What I Read in July 2012

This month I was involved with two long and complex books — The Folks and Tess of the D’Urbervilles — with alternate, multiple postings. Thanks for your patience.

Ruth Suckow, The Folks. This 1934 novel tells the lives of an Iowa couple, the Fergusons, and their extended family, beginning before World War I and ending during the Great Depression. I have commented by sections:

Ruth Suckow, The Folks (Parts 1 and 2)
Ruth Suckow, The Folks ~ Continued (Parts 3 and 4)
Ruth Suckow, The Folks ~ Concluded (Parts 5 and 6)

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Sarah (A Rat in the Book Pile) and I have been reading this classic together and commenting jointly.
I – The Maiden and Maiden No More
II – The Rally and The Consequence
III – The Woman Pays and The Convert
IV – Fulfillment

Pietra Rivoli, The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy. I learned about globalization in Paris z dozen years ago. I penetrated into a real French department store (no English spoken here) and went looking for t-shirts. I didn’t know what they are called in French, of course, but I quickly learned they are called t-shirts. In this fascinating book, an economist follows her t-shirt on its travels, beginning in the cotton fields of Texas and ending in the second-hand market of Dar Es Salaam.

Michael Lewis, Moneyball. I avoid professional sports and I avoid talking about professional sports, so who would predict I would enjoy this book about how to manage a professional baseball team when you don’t have a lot of money to spend on star players? It’s a great little morality tale about conventional wisdom in any area of life.

I have posted on the two books together: Not Dismal at All.

Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March. Three generations of the Trotta family serve and are served by the long-lived Hapsburg Franz Joseph, ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Neither Franz Joseph nor the Trottas survive the Great War.

Yoko Ogawa, The Diving Pool. This book contains three novellas by the author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. Each story is told in first person and is unsettling in some way. I found the narratives hard to understand and the emotions difficult to relate to. The author’s detached tone worked for me in The Housekeeper and the Professor, but leaves these stories outside my circle of enjoyment.

Paul Krugman, The Conscience of a Conservative. New York Times columnist and Novel laureate (economics) describes the ups and downs of liberal programs in modern America and suggests areas for improvement. The book, published in 2007, does not include the collapse of the housing bubble, the ensuing financial crisis or the election of Obama.

Geraldine Brooks, March. Pulitzer-Prize winning novel imagines the story of Mr. March, the father of the four girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. In that book, March is with the troops, but we do not hear what he is doing there. In this book, we find that his life is greatly changed by his wartime experiences.

Josephine Johnson, Now In November. This 1930s Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel brings us hard times on the farm. A family struggles to extract enough from the natural world to deal with the outside world of hard time economics and the cruel circumstances of a drought.

Tess of the D”Urbervilles ~ Part IV

Sarah and I complete our discussion of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Nancy:

In our last post, we commented on Phases Five (The Woman Pays) and Six (The Convert). That leaves Phase Seven, Fulfillment, which is short but merits a post of its own. It’s like the finale of a symphony Here Hardy completes the life of Tess and sounds again all the themes we have heard before.

If life is a journey, then Hardy’s characters are traveling all the time. They use whatever transportation is available, but mostly they walk. Angel first sees Tess when he is on a walking trip. Tess walks to her new job at the Dairy and, later, to the upland farm. She makes a long walk to try to visit Angel’s parents and, on the weary return re-encounters Alec. They move, these characters; they experience the landscape and its inhabitants close up and on foot.

Phase Seven completes the journey. Angel returns to Tess from Brazil — and from farther than that in his understanding. When she turns him away, he leaves on foot, too impatient to wait for a train. She follows him. They make a last long walk until their journey ends at Stonehenge in the middle of a very dark night. It strikes me that, for the first time in their experience of each other, Angel and Tess are united. They know the worst of each other, but now he insists that they travel on together.

