Last one:
The last of my projected Hardy readings, although I liked them all so much that I believe I’ll return to him someday.
The novel follows the fortunes of Bathsheba Everdene, who, after we first meet her as a poor relation of a well-to-do farmer, suddenly inherits the farm and vows to run it herself. For she’s single. When I say the novel follows her fortunes, I mean it essentially follows the course of her loves—it’s interested in her as a woman trying to make a go of independent farming, and Hardy is modern enough not to doubt that she’s smart enough and wilful enough to learn how to do it. What eventually breaks her from it is not the hardness of the task, but her romantic entanglements.
She has three suitors, who kind of move in and out of the story in a chiasmic fashion. First there’s Gabriel Oak, who’s a newly-established independent farmer when she meets him. Therefore he’s above her in station. She happens to save his life, though, one night in the sheep-pastures, and he falls in love with her. She won’t have him—doesn’t love him, and doesn’t intend to marry. Then she disappears—she was only in the town temporarily, visiting an aunt. Then he’s ruined through an accident that kills his flock. He’s forced to become an itinerant laborer.
Wandering the countryside on hiring-day, he eventually makes himself useful by putting out a fire in some haystacks, and is hired by the farmer—who turns out to be Bathsheba, newly come into her fortune. She hires him strictly as a shepherd, and treats him as one of the hired men only.
The second suitor is a neighboring farmer named Boldwood. He’s the only man of her station in the neighborhood who doesn’t gawk at her beauty, and in a moment of mischief she sends him a valentine. Anonymously, but he soon learns who sent it, and it explodes his world. He’s never before thought of marrying—never looked at a woman twice—and now all the pent-up passion of an entire lifetime (he’s considerably older than her) comes rushing out. She’s scared—she only meant it as a prank, and puts him off as long as she can. Finally he pressures her to consider marrying him, and to give him an answer by a certain date.
Unfortunately, in the meantime she meets Sergeant Troy, her third suitor. He’s a local boy of some education (meaning barely acceptable social station) who’s unfortunately kind of an adventurer. He made promises to one of Bathsheba’s servants, Fanny, then deserted her—something known only to Oak and Boldwood—and now he comes back to town and strikes up a whirlwind romance with Bathsheba. He’s a dashing soldier, she’s a beautiful heiress, and he sweeps her off her feet. (There’s a wonderfully sensual scene where he dazzles her with a display of swordsmanship, his blade always stopping just short of hitting her.)
Boldwood is driven nearly mad by his defeat at the hands of this well-known cad, and threatens to kill him. Bathsheba rushes off to Bath, where Troy has gone with his regiment, to warn him, and comes back married to him.
Unfortunately, she soon realizes what a cad Troy is, and the crisis comes when Fanny, who had disappeared, comes back—with a baby. She and the baby promptly die, and it’s only then that Troy realizes it was Fanny he truly loved, and that Bathsheba realizes that Troy had fathered a baby before meeting her, and never told her. Troy leaves, and goes swimming in the sea, and disappears. It’s thought he’s drowned, and soon Boldwood is after her again.
Again he pressures her to give her an answer by a certain time—Christmas Eve. He throws a party, but then Troy shows up at it, having decided that sponging off his legal wife, even if he doesn’t really love her, is better than living hand-to-mouth like he has been. Boldwood is driven over the edge by this, and shoots Troy. Boldwood then turns himself in, and is imprisoned for life.
This leaves Oak, who gets the girl in the end. All this time, he’s loved her hopelessly, and utterly selflessly—trying to get her to do right by Boldwood, and not get entangled with Troy, and meanwhile going far beyond his duties as shepherd to make sure her farm prospers. In the end, she realizes that his is true friendship and loyalty—he loves her in spite of having seen all her bad qualities, and has time and again put her own interests above his own. They marry.
What a difference a couple of decades seems to have made for Hardy’s outlook. While this, like the other books of his I’ve read, contains the same cynical asides about marriage, religion, and life in general, they’re fewer than in his later books, and balanced by a genuine optimism about the possibility of love and happiness—it’s rare, but real—that gets dimmer and dimmer as time goes by. The writing, too, seems younger—more passages of celebratory nature poetry, some quite transporting.
Oak is a picture of male constancy to go with Tess’s female constancy—and Hardy knows that because society is what it is, Oak doesn’t have to die a martyr. In that sense he sacrifices less, and maybe even suffers less, but he’s a touching figure nonetheless. Something of the mythical about him, I think, rather like the heroine of Persuasion—his constancy and selflessness are maybe too much to be believed, although they’re certainly not a problem for the enjoyment of the novel. But compare him to Jude, who’s just as constant to Sue, but only after a youthful indiscretion of his own. Oak is purer (as his allegorical name implies: he’s sturdiness itself).
Bathsheba, meanwhile, is an interesting character. I don’t think Hardy is punishing her for daring to be an independent woman farmer. In fact, her flaws show up before her fortune does: a little haughtiness, which money turns into that fatal moment of mischievousness. She’s awful slow in recognizing that Oak is the best man she knows, but throughout she’s quite insistent that she doesn’t want to marry for anything less than love. In that she’s like Eustacia in Return of the Native, but except for her one moment of youthful playfulness, she’s not fickle like Eustacia. She’s not really a romantic—or at least, if she is, she’s one without many illusions. She only wants to marry for love, but doesn’t think that’s liable to happen, and so is perfectly content to live without marriage, as much work as that may mean.
