.
James Phelan’s method of understanding character by studying the thematic and mimetic components as revealed through the progression of the novel provides a useful means of understanding Clym and his failure to reassimilate into the community of his birth. Part of Clym’s success as a character is due, I believe, to Hardy’s expertise in developing both the mimetic and thematic components to the degree that 74 they function equally in the narrative, creating a fusion of the two.
Thematically, Clym is of course the titular character: he i_s the returning native. He is the "modern" man, rootless and forever searching for the meaning of his existence, in this case somehow to be found in the community of his birth. This is the focus of the novel and the thematic function of Clym necessarily lies at its core.
The mimetic function of Clym’s character is equally well-crafted, for he clearly fulfills the readers’ expectations of what it feels like to attempt and fail to reassimilate into one’s childhood community and culture. Clym’s aspirations, his incomplete view of himself, his quasi-nostalgic view of the community and his slightly patronizing approach to the community are all fully and realistically presented.
The mimetic side to Clym’s character is seen through his development throughout the novel, but most clearly perhaps, in his reaction to Mrs.
Yeobright’s death, his subsequent furor over Eustacia’s role in that tragedy, and his ultimate realization that emotionally he is merely the shell of a man.
Throughout the progression of the novel, the fusion of the thematic and mimetic components of Clym’s character is evident. We are aware of Clym’s thematic component from the onset, of course, because it is indicated so emphatically by the title of the novel, and our first awareness of Clym comes, significantly, from other characters before his actual appearance in the text. The peasant group gathered around the bonfire provides our initial understanding of Clym by indicating what he represents, not necessarily what he is. 75
Clym’s thematic function is expressed largely through his role as a participant observer. Although Clym adopts this role unconsciously
(he returns to the Egdon community ostensibly to "help" it rather than study it), it greatly influences his actions in the novel and is a major factor in his failed reassimilation. It is significant that one of our earliest views of Clym in the novel, the Christmas mummers’ party hosted by his aunt, clearly exemplifies his participant observer status. From his position within the settle, Clym looks out upon and watches the festivities, his participation -like so much of his action in the novel - only vicarious. His presence at the party parallels his presence in the community; he is physically a part of the group, yet spiritually and emotionally he is absent. Like Hardy’s narrator, he is always "detached," never fully involved in the event at hand.
This detached, participant observer role is evident in Clym’s relationship with the peasant faction as well, as illustrated by the conversation with Timothy Fairway and the hair-cutting group discussed above. Clym comes upon the group, i.e. the community, makes his observations, and leaves, never truly joining in. This detachment of both his observation and his participation is rather pitifully in evidence at the close of the novel, where he stands as an "itinerant preacher" above the gathering on Rainbarrow. Even here, in what he feels to be his rightful vocation, Clym stands alone, separate from the community of which he so desperately wants to be a part.
One result of consciously adopting the role of participant observer is the reflexivity it necessarily imposes on the observer; that is, the ability to view himself in a new light, refracted as it 76 were by the view of the observed. As disconcerting as the reflexive experience may be, it heightens the observer’s sense of and understanding of himself. Thus, Clym’s unawareness of his role of participant observer and its accompanying reflexivity rob him of the sense of identity he needs to rejoin the community. He is never able to truly see himself or how he fits into the fabric of the community.
The depth of self-knowledge offered by a reflexive experience is denied
Clym, with the result that he cannot achieve happiness by rejoining the community and truly fulfilling his vocation of ministering to the community’s needs. Thus, his thematic function remains constant throughout the novel; he is forever caught in the act of return, never in the accomplishment of reassimilation.
In all his actions, Clym behaves in a human, believable manner, always in keeping with his thematic construct, ensuring that we accept him both as a representative of mankind, and as a type. The union of these two components is forcefully present in the final image of Clym as the figure on the barrow. Here, as everywhere in The Return of the
Native. Clym is present in the community of his fellow Heath-dwellers, yet he is spiritually separate from them. Because his thematic and mimetic components are equally successful, the pathos of the final scene is the more touching.
In psychological terms, the ego embraces the "organization of the conscious mind [which is composed of conscious perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings] and is the highly selective gatekeeper to consciousness" (Hall 34). With the exception of his attraction and marriage to Eustacia and his work as a furze-cutter, periods when his 77 personality is dominated by its shadow component, Clym’s strongest psychic characteristic is the ego. His motivation for returning to the heath to become a school teacher, and his ultimate decision to live as a single man and itinerant preacher are indications of the degree to which "conscious perceptions" and "thoughts" determine Clym’s ability to recognize the portions of himself which are related to the elemental nature of the heath and thus come from his unconscious. Similarly, he is dominated at the end of the novel by agonizing memories of his mother (and to a lesser degree, his wife). It is perhaps only in the final negation of feeling he experiences in his personal life that the unconscious functions, albeit negatively, in his life.
A close look at the role of the narrator in influencing our view of the interworkings of community and self, the nature of the community in The Return of the Native, and the selfhood of its protagonist, Clym, provides an understanding of what the Egdon community means for Clym and why he goes to such great lengths to achieve reassimilation. It allows the reader to see Clym’s return as an attempt to reclaim the personal safety embodied in his past, to fulfill a sense of purpose in life, and to achieve, finally, self validation. Because Clym’s sense of self is so tenuous, these needs can only be met for him through return to and reabsorption by the natal community. Clym’s relationship with this community changes markedly throughout the progression of the novel. In the outward, more physical, sense his reassimilation is complete by the novel’s end for he has succeeded in making Egdon his domicile and he has managed to find an occupation there which, to his mind, sustains both his needs and aspirations. Emotionally and 78 psychically, however, he remains as distant from participation in the community as he had been in Paris. Clym’s sense of self actually regresses throughout the novel because of his growing self-delusion and cynicism.
Ultimately, Clym’s attempt at reassimilation fails because he is unable to comprehend the true nature of his natal community and fails to see accurately the complexity of his own relationship to that community. He fails to achieve the sure sense of self necessary to become an accepted member of Egdon, or of any community.
Even more significant is the failure to achieve inner wholeness symbolized by the thwarted attempt at reassimilation. Although Clym’s self awareness deepens markedly through the progression of the novel, his inner wholeness shows only a regressive movement. Throughout all his struggles since returning to Egdon, Clym’s ego retains its dominance with the result that all but the darker elements of the unconscious lie repressed and his personality is yet more fragmented at the novel’s end than in its beginning: only the isolation, fragmentation, and tragic negativity of the heath and the shadow of the unconscious break through to the surface.
The tragedy of The Return of the Native is not so much that Clym loses his wife and mother, or even his aspirations of teaching Egdon youngsters, but that he never achieves a clear sense of who he is. The close of the novel finds him, rather, deluding himself that he has finally achieved his purpose as a productive and fully accepted member of the community, and in this delusion lies the heart of his tragedy. 79 WORKS CITED
Harold Bloom, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Wayne C. Booth. The Rhetoric of Fiction, ed. 2. U of Chicago P, 1983.
Peter J. Casagrande. Unity in Hardy’s Novels. ’Repetitive Symmetries’. Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1982.
Leonard W. Deen. "Heroism and Pathos in Hardy’s Return of the Native." Nineteenth Century Fiction. 15 (1960), 207-219.
Roger Ebbatson. The Evolutionary Self. Hardy. Forster. Lawrence. Sussex, England: The Harvester Press, 1982.
Andrew Enstice. Thomas Hardy: Landscapes of the Mind. London: MacMillan, 1979.
Avrom Fleishman. "The Buried Giant of Egdon Heath." Modern Critical Interpretations of Thomas Hardv’s The Return of the Native. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
John Fowl es and Jo Draper. Thomas Hardy’s England. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984.
Calvin S. Hall and Vernon J. Nordby. A Primer of Junaian Psychology. New York: New American Library, 1973.
Donald A. Hansen. An Invitation to Critical Sociology. New York: MacMillan, The Free Press, 1976.
Thomas Hardy. The Return of the Native. P.N. Furbank, ed. London: MacMillan, 1974.
Noorul Hasan. Thomas Hardy: The Sociological Imagination. London: MacMillan, 1982.
Bruce Johnson. "Pastoralism and Modernity." Modern Critical Interpretations of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Perry Meisel. Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1972.
John Paterson. "The Poetics of ’The Return of the Native’". Modern Fiction Studies. 6.3 (1960), 214-22.
— . "The Return of the Native as Anti Christian Document." Nineteenth Century Fiction. 14 (1959), 111-127. 80 James Phelan. Reading People. Reading Plots. The U of Chicago P, 1989.
Merryn Williams. Thomas Hardv and Rural England. London: MacMillan, 1972.
Virginia Woolf. Collected Essays. Vol. 1. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966. CHAPTER II
The Woodlanders: False Identities and Community Membership
The second novel involving a return to the natal community is The
Woodlanders. which began its serial publication in 1886. The difficulties accompanying the attempted return are less clear-cut here than in The Return of the Native, and yet while much more subtle in nature, they are equally problematic. Like Clym Yeobright, Grace
Mel bury is the child of an ambitious parent, in this case a fatherwho has sent her away to a fashionable school to attain a refined education. Unlike Clym, however, Grace - and her parent - have always planned on her eventual return to the native community. The culture of the remote village of Little Hintock is worlds away from that of the genteel boarding school to which Grace has grown accustomed, and the discrepancies between her roots and the society to which she has been educated grate jarringly on Grace’s sensibilities when she returns home to Little Hintock in Chapter Five of the novel.
Thus Grace, too, returns as an outsider. Whereas she does not share Clym’s delusions about the native community itself, she is equally - if not more - tentative in her vision and understanding of herself and the role she will play in the community to which she returns. The curious combination of a lack of resolve and an overriding concern for others’ approbation with a pampered upbringing
81 82 and fastidious education results in the lack of self-knowledge required for Grace to take the place in Little Hintock society which would bring her the most happiness and the greatest satisfaction. It is significant that at the novel’s end, Grace plans to once again leave her natal community, this time for the dubious plan of rejoining
Fitzpiers. The unsoundness of this decision exemplifies the extent of
Grace’s failure to understand her essential nature and work towards membership in the community. The reader is left to wonder if Grace has any greater self-awareness than she possessed before the tragic events of the novel but is simply overcome with resignation, or if she has chosen, once again, to blind herself to her own inner person to create her self in the misguided image another has determined for her. 83
1
The Focus on Artificiality
The narrator of The Return of the Native draws the reader into the community of Egdon Heath by inviting participation in Diggory and
Tamsin’s journey along the dusty roadway. This initial invitation into
the world of the novel enhances the sense of reality by diminishing the
reader’s recognition of his role of spectator, thereby blunting his or
her critical view. Hardy’s narrator also introduces his audience to
Little Hintock via roadway travel, yet here the narrative perspective
is quickly set up to ensure a clearer view of the artificial nature of
the reality presented in The Woodlanders. The reader’s eye focuses on
the figure of Barber Percomb as he awaits Mrs. Dollery’s van and then
enlarges its field of vision to embrace the silhouette of the travelers
Percomb joins in the coach:
Looking at the van from the back the spectator could thus see, through its interior, a square piece of the same sky and landscape that he saw without, but intruded on by the profiles of the seated passengers, who, as they rumbled onward, their lips moving and heads nodding in animated private converse, remained in cheerful unconsciousness that their mannerisms and facial peculiarities were sharply defined to the public eye. (W 27)
As he thus describes the van carrying Barber Percomb to Little Hintock
at the outset of the novel, Hardy’s narrator purposefully invites the
reader to view the characters and events more as constructs of reality
than as simple imitations thereof, with the result that our critical
perception of the characters and their community is sharpened. The
reader’s ability to view the problem of reassimilation more accurately 84 is thus greater in this second novel of return because we are immediately enjoined to retain the distance of the spectator.
After establishing this critical distance, the narrator functions similarly as he does in The Return of the Native, particularly in his influence on our understanding of the community of Little Hintock and in his portrayal of the character of Grace Mel bury in such a fashion that our understanding and acceptance of the imperfections of each is assured. In The Woodlanders. however, Hardy’s narrator more deftly focuses on the implications of education and culture as barriers to reassimilation into the native community. The dichotomy between society-at-large and the home community is further emphasized by
Hardy’s inclusion of the divorce question, an issue that in Hardy's day was clearly beyond the scope of provincial experience. In The
Woodlanders. therefore, the tensions between education and ignorance,
"society" and folk culture, and worldly and naive understanding of the law serve, along with Grace’s essential misunderstanding of self, as formidable barriers to her successful reassimilation into the community of her birth.
These educational, societal, and legal tensions are, of course, inextricably bound up with the overriding tension between the classes.
The narrator of The Return of the Native emphasizes the distinctions in class among the residents of the heath, yet he does so with more acceptance than in The Woodlanders. We are conscious, for example, of the difference in station between Clym and Eustacia, but we are not led to believe that one is inherently "better" than the other because of this rank. Hardy presents Clym as a middle-class man of noble 85 character and Eustacia as a deep-souled member of the upper classes and
in this sense they are equal.
In The Woodlanders. however, the narrator frequently injects his opinion - and Hardy’s - into the mouths of his characters. There is the implicit notion that those of the upper classes are inwardly corrupt, suspect individuals and that this is somehow due to their
social rank. Hardy effectively conveys this view early in the novel, through a narrative intrusion into the character of Giles Winterborne, who speaks derisively of Grace’s budding interest in Felice Charmond:
How can you think so much of that class of people! Well, I beg pardon, I didn’t mean to speak so freely. How do you like her house and her? (W 76)
With this outburst and its ineffective "retraction". Hardy makes clear
his opinion on the upper classes. Because the narrative portrayal of
Giles has been and continues to be so glowing, the reader is subtly
coerced into sharing his view. Ironically, Giles - and the narrator -
show the same social snobbishness they decry in the upper classes, as
Giles effectively reduces Felice here to first a nameless number of a
social group, then to a "house," and only finally to an individual,
snidely referred to as "her."
Given the social focus of the novel, it is fitting that in The
Woodlanders. the role of fatalism emerges most strongly in that arena
of the characters’ lives. Mr. Mel bury feels remorse for his wronging
of Giles’s father and educates Grace to be a "choice" bride for the son
in recompense. Mel bury becomes infatuated, however, with the notion of
Grace moving up socially and encourages her to reject her inclinations
towards Giles as a spouse. 86
Whether these events are the machinations of fate or merely behavioral adjustments is debatable, but the events that further conspire against Grace and Giles’s union are clearly the products of
Hardy’s fatalism. In cutting down the massive tree outside John
South’s window in an attempt to prolong the aged man’s life, Giles actually hastens South’s death and the end of his own tenancy that results. This event, coupled with the offence Giles’ gives his landlady, Felice Charmond, by refusing to yield the right-of-way on the highway, initiates the downward spiral socially that prevents him from wedding Grace.
For Grace herself, fate intrudes less directly into her own experience than it does into the lives of those with whom she associates, particularly Giles. This is appropriate, however, because it highlights the ways in which Grace loses her identity through giving its formation over to others, a loss which epitomizes the central aspect of her tragedy.
Hardy’s narrator conveys the influence that fatalism exerts indirectly on Grace’s life quite effectively through his presentation of her thoughts:
Acquiescence in her father’s wishes had been degradation to herself. People are not given premonitions for nothing; she should have obeyed her impulse on that early morning when she peeped out and saw the figure come from Fitzpier’s door, and have steadfastly refused her hand. (W 193-4)
Because of her upbringing and her attempts to realize her father’s hopes for her socially, Grace rejects her best instincts and embarks on a course that elevates her socially and pleases her father, but contributes to the death of her would-be lover, Giles, and cements the 87 inner wall that prevents the growth and realization of her sense of self.
Just as Hardy’s narrator emphasizes his view of the social classes which form the Little Hintock society, so does Hardy himself show an equally marked preference for the physical community itself.
In The Life Hardy notes that "after reading rihe Woodlanders1 after many years, I like it, as a story, the best of all. Perhaps that is owing to the locality and scenery of the action, a part I am very fond of" (W 17). It could be argued that the setting for The Woodlanders is indeed one of Hardy’s finest.
The narrative presentation of the physical community adds significantly to the persuasiveness of Little Hintock as a representation of a "real" location as well as of the reliability of the narrator. The contribution is due, largely, to the honesty and completeness of the description, for even more than in The Return of the Native, the dark aspects of the natural world are as prominently and unabashedly portrayed as its beauties. Similarly, the narrator of
The Woodlanders resolutely includes the blemish in his depiction of the autumn beauty of White-Hart Vale and the reader is presented with the wholeness of nature - in both its light and dark hues. As Grace watches her husband ride away to a meeting with his mistress in Chapter
28 of The Woodlanders. this juxtaposition of the gall inherent in nature’s beauty is noteworthy:
And so the infatuated surgeon went along through the gorgeous autumn landscape of White-Hart Vale, surrounded by orchards lustrous with the reds of apple-crops, berries, and foliage, the whole intensified by the gilding of the declining sun. The earth this year had been prodigally bountiful, and now was the supreme moment of her bounty. 88
In the poorest spots the hedges were bowed with haws and blackberries; acorns cracked underfoot, and the burst husks of chestnuts lay exposing their auburn contents as if arranged by anxious sellers in a fruit-market. In all this proud show some kernels were unsound as her own situation, and she wondered if there were one world in the universe where the fruit had no worm, and marriage no sorrow. (W 189-90)
The narrative observations implicit in this scene, in addition to
Grace’s own, reveal an acute yet realistic sensitivity to the beauties of the natural world. The combination of this narrative revelry in the exquisite lushness of the autumnal landscape and the acknowledgement of its "unsound kernels" serves to emphasize the narrator’s appearance of honesty and thereby enhances the novel’s realism, thereby ensuring the reader’s fuller engagement in the heroine’s attempt at reassimilation.
The self-consciousness of Hardy’s narrator in The Woodlanders. his bias towards the lower classes and the rural community they inhabit, and his relatively unclouded appreciation for the natural world help define the ways in which his narrative techniques influence our view of the community of Little Hintock. The bias towards the characters of lower class and education who enjoy a close affinity with the natural world, such as Giles and Marty, enables the reader at the very least to more fully understand the importance Hardy places on community values in The Woodlanders and encourages the reader to engage in the same favorable view of the community held by the narrator. This narrative bias towards the community is similar to that found in The
Return of the Native, yet it is achieved by different means. In the
Return, the narrative bias is more emphatically directed towards the
"middle class" with its modicum of education and worldly knowledge, while in The Woodlanders. the emphasis is on those of a lower social 89 class whose education and knowledge are not those of either the middle or upper classes, but of the "class" of persons daily involved in close community with nature, namely Giles and Marty. Interestingly, Grace herself is removed from this favored sector of Little Hintock society and thus is set up in a sort of opposition to the community values espoused by the narrator. This segregation in itself prefigures her essential and continuing lack of wholeness.
In The Woodlanders. Hardy’s narrative affinities are aligned with what he sees as the definitive characteristics of the Little Hintock community. He extols the rural over the urban, relative ignorance over education, simplicity over sophistication, the peasant over either the middle or upper classes, and the past over the present or future.
Hardy seems to be saying that only here, in the obscure, rural community, can anything approaching happiness be found. Indeed, Grace herself expresses this sentiment in her conversation with her father in
Chapter Thirty, although at this point she is as yet not completely aware of its implications:
... I have never got any happiness outside Hintock that I know of, and I have suffered many a heartache at being sent away. 0, the misery of those January days when I got back to school, and left you all here in the wood so happy! I used to wonder why I had to bear it. And I was always a little despised by the other girls at school, because they knew were I came from, and that my parents were not in so good a station as theirs. (W 204)
The seemingly regressive portrayal of community that Hardy gives in The Woodlanders causes the 20th century reader to puzzle over why
Hardy, his narrator, and his heroine, Grace, all are so fundamentally attracted to the community and why they find a return to its representation so irresistible. This basic question, which I believe 90 lies at the heart of Hardy’s work - individually and as a whole - begs an answer of all readers, regardless of the community, society, or era in which they are situated.
What Hardy suggests here is not so much the presentation of
Little Hintock as an "ideal" community, but the necessity to accept all sides of a community and of an individual. These must be integrated, thus bringing both into balance, in themselves and with each other. It is as though he asks his audience of well-educated, middle-to-upper- class Victorians to acknowledge the rural, uneducated, socially unacceptable, dark and obscure portion of their culture rather than view it through the eyes of either the romanticist or the self- righteous reformer. This goes beyond the call to integrate a social and economic sub-culture, but summons as well an unconscious public to acknowledge and incorporate its own hidden characteristics.
In The Woodlanders. the attempt of the carefully educated and urbanized Grace to become again an integral and functional part of the rural community of her birth and the requisite integration of her multifaceted personality constitutes Hardy’s plea for his own culture to embrace the various ways of life which make up its fabric. 91
2
The Community Ingrown
In Thomas Hardy. The Sociologie Imagination. Noorul Hasan writes of the setting for The Woodlanders that "the personality of place is seldom again as important a fictional ingredient in the Wessex novels as it is here. The milieu naturel is superbly achieved in The
Woodlanders" (82). Unlike the Egdon Heath community, which is presented as a discrete character itself, with a unified personality, that of Little Hintock seems to be more a composite of personalities which contribute to an ever changing, almost quixotic character.
Little Hintock is, above all, a community imbued with a natural, woodsy, earthy component. Like Egdon Heath, it is a lonely spot, made even the more so by the thick woods which sequester it from the rest of the Wessex community. There are two opposing sides to the Hintock personality which coexist and vie for ascendancy; the bounty of its autumn harvest is sharply contradicted by the blighted air of its dense forests:
The plantations were always weird at this hour of eve - more spectral far than in the leafless season, when there were fewer masses and more minute lineality. The smooth surfaces of glossy plants came out like weak, lidless eyes: there were strange faces and figures from expiring lights that had somehow wandered into the canopied obscurity; while now and then low peeps of the sky between the trunks were like sheeted shapes, and on the tips of boughs sat faint cloven tongues. (W 266)
There is a strong implication here that the community of Little Hintock is a community apart, existing as it were "outside the law," whose animal members "knew neither law nor sin" (W 272). 92
The opposition of these aspects of the natural character of
Little Hintock finds a certain parallel in Grace’s situation of a returned native. In essence, her essential character mirrors the earthy, natural tenor of the woodland, yet in the end she, too, is blighted in her recognition that Giles is her more appropriate partner, her inconstancy towards him, and in her ultimate happiness. She only recognizes too late, and then too little , that the portion of her personality that matches the benevolent side of the woodland is the part she should cultivate. Rather, Grace’s character and her attempts to rejoin the community have more in common with the "weak, lidless eyes" and the "expiring lights" of the woodland: she lacks strength, perception, and resolve.
As with the natural character of Little Hintock, the spiritual character of the community comes as well from the woods. Like the portrayal of nature, the spiritual depiction of Little Hintock is somewhat dark, menacing and repressive. It is clearly representative of the shadow side of the community. The almost overpowering presence of the trees implies that here, nature is more powerful than man, a notion that is clearly born out in the deadly influence the old elm exerts over John South. In this sense, the trees of Little Hintock approach beings whose struggles and influences outstep those of the human inhabitants. When she at last approaches a partial enlightenment during her self-enclosure in Giles’ hut, Grace recognizes these woodsy beings as unreconcilable forces in their own right:
From the other window all she could see were more trees, in jackets of lichen and stockings of moss. At their roots were stemless yellow fungi like lemons and apricots, and tall fungi with more stem than stool. Next were more trees 93
close together, wrestling for existence, their branches disfigured with wounds resulting from their mutual rubbings and blows. It was the struggle between these neighbours that she had heard in the night. Beneath them were the rotting stumps of those of the groups that had been vanquished long ago, rising from their mossy setting like black teeth from green gums. Further on were other tufts of moss in islands divided by the shed leave - variety upon variety, dark green and pale green; moss like little fir- trees, like plush, like malachite stars; like nothing on earth except moss. (W 276)
Just as the dark spiritual qualities of the woods cause the trees to wrestle and disfigure each other in their struggle for survival, so does this malevolence work against Grace in her attempt at reassimilation and self-knowledge. In her relationship with Giles, the malevolence aspect reaches its apex in the storm which batters Giles’ hut and its refugee Grace in Chapter 41:
The wind grew more violent, and as the storm went on it was difficult to believe that no opaque body, but only an invisible colourless thing, was trampling and climbing over the roof, making branches creak, springing out of the trees upon the chimney, popping its head into the flue, and shrieking and blaspheming at every corner of the walls. As in the grisly story, the assailant was a spectre which could be felt but not seen. She had never before been so struck with the devilry of a gusty night in a wood, because she had never been so entirely alone in spirit as she was now. She seemed almost to be apart from herself - a vacuous duplicate only. The recent self of physical animation and clear intentions was not there. (W 274)
It is this storm which brings Giles to his death, thus destroying the one person who could enable Grace to achieve sufficient self awareness and reassimilate into the community. Although Grace is unaware at this point that Giles is mortally ill, her view of the storm as a spectral assailant against whom she is alone and defenseless is a premonition of her final relationship to the community and to her own self; she will be forever an outsider. With this preview of Grace’s 94 ultimate separation from the community comes an insight into her concept of self and the lack of wholeness which prevents her from recognizing a viable path to reassimilation: "She seemed almost to be apart from herself - a vacuous duplicate only ... the recent self of physical animation and clear intentions was not there." The implications of Grace’s view of herself as a "vacuous duplicate" will be discussed in greater detail later in the chapter, yet it is significant that here, when faced with the full force of the shadow side of nature - and by inference with the shadow side of her own personality - she comes closest to acknowledging the disunity within her.
Socially, the community of The Woodlanders is less isolated than that of The Return of the Native in that it is markedly more commercial in its dealings with the outside world, yet it remains equally in- grown. The stratification of the Little Hintock social classes is more diverse and there is less interaction between members of the different classes. The dismal failure of Giles’ party for Grace exemplifies the general inability of Little Hintock inhabitants to cross social boundaries.
The characters that Hardy seems to favor in The Woodlanders come not from the middle class arena of the Yeobrights, but rather from the peasant class. While there are, certainly, characters of this class who function as caricatures, such as Creedle, the peasant class as a whole is presented much more favorably. And, of course, its principal proponents, Giles and Marty are usually seen as the novel’s true hero and heroine. Like the peasant class of Egdon Heath, those of Little 95
Hintock are ignorant in terms of worldly knowledge or education, yet they are far wiser concerning nature and suffering. Frank R. Giordano writes in "The Martyrdom of Giles Winterborne" that:
In the primitive world of the woodlands, the individual’s life is rigorously governed by custom and habit; and, where everyone leads the same kind of life, the ideas, feelings, and occupations common to nearly all the members create a powerful form of collective supervision over the individual. The effects of customary social forces are indicated early in The Woodlanders. (64)
Although Giles and Marty are seen as unsuccessful socially and economically, they are highly respected by other members of their community for their strength and depth of character. Even though their lives are altered tragically by misfortune and unrequited love, they each possess a thorough understanding and appreciation of themselves as individuals and of their community. They are whole and they belong.
In their ties with nature, their self-awareness, and their simplicity,
Giles Winterborne and Marty South embody all that is necessary for full participation in the community. They possess all that Grace lacks and are nowhere so apparent as in their conversation with each other:
"Suppose, Marty," he said after a while, looking at her extended arm, upon which old scratches from the briars showed themselves purple in the cold wind, "suppose you know a person, and want to bring that person to a good understanding with you, do you think a Christmas party of some sort is warming-up thing, and likely to be useful in hastening on the matter?"
"Is there to be dancing?"
"There might be dancing, certainly."
"Will He dance with Her?"
"Well, yes."
"Then it might bring things to a head, one way or the other, I won’t be the maid to say which." 96
"It shall be done," said Winterborne, not to her, though he spoke the words quite loudly. And as the day was nearly ended, he added, "Here, Marty, I’ll send up a man to plant the rest to-morrow. I ’ve other things to think of just now. "
"It will be fine to-morrow," said Marty, observing them with the vermilion light of the sun in the pupils of her eyes, "for they are acroupied down nearly at the end of the bough. If it were going to be stormy they’d squeeze close to the trunk. The weather is almost all they have to think of, isn’t it, Mr. Winterborne? And so they must be lighter-hearted than we."
"I dare say they are," said Winterborne.
Giles and Marty are representative of a class whose members deal with essentials in a matter-of-fact fashion. Their language is terse and straight forward and without pretense, and they discuss social events as means of bringing people together rather than as displays of etiquette or snobbery. There is a certain innocence behind this view that presupposes an equal straight-forwardness on the part of others, particularly those of a slightly higher class, in this case the
Melburys. Giordano discusses Giles’ social limitations and their consequences notably:
All of these social pressures, which set limits on individuality and subordinate one’s personal value to false social values, increase Giles’s vulnerability to self- destruction. ... A lover and a person of affairs, Giles is not in the habit of regarding his inner self spectacularly; as a result he fails to note the rare power he possessed, that of keeping both judgement and emotion suspended in difficult cases. (65)
Unfortunately, both his "rare power" of dispassionate action and his openness and lack of sophistication prevent Giles from planning his entertainment of the Melburys with adequate care, and he thereby fails to meet the expectations of his guests on this celebratory occasion of 97
Grace’s return and in his dealings with the Melbury’s from that point onward.
Grace’s closing words exemplify the strengths of her class. Her ability to read nature is a clear expression of the affinity she possesses with the natural world, so central to the woodland community, and she places her own identity squarely within that community, speaking of herself and the trees as though the lines separating their species were nebulous. Along with this close association with the natural world comes the acceptance of its totality and the totality of the self. Both the light and the dark sides are recognized and incorporated into the world view and the perception of self, taken almost to the point of fatalism.
