Classics and the Western Canon discussion

Tess heads home and confides in her mother that she revealed everything to Angel. She gives her half the money she received from Angel to compensate for the trouble she has caused.

Meanwhile, Angel goes home to his parents and tells them of his plan to go to Brazil. He deludes them into thinking Tess will join him later, insisting Tess is “pure and virtuous” and “spotless.” He blames Tess for making him lie to his parents. He bumps into Mercy and whispers something blasphemous in her ear. He invites Izz Huett to go with him to Brazil only to retract his offer when Izz tells him nobody could love him more than Tess. Angel has a momentary lapse thinking he will go back to Tess, but then decides against it.

Eight months pass. Tess has been working in a dairy and then in fields at harvest time. But the rain prevents harvesting so she is obliged to spend some of Angel’s money until little is left. She receives thirty pounds from Angel’s bank and sends twenty pounds to her mother. Meanwhile, Angel suffers from a fever in Brazil.

On her way to work at a farm recommended by Marian, Tess encounters the Trantridge man who had recognized her at the inn. She runs away from him and sleeps in a field. Harassed by men because of her good looks, she intentionally dresses in old, tatty clothes and cuts off her eyebrows so men would no longer chase after her. Marian is shocked at the change in Tess’ appearance. Tess finds employment at Flintcomb-Ash with Marian.

Work in the field is back-breaking, but Tess and Marian persevere even in the rain because they need the money. Izz Huett joins them. In yet another coincidence, the farmer they work for is the same Trantridge man who recognized and harassed Tess earlier.

Marian reveals Angel had invited Izz to join him in Brazil but then changed his mind. Tess is incensed. She regrets giving Angel power over her and decides to exercise agency by visiting his family. After walking for several miles, she finally arrives at their village. She exchanges her heavy walking boots for shoes before meeting them, intending to wear the boots on her return journey.

No one answers when Tess rings their door-bell. Tess experiences two more blows while waiting for them to return from church: Angel’s brothers find and take her boots; she overhears them express regret at Angel’s choice of a dairymaid for a wife. Tess is crushed and turns back without meeting Angel’s family. On the way home, she hears Alec D’Urberville preaching about how he was once a great sinner but has now converted.

I am struck by Hardy’s skill in situating Tess in a detailed, intense description of the Wessex countryside. Tess spends most of her time outdoors where nearly all the action takes place. Hardy immerses the reader in the natural environment. We are made aware of the animals, changes in the weather, people working in fields, transporting goods, etc. The countryside bustles with activity and change. There is always something going on outside.

It is an active, expansive countryside, which can be beautiful but also dangerous. But it seems to shrink when it comes to the people who populate it. The same people keep bumping into each other as if to torment Tess and remind her of her past.

There seems to be a pattern of things happening to Tess when she sleeps outdoors.

When she runs away from the Trantridge man, she makes a bed of leaves for herself in the woods and falls asleep. She wakes up to find pheasants, victims of a shooting party, slowly bleeding to death. With tears running down her face, she puts them out of their misery by wringing their necks.

The scene parallels the wood scene with Alec where she falls asleep on a bed of leaves. But with Alec, instead of waking up to a scene of violence, she is a victim of violence. The pheasant scene also echoes the death of Prince early in the novel when Tess wakes up to find Prince has been injured and bleeding to death. She tries to stop the blood streaming from Prince’s injury and ends up splashing herself with his blood.

After sleeping outdoors, Tess wakes up either to be a victim of violence or to witness violence perpetrated on animals. I don’t know what to make of this pattern, but I mention it in case anyone has ideas.

What is going on with Angel in this section? He lies to his parents by asserting Tess is “spotless” even though he doesn’t believe it. He shocks Mercy with his blasphemy. He invites Izz to go with him to Brazil but then retracts his offer when she tells him of Tess’ love for him. If he is willing to defy convention by taking Izz with him to Brazil, why isn’t he willing to take Tess?

With all the coincidences, constant reminders of her past, and the bad luck that plagues Tess at every turn, does it seem as if Hardy intentionally makes things hard for Tess?

Interesting question, re the coincidences. I think a lot of them are unnecessary, but that they weren't looked on badly by a Victorian audience. For example, there's no need for Tess to run into the man who knows here specifically; it's enough that she is plagued by men. I think Victorians must have had a taste for coincidence. The only really necessary coincidence is running into Alec again.

I love Hardy's depiction of the rural world in these chapters. Standouts are the scenes of Tess and Marian breaking up frozen tubers, and the wonderful depiction of Tess's nocturnal walk to see Alec's parents. Seldom have I felt I saw a landscape so clearly as the Wessex hills and footpaths of this novel. The details all ring true, and it is deeply felt.

I feel the pheasants is another instance of likening Tess to the natural world itself, in which mankind is violent and pitiless. Once again, she allies herself to nature, knowing that what the pheasants want is to be put out of their misery. Another great scene, particularly the night she spends beforehand, paralyzed with fear as to what the noises mean.

Angel seems to me to be having a bit of a nervous breakdown. He is humiliated, having thrown away his class privilege to marry a dairymaid because of her purity and virtue, and doesn't want to admit to his parents that he was wrong. With Izz he seems to be flailing destructively; he is embittered towards life and feels a need to break something.

When Tess learns from Marian that Angel had asked Izz to go with him to Brazil and then retracted the offer, she becomes angry at him for his apparent willingness to sin with Izz after condemning her. She recognizes her mistake in “leaving everything to be done by him.” She begins writing a letter to him but is unable to finish it. Why is she reluctant to go through with it? Why is it so hard for her to see Angel for what he is?

My favorite passage in this section--again, because I felt Hardy had nailed it:

But over them both there hung a deeper shade than the shade which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the shade of his own limitations. With all his attempted independence of judgment this advanced and well-meaning young man, a sample product of the last five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings. No prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of his was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency.

It seems as if Angel's parents would agree with this assessment, or at least have the capability to accept it, while his brothers are the worst kind of conventional. Tess sees the taking of her boots by the ironically named Mercy as a bad omen, but that act, in which Mercy imagines someone "wicked" has hidden them to dupe others, has a very different effect on the reader. It points to the real wickedness of judgment and the failure to recognize one's own limitations.

Kathy wrote: "It seems as if Angel's parents would agree with this assessment, or at least have the capability to accept it, while his brothers are the worst kind of conventional..."

I'm not sure Angel's father would have agreed with his son's assessment or his treatment of Tess. Hardy indicates his father was compassionate and charitable:

It was impossible to think of returning to the Vicarage. Angel’s wife felt almost as if she had been hounded up that hill like a scorned thing by those—to her—superfine clerics. Innocently as the slight had been inflicted, it was somewhat unfortunate that she had encountered the sons and not the father, who, despite his narrowness, was far less starched and ironed than they, and had to the full the gift of charity.

This is yet another example of the bad luck that haunts Tess.

Sorry, to clarify, the assessment I meant was of Tess. It seems that Angel's parents might be willing to agree that Tess was "as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel..." It is, indeed, bad luck that she meets the sons and not the father!