Upon reading the first few pages of Tess of the D'Urbervilles I really had no idea what to expect other than what the back of the book had already declared:
There's a family called the Derbeyfields who might be related to the wealthy D'Urbervilles and so they send Tess to maybe claim a bit of the fortunes. Her manipulative "cousin" does some shocking act of betrayal that makes Tess an outcast upon returning home. The parson's son, Angel Clare, comes along and is probably the man she ends up with in the end. Manipulations, twisted morality, and other frustrations ensue.
I have to say I have been a little apprehensive to delve too deeply into this one. There's a bit of a Wuthering Heights vibe from the get go with the manipulative cousin and "shocking act of betrayal". I swear I'm still suffering some PTSD after that damnable novel.
Thomas Hardy starts out the novel in one of the best ways that I can imagine. Tess' father is walking down the lane when the local minister calls out a greeting to him by the name "Sir John". Confused John asks why. The minister tells him it's because of something he'd read, that John Durbeyfield's last name is a corruption of an older family name "D'Urberville" which was once a noble name in those parts. The minister bids "Sir John" good evening and walks off. From there the tale becomes further embroidered by "Sir John" into how rich the family was, how noble, how many holdings they had, and a knightly shield that they once carried, and all this he tells down at the local pub in a drunken game of "Telephone". The legend grows so great in his telling of it that he and his wife send Tess to the "D'Urbervilles" to claim kin and perhaps gain some amount of fortune...BUT...that particular clan of D'Urbervilles is a false clan given that the man, a financier or merchant, trying to escape debts and/or trouble changed his christened named to D'Urberville which just happened to be an ancient he discovered in some old and musty books. It suited his purpose and he set himself down in peace sure he'd never have trouble come knocking. Fast forward a few years and there is Tess knocking on their door gaining the unfortunate attention of one Alec D'Urberville.
Now, it is important for me to relate that I really appreciate Hardy's style. There are moments where the sentences and imagery is a bit overwrought, but that aside the man has a very good eye for someone who wasn't born in the era of moving pictures. We go from the evening meeting with the minister to the pub, with a pass by Tess with other women in white dresses dancing for some peculiar village reason where she meets and dances with the man I'm fairly certain she ends up with, and then back to home where Mrs. Derbyfield is tending to a house full of her own urchins. It is so well paced and timed I could practically see the film in my head with scene handoffs like that.
When we first meet Alec the reader almost instantly, on "sight", by which I mean his physical description, we know him for exactly who he is. After Tess leaves him the first time Hardy let's the "camera" that has been exclusively by Tess' side hang back to look over Alec's shoulder as he hints to no one in particular his terrible intentions. The next few chapters in the phase highlights Tess' innocence and Alec's grooming of her in an incredibly cinematic manner, pulling in focus on this, giving a landscape there. Even Alec's return at night in the wood where he left Tess is fraught with cinematic cues that naturally blossom within the modern mind. Out of all the books I've read in the 100BYSRBYD series so far none of them have been so ready for filming as this one.
Today I finished Phase One and, naturally, I came to the part that I had been dreading. At least I assume what happened in my head actually happened. I mean it was written in the later half of the 1800s and so he couldn't just come out and say that Alec raped Tess.
My natural outrage came out at the act. Hardy wrote Alec so well in his monstrous regard that I was somewhat shocked that Alec's desires and reasons for doing it are still used to this day. "She wanted it." "She owed me." "She shouldn't have dressed or acted like that." His grooming of her all along the way is still typical in this modern age and that was half of the shock for me. "We still haven't learned. There were jerks like that back then. So little has changed." was the first series of thoughts.
Fortunately what has changed is our level of compassion as individuals.
You can't look up information on this novel without coming across the fact that it garnered such outrage and such scandal not because Tess was raped. Rather the scandalous nature of the novel was in suggesting that after the rape act Tess was still a "pure woman". These days we can acknowledge the fact that it is not the victim's fault. Back then there was no such consideration at all. The man would get away with it, might be frowned at, but the victim would be marred for life. It's still something I'm not sure I can wrap my mind around. The idea that she is somehow to be punished for it, as if she "allowed" it to happen, is immediately repugnant to any modern thinking human being.
It will certainly be difficult to dig into the following chapters and "phases" while attempting to understand their viewpoint. It's easy for us to point and go "bloody idiots" to that society, but we often forget that they had actually reasons for behaving the way they did and thinking the way they did. These reasons made sense to them or they wouldn't have ascribed to them. Someday our values will be mocked by future generations, so it should be possible to at least a gain a sense of it.
Given that the novel appears to be a long treatise on how that society acts in shaming Tess, I imagine this is going to be quite the difficult novel to get through. I hope for a happy...ish ending...but it's got that battery acid tang of Wuthering Heights to it that unsettles me to my core.
Pax,
W