Although the most admirable characters in The Woodlanders. Giles and Marty, belong to the peasant class, the protagonist comes, once again, from the middle classes. Hardy’s representation of this class is one that is stratified, essentially, of three levels: Mr. Mel bury,
Grace, and Fitzpiers. These characters function as the link between
Little Hintock and the world-at-large and each shares the interesting quality of being somehow dissatisfied with his or her lot in life and in search of "something better." In each case, this search has tragic implications for their happiness: Mr. Melbury’s aspirations for his daughter (a representative of him self) cause her original breech with the community; Grace’s notions of genteel life alienate her from Giles and cause her to favor Fitzpiers; and Fitzpiers in turn seeks the status inherent in Mrs. Charmond’s social wealth and social position. 98
This progression appears as well in the educational level of these three representatives of the middle class. Mr. Mel bury possesses an education that allows him to function successfully as a timber merchant, both in the agricultural and the commercial arenas, yet in terms of any close feeling for either the natural world or the legal and social aspects of the world outside Little Hintock he is deficient.
Grace has become educated, both academically and socially, beyond her father, yet she has lost whatever communion with the natural world she enjoyed as a child, a fact that Giles notes immediately upon her return to Little Hintock. Her degree of sophistication is greater than Mr.
Melbury’s, yet she yields to his decisions and preferences in nearly every important aspect of her life and she is similarly naive regarding legal and social fine points.
On the upper end of the continuum, Fitzpiers is almost utterly alienated from the natural world, except in his attraction to women.
As a medical doctor, he is well educated and in his seeking for metaphysical knowledge, dangerously so. Indeed, the night-time light from his windows and his intention to "buy" Grammer Oliver’s body upon her death embue him with a Faustian quality. In general, it seems as though the role of education for the Little Hintock middle class is somehow suspect in Hardy’s view, for in each case it leads his middle class characters away from a deeper understanding of the world that is so central to their community, and from a clear understanding of themselves, leading ultimately to misfortune.
The dissatisfaction with one’s current situation and the search for something better and the separation from nature common to these 99 middle class characters are expressed succinctly in Fitzpiers conversation with Giles in Chapter 18:
"I have no wife; and no idea of one. I hope to do better things than marry and settle in Hintock. Not but that it is well for a medical man to be married; and sometimes, begad, ’twould be pleasant enough in this place, with the wind roaring round the house, and the rain and the boughs beating against it. I hear that you lost your lifeholds by the death of South?" (W 118)
Disdain is the most prominent tone in the doctor’s language; disdain for social conventions (marriage), rural society (Hintock) and the workings of nature (wind and rain), yet it is a disdain that embraces much more than any one of these three particulars. By speaking of them in one breath, as it were, Fitzpiers indicates a general superciliousness - and lack of understanding of - anything that is not urban, sophisticated, and perhaps even slightly decadent. His act of ending this litany of complaints with a casual inquiry regarding Gile’s great loss indicates insensitivity in the extreme. There is clearly no communal feeling between the two speakers. If Giles is "Autumn’s very brother", Fitzpiers - and therefore his class - represent the antithesis of Wessex community ideals.
Peter J. Casagrande notes in his article, "The Shifted ’Centre of
Altruism’ in The Woodlanders: Hardy’s Third ’Return of a Native’" that:
The Woodland is Hardy’s symbol of man in society - in the society of organic life. ... The intermingling in the Hintocks of hamlet and thicket, of men and trees, or orchard land and timber land reflects The Woodlanders preoccupation with the common origin and thus the community of all organic life. But it is an ironic idea of community, for it is community governed by an Unconscious and Unfulfilled Intention and held together by the common experience of pain and travail... (118) 100
Casagrande’s commentary attests to the essential unity and wholeness present in the Little Hintock community, qualities that are so lacking in Grace’s makeup, yet it also points to a crucial lack implicit within the character of the community itself that contributes to the impossibility of Grace’s reassimilation. The woodland community is representative of wholeness in that both the light and the dark sides are recognized and given play, significantly, however, in unequal measure. The wholeness is imperfect, thus, because it exists out-of balance, with the dark or shadow side, the "Unconscious and Unfulfilled
Intention" holding the ascendent position.
Giles and Marty are in sync with this version of "wholeness," for the "common experience of pain and travail" is an ever-present characteristic of their situation and their outlook. They accept - and one might almost say - embrace the shadow side of experience and they therefore are fundamentally at home in the Little Hintock community.
Because the shadow side of the community is so strong and their reaction to it virtually non-existent, both Giles and Marty are ultimately subsumed by this "Unfulfilled Intention" that is so central to both their community and their selves. When one remembers the fate of Marty’s father, John South, one tends to view this submission as representative of the Hintock peasant class in general.
Grace, however, neither willingly recognizes nor fully accepts the disturbing aspects of either her own personality or her native community. She is thus prevented from full participation in the community, and while she is certainly protected from being swallowed up, as it were, by the darker aspects of the woodland, she is also - 101
and more significantly - prevented from achieving a just and adequate
appraisal of her own situation and her own inner self. Because of her
perpetual lack of self-understanding, Grace is excluded, in the end,
from a fulfilling membership in any community.
In The Woodlanders the community of Little Hintock survives
intact and its human representatives, Giles and Marty, retain their
sure sense of self and inner wholeness in spite of personal tragedy.
In the end, the vision of community Hardy presents in The Woodlanders
remains unchanged. Glenn Irvin notes in "Structure and Tone in The
Woodlanders." that "Hardy ultimately sides with the community, although the community that triumphs is not the one Hardy would prefer" (86).
Indeed, the representative of the individual in the novel, Grace
Melbury, survives, but is doomed to a stunted existence. She fails to
rejoin the community of her birth, either figuratively or literally,
she recognizes too late the man who would be her true partner and
unwittingly contributes to his death, she returns to an unfaithful
husband who will remove her from her native community, perhaps to a
lifetime of transient residence, and she remains ever unaware of her
essential character and inner self.
Although Hardy does not judge Grace harshly, it is nevertheless
evident that he is less sympathetic towards her than towards those
representations of the community, Giles and Marty. This assessment of
character and community seem to indicate that here, his sympathies are
more clearly aligned with the community than with the self; or at least
that Hardy feels community to be the stronger force in this instance. 102 3
The Self Sequestered
The community of Little Hintock plays a significant role in the representation of Grace’s tragedy in that it parallels her situation, her personality, and her ultimate disappointment in life. Like Egdon
Heath, Little Hintock is a community set apart from the world. Its sequestered character is aptly described by Mrs. Dollery in the novel’s opening pages: "’Tis such a small place that, as a town gentleman, you’d need have a candle and lantern to find it if ye don’t know where t ’is" (W 26). Her words imply that Little Hintock is infrequently visited, and that it is obscure and hidden. The allusion to darkness is significant, not only in its description of the literal and figurative atmosphere of Little Hintock, but particularly in that much of Grace’s tragedy derives from her return from worldly society to this obscure, sequestered locale; since she has become through education a
"town lady" she, too, will need a means of illumining her way inLittle
Hintock.
In many ways, the character of Little Hintock is similar to
Grace’s. Hardy presents Little Hintock as:
... one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more listlessness than meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in inferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, dramas of grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and closely-knit interdependence of the lives therein. (W 27) 103
As the only child of an indulgent parent, Grace has led a sheltered, if
not exactly sequestered, life. Her life, both under her father’s
protective eye and in the carefully chosen boarding schools, removed
her from direct experience with hardship and only intensified her
natural inclination towards passivity. Like Little Hintock, Grace
possesses a certain "listlessness" which allows her to succumb to the misguided plans others, most notably her father, have for her life.
L ittle Hintock’s combination of "narrow" reasoning resulting in
"inferences wildly imaginative" also finds its parallel in Grace
Melbury. She is a person of average intelligence who is neither
inclined nor has been trained to make decisions based on rational
choices. That her feelings for both Giles Winterborne and Edmund
Fitzpiers derive from imaginative rather than rational judgments is a
notable example. Grace’s tragedy - and that of Giles, Marty, and to a
lesser extent, Felice Charmond and Edmund - reaches a larger dimension
than that of an obscure woodland village, and is very much the product
of lives lived in "close knit interdependence."
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the role the community of
Little Hintock plays in the representation of Grace’s tragic attempt at
reassimilation, however, derives from the dark side of its nature:
On older trees still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like lings. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes lif e what i t is, was as obvious as i t could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; the lichen ate the vigour of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling. (W 64-5) 104
Grace, as well, is the victim of Hardy’s "Unfulfilled Intention" in
that she resembles the "sapling" whose promise and joy in lif e is
slowly, but inexorably, "strangled."
This is not a strangling of the physical body, but of the mind.
In his a rtic le , "Hardy’s The Woodlanders: Inwardness and Memory,"
George S. Fayan comments on the notion that all elements of the woodland society, "animal, vegetable and human" fall victim to their
"own self-torment" (90). He states further that:
The most common experience in Little Hintock, the contorting and deflecting of impulses, represents less a cosmic conspiracy than a psychological effect. Behind its pervasiveness is one cause: the susceptibility to stress of living substance, its fierce or timid sensitiveness before what it comes to know, and the single-minded concern to which an event can reduce a temperament, almost as if summoned by its readiness to be so constricted. (95)
The representative role of the community of Little Hintock is
crucial because it allows Hardy to develop his thematic points about
the relationship between community and self in the question of
reassim ilation. Because L ittle Hintock so closely parallels Grace in
situation, personality, and susceptibility to tragedy. Hardy is able to
use its representation as a vehicle for more realistically portraying
the differences between rural and urban, ignorance and education, and
simplicity and sophistication which contribute to Grace’s unhappiness.
This representation of the community also allows him to present a
fa irly non-judgmental view of both community and character. Hardy
shows both L ittle Hintock and Grace Melbury plainly and without
apology; he matter-of-factly portrays attributes and failings alike.
The reader first learns of Grace through the ears of Marty South
as she eavesdrops on the conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Melbury in 105
Chapter Two. The narrator tells us parenthetically that Grace is
Melbury’s only daughter and Melbury goes on to air his fears that he has educated Grace "so well and so long" that he hesitates in "wasting her" should he encourage a marriage with Giles. These images of a pampered, perhaps spoiled only child are strengthened when Grace’s father confesses to her stepmother how he has carefully sheltered the imprint of her foot in the garden:
’Tis the track of her shoe that she made when she ran down here the day before she went away all those months ago. I covered i t up when she was gone; and when I come here to look at it, I ask myself again, why should she be sacrificed to a poor man? (W 37)
Such a shrine as this implies an overbearing, almost idolatrous concern about Grace’s wellbeing on Mr. Melbury’s part. It causes the reader to envisage a girl who is not only pampered, but idolized and dominated to the extent that her character and her will are subsumed by those of her father. This prejudiced view is only augmented by
Creedle’s comment that "to keep a maid at school t i l l she is ta lle r out of pattens than her mother was in ’em - ’tis a tempting of Providence"
(W 44).
Thus when the reader at last encounters Grace in Chapter Five it
is with adequate preparation to expect the worst, a mere spoiled puppet of a woman with ideas well above her station:
It would have been d ifficu lt to describe Grace Melbury with precision, either then or at any time. Nay, from the highest point of view, to precisely describe a human being, the focus of the universe, how impossible! But apart from transcendentalism, there never probably lived a person who was in herself more completely a reductio ad absurdum of attempts to appraise a woman, even externally, by items of face and figure. ... Speaking generally, i t may be said that she was sometimes beautiful, at other times not beautiful, according to the state of her health and 106
spirits. ... Her look expressed a tendency to wait for others’ deeds before her own doings. In her small, delicate mouth ... there was a gentleness that might hinder self-assertion for her own good.
What people therefore saw of her in a cursory view was very l ittl e ; in truth, mainly something that was not she. The woman herself was a conjectural creature who had little to do with the outlines presented to Sherton eyes; a shape in the gloom, whose true quality could only be approximated by putting together a movement now and a glance then, in that patient attention which nothing but watchful loving kindness ever troubles itself to give. (W 52-3)
The narrator’s description of Grace mirrors the essential attributes of her personality: imprecise, vague, and to a certain extent, inscrutable. The imprecision of her demeanor extends to her actions as well, expressing itself in her hesitancy and passive dependence. This belies the earlier prejudicial view of an utterly spoiled, self-centered person, and tempers the reader’s perception of
Grace so that the predominant judgment of her character is that she is vulnerable, rather than merely pampered. One feels a movement of pity towards Grace, as though she were a displaced child.
Just as it is difficult to pin down the exact nature of Grace
Melbury’s demeanor and actions, so i t is hard to describe her physical appearance with regularity; she is "sometimes beautiful, at other times not beautiful, according to the state of her health and spirits."
Hardy implies here that not only does Grace have the sophistication of a child in her inability to keep her inner state from imprinting itself on her physical self, but more importantly that there is a distinction between her inner and outer selves. These two components of her personality, in other words, are not unified. 107
What we see of Grace outwardly, therefore, is "mainly something that was not she," a person not easily understood with accuracy by others, nor presumably by herself. Grace’s personality is limited by this very characteristic in that she cannot become outwardly adjusted
"in the absence of inner adjustment" (Hall 75). In sum. Hardy presents
Grace to the reader as an enigma, a character who at first glance seems weak, shallow, and overly self-centered, but whose "true quality" ultimately appears to the persons who take the trouble to piece together the hints offered by her slightest actions, suspend judgment and see her as the confused, misguided yet potentially vital character she is.
Grace’s connection with the natural aspects of the Hintock community is less readily discernable than is Clym’s connection with the Heath. Although she has likely been away from her native community for a shorter time, the separation seemingly has created a greater gulf. Her conversation with Giles about the apple orchard as he brings her home in the early pages of the novel testifies to her estrangement from the natural community, an estrangement that, like everything about
Grace, vacillates. Giles’s exclamation that Grace "used to know well enough" the difference between John-apples and bitter-sweets (W 55) indicates that, before her departure to acquire a lady’s education,
Grace was sufficiently knowledgeable about the woodland, yet that upon her return this knowledge has been forgotten, or at least suppressed.
I contend that it is the latter and that the woodland represents a portion of her inner personality that she has repressed in order to function as the person her father wants her to be. Seen in this way. 108 the woods become the means of allowing us a glimpse into the person
Grace truly is and they also help explain the all-consuming passion
Giles maintains for her. Grace’s reassimilation into the community, therefore, is doomed because in refusing to embrace the character of the woodland, she is refusing to accept a central aspect of her own psyche.
Grace’s realization of this repressed portion of her personality glimmers sporadically as she learns of the reconcilement between her father and Giles in Chapter Thirty-three. As Grace and Giles stand
"facing each other, fearing each other, troubling each other souls ...
Grace [experiences] acute regret at the sight of these wood-cutting scenes, because she had estranged herself from them..." (W 214) The recognition of the split within her self is quickly suppressed, but surfaces again briefly in her spontaneous words of consolation and encouragement as she la te r guides her rival, Felice Charmond, through the dark woods: " ... there is nothing to fear; I know these woods well" (W 220).
Grace has one la st chance to confront the connection between the natural community of the woodland and her inner self during her lonely refuge in Giles’ hut. The ravages of the storm, coupled with her isolation and inner desperation bring her to an unbearable understanding of her self and her relationship to the community.
Opening the door of Giles’ hut at last to allow him shelter, she finally allows herself to look within:
The darkness was intense, seeming to touch her pupils like a substance. She only now became aware how heavy the rainfall had been and was ... She stood listening with parted lip s, and holding the door in one hand, t i l l her 109
eyes growing accustomed to the obscurity she discerned the wild brandishing of their arms by the adjoining trees. At last she cried loudly with an effort: ’Giles! You must come in i’ ...
... ’Giles, Giles!’ she cried, with the full strength of her voice, and without any of the shamefacedness that had characterized her first cry. ’0, come in - come in! Where are you? I have been so wicked - I have thought too much of myself Do you hear? I don’t want to keep you out any longer. I cannot bear that you should suffer so. I want you here! G i-i-iles!’ (W 275)
Although Grace laments that Giles "should suffer so," one suspects that she bemoans her own suffering ju st as greatly as she does his. When she peers into the darkness and recoils from the "wild brandishing" of the trees that mirrors her soul, she has recognized at last that Giles is the only person able to reconcile her to her inner nature and thus to the community of her birth. It is, of course, too late.
That Grace remains perpetually unaware and unaccepting of her self constitutes the fatal flaw which prevents her from achieving full participation in the L ittle Hintock community. In the end, Grace reconciles with her husband, thus forever negating the possibility of a return to either her native community or, most importantly, to the requisite recognition and acceptance of self. She blinds herself to reality and contributes to what Milan Kundera has called "the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return" (4).
Grace is able to avoid self-recognition so successfully because she is superbly adept at assuming different masks or personas as needed to win approval from others. The persona has been called, quite appropriately for Grace, "the conformity archetype ... the basis for social and community life" and the discovery of the persona expected by 110 those of influence to be requisite for "[getting] ahead" in the community (Hall 44). Grace successfully learns which persona to adopt in order to please her father, which to present to her school companions, and to a lesser degree which role to assume for her husband. She goes a great ways toward meeting th eir expectations for her role in the community, but unfortunately develops these various personas at the expense of other components of her personality.
Because of this imbalance, Grace can only rarely view her native community with anything approaching a freshness of opinion. Such infrequent glimpses as she has would very likely occur with greater frequency were it not for her father’s stronghold on her outlook.
Indeed, shortly after her return to Little Hintock the veneer of her boarding school persona begins to wane:
... the homeliness of Hintock life was fast becoming lost to her observation as a singularity; as the momentary strangeness of a face from which we have for years been separated insensibly passes off with renewed intercourse, and tones itself down into identity with the lineaments of the past. ( W 91)
As the tragedy of her marriage becomes apparent to her, Grace yearns for the simplicity of life that would be hers had she remained at home and married Giles, yet even this yearning is half-hearted and indeterminate upon her reconciliation with Fitzpiers at the novel’s end.
At the point in her life where Grace enters the stage of The
Woodlanders. her personality is as yet incompletely formed and her sense of self as yet tenuous. Having ju st passed from school life to adult lif e in her home community, Grace finds herself very much in a position of liminality. The resulting disequilibrium is disconcerting Ill to even the strongest of personalities, but for Grace it proves disastrous as she sets out not to affirm the self she herself chooses to develop, but continues instead in her apparently lifelong attempt to form a se lf pleasing to her parent, Mr. Melbury.
Fairly soon after her return to Little Hintock, Grace begins to express an awareness that she had been forming herself according to her father’s desired image of her. Most importantly, she begins to recognize the burden of developing a false self;
She wished that she was not his worldly hope; the responsibility of such a position was too great. She had made it for herself mainly by her appearance and attractive behavior to him since her return. ’If I had only come home in a shabby dress, and tried to speak roughly, th is might not have happened,’ she thought. She deplored less the fact, however, than the contingencies. (W 94)
Grace’s wishes indicate that, unfortunately for her self, she continues to think in "outward" terms; she is as yet unable to define herself by anything but appearances and behaviors - specifically as she regards these in the mirror of her father’s view of her.
After her marriage to Fitzpiers, Grace includes his definition of her self in her self-image and thus adds to her burden. When she opens herself to the influences of the natural community and recognizes
Giles’ as "autumn’s very brother" she briefly allows a sense of her true self to emerge: "The consciousness of having to be genteel because of her husband’s profession, the veneer of artificiality which she had acquired at the fashionable schools, were thrown off, and she became the crude country girl of her latent early instincts" (W 191).
The self-awareness is terrifying to Grace, however, because it brings with it the realization of her basic affinity with and attraction to 112
Giles. Because th is would mean being subsumed by the forces of nature which define the woodland community, Grace represses her budding consciousness of her inner self.
Nevertheless Grace’s sense of self grows steadily as the novel progresses and reaches its pinnacle when she regards Giles’ haggard form and recognizes her causal role in his morbid condition: "0, ... how selfishly correct I am always - too, too correct! Can it be that cruel propriety is killing the dearest heart that ever woman clasped to her own!" (W 277). This spark of self-awareness, however, ultimately proves too frightening for Grace and she soon relapses in the relative comfort of her previous self-ignorance. She remains unable to face the darker sides of her personality, the parts that do not fit the socially acceptable masks of the fashionable boarding-school that win her fath er’s and her husband’s approval.
Donald Hansen writes in An Introduction to Critical Sociology that the "developing self requires both involvement in the social conventions and a capacity to challenge those conventions" (35). Grace has certainly mastered the first of these requirements, but she falters when it comes to the second. She eventually recognizes that her timid adherence to social conventions destroys any possibility of achieving true happiness and at some level must make the connection between the possession of this happiness and the unification of self which would make possible her successful reassimilation into her natal community.
Nevertheless, she never finds the self-assurance to be anything but
"too, too correct." What she sees as the dark side of her inner self - the alliance with the natural instincts and behaviors of the woodland 113 community - is in truth merely the strength to see past the confines of social conventions and surmount them.
Grace’s first conversation with Giles when he comes to escort her home in Chapter Six reveals much about her character. As they drive home together, Giles reminisces about the incipient romance of their earlier friendship and queries:
"Have you forgotten all that, or haven’t you?"
She owned that she remembered i t very well, now that he mentioned the circumstances. "But I must have been in short frocks," she said slyly.
"Come now. Miss Melbury, that won’t do! Short frocks indeed! You know better as well as I."
Grace thereupon declared that she would not argue with an old friend she valued so highly as she valued him, but if it were as he said, then she was virtually no less than an old woman now, so far did the time seem removed from her present.
"But old feelings come to life again in some people," she added softly.
"And in others they have never died!" said he.
"Ah - they are Love’s very ownest and best, I suppose! I don’t pretend to rank so high as they."
"It’s not a they - it’s a he."
Grace sighed. "Shall I tell you all about Brighton or Cheltenham, or places on the Continent that I visited last summer?" she said.
"With all my heart."
She then described places and persons, avoiding, however, what he most wished to hear - everything specially appertaining to her own inner existence. When she had done she said gaily, "Now do you te ll me in return what has happened in Hintock since I have been away."
"Anything to keep the conversation away from her and me," said Giles within him. (W 57) 114
Five distinct voices can be heard in Grace’s brief conversation with Giles. They attest to her social and educational background, her age, her relationship with men, and particularly, to her own self- concept and essential personality. The first voice is clearly that of the coy, young woman who is enjoying a moments flirta tio n with a man she knows has been enamoured with her since childhood. Grace’s sly comment on "short frocks" shows her to be a woman who enjoys her youth, her attractiveness and her emotional ascendancy over G iles’s affections.
The rather country, hoydenish tone of this early bantering is momentarily cast aside and Grace shows us a rare glimpse into herself as she drops the mask of the coquette and reveals, quietly in and few words, an indication of her inner feelings: "But old feelings come to life again in some people." The soft tone, the depersonalization of emotion ("some people"), and the brevity of this statement combine with her self-degrading retort, "I don’t pretend to rank so high as they," to belie Grace’s instinctive hesitancy and her strong fear of looking inward.
When so pressed to confront and reveal her inner self, Grace resorts to another mask and adopts the voice and manners of the fashionable school girl and loquaciously recounts her recent sojourns to British and Continental resorts. The self-absorption and insensitivity to others that results from this pretense is clearly revealed in her rather condescending plea to Giles that he "tell [her] in return what has happened in Hintock." 115
The rapid movement from these four voices and their corresponding personas causes the reader to be unsurprised at the strong undertone which runs like a current throughout Grace’s conversation. The voice that is most vocal is heard in the unmistakable tone of self- deprecation and lack of self-confidence that resurfaces again and again in the above passage in the narrative commentaries on Grace’s and
Giles’ conversation. The most telling statement is the admission that
Grace is eager to discuss anything that avoids divulging "[anything] specially appertaining to her own inner existence."
The primary aspect Hardy employs in his characterization of Grace
Melbury is the mimetic aspect. In his artic le , "’The Woodlanders’ as
Traditional Pastoral." Robert Drake comments on Hardy’s "reported
’provocation’ with Grace, by finding her, nonetheless, "the most appealing of Hardy’s heroines" (255). While it is difficult to accept this view of Grace as an appealing character, Drake’s opinion of her characterization and Hardy’s "provocation" with her certainly attest to the realism of Grace’s representation. Her representation as a young woman of her times is w ell-crafted. Although readers are well aware of
Grace’s many shortcomings - and very often frustrated by them - most regard her with a certain sympathy because her submissive, self- centered demeanor is so largely the responsibility of her doting father. As much as one must deplore Grace’s actions, one ends by viewing her with a certain pity that would never be aroused by a
"type."
In particular, Grace’s central attributes of hesitancy, passivity, and her extreme desire to please those close to her are very 116 re a listic a lly portrayed. The combination and development of these tra its throughout the progressions of The Woodlanders makes Grace
Mel bury a very "plausible person" indeed. (Phelan 11) The strength of her mimetic function is masterfully presented in that act which most angers many readers: her ultimate return to Fitzpiers at the novel’s end and the blatant self-blinding the behavior represents.
Grace’s thematic function remains secondary in the novel. She never quite becomes a type, no matter how stereotypical her behavior seems to be. Unlike Clym, Grace’s connection with the title is ironic, at best. She never becomes one of "the Woodlanders," and the reader is left questioning whether she, in fact, ever was. In the accepted
Victorian view, Grace possesses quite desirable feminine tra its ; she is passive, submissive to the male authorities in her life, and comforms admirably to the social and moral standards of her culture. Because
Hardy gives this presentation, however, so clearly ironically, she never fulfills a truly thematic function in traditional Nineteenth- century terms.
The thematic function that Grace achieves is appreciated more by the modern or post-modern reader; she stands ultimately as a woman who closes the door on her true self, and thus brings tragedy into her own life and the lives of those whom she loves. Thematically, then, for the Twentieth-century reader, Grace functions somewhat as a
"vi11 ai ness," a representation that Hardy illustrates vividly in his portrayal of Grace’s enlightenment in the face of Giles’ lingering death. 117
Throughout the progression of The Woodlanders. the separation between the mimetic and thematic functions narrows, widens briefly in
Grace’s flash of self-knowledge, and then fuses irrevocably by the novel’s end. Grace’s failure to reassimilate into her natal community is made all the more emphatic in that she never again becomes "a woodlander." In this aspect of her thematic function, she is replaced by Marty South. In leaving the Hintock community with Fitzpiers after their "reconciliation," she ultimately fuses the split between her mimetic and thematic functions and "succeeds" at last in becoming a type, loosing her "plausibility as a person." At this point, she loses much of the reader’s sympathy. Ironically, her tragedy arises largely from this fusion. 118 WORKS CITED
Peter J. Casagrande. "The Shifted ’Centre of Altruism’ in The Woodlanders: Thomas Hardy’s Third ’Return of a Native’ ." English Literary History. 38 (1971), 104-25.
Robert Y. Drake, Jr. "’The Woodlanders’ as Traditional Pastoral." Modern Fiction Studies. 6.3 (1960), 251-257.
George S. Fayan, Jr. "Hardy’s The Woodlanders: Inwardness and Memory. "Studies in English Literature 1500-1900. 1.4 (1961), 81-100.
Calvin S. Hall and Vernon J. Nordby. A Primer of Junoian Psychology. New York: New American Library, 1973.
Donald A. Hansen. An Invitation to Critical Sociology. New York: MacMillan, The Free Press, 1976.
Thomas Hardy. The Woodlanders. P.N. Furbank, ed. London: MacMillan, 1974.
Noorul Hasan. Thomas Hardy. The Sociological Imagination. London: MacMillan, 1982.
Glenn Irvin. "Structure and Tone in The Woodlanders." Thomas Hardy Annual. No. 2. Norman Page, ed., 1984.
James Phelan. Reading People. Reading Plots. U ofChicago P, 1989. CHAPTER III
Jess of the d’Urbervilles: Beginnings of Community Redefinition
C ritics are generally in agreement that Jess of the d’Urbervilles represents a marked change from Hardy’s early novels, P. N. Furbank going so far as to say that i t stands outside the "’Wessex’ cycle of novels." Whereas Furbank asserts convincingly that the landscape scenes of Tess are "Bunyanesque" and that the novel is "intermittently a whole series of allegories" (19), the interactions between Tess the character and the many landscapes of the novel move far beyond allegory to show, instead, a distinct progression in Hardy’s thought concerning community and self.
Our f ir s t encounter with the protagonist of Tess of the d’Urbervilles differs from the initial encounters with the central characters in either The Return of the Native or The Woodlanders. for when we first meet Tess, she has not yet left her natal community.
When she does so, however, she meets with such disastrous experiences that when she attempts to return to her home community of Marlott, she can do so only in name. Because her sense of self has been so maimed by her encounter with Alec at Trantridge, she endures a self-imposed, spiritual alienation from the Marlott community. She is ostracized not by the other farm laborers of her class, but rather by her sense of shame, alienation, and self-deprecation. When the death of her child
119 120
"frees" her to leave her home community, she embarks on the self- imposed exile that takes her away from the community of her birth to
Talbothays. Although Tess is in fact well suited to th is dairy community, she feels herself to be an outsider, and after her marriage to Angel causes her to leave Talbothays, she moves farther and farther from community membership. Ironically, Tess’s avoidance of true participation in community ultimately brings her closer to understanding a true sense of self. 121 1
The Critique of Social Convention
The narrator of Tess of the d’Urbervilles engages his readers, once again, by bringing us into the community in the company of a member of the lower classes who is traveling there on foot along a solitary country road. In contrast to The Woodlanders. however, the narrator of Tess induces the readers to engage in his narration not only as observers, but also as participants, as i t were.