That her desire for love leads her to disaster—for she really does love Troy, in spite of his flaws—may simply be Hardy’s way of contrasting varieties of love. Bathsheba suffers for a blind, romantic love, but in the end she finds happiness, too, we’re told, in a love that, because it’s made of different stuff, will endure and satisfy much more than the other kind. So in the end she gets what she was holding out for—a marriage founded in love.
That’s the most optimistic ending I’ve seen in any of Hardy’s novels I’ve read.
Showing posts with label thomas hardy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thomas hardy. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Native
Again from the vault. Somehow I decided to read Hardy backward:
Working backward through Hardy’s five acknowledged classics we come to this.
It mainly involves Clym Yeobright and his cousin Thomasine. As the novel opens, Thomasine is returning to Egdon Heath, the setting of the novel, after a failed attempt to marry her sweetheart Wildeve at Budmouth. Wildeve, it turns out, has been toying with her—he actually loves Eustacia Vye, another resident of the Heath.
Wildeve, Eustacia (who lives with her grandfather, an ex-naval captain, supposedly), and the Yeobrights are the only gentlefolk on the Heath, and therefore the only fit society for each other. Eustacia is half Greek, and is presented as a sort of tempestuous goddesss, wildly beautiful, and ambitious to get out of Egdon and into the sort of glamorous, exciting life for which she feels she’s destined; she feels that a truly transporting love is the way it’ll happen. She sort of loves Wildeve, who’s a failed engineer now running an inn; but their love for each other is half play, half mutual dare—as soon as one proves devoted to the other, the other loses interest. They’re both, in short, jaded and insincere people. Hardy tries to give Eustacia tragic dignity and mythic resonance, however, while Wildeve is just a bounder.
Anyway, Thomasine and Wildeve were set to marry, but a misunderstanding about the license prevented it; this brings them back to Egdon unmarried, with Thomasine in a social disgrace that will only be taken away by Wildeve marrying her. But now that he’s back near Eustacia he’s not so sure he wants to. He keeps meeting Eustacia on the sly, and they talk about running away to America together; but now that Eustacia seemingly has Wildeve where she wants him, she again seems to lose interest in him, and puts him off.
Then Thomasine’s cousin Clym comes back to the Heath. He’s been away for years, working in Paris as the manager of a diamond merchant’s establishment. This gives him a suitably glamorous air in the eyes of Eustacia, who quickly maneuvers to get to know him. He protests that he has no plans to return to Paris, but rather wants to set up back on the Heath as a schoolmaster or some such thing—he has vague idealistic notions of educating the commoners in such a way as to lift them from their superstition.
He’s quite open and honest about this with Eustacia, but she persists in believing that if she marries him, he’ll whisk her off to Paris. They marry, and he whisks her off to a cottage on the other side of the Heath. In retaliation, sort of, Wildeve finally marries Thomasine. Both couples are thus set up for unhappiness, and it comes. Clym’s eyes go bad—not total blindness, but enough to prevent him from studying, which thwarts his plans to set up as an educator. To prevent himself from being idle, as well as to keep their capital somewhat intact, he starts working as a furze-cutter on the heath. He’s perfectly happy doing this, but Eustacia is mortified, and this drives her into thinking about Wildeve again.
The other complication involves Clym’s widowed mother, who was against Thomasine’s marriage to Wildeve (until it became necessary to save her from shame) and Clym’s to Eustacia; she and Clym are estranged because of it. At length, though, he wants to be reconciled, and so does she; Eustacia won’t speak to the old woman, though, because she’s annoyed that Mrs. Y never trusted her. One day Mrs Y comes to visit, to be reconciled; Clym’s asleep on the sofa, and Eustacia and Wildeve are there, sort of trysting. They run out the back door, nobody lets Mrs Y in, and she turns back to cross the heath. It’s a hot day, and she collapses from heat stroke, is bitten by an asp, and dies, muttering that her son has deserted her.
Eventually Clym learns that Eustacia intentionally didn’t let his mother in, and thus inadvertently caused her death, before they could be reconciled. They fight, and separate. Wildeve seizes on the chance to convince Eustacia to run away with him, but she’s so mortified by the bad name this will leave behind that, on the rainy night they’re about to depart, she drowns herself. At least, that’s what we’re led to believe—all we know is she falls in a pool; Wildeve jumps in to rescue her and drowns; Clym jumps in and is just saved.
Thus the wicked illicit almost-lovers (they didn’t actually do anything while married, only talked about it) die, and the cousins are left alive and grieving. Clym blames himself both for his mother’s death and Eustacia’s—he was on the verge of forgiving her, too, when she died, and he eventually becomes a solitary itinerant preacher, sadder but wiser.
Thomasine remarries, to the other major character I haven’t mentioned yet, Diggory Venn. He’s not quite a gentleman, but was the son of a local wealthy farmer—just one step below the Yeobrights on the social scale. He’s always loved her, and when she rejected him (before the novel begins) he took up the trade of a reddleman, a wandering peddler of red sheep-dip, carrying which turns him, his clothing, and his van a devilish shade of red. He appears at the very beginning of the novel, having run into Thomasine as she flees Budmouth in disgrace; he carries her home in his van, and then sticks around, coming and going mysteriously and always intervening for her protection. He frustrates Wildeve’s attempts to tryst with Eustacia after they’re both married, for example, and he helps pull Clym out when he’s about to drown. He’s a great character—sort of a Robin Hood vigilante type. He cares nothing for his social disgrace in becoming a reddleman (the redness makes the rest of society treat him like a pariah, and as an occupation it’s considered quite undesirable), and is quite willing to help Thomasine be happy with Wildeve, if she won’t have him. Supposedly Hardy was originally not planning to give Venn and Thomasine a happy ending together, but bowed to commercial pressures; I’m glad he did, though, as their happiness provides a nice contrast with Clym’s sorrow.