Sarah:

There is a pronounced correlation between the topology of the terrain, their travels, with their travails.  It is probably a superficial parallel, but at the very end, as Angel and ‘Liza-Lu walk up the slope away from the city, I was tempted to make a connection with A Pilgrim’s Progress.  If there is such a connection then it doesn’t seem as if it were a happy one.  There are still hills to climb and the Celestial City is nowhere to be seen.  This was another point in the novel where I suspected a kind of malevolent authorial presence.  As Tess is ground down by an inevitable fate which derives from societal values and her personal reaction to social restraints I can almost feel Hardy’s own despair over her fate, and an exasperation with the society which has forced his hand ”Look what you made me do!”  It is, as you previously observed, Nancy, a very bitter novel.  Bitterest of all is the ending which conforms to a stiff kind of moral code in which the chaste are rewarded.  That it does so without conviction seems to convey authorial contempt for those values and perhaps for his Victorian reader.

Nancy:

Stonehenge. It is unexpected, those great stone pillars.

The next pillar was isolated; others composed a trilithon; others were prostrate, their flanks forming a causeway… and it was soon obvious that they made up a forest of monoliths grouped upon the grassy expanse of the plain. The couple advanced further into this pavilion of the night till they stood in its midst.

“It is Stonehenge!” said Clare.

“The heathen temple, you mean?”

“Yes. Older than the centuries; older than the d’Urbervilles!”

Angel rejected his father’s unquestioning religious faith. When trouble came, he learned that he had not cast off a concept of purity which derived from his father’s faith. Tess had adopted Angel’s attitudes toward religion, not because she understood them but because they were his. Meanwhile, Alec adopted and then dropped whatever beliefs suited his needs at that time. Now we are in the final place of truth, and that truth is “older than the d’Urbervilles.” Do the men who surround the couple that dark night and take Tess into custody represent the new standards adopted since pagan times? Or do they represent the older truth that we cannot escape the consequences of what we do?

Sarah:

Yes and yes.  I think your question is a fine illustration of the complexity and ambiguity of Hardy.  This is a novel which protests against societal mores and against religious dogma but does not, I think, purport to have all the answers.  Perhaps what is advocated here is the freedom to assess and determine, each according to his own lights.  But this comes with an implicit warning.  This is not a licence to play the system.  Angel appears to make real progress, to reassess and reformulate his values,  whereas Alec lacks sincerity and Tess adopts the values of another, a mistake that leads her into grievous error.  These last two suffer the ultimate penalty for their lack of moral rigour, but Angel’s projected future has something of the incongruous about it.  Too pat, too perfect; at heart we cannot believe in contentment for Angel.  At best a puling facsimile of happiness awaits him.

Nancy:

As I finished Tess I was taken back to the earlier book we read together, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. The settings are very different but the time period is about the same and there are some parallels in the women’s situations. Both are “fallen women” by their community standards. Carrie is much more pragmatic about what she requires out of life, while Tess feels shame, especially because she allowed herself to be deceived without love. Both are willing to accept support from a man — under the right circumstances — but both want to work on their own behalf when they have that option. Carrie leaves an unsatisfactory husband without looking back and takes satisfaction if her freedom. Tess, on the other hand, feels “owned” by the man who has possession of her.

He [Alec] has come between us and ruined us…. You didn’t come back to me, and I was obliged to go back to him.

Tess has a very deep belief that she belongs to somebody, whether Alec or Angel, and this governs what would otherwise be a rather independent spirit, as shown by her determination to support herself, even by hard labor, when she can. Not married to Alec, she could have left him at any time, which makes nonsense of “Too late, too late!” when Angel comes to reclaim her.  Only after Alec’s death did she feel free of him. There is also a primitive implication that his violation of her also dishonored her husband: “his wrong to you through me.”

Hardy’s subtitle for Tess of the D’Urbervilles is “A Pure Woman,” and so we need to think about the meaning of purity. Is it primarily the absence of any illicit sexual experience? Hardy does not explain and rarely  uses the words “pure” or “impure” in his text. One of the few times he does is near the end. Tess seeks Angel on the road. and he is still her ideal man.

To her he was, as of old, all that was perfection, personally and mentally. He was still her Antinous, her Apollo even; his sickly face was beautiful as the morning to her affectionate regard on this day no less than when she first beheld him; for was it not the face of the one man on earth who had loved her purely, and who had believed in her as pure.