Significantly, we are encouraged to participate in the narration primarily through the role of the lower class. Through the roadway conversation of the slightly drunken Mr. Durbeyfield and Parson
Tringham with which the novel opens, we are not only introduced to the rural community of Marlott, but, more importantly, we gain substantial insight into and understanding of the lower classes of rural Wessex.
When the parson salutes Jack Durbeyfield as "Sir John," a revealing and portentous interchange occurs between the two:
’Then what might your meaning be in calling me ’Sir John’ these different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield, the haggler?
. . . I t was only my whim,’ he said; and, after a moment’s hesitation: ’It was on account of a discovery I made some little time ago, whilst I was hunting up pedigrees for the new county history. I am Parson Tringham, the antiquary, of Stagfoot Lane. Don’t you really know, Durbeyfield, that you are the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly family of the d’Urbervilles, who derive their descent from Sir Pagan d’Urberville, that renowned knight who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror, as appears by Battle Abbey Roll? ... Aye, there have been generations of Sir Johns among you, and if knighthood were hereditary, like a baronetcy, as it practically was in old times, when men were knighted from Father to son, you would be Sir John now.’ 122
’In sh o rt,’ concluded the parson, decisively smacking his leg with his switch, ’there’s hardly such another family in England.’
’Daze my eyes, and isn’t there?’ said Durbeyfield. ’And here have I been knocking about, year after year, from p illa r to post, as if I was no more than the commonest feller in the parish ... And how long hev this news about me been knowed, "Pa’son Tringham?’ (T 34-5)
By this seemingly inconsequential conversation, we learn that the community of Marlott is a small, obscure, country village whose inhabitants are singularly removed from anything but provincial concerns. Hardy’s narrator ensures our c ritical reception of Parson
Tringham and his class; although Tringham admits that "our impulses are too strong for our judgment sometimes," i t is evident that Tringham is far more preoccupied with his antiquarian interests than with welfare of the Marlott parishioners, or he would think twice before imparting such potentiously "dangerous" information to the foolishly gullible
Durbeyfield. Similarly, we are made aware that the foolishly naive
Durbeyfield is only too quick to attach great importance to Tringham’s thoughtless declarations, and while we remain critical of his irresponsible, lazy behavior, we soon note that it is Durbeyfield who suffers from the encounter, not Tringham.
The dialogue between these two is noteworthy from a narrative perspective not only in that it provides an initial indication of the character of the Marlott community, but that it reveals much about the views on class systems and the history of social hierarchy that form so large a part of Hardy’s authorial concerns in the novel. Tringham’s words and Durbeyfield’s reaction to them ensure the reader’s immediate awareness of the difference in hierarchy between the Durbeyfields and 123 the d’Urbervilles. Similarly, John Durbeyfield finds the parson’s remarks so attractive because in his naivete, he accepts the implicit equation of blood and nobility.
In promoting so early in the novel the notion that the social world in which Tess is grounded is beset with problems, Hardy’s narrator encourages our expectations that this rural community is no pastoral ideal, either socially, or fundamentally. He intrudes into the words of these country denizens to describe Kingsbere-sub-
Greenhill, the burial place of the noble d’Urbervilles, as a "little one-eyed, blinking sort o’ place" and in Tess’s own declaration that the "star" on which she lives is "a blighted one."
Nowhere is this narrative perspective more prominent than in
Hardy’s narrator’s response to the meeting between Tess and Alec:
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 for loving. Nature does not often say "See!" to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply ’Here!’ to a body’s cry of ’Where?’ till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. 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 jo lts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointment, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies. (T 72)
By assuring us that this is the universe in which the rural community of Marlott exists, Hardy’s narrator predisposes us to look for and accept without surprise the unsoundness or blemish that lie s at the 124 heart of the community and of the characters who are its inhabitants.
He seems to encourage a passive resignation that parallels Tess’s own:
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." There lay the pity of i t . An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from the previous self of hers who stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry- farm. (T 107-8)
Hardy’s narrator points to the ingrained fatalism of the Wessex peasants, an aspect of the novel that will be discussed in greater depth. What is significant here about the passage, however, is that he does not condemn the peasants’ tendency to judge the "sins of the flesh" with far greater leniency than do the members of the middle and upper classes. Near the close of the novel, the narrator emphasizes this view fairly strongly through his intrusion into the thoughts of the chastened Angel Clare, asking:
Who was the moral man? S till more pertinently, who was the moral woman? The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed. (T 388)
This view of morality espoused by the narrator of Tess is a fairly radical approach for a Victorian novelist to take, and the admonishment to look at the character’s "aims and impulses" rather than "things done" is revolutionary. Hardy is asking his readers to look at his characters as human beings whose errors and weaknesses are ju st as frequently caused by their environments and circumstances as by their moral core. More significantly, his characters may be viewed as representations of the inner states of the human psyche, anticipating the post-Freudian character studies of twentieth-century literature. 125
He suggests, for example, that in Tess the inner person carries more weight than the outward actions. In his delineation of the characters in the novel, therefore, Hardy focuses on the inner being, rather than the outer.
The tenor of these passages of narration is both sympathetic to the human struggle they describe and stridently editorial in its criticism of the social structures that allow that suffering. The resulting complexity of tone sets up a certain tension that erodes somewhat the realism of the novel. Because of the narrator’s sympathetic presentation of community and character, the reader is encouraged to endorse the novel’s claim to realism, yet the strongly didactic passages detract from that realism, supporting a tendency to accept Furbank’s appraisal of the novel as "Bunyanesque".
Hardy replies to this issue in his 1912 Preface to Tess:
Nevertheless, though the novel was intended to be neither didactic nor aggressive, but in the scenic parts to be representative simply, and in the contemplative to be oftener charged with impressions than with convictions, there have been objectors both to the matter and to the rendering. ... Let me repeat that a novel is an impression, not an argument. (T 29-30)
While it is difficult to accept Hardy’s assertions that the content of
Tess functions only secondarily as an "argument," it is my assertion that through his representation of the "scenic parts" (community) and his treatment of his characters ("[contemplation] ... charged with impressions") the novel remains, in the end, an equally strong representation of realism as a forceful social argument. Through his treatment of community and self, Hardy’s narrator makes the novel both responsive to his own cultural situation and pertinent to the tension 126 between community membership and individuation as i t exists in many late 20th century cultures.
Just as Hardy's narrator applauds the less judgmental moralityof the Wessex peasants, so too is he accepting of the fatalism thatallows them to avoid condeming Tess for her pregnancy by saying "It was to be." Of all Hardy’s major novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles is built most securely around the tenet of fatalism. From the introduction to the concluding chapter of the novel, the events that determine and guide Tess’s existence are linked with the iron chain of fate.
The father’s drunkenness, the parson’s thoughtless remark,
Angel’s choice of another dance partner, the death of Prince, the misdirected le tte r, the chance reaquaintance with the "reformed" Alec: these are but a few of the acts of fate that lead Tess inexorably to the gallows. In fact, they are piled on so heavily one upon the other that Tess, as an invididual consciousness, seems to have no control over her life whatsoever.
The narrator’s final words comes as no surprise when he sums up the dominant role that fate plays in Tess’s life :
"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. (T 449)
This controversial passage epitomizes Hardy’s narrational point in Tess. I believe. Throughout the novel, he has shown how Tess’s life is utterly determined by the machinations of fate, yet she continues to explore her relationship with the community and to pursue the development of her individuality. She shakes her f is t, quietly but surely, at Hardy’s cruelly impassive universe, and goes on. In this 127 she is heroic. In the reverent attitude of Angel and Liza-Lu, Hardy’s narrator poignantly shows that Tess stands as symbol of hope for individuation, in spite of the barriers of fate and social convention.
Hardy’s narrative presentation of the natural beauty of the
Wessex scene is again a major focus in his discussion of the tension between self and community within the novel. In Tess. there is a stronger connection between the author, narrator, and the protagonist, than in either The Return of the Native or The Woodlanders. for the view of nature held by Hardy, his narrator, and Tess are exceedingly close. In each case, there is a strong affinity with nature which surpasses that held by Clym and certainly Grace. Tess’s closeness with nature rivals that of Giles and Marty and makes her the first protagonist of the four novels. The Return. The Woodlanders. Tess. and
Jude, to hold such a synchronous position with either the narrator or the author.
Keen observation and appreciation of natural beauty allow the narrator successfully to envelop the reader in the scene as he describes, for instance, a "fine September evening, just before sunset, when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hair-like lines, and the atmosphere itself forms a prospect without aid from more solid objects, except the innumerable winged insects that dance in it" (T
95). Notable for its lovely representation of an evening in late summer, this description captures more than the beauty of the rural scene and allows the reader to move beyond the description of the
"solid objects" to vicarious participation in the natural scene itself. 128
It is this personal regard of nature that Hardy and his narrator emphasize so strongly, and they and Tess hold in common. This intense affinity with nature is one of the characteristics that make Tess unique among Hardy’s protagonists in that she is able to become one, sp iritu ally , with the natural world around her:
With no longer a companion to distract her, Tess fell more deeply into reverie than ever, her back leaning against the hives. The mute procession past her shoulders of trees and hedges became attached to fantastic scenes outside reality, and the occasional heave of the wind became the sigh of some immense sad soul, conterminous with the universe in space, and with history in time. (T 60)
This affinity with natural beauties tends to approach, from time to time, less a transcendence than an embodiment of the pathetic fallacy, as the narrator’s description of Tess’s night-time walks after her return to Marlott from her disastrous stay at Trantridge:
On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with the element she moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly- wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other. (T 120)
The "bitter reproach" of the twigs and the "expression of irremediable grief" inherent in the rain are certainly, in themselves, clear examples of the pathetic fallacy and not of a transcendent affinity with nature, yet the narrator ensures that when we reach these expressions, our judgment of them will be tempered by what has come before. He accentuates how Tess fits so neatly with the landscape 129 surrounding her in that she becomes "an integral part of the scene."
He notes that it is Tess’s "whimsical fancy" that allows her view of nature to approach the pathetic fallacy, indicating that both narrator and character are essentially aware of the falseness of this view.
Most significant in this narrational presentation of Tess’s exceptional affinity with nature, however, is the comment that "the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what [the natural processes] seemed they were." In offering this view of reality,
Hardy’s narrator chips at the boundaries between the outward, objective form and its inner qualities, revealing a glimpse of the unity which lies beneath.
One of the most outstanding features of the novel is the narrator’s expertise in representing the idyllic, pastoral world of
Talbothays. As he shows us the Valley of the Froom through the eyes of
Angel Clare, we may well catch our breaths at the beauty of the description:
... the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume of the summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein a vast pool of odour which at th is hour seemed to make the animals, the very bees and butterflies, drowsy. Clare was now so familiar with the spot that he knew the individual cows by th eir names when, a long distance off, he saw them dotted about the meads. It was with a sense of luxury that he recognized his power of viewing life here from its inner side ... (T 209)
This "inner side" of life is delightfully portrayed by this, and other descriptions of Talbothays dairy, yet Hardy’s narrator ensures that the reader sees both of its aspects, the dark and the light. Bathed in the glow of Angel’s idealism and his love for Tess, this inner side is exquisitely beautiful, yet the same scene is perceived in a quite 130 opposite tone when viewed by the despairing Tess after her revelation to Angel: "The gold of the summer picture was now gray, the colours mean, the rich soil mud, and the river cold" (T 295).
Similarly, Hardy’s description of The Chase on the night of
Tess’s rape provides an early example of the narrator’s recognition of the darker aspects of the natural world:
Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above them rose the primeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which were poised gentle roosting birds in their last nap; and about them stole the hopping rabbits and hares. But, some might say, where was Tess’s guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not be awakened. (T 107)
In thispassage, the narrator’s words aptly de scribe the quiet
beauty of this oldest of forests, with the gentleness and relative
security of its animal life. This nocturnal pastoral is abruptly
broken, however, by the narrator’s philosophical questionings. These
comments on the whereabouts of "Tess’s guardian angel" express far more
than the narrator’s anger over Tess’s victimization by Alec or Hardy’s
editorial proclamations on theology. Rather, the questions posed by
the narrator attest to his recognition that in man, as in nature, good
and evil co-exist.
There is an anger in this recognition that is not expressed to
suchan extent in either The Return of the Native or The Woodlanders:
and with this anger comes a new and profound despair that is symbolized
poignantly and unforgettably by the arctic birds which descend on the
frozen waste of Flintcomb-Ash:
... gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes — eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in 131
inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-hills by the shooting light of the Aurora ... These nameless birds came quite near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had seen which humanity would never see, they brought no account. ... with dumb impassivity, they dismissed experiences which they did not value for the immediate incidents of this homely upland — the trivial movements of two girls in disturbing the clods with their hackers so as to uncover something or other that these visitants relished as food. (T 334)
The stark desolation explicit in this scene presents a view of nature in direct opposition to the lush, pastoral scenes of Talbothays and paints a convincing portrait of nature’s dark side. Taken together, this view of the harsh, frozen wastes of the North and the idyllic depictions of the fertile dairy lands provides a convincing representation of what Hardy sees as the wholeness of nature.
In Tess, the narrative commentary is frequently more successfully focused on the natural community rather than the social community.
Nevertheless, it is evident that Hardy, and his narrator, lament the passing of the old Wessex culture and attempt, through its representation in the novel, to preserve a portion of this passing culture. While Hardy may be accused of sentimentalism in his endorsement of rural culture, his view is not entirely biased, for as his narrator notes in Tess, "So do flux and reflux — the rhythm of change — alternate and persist in everything under the sky" (T 399).
What Hardy seems to resist is not change, but as his narrator emphasizes, the insensitive treatment of the rural inhabitants by the encroaching culture of polite morality, commercialism, and mechanization. He notes that: 132
These families, who had formed the backbone of the village life in the past, who were the depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek refuge in the large centres; the process, humorously designated by statisticians as ’the tendency of the rural population towards the large towns’, being really the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery. (T 401)
In his representation of "village life" and "village traditions,"
Hardy’s narration succeeds admirably.
In Tess of the d’Urbervilles. the goal of joining the coimnunity is replaced by the attainment of an inner state that is independent of the protagonist’s surroundings. This reassimilation becomes, to a large degree, the realization of selfhood, although Tess herself is only able to approach this completion by union with Angel Clare, which she does upon their reconcilement. In the novel. Hardy utilizes two distinct narrational techniques to convey the implications of this attempt at return to the natal community.
Hardy’s narrative presentation of the character of Angel Clare in
Chapter Eighteen conveys succinctly this view of the struggle between community and self:
He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly — the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters, mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things. (T 157)
This passage represents Hardy’s new conception of community as perceived in Tess by its implicit view of community as "something new in life and humanity" which a deeper awareness of the world has rendered possible. For Clare, as for Hardy, the definition of community has altered, still embracing the Wessex setting, but in a 133 broader, deeper context. There is a greater understanding of that community in all its aspects, a greater appreciation of the oppositions which create its unity, the "seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon." Tess and Angel see community, thus, as a harmonious coexistence with nature rather than a social and geographical demarcation.
There is a childlike acceptance and delight-in-the-moment implicit in this view of community which Hardy emphasizes in narrational commentary near the close of the novel as Tess and Angel enjoy their last moments of freedom together:
...there was an unpractical vagueness in their movements throughout the day; neither one of them seemed to consider any question of effectual escape, disguise, or long concealment. Their every idea was temporary and unforfending, like the plans of two children. (T 438)
Although the "unpractical vagueness" of their flight stems partially, of course, from resignation, it is also born of Tess and Angel's diminished need for any company or community but their own. Through their reconcilement, they have 'come home’ in the only manner that remains possible for them in the light of Tess's murder of Alec. One might also say that it is the only manner that is meaningful to them.
For the most part, there is relatively little tension between the realistic portrayal of community and self for the narrative audience and the recognition of these as artificial constructs for the authorial audience. The realism of the novel is successful largely because of the narrator's descriptions of community and character. The expertise with which he draws upon sensual imagery to create the lush, evocative beauties of Talbothays, the draining, back-breaking hardships of 134
Flintcomb-Ash, and the very human qualities inherent in the characters of both Tess and Angel creates a most convincing representation of realism for the narrative audience.
Similarly, the synchronous alignment of outlook between author, narrator, and protagonist creates a convincing unity of perspective which tends to encircle and captivate the audience. Because the lines separating the thought of Hardy, the narrator, and Tess are so tenuous, the reader is left with the impression that the events and emotions conveyed in the novel are less fiction than fact. In this sense, there is little difficulty for the narrative audience to suspend disbelief while engaged in the novel.
Finally, Hardy reaches a greater degree of realism in his representation of the community and self in Tess because he is more able to fuse the opposite qualities of rural/urban, ignorance/knowledge, simplicity/sophistication, and past/present/future. These opposites are clearly at work in the novel, but Hardy is able to bring them closer to fusion than in the earlier novels, primarily through the symbolic union of Tess and Angel, who are themselves, separately, quite opposite in nature.
The rather heavy-handed narrational commentaries which open and close the novel certainly do impress the artificiality of Hardy’s representation upon his audience. The epigraph, "Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman faithfully presented by Thomas Hardy" impresses the audience straight away that they are opening the pages of a work of fiction, whereas Hardy’s concluding paragraph reminds them 135 yet more forcefully of the fictive nature of the representation of community and self they have just ended:
"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on. (T 449)
In spite of the bitter theological invective and the sarcastic denunciation of social hierarchies that are so stridently professed in these concluding words, the artificiality they create is tempered somewhat by the image with which the narrator leaves us. This very realistic symbol of human unity is sufficiently strong to bring once again to the fore the realism afforded the narrative audience. Equally significant is that the image signals the ongoing nature of Hardy’s exploration of the relationship between selfhood and community. 136
2
The Community Dispersed
In Tess of the d’Urbervilles. the notion of community that was presented in previous novels is greatly enlarged so that although the action of the novel takes place in the Wessex locale, there is no one setting which is, in itself, representative of community. There is no locale that functions, for instance, as Egdon Heath does in The Return of the Native or Little Hintock in The Woodlanders. This enlargement of locale is noteworthy as it signifies a fundamental change in Hardy’s view of community. In his discussion of the workings of landscape in
Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Andrew Enstice notes the change from a set to a moving setting:
And it is this change more than any other that enables Hardy successfully to make the union of his universal ideas with the enclosed landscapes of his Wessex world. ( III)
In Tess the idea of "community" indeed begins to take on a different connotation, one that is more spiritualized and is less tied to any one specific landscape. Similarly, the previously implacable dominion of the community over the self begins to weaken. Tess’s struggles in the various communities in Wessex are representative of both her growing knowledge and definition of self and her realization that in her case, selfhood is essentially incompatible with community.
Tess’ capture at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain and her subsequent hanging function not as signs of her defeat, but rather of her choice of selfhood over community. Hardy applauds her decision yet perceives society’s unreadiness to place the individual before the communal. 137
If the definitive characteristics of the communities of Egdon
Heath and Little Hintock are "isolated" and "sequestered," respectively, "dispersed" is the term that best describes the community of Tess. As in the previous novels, this definitive characteristic categorizes all components of the community: Marlott is a "dispersed village" (T 53), Tess leads a life that is fragmented and dispersed and her sense of self retains these qualities almost until the end, and finally, the ancient d’Urberville family from which Tess descends has become dispersed down through the generations.
Most importantly, the wholeness which should characterize a community has also been dispersed. Of the six distinct communities in which Tess participates, Marlott, Trantridge, Talbothays, Flintcomb-
Ash, Sandbourne, and the final community of self she creates with
Angel, only the latter represents more than a single portion of what constitutes a unified community. Each plays a significant role in
Tess’s development of selfhood, yet each alone is insufficient and ultimately unsatisfactory. Taken together, albeit sequentially, they provide Tess with the experience of wholeness that allows her to transcend the communal need and achieve a close approximation of self individuation.
In Chapter Two, Hardy’s narrator presents a panorama of the aforesaid Wessex communities:
This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bui barrow, Nettlecome- Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. The traveller from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs and corn-1ands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of these escarpments, is surprised 138
and delighted to behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country differing absolutely from that which he has passed through. Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a net work of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor. (T 39)
This lengthy and detailed description of the environs of Tess’s natal village is significant for its portrayal of the opposing extremes of landscape. In the Vale of Blackmoor itself, the reader enjoys a view of an Eden-like territory that is sheltered and fertile, languorous and delicate, all to the degree of a landscape exquisite in the lushness and fullness of beauty. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the area which includes the hellish wasteland of Flintcomb-
Ash: this area, by contrast, is unenclosed and barren, harsh and colorless, altogether uninviting and inhospitable. It is significant that these opposite landscapes are not integrated, but separated by the
"bold chalk ridge."
Within the lush aspect of this broader view lies the village of
Marlott, Tess’s birthplace and childhood home. Its initial presentation provides an early insight into the spiritual characteristics of the series of communities experienced by Tess.
Although happy in its fortunate location in the fertile vale, Marlott is, as noted, a "dispersed village" that retains such vestiges of past 139 ways of thinking as to render it slightly out-of-sync with the rest of
19th-century England:
The forests have departed, but some old customs of their shades remain. Many, however, linger only in a metamorphosed or disguised form. The May-Day dance, for instance, was to be discerned on the afternoon under notice, in the guise of the club revel, or ’club-walking’, as it was there called ... The club of Marlott alone lived to uphold the local Cerealia. It had walked for hundreds of years, if not as benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked s till. (T 40)
The vestiges of the past inherent in the club-walking resemble the remains of the ancient d’Urberville line living on in the
Durbeyfield family, both misplaced in the world of their contemporaries. Marlott, then, is a community spiritually more in tune with medieval or pre-Roman times than with the 19th century. In writing of Marlott, Andrew Enstice notes that "here the necessity for detail has gone — the community has receded into the background — and the building are mere cyphers, set prominently within the arena of action" (118). Indeed, the community lives more through sensation than by rational thought, and its affinity with nature is very nearly pagan. As the initial stage in Tess’s relationship with community,
Marlott represents an almost primeval earthiness overlaid with an ageless fatalism.
The next significant representation of community in the novel functions more briefly as a setting, but its ramifications are equally lasting. The agricultural community of Trantridge, site of the Stoke- d’Urberville country home represents selfishness, idleness and above all, temptation. In Trantridge the irresponsibility seen in the
Marlott community is increased to hedonism, a quality which extends 140 beyond the bounds of Alec’s home, effectively rendered in Hardy’s description of the peasant dance that Tess finds so unappealing:
When she came close and looked in she beheld indistinct forms racing up and down to the figure of the dance through this floating, fusty debris of peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers, and forming together a sort of vegeto-human pollen, the muted fiddles feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the spirit with which the measure was trodden out ... Of the rushing couples there could barely be discerned more than the high lights — the indistinctness shaping them to satyrs clasping nymphs — a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity of Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing. (T 95-6)
The frantic tone of the dance, in which physical sexuality is extolled with no concern for the mental or emotional appropriateness of the union, creates an atmosphere far beyond the innocent earthiness of
Marlott.
After her encounter with the hedonistic eroticism of the
Trantridge community, Tess moves briefly through Marlott and on to what is clearly the most beautifully idyllic of the Wessex communities represented in the novel. Lying on the southern side of the divisive chalk ridge, the dairy community of Talbothays portrays the representation of the ideal combination of erotic and spiritual love, embodied, respectively, in the characters of Tess and Angel Clare. The description of Tess’s passage through the garden, as she moves mesmerized by the spiritual beauty of Clare’s music and its evocation of her love for him, epitomizes the spiritual character of the dairy community:
The outskirts of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass which set up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive smells — weeds whose red and yell;ow and purple hues 141
formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him. (T 161-2)
The abundant fertility and near-Eden-like qualities of the garden setting are unmistakable, yet they prove transitory as a mirage. It is significant here that Jess "drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him" for tragically, the two fail to achieve a lasting union at
Talbothays, largely because of Clare’s inability to "observe" closely and without prejudice. Because he fails to see less for herself rather than as the embodiment of his ideal, Angel is unable to truly understand Tess’s nature. It is true that, as Enstice notes, "the harmony of man and nature, generalised through the communities of the earlier novels, becomes [in Talbothays] a symbol of personal love"
(135), yet it is an incomplete representation of that love. For in spite of its rich beauty, the community of Talbothays represents very much that "debatable land between predilection and love; where no profundities have been reached; [and] no reflections have set in ..."
(T 168).
Perhaps the exact opposite of the Talbothays community is that of
Flintcomb-Ash, that inhospitable region lying just to the south of the
Vale of Blackmoor.
... the whole field was in colour a deslolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the 142
white face looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface of the former like flies." (T 331)
The tenor of Flintcomb-Ash is desolation, a place vacant of any beneficent emotion, inhuman and expressionless in its utter lack of concern. In this hellish landscape, less and her hard laboring companion, Marian, are reduced to the significance of flies. For less, the community of Flintcomb-Ash represents abandonment in the extreme.
From the despair of Flintcomb-Ash, less spends, once again, a brief tenure at Marlott before moving on to the penultimate of the significant representations of community in her experience.
Sandbourne, the gay, dissolute locale of forgetting, forms a complement to Trantridge as here less again succumbs to Alec’s domination of her.
Just as Sandbourne represents a more purely hedonistic way of life than
Trantridge, so has Tess’s victimization become more complete, for at
Sandbourne, she loses her spirit, as well as her body, to Alec.
When he comes in search of Tess, the repentant Angel describes
Sandbourne as a "fashionable watering-place," a "fairy place suddenly created by the stroke of a wand." As a community, it is a "glittering novelty" whose longevity is likened to the "prophet’s gourd" (T 426).
Thus, its pleasures and fulfillments are mere transient, shimmering facades, and Hardy suggests that in its falseness, Sandbourne is no better than the absolute negation of human spirit epitomized in
Flintcomb-Ash.
The final, and most significant, community in the novel is less a locale than a state of being. For Tess, it represents the promise of wholeness, self acceptance and realization, and finally, transcendence. 143
This community, of course, comes into being at her final self justification by killing Alec and the victimization of self that he represents and, most parti ciularly, with Tess’s reunion with Angel.
The wholeness that these two experience together is expressed succinctly in Tess’s quiet recognition that "it seems as if there were no folk in the world but we two; and I wish there were not — except
’Liza-Lu" (T 445). This younger sister symbolizes Tess before her victimization and through this representation of the "original" Tess,
Hardy provides his strongest hope for the ultimate realization of self which transcends the need for a physical community:
The band of silver paleness along the east horizon made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near; and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual before day. (T 446)
While the spiritual characters and symbolic functions of these disparate communities differ radically, they share a common social structure. As with The Return of the Native, and The Woodlanders. Tess of the d’Urbervilles operates with the same triangular social formation of peasant class, intermediate class, and upper class. Unlike the first two novels, however, Tess focuses primarily not on the intermediate class, but on the peasant class. For the Victorian audience, this focus would likely evoke the strongest sympathy for the heroine, for as Merryn Williams notes, Dorset was always known as a county where "the labourer’s lot was particularly bad" with the "worst of homes and the poorest of labourers" (107).
The primary representatives of this class in the novel are Tess
Durbeyfield and her family. Theirs is the culture of a bygone era. 144 characterized by the May Dance. Earthy, improvident, fertile and hardworking, they live close to nature and view the world with a basic good will toward others and an unshakeable fatalism toward their own lot. Marian, Izz, and Retty, Tess’s fellow dairymaids at Talbothays, suitably express this intrinsic nature:
They were generous young souls; they had been reared in the lonely country nooks where fatalism is a strong sentiment, and they did not blame her [for winning Angel]. Such supplanting was to be. (T 186)
For the most part, the members of this peasant class possess little formal education, Tess being rather the exception in her attainment of the Sixth form. They are, however, intensely knowledgeable about the workings of nature and the inclinations of the human spirit. This perceptiveness, which is so lacking in members of the higher classes in the novel, is evidenced by the conversation of
Tess’s fellow field-workers as she nurses her young infant:
"She’s fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en, and say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard," observed the woman in the red petticoat.
"She’ll soon leave off saying that," replied the one in buff. "Lord ’tis wonderful what a body can get used to o’that sort in time!"
"A little more than persuading had to do wi’ the coming o’t, I reckon. There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in The Chase’ and it mid ha’ gone hard wi’ a certain party if folks had come along."
"Well, a little more, or a little less, ’twas a thousand pities that it should have happened to she, of all others. But ’tis always the corneliest! The plain ones be as safe as churches - hey, Jenny?" The speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined as plain. (T 126)
The dialect of the lower class, uneducated laborer is immediately recognizable in this conversation and stands as a most effective means 145 of establishing the realism of the novel. As Tom Paulin declares in the Thomas Hardy Annual :
... Hardy’s extraordinary sensitivity to the speaking voice must have been nurtured in the depths of a rural folk culture, and ... he discovered and made his poetic voice by trusting and receiving the voices of the people around him. (92)
Although their language is simple and their accents unpretentious, there is without doubt a poetic quality to the speech of Tess’s fellow peasants, and a quiet wisdom exists therein. A basic disinclination to judge another’s failings harshly and an acceptance of the workings of the natural world are implicit in the field worker’s words. Indeed,
Perry Meisel notes Hardy’s emphasis that Tess’s child is not the cause of her alienation from the community, noting that "rural society would see fit to overlook the infant’s illegitimacy" (123).