Thematically it’s trying to create in Eustacia a sort of classical mythical heroine, but she’s too dislikable to really admire in any mythical way. She’s just consistently selfish and small-minded. She and Wildeve really deserve each other. …There’s lots of myth stuff, though—as in Casterbridge the land itself, with all its Roman and pre-Roman ruins, its pagan nature-worship aptitudes, becomes a character, and colors all. The fact that Clym ends by becoming a preacher—a Christ-figure preaching on a mount—might be intended to suggest the end of the pre-Christian phase of this world, but that only serves to underscore how long its pagan rhythms survived, in Hardy’s mind.
Not quite as affecting as the others—I really think he got better as he went along—but quite good. And its prose is more poetic than the others—very flowery, but often quite striking for that.
Working backward through Hardy’s five acknowledged classics we come to this.
It mainly involves Clym Yeobright and his cousin Thomasine. As the novel opens, Thomasine is returning to Egdon Heath, the setting of the novel, after a failed attempt to marry her sweetheart Wildeve at Budmouth. Wildeve, it turns out, has been toying with her—he actually loves Eustacia Vye, another resident of the Heath.
Wildeve, Eustacia (who lives with her grandfather, an ex-naval captain, supposedly), and the Yeobrights are the only gentlefolk on the Heath, and therefore the only fit society for each other. Eustacia is half Greek, and is presented as a sort of tempestuous goddesss, wildly beautiful, and ambitious to get out of Egdon and into the sort of glamorous, exciting life for which she feels she’s destined; she feels that a truly transporting love is the way it’ll happen. She sort of loves Wildeve, who’s a failed engineer now running an inn; but their love for each other is half play, half mutual dare—as soon as one proves devoted to the other, the other loses interest. They’re both, in short, jaded and insincere people. Hardy tries to give Eustacia tragic dignity and mythic resonance, however, while Wildeve is just a bounder.
Anyway, Thomasine and Wildeve were set to marry, but a misunderstanding about the license prevented it; this brings them back to Egdon unmarried, with Thomasine in a social disgrace that will only be taken away by Wildeve marrying her. But now that he’s back near Eustacia he’s not so sure he wants to. He keeps meeting Eustacia on the sly, and they talk about running away to America together; but now that Eustacia seemingly has Wildeve where she wants him, she again seems to lose interest in him, and puts him off.
Then Thomasine’s cousin Clym comes back to the Heath. He’s been away for years, working in Paris as the manager of a diamond merchant’s establishment. This gives him a suitably glamorous air in the eyes of Eustacia, who quickly maneuvers to get to know him. He protests that he has no plans to return to Paris, but rather wants to set up back on the Heath as a schoolmaster or some such thing—he has vague idealistic notions of educating the commoners in such a way as to lift them from their superstition.
He’s quite open and honest about this with Eustacia, but she persists in believing that if she marries him, he’ll whisk her off to Paris. They marry, and he whisks her off to a cottage on the other side of the Heath. In retaliation, sort of, Wildeve finally marries Thomasine. Both couples are thus set up for unhappiness, and it comes. Clym’s eyes go bad—not total blindness, but enough to prevent him from studying, which thwarts his plans to set up as an educator. To prevent himself from being idle, as well as to keep their capital somewhat intact, he starts working as a furze-cutter on the heath. He’s perfectly happy doing this, but Eustacia is mortified, and this drives her into thinking about Wildeve again.
The other complication involves Clym’s widowed mother, who was against Thomasine’s marriage to Wildeve (until it became necessary to save her from shame) and Clym’s to Eustacia; she and Clym are estranged because of it. At length, though, he wants to be reconciled, and so does she; Eustacia won’t speak to the old woman, though, because she’s annoyed that Mrs. Y never trusted her. One day Mrs Y comes to visit, to be reconciled; Clym’s asleep on the sofa, and Eustacia and Wildeve are there, sort of trysting. They run out the back door, nobody lets Mrs Y in, and she turns back to cross the heath. It’s a hot day, and she collapses from heat stroke, is bitten by an asp, and dies, muttering that her son has deserted her.
Eventually Clym learns that Eustacia intentionally didn’t let his mother in, and thus inadvertently caused her death, before they could be reconciled. They fight, and separate. Wildeve seizes on the chance to convince Eustacia to run away with him, but she’s so mortified by the bad name this will leave behind that, on the rainy night they’re about to depart, she drowns herself. At least, that’s what we’re led to believe—all we know is she falls in a pool; Wildeve jumps in to rescue her and drowns; Clym jumps in and is just saved.
Thus the wicked illicit almost-lovers (they didn’t actually do anything while married, only talked about it) die, and the cousins are left alive and grieving. Clym blames himself both for his mother’s death and Eustacia’s—he was on the verge of forgiving her, too, when she died, and he eventually becomes a solitary itinerant preacher, sadder but wiser.
