Secondary Readings: Tess of the D Urbervilles
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Williams
SECONDARY READINGS: TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES
Secondary Readings:
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Dan Williams
Fresno Pacific University
Learning Outcome #3
Lit 906 British Novels
4 May 2016
“Plot Circles: Hardy’s Drunkards and Their Walks.”
In Margaret Kolb’s article, she focusses on the circular paths that characters in Hardy’s novels tend to tread. The heroes and heroines generally move about Hardy’s Wessex countryside and wind up retracing their steps perhaps multiple times, ending up where they began. Kolb relates that “Though the novel [Tess of the D’Urbervilles] might read as a series of departures - Tess sets out from Marlott for Chaseborough, for Talbothays, for Flintcomb Ash, and finally for Kingsbere – it is also a series of returns” (2014, 56, p. 608-609). Tess always seems to wind up back where she started not only geographically, but also experientially.
Kolb also looks into the binary choices that characters are forced to make in Hardy’s novels. These choices seem to Kolb unnecessarily and unrealistically black and white, depriving characters of possibly thousands of equally likely possibilities; she sees these choices that the plots lean so heavily upon as oversimplified and contrived. In Tess of the D’Urberville, virtually all of Tess’s choices cause her calamity; if in binary choices one outcome will be positive and the other negative, it seems improbable if both likelihoods are “Equipossible” (2014, 56, p. 601) that Tess should always choose the worst.
Kolb cites the work of philosophers and mathematicians who attempt to explain the probability that choices will result in positive outcomes and the likelihood that an individual ends up at the point from which they started after a series of random trajectories. Rounding out her article Kolb mentions a few Victorian board games that resulted in a repetition of events and a circular path based on players’ choices. She notes the implied cultural view of the time as one which saw the world and our choices in these same binary and cyclical ways.
It is difficult to determine whether Kolb finds that the tendency of Hardy’s novels to follow these patterns and rules reflects poorly on the author and the works’ quality or if she is simply observing the tendencies and attempting to divine their cause, impact, and prevalence.
“Pure women and tragic heroine? Conflicting myths in Hardy’s Tess…”
Parker points out that Hardy, for Tess of the D’Urbervilles”, in “its first publication in novel form (1992, 24, p. 273) gave it the subtitle “… : A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented.” Hardy apparently thought there was no question as to whether or not Tess was a Pure Woman; however, many critics questioned the subtitle and wondered by what criteria she was pure. To them, whether Hardy meant it or not, the subtitle suggested that the question of Tess’s purity functions as the novel’s central theme and question.
In a relatively generous and progressive allowance, many critics concede that Tess is a “pure woman,” accepting her inability to prevent her rape. Her actions at the end of the novel though: taking a second husband, and committing murder, to be outside of what is allowable for a “pure woman.” Hardy’s rebuttal as related by Parker was to say of his critics, they “drag in, as vital point, the acts of a woman in her last days of desperation, when all her doings lie outside her normal character” (1992, 24, p. 274).
Parker notes a few flaws in Hardy’s defense and asserts that It weakens the strength of the narrative and does not allow for Tess to be a tragic heroine by definition: “If Tess’s actions are not generated from within, if her actions are not an essential consequence of her character, the tragedy does not exist” (1992, 24, p. 275). Parker goes on to question Hardy’s other arguments to justify “pure” as a label for Tess as a result of his applying social law to Tess when he contradicts himself later by assimilating her with nature which in the narrative makes her subject to a different set of laws which view the rape differently.
Parker also points out Hardy’s apparent notion that, “Women… do not enjoy or seek their own sexuality: Hardy presents sexual experience as something which can only be wrested from the female” (1992, 24, p. 275). This exempts Tess from responsibility for her fallen state.
The article continues to suggest weakness and inconsistency in Hardy’s defense of his heroine’s purity. Ultimately Parker concludes that the “Tension between Hardy’s attempt to tell the story of a ‘pure woman’ and the conventions and restrictions of the ballad form which generates both the imaginative power and thematic confusion of Tess of the D’Urbervilles” (1992, 24, p. 280).
References
Kolb, Margaret (2014). Plot Circles: Hardy’s Drunkards and Their Walks. Victorian Studies. 56 (4), 595-623. Retrieved May 5, 2016, from Academic Search Main Edition database.
Parker, Lynn (1992). Pure women and tragic heroine? Conflicting myths in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Studies in the Novel. 24 (3) 273-280. Retrieved May 5, 2016, from MasterFILE Main Edition database.