Perhaps most noteworthy is the perceptiveness regarding the human character conveyed in these brief sentences. The peasant women understand, almost more than the young Tess herself, the strength of the bond that can exist between mother and child. Similarly, their recognition of the coercion involved in Tess’s seduction is keen, and an anger and desire for basic justice lies beyond the condemnation of the seducer’s actions in The Chase. All this is bound up with the acceptance of nature and a fatalistic view of the universe that is so strong an element of the peasant character.
Oddly, it is Tess’s fundamental accord with these elements of the peasant character that make it impossible to reassimilate into the community after her experience at Trantridge. Her instinctual affinity with nature, her perceptiveness of and sensitivity to others’ views, 146 her desire for basic justice, and her fatalism all combine to make her reentry into the community impossible. She is too keenly aware of her victimization to allow the self-acceptance required for true community membership.
The intermediate class is most clearly represented in Tess by
Angel Clare and his family and thus performs two distinct functions in the workings of the novel. At its best, that is as represented in
Angel’s finer qualities, the intermediate class symbolizes the intellectual ism and aesthetic purity of Tess’s mind. At its worst, the intermediate class represents the very group responsible for Tess’s sense of victimization as it is the class of persons symbolized by the
Clare family who Hardy sees as upholding the stiff morality and sexual double-standard that condemn Tess.
Culturally, the Clare family is intellectual, more spiritually than physically inclined, churchy and often pompous. They lack the perceptiveness into the human heart that is so strong in the peasant class and therefore frequently display an insensitivity and emotional coldness. With the exception of the elder Clare, the family is judgmental. Nevertheless, in spite of their smug sense of moral superiority, they mean well and desire to "do good" in the world.
The family is well educated, and this privilege accords them an assured and respected status in any community in which they choose to participate. For instance, Angel’s social mobility allows him to achieve a quite successful membership in the lower class, agricultural community of Talbothays, and the respect accorded him is largely due to his position of being "a clergyman’s son, and learning how to be a rich 147 and prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder of cattle’" (Williams 120).
Unfortunately, the knowledge and advantage of this education does not extend to a sympathetic understanding of humanity, particularly on the part of Angel’s two brothers. With the partial exception of Parson
Clare and Angel himself, the family and the class that they represent remain sadly ignorant of human nature. What understanding they possess is largely theoretical and only Angel comes to a belated realization of the human condition.
These characteristics of the intermediate class as Hardy conveys them in Tess become apparent in the dinner-time conversation Angel and his family enjoy on his visit from Talbothays:
’Ah, you are looking for the black-puddings, my dear boy,’ observed Clare’s mother. ’But I am sure you will not mind doing without them, as I am sure your father and I shall not, when you know the reason. I suggested to him that we should take Mrs. Crick’s kind present to the children of the man who can earn nothing just now because of his attacks of delirium tremens; and he agreed that it would be a great pleasure to them; so we did.’
’Of course,’ said Angel cheerfully, looking round for the mead.
’I found the mead so extremely alcoholic,’ continued his mother, ’that it was quite unfit for use as a beverage, but as valuable as rum or brandy in an emergency; so I have put it in my medicine-closet.’
’We never drink spirits at this table, on principle,’ added his father.
’But what shall I tell the dairyman’s wife?’ said Angel.
’The truth, of course,’ said his father.
’I rather wanted to say we enjoyed the mead and the black- puddings very much. She is a kind, jolly sort of body, and is sure to ask me directly I return.’ 148
’You cannot, if we did not,; Mr. Clare answered lucidly.
’Ah — no; though that mead was a drop of pretty tipple.’
’A what?’ said Cuthbert and Felix both.
’Oh — ’tis an expression they use down at Talbothays,’ replied Angel, blushing. He felt his parents were right in their practice if wrong in their want of sentiment, and said no more. (T 202)
The speech of the Clares expresses their well-educated, upper-middle- class status. Both the words and the tones of their language clearly indicate that the family inhabits a different world than that of Tess and her compatriots. Their awareness of this division is abundantly clear in the snobbish exclamation of Cuthbert and Felix over Angel’s temporary use of dialect.
Indeed the Clares’ careful phrasing is in perfect keeping with the intrinsic idealism and high-mindedness that so frequently lapses into priggishness, as evidenced by Mr. and Mrs. Clare’s expressed disapproval of the "extremely alcoholic" nature of the mead. Although the family truly strives towards charity, it is evident in their table conversation that their compassionate concern for their fellow human beings is severely limited. None but Angel, for example, considers
Mrs. Crick’s feelings over her culinary gifts, and Mr. Clare states
"lucidly" that Angel should have no quandary over telling her the disposition of her kind offering. The narrational intrusion into
Angel’s thought which closes the conversation sums up nicely both the strengths and the short-comings of their middle-class views: the family acts rightly in their practice of doing good, but they are guilty of the more significant wrong; that is, their "want of sentiment." 149
The representation of the intermediate class as seen through the
Clare family holds significant implications for Tess’s failure to rejoin her native community. Because she possesses, in a purer though less educated form, the intellectual ism and sincerity of the Clares’, she feels herself to be more the outcast than her peasant-class fellows view her to be. Equally significant, and perhaps more irremediable, is the role played by the priggish moral ism of the middle class. Because of the pervasive strength of their views, Tess’s moral "fall" forever brands her as immoral in the eyes of polite society.
The third and final class which plays a significant role in Tess, is the upper class, which differs from that of the previous novels in that its representation in Tess goes beyond the effete and dissolute portrayal in The Return of the Native and The Woodlanders to include both those characteristics and to embrace spuriousness, as well, as evidenced by the Stoke family’s buying the d’Urberville name.
Unlike either Eustacia or Felice Charmond, Alec d’Urberville has little , if anything, to recommend him to the reader’s sympathies. Seen by his example, the upper class in Tess of the d’Urbervilles possesses few distinctions. Culturally, they tend to live only to satisfy their own inclinations, depicted effectively by the blind Mrs. d’Urberville’s devotion to her birds and Alec’s selfish pursuit of lustful satisfaction. Utterly thoughtless and insensitive, he presents an exterior which is socially smooth and well-polished, yet the frequent eruptions of his anger reveal the fragility of this veneer.
Possessing the rudiments of a standard education, Alec gives little thought to the inner nature of things and finds no interest in 150 anything but self-amusement and pleasure, although he pays lip service to the importance of schooling as regards Tess’s younger brothers and sisters.
Hardy’s contemptuous view of the upper class as conveyed through his portrayal of Alec d’Urberville is forcefully revealed in Alec’s words to Tess when she divulges that she and her family have been denied tenancy because she is "not a ... proper woman":
’What a blasted shame! Miserable snobs! May their dirty souls be burnt to cinders!’ he exclaimed in tones of ironic resentment. ’That’s why you are going, is it? Turned out?’
’We are not turned out exactly, but as they said we should have to go soon, it was best to go now everybody was moving, because there are better chances.’
’Where are you going to?’
’Kingsbere. We have taken rooms there. Mother is so foolish about father’s people that she will go there.’
’But your mother’s family are not fit for lodgings, and in a little hole of a town like that. Now why not come to my garden-house at Trantridge? There are hardly any poultry now, since my mother’s death; but there’s the house, as you know it, and the garden. It can be whitewashed in a day, and your mother can live there quite comfortably; and I will put the children to a good school. Really I ought to do something for you!’
’But we have already taken the rooms at Kingsbere!’ she declared. ’And we can wait there —’
’Wait — what for? for that nice husband, no doubt. Now look here, Tess, I know what men are, and, bearing in mind the grounds of your separation, I am quite positive he will never make it up with you. Now, though I have been your enemy, I am your friend, even if you won’t believe it. Come to this cottage of mine. We’ll get up a regular colony of fowls, and your mother can attend to them excellently; and the children can go to school.’ (T 403)
Alec’s words here reveal the depth of his deceit and cunning.
Knowing Tess’s tender heart and love for her mother and siblings, he 151 preys on these "weaknesses," promising to provide a home for them.
Significantly, however, he suggests a menial occupation for her mother, and as an afterthought, schooling for her brothers and sisters. He only implies by his lack of any stated occupation for Tess what his intentions are regarding her.
Most evident in this conversation, however, is Alec’s intrinsic selfish cruelty. Faced with the knowledge that Tess still waits for her husband, his angry, possessive nature erupts and he harshly tells her that because of her past (for which he, Alec, is responsible),
Angel will never return to her.
In Tess, the upper class as represented by Alec is a temptation to Tess, not for the physical or material pleasures it can convey, but for the safety it can provide those she loves more than herself. Its implications for her failed reassimilation are that it brings about the initial tragedy that separates her from her native community, and that it offers at the end, a temptation that she, in her selfless concern for others, cannot forego. Tess’s final acquiescence to Alec’s plans represents the absolute loss of self worth that has been ingrained in
Tess by the pervasiveness of middle-class morality. When she accompanies Alec to Sandbourne, Tess feels herself to experience, with yet greater intensity, the circumstances that precipitated her original trip to Trantridge in her innocent youth.
There are two essential problems in the community in Tess that hinder the protagonist’s full participation in the community of her birth. Perhaps most obvious is what Hardy sees as this insidious pervasiveness of middle-class morality. As indicated above, the 152 ramifications of this morality clearly influence the actions of the various social classes in the community and profoundly affect Tess, as well as Angel. Because of their moral prejudice, the representatives of the middle and upper classes are unable to see past the externals to the inner, or true, person. Alec, for example, is prevented from viewing Tess as anything but a beautiful temptress who "belongs" to him.
Yet more unfortunate is Angel’s inability to recognize Tess as the pure "woman of the soil" that she is, whereas he all too easily forgives himself of the same "crime." In passages such as those describing the snide comments of the Marlott girls regarding Tess’s misfortune. Hardy hints that, albeit to a far lesser degree, this false moral superiority has trickled down to the lower classes, as well. In her commentary on Tess’s function as a "social warning" to these young girls, Merryn Williams states that:
The community itself delivers Tess into [Alec’s] hands [after the Trantridge revel] ... These community attitudes make it possible for her (unlike Hetty Sorel) to return home and even to suckle her child in the field. But she still feels with justification that everyone is observing her. (93)
The second and essentially more significant defect in the community as represented in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. however, is its underlying characteristic of dispersal. In the division into separate parts scattered across the Wessex landscape, the community has lost the essential unity it enjoyed in either The Return of the Native or The
Woodlanders. Because the community is so essentially fractured, its members are unable accurately to view the inner potential for wholeness inherent in either themselves or others. Part of this fracturing is 153 due, of course, to the sweeping cultural changes of the period, the character of which Andrew Enstice appropriately describes in Thomas
Hardy: Landscapes of the Mind:
In Tess. Hardy brings the enclosed landscape to its artistic and thematic end. The future for the rural world was inevitable; it was about to be changed, whether it would or no, by education, by technological advance, by theorising and planning, by the decay of an outworn paternal order ... (153)
The throwing-off of one way of life in exchange for another creates culture-shock for any thinking person, yet as Hardy presents it, the great change in the rural community in Victorian England is accompanied by a change in the psychic perceptions of individuals.
Just as the technological and education advances bring about a change in lifestyle and in outlook, so too do they initiate a redefinition and progression of self-hood.
In Tess. this new view of self and accompanying lack of wholeness experienced by the community at large is most keenly and excruciatingly felt by its more sensitive members, particularly Angel Clare and Tess.
Angel is incapable until the end of accepting his dark side and thus cannot accept its counterpart in Tess. Tess, herself, is unable to put aside society’s rejection of her, and thus for the larger part of the novel, she is equally unable to accept the wholeness of her personality. For each, the wholeness that should lie at the heart of their own sense of self and thus their relationship with each other has been severely hindered by the divisiveness of the community.
Merryn Williams quotes Richard Jeffries’ account of this phenomenon of the fractured community in 19th century England which he depicted in Hodge and his Masters in 1880: 154
There has grown up a general feeling in the villages and agricultural districts that the landed estates around them are no longer stable and enduring. A feeling of uncertainty is abroad, and no one is surprised to hear that some other place, or person, is going. (36)
The lack of stability and certainty that Jeffries’ notes in the actual rural English communities in the late 19th century is quite realistically portrayed in Tess. The temporary nature of the agricultural work Tess and Marian endure at Flintcomb Ash, and the
Durbeyfield family’s eviction from their cottage after the lifehold ends with John Durbeyfield’s death are two of the many examples of this transience in the novel.
Hardy is not suggesting that change is in itself negative, nor that the temporary disunity that results is a thing to be avoided. He does imply, however, that the changes at work in 19th century English culture, particularly as they affect the rural classes, create an atmosphere of uncertainty which is incompatible with a cohesive community composed of individuated members. And as Andrew Enstice notes. Hardy concentrates in Tess "on the effects of change on the individual" (146). Because of the great changes at work during Hardy’s lifetime, his vision extends, rather, to a conception that the traditional community can no longer survive, and what must rise in its place is the personal sense of communion born of a fully recognized and accepted self.
Thus in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. the preeminence of community is revoked and replaced by the ascendancy of the self. The community becomes less a representation of the unconscious than a portrayal of an unconscious severely repressed by an overbearing ego, here symbolized 155 by the shallow morality of the middle and upper classes. Hardy’s new emphasis on the self and the means for fulfillment is represented by
Tess and Angel’s ultimate rejection of traditional notions of society and community and their search for self-knowledge and wholeness. Hardy implies that when this search is realized, a true spirit of community -
- acceptance and supportiveness — can live within the individual. In the spirit of Matthew Arnold couple in "Dover Beach," Tess and Angel look to each other to achieve this realization, albeit briefly, before society and the traditional notions of the repressed community intervene and destroy their private community by Tess’s execution. 156 3
Victimization: The Self Fragmented
As with Clym Yeobright and Grace Mel bury, who can be called
"isolated" and "sequestered," respectively, as Hardy depicts the communities in which they live, so too can Tess Durbeyfield be partially described by Hardy’s key descriptor of the community in Tess of the d’Urbervilles: dispersed. For not only is she dispersed in terms of domicile, so is she fragmented in spirit until her final, tragically brief union with Angel Clare at the novel’s end.
Like Clym and Grace, Tess is initially sent away from the community of her birth to seek a higher social and economic status elsewhere, and like them, she too finds this initial sojourn to have unexpected and unhappy consequences for both her personal life and her situation within the natal community. Clym receives a cosmopolitan education, Grace the education of a refined lady, and Tess an utterly different sort of education altogether. In each case, the protagonists’ first experiences outside the community render their return impossible because of a change within their self concept.
The reader first becomes acquainted with Tess as she participated in the May-Day dance with her club of "genuine country girls, unaccustomed to many eyes". Out of this group, Tess is singled out as a "fine and handsome girl — not handsomer than some others, possibly -
- but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape" (T 41-2). Furthermore, she is "the only one of
[this] white company" to wear a red ribbon threaded in her hair. Hardy 157 intends his audience to be aware not only of Tess’s beauty, however, for he soon stresses the inner qualities of her personality as well:
Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some extent, despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of that dialect for this district being the voicing approximately rendered by the syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech. The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle to her top one upward, when they closed together after a word.
Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect s till. As she walked along to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then. (T 42-3)
This presentation of Tess functions as a particularly effective introduction to her character as it contains most of her essential attributes. We learn, for instance, that she is simple and straightforward, speaking unaffectedly with the distinctive dialect of her rural community, despite her certain exposure to the standard pronunciations at the "village school". She is innocent and unworldly, being "untinctured by experience", and has not altogether outgrown the liveliness and optimism of the child. Finally, Hardy is emphatic that the reader notice Tess’s clear possession of innate beauty and sensuality, comparing her to a "vessel of emotion" and lingering in his description of her "pouted-up deep red mouth" and "bouncing handsome womanliness."
Hardy’s depiction of the heroine’s mimetic aspect in Tess of the d’Urbervilles is perhaps the best of the three characterizations discussed so far. Throughout most of the novel, Tess is a very 158 convincing representation of a young, innocent country woman of the
19th century in England. The author’s initial presentation of her at the May-Day dance effectively initiates this realism. Tess’s chagrin over her father’s drunkenness in full view of her friends is artfully, yet realistically portrayed by the details Hardy provides. His description of her embarrassment aptly conveys the emotions felt by a naive, sensitive girl: " the colour upon her cheeks spread over her face and neck. In a moment her eyes grew moist, and her glance drooped to the ground" (T 42). Of equal importance, the narrative intrusion into Angel’s Clare’s thoughts as he leaves the scene does much to enhance Tess’s realism: " ... he knew it to be the pretty maiden with whom he had not danced. Trifling as the matter was, he yet instinctively felt that she was hurt by his oversight. He wished that he had asked her; he wished that he had inquired her name" (T 45).
This keenly developed realism follows Tess’s character throughout the novel until the end. The fine detail cited above surrounds her characterization, making the visual impression of the novel resemble a photograph more than a painting. Similarly, the very dispersal which is so symbolic of both Tess and the community enhances this air of realism. Because Tess is the one character who provides unity to the various separate communities and characters that play a part in the novel, the reader is naturally drawn to her as the focal point. With the realistic details of her character and experiences, this focus combines to endear Tess to the reader much as though she were a real person. 159
Tess’s thematic aspect is equally well developed to the extent that the name "Tess of the d’Urbervilles" is nearly synonymous with the innocent woman who is tragically victimized. The strength of this thematic aspect is soundly announced in Hardy’s epigraph, which emphatically encourages the reader to view Tess as a type who represents both the quintessential "pure woman" and the hapless victim.
At Talbothays, Tess looks at Angel Clare "as Eve at her second waking might have regarded Adam" (T 210), and at Flintcomb-Ash she cries out to Alec: "Whip me, curse me; you need not mind those people under the rick! I shall not cry out. Once victim, always victim — th a t’s the law!" (T 379).
As forceful as Tess’s thematic component is, for the most part, i t does not hinder the success of the primary, mimetic component.
Indeed, both the thematic and mimetic aspects of Tess’s characterization are so masterfully executed that they function in near equal consort throughout the progression of the novel. Hardy takes care throughout the novel to present Tess as much as a "real person" as possible, and he succeeds in this representation. The thematic aspect, which is only slightly secondary, punctuates the novel beginning with the epigraph, continuing in the views of Tess held by Alec and Angel respectively, and ending with the obvious symbolism of Stonehenge and the didacticism of Hardy’s conclusion. In themselves, these points would be much too heavy-handed in th eir emphasis of Tess’s thematic aspect; tempered by the primary mimesis of her overall characterization, they create a very workable union of the two functions. 160
The character of Tess Durbeyfield is vital to Hardy’s life-long concern with the relationship between community and self. Until her seduction, Tess believes herself to be fully in accord with both her social and natural community. After her misadventures at Trantridge, however, she feels herself to be irremediably outcast. In spite of the orthodox views of his culture. Hardy asserts that essentially nothing has changed in this relationship:
But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly. (T 121)
Although he admits that Tess’s experience has removed her beyond the pale of social community, particularly as represented by those of upper-class fastidiousness, he emphasizes that Tess is fundamentally and irrevocably at one with nature, the one representation of community that he wholeheartedly endorses in the novel. Rather her sensitivity and self-ostracization from nature are mere "fancies" to Hardy’s mind.
The closeness of Tess’s affinity with this natural community is emphasized over and over again in the comparisons of Tess with wild animals. At her f ir s t meeting with Alec, she locked at him with "her large eyes staring at him like those of a wild animal" (T85), the flash of light from the threshing machine reveals Tess in "the suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at pause" (T 228), and in her despair,
Tess wanders with "something of the habitude of the wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled on ..." (T 321). Perhaps the most evocative indication of Tess’s fundamental connection with nature is found in her quiet efforts to shelter herself in the forest 161 when she had "scraped together the dead leaves t i l l she had formed them into a large heap, making a sort of nest in the middle. Into this Tess crept" (T 322).
Tess’s view of her position in the social community after her
"fall" is far more accurate than her self-exclusion from the natural world. As much as the majority of the peasant class in Marlott will sympathize with Tess, those members of the peasant class in other locales will judge her less kindly. The extent of the alienation Tess will endure is effectively described by Merryn Williams:
The boozer’s remark suggests that the community’s consciousness is far from idyllic; everyone except Tess herself realises the danger in which she stands. Yet her departure from the valley is in a real sense a farewell to childhood, for until then she has had no lif e outside it. "The Vale of Blackmoor was to her the world, and its inhabitants the races thereof." As a result of this first departure she becomes an exile and wanderer; banished from the old-style enclosed village she is turned into a rootless traveller more than any other of Hardy’s figures but Jude. (175)
Tess holds a variety of views towards and reactions to the various faces of social community that she experiences through the course of the novel. As Williams suggests, Tess truly moves from a childlike appreciation and participation in the Marlott community to a profound d istru st of community in general. Her life becomes characterized by the rootless wandering of the exile, an emigration which is largely self-imposed. In all cases, her relationship with each representation of community, whether i t be as participant or outsider, informs her personal philosophy and her sense of self. At times this relationship is beneficial to her inner growth and at other times it exerts a negative influence. 152
As Hall and Nordby note, the influence of the community upon the individual sense of self may fluctuate:
The environment, it is true, can also aid development. It does so when i t nourishes the inherent qualities of the individual or helps to bring them into balance. It hinders growth when it deprives the person of the necessary nutriments or when it provides the wrong supplies. (Hall 85)
In general, the idyllic Talbothays and the briefly-lived community "a deux" she shares with Angel Clare before her capture and execution are the two communities that truly aid Tess’s inner development.
Talbothays Dairy bolsters her sense of harmony with nature and strengthens her sense of self because it represents the finest, truest aspects of her character. As such, this community serves to replenish the reserves which had been so tapped by her unfortunate experiences with Alec at Trantridge. Immersion in nature brings Tess a deeper self-awareness that is irrevocably connected with her recognition and definition of self. Perry Meisel writes in Thomas Hardv: The Return of the Repressed that:
Tess knows nature as a child of the folk. But, because of her self-consciousness (a more exact term for her dreaminess), she recognizes the earth as the ground level of value in a more than instinctual way ... [her] predisposition for self-recognition individualizes her ... (125)
Tess not only draws strength from communion with nature, but seems to recognize the benefits that a positive natural setting like the Talbothays community holds for her inner person, even though she is unable to completely lose herself in this peaceful, natural environment. Hardy states that while at Talbothays:
The days of declining autumn which followed her assent, beginning with the month of October, formed a season 163
through which she lived in spiritual altitudes more nearly approaching ecstasy than any other period of her life. (T 234)
Yet accompanying th is ecstasy born of both her growing love for Angel
Clare and her innate suitability to her surroundings at Talbothays,
Tess’s innate fatalism intrudes:
A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual remembrance. She walked in brightness, but she knew that in the background those shapes of darkness were always spread. They might be receding, or they might be approaching, one or the other, a little every day. (T 237)
As much as Tess recognizes her natural affinity with the rural fertility of Talbothays, and as much as she reaches exalted "spiritual altitudes" in her recognition of a soul-mate in Clare, she is deeply aware of the transience of this inner brightness.
This in trin sic awareness of "flux and reflux" is due to more than
Hardy’s renowned "pessimism," but stems as well from Tess’s unconscious recognition that wholeness of self must first be achieved individually, and only then affirmed by association with a community, no matter how personally satisfying, nor by association with another human being, regardless of the strength of the love and affection therein. This recognition is subtly conveyed by the "spiritual forgetfulness" Tess enjoys during these halcyon days at Talbothays. As much as she feels her self, rightly, to be in communion with the dairy society and with
Angel Clare, she is not yet whole of self. Tess’s "intellectual remembrance" of her past still intrudes into her happiness and prevents a sense of wholeness because it represents ties with as yet unaccepted portions of her unconscious. 164
Tess senses rightly; the natural, bucolic tranquility of
Talbothays dairy will not and can not endure. The revolutionary changes already being ushered in by agricultural mechanization will destroy such an idyllic community. She recognizes as well that her essential self can not be reconciled by the encroaching, mechanizing modernization of th is great change. Hardy conveys th is awareness strikingly in his vignette of Tess standing beneath the holly tree:
The light of the engine flashed for a second upon Tess Durbeyfield’s figure, motionless under the great holly tree. No object could have looked more foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels than this unsophisticated g irl, with the round bare arms, the rainy face and hair, the suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at pause, the print gown of no date of fashion, and the cotton bonnet drooping on her brow. (T 228)
Against the agricultural change which will revolutionize and irremediably a lter the rural communities she has known, Tess is powerless, as Hardy so evocatively signals by his depiction her
"motionless figure." Her conception of both community and self is utterly "foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels" which symbolize the new form of the English agricultural community. During her participation in these rural communities as a farm labor, Tess is but dimly aware of this incongruence, and recognizes even less that the changes she witnesses in the encroaching mechanization are themselves only a foretaste of the sweeping changes that will come to the rural
Wessex of her experience.
The transience of both the heroine’s affinity with the Talbothays community as well as with the incipient community of agricultural mechanization is finally impressed on Tess’s consciousness when she shelters with Angel in the closed-up manor house. After having suffered 165
physically, emotionally, and psychologically to the point of despair,
Tess has come very close to losing her self respect and self-awareness
in her lif e with Alec at Sandbourne. In the resignation and fu tility of
her flight from the authorities, Tess looks out with Angel through the windows of their hiding place and recognizes finally that wholeness
must be achieved within:
"What must come will come." And, looking through the shutter-chink: "All is trouble outside there; inside here content."
He peeped out also. It was quite true; within was affection, union, error forgiven; outside was the inexorable. (T 442)
Tess seems cursed with an almost inbred sense of self
deprecation, even before she feels herself to be morally destroyed by
the rape. Just as her overall opinion of the world is that it is a
"blighted star", so too is she so excessively sensitive as to magnify
her faults and her misfortunes to the degree that views her self as
irrevocable blemished. Her remorse and sense of personal
responsibility over Prince’s death are so great that although "nobody
blamed Tess as she blamed herself . . . she regarded herself in the light
of a murderess" (T 62-3). It is shame that causes her to leave Marlott
after the death of her child and an abiding lack of self-worth that
compels her to declare at Talbothays, "But 0, I sometimes wish I had
never been born" (T 231).
Because of these severe self doubts and castigation, Tess
believes herself to be more the outcast than she really is. In "’Men’s
Words’ and Hardy’s Women," Adrian Poole comments that: 166
Hardy’s women are not as a rule openly rebellious, and the exiles and outsiders are, with the partial exception of Sue Bridehead, not voluntary exiles or rebels, (331)
Indeed, less remains a more integral part of the rural community than she sees herself to be. Similarly, she fails to recognize the inner qualities that reveal her distinct individuality. At the Marlott Club
Walking, for instance, less unconsciously distinguishes herself from the other maidens by the fatefully symbolic red-ribbon she wears in her hair and her over-sensitive reaction to Angel Clare’s choice of a partner other than herself. Her deep and uniquely individual sensitivity is particularly evident in Tess’s early morning commentary at Farmer Crick’s breakfast table:
"1 don’t know about ghosts," she was saying; "but 1 do know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive."
... "A very easy way to feel ’em go," continued Tess, "is to lie on the grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds o’ miles away from your body, which you don’t seem to want at a ll." (T 158)
When her companions’ reaction draws attention to herself, Tess blushes, "remarking evasively that i t was only a fancy." Her thoughts on the soul are not fancies, however, but deeply felt beliefs which form one of the strongest aspects of her personality. Without ever being truly conscious of it, Tess is very much a spiritual seeker, and this characteristic is a far more essential manifestation of her inner self than those outer "failings" she sees to be the hallmarks of her character. Finding that her spiritual inclinations bring attention to her, Tess significantly denies them, denying in fact her inner self. 167
As Adrian Poole suggests, Tess does not so much intentionally rebel against the moral code for a woman of her culture and she does not set out to move beyond the accepted feminine conventions, whether intellectual or moral. Indeed she blames herself for her sexual victimization by Alec and her emotional and physical abandonment by
Angel. Because she is unable to recognize the inner qualities which set her apart, she is unable to withstand the negative views that others take of her character, and thus opens herself to defeat.
Part of Tess’s failure to appreciate her own inner worth is due to her perpetual confusion about self. She remarks, alternately, in
Chapters Thirty-three and Thirty-five:
"0 my love, my love, why do I love you so!" she whispered there alone; "for she you love is not my real self, but one in my image; the one I might have been !" (T 256)
. . . "I thought, Angel, that you loved me — me, my very self! If i t is I you do love, 0 how can i t be that you look and speak so?" (T 271)
The first of these statements reveals Tess’s self-deprecation and unawareness that the self she calls "the one I might have been" is, in truth, her "real self" rather than the reverse, as she supposes. Yet after she has confessed her "sin" to her newly wedded husband, she implies in her exclamation that these two selves are in fact one, her
"very self".
Through her murder of Alec, which she considers to be not only her own justification, but significantly, more the justification of her husband, some of Tess’s confusion over her self identity seems to disintegrate, although whether this is due to a greater self acceptance and strengthened identity or submersion of self in the beloved, Angel 168
Clare, is debatable. I suggest that Tess makes great strides in owning her inner self, but that she falls just short of achieving true individuation by the novel’s end. That Tess s till feels herself deficient is indicated, I believe, in her final wish that "there were no folk in the world but we two; ... except ’Liza-’Lu" (T 445). It is as though Tess’s self-acceptance is only partial and stops at the very point that Hardy so emphatically champions: her purity. For in her younger sister, Tess sees all the best of her own person with none of its blemishes, fille d with a bright promise of self-realization.