Thomasine remarries, to the other major character I haven’t mentioned yet, Diggory Venn. He’s not quite a gentleman, but was the son of a local wealthy farmer—just one step below the Yeobrights on the social scale. He’s always loved her, and when she rejected him (before the novel begins) he took up the trade of a reddleman, a wandering peddler of red sheep-dip, carrying which turns him, his clothing, and his van a devilish shade of red. He appears at the very beginning of the novel, having run into Thomasine as she flees Budmouth in disgrace; he carries her home in his van, and then sticks around, coming and going mysteriously and always intervening for her protection. He frustrates Wildeve’s attempts to tryst with Eustacia after they’re both married, for example, and he helps pull Clym out when he’s about to drown. He’s a great character—sort of a Robin Hood vigilante type. He cares nothing for his social disgrace in becoming a reddleman (the redness makes the rest of society treat him like a pariah, and as an occupation it’s considered quite undesirable), and is quite willing to help Thomasine be happy with Wildeve, if she won’t have him. Supposedly Hardy was originally not planning to give Venn and Thomasine a happy ending together, but bowed to commercial pressures; I’m glad he did, though, as their happiness provides a nice contrast with Clym’s sorrow.
Thematically it’s trying to create in Eustacia a sort of classical mythical heroine, but she’s too dislikable to really admire in any mythical way. She’s just consistently selfish and small-minded. She and Wildeve really deserve each other. …There’s lots of myth stuff, though—as in Casterbridge the land itself, with all its Roman and pre-Roman ruins, its pagan nature-worship aptitudes, becomes a character, and colors all. The fact that Clym ends by becoming a preacher—a Christ-figure preaching on a mount—might be intended to suggest the end of the pre-Christian phase of this world, but that only serves to underscore how long its pagan rhythms survived, in Hardy’s mind.
Not quite as affecting as the others—I really think he got better as he went along—but quite good. And its prose is more poetic than the others—very flowery, but often quite striking for that.
Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge
Again from the vault:
I must have been a total loser to hate this novel so much when I was sixteen. Illiterate, really. I mean, I just wasn’t smart enough yet to understand the language he was writing in, much less care about the concerns he’s dealing with.
Michael Henchard, a hay-trusser, gets drunk and sells his wife and baby daughter to a sailor. He then sobers up and tries to find them, but fails. He takes a vow not to drink for as many years as he is old (21), and then moves on. Zip forward about twenty years, and he’s now a prosperous corn (grain) merchant and mayor in the town of Casterbridge. His sold wife, Susan, and her daughter Elizabeth-Jane come to town looking for him, because the sailor, Newson, is reported dead at sea, and they have no place else to turn. Henchard marries Susan, both of them pretending it’s their first marriage so as not to let the town or EJ know the truth of their pasts.
Meanwhile, at the same time they come to town, a young Scot named Farfrae comes to town. He’s smart and knows the corn business, and immediately impresses Henchard so much that he hires Farfrae as his manager. Farfrae is so modern and charming, however, that he soon outstrips his boss in popularity—everyone believes he knows what he’s doing more than Henchard. Henchard fires him, and Farfrae sets up on his own in the same business. Henchard tries to crush him, but goes bankrupt himself. He loses everything: Farfrae buys him out, buys his house, and becomes mayor.
Meanwhile, Susan has died, and Henchard has found out from a letter she wrote on her deathbed that EJ is not his child—his child died, and EJ’s father is Newson. This turns Henchard against EJ, but he still doesn’t tell her the truth—he’s only just convinced her to accept him as her true father. Meanwhile meanwhile, a woman named Lucetta comes to town. This is a woman who Henchard had an affair with a while back, and who he had promised to marry just before Susan came back. Susan’s return meant he had to jilt Lucetta, but Susan’s death means she can make him keep his promise, which is why she’s moved to town. In the meantime, she has inherited money, which makes her charming to the single Farfrae, who had previously hinted at an interest in EJ. EJ is so alienated by Henchard’s new coldness to her that she befriends Lucetta and moves in with her; Henchard now actually wants to marry Lucetta, but she’s putting him off now, because she’s falling in love with Farfrae. Lucetta and Farfrae marry, with Farfrae ignorant of the scandal in her past. EJ accepts her personal setback with philosophy.
Henchard does not—he feels everything has been taken from him. The years of his vow over, he takes to drinking; he also has to beg a job of Farfrae to support himself, but he can’t bear the shame long, and finally he tries to fight Farfrae to the death in an empty hay-barn. He beats Farfrae, but at the last minute can’t kill him. Meanwhile, the secret of Lucetta and Henchard’s past gets out (through Henchard’s doing, although he does not intend it). The townspeople stage a “skimmington ride,” in which effigies of the two illicit lovers are paraded through town. This is such a shock to Lucetta that she takes sick and dies.
Henchard is full of remorse for all he’s done, and tries to be supportive of both Lucetta and Farfrae through this, but all he succeeds in doing is drawing closer to EJ, who still thinks he’s her real father. She’s all he has left, and she moves in with him. He’s poor and humiliated, but happy to have someone who loves him. Then Newson comes back, looking for her. Henchard lies and says EJ died when Susan did, but he knows this lie won’t keep Newson away for long. So when he hears that Newson is coming back, he leaves town to become a wandering hay-trusser again.
Newson and EJ are reunited, and EJ and Farfrae marry. Henchard tries to come to the wedding, but EJ rebuffs him, and he wanders off to die of a broken heart. This is when EJ realizes how much he always blamed himself—he was never exactly a good man, but he never thought he was, either, and so when it all came crashing down he never even tried to salvage his position, feeling he deserved it.
