THOMAS

(1840-1928)
THOMAS HARDY was born in a small hamlet in the south-west of England, in 1840. He came from an old yeoman family and spent his childhood and later, most of his Iife, in the country-side. He showed great interest in folkways and folklore, in the Celtic, Roman and Saxon past and manifested great Iove for peasant songs and dances. His father was a master-builder and this determined him to send his.son, Thomas, to London, to study architecture. But his natural bent was towards literature to which he soon dedicated himself abandoning architecture l altogether. ; ; His first novei, written in 1867-1868, met with great opposition from all ! quarters and was rejected by three publishers. One of them, the novelist Meredith, advised him to try again, this time avoiding social satire and finding a subject which the English Victorian public might accept more easily. Hardy admitted the compromise and wrote Desperate Remedies (1871) a highly improbable tale of mystery and murder, full of sensational incidents which was readily accepted and published. In 1874, his first masterpiece appeared, Far From the Madding Crowd, which met with enormous success and consecrated Hardy as a leading novelist. Best novels followed one after another: The Return of the Native, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure. After that he turned to poetry for the remainder of his Iife, over 30 years. It was poetry which continued the traditions of his predecessors and did not win ; any high place for him in this field of literature. But as a novelist, he remains one of the greatest English realists whose work expresses the writer's protest against : the existing social order by developing a philosophy of pessimism unparalleled in i English literature.

TESS OF THE D'UBERVILLES

The tragic themes infuse the major novels written by Hardy. In Tess of \ the d'Urbervilles an essentially good and natural character is destroyed by the > combined powers of society and circumstance. Tess's story begins with the notion of her poor, foolish father, who is a ? descendent of one of the ancient Norman families of Wessex, and his drunken \ cellebration of this situation, which prevents him from carrying to the market the [ beehive on'which the family depends for living. Tess takes on the job, falis asleep ; on the way and their horse is killed. As a consequence of this irreparable loss, Tess \ is forced to seek the assistance of the d'Urbervilles, her supposed kin, and a i wealthy family. In due time, she is seduced by Alee d'Urbervilles and bears a child, who dies in infancy. After this, she leaves home to work as a dairy-maid in ; the rich farming section of Talbothays. There she meets Angel Clare, .son-of-a.! clergyman and a gentleman who is learning the dairy business; eventually, they fli i in Iove and get married, Tess never having been able to take the courage or find the opportunity to teii Angel about her past life. She confesses to him on their : wedding night; his concept on Tess's maiden innocence is shattered and blind to her real innocence and purity of spirit he insists on a separation. He goes abroad and becomes an itinerant farm labourer. At this crucial moment for Tess, Alee reappears, t h i s time apparently converted into a fanatical evangelist. His new personality is not, however, firmly enough established for him to resist his worse side, when he once again encounlers Tess. His pursuit of her, combincd with her despair, finally brings her back into his power. But, when she discovers that Angel has

never intended to abandon her and that her letters hd not reached him until too late, she murclers Alee in a frenzy of grief and torment. She flees with Angel, but is finally caught and executed. Tess is by far the most admirable person in the novei and the two men in her life - both above her in the social scale - are shown as the victims of false ideas about human interrelationships coming from their background. Hardy demonstrated in Tess... the problems that arise from social prejudices and illusions. The central characler is outstanding among Hardy's heroines because she is the only good woman who has the role of a protagonist. She is more alive than the other woman characters, she is more female, more sexual, more passionate. In combination with her innocence, her gentleness, and her loyalty, this sexuality makes her indeed a memorable character. And she has greater moral and physical endurance than any other heroine. She has the straight-forward sincerity, the natural simplicity of those who live close to nature. In all Hardy's novels, women are created after a general pattern: they are all passive and live their lives in peace, ccepting their destiny without a blink. Every time one of them is rebelling against fate, she ends badly, she is punished for her disobedience. Tess rebels not only once, she rebels against Alee and leaves him, rebels against her poverty and goes to work on a farm, rebels against her own sin and finally, she makes,her greatest mistake: she breaks the pattern, she kills the mn who destroyed her life. In expressing and accounting for Tess's pain, Hardy shows in many different ways how the.individual's life is determined only partly by his or her own efforts, and how much it depends upon the pressure of things over which the individual has no control. The blending of symbol and reality, the mythic meaning combined with the human meaning, the superbly realized description of action and setting match anything in this novei. Here, the folktale of the ruined maid takes on the aspect of universal tragedy. Tess... is a fine novei from the realistic poinl of view, as well as from the symbolic one. Hardy did not intend his novei to be a social tract, but he did want to treat social prohlems in a mature way. He did not discuss only the moral standards, but also considered the effect on ordinary people of the economic instability and social climbing. The constant need for steady income to support the family, takes Tess far away from home, and tunis her into an itinerant farm labourer, thus setting the stage for Alec's reappearance. Part of Hardy's social criticism is thus aimed at the agricultura! situation in which poor people lacked security and were subject to any chilly economic wind that might blow along. Social realism is not, however, an aspect that gives the power to the novei. The myth does that. As soon as Tess and Angel are in the presence of Stonehenge, the realistic level - with its themes and narrative structures - sinks into insignificance. They step into myth which is concretely linked to the physical contact with the stone monument. There is a process of initiation here, they "grope" around and gradually become acquainted - through their senses: hearing and touching with the place which they define as "a temple of the winds", and the author defines as "the pavilion of the night". It's a concrete place with a mysterious meaning: the remnant of a very old civilization that worshipped nature (i.e. the Sunstone) by bringing human sacrifices, thus suggesting the insignificance of mn in the face of nature laws. This insignificance is further suggested by the dimen sions of the edifice, its strangeness, its "uncompromising" proportions. The temple - seen as a prison for the independent spirit and thinking becomes a prison and a trap for Tess. The ambiguity is great here, because, at first, the place seems f proiective to Tess, the slone that will become her executioner's block feels "warm, and dry", the night seems to offer her a proiective roof. But the pillars "blankly '.'. defined" syinbolize the priests of sacrifice. In fact, the whole place is a great symbol: i t 's "the heathen temple", because Tess herself is a p gn from the Christian point of view: she disobeyed on'e of the 'Biblical

commandments by committing a crime. AII motifs and themes converge in the scene of pursuers approaching: the coming of light is, in fact, the coming of death; the soldiers appear at dawn. The wind dies out and nothing moves anymore, suggesting Tess's near death. AII is characterized by "reserve, taciturnity and hesitation". The scene is now ready for the ritual sacrifice. Tess is indirectly compared to a creature "lesser than a woman" whose breathing is "quick and small", thus symbolizing l "the animal" to be sacrificed. The Chance, the Blind Destiny has made its mystic j and malign influence felt once again. The picture Hardy presents of human life is not a cheerful one, but we must not exaggerate bis pessimism. Hc is capable of suggesting the vitality of the will to life and joy, of showing real moral growth (as in the case of Angel Clare) and also, in the character of Tess, of showing how the human being can rise to great dignity in suffering. And there is great dignity of her behaviour when waking up in the final scene: "It is as it should be... She stood up, shook herself, and went forward , neither of the men having rnoved. I am ready, she said quietly." Tess remains Hardy's most moving dramatization of a pure soul struggling with the inscrutable evils of existence. "Love and honour and pity and compassion and sacrifice" - these are the stuff out of which Hardy created his fiction and these are values which last.