For many readers, Tess remains the most genuine and the most likeable of Hardy’s heroines, in spite of her own self-contempt. To the 20th century reader, at least, Tess’s fateful flaws have very l i t t l e to do with her sexual liaison with Alec. Indeed, Hardy emphasizes that many of Tess’s shortcomings lie beyond her self, being characteristics inherent in the d’Urberville family line. Her dreaminess, which is so distinctive an aspect of her personality, is an elevated version of her father’s irresponsible imagination, and functions as Meisel terms i t , quite like a " mythical genetic component" (119). whether due to genetics or early childhood environment, the "slight incautiousness of character inherited from her race" (T 126) does prevent Tess from divining Alec’s intentions in time to prevent him from taking advantage of her naivete. From her mother’s genes, Tess inherits the outer quality which makes her so attractive to
— and so misunderstood by — the two most significant men in her life,
Alec and Angel. This sensual beauty, which Tess’s poor mother sees as her "trump card" and ticket to good fortune had, of course, just the 169
opposite function. And for this characteristic of physical beauty, as well, Tess is not responsible.
Like Clym and Grace, much of Tess’s in itia l unhappiness and
confusion stem largely from parental misguidance, but Tess is fairly
quick to comprehend the nature of her mother’s well-intentioned yet
inappropriate advice and learns to follow her own counsel in a way that
Clym can only partially do and Grace never can. While modern readers
are likely to praise Tess for her independence in thought, a major part
of her misfortune arises from this very independence of mind. Because
Tess’s sense of self is so damaged by Alec’s mistreatment of her
person, her ability to judge her situation clearly is severely limited
and she perseveres in self-blame when others have ceased to do so.
Similarly, her independent nature influences her to discount her mother’s advice and she reveals her guilty secret to Angel on their wedding-night.
Quite apart from any genetic or parentally induced "flaws," the most lamentable failing Tess reveals in the novel has to do with her
lack of courage. Hardy calls this "feminine lack of courage at the
last and critical moment through her estimating her father-in-law by
his sons" the "greatest misfortune of her life" (T 347). It is
significant that Hardy thus laments Tess’s lack of courage more greatly
than he does her "ruin" at Alec’s hands, for he thereby implies that
the qualities of the inner person are of far greater import than the
views of any given social community. Indeed, this inner weakness
contributes more to Tess’s tragedy than any other trait or experience
she possesses, for her essential lack of courage prevents her from self 170 forgiveness and acceptance, qualities essential for successful individuation.
The use of dialect in Tess’s speech is one of the most effective aspects of her characterization and greatly enhances her mimetic qualities. It is, as well, one of the most distinctive qualities of
Tess’s individualism because she continues its use through choice, in spite of being otherwise educated at school. Adrian Poole provides an interesting commentary on Tess’s speech:
Hardy’s women are not without a language of their own; they can take over words when they need them. What often distinguishes them from the men is that, as here with Tess, they have a finer sense of the use of words — that is, the usefulness and uselessness of the words and language and learning that are used by people to communicate with each other. (343)
Indeed, Tess’s superior use of language is one of the qualities which defines her distinctive individuality and sets her apart and above the other characters in the novel. The fineness of her verbal expression shows itself clearly in the conversation she holds with Alec as she walks homeward along the dusty road after her flig h t from
Trantridge:
After some miles they came in view of the clump of trees beyond which the village of Marlott stood. It was only then that her still face showed the least emotion, a tear or two beginning to trickle down.
"What are you crying for?" he coldly asked.
"I was only thinking that I was born over there," murmured Tess.
"Well — we must all be born somewhere."
"I wish I had never been born — there or anywhere else!"
"Pooh! Well, if you didn’t wish to come to Trantridge why did you come?" 171
She did not reply.
"You didn’t come for love of me, that I’ll swear."
"’Tis quite true. If I had come for love o’ you, if I had ever sincerely loved you, if I loved you still, I should not so loathe and hate myself for my weakness as I do now! ... My eyes were dazed by you for a l i t t l e , and that was a ll."
He shrugged his shoulders. She resumed —
"I didn’t understand your meaning till it was too late."
"That’s what every woman says."
"How can you dare to use such words!" she cried, turning impetuously upon him, her eyes flashing as the latent s p irit (of which he was to see more some day) awoke in her. "My God! I could knock you out of the gig! Did i t never strike your mind that what every woman says some women may feel?" (T 112)
In this brief conversation, much of Tess’s essential character is revealed. Her fatalistic sensitivity is evident in her reflections on
Marlott, the village of her birth. That Tess’s innate sensitivity is greater than the average is evident in that she expresses her deepest thoughts in conversation with such an insensitive and unphilosophical listener as Alec. Similarly, the eloquence of her words denying that she ever loved him parallel both the beauty of her form and of her inner nature. By her thoughtfulness and her eloquence, Tess shows herself clearly to be far more than the simple country girl that Alec thinks her to be.
While Tess’s simplicity and unaffected honesty might seem to
belie this view of her intellectual stature, the truth they convey reveals a depth of understanding rivalling that of the most
sophisticated, cosmopolitan woman. Indeed, she expresses truths which
Alec is ill-prepared to recognize. He takes her simple exclamation, "I 172 didn’t understand your meaning till it was too late," as an absurd
piece of naivete, yet in fact her truthfulness in admitting her
blindness attests as much to her strength of character as to her
simplicity. And she is able to cause him to do what many women
undoubtedly have not for her eloquent declaration that "what every woman says some women may feel" evokes as much an apology as Alec can muster: Very well . . . I am sorry to wound you. I did wrong — I admit
it" (T 112).
The almost stoic strength of her language can be seen in Tess’s quiet endurance of great emotional pain, expressed succinctly in her quiet statements "I was only thinking that I was born over there. ... I wish I had never been born —there or anywhere else!", as well as in the force of the latent anger as she "impetuously" rebukes Alec for his callousness.
Perhaps because of this spark of ardent spirit that lies within her, Tess makes far greater strides towards individuation than either
Clym or Grace. Whereas Clym deludes himself as to his inner development, and Grace turns a blind eye to the re a litie s of both her marriage and her image of selfhood, Tess does not turn permanently away from self-knowledge and thus achieves a much greater awareness of her
inner self by the novel’s end.
This process of working toward inner wholeness is quite re a listic a lly portrayed in that Tess does not follow a steady progression towards self-awareness, but progresses and regresses in turn. Her early experience with Alec functions, certainly, as a regression and "deforms" her personality in the sense that her sense of 173 self-acceptance is severely and irrevocably destroyed. Through this extreme diminishment of self-esteem, Tess unconsciously over develops the persona of self-effacement in a desperate attempt to win acceptance by the community and conform to its expectations of her. Because Tess believes that the community so condemns and ostracizes her for her moral fa ll, she attempts to f i t in by conforming to th is view and therefore thinks of herself as a "fallen woman." As a result, she willingly embarks on a life of backbreaking hardship and self-denial.
Fortunately, Tess’s progress towards individuation does not remain at this level. Just as she learns to adapt to the physical community in which she lives, so too does she adapt to her "inner psychic world" (Hall 74). At Talbothays, Tess remains acutely sensitive about her past, but she learns to develop the spiritual side of her person, as well. She feels her natural affinity with this fertile dairyland and relaxes the stronghold she previously held upon her emotions to the extent that she is able to fall in love with Angel.
This is no mean feat; a woman who has been so cruelly used by one man does not easily open herself emotionally to another. Yet Tess learns to love Angel wholeheartedly, indicating that her self-condemnation has begun, albeit slightly, to ease.
As such, Tess’s happiness at Talbothays represents the
"withdrawing into one’s self" that is often termed "regression".
Rather than the backward movement usually indicated, this type of regression allows the individual to step aside and find answers in the unconscious (Hall 89). Tess’s affinity with the id y llic pastorale of 174
Talbothays is thus symbolic of her looking to the unconscious for
healing.
Critics such as Merryn Williams are apt to look cynically at the
birth of Tess’s love for Angel at Talbothays, and thus view with
skepticism the claim that Tess matures psychically during this period
of her lif e . Williams states, for instance that Tess "is a novel about
false consciousness; Angel has it, and so in her excessive idealization
of Angel has Tess" (172). Indeed, Hardy himself emphasizes the
worshipful, almost idolatrous love that Tess feels for Angel, noting
that when she regards him, it is "as if she saw something immortal
before her" (T 234). Yet he goes on to add that "Angel Clare was far
from all that she thought him in this respect; absurdly far, indeed;
but he was, in truth, more spiritual than animal..." (T 234).
The important word here is the conjunction "but" that draws the
focus away from Tess’s idealization of Angel and lays emphasis instead
upon Angel’s "spiritual" dimensions. The spiritual nature of Angel’s
outlook does, of course, in its misguided aspect, cause Angel to turn
away from Tess emotionally after her confession to him. Yet far more
significantly, Angel’s intellectual ism and spirituality are
representative of the level of consciousness that Tess is able to reach
while at Talbothays. In recognizing in Angel her soul-mate, she
unconsciously affirms the deeply spiritual quality of her inner nature.
Were she to bring this affirmation to consciousness, she would be able
to see herself as Hardy does, as a "pure woman" and thereby achieve the
acceptance in community that she denies herself. 175
In this implicit recognition of her highly developed inner spirituality, Tess has progressed infinitely farther than Clym, whose period of inner reflection finds him earthbound, looking downward into the furze-covered heath, or than Grace, who turns aside, daunted by the inner view she sees mirrored in the thick woods surrounding Giles’s hut, and "escapes" self-recognition by leaving the community with her unfaithful, society husband. Unlike Clym and Grace, who are members of the middle classes, the peasant class Tess represents an inversion of the identity phenomenon noted by Regenia Gagnier in her study of
Nineteenth century autobiography:
The narrative and psychological disintegration of working- class writers who attempted to adopt middle-class narratives of self, and the relatively successful identities of those supported by alternative participatory articulations, indicate the significance and subtlety of discourse and ideology — in this case, of gendered, familial discourse and ideology — in human identity, as well as th eir insufficiency to override nondiscursive material conditions entirely. (54)
Hardy’s protagonists do not narrate their own stories, yet they can be seen as representations of varying, often conflicting sides of their author’s experience. An argument could be made for Clym’s and Grace’s
"psychological disintegration" as they attempt to be something or someone else, whereas Tess’s greater self knowledge and unpretentious nature allow her the "alternative participatory articulations," i.e., her "dreaminess" of "self-consciousness" necessary for her to achieve a greater sense of "human identity," fluctuating though it is.
This alternating pattern of advancement and retreat continues throughout the novel with regard to Tess’s journey of individuation.
Although she does by no means reach complete inner wholeness by the 175 novel’s end, Tess does reach a greater degree of self-awareness and self-acceptance than Clym or Grace. Yet her murmured words to Angel at her arrest reveal that she is still unable to completely reject
society’s prejudiced definition of her self:
’It is as it should be. ... I am almost glad — yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted. It was too much. I have had enough; and now I shall not live for you to despise me!" (T 447).
It is as though Tess’s hold on self-acceptence is so tenuous that she doubts its permanence. The fear of losing her new view of self as much as her terro r of losing Angel’s love allows Tess to go w illingly with the authorities. As she turns to the constables at Stonehenge, her quiet, final words "I am ready" (T 447) show clearly that she meets her death without fear or regret.
Tess Durbeyfield’s attempt to rejoin the rural, Wessex community of her birth and childhood differs from the reassimilation attempts of
Clym Yeobright and Grace Mel bury in that while Tess outwardly seeks community membership, her search is actually for the attainment of a level of consciousness: self-acceptance. She becomes, in name, a viable member of each community she inhabits, but in failing to feel herself truly accepted, she is thereby prevented from full community participation. Only after drawing on her latent instincts of self- preservation, vindication and courage to kill Alec does Tess find some measure of self-acceptance and she is able to enjoy a short-lived, but real full-community membership in her association with Angel, and more
importantly, within her self. Hardy is not, of course, suggesting murder as a means of achieving self-acceptance or integration within the community; in Tess. rather, the murder of Alec represents Tess’s 177 movement away from the passivity and self-negation that have prevented her individuation.
Therefore, although her act of murder cements her alienation from the community in a way that the sexual liaison with Alec never did, and thus prevents Tess from regaining her status as a fully accepted member of the social community, Tess comes close to achieving the more important acceptance of the self that is more than any other quality the requirement for community participation. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Hardy thus anticipates the notion that "harmony is to be established . . . within the individual and not as a consequence of trying to make a complementary union with another person." (Hall 108)
Although her lif e experiences certainly qualify Tess as a tragic heroine, she stands apart from Hardy’s other protagonists in that, for a time, she is able to achieve both inner harmony and "complementary union" with another person.
Critics disagree fairly widely as to what constitutes Tess’s essential tragedy in the novel. Hardy, himself, says that "the greatest misfortune of her life [is] that feminine lack of courage at the last and critical moment through her estimating her father-in-law by his sons" (T 347). One wonders if Hardy is indeed telling his audience that Tess has merely lacked courage at a c ritic a l moment when she later finds sufficient courage to stab Alec. And if so, would finding the courage to speak to the Reverend Clare prevent her eventual return to Alec? Would the act of seeking help from Angel’s father fu lfill the same function as killing Alec does? 178
I think not. What Hardy deplores in this statement is not Tess’s weakness, but rather her "[estimation] of her father-in-law by his sons." Tess’s misjudgment of the father because of the priggish, self- satisfied snobbery of his sons constitutes her tragedy in that th is prejudice is in fact an extension of her own self-condemnation and inability to forgive herself for "being more sinned against than sinning." Tess’s tragedy stems from her failure to own the socially unacceptable portions of her inner nature, and accept her self for the person she is, not the person that others see her to be.
Tess’s tragedy is perhaps more poignantly depicted than either
Clym’s or Grace’s, but it is in the end less harsh, for there is a certain release brought about by the act of murder, another socially unacceptable act, that allows Tess a greater acceptance of the totality of her nature than she ever possessed earlier. In her confession to
Angel that she somehow foresaw the murder, Tess reveals that the recognition of her shadow side has finally broken through her consciousness:
I have done i t — I don’t know how, ... S till I owed i t to you, and to myself, Angel. I feared long ago, when I struck him on the mouth with my glove, that I might do i t someday for the trap he set for me in my simple youth, and his wrong to you through me. He has come between us and ruined us, and now he can never do i t any more. (T 436)
In the fa ta lis tic world view of the Wessex peasant, Tess sees her k illing of Alec as an act that redeems herself and provides justice to her husband, yet Hardy also implies that through th is deed, Tess has symbolically put to death that element which has divided her from her inner self, and she achieves a tremendous step towards psychic wholeness. 179 WORKS CITED
Andrew Enstice. Thomas Hardy: Landscapes of the Mind. London: MacMillan Ltd., 1979.
Regenia Gagnier. Subjectivities. A History of Self-Representation in Britain. 1832-1920. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Calvin S. Hall and Vernon J. Nordby. A Primer of Junaian Psychology. New York: New American Library, 1973.
Thomas Hardy. Tess of the d'U rbervilles. P.N. Furbank, ed. London: MacMillan, 1974.
George Levine. The Realistic Imagination. English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterlev. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
Perry Meisel. Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1972.
Tom Paulin. "’Words, in all their Intimate Accents’." Thomas Hardy Annual. I (1982), 84-94.
Adrian Poole. "’Men’s Words’ and Hardy’s Women." Essays in Criticism. 31 (1981), 328-345.
Merryn Williams. Thomas Hardy and Rural England. London: MacMillan, 1972. CHAPTER IV
Jude the Obscure: The Emerging Ascendancy of the Self
In Hardy’s final novel, the separation of the individual from the natal community — of in fact any community — becomes absolute. Jude
Fawley is the only one of the protagonists in question whom the readers first encounter as a child. Significantly, we do not meet Jude when he is an infant living with his parents, but rather we are introduced to him after he has been orphaned and has already le ft the community of his birth. By the time we meet Jude, he has begun his wanderings from community to community, and is merely stopping to spend his middle childhood and adolescence as the ward of his spinster aunt in
Marygreen.
Jude Fawley, thus, never knows the meaning of full participation in a community, and the search for this membership consumes the greater part of his life. Unlike the protagonists who have preceded him in
Hardy’s fiction, however, Jude does not attempt to rejoin the community of his birth; rather he aspires to membership in a different sort of community altogether. Because of his interests and sensibilities, he rightly acknowledges his intellectual alienation from the rural, peasant community of Marygreen and other villages like i t , but tragically, the intellectual community of Christminster to which he aspires receives him no more willingly than he embraces the rural
180 181 community. Jude’s idealism prevents him from accepting this repulsion, and to a large degree, the tragic outcome of his life is due to this id ealistic view of the academic and ecclesiastic community of
Christminster.
Yet Jude is a split character in that although his intellectual and emotional aspects are foreign to rural society, his physical inclinations and desires are well suited for the earthy life of Hardy’s peasant Wessex. Jude’s strong sense of fairness and virtue finds itself equally balanced by his more dionysian attributes of lust and debauchery so that just as he vacillates between urban and rural residency, so too does he vacillate between the spiritual and the carnal.
In Jude the Obscure. Hardy represents both the rural communities and the urban Christminster community as ultimately antagonistic to an individual like Jude, who embodies the extremes of both worlds.
Because Jude never knows true community membership as a keystone of self-identity, Jude stands apart from the three protagonists discussed earlier in his self-awareness. More than Clym, Grace, or even Tess,
Jude represents the rootless, alienated individual who cannot find wholeness of self in any community. In his despairing, death-bed quotation of the lamentations of Job, Jude comes very near indeed to complete renunciation of any human community. It is this element of negation that makes Jude’s experience of selfhood and community so very tragic.
Hardy’s po rtrait of Jude Fawley represents his final recognition of the death of the rural Wessex community as a source of identity 182 support for its members. There is clearly sadness in Hardy’s acknowledgement, yet in Jude th is sadness is heavily overcast with the strangulation of feeling that often accompanies absolute resignation.
Hardy’s vision here is truly modern in that this resignation is absolute, and his hope for wholeness for the individual flickers decidedly with Jude’s solitary death. For Hardy, the individual can no longer attain individuation within the community, be it the community of birth or of choice, and his hope that the individual can achieve inner wholeness as a separate being is severely challenged.
Nevertheless, Jude Fawley comes the closest of any of Hardy’s protagonists to achieving individuation apart from the community. 183
1
The Didacticism that Masks Despair
Hardy’s narrational stance in Jude the Obscure is emphatic to the point of didacticism in its judgement of late Victorian society. His position is decided that the changes which have affected the rural
Wessex community are irrevocable and he signals th is change in the altered beginning to the novel. Unlike The Return of the Native. The
Woodlanders. and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Jude the Obscure does not open with a roadway scene. Whereas in the previous novels Hardy has introduced his readers to the narrative scene as though they were travellers moving along a road whose destination is as yet unclear, he brings us immediately in the midst of the scene in Jude. The scene of the removal of the schoolmaster’s belongings from Marygreen is a stationary one, a scene that implies departure from the community rather than a journey into it.
The voice in which Hardy’s narrator depicts th is scene is impersonal and impartial yet notably, and significantly descriptive.
By opening the novel in th is fashion, he encourages the reader to simulate this stance of the cool observer. Although the scene is evidently one of much bustling and physical exertion, the narrator focuses instead on the persons present and his perceptions of their reactions to the teacher’s impending departure from th eir community:
The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The m iller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the departing teacher’s effects. ... The rector had gone for the day. 184
being a man who disliked the sight of changes. He did not mean to return till the evening, when the new school teacher would have arrived and settled in, and everything would be smooth again. (J 9)
The first sentence strikes a tone of loss and superficiality: a central figure is moving away from a small and presumably interdependent community. This person has held a position of respect and influence in the community, yet the narrator can only say of that the departing teacher’s friends, and associates "seemed sorry" to see him leave. It is significant that a resident from another village,
Cresscombe, is the one to lend the departing teacher the cart rather than a fellow resident of Marygreen. By these subtle indications, the narrator presents the community as far different from the close-knit communities of the early novels. Permanence and cohesiveness have been replaced by transience and relative indifference. Perry Meisel strikes at the heart of th is fundamental change in the Wessex community, noting that "Jude is a novel modern in its assumptions, for Wessex is now as barren a home for its inhabitants as a city" (136). In short, the rural community no longer provides a supportive network for the individual; it has become for Hardy as cold and alienating as the urban world.
The intentional absence of the rector on the day of the schoolmaster’s departure shows not only Hardy’s poor opinion of the clergy in general, but more significantly the lack of caring which has crept into the Wessex community. The rector, of all residents, is the one who would be expected to support a member of the community, yet because of his distaste for "the sight of changes," he keeps away until the departure is complete. Selfish concern has thus replaced communal 185 feeling. Indeed, there is the sense that the individual has ceased to matter to the community: the rector does not lament the departure of one particular teacher any more than he anticipates the arrival of the next. His concern is for the appearance and machinery of the community, those elements that "make everything smooth," not for the individual members themselves.
The narrator in Jude plays as influential a role in his depiction of character as he does of community. This is particularly evident in the portrayal of Jude Fawley himself in the opening chapters of the novel. Although Hardy’s narrator attempts to convey Jude’s perspective to the reader as convincingly childlike, he does not entirely succeed.
For example, Jude’s outward reactions to Farmer Troutham’s chastisement are typically childish, yet the narrator’s view of Jude is not, creating a tension between the realism of characterization and the obvious presemce of the narrator:
Jude leaped out of arm’s reach, and walked along the trackway weeping — not from the pain, though that was keen enough; not from the perception of the flaw in the te rre stria l scheme, by which what was good for God’s birds was bad for God’s gardener; but with the awful sense that he had wholly disgraced himself before he had been a year in the parish, and hence might be a burden to his great- aunt for life. (J 15)
Jude’s avoidance of further physical pain and his overwhelming embarrassment for his "disgrace" are both re a listic a lly childlike, but the theorizing on the "flaw in the terrestrial scheme" is clearly an expression of Hardy’s narrator. The juxtaposition of Jude’s vision and the narrator’s voice within the passage reinforces the reader’s awareness of the narratorial presence. 186
Because the narrator’s treatment of Jude and his verbal and mental expressions convey so much of the authorial presence, the reader
views, in turn, the other characters in the novel with greater
skepticism as well. Thus the reader learns early in the novel to look
constantly beyond the characters to the narrative perspective, an
action that detracts somewhat from the realism of the novel.
In Thomas Hardv: Landscapes of the Mind. Andrew Enstice comments
on the relative lack of physical description the narrator provides his
characters in the novel, expressing the view that "the true scope of
the novel lies in Sue’s mind" and that "until [Jude] reaches
Christminster, he is purely a mind, no face or figure being visiblefor
our study" (176). Because of the strong narrational presence in
conveying those "minds" which are the central characters, the reader is
le f t wondering how much Sue and Jude function as individual minds and
how much they are simply extensions of the mind of the narrator, and
therefore Hardy.
This displacement, as it were, of Jude’s mind by the author’s is
strikingly evident in the narrative portrayal of Jude’s relationship
with the community of Marygreen. In the in itia l portrayal of the rural
community during Jude’s childhood, the narrator thereby conveys his
view of the universe as cruel, disinterested and essentially
alienating.
The basic cruelty of nature is strongly conveyed through the
narrator’s very adult voice intruding into Jude’s childhood thoughts:
Growing up brought responsibilities, he found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought. Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of 187
harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point of its circumference, as you had felt when you were little , you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it. (J 17)
Thenarrator effectively captures the sense of questioning puzzlement of a child, particularly one so alone in early life as Jude, yet he even more effectively portrays the sense of adult angst that is so great a part of the modern condition. Whereas this very grown-up existentialism draws the reader away from viewing Jude as a realistic portrayal of a late-nineteenth-century Wessex child, it quite strongly establishes the view of life that Hardy wants us to take, and we therefore view each succeeding representation of community through this harsh tint.
Hardy’s narrator also uses Jude’s childhood reflections to convey his view of the universe — and human nature — as basically disinterested. As an orphan, Jude feels this disinterestedness keenly, both socially and cosmically. Indeed, his decision to forsake his duties as "scarecrow" stem from this perception:
Why should he frighten them away? They took upon them more and more the aspect of gentle friends and pensioners — the only friends he could claim as being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often told him that she was not. He ceased his rattling, and they alighted anew. ... They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil, and Jude enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow- feeling united his own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled his own. (J 14)
There is something quite sad in Jude’s felt kinship with the field birds. He sees in them a gentleness and a connection with himself that he does not feel with any human being, even his only close 188
adult relative, the aunt who "often told him that she was not
[interested in him]." The hunger that Jude perceived in the birds and
his enjoyment in their "appetite" is symbolic of his own inner hunger
for community and his desire for fulfillment. The narrator’s choice of the crows pecking at the "nut-brown soil" to convey Jude’s hungry need,
however, emphasizes the extreme lack of human feeling which pervades
the community, and therefore renders the realization of his hopes
futile.
Equally telling is the adjective "magic" that the narrator uses
to describe the "thread of fellow-feeling [that] united [Jude’s] life with [the birds]." This connection which Jude so desperately needs is
only virtually beyond reach; in the modern community, it has become
"unreal." Indeed, Hardy implies that the connections between members
of the natural — and by extension social — community are mere
threads, a situation he renders the more pitiable by Jude’s perception
of his life, and the birds’, as "puny and sorry."
Finally, the narrator uses intrusions into Jude’s thoughts to
convey the essential alienation inherent in Jude’s situation. As Jude walks homeward in the night, beset by childish terrors of the dark, we
are told that he "was glad when he saw the church tower and the lights
in the cottage windows, even though this was not the home of his birth,
and his great-aunt did not care about him" (J 19). The narrator
emphasizes the basic human need for community through Jude’s eagerness
to reach the safety of the Marygreen village, yet he contrasts this
need with the seeming insubstantiality of the church tower and window
lights towards which Jude hastens. 189
Although Jude hurries towards these symbols of community and warmth for shelter from his terrors of the night and the unknown, the narrator implies that they will provide him no true support. As solid and comforting as the village of Marygreen might appear to be, it is not "the home of [Jude’s] birth," and its one resident who might be expected to care for him does not. Even as a young, dependent child,
Jude is an outsider, forever alienated through no fault of his own from the community from which he seeks shelter.
The narrator takes care to ensure from the outset that the reader is aware of the underlying and insidious role that fate plays in Jude’s life. Jude’s aunt laments Jude’s bleak prospects in Chapter One, referring to him as a "poor, useless boy" for whom "it would h’ been a blessing if Goddy-might had [taken] wi’ [his] mother and father" (J
12). Indeed, there is a seemingly genetic predisposition for misfortune in the Fawley family, particularly in their experience with intimate relationships and marriage. Jude’s aunt warns sternly, "Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry! ’Tisn’t for the Pawleys to take that step any more." (J 13)
It is therefore fated that Jude will fail in his aspirations to become either an academic or a cleric, that he will meet the wrong woman first, that he will introduce the one woman he loves to the man who becomes his rival and ultimately the one who "wins" her companionship.
Although he is unable to put a name to the element of fate, Jude recognizes its presence at an early age. As Hardy’s narrator relates,
"Events did not rhyme quite as [Jude] had thought. Nature’s logic was 190 too horrid for him to care for, ... All around [him] seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling [which] hit upon ... your life, and shook it, and warped it" (J 17).
This fatalistic view grows steadily in Jude, despite his persistent efforts to better his situation. As an echo of the narrative portrayal of Mrs. Yeobright’s despairing thoughts as she labours across Egdon Heath, Hardy’s narrator notes the thoughts of
Jude:
Somebody might have come along that way who should have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the world. ( J 27)
In this passage conveying such fatalistic depair, Hardy’s narrator succinctly summarizes Jude’s life. It is significant, however, that Jude does not take the route of Mrs. Yeobright and die, much as he desires such. Rather, he lives on to suffer increasing sorrow and isolation.
Sue’s words to Jude as they mourn the death of their children illustrate the extent to which fate determines not only the life experiences of Hardy’s characters, but their personal outlooks and philosophies as well:
My eyes are so swollen that I can scarcely see; and yet little more than a year ago I called myself happy! We went about loving each other too much — indulging ourselves to utter selfishness with each other! We said — do you remember? — that we would make a virtue of joy. 1 said it was Nature’s intention. Nature’s law and raison d’etre that we should be joyful in what instincts she afforded us — instincts civilization had taken upon itself to thwart. What dreadful things I said! And now fate has given us this stab in the back for being such fools as to take Nature at her word! (J 268) 191
Without doubt, the most painful operation of fate in Jude’s life involves the murder and suicide of Jude’s children. The horror, guilt, and brokenheartedness that results from Little Father Time’s deed, undertaken after he overhears Sue’s chance remark about the paucity of the family finances, not only causes the miscarriage of Sue’s impending child, but her mental and emotional crisis as well. It is this breakdown, of course, that ultimately leads to Jude’s final state of despair and his lonely death.
Through the visitation of this crushing blow of fate, Hardy’s narrator seems to indicate that there is not chance for personal happiness, within the community or outside it. In Sue’s emotional breakdown, he suggests that there is likewise no possibility of individual wholeness.