It’s clear, as the intro notes, that Henchard and Farfrae are based on Saul and David, and there’s something touching and mythical about Henchard. He’s larger than life, with his towering moodiness and gargantuan inarticulateness. He’s doomed, clearly, and we know he deserves it—but he’s partially redeemed in our eyes because we know he knows he deserves it.
The intro also points out how shallow Farfrae is as a man—not a David himself by any means. This I find interesting because of how clearly Farfrae is meant to represent the coming of modernity to this backwater agricultural community. Henchard does business the old way, estimations and handshakes and divination; Farfrae, with his Scottish efficiency, brings in machinery and exact calculations and written contracts. It’s good for the town, and everybody knows it, but at the same time there’s a tremendous sense that the ancient pagan ritualistic communal aspect of life there is going to disappear with the arrival of the new ways. Henchard represents this. The old ways are crude, inexact, and not too nice—just like Henchard—but at least they have great depth of feeling, which Farfrae doesn’t have. This is what Hardy seems to be saying, on one level, and it’s a pretty interesting way of putting it.
Great book.
I must have been a total loser to hate this novel so much when I was sixteen. Illiterate, really. I mean, I just wasn’t smart enough yet to understand the language he was writing in, much less care about the concerns he’s dealing with.
Michael Henchard, a hay-trusser, gets drunk and sells his wife and baby daughter to a sailor. He then sobers up and tries to find them, but fails. He takes a vow not to drink for as many years as he is old (21), and then moves on. Zip forward about twenty years, and he’s now a prosperous corn (grain) merchant and mayor in the town of Casterbridge. His sold wife, Susan, and her daughter Elizabeth-Jane come to town looking for him, because the sailor, Newson, is reported dead at sea, and they have no place else to turn. Henchard marries Susan, both of them pretending it’s their first marriage so as not to let the town or EJ know the truth of their pasts.
Meanwhile, at the same time they come to town, a young Scot named Farfrae comes to town. He’s smart and knows the corn business, and immediately impresses Henchard so much that he hires Farfrae as his manager. Farfrae is so modern and charming, however, that he soon outstrips his boss in popularity—everyone believes he knows what he’s doing more than Henchard. Henchard fires him, and Farfrae sets up on his own in the same business. Henchard tries to crush him, but goes bankrupt himself. He loses everything: Farfrae buys him out, buys his house, and becomes mayor.
Meanwhile, Susan has died, and Henchard has found out from a letter she wrote on her deathbed that EJ is not his child—his child died, and EJ’s father is Newson. This turns Henchard against EJ, but he still doesn’t tell her the truth—he’s only just convinced her to accept him as her true father. Meanwhile meanwhile, a woman named Lucetta comes to town. This is a woman who Henchard had an affair with a while back, and who he had promised to marry just before Susan came back. Susan’s return meant he had to jilt Lucetta, but Susan’s death means she can make him keep his promise, which is why she’s moved to town. In the meantime, she has inherited money, which makes her charming to the single Farfrae, who had previously hinted at an interest in EJ. EJ is so alienated by Henchard’s new coldness to her that she befriends Lucetta and moves in with her; Henchard now actually wants to marry Lucetta, but she’s putting him off now, because she’s falling in love with Farfrae. Lucetta and Farfrae marry, with Farfrae ignorant of the scandal in her past. EJ accepts her personal setback with philosophy.
Henchard does not—he feels everything has been taken from him. The years of his vow over, he takes to drinking; he also has to beg a job of Farfrae to support himself, but he can’t bear the shame long, and finally he tries to fight Farfrae to the death in an empty hay-barn. He beats Farfrae, but at the last minute can’t kill him. Meanwhile, the secret of Lucetta and Henchard’s past gets out (through Henchard’s doing, although he does not intend it). The townspeople stage a “skimmington ride,” in which effigies of the two illicit lovers are paraded through town. This is such a shock to Lucetta that she takes sick and dies.
Henchard is full of remorse for all he’s done, and tries to be supportive of both Lucetta and Farfrae through this, but all he succeeds in doing is drawing closer to EJ, who still thinks he’s her real father. She’s all he has left, and she moves in with him. He’s poor and humiliated, but happy to have someone who loves him. Then Newson comes back, looking for her. Henchard lies and says EJ died when Susan did, but he knows this lie won’t keep Newson away for long. So when he hears that Newson is coming back, he leaves town to become a wandering hay-trusser again.
Newson and EJ are reunited, and EJ and Farfrae marry. Henchard tries to come to the wedding, but EJ rebuffs him, and he wanders off to die of a broken heart. This is when EJ realizes how much he always blamed himself—he was never exactly a good man, but he never thought he was, either, and so when it all came crashing down he never even tried to salvage his position, feeling he deserved it.
It’s clear, as the intro notes, that Henchard and Farfrae are based on Saul and David, and there’s something touching and mythical about Henchard. He’s larger than life, with his towering moodiness and gargantuan inarticulateness. He’s doomed, clearly, and we know he deserves it—but he’s partially redeemed in our eyes because we know he knows he deserves it.
The intro also points out how shallow Farfrae is as a man—not a David himself by any means. This I find interesting because of how clearly Farfrae is meant to represent the coming of modernity to this backwater agricultural community. Henchard does business the old way, estimations and handshakes and divination; Farfrae, with his Scottish efficiency, brings in machinery and exact calculations and written contracts. It’s good for the town, and everybody knows it, but at the same time there’s a tremendous sense that the ancient pagan ritualistic communal aspect of life there is going to disappear with the arrival of the new ways. Henchard represents this. The old ways are crude, inexact, and not too nice—just like Henchard—but at least they have great depth of feeling, which Farfrae doesn’t have. This is what Hardy seems to be saying, on one level, and it’s a pretty interesting way of putting it.
