of class, gender, morality and the supernatural do not work; and that it is natural for
Tess to attract Alec and Angel, and may even be natural for her to kill Alec. The use
of paradox in the nineties is not confined to Shaw and Wilde.
Tessis crude in plot and in the character of Alec, but not in its natural and imag-
inative style, although at times there are clumsily learned references. After the
Chaseborough dance, for example, a village beauty jealous of Tess challenges her to
a fight. She strips off her bodice and
bared her plump neck, shoulders, and arms to the moonshine, under which they looked
as luminous and beautiful as some Praxitelean creation, in their possession of the
faultless rotundities of a lusty country girl. She closed her fists and squared up to Tess.Alec rides up and rescues her: ‘Jump up behind me’, he whispered, ‘and we’ll get shot
of the screaming cats in a jiffy!’ Melodramatic cliché! Although a female punch-up is
a subject for neo-classical laughter in Fielding’s Tom Jones, the Greek sculptor
Praxiteles has nothing to do with this episode, omitted from the serialization in the
popular Graphic. The mention of Æschylus as the curtain comes down forces a
comparison with Tragedy. But ‘the President of the Immortals’ was a phrase unfamil-
iar to classicists, and is less well introduced than Cyrus at the end ofMiddlemarch.
Hardy may have thought his pure suffering Teresa a more realistic modern counter-
part to St Theresa of Avila than was George Eliot’s martyr to idealism, Dorothea.
Having rescued Tess from the frying-pan, and the ‘screaming cats’, Alec loses his
way in the night. Tess is tired, and he stops to give her a rest, lending her his over-
coat. He goes to find out where they are, and returns.
The Chase was wrapped in thick darkness, although morning was not far off. He was
obliged to advance with outstretched hands to avoid contact with the boughs, and
discovered that to hit the exact spot from which he had started was at first entirely
beyond him. Roaming up and down, round and round, he at length heard a slight
movement of the horse close at hand; and the sleeve of his overcoat unexpectedly caught
his foot.
‘T ess!’said d’Urberville.
There was no answer. The obscurity was now so great that he could see absolutely
nothing but a pale nebulousness at his feet, which represented the white muslin figure he
had left upon the dead leaves. Everything else was blackness alike. D’Urberville stooped;
and heard a gentle regular breathing. He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his
face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and
upon her eyelashes there lingered tears.
Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above them rose the primeval yews
and oaks of The Chase, in which were poised gentle roosting birds in their last nap; and
about them stole the hopping rabbits and hares. But, might some say, where was Tess’s
guardian angel?The reader is to understand that Alec takes advantage of the sleeping ‘pure woman’:
a kind of rape. But the Chase speaks better of innocence and wrong than the heavy
question about the guardian angel. Hardy is best when he allows description to
interpret itself, as in the visionary scenes of courtship at Talbothays Dairy. He is a
great visual and symbolic storyteller, rather than a social analyst in the tradition of
the 19th-century realistic novel. The red-mouthed pure-hearted Tess is a memorable
symbolic figure.
In Jude the Obscure, a child called Old Father Time hangs his two younger siblings
and then himself, leaving a note: ‘Done because we are too menny’. Grotesque! But
FICTION 319