As in the bulk of Hardy’s fiction, strong parallels exist between the authorial and narrational perspectives and in spite of Hardy’s disavowals, equally clear autobiographic and philosophic connections are at work between the author and his portrayal of Jude. Hardy first published the novel at the age of 55, when both his personal and professional situations were troublesome, and it is consequently not surprising that both Jude’s tragedy and Jude’s greater awareness of it are more bitterly portrayed than the tragedies of the earlier novels, including less. The cynicism of Jude’s outlook towards the community and the world at large darken aspects of Hardy’s work which he previously treated much more brightly.
In particular, the appreciation of natural beauty and the accompanying lush descriptions which are so much a hallmark of Hardy’s 192 writing are notably absent in Jude. The narrator himself seems to comment on this diminished ability to take an appreciative view of natural beauties. In his description of the town of Shaston, for instance, he notes that:
The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain; but strange to say, these qualities, which were noted by many writers in ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreciated, are passed over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England stands virtually unvisited today. (J 158)
The narrator’s observations on the failure of Jude’s contemporaries to notice and enjoy "scenic beauty" is an implicit commentary on both Hardy’s darkened vision and what he sees to be an irrevocable loss accompanying the changes forming late Victorian society. There is regret in this commentary, but little if any hope that the change may be reversed. Like much in Jude, enjoyment of nature’s beauties has become impossible due to the individual’s increasing alienation from both the community and from his inner self.
Nature no longer plays either a sustaining or a determining role in the lives of Hardy’s Wessex characters. As a source of influence and inspiration for either Hardy or his characters, nature as a "character" or living force has vanished from the Wessex scene.
What is left is a neutral and coldly indifferent landscape which seems to mirror the final resignation of the major characters. Hardy’s narrator is ever adept in his descriptions of the countryside, yet the scenes described are increasingly devoid of any emotion save despair.
Jude’s journey back to Christminster after his last visit to Sue eloquently conveys this alteration: 193
There are cold spots up and down Wessex in autumn and winter weather; but the coldest of all when a north or east wind is blowing is the crest of the down by the Brown House, where the road to Alfredston crosses the old Ridgeway. Here the first winter sleets and snows fall and lie, and here the spring frost lingers last unthawed. Here in the teeth of the north-east wind and rain Jude now pursued his way, wet through, the necessary slowness of his walk from lack of his former strength being insufficient to maintain his heat. He came to the milestone, and, raining as it was, spread his blanket and lay down there to rest. Before moving on he went and felt at the back of the stone for his own carving. It was still there; but nearly obliterated by moss. He passed the spot where the gibbet of his ancestor and Sue’s had stood, and descended the hill. (J 310)
The cold east wind that buffets against the already ill Jude is less a malevolent force than an indifferent aspect of nature that chills the place where Jude walks, somehow combining with his own outlook to make that crest near the Brown House the "coldest [spot] of all." Indeed, the narrator seems to emphasize that the weather is an extension of Jude’s inner state in his repetition: "Here the first winter sleets and snows fall," "here the spring frost lingers last," and finally, "here in the teeth of the north-east wind and rain" Jude struggles along.
Perhaps most significant are the last two sentences, which convey so poignantly Jude’s utter despair. As if in tune with Jude’s own bitter resignation of his early hopes, nature, too, has "nearly obliterated by moss" the carving symbolizing all of Jude’s struggles and aspirations. After Jude feels the faint, moss-covered outlines for the final time, he turns his back on nature as a source of beauty and kinship as though it were a thing hanged and "[descends] the hill".
Just as Hardy’s narrational presentation of natural beauty has undergone severe changes in his final novel, so also has his strong, 194 lifelong concern with the preservation of passing culture. In Jude the
Obscure, the narrator seems to indicate that there is no longer anything worth preserving. In his description of Stoke-Barehills, for instance, the narrator comments that:
The most familiar object ... nowadays is its cemetery, standing among some picturesque mediaeval ruins beside the railway; the modern chapels, modern tombs, and modern shrubs, having a look of intrusiveness amid the crumbling and ivy-covered decay of the ancient walls. (J 229)
Once again, the prevailing image is one of the death of a former way of life. What remains from the past is "ruins," "crumbling [in] ivy-covered decay," too insubstantial and empty to bear restoration, let alone preservation. Significantly, the remnants of past culture that the narrator chooses to depict are empty shells of what used to house human endeavor: the human element of the past culture is itself beyond recal1.
Accompanying the narrator’s resigned dismissal of the relics of the past is his similar disregard for those of the present, which appear more as "intrusive" elements than markers of any particular culture. In Jude, unlike his previous novels. Hardy has given up, as it were, on his attempt to preserve what he had previously fictionalized as the golden years of 19th-century rural English culture.
The authorial and narrational implications for the act of return in Jude the Obscure are equal blends of cynicism and intense desire regarding renewed participation in community. More than in his previous novels. Hardy is aware in Jude of the faults of the Wessex community which stifle the growing self-awareness of his characters. 195 yet concurrently, he knows that attainment of autonomous selfhood apart from some community participation is equally unlikely. His realization of this dilemma, which George Levine might term "disenchantment" (71), both affirms Hardy’s strength as a cultural historian for his century and a commentator on the modern culture which he sees replacing it.
Hardy has seen at last the impossibility of preserving past culture.
As his narrator voices through the thought of the young Jude, "[he] learnt for the first time that there was no law of transmutation, as in his innocence he had supposed" (J 27).
Relatively little tension exists between the narrative audience and the authorial audience in their abilities to accept Hardy’s presentation of the community in Jude the Obscure as a realistic representation of community as it would have been experienced by one of
Jude’s actual contemporaries. If the reader looks past Hardy’s obviously false denial of any autobiographical material in Jude, this realism becomes particularly striking, surpassing that of the previous novels. Regenia Gagnier notes that this, Hardy’s final novel, contains elements common to many working-class autobiographies of late Victorian
England:
In Jude the Obscure (1895) the stonecutter’s desire to raise himself (a combination of Hardy’s stonecutter father’s desire for prosperity and Hardy’s desire for a proper education) as well as the harried feeling of needing work and forever being told to ’move on’ also reflect the thematic concerns of much working-class autobiography. (108)
To Hardy’s contemporaries, therefore, who were sufficiently aware of the plight of the working class, his novels would have been disturbingly realistic. Perhaps more disturbing is the fact that much 196
of what makes Jude Pawley’s situation so realistic for the Victorian
era is equally true for many working class — and lower middle class — members of twentieth-century Western society; i.e., many of those who
read Hardy now. 197
2
The Death of the Wessex Community
The notion of community takes a radically different form in
Hardy’s final novel. In The Return of the Native, the community was likened to a personality; in The Woodlanders the community was snug and enclosed to the point of a painful inward growth; and in Tess the community was dispersed. In Jude the Obscure the community has become so diffuse that it barely exists apart from a geographical entity. The sense of community as a group of people engaged in a common concern, living in symbiotic relationship, has become merely an elusive ideal, an ideal for which Jude searches unsuccessfully.
In Jude the Obscure, therefore, the definition of community entails two aspects: the actual, which is geographical rather than psychological, and the ideal, which exists only in the mind (Jude’s).
Part of the tragedy of Jude is that the actual community becomes for him merely the peripheral in his understanding of community, whereas the ideal, embodied in Christminster, becomes Jude’s central definition of community. Christminster is his community of choice — or rather
"mischoice," because his participation in that community as a full- fledged member is a reality that does not and cannot exist for him.
In the novel, the communities of Marygreen, Alfredston, Shaston,
Stoke-Barehills, and Melchester fit the category of the "actual."
These are the locales in which Jude spends most of his life, but which never provide him with the aspect of community he so desperately desires. He never accepts or is accepted by them, and although he 198 lives in these communities many years, he never achieves true membership within them in that he always feels himself to be an outsider. Indeed, because of his scholarly leanings and more particularly because of his relationship with Sue, those communities in turn treat him as someone on the outside.
Although these peripheral communities of Marygreen, Alfredston,
Shaston, Melchester, and Stoke-Barehills are all either rural villages or smaller cities surrounded by agricultural lands, their character does not derive from their proximity to nature. In his presentations of these communities. Hardy turns away from his earlier focus on the influence of the natural world on his characters. For the most part, the picture he paints of this rural landscape is one of a dull sameness that obscures to most viewers its underlying character. Hardy emphasizes instead the seemingly broken connection between man and nature.
In his account of Jude’s short-lived occupation as a scare-crow.
Hardy portrays the natural landscape with barren, impersonal imagery as though to reemphasize his character’s utter lack of appreciation for nature’s beauties. The description he provides shows nature to be, instead, endowed with coldness and indifference:
The brown surface of the field went right up towards the sky all round, where it was lost by degrees in the mist that shut out the actual verge and accentuated the solitude. The only marks on the uniformity of the scene were a rick of last year’s produce standing in the midst of the arable, the rooks that rose at his approach, and the path athwart the fallow by which he had come, trodden now by he hardly knew whom, though once by many of his own dead family. ... The fresh harrow-1ines seemed to stretch like the channellings in a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air to the expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it of all history beyond that of 199
the few recent months, though to every clod and stone there really attached associations enough and to spare —echoes of songs from ancient harvest-days, or spoken words, and of sturdy deeds. Every inch of ground had been the site, first or last, of energy, gaiety, horse-play, bickerings, weariness, (13)
This is a scene devoid of personality, completely divorced from human interaction save for an ordinary, utilitarian relationship. The primary colors are the plain brown of the fields, utterly lacking in
"gradations" which might lend it interest or character, and the non color of the mist which obscures the boundaries of the field and
"[accentuates] the solitude" of the place. The only wildlife present are the scavenging rooks, the very birds which it is Jude’s job to disperse, thereby preventing them from feeding on the corn growing in the brown expanse.
This paucity of visual beauty in Hardy’s presentation of the scene is typical of his presentation of the natural world in Jude. It depicts not only the disconnection between man and nature, but also the spiritual tone of Jude’s world as well. In his opening chapter. Hardy thus portrays the dull, toneless world of the poor in late 19th-century
Britain. The drudgery and utilitarian aspect of this life is so pronounced that it has colored the once-bright view of nature so vibrantly portrayed in Hardy’s earlier novels.
Jude’s relentless striving to earn a livelihood and the futility of his economic or social rise are clearly representative of the lot of his class as Hardy perceived it, with its resultant dulling of hopes and aspirations appropriately played out against the backdrop of an ordinary, fustian landscape. The harshness of this poverty has rendered impossible the intense appreciation of and affinity with 200 nature enjoyed by Hardy’s earlier protagonists. This situation, hinted
at in Jess’s experience of backbreaking labor at the harsh,
inhospitable domain of Flintcomb-Ash, has now become pervasive and
indicates in Jude the final severing of the ties between the protagonists and the natural elements of community. As Meisel comments, in Jude "the rich backdrop of natural setting has retreated before the necessities of the self" (160).
This is indeed a radical departure from Hardy’s earlier writing, as Enstice notes:
We have been used, even in Tess to see the community in all its diverse forms as the compass of an individual’s life. Doubts have been cast, and questions asked, but until that last fast-moving series of vignettes by which Tess and Clare seek to escape their own world, human society in partnership with Nature has been the final arbiter of the way lives are lived. (154-5)
In Jude, "human society" has disjoined itself from and supplanted
Nature as the "final arbiter," and the result is a society whose concerns are largely economic and political rather than personal and nurturing. Because Nature has been so displaced, it is powerless to provide Jude the emotional sustenance it afforded Clym as he worked in tune with the Heath as a furze-cutter, or Tess as she felt herself so akin to the lush fertility of the Talbothays dairy. The society as presented in Jude has evolved very clearly from what Regenia Gagnier describes as an "other regarding" based on nurturance to a society almost solely ruled by economic determinism.
This change has rendered the natural community antagonistic to any attempt at membership that Jude might make. The symbiotic relationship between man and nature that was so prevalent in Hardy’s 201 earlier novels no longer exists, rendering the natural community unappealing to a person with Jude’s sensibilities. Although Jude has none of the special knowledge of or ties to the land, such as are possessed by characters like Giles Winterborne, he is sufficiently sympathetic to nature as to be puzzled by Farmer Troutham’s anger towards the hungry crows.
Spiritually, the "peripheral" communities in Jude are characterized by a lack of substance rather than by strong, internal qualities, whether positive or negative. They represent the very characteristics which define Jude’s existence and which he so detests:
They are lacking in any connectedness with the past and transient in their present state; they are ordinary and undistinguished; they are unappreciated and neglected; and they carry the propensity for decadence and moral uncertainty.
Hardy describes Marygreen, the community in which the reader first becomes acquainted with Jude, as "a small sleepy place ... as old-fashioned as it was small" (J 11), words which might equally well describe the child Jude. Furthermore, Marygreen — like the orphan
Jude — has become severed from its past with the result that it is curiously lacking in any strong sense of personal history:
In place of [the original church] a tall new building of modern gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obi iterator of historic records who had run down from London and back in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteen penny cast-iron crosses warranted to last five year. (J 11-2) 202
The obliteration of the past by an insensitive, outside, urban hand marks Marygreen as a locale that no longer plays any consequential role and is therefore considered cheap and dispensable by society at large. Indeed, there is the strong sense that Marygreen is a dying hamlet, one whose significance is unlikely to warrant any commemoration other than a "penny cast-iron cross."
Shaston, a subsequent community that represents the peripheral in
Jude’s vision, is characterized by a similar insignificance:
The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain; but strange to say, these qualities, which were noted by many writers in ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreciated, are passed over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England stands virtually unvisited today. (J 158)
In spite of its unique beauty and character, the community of Shaston has also seen its day. Although no attempt has been made to
"obliterate" it, as has seemingly been done with Marygreen, Shaston remains "unappreciated" and "unvisited," abandoned.
The narrator notes that the community of Shaston possesses qualities additional to its natural beauty that should, but do not, prevent its relative obscurity. He calls these qualities
"peculiarities," one legendary and the other modern. In "former times," for example, "Shaston was remarkable for three consolations to man, such as the world afforded not elsewhere ..."
It was a place where the churchyard lay nearer heaven than the church steeple, where beer was more plentiful than water, and where there were more wanton women than honest wives and maids. It was also said that after the middle ages the inhabitants were too poor to pay their priests, and hence were compelled to pull down their churches, and refrain altogether from the public worship of God; a necessity which they bemoaned over their cups in the settles of their inns on Sunday afternoons. In those days 203
the Shastonians were apparently not without a sense of humour. (J 159)
This legendary view of the Shaston community reveals its propensity for excessive drinking and licentiousness, characteristics that Jude struggles against in his own life. Shaston’s poverty and the subsequent denial of its spiritual needs by the organization of the
Church are two more ways in which the community’s spiritual make-up parallels Jude’s own. In legend, Shaston is a locale in dire need of consolation, but it receives none of lasting sustenance; only the temporary anodynes of beer and sex deaden its pain of abandonment.
Hardy claims that Shaston’s "modern peculiarity" stems as well from its "unique position on the summit of a steep and imposing scarp"
(J 158-9), a location that is without doubt a cause of its poverty, isolation, and decadence. The second characteristic is the transience of its populace in Jude’s day. For when Jude resides in Shaston:
[it] was the resting-place and headquarters of the proprietors of wandering vans, shows, shooting-galleries, and other itinerant concerns, whose business lay largely at fairs and markets. As strange wild birds are seen assembled on some lofty promontory, meditatively pausing for longer flights, or to return by the course they followed thither,, so here, in this cliff-town, stood in stultified silence the yellow and green caravans bearing names not local, as if surprised by a change in the landscape so violent as to hinder their further progress; and here they remained all the winter till they turned to seek again their old tracks in the following spring. (J 159)
Shaston’s function as a "resting-place" for those of "itinerant concerns" aptly fills Jude and Sue’s requirements for the community they seek. Feeling very much "hunted" and outcast, they want and need a place of rest and security. Because they are living a life ill- suited to the mores of their era, however, Jude and Sue are fated to 204 follow an itinerant lifestyle. The two are very much like the "strange wild birds" in their stultified progress. Indeed, the fates of both are neatly symbolized by these fictitious birds, Jude "meditatively pausing for longer flights" of mental searching and Sue "[returning] by the course [she] followed thither."
In the description of Stoke-Barehills, Hardy portrays a community whose character closely parallels Jude’s own. Its obscurity is as pronounced as his own, as the narrator so poignantly conveys in the declaration, "the town may be called Stoke-Barehills," suggesting that the actual name scarcely matters. Like Jude, this town possesses a gaunt, unattractive past and an undistinguished, unpromising present in which death has become the "most familiar object." What makes Stoke-
Barehills - and Jude - so piteous is that this is not merely physical death, but the death of all hope and aspirations; for both the
"questions of choice" are dead, and they both, the town and the man, remain in the end utterly abandoned.
Christminster, on the other hand, is Jude’s ideal vision of community towards which he gravitates like an asteroid around a dying star. It exists as in a multitude of forms in the novel: the community in which Jude tries to achieve membership; the vision of his idealism; the empty, heartless place that Hardy sees its academic and ecclesiastic aspect to be; and finally, but no less importantly, the down-to-earth, quotidian habitation of the laboring classes. The community of Christminster exists, therefore, as a representation of both idealistic vision and hard-core reality. In the scheme of the novel, Christminster stands between the peripheral and central 205 locations of community, thus blurring the lines between the community of the actual and the community of the mind.
The initial presentation of Christminster depicted in the novel remains one of the most beautiful and spiritualized of Hardy’s descriptions. This dream-like view of Jude’s ideal community as viewed from afar becomes the nebulous vision of selfhood and community participation that becomes Jude’s goal:
Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape, points of light like the topaz gleamed. The air increased in transparency with the lapse of minutes, till the topaz points showed themselves to be the vanes, windows, wet roof slates, and other shining spots upon the spires domes, freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly revealed. It was Christminster, unquestionably; either directly seen, or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere. (J 19)
In this scene, the transparency of the air and the gleaming, golden light of the city suggest an almost trance-like state in Jude’s perceptive qualities. There is an other-worldliness about the vision, yet it is unclear at this point whether this is due to the true beauty of the ideal or the falseness of Jude’s illusions about himself and the community towards which he yearns.
That it is the latter becomes clear upon close scrutiny of the vision: what appear to Jude as topaz points of light are, in fact, merely the reflection of light by the more mundane appurtenances of the
"spires, domes [and] freestone-work," the "vanes, windows, [and] wet roof slates." Hardy argues, thus, that unbeknownst to Jude, his truest expression of self-hood and community membership may well be found within the framework of the working class. At any rate, in the final sentence of this passage, there is the implicit, and slightly satiric. 206 suggestion that the issue of the true identity of the community of
Christminster is dubious in nature. Indeed, there is a strong suggestion that in its ability to be "either directly seen, or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere," the revered city possesses a basic, inner duality of character.
Once Jude has achieved his initial goal of relocating to the
Christminster community, he swiftly perceives the hidden duality of his personality. In contrast to the ethereal glow of topaz which previously struck his youthful eye, the darkness of decay and deceit now become the dominant hue:
High against the black sky the flash of a lamp would show crocketed pinnacles and indented battlements. Down obscure alleys, apparently never trodden now by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemed to be forgotten, there would jut into the path porticoes, oriels, doorways of enriched and florid middle-age design, their extinct air being accentuated by the rottenness of the stones. It seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit and superseded chambers. (J 64)
In this murky atmosphere, Jude:
... found that the colleges had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances: some were pompous; some had put on the look of family vaults above ground; something barbaric loomed in the masonries of all. The spirits of the great men had disappeared. (J 68)
The idyllic atmosphere of the distantly perceived Christminster has changed into one of darkness and decay, in which all topaz elements are forgotten, replaced by an air of extinction. The architecture of war seems to predominate, as evidenced by the "crocketed pinnacles and indented battlements," revealing this community of higher learning to be more preoccupied with the conflicting aspects of the light and dark of human relations, the constant warring between past and present, with 207
the regressive tendencies of backward views too often triumphing over
the "modern thought" usually affiliated with an academic community such
as Christminster.
Overlying this darkness is the air of deceit and treachery which
Jude in his naivete finds so astounding and unexpected. He views the
pomposity of the building, coupled with their death-like aspect and
perceives within a callousness taken to the point of barbarismfrom which the "spirits of the great men had [utterly] disappeared." As
Andrew Enstice so perceptively suggests, "Christminster seems to reek
of decay in mind and body" (160).
Enstice further elucidates the significance of Christminster in
the novel by noting its meaning for Hardy as well as for Jude:
[Christminster] changes, too, for Hardy, as he questions its reality first as a place of study, then as an architectural expression of man’s skill, then as a heart of the changing nineteenth century society and culture, then simply as a living town, finally as a symbol of division, unfairness, tragedy, pleasure and transience. ... in a sense, it is Christminster that is the heart of the novel, all other physical settings being extremely sketchy by comparison. (154)
What is particularly significant about this description of
Christminster is the question or confusion over its identity for Hardy
- and by inference - for Jude. The reality of the community of
Christminster seems to be in question, as it struggles to achieve
integration of its various characters. That Christminster never quite
succeeds is perhaps due to its function as the "heart of the changing
nineteenth century society and culture" which comprises, as well as
symbolizes, the aspects of "division, unfairness, tragedy, pleasure and 208 transience" experienced by Jude and all other humans, real or fictitious.
It becomes clear in Jude that Hardy’s earlier vision of community as seen in his Wessex representation has itself fallen victim to the vast and irrevocable changes apparent in late nineteenth-century
British culture. Locating his protagonist’s ideal community in an urban rather than rural setting is one way that Hardy conveys his sense that the beloved rural community of his [imagined] past has beenswept away. As Perry Meisel relates this phenomenon to Jude the Obscurein a most convincing manner:
Christminster is ’within hail of the Wessex border’ ... but, by now, the implications in Tess that locality is irrelevant to the pervasive conditions of social existence are clearly operative ... Still, Jude’s arrival in the city makes the intimations of his isolation plain. In answer to why his suicide attempt failed, he begins to realize that he is in search of himself. (144)
Jude’s failed attempt to achieve community membership is indeed largely due to the fact that he is "in search of himself" yet it is also true that the communities represented in the novel also play a causative role in his failure. Spiritually, the peripheral communities of Marygreen, Shaston, and Stoke-Barehills lack the permanence, cohesiveness, compassion, or mental stimulation to make them attractive to or accepting of an individual like Jude. The central community of
Christminster is essentially antipathetic to Jude and he rejects it in the end because it falls so short spiritually of his idealization of it.
Both the rural and the urban communities fail to satisfy in Jude because they repel rather than embrace any individual or group 209 different from what they consider to be the norm. As Andrew Enstice so persuasively notes, "these well-meaning, upright people form, in their amorphous mass, part of the new landscapes of the mind. They are the bigotry of society at large, which survives by destroying all incipient aberration within itself" (172).
Meisel’s emphasis on the importance of the "pervasive conditions of social existence" is one of the key aspects of this passage. It is true that "locality" no longer performs the function of cohesion in human relations in Jude but that increasingly, it is social class which does. As in The Return of the Native. The Woodlanders. and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Hardy divides the social world of the novel into three basic classes: lower, middle, and upper. It is significant that in
Jude the characteristics of these three groups have altered somewhat.
For instance, what was perceived as the "peasant" or rural farm worker comprising the lower class in the previous three novels becomes the urban laboring class in Jude and the middle class is now represented by the professions of ecclesiastic artist and grammar school teacher. Equally marked is the shift seen in the character of the upper class, which has been transformed from the effete representations of the idle rich to representations of the remote echelons of the University and the Church. In short, the classes have changed character because the overall shift has been made from rural to urban.
Similarly, the narrative focus has changed in Jude from the earlier novels. Whereas in those novels. Hardy seemed most interested in the lives of his middle class characters and their social stratum. 210 he quite clearly turns his greatest attention to the lower, laboring class of which Jude is its most prominent member.
The culture of this class revolves around its work, most of which is physically demanding, and its attempts to escape from the drudgery of this labor and the improbability that their lot in life will ever greatly improve. There are no communal activities of the sort portrayed by the Guy Fawkes bonfires or Christmas mummers’ party of the
Yeobrights, no neighborly socializing such as Giles undertakes, nor any barn dances or club-walking enjoyed by Tess and her fellow farm workers.
The cultural make-up of the laboring class in Jude seems barren by contrast. The joviality of the Egdon Heath gatherings, the polite solicitude of Giles’ dinner party, and even the exuberant sexuality of the Trantridge barn dance seem replaced in Hardy’s last novel by vulgarity, debauchery, and deceit. For example, the social aspects of
Jude and Arabella’s initial encounter has at its center a strikingly vulgar expression of human sexuality that would have shocked its
Victorian readership. Similarly, Jude, Arabella, and others of their class find their social niche in the pub with excessive drinking, and both of Arabella’s successful attempts to marry Jude are replete with deceit and debauchery.
It is telling, I believe, that the only other social event that convenes the members of the lower class in Jude the Obscure is the funeral of Jude’s aged aunt in Marygreen. Attended by a very few mourners, this event symbolizes the death of the sociability and 211 colorful rural culture so vividly portrayed in the earlier Wessex novels.
With the exception of Jude, the scholarly education of this lower class is next to nil. Whereas the peasants represented in The Return.
The Woodlanders. and Tess did not possess much academic education, they were well versed in the cycles of nature and in the histories of their culture. In Jude this non-traditional education of the laboring class has been replaced by the knowledge of a particular trade, such as stone-cutting, and only a vague sense of cultural history.
Unfortunately, there is a greater knowledge of ways to deceive than in the previous novels, as Dr. Vilbert and Arabella both exemplify.
The speech of the laboring class is indicative of their views towards education, their community, and the society of other classes with whom they interact. The setting for the following excerpt is a
Christminster pub, where a slightly inebriated Jude expounds on his views of the academic world:
"I don’t care a damn,’ [Jude] was saying, ’for any Provost, Warden, Principal, Fellow or cursed Master of Arts in the University. What I know is that I’d lick ’em on their own ground if they’d give me a chance, and show ’em a few things they are not up to yet!"
"Hear, Hear" said the undergraduates from the corner, where they were talking privately about the pups.
"You always was fond o’books I’ve hear," said Tinker Taylor, "and I don’t doubt what you state: Now with me ’twas different: I always saw there was more to be learnt outside a book than in; and I took my steps accordingly, or I shouldn’t have been the man I am."
"You aim a the Church I believe?" said Uncle Joe. "If you are such a scholar as to pitch yer hopes so high as that, why not give us a specimen of your scholarship? Canst say the Creed in Latin, man? That was how they once put it to a chap down in my country." 212
"I should think so" said Jude haughtily." (J 98)
Early in the conversation, the suspicious view of "books" and the higher learning they represent is clear. Tinker Taylor is a member of the laboring classes, and his words to Jude reveal his essential disbelief in the value of this learning. Indeed, his comment that more can be "learnt outside a book than in" and his pursuit of this belief made him the "man [he is]" strongly suggests that he sees higher learning as somehow restrictive — if not preventive — of self- realization.
Taylor views the institution of the Church of England as the zenith of academic learning, and finds it therefore fitting that aspiring to the ranks of the clergy should be Jude’s educational goal.
Interestingly, Taylor views the Church as an academic body rather than a spiritual one. His "test" of Jude’s academic and ecclesiastical promise, that he "canst say the Creed in Latin," is singular in that it reveals Taylor’s essential conception of the Church as an arcane
institution little connected with the lives of common people. For
Tinker Taylor, the proof of Jude’s theological knowledge is found in the repetition of the well-known Nicene creed in a language no longer
in common use; he has no conception of querying Jude as to any discussion of theological thought.
Taylor’s suspiciousness and ignorance of either academic or ecclesiastic learning are in keeping with the limited world-view he holds. For Tinker, the test of the mettle of any person or idea can be found in past experiences and histories belonging to the lower classes.
This view is regressive in that for Taylor and his companions, past 213 knowledge is more sound than discoveries of either the present or the future. In this sense, the notion of community still prevails among the laboring classes in that its members ground their perception of knowledge and truth in the experiences "once put ... to a chap down in
[their] country."
Unlike the middle class representations in The Return of the
Native. The Woodlanders. or Tess of the d’Urbervilles. the middle class is paid scant and largely uncomplimentary attention in Jude the
Obscure. There are only two characters in the novel who fully belong to this class: the schoolmasters Phillotson and Gillingham. A third character, Sue, seems to vacillate between the lower and middle class, according to her occupation and her mate and her representation of these classes therefore must be discussed separately.
Phillotson and his colleague and friend, Gillingham, are solidly middle class. Hardy’s view of them and the class they represent is apparent in the sterility of their personalities and the narrow mindedness of their culture. Both are portrayed as emotionally underdeveloped, and apart from the association made necessary by their professions, these middle class school teachers have little substantive contact socially with either the lower or upper classes. What we do see of their social interaction, and what we can deduce of their culture, is portrayed in the quiet conversations Phillotson and
Gillingham hold in their residences.
Clearly, these representatives of the middle class are well educated and value the acquisition of academic knowledge. Phillotson, particularly, holds personal aspirations of going to the University and 214 then becoming ordained by the Church. He desires knowledge both for the increased social and economic status it will afford him and for the personal satisfaction he derives from learning. In these attributes, he is very much like Jude himself. Furthermore, in the early days of his career as a rural schoolmaster, before becoming disillusioned by his own failure to matriculate at Christminster University, Phillotson displays the noble desire to help poor but intelligent schoolboys as he does the young Jude at Marygreen.
In their educational makeup, thus, and in the early stages of its philanthropy, the middle class characters in Jude would seem to represent attributes that Jude, Hardy, and his readership would find admirable. As the novel progresses, however, the increasing cynicism expressed by Jude, Phillotson, and the author conveys a profound disillusionment with the educational ideals portrayed by the middle class.