Great book.
Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Tess was next:
So I decided to keep going with Thomas Hardy for a while. This seemed to be the obvious next step. It didn’t move me quite as deeply as Jude did, for some reason, but I’d have to say, objectively, that it’s just as fine a novel.
Tess is a peasant girl whose layabout father has just discovered that he is the last of the ancient noble line of the d’Urbervilles (corrupted by his time to Durbeyfield). This gives him airs, and when a sudden disaster puts them in economic difficulty, Tess finds it her responsibility to seek out a wealthier branch of the line and ask for assistance. Thus she meets Alec d’Urberville, whose father, a self-made man, had forged ties with the supposedly-defunct d’Urbervilles to give his family an air of respectability. Alec takes Tess into service, rapes her, and then she leaves him.
She goes home, where she has his baby and refuses his offer to marry her—she’s incensed at his cavalier treatment of her. The baby dies, and after about a year of seclusion, Tess realizes she’s a burden on the family and goes to work on a dairy. Here she meets Angel Clare, the third son of a very conservative parson. Angel is a freethinker who has elected to become a gentleman farmer instead of a clergyman like his father (his father won’t send him to the university since he won’t toe the line, doctrinally, so he really has no choice but to learn how to support himself); he’s at the dairy to learn that aspect of farming. Soon he falls in love with Tess (who he’s seen once before, briefly, at the beginning of the book—she remembers, but he doesn’t). He’s taken with her pure peasant virtue, and refuses to take no for an answer. She loves him, too, but knows that he’d reject her if he knew about her past, and resolves to reject him. But he prevails, finally, and then prevents her when she tries to tell him before the marriage.
Finally on the night after the wedding, they confess their past sins. He admits that he dallied with a woman in London right after he lost his faith. She forgives him frankly, and then tells of her past. He goes ballistic and leaves her, blind to his own hypocrisy.
For a year she scratches out a living, while he’s off experimenting with farming in Brazil. She becomes worse and worse off financially, while her pride prevents her from appealing to his parents, who never supported the match and to whom she’s never even been introduced. Finally Alec comes back into the picture—at first he’s a religious fanatic, having been converted by Angel’s father, but then his love (lust?) for Tess reasserts itself and he tries to get her to come with him. Finally, when she’s given up on Angel ever returning, and her father is dead and her mother and siblings made homeless, she gives in to Alec. This is when Angel chooses to come back and declare that he’s forgiven her. Too late. This drives her out of her mind, and she stabs Alec to death. She and Clare enjoy a week’s happiness on the run before the cops catch up with them at Stonehenge.
So, clearly it’s an indictment of traditional English Christian morals, which allow a man, be he a scoundrel like Alec or just a headstrong gentleman like Angel, to sin and get away with it while condemning a woman to a lifetime of shame for something she didn’t do willingly in the first place. As such, it’s a powerful book. It’s also a very perceptive look at Angel’s particular brand of hypocrisy—you can see it coming a mile away but it’s still effective when it gets there.
There are other aspects that I didn’t pick up on as readily—Hardy is allying Tess with the old pagan nature-spirit aspects of the English peasantry, those things that are prior to the Christian overlay. There are some mythological overtones that I didn’t quite get.
It’s also a detailed look at how the country ways were changing in one particular stage of the industrial revolution—he’s very detailed on farming techniques and how they affected social patterns. It’s here in particular that I could have used some notes—the Pan edition I read is a reprint of an annotated version, shorn of the actual notes—it leaves spaces where the asterisks were, and sometimes the telltale asterisks
So I decided to keep going with Thomas Hardy for a while. This seemed to be the obvious next step. It didn’t move me quite as deeply as Jude did, for some reason, but I’d have to say, objectively, that it’s just as fine a novel.
Tess is a peasant girl whose layabout father has just discovered that he is the last of the ancient noble line of the d’Urbervilles (corrupted by his time to Durbeyfield). This gives him airs, and when a sudden disaster puts them in economic difficulty, Tess finds it her responsibility to seek out a wealthier branch of the line and ask for assistance. Thus she meets Alec d’Urberville, whose father, a self-made man, had forged ties with the supposedly-defunct d’Urbervilles to give his family an air of respectability. Alec takes Tess into service, rapes her, and then she leaves him.
She goes home, where she has his baby and refuses his offer to marry her—she’s incensed at his cavalier treatment of her. The baby dies, and after about a year of seclusion, Tess realizes she’s a burden on the family and goes to work on a dairy. Here she meets Angel Clare, the third son of a very conservative parson. Angel is a freethinker who has elected to become a gentleman farmer instead of a clergyman like his father (his father won’t send him to the university since he won’t toe the line, doctrinally, so he really has no choice but to learn how to support himself); he’s at the dairy to learn that aspect of farming. Soon he falls in love with Tess (who he’s seen once before, briefly, at the beginning of the book—she remembers, but he doesn’t). He’s taken with her pure peasant virtue, and refuses to take no for an answer. She loves him, too, but knows that he’d reject her if he knew about her past, and resolves to reject him. But he prevails, finally, and then prevents her when she tries to tell him before the marriage.
Finally on the night after the wedding, they confess their past sins. He admits that he dallied with a woman in London right after he lost his faith. She forgives him frankly, and then tells of her past. He goes ballistic and leaves her, blind to his own hypocrisy.
