Book: Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

I would feel like a doofus spending too much time writing a review of a classic work of literature, about which scholars have composed dissertations for over a century, but I loved this book too much not to shamelessly use this forum to help me digest it. 

I will underscore with a cursory mention a few oft-noted aspects of the novel:  the elegance and philosophical sagacity with which Hardy writes; the pointed critique he offers of Victorian social, especially sexual, mores; the empathy and depth with which he portrays his female protagonist.  I noted these same components in the first novel of Hardy's that I read, Jude the Obscure (I seem to be working my way backward through his body of work). 

Something I hadn't initially noted in Jude - something I only just realized retrospectively in light of Tess - is the care and detail Hardy puts into describing the quotidian of 19th-century English vocations.  In Jude, it is Jude Fawley's occupation as a mason.  In Tess, our protagonist holds a number of rural and agricultural jobs that Hardy depicts with even greater relative attention.  Tess works, for example, tending birds, as a dairy maid, and at the much heavier tasks involved in turnip-growing and processing grain.  The action of the novel primarily occurs during these out-of-doors occupations and, indeed, Tess' relationship with nature and "the elements" comprises a major component of her personality for Hardy.  In this way, though an individuated character of depth, Tess serves also as a symbol for traditional rural life in England at the cusp of full industrialization.  Throughout the novel, Hardy depicts this tension between traditional country life and steady modernization,  which saw an inversion of the old relationship between human and machine.  Previously, machines were tools used by humans according to human natural rhythms and requirements, whereas with industrialization, humans became tools to serve a machine's requirements according to its rhythms.

In one scene, Tess must help feed a threshing machine.  Hardy writes:

"The old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past days when they had been accustomed to thresh with flails on the oaken barn-floor; when everything, even to winnowing, was effected by hand-labour, which, to their thinking, though slow, produced better results.  Those, too, on the corn-rick talked a little; but the perspiring ones at the machine, including Tess, could not lighten their duties by the exchange of many words...for Tess there was no respite; for as the drum never stopped, the man who fed it could not stop, and she, who had to supply the man with untied sheaves, could not stop either..."  (345-5)*

Just as Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a critique of repressive Victorian social codes and a sympathetic plea for the "fallen" woman, so, too, it is a lament for the passing of a way of life that was tied to nature and worked with its cycles and tendencies rather than against them.  Indeed, Hardy links the natural world to a freer attitude toward sex.  Tess, in having sex without being married, "had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly." (101)  It is the social law that is out of accord with nature, not Tess.

Whether discussing sexual mores or agricultural practices, Hardy mourns for the unnecessary discord humans create between themselves and nature.  In doing so, he keenly observes the web in which we have caught ourselves, the strands of which are comprised of our own dual aspect - as children of nature and as would-be masters of it. 

*In the 1964 Signet Classic paperback version.

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