Culturally, the middle class as represented in Jude appears nondescript. Apart from the socializing attending the duties of schoolmaster, Phillotson, for example, appears to have little social contact with the lower, or upper classes, and his social contact with his own class seems to consist only of occasional, solitary visits with his colleague, Gillingham, and his quasi-professional, quasi-"romantic" relationship with Sue. Even the marriage ceremony between the two is quiet and drab with little social festivity attending it. There is no sense of an extended community with mutual support and concern among the middle class characters in the novel. 215
As viewed through the person of Sue Bridehead, the middle class character is educationally and culturally less bleak than that represented by the two schoolmasters. Although this is due largely to the force and singularity of Sue’s personality, there are elements of her character which reflect Hardy’s notions of the middle class. Sue is a well-educated woman possessing a degree of knowledge uncommon to the middle class woman, yet she has acquired this in a non-traditional manner, as would be necessary for a woman in late nineteenth-century
Britain. Hardy emphasizes the modern aspect of Sue’s personality and her knowledge, noting more than once that Sue is more advanced than
Jude in her thinking and view of the world. She certainly possesses a more inquiring mind and is more intellectually stimulated than either
Phillotson or Gillingham.
Although Hardy sets Sue, thus, as an example of what education a modern woman should possess. Hardy never suggests that Sue has been wronged by a society that prevented her from attending the University.
In portraying Sue as an intelligent, self-educated woman, therefore.
Hardy seems to suggest that while she thereby embodies the best of the middle class’s view of education. Sue is not quite equal to Jude in deserving a chance at a formal education.
Culturally, Sue Bridehead seems no more socially oriented than
Phillotson or Gillingham, although she is somewhat less concerned than they about social appearances or the ways in which "respectability" may influence the success of her career. Her dismay, for instance, at losing two positions because of other’s reprehension of her thought and actions is less acute than Gillingham’s view of Phillotson’s 216 professional "suicide." As the novel progresses, however, both Sue and Phillotson become increasingly preoccupied with the opinions others of their class hold of them, and thus become more solidly "middle class."
These characteristics are notably evident in one of the private conversations between Phillotson and Gillingham, which reveals much about the nature of the middle class as Hardy perceives it in Jude:
" ... Well: you’ve all but got her again at last. She can’t very well go a second time. The pear has dropped into your hand."
"Yes .. I suppose I am right in taking her at her word. I confess there seems a touch of selfishness in it. Apart from her being what she is, of course, a luxury for a fogey like me, it will set me right in the eyes of the clergy and orthodox laity, who have never forgiven me for letting her go. So I may get back in some degree into my old track."
"Well — if you’ve got any sound reason for marrying her again, do it now in God’s name! I was always against your opening the cage-dcor and letting the bird go in such an obviously suicidal way. You might have been a school inspector by this time, or a reverend, if you hadn’t been so weak about her.."
"I did my self irreparable damage — I know it."
"Once you’ve got her housed again, stick to her." (J 290)
As befitting their positions as schoolmasters, the speakers express themselves in a proper, well-educated diction that conveys more about their public selves than their private selves. Although some personal interaction goes on between the two, the language of the personal is expressed mainly by the topic of the conversation and through the symbolism they use in referring to Sue.
This discussion of Phillotson’s plan to remarry Sue reveals much about the middle class character as represented in Jude. The reader 217 notices immediately the lack of sensitivity and emotional well-being on the part of the speakers. Nowhere in the discussion of Phillotson’s impending remarriage is there any discussion of any emotional gain or satisfaction. Indeed, the terse, impersonal tone of Phillotson and
Gillingham seems to hide a deeply felt discomfort with any expression -
- or even admission — of the affective aspect of the issue. This discomfort is quite clearly conveyed through the used of symbols use to represent Sue. The objectification of the "beloved" as a "bird" or
"pear" emphatically illustrates this fear of emotion. Phillotson refers to Sue as too much a "luxury for a fogey like [himself]," further indicating his perception of her as a possession to be "caged" or "housed" rather than a companion with her own emotional needs.
Marriage is seen as a proprietorship on the part of the husband rather than as a union of two equal individuals. Indeed, Gillingham deplores his friend’s being "so weak about [Sue]" when in fact this "weakness" was actually a sensitive consideration of Sue’s happiness.
Perhaps most pronounced in the speech of the two schoolmasters is an overriding concern for respectability, for which blindness to another’s or even one’s own emotional health is seemingly requisite.
For both men, the quest for professional respect and recognition causes their intense desire for being perceived as "respectable." In keeping with this pursuit of respectability is the notion that career advancement is far more important than marital happiness or the personal well-being of either partner. Marriage is therefore a worldly rather than a spiritual institution according to the middle-class mindset portrayed in Jude. 218
In short, the predominant concern expressed in the conversation between Phillotson and Gillingham is self-advancement in social rather than psychological terms. Phillotson’s final sentence of the excerpt conveys this notion clearly — "I did myself irreparable damage — I know it." This simple statement speaks volumes about Hardy’s view of the middle class as a social group whose primary concern is for the external aspects of the self: reputation, prestige, and self- importance.
In the representation of the upper class in the novel. Hardy emphasizes yet more sharply the absence of the personal or emotional component of human relations. In Jude this class is portrayed by the academicians and clergy of Christminster, past and present. It is significant that this class is only seen in the novel in the processions of the dead that Jude perceives in his imagination and in the festival processions he watches from the sidelines. There is little communication with the members of this class and the sole individual representatives consist of the don who commands the gathering crowds to provide passage for the procession and the academic who replies to Jude’s letter asking advice on his best course in entering the University.
Culturally, the social life of this upper class revolves around the institutions of the University and the Church, rather than around that of the aristocracy and landed gentry as in the earlier three novels discussed. Given Hardy’s own early aspirations to join the ranks of these institutions, the reader infers that the upper class as portrayed in Jude represents Hardy’s view of the zenith of the upper 219 class echelons. In this part of the upper class, culture and educational background seem to be one in Hardy’s eyes, for he barely distinguishes one from the other.
Hardy’s portrayal of Jude’s early view of Christminster as the glittering topaz "city of light" and "high culture" shows the obvious influence of John Ruskin’s theoretical fusion of the aesthetic and the moral. Similarly, the basis of Jude’s enduring idealism of
Christminster as it represents knowledge, culture, and the arts has clear antecedents in Ruskin’s practice of gaging the health of a given society by the comparative greatness of its art. Because Christminster continues to excel in all of these human endeavors, Jude seems to conclude that the tenets of its society must, perforce, be "right".
It is telling, particularly in consideration of the aspirations of the implied author, that of the various ways of moving into the upper classes available to the ambitious person of the Victorian lower classes, the narrator chooses the vehicles of academia and the Church as Jude’s preferred means to improve his status. For an individual as sensitive and fairminded as Jude, the denial of these means of self- improvement is particularly frustrating. As an idealist, Jude expects that the University and the Church will base their judgment of a person’s worth on integrity and intelligence, not on lineage or economic status.
Tetuphenay’s terse note to Jude, however, reveals just the opposite, making explicit the narrative stance that social class and wealth remain everywhere the operant measures of an individual’s worth and the gatekeepers of his or her future potential. 220
It is significant that the only verbal communication that exists among the upper class characters in the novels takes the form of this brief, written note, perhaps the most impersonal mode of communication available to them. Short as it is, this letter provides an interesting view of the upper class as Hardy perceived it in Jude:
"Biblioll College
"Sir, — I have read your letter with interest, and, judging from your description of yourself as a working-man, I venture to think that you will have a much better chance at success in life by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course. That, therefore, is what I advise you to do. Yours faithfully,
"T.Tetuphenay.
To Mr. J. Fawley Stone-Mason" (J 95)
It is evident from Tetuphenay’s letter that his snobbishness and class-consciousness cause him to quickly dismiss Jude simply because he is a "working-man." He implies thereby that Jude should not try to
"[adopt] any other course" by aiming too high but should "[remain] in
[his] sphere." The brevity of the letter indicates the ease with which Tetuphenay dismisses Jude. That he closes — rather than opens -
- the letter with Jude’s name is more than the typical usage for such correspondence, but indicates further his refusal to view Jude as an equal and a viable individual in his own right. Through this letter and its portrayal of the upper-class. Hardy conveys his disdain for this group and its culture. His designation of the Biblioll academic with the preposterous name of "T.Tetuphenay" is an incisive indicator of this contempt. 221
In his social make-up, Jude is a blend of the characteristics — good and bad — of each of these three major classes, but he does not possess sufficient development of any one and the subsequent suppression of the others that would be required for true membership in one specific social group. Just as none of the groups can fully embrace Jude, neither is he ultimately able to choose one of them over the others because his idealism prevents him from overlooking their faults. Part of Jude’s despair stems from the essential coldness and sterility found in every representation of community within the novel and from his own inability to reconcile himself to aligning himself with such a community. He seems not to realize that while membership in any community is, in some way, limiting for the individual, it is necesary to counter the despair of anomie.
The essential flaw found in the community as a whole as it is represented in Jude the Obscure may be said to be the overwhelming sense of anonymity it engenders. Because there is such a lack of cohesiveness and the boundaries of the community have thereby become so liminal, the identity of any one individual is easily hidden or obscured. While this phenomenon is a likely reaction to the sweeping changes occurring in late 19th-century British culture, taken as a subconscious defense against the disintegration of the world as one has known it, anonymity taken too far is a most dangerous state. This is precisely what Hardy expresses in Jude.
When one has become anonymous, one has not only lost a public identity, but comes precariously close to losing a private identity, or sense of self, as well. Both Jude and Sue without doubt — and perhaps 222 all major characters in the novel — experience this very deep loss of self at some point in the novel. Whether this is ultimately their permanent state, however, remains in question. Andrew Enstice presents an interesting conanentary in his discussion of Hardy’s landscapes:
Both characters and locations are designed to preserve the anonymity of the settings and their inhabitants, and in particular to destroy any sense of communal effort or support. ... Jude and Sue are doomed to wander beyond hope of succour from any community or family links. (171)
In the picture of community Enstice paints here, there is a sense of isolation far greater than experienced by the inhabitants of Hardy’s isolated Egdon Heath, for there is no longer any thread which connects one individual to any other, or to the physical community in which he or she lives. Even the basic link with the family has corroded, as
Hardy so painfully emphasizes in the young Jude’s thoughts that "his aunt didn’t like him much." There is, in fact, no support system inherent in Jude’s society; rather, each individual must struggle alone, and most often with selfish motives.
The cause of the inexorable anonymity of the community that Hardy conveys in this final novel is the disconnection between the inner and outer aspects of the individual psyche. There is not one character in
Jude who is presented as a whole individual, certain and accepting of self or others. Indeed, Hardy’s recognition of this disunity in his own culture is largely responsible for the bleakness and cynicism of the novel. Andrew Enstice takes the view that "there is never any sense of personal involvement for Jude, Hardy, or the reader" (153); yet I would disagree: the pessimism Enstice notes is not due to any lack of involvement on the part of protagonist or author nor — I would 223 venture to say — reader, but rather from an intense concern, frustration, and resigned sadness for the fragmentation of community and self. Psychic unity for either the social unit or the individual is no longer possible in Hardy’s fictional universe.
The dichotomies of the marital pairings in the novel most forcefully convey the influence of this psychic disconnection on the major characters. The marriages that occur among the four major characters are all profound disasters for one party, if not for both.
Jude and Arabella are drawn to each other physically, yet intellectually they have nothing in common. Sue and Phillotson, conversely, enjoy a certain intellectual companionship, yet she is utterly revolted by any physical connection with him. Phillotson, for his part, rather soon learns to dismiss Sue emotionally when he "takes her back" when she leaves Jude. It is as though Jude and Arabella represent one aspect of the psyche, while Sue and Phillotson represent another, resulting in the impossibility of emotional or intellectual union within their marriages.
While Hardy’s dim portrayal of marriage is clearly due both to his own disillusionment with life with Emma and what he saw as the social misconceptions of what marriage is and should be, this is not the only meaning attached to marriage in the novel. On a more basic level, marriage can be seen as a symbol of unity: on the conscious level, the unity of two individuals and on the unconscious level of the individual self. On this deeper level, it is as though Hardy is saying that unity of the self is no longer possible, because the people in his culture are prevented psychologically from achieving individuation. 224
Jude’s recognition of this debilitating characteristic of his
community has been described by Perry Meisel as the moment when "his
consciousness is awakened" as a result of learning that Arabella has
faked pregnancy in order to induce him to marry her. As Meisel notes,
Jude’s is an "[unconscious response to a] code of a community that he
takes for granted" (143). Much of Jude’s tragedy is thus precipitated
by his failure to recognize that his view of community is an illusion.
Community has clearly ceased to be a viable force in Jude the
Obscure:in the manner in which it functioned in Hardy’s earlier writings. It is no longer a cohesive unit whose members show a certain
degree of mutual supportiveness. What has emerged in Jude is a greater
focus on the individual’s self-knowledge as a means of understanding
and adjusting to a culture which is rapidly and irrevocably changing.
If there is any hope — and Hardy seems to question frequently whether
indeed there is — it must lie within the individual’s concept of the
self and what he does with that understanding. 225 3
Abandonment: The Self in Alienation
Hardy presents Jude Fawley to the reader in the opening pages of the novel concurrently with his presentation of the community of
Marygreen. Significantly, this initial scene is one of change, loss and abandonment in which the community of Marygreen seems to represent something archaic that no longer moves in the mainstream. At the edge of this peripheral community stands an 11-year-old child who watches in sad silence as his teacher, mentor, and only friend prepares to leave.
Jude Fawley is immediately impressed on the reader’s vision as an embodiment of solitary innocence, powerlessness, and stifled potential.
Three excerpts from these opening pages of the novel poignantly reveal these basic components of Jude’s characterization: his loneliness and innocence, his potential in the face of almost utter powerlessness, and his innate sensitivity. They show him, as well, in social groupings that preview his situation as the novel progresses: on the periphery of the group, with an intellectual friend, and finally, alone with his despair.
In the first excerpt. Hardy presents both Jude’s visual and verbal expression:
A little boy of eleven, who had been thoughtfully assisting in the packing, joined the group of men, and as they rubbed their chins he spoke up, blushing at the sound of his own voice: "Aunt has got a great fuel-house, and it could be put there, perhaps, till you’ve found a place to settle in, sir. (J 9)
This presentation of the protagonist’s character reveals the young Jude to be a thoughtful child caught in the difficult period between 226 childhood and adolescence. He is on the outside of the group socially, yet he is desirous of being a part of the gathering and of being useful. Although he is shy and sensitive, his tentativeness around others does not prevent him from coming up with and presenting a solution to those assembled.
In the second passage, the reader sees the young Jude alone with his former schoolteacher, the other members of the packing group having left them. Phillotson has just given his young pupil a book in token of his recognition of Jude’s aspirations and potential:
Tears rose into the boy’s eyes, for he was not among the regular day scholars, who came unromantically close to the schoolmaster’s life, but one who attended the night school only during the present teacher’s terms of office. ... The boy awkwardly opened the book he held in his hand, which Mr. Phillotson had bestowed on him as a parting gift, and admitted that he was sorry [that the teacher was leaving]. (J 10)
Here, Jude’s powerlessness and passive acceptance and respect for authority stand in contrast with the intellectual and spiritual hope and promise he carries within him. His sensitivity causes "tears [to rise]" at the schoolteacher’s expression of mentorship and recognition of Jude’s potential, yet he stoically manages to prevent them from flowing. It is painfully apparent that the only "romance" or joy that
Jude finds in life comes to him through his imagination and his scholarship, and he is already well used to struggling on while enduring great emotional pain. Hardy makes clear in this early passage that the young Jude has been quite fully disenfranchised by his poverty, and that the only fulfillment he will be able to achieve will be found separately in his intellectual life. Finally, Jude’s shy pleasure at the gift and his awkwardness and reticence in admitting. 227 verbally, that he regrets Phillotson’s departure reveal that even in the company of one other person, Jude is still socially ill at ease.
The final excerpt from the opening chapter that introduces the reader to the make-up of Jude’s character and situation shows Jude alone, drawing water from the village well:
There was a quiver in his lip now, and after opening the well-cover to begin lowering the bucket he paused and leant with his forehead and arms against the frame-work, his face wearing the fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the pricks of life somewhat before his time. (J 11)
In solitude, Jude is finally able to give expression to his pent- up emotion: his lip quivers and the eleven-year-old child lays his head and arms against the well in the posture of despair. In describing
Jude’s face as having the "fixity of a thoughtful child’s who has felt the pricks of life somewhat before his time," Hardy portrays Jude as set apart from the typical childhood experience of life, showing him symbolically as a solitary bearer of the heaviness and despair of the world.
The primary aspect of Jude Pawley’s character in the novel is therefore the thematic one. As the title conveys, he is the obscure, struggling man whose name suggests the suffering and despair of the Job of the Old Testament. Indeed, Jude is very much a composite of
Biblical and mythic types, as Sue declares so insightfully:
You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams, dear Jude. And a tragic Don Quixote. And sometimes you are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. 0 my poor friend and comrade, you’ll suffer yet! (J 163)
As Jude expresses in his ownwords, he is "an outsider to the end of [his] days!" (J 259), and as in all he does, Jude stands outside in mythic proportions. While the other major characters in the novel are 228 all "outsiders" at one point or another and while they all suffer, dream and aspire to better things, and with the possible exception of
Arabella, ultimately lose part of themselves, it is Jude who takes on these qualities as his own, becoming himself ultimately the Sufferer, the Dreamer, and Martyr of the novel.
These characteristics of suffering, dreaming, and self-imposed martyrdom are apparent in Jude’s personality throughout, but as the novel progresses they become stronger until the man who dies the lonely death in Christminster is less the mimetic representation of a tragic human being than the rejected, despairing symbol of the dark side of humanity. As a character, Jude remains forever just beyond the realistic portrayal of the late-Victorian working-class man, and remains a symbol for all that Hardy saw as painfully wrong in his society.
Jude’s character possesses none of the flatness usually associated with a type, however, for although his mimetic aspect is secondary, it is by no means undeveloped. Perry Meisel has called Jude
"Hardy’s most living character" (144), and indeed Jude functions quite realistically in the novel. Although he may react to his circumstances in an exaggerated and passionate manner, he is never unrealistic as a representation of humanity. The passion of Jude’s emotional make-up is an essential part of his character, for as Hardy’s narrator emphasizes:
"[he] was apt to get too enthusiastic over any subject in hand ..." (J
256). In fact, Jude’s flaw of excess enthusiasm is one of the very qualities which makes him so convincingly human. 229
Perhaps the most convincing aspect of Jude’s characterization, however, and the one which best contributes to the realism of his portrayal, is the profound duality of his inner nature. Throughout the novel. Hardy draws Jude’s overindulgence, his lust, his intellectual ism, and his deep spiritual searching most realistically, depicting both the physical and mental components equally convincingly.
Jude may be seen as the most "whole" of any of Hardy’s fictional characters in that both the light and the shadow sides of his personality are equally developed and sustained. He is convincingly human in that his attempts to reconcile these two aspects of his personality remain frustrated and incomplete.
Throughout Jude the Obscure, the thematic and mimetic aspects of
Jude Pawley’s character perform an intricate dance in which they are inseparable partners. The thematic aspect becomes visible and increasingly stronger as the novel progresses, yet the mimetic aspect is just as necessary to the creation of Jude’s character because of its role in emphasizing and supporting the thematic aspect. In Jude’s deathbed assumption of the role of Job, his thematic component clearly gains its ascendancy, but the realistic human qualities of his characterization remain sufficiently present, allowing Hardy to preserve the emotional meaning of Jude’s death without its becoming maudlin.
Hardy’s description of Jude as a young man provides a visual manifestation of his character’s essential attributes:
Jude would not have been described as a young man with a forcible, meditative, and earnest rather than handsome cast of countenance. He was of dark complexion, with dark harmonizing eyes, and he wore a closely trimmed black beard 230
of more advanced growth than is usual at his age; this, with his great mass of black curly hair, was some trouble to him in combing and washing out the stonedust that settled on it in the pursuit of his trade. ... The ultimate impulse to come [to Christminster] had had a curious origin — one more nearly related to the emotional side of him than to the intellectual, as is often the case with young men. (J 62-3)
Through this passage, it becomes clear that Jude Fawley possesses a determined, philosophical nature and that the emotional and sensual qualities of his personality are ascendent. Similarly, he is depicted as a physically strong, virile, and hard-working young man with an arresting, if not handsome, appearance.
A closer scrutiny of Jude’s attributes reveals the ways in which the duality of his inner nature parallels the intertwining of the thematic and mimetic aspects of his character. Jude’s "positive" attributes make him one of Hardy’s most admirable characters, while the concurrent presence of his "negative" attributes causes him to appear at times one of Hardy’s most dissolute. The juxtaposition of these positive and negative qualities make Jude the compelling, memorable character that he is, and form the primary contribution to the novel’s emphatic message about the human condition.
Among the positive attributes of Jude’s character is his essential kindness towards and affinity with the oppressed beings of the natural community. This attribute expresses itself time and again in the novel. Hardy says of Jude that "he was a boy who could not bear himself to hurt anything ... He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a fancy that it hurt them" (J15). In
"Individuation and Consummation in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure." Mary Ann 231
Kelly explains the significance of Jude’s usual sensitivity to the natural community:
Jude’s history of being left an orphan, from his earliest days, primes him to expect that loss, isolation, and solitude are his lot — and yet, his "lot" feeds a tremendous compensatory urge for coiranunity which he sublimates in his affinity with Nature and in his attraction to the role of caretaker and protector of wild birds, rabbits, and the domesticated pig. (52)
In keeping with Jude’s vision of himself as "caretaker and protector," and perhaps of even greater significance to the formation of his character are his profound romantic idealism and his accompanying sense of personal honor. These attributes are evidenced by Jude’s marriage to Arabella and his subsequent "factious belief in her" (J 48) in light of her dishonesty and trickery in arranging the marriage.
Along with Jude’s sensibility comes a well-developed and enquiring intellect that is reminiscent of Clym Yeobright’s, yet the reader suspects that a comparison of the two characters would reveal
Jude’s to be the more original mind, in spite of his greater disadvantages. It is, ultimately, the attributes of innate sensitivity and intelligence that combine to form Jude’s greatest quality: his unceasing quest for intellectual and spiritual fulfillment.
Jude’s intense spiritualism finds its converse in his strong, underlying sensuality, which fairly often erupts dangerously under the influence of his tendency to excess and overindulgence. While not
"negative" in themselves, these attributes highlight Jude’s humanity at the same time as they subvert his more lofty intentions. Taken to the extreme, his sensuality, excessiveness, and overindulgence combine to 232 create his more personally destructive attribute: his idolatry of
Christminster and Sue.
Similarly, Jude’s affinity with the natural world exerts a harmful influence on his character when taken to the excess. As Hardy cynically suggests, Jude’s excessive grief over the existence of pain in the natural world is a;
...weakness of character,as it may be called, [and] suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with him again." (J 15)
These contrasting attributes, the "positive" and the "negative" qualities of his personality, are in fact mere opposing expressions of the same inner desire which is Jude’s prevailing characteristic: his desire to be on the "inside." This lifelong attempt to belong somewhere, to someone, is itself but a mask for that deeper search for meaning and fulfillment in a seemingly indifferent world, and is the quality which embraces all other aspects of Jude’s personality and forms the basis of his being as well as the purpose of the novel.
Mary Ann Kelly cites Jude’s recognition of himself in the natural, with all the duality of his personality, as the basis for his perception of community. Continuing her discussion of Jude’s affinity with nature, she notes that:
In these specimens of Nature, Jude, not necessarily consciously, but certainly intuitively, recognizes himself; in his sympathy for suffering creatures, victims, outcasts, he gives what he longs to receive: sympathy, compassion, and a sense of community with others — or an other. Jude’s attempts at integration with something beyond himself — community — whether it be with the natural world, with the family represented by his aunt, or with the family always potentially represented in his marriages — repeatedly fail. (62) 233
These "attempts at integration with ... community" form the basis for the question with which Jude struggles throughout the novel, with which the four protagonists studied in this dissertation have struggled, and the struggle that I believe Hardy himself undertakes in the writing of his fiction. In discussing the changing role of communal landscapes in Hardy’s fiction, Andrew Enstice notes that
"until that last fast-moving series of vignettes by which less and
Clare seek to escape their own world, human society in partnership with
Nature has been the final arbiter of the way lives are lived" (154-5).
It is indeed as though in Jude. Hardy comes to the conclusion that neither the community nor Nature is sufficient to fulfill the yearning for belonging and self-actualization in the individual.
Like less, Jude moves from one community to another, yet it is not fear for his own reputation that ultimately precipitates his moves, but rather concern for those he feels to be in his protection, that is
Sue and the children. After his initial disillusionment with
Christminster, the community of choice, Jude seems to recognize that no community has the power either to benefit or to hurt him spiritually.
As a result, a sort of distaste for any and all communities arises in him and, like less, he turns to another individual for self- fulfillment.
When Sue leaves him in the end, and he finds himself bereft of succour from either community or companion, Jude returns again to
Christminster, as though to resurrect his former belief in that community. In spite of the attraction the city holds for him, Jude is once again unable to summon up the necessary fiction that would allow 234 him to live with Christminster and its ideals just as he was previously unable to live with Arabella. In short, Jude can no longer convince himself that "[h]is idea of her [ — or of Christminster — is] the thing of most consequence" (J 48). He is forced to look within for the fulfillment for which he has been searching. Because he is actually only at the beginning of self-study, Jude finds only despair and dies, unfortunately, before he can pass through that wasteland.
Jude possesses a greater self-awareness than any other of Hardy’s protagonists and is therefore much farther along the road to individuation than any of them. While his recognition of his inner self is superior to Clym’s, Grace’s, or Tess’s, Jude is clearly surpassed by Tess in the achievement of anything approaching self acceptance. Even more than hers, Jude’s death is a suicide, and he never feels even the fleeting self-vindication that she does.
From his childhood Jude Fawley has, understandably, been notably lacking in self-esteem. As a child he accepts without question his aunt’s lack of concern for his person; as a young newly married man, he accepts Arabella’s view of him as a "tender-hearted fool" (J 55); and he questions "[w]hat was he reserved for? He supposed he was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide ... [while] peaceful death abhorred him ... and would not take him" (J 59). Such thoughts reveal a deep-seated lack of self-worth, even self-loathing that betrays
Jude’s profound discomfort with the less "worthy" aspects of his personality.
Although his self-acceptance remains stultified, Jude does progress remarkably in self-knowledge. Hardy notes that: 235
Jude began to be impressed with the isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the sensation being that of one who walked but could not make himself seen or heard. (J 64-5)
Jude thus recognizes his personality to be an uncommon one, but it is not this recognition that most strikes the reader about this passage.
Rather, Jude’s view of himself as a "self-spectre" brings to mind a personality that is one of the "walking dead," possessing no interaction not only with others, but "dead" within itself. Such a profound feeling of isolation indicates that there are portions of
Jude’s inner character which he is hiding from his own consciousness and cannot accept.
That Jude is unable to accept — and therefore integrate — the darker aspects of his personality becomes abundantly clear in his exclamation to Sue:
So that I am near you, I am comparatively happy. It is more than this earthly wretch called Me deserves — you spirit, you disembodied creature, you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom — hardly flesh at all; so that when I put my arms round you I almost expect them to pass through you as through air! (J 195)
As these words express, Jude views himself as an "earthly wretch," too much contaminated with the lusts of the flesh to be a sufficiently spiritual individual. Mistakenly, he does not see that he does not need Sue to help him achieve wholeness: he possesses both necessary components within himself, the fleshly arid the spiritual, of which she possesses only the latter. Were Jude to accept his earthly, or
"darker" side and integrate it with his intellect and spiritual capacity, he would find belonging and wholeness of self apart from any community, any person — even from Sue. 235
Jude is unable to make the necessary mental leap, however, to look inside himself in this way. As philosophically oriented as he is,
Jude does not have Tess’s metaphysical aptitude; he is not able to
"feel [his] soul leave [his body]" as she is able to do in her contemplation of nature. Perry Meisel describes Jude’s view of the world as one that is based on concrete experience. He states:
The law of Jude’s perception — perhaps the reason he is Hardy’s fullest, most living character — is that consciousness grows with the accumulation of actual experience, that real awareness is the result only of real experience. (144-5) ... In his experience with Sue, Jude comes to know directly the effects of society upon what is natural in man; only then does he come to an intellectual awareness of the effects and the reality of civilization itself. (147)
What is significant about Meisel’s interpretation of Jude’s "law of perception" is that his knowledge comes from outside himself, and particularly from his friendship with Sue Bridehead. Whether the affinity of their thought in much of the novel stems from their true compatibility of spirit or from Jude’s adoring acceptance of Sue’s intellectual ideas remains in question. It is clear nevertheless that
Jude’s acquisition of knowledge of his world and of himself comes from deduction, rather than philosophical induction.
This limiting quality of Jude’s intellect is itself a product of his experience as a poor, lower-class worker, as Regenia Gagnier’s discussion of Henry Mayhew’s accounts of Victorian poverty suggests.
Gagnier states that:
Mayhew saw that the mind or personality that was traditionally so unique and individual — what the middle classes called "genius" —was dependent upon communication with others, was in fact the most shared aspect of 237
"individual" identity. Alternatively, the body, so common that everyone had one, under conditions of deprivation became the most private and alienating aspect of identity. (83)
Because of his deprivation, physically, socially, emotionally, and intellectually, Jude is perfunctorily prevented from realizing the potential of his "genius" and he therefore lacks the ability and the insight to realize that he can only realize his aspirations of
"belonging" to and understanding his world by looking within himself.