For a year she scratches out a living, while he’s off experimenting with farming in Brazil. She becomes worse and worse off financially, while her pride prevents her from appealing to his parents, who never supported the match and to whom she’s never even been introduced. Finally Alec comes back into the picture—at first he’s a religious fanatic, having been converted by Angel’s father, but then his love (lust?) for Tess reasserts itself and he tries to get her to come with him. Finally, when she’s given up on Angel ever returning, and her father is dead and her mother and siblings made homeless, she gives in to Alec. This is when Angel chooses to come back and declare that he’s forgiven her. Too late. This drives her out of her mind, and she stabs Alec to death. She and Clare enjoy a week’s happiness on the run before the cops catch up with them at Stonehenge.
So, clearly it’s an indictment of traditional English Christian morals, which allow a man, be he a scoundrel like Alec or just a headstrong gentleman like Angel, to sin and get away with it while condemning a woman to a lifetime of shame for something she didn’t do willingly in the first place. As such, it’s a powerful book. It’s also a very perceptive look at Angel’s particular brand of hypocrisy—you can see it coming a mile away but it’s still effective when it gets there.
There are other aspects that I didn’t pick up on as readily—Hardy is allying Tess with the old pagan nature-spirit aspects of the English peasantry, those things that are prior to the Christian overlay. There are some mythological overtones that I didn’t quite get.
It’s also a detailed look at how the country ways were changing in one particular stage of the industrial revolution—he’s very detailed on farming techniques and how they affected social patterns. It’s here in particular that I could have used some notes—the Pan edition I read is a reprint of an annotated version, shorn of the actual notes—it leaves spaces where the asterisks were, and sometimes the telltale asterisks
Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure
A couple of summers ago, I went on a Thomas Hardy jag. (Can you use "Thomas Hardy" and "jag" in the same sentence? I guess you can if you make an appropriately meta and self-deprecating parenthetical remark immediately afterward. At least, I hope so.) This surprised me - that is, it surprised me that I got so into Thomas Hardy - because the summer before my senior year of high school I had to read The Mayor of Casterbridge for AP English, and it took me all summer and I hated it and I almost gave up on serious books for good and I spent the next fifteen years bellyaching about Thomas Hardy being the most boring writer in the world. But: as it turns out, I was an idiot, and Thomas Hardy is one of the greats. One of the stalwarts, fighting the good fight down there in the trenches with the words and the feelings and the ideas.
I started with Jude the Obscure (1896), and here's what I wrote about it then:
Another lunch-break library book [ed.: I was doing dissertation research in Japan at this time, and strayed into the school's small selection of English literature in English, and ended up spending a lot of lunch hours reading]. We watched the film version, with Kate Winslet, and the next day I saw this on the shelf and picked it up. I couldn’t believe I was reading a Thomas Hardy novel—reading The Mayor of Casterbridge the summer before my senior year of high school was one of the most annoying experiences I’ve ever had with a book. What’s even more unbelievable is how much I loved this one.
Jude Fawley is an orphan in a village in Wessex who dreams of going to study at Christminster (Oxford) and then entering the ministry. Of course, in his day this is impossible for anybody born poor like him, but he doesn’t realize it, and sets himself to studying on his own. When he become a man, he picks up a trade (stonemasonry), and is saving up to go to Christminster when sex intervenes. He’s seduced by a local girl, Arabella, and she tricks him into marrying her by saying she’s pregnant. It’s an unhappy marriage, and when he finds out he was tricked they argue, and she then leaves for Australia with her parents.
He goes to Christminster. Here he meets his long-lost cousin Sue Bridehead, also an orphan, and falls in love with her, although because he’s married and bound for the priesthood and her cousin and they both come from families cursed to miserable broken marriages, he treats her as a friend only. But of course they’re both falling in love. She’s independent-minded— skeptical about religion and social mores. Meanwhile, he finally realizes that the colleges won’t have anything to do with him because he’s a working man. Meanwhile, she starts teaching for Phillotson, Jude’s old schoolmaster. Then she goes away to a teacher’s training college.
Jude visits her, and they go on an outing from which she’s late returning. They’re clearly falling in love, everybody around them can see it, but they don’t do anything bad. However, the scandal gets her expelled from the college. Then he tells her he’s married, when he finds out she’s engaged to Phillotson, and she’s so upset that she goes and actually marries Phillotson. But she doesn’t love him: she loves Jude.
Thus far, about halfway through, the book has this wonderful sense of tragedy: their love is evoked quite intensely, and the fact that they’re both married to other people makes them nicely star-crossed lovers.
But then their respective spouses actually grant them divorces: Arabella so she can remarry, and Phillotson because he pities Sue. This is an interesting turning point in the book, because now they’re actually free to legally marry. But they don’t—Sue is too delicate on the matter of physical relations, and afraid of the legal responsibilities that marriage will entail. She doesn’t want the law to force her to love someone forever. Independent-minded.
But from this point the novel ceases to be a tragedy of star-crossed lovers, really: they could marry, and thus legitimize their relationship and go on with their lives. But they don’t. But they have kids anyway (including taking on one that Jude had unknowingly fathered with Arabella). And every town they go to eventually chases them away as a scandal. Then the kids die (Arabella and Jude’s is preternaturally doomy, and kills himself and the others), and Sue takes this as God’s judgment on her. She abruptly abandons all her modern ideas, even as Jude has abandoned his beliefs, feeling that they can’t be true if they so conflict with his natural human impulses.