As a member of the impoverished and down-trodden working classes, Jude has never been encouraged to view his selfhood as anything but
"wretched;" he does not understand the potential that lies within himself.
Targeting the character flaw which makes the most significant contribution to Jude’s tragedy is a complex process. Various critics suggest viable and worthwhile qualities in Jude’s personality to fulfill this function. For Andrew Enstice, Jude’s greatest personal mistake is self-delusion:
The self-delusion of Jude is all too apparent in the horridly prosaic necessity of going to the staircase to catch a glimpse of windows and pinnacles, ,,, Jude the dreamer, the seeker after wisdom, subverts the skills and hopes of Jude the artisan, in the hopeless search for man- made answers to the riddle of life, (161) ,,, for Jude, the exception who cannot accept his place in this rich tapestry, there must be some personal justification of existence, ,,. To us, with foreknowledge, the example of Clym’s self-destructive dreams is all too clear; but Jude is, once more, blind to all but the ideal, (163)
Enstice’s discussion of Jude’s self-delusion is insightful and helps illuminate the reasons for his tragic end in the novel, yet this self- delusion is not as pervasive as Clym’s. Although Jude clearly prefers and seeks after the ideal, he is not blind to the less perfect aspects 238 of life, as his late cynicism so bitterly attests. Self-delusion certainly helps precipitate Jude’s tragedy, but it is not its only, or even its prime, cause.
Mary Ann Kelly notes a second flaw in Jude’s personality which contributes, in a secondary role, to Jude’s tragedy. Citing his accurate view of himself as an outsider, she states that:
Yet Jude’s fate, above all, is to feel obscure, isolated, and rejected in the corporeal world; and the obsessive desperation of his psychological need to belong (which is correct in Nature, according to Schopenhauer), coupled with repeated repudiation, becomes his tragic flaw. (52)
Jude’s desire to belong is indeed an obsession with him, particularly in relation to Sue, but it is by no means unwarranted. An impoverished, unwanted orphan, Jude more than "feels obscure, isolated and rejected"; he is. these things. To change this; i.e., to "belong", is socially as well as naturally viable, and for Jude to reject this basic need would by no means prevent his tragedy.
Perhaps closer to the mark is Perry Meisel’s definition of Jude’s tragic flaw, his "self-consciousness" (150). Indeed, Jude possesses a heightened appreciation for his obscurity and his isolation, and is remarkably aware of the simultaneous existence of the opposing qualities of his personality. He focuses particularly on his less admirable traits, all too easily convincing himself that he truly is
"at bottom a vicious character, of whom it [is] hopeless to expect anything" (J 97). This inability to either respect or trust himself as a worthwhile individual prevents Jude from integrating the opposing sides of his personality on his own, apart from attempting to do so through union with Sue. This trait, I believe, constitutes the 239
"fatal flaw" which goes farther than any other in bringing to his ultimate death and despair. In the end, it is Jude’s failure to accept his inner self and work towards individuation that makes his separation from community so intolerable and thus creates his tragedy.
In spite of his titular appellation as "obscure," the pronounced duality of his nature causes Jude Fawley to stand clearly as Hardy’s most complex character. More than any other protagonist whose speech has been scrutinized thus far, the various verbal expressions of Jude’s character reveal the extent of this schism in his personality.
Jude’s intellectual, political voice belies the personality he strives so desperately to foster and which he presents as his public persona in the novel. A telling example of this speech occurs in one of Jude’s Christminster expostulations. Addressing an assembly of citizens watching the procession of the University Dons, Jude proclaims his public version of his life story:
"However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one; and my impulses — affections — vices perhaps they should be called — were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who should be as cold blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a really good chance of being one of his country’s worthies. You may ridicule me — I am quite willing that you should — I am a fit subject no doubt. But I think if you knew what I have gone through these last few years you would rather pity me. And if they knew — he nodded towards the college at which the Dons were severally arriving — "it is just possible they would do the same." (J 257)
Jude’s well-spoken words convey that he possesses an innate intelligence, has engaged in serious scholarship, and is well-versed in rhetoric. As such, his speech reveals him to be one intellectually with the society of the University to which he aspires. Through the 240 assurance of this voice, however, peeps that self-castigation from which he can never quite free himself, as he notes that he is indeed a
"fit subject" for ridicule. Overlying Jude’s speech is the voice of
Hardy’s political views speaking through his character, condemning the social, economic, and educational ills of his society. In sum, Jude’s words to the gathering represent his final expression of his intellectual potential and quest, his own proclamation of his epitaph.
An earlier conversation with Sue reveals the complexity of the emotional side to Jude’s character. In this terse interchange Sue puzzles over her liking for a particular hymn Jude has beenplaying.
After playing it herself, she remarks:
"It is odd," she said, in a voice quite changed, "that I should care about that air; because —"
"Because what?"
"I am not that sort — quite."
"Not easily moved?"
"I didn’t quite mean that."
"0 but you are of that sort, for you are just like me at heart !"
"But not at head."
She played on, and suddenly turned round; and by an unpremeditated instinct each clasped the other’s hand again.
She uttered a forced little laugh as she relinquished his quickly. "How funny!" she said. "I wonder what we both did that for?"
"I suppose because we are both alike, as I said before."
"Not in our thoughts! Perhaps a little in our feelings." 241
"And they rule thoughts ... Isn’t it enough to make one blaspheme that the composer of that hymn is one of the most common-place men I have ever met!"
"What — you know him?"
"I went to see him."
"0 you goose — to do just what I should have done! Why did you?"
"Because we are not alike," he said drily.
While few words are spoken during this conversation, much is revealed about Jude’s inner character and his relationship with Sue.
Immediately notable is Jude’s perceptiveness and insight into other’s characters, in this case Sue. Yet at the same time, his perceptiveness is suspect because of his obvious adoration of Sue. So much does he idealize her personality that his intense desire to find wholeness in union with Sue compels Jude to find the two of them spiritually identical. It is clear from this conversation that Jude possesses an unusual emotional depth and that he relies ultimately on his emotions as his guide. Finally, the dry wit of his last sentence conveys both his gentle humour and his quick wit.
This second example of Jude’s speech and its emphasis on the strong emotional component of his personality reveal to the reader
Jude’s "inner face," the gentler, more introspective side of his make up). In his sensitivity and emotional self-sacrifice Jude actually displays more traditionally "feminine" characteristics than Sue, and it is during the expression of this portion of his personality that Jude seems the most content and the most alive. A comparison of the tone of the two representations of Jude’s speech emphasizes the disconnection that exists between the inner and outer components of Jude’s 242 personality, for the two voices seem to come from two distinct persons.
Jude’s inability to reconcile and thus integrate these two voices, these two aspects in his inner self, has haunted him since childhood.
In the opening chapters of the novel. Hardy writes:
... Jude had his outer being for some long tideless time. But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small. (J 20) ... He had become entirely lost to his bodily situation during this mental leap, and only got back to it by a rough recalling. (J 21) ... Jude continued his walk homeward alone, pondering so deeply that he forgot to feel timid. He suddenly grew older. It had been the yearning of his heart to find something to anchor on, to cling to — for some place which he could call admirable. (J 22-3)
Even as a young child, it is evident that Jude’s inner life is of much larger dimensions and is more fully developed than the outer personality he presents to the world. And even as a child, he is unable to fuse these two components of self, moving from one to the other joltingly.
Throughout the novel, Hardy’s representation of Jude Fawley is a representation of a personality in turmoil. Jude never finds the
"admirable anchor in his heart" that he so desires. In their discussion of the human psyche, Hall and Nordby write:
A person who does not know his unconscious self projects the repressed elements of his unconscious on others. He accuses them of his own unrecognized faults, thus criticizing and condemning them, while all the while he is really projecting an unconscious part of himself. [Jung] concluded that ..."the self is our life’s goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality ..." vol. 7, p. 238. (53)
This notion of projection illuminates some of Jude’s idealization of Sue. To a large extent, he projects elements from his own unconscious onto Sue, not condemning them in the way that Hall and
Nordby suggest, but rather admiring them in spite of the way that his 243 self-frustrating ego prevents him from recognizing and applauding them in himself. For what he admires most in Sue — her independence of thought and her bright intellect — are qualities that are even more prominent in his own personality.
Jude sees in Sue the realization of all that is best in himself, as he expresses to her so eloquently:
All that’s best and noblest in me loves you, and your freedom from everything th a t’s gross has elevated me, and enabled me to do what I should never have dreamt myself capable of, or any man, a year or two ago. (J 210)
Because he does not have sufficient self-assurance to accept that he can himself express his "best and noblest" qualities without Sue’s help, Jude verges upon the fanatic in his quest to achieve union with
Sue.
There are indeed certain aspects of Jude’s and Sue’s characters that complement each other in an almost uncanny fashion. In one sense, th is complementary relationship reflects the widespread Victorian view of a world lacking in shared values (community) wherein romantic love has become the "last, best hope" as expressed, for instance, in
Arnold’s "Dover Beach". Viewed more cynically, both Jude and Sue can be seen as using the other in a co-dependency relationship that enhances their best qualities and tempers their poorer ones. Seen as
Hardy would like the reader to perceive them, Jude and Sue do possess an "extraordinary sympathy or sim ilarity" and "seem to be one person split in two" (J 183). Hardy is quite emphatic on this point, ensuring that the reader is aware of the "complete mutual understanding, in which every glance and movement [is] as effectual as speech for 244 conveying intelligence between them, [making] them almost the two parts of a single whole" (J 231).
Just as clearly. Hardy ensures that the reader knows that something goes very wrong, and that a complete and permanent union between these two halves never takes place. If Jude and Sue do represent the conscious and unconscious portions of one individual
(Jude), their separation with all its harsh irrevocability at the novel’s end would seem to represent the psychic collapse of each. By extension, th eir eventual disunion may be seen as Hardy’s despair over the ultimate possibility of any type of individuation for his characters, or perhaps even for himself. Jude’s words of dismay over
Sue’s change and growing conservatism, "My good heavens — how we are changing places!" (J 274) imply a psychic split that appears irreparable.
In Hardy’s final novel, the protagonist is no longer seen as attempting to return to and reassimilate into the culture of a natal community. Jude Fawley, having been orphaned and rejected, seems to understand from the beginning that the community of his birth no more wants him than he wants to be a part of it. Nevertheless, he feels an intense yearning to fill the void created by the absence of community -
- the mutual concern and support of several individuals engaged in the mutual undertaking of survival — and he sets out to find a community to which he feels suited and which he believes will accept him in return. Whereas Jude has judged his own suitability to this desired community quite rightly, his naivete makes him insufficiently aware of 245 the social, cultural, and class differences which will make the members of that community shun him as an outcast.
As a result, the individual emerges as Hardy’s dominant concern in the novel, with the notion of community falling more and more into a secondary position. Andrew Enstice sheds an interesting light on this occurrence, noting that:
Jude is the central figure of the novel, the only one we are permitted to communicate with through thought. Even Sue is no more than a figure seen through Jude’s life. And his life is no more than a process of searching. One after another, he builds his dreams; one after another he seems to grasp them, only to see them turn to clay and crumble in his arms. (178)
With Jude so clearly the focal point of the novel, the reader is le f t in no doubt as to which finally takes precedence in Hardy’s fictional scheme —the community or the individual. Whereas i t is evident that Jude’s conceptions of community are as tenuous as dreams and crumble like dry plaster constructions, i t is less obvious whether
Hardy believes that a strong sense of selfhood can replace the need formerly fille d by the community. Because Jude’s own attempt at individuation is so tragically incomplete, it is doubtful that Hardy views the future for the individual as any less tenuous than the dream- castle he finds the community to be.
In his book. The Realistic Imagination. English Fiction from
Frankenstein to Ladv Chatter!ev. George Levine presents an interesting view of the function of character in Hardy’s and other 19th-century
British writers’ fiction. He posits that:
But the ideal required that plot exist only in organic relation to character, so that character becomes fate: the motto out of Novalis is Hardy’s and George E liot’s. It implies, once again, a meaningful universe, although not 246
now in such s tric t moralist terms as we have seen in Whately. Rather, characters must be seen not so much to get what they deserve, as to create or place themselves in the conditions that correspond to their natures. Realist plotting begins to break down the simple distinction between self and other at the same time as it thematically asserts, in the form of enchantment, the necessity to understand the difference between self and other. (147)
Jude is an appropriate example of how "character becomes fate" in that his fatalism and depressive personality help to bring about his own self-victimization. In his suicide, therefore, Jude ensures that he will fulfill his thematic and titular function as the isolated man who despairs and dies in obscurity. This self-martyrdom occurs largely because Jude is never able to realize a sufficient self-image to distinguish the "difference between self and other" necessary to successful individuation.
In psychological terms, Jude’s tragedy comes about not only because of his insufficient ability to determine the boundaries between self and other, but also because he is unable to reconcile the opposing aspects within himself. Indeed, some psychological theorists posit that:
Achieving a state of self-realization depends largely upon the cooperation of the ego; for if the ego ignores messages from the self archetype and appreciation and understanding of the self would be impossible. Everything must become conscious in order to have the effect of individuating the personality. (Hall 52)
Jude’s ego quite effectively ignores his inner self by continually discounting and castigating its potential, validity, and worth. He is never able to make conscious, and therefore understand, the significance of the role Sue plays in his life or while his need of her for his own self-definition is so great, nor is he able to accept the 247 more earthy side of his personality. This last is particularly unfortunate because it is the qualities of this earthy aspect that make
Jude so re a listic and so likeable as a character. The death of both sides of his personality through his lonely suicide is as much the reader’s loss as his own.
The reader optimistic — or even curious — about the possibility of social and psychic evolution may wish that Hardy had written yet another novel suggesting that the individual may achieve the sure sense of self that results in personal autonomy. Through the process of his fictional exploration of the relationship between community and self, however. Hardy clearly found himself to be increasingly disillusioned as to the viability of this notion.
Never able to shake his essential pessimism and fatalism. Hardy may have fallen victim to a similar "conjuncture" that so tragically affected the characters in his novels. For if fate does exist as a figure with arm outstretched, waiting to crush human endeavors*, such a condition would ultimately prevent any realization of the movement towards automony of self that Hardy explores in Tess and Jude. As
Perry Meisel posits:
Once his early faith had been destroyed by a conversion to rationalism as a young man. Hardy released a stream of impulses in his novels that led him, with an inner logic, to the limits of his ability — perhaps even of his sanity — in Jude the Obscure. (166)
*Hardy expressed and espoused this view, which he said was "Mother’s view and mine." The operations of coincidence in many of his novels as well as the tone of his poetry can be fittingly ascribed to such a symbolic figure. 248
Hardy’s decision to end his career as a novelist may, in fact, have had much less to do with the viciousness of public criticism of
Jude or with the added strain that novel’s publication placed on his already fragile marriage. Rather he may have avoided writing another novel because he saw too clearly where his treatment of the community/self dichotomy of his fiction was invariably leading. To write this novel might very well have led him too close to his fictional counterpart as expressed the character of Jude, so that he too lived his final years with the inexorable weight of despair. 249 WORKS CITED
Andrew Enstice. Thomas Hardv: Landscapes of the Mind. London: MacMillan Ltd., 1979.
Regenia Gagnier. Subjectivities. A History of Self-Representation in Britain. 1832-1920. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Calvin S. Hall and Vernon J. Nordby. A Primer of Junoian Psychology. New York: New American Library, 1973.
Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure. Norman Page, ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978.
Mary Ann Kelly. "Individuation and Consummation in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. The Victorian Newsletter. 82 (1992), 62-4.
George Levine. The Realistic Imagination. English Fiction from Frankenstein to Ladv Chatterlev. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.
Perry Meisel. Thomas Hardv: The Return of the Repressed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1972. CONCLUSION
Thomas Hardy’s treatment of the representation of community and self-hood in 19th-century English culture embraces both the Romantic and the Victorian notions of his century. In his work. Hardy shows himself clearly an heir of the Romantic focus on the formation of the self, the emphasis on landscape, and the preoccupation with the
"infinite longing" of the individual. Hardy’s antecedents in the notions of the Romantic poets are striking. In particular, Coleridge,
Shelley, and Byron, poets credited with the introduction of the theme of exile to the Victorians (Abrams 13) influence Hardy’s fiction.
Indeed, Hardy’s treatment of this "theme of exile, of the disinherited mind that cannot find a spiritual home in its native land and society, or anywhere in the modern world" (Abrams 13) becomes a central theme of his major novels.
Like many of his fellow Victorians, Hardy brings to his work the anxiety and sense of loss so charactertistic of his age. The Victorian preoccupation with time and with the deleterious affects of technology on the individual psyche is also directly represented in his fiction.
These notions of displacement and psychic strain result in a turning inward and an ultimate rejection of the belief that an adequate community does, or even can, exist wherein the self can achieve individuation.
250 251
Yet Hardy is unable to relinquish the Victorian hops that the individual may indeed attain autonomy and the synchronous ab ility to function as a viable, fully-participatory member of the community. The paradox of this goal, and the inevitable tension it necessarily exerts on the individual form the central theme that is played out in the four novels that are the focus of this dissertation.
These novels. The Return of the Native. The Woodlanders. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. and Jude the Obscure, are representative of Hardy’s view of community over a period spanning nearly twenty years, thus revealing not only the changes that he saw occurring in the rural communities of his era, but also the individual’s evolving perceptions of community as the century came to a close. Throughout his lifetim e as both a native participant and a keen observer of rural English culture. Hardy saw the community of his birth irrevocably changed by the cultural "advances" brought about by the industrial revolution and the growing urbanization of 19th-century British society. The resulting fragmentation of the community and the increasing lack of cohesion among its members signal the death of Hardy’s idealized concept of community.
In The Return of the Native. Hardy presents a vision of community that, in spite of the darkness of the unknown lurking just beneath the surface in the character of Egdon Heath, is very much a port of refuge for the world-weary protagonist. Egdon is a community whose customs are vibrantly and colorfully alive, and it exists in happy seclusion from the rest of the world. Sufficient unto itself, its members participate in a society of mutual concern and support. As their 252 social gatherings show, all classes remain interconnected in this early view of community.
The second novel in this sequence. The Woodlanders. shows a community that is still separate from the rest of British society, but its character has been increasingly tainted by, as Casagrande would say, "outsiders." Its society is effectively controlled and influenced by the modern, urban culture of these non-native inhabitants, with the result that social contact among the natives has been sharply curtailed and the presence of folk-culture has been obscured.
In this community of L ittle Hintock, nature its e lf has taken on an increasingly dark and menacing role, far surpassing the subtle influence of Egdon Heath. Here, the woods in all th eir dark reflection of the malevolence of nature, surround and threaten to choke the spirit of the community. As a result, the community to which Hardy’s protagonist returns is no longer a haven, but a place in which she feels herself a threatened stranger. She had grown away from its ways, and the natural forces of the community are determined, as it were, to punish her. Whereas Clym is able forge a partial reassimilation into his natal community, Grace is not and she leaves, finally, once more.
By the third novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Hardy has recognized and accepted the fragmentation of the community as he has known it, but he nevertheless strives to recreate it time and again throughout the novel. When Tess leaves Marlott of her own accord, this time for Talbothays, she embarks on a search for the simple, earthy community that is Hardy’s ideal. Unfortunately, her vision of this community — as Hardy’s — slips through her hands, with the result 253 that her subsequent experiences of community follow a deteriorating path that leads her to the urban construct of Sandringham and finally to her death.
Whereas the shipment of the milk to London helps ensure the economic viability of the community, it is nonetheless significant in
Tess that the rich milk of the rural community as represented by
Talbothays is taken by rail to the great urban centers of England, rather than used to sustain the rural inhabitants who help in its production. Using the dairy product in this symbolic manner. Hardy conveys his awareness that the ideal of the rural community is slowly dying, its lifeblood instead turning to and being drained by a distant urban culture.
By the time Hardy wrote Jude the Obscure, fittingly his final novel, the rich, rural community that had been his ideal is surely dead, replaced only by the shell of such clusterings as Marygreen,
Shaston, and Stoke-Barehills. In this novel, the protagonist, Jude, finds no support or sustenance whatsoever in the rural culture, and indeed he is the "native" of no community, rural or urban. The vision of the ideal community has been replaced for Jude, as it once was for
Hardy, by the mirage of the community of knowledge, i.e .,
Christminster.
Unfortunately for Jude, and for Hardy, this community proves as insubstantial and hollow as the final communities of Tess’s experience or the rural communities Jude encounters. What is le ft, therefore, is the absence of communal relationship among individuals seen so shockingly in the stark alienation of Jude. 254
With this slow, sure demise of the community represented through the progression of the four novels, the protagonists cease to find a home or a sense of self-identity within either the community of birth or the community of choice. They are increasingly left with themselves alone, and as a result, the growing self-consciousness of Hardy’s protagonists becomes his focus, whereas i t once had been the community.
As Hardy’s view of the community changes, so too does his perception and portrayal of the individual. In The Return of the
Native. Clym Yeobright is portrayed as a person who believes himself to be an integral part of the community. As such, Clym is an individual whose consciousness cannot survive apart from Egdon Heath.
Grace Melbury of The Woodlanders is depicted as having lo st her essential self by her experience and education outside of Little
Hintock. It is as though she has been "spoiled" by contact by an urban culture which is becoming so increasingly powerful that its influence can no longer be wiped out, as it is in the case of Clym.
In Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Tess Durbeyfield feels herself so irrevocably soiled by the touch of the urban that she finally separates herself psychically from the rural community at the same time as she continues as an inhabitant. It is only after her courageous act of killing the representation of the pollutant that she begins to see and accept herself as an individual who can exist without relying on the collective for self-affirmation.
By the time Hardy creates his final protagonist, Jude Fawley has become the focus, with the community functioning largely as the backdrop for Jude’s individualism. From childhood, Jude quickly learns 255 that self-actualization does not come from association with a native community, and after he learns that even a chosen community does not support selfhood, he — like Tess — turns to another individual to achieve personal wholeness. Although he comes farther than she in the realization that individual identity can only be achieved within, he ultimately falls short of the true integration of the components of his personality that would allow him to stand fully as an individual.
It becomes increasing evident in Hardy’s progressive representation of the individual consciousness that what his characters are actually in search of is not community membership, but self- realization. Much less than a century later, Carl Gustav Jung theorizes that this quest for "consummate selfhood is archetypal inborn." His theory further posits that:
No one can avoid the powerful influences of this unity archetype, although what course its expression may take and how successful one may be in realizing the aim varies from person to person. (Hall 82)
Seen through this lens, it becomes clear that the characterization of Hardy’s protagonists represents not their desire for participation in the collective of community, but rather the need for self-understanding and a resultant creation of a distinct identity or self. As representations of an actual need or experience, Clym,
Grace, Tess, and Jude are manifestations of the alienation and se lf questioning experienced by their creator as he continually reacted to the constantly erupting changes of his culture.
From Clym, to Grace, to Tess, and ending with Jude, the alienation of the protagonists increases inexorably. As these individuals become more and more the focal points of the novels, their 256 realization of themselves as identities separate from the community becomes increasingly acute. With the increase of their perception of self-hood comes an incremental decrease in their participation in community. Not surprisingly, perhaps, their personal happiness and ability to function within the community decreases as well.
The twentieth-century sociologist Donald A. Hansen has noted that
"alienation ... somehow ... [points] to the inability to feel one’s self a ’whole person’ in the modern world (9)" and this is very much the plight of Hardy’s protagonists. The world in which they live is becoming increasingly modern and, like Hardy, they have no conception of how to realize themselves in this new "community" called modern culture. As a resu lt, their psyches become at least temporarily s p lit, becoming as essentially fragmented as the rural communities that surround them. This, too, is a "modern" phenomenon, described by John
Vernon in The Garden and the Mao as a
... kind of process, the movement from wholeness to sp littin g , [which] is a universal one in the act of being human. Erich Neumann sees in i t the birth of the ego and the origin of human consciousness. (4)
With this growing self-consciousness of his characters. Hardy seems to be asking the very question that David Daiches poses in The
Novel and the Modern World: "Are human relations really possible, or is every individual condemned ultimately to remain in the prison of his own incorrigibly private consciousness?" (Meisel 138). The only characters who truly seem to enjoy any kind of viable relationship with another human being are Tess and Jude, and their experiences in this area are notable short-lived and tragic. Tess is separated from Angel by her conviction and execution whereas Jude and Sue bring about the 257 death of their own relationship by allowing society to come between them.
In Jude’s stark and lonely death, Hardy seems to indeed signal the demise of his hopes for "human relations." A look at the four protagonists of whom Jude is the final representative reveals that they all end without viable relationship to any other. Their recognition of their fundamental isolation causes Clym and Grace to retre a t into self- denial and Tess and Jude to bring about th eir own physical deaths.
Peter J. Casagrande succinctly presents his view of the implications of this profound alienation for Hardy and his era. His book, Unitv in Hardv’s Novels, suggests that:
.. . Hardy’s moods and personality led him to view the world as would a man distressed by the process of irremediable decay he saw inexorably at work there, and that his style - - in the broad sense of the word — is essentially repetitive, taking the form of a series of fictional variations on a single theme, the theme of regeneration. The seminal experience of leaving home and family and returning to them is explored and re-explored through the novels of return at the same time that a cognate story, the story of moral restoration, is explored and re-explored in the novels of restoration. (12)
It is singular that Hardy perceived the changes overtaking his society as "decay" and attempted to counter them by using the themes of
"regeneration" and "restoration" in his fiction. This very act, I believe, attests both to the force of the changes overtaking his society and to his sensitivity and insight as an observer and a writer.
This perceptiveness has allowed Hardy to be described appropriately as
"a figure bridging the old public world and the modern inner world"
(Meisel 137). 258
The treatment of community and selfhood in these four major novels has significant implications for Hardy’s status as an historian of the sociologic and psychologic aspects of his era and clearly a ttests to his prominence in these field s. Maurice Stein writes in The
Eclipse of Community that:
The interplay of literary and sociological techniques for community exploration is quite intimate. Good novelists always show the implications of the events portrayed on the growth of their characters just as do good sociological life histories. (300)
Hardy shows that he is well-suited for combining "literary and sociological techniques for community [and individual] exploration" ju st as his reaction to the harsh reception of Jude the Obscure reveals the extent to which he undertook this exploration personally. His work atte sts to Donald Hansen’s assertion that "communal involvement not only unites men and women to each other, [but] also divides and alienates" (51), for Hardy himself felt this alienation all the more keenly as he presented his observations through his fiction. That
Hardy touched a raw nerve in his society’s sensibility is clear and, indeed, the viciousness of the public outcry against Hardy’s final representation of community and selfhood in Jude strongly supports the view that his insights into 19th-century culture were accurate.
Through his representation of the psychological aspect of the individual in his novels, and personally through his own act of writing, Thomas Hardy indeed embodies the notion that:
Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation 259
of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination. (Hall 130)
The novels scrutinized in this dissertation show the extent to which Hardy came to believe in the worth of the individual, within, in struggle with, and apart from the community. In their various attempts to achieve community membership and individuation, Hardy’s protagonists do perform "[acts] of high courage," all with great personal loss. The
Return of the Native exemplifies the individual courageous decision to leave a lucrative urban life and return to the obscure community of his birth. Clym Yeobright’s is a valiant attempt to live in a chosen community. In the face of professional disappointment and personal pain, he becomes a man robbed of emotional substance and accurate self vision, yet he manages to continue within the framework of the community he has chosen.
In The Woodlanders. Hardy’s protagonist is able to grow out of the romantic view of the community represented by Clym. Grace Melbury possesses the insight to recognize the insidiousness of an ingrown community. This experience in the Hintock wood proves so terrifying for her that in the end she leaves the community altogether and reverts to sustaining the identity created for her by her father and husband.
Nevertheless Grace’s perception about the community represents a momentous step in the progression of Hardy’s novels in that she has possessed sufficient courage to recognize, however briefly, the flaw inherent in the community.
The third novel in the sequence, Tess of the d’Urbervilles extends the notion of community beyond the confines of the native 260 locale. Finding her sense of self continually at odds with the series of communities she encounters, Tess Durbeyfield represents Hardy’s first attempts at constructing a character is able to begin separating self from community. Although Tess spends much of her life acquiescing to some degree to the identities imposed on her by the various communities in which she lives, she ventures at the end towards an understanding of self that lies beyond temporal society.
Jude the Obscure represents the culmination of Hardy’s novelistic examination of the tension between the individual and the collective.
Of all the protagonists represented, Jude Fawley shows the greatest courage in his attempts to achieve an understanding of community and selfhood. Although he is rejected by the community of choice, this time an academic rather than a natal community, Jude persists in the intellectual and scholarly identity he has formed for himself. His lonely suicide at the novel’s end is less an abandonnent of hope than an expression of "self-determination." Rather than live in a community that imposes on him an identity he finds repugnant, i.e. a purely sensual identity divorced from intellect, Jude chooses to voice a "no" even stronger than Tess Durbeyfield’s.
Faced himself by the sweeping changes of 19th-Century culture that threatened the individual’s concept of self, Thomas Hardy voices an equally strong and prophetic "no" against the societal forces that would subsume the individual by the collective. His novels and their progressive view of the individual’s evolving sense of self affirm the continuing success of humanity’s "adaptation to . . . existence" (Hall
130). 261
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