In the end Sue goes back to Phillotson and forces herself to endure physical relations with him as a penance. Jude is once again tricked by Arabella into marrying her (she keeps him drunk for a week), but once he learns that Sue has truly given herself to Phillotson he basically wills himself to die, and does.
Well, put like that it kind of sounds silly in places, but he pulls it off nicely. As I say, halfway through it ceases to be a tragedy of mythic dimensions. Instead, it becomes this fascinating character study. Sue is a woman the likes of whom I’ve met, and probably all men secretly fear women are: at the root of her modern ideas of love and marriage is the wish that sex didn’t have to enter into it at all. She’s ethereal, mental, even spiritual, but not sexual. As a result, her treatment of Jude is what we would now call a cock-tease. But Jude understands that she’s not trying to torment him, and he’ll forgive her anything. Both of them do what they do out of choice, which makes it not so much a tragedy as an inquiry into their psychologies, and into the social forces that make them both so wary of marriage in the second place. Of course it’s also an indictment of a society that thinks it’s anybody’s business what two consenting adults do in private.
Anyway, I really loved it. It reminded me a little, in the intensity of its anatomization of their emotions, of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow—I was happy to read somewhere that Lawrence liked this book.
I started with Jude the Obscure (1896), and here's what I wrote about it then:
Another lunch-break library book [ed.: I was doing dissertation research in Japan at this time, and strayed into the school's small selection of English literature in English, and ended up spending a lot of lunch hours reading]. We watched the film version, with Kate Winslet, and the next day I saw this on the shelf and picked it up. I couldn’t believe I was reading a Thomas Hardy novel—reading The Mayor of Casterbridge the summer before my senior year of high school was one of the most annoying experiences I’ve ever had with a book. What’s even more unbelievable is how much I loved this one.
Jude Fawley is an orphan in a village in Wessex who dreams of going to study at Christminster (Oxford) and then entering the ministry. Of course, in his day this is impossible for anybody born poor like him, but he doesn’t realize it, and sets himself to studying on his own. When he become a man, he picks up a trade (stonemasonry), and is saving up to go to Christminster when sex intervenes. He’s seduced by a local girl, Arabella, and she tricks him into marrying her by saying she’s pregnant. It’s an unhappy marriage, and when he finds out he was tricked they argue, and she then leaves for Australia with her parents.
He goes to Christminster. Here he meets his long-lost cousin Sue Bridehead, also an orphan, and falls in love with her, although because he’s married and bound for the priesthood and her cousin and they both come from families cursed to miserable broken marriages, he treats her as a friend only. But of course they’re both falling in love. She’s independent-minded— skeptical about religion and social mores. Meanwhile, he finally realizes that the colleges won’t have anything to do with him because he’s a working man. Meanwhile, she starts teaching for Phillotson, Jude’s old schoolmaster. Then she goes away to a teacher’s training college.
Jude visits her, and they go on an outing from which she’s late returning. They’re clearly falling in love, everybody around them can see it, but they don’t do anything bad. However, the scandal gets her expelled from the college. Then he tells her he’s married, when he finds out she’s engaged to Phillotson, and she’s so upset that she goes and actually marries Phillotson. But she doesn’t love him: she loves Jude.
Thus far, about halfway through, the book has this wonderful sense of tragedy: their love is evoked quite intensely, and the fact that they’re both married to other people makes them nicely star-crossed lovers.
But then their respective spouses actually grant them divorces: Arabella so she can remarry, and Phillotson because he pities Sue. This is an interesting turning point in the book, because now they’re actually free to legally marry. But they don’t—Sue is too delicate on the matter of physical relations, and afraid of the legal responsibilities that marriage will entail. She doesn’t want the law to force her to love someone forever. Independent-minded.
But from this point the novel ceases to be a tragedy of star-crossed lovers, really: they could marry, and thus legitimize their relationship and go on with their lives. But they don’t. But they have kids anyway (including taking on one that Jude had unknowingly fathered with Arabella). And every town they go to eventually chases them away as a scandal. Then the kids die (Arabella and Jude’s is preternaturally doomy, and kills himself and the others), and Sue takes this as God’s judgment on her. She abruptly abandons all her modern ideas, even as Jude has abandoned his beliefs, feeling that they can’t be true if they so conflict with his natural human impulses.
In the end Sue goes back to Phillotson and forces herself to endure physical relations with him as a penance. Jude is once again tricked by Arabella into marrying her (she keeps him drunk for a week), but once he learns that Sue has truly given herself to Phillotson he basically wills himself to die, and does.
Well, put like that it kind of sounds silly in places, but he pulls it off nicely. As I say, halfway through it ceases to be a tragedy of mythic dimensions. Instead, it becomes this fascinating character study. Sue is a woman the likes of whom I’ve met, and probably all men secretly fear women are: at the root of her modern ideas of love and marriage is the wish that sex didn’t have to enter into it at all. She’s ethereal, mental, even spiritual, but not sexual. As a result, her treatment of Jude is what we would now call a cock-tease. But Jude understands that she’s not trying to torment him, and he’ll forgive her anything. Both of them do what they do out of choice, which makes it not so much a tragedy as an inquiry into their psychologies, and into the social forces that make them both so wary of marriage in the second place. Of course it’s also an indictment of a society that thinks it’s anybody’s business what two consenting adults do in private.
Anyway, I really loved it. It reminded me a little, in the intensity of its anatomization of their emotions, of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow—I was happy to read somewhere that Lawrence liked this book.
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