Angel did believe once in her purity, but what happened after that belief was shattered makes it difficult to understand this passage. Has Tess become quite mad and returned in her own mind to a past in which Angel did love her purely? Or is the fact that Angel once believed her to be pure more important than anything else that has happened? Is Hardy mocking “purity” or does he want us to accept the meaning Tess gives to it?

Sarah:

Strange that we have chosen two books with similar themes.  On a more simplistic level than your comparison I was aware that Tess was easier for me to engage with. US cities of the Sister Carrieperiod were an alien landscape for me, while rural eighteenth century Wessex doesn’t pose many difficulties to my understanding, although I got the impression that you were equally at home in this locale, Nancy.

The definition of purity is at the very center of Tess. I think the answer, at least to Hardy’s take on purity and Angel’s epiphany, comes earlier, in Angel’s self-reproaches.

“He had undergone some strange experiences in his absence; he had seen the virtual Faustina in the literal Cordelia, a spiritual Lucretia in a corporeal Phryne; he had thought of the woman taken and set in the midst as one deserving to be stoned, and the wife of Uriah being made a queen; and he had asked himself why he had not judged Tess constructively rather than biographically, by the will rather than the deed?”

Purity is intention rather than deed, but this doesn’t really help us, as Tess is not the innocent victim of Alec.  By her own admission she erred, not so much in deed as in thought.

One might argue a Platonistic interpretation, in which the archetypal Tess is pure of spirit.  This is the Tess that may be perceived by an effort of will, and it is this effort which Tess values in Angel  Finally, I am somewhat confused.  My instinctive feeling is that Hardy is redefining ‘purity’ in less Puritan terms, but I am not convinced that the evidence bears this out.

Thanks for doing this, Nancy.  I don’t reread as much as I would like, and Tess was well worth a revisit.  I didn’t actually like it that much on the first occasion and have suspected for a long while that I didn’t do it justice.  Your company and insight along the way have made the read doubly enjoyable and rewarding.

Nancy:

Thank you. I have enjoyed it. The distance between us is geographical, not psychological.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Part III

“The three o’clock sun shone full upon him, and the strange enervating conviction which had been gaining ground in Tess ever since she had heard his words distinctly, was at last established as a fact indeed. The preacher was Alec D’Urberville.”

Sarah and I continue to read Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles together.

Sarah:

In The Woman Pays, Angel, now fully and ingloriously acquainted with Tess’ past, effectively casts her off. In the intricate manoeuvring which follows the disclosure, social convention, religious dogma and financial considerations all have their place, at the expense of former romantic reasoning. Angel’s ability to look beyond the prescribed is sorely tested. It fails.

The complex responses of the pair are hard to sift through. Tess appears infinitely malleable to Angel’s proclamations, but there is a suggestion that had she employed “wiles” she might have achieved an outcome conceivably more advantageous to both parties. While Angel appears intransigent and blinkered in his responses, his sleepwalking episode allows a glimpse of his subconscious which insists that his response is built not on a logical response to received wisdom but a genuinely instinctive reaction derived from belief. Under these circumstances we would have to question the value of artificially circumventing Angel’s convictions. Is it wisdom on Tess’ part to accept without argument what Angel lays down, and are there any (readerly) grounds for a sympathetic response to Angel’s stand?

Nancy:

I could not find any sympathy for Angel, who not only makes Tess miserable but also destroys his own hopes for any happiness. Angel’s reactions were not based on such analysis of outcomes; his first and spontaneous remarks reflect his deepest sense of reality. She asks for his forgiveness.

‘O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case. You were one person; now you are another. My God — how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque prestidigitation as that!”

Now you are another — Tess is not who he thought she was, and he is unable to consider having anything to do with a different Tess. He may not be able to control his initial response, but he certainly could have controlled how he handled it after the first blow. Then his shallowness and deference to convention become very clear.

And yet…. If Tess had used wiles — and maybe a little healthy defiance — it might have delayed their separation until he could have begun to see it differently. This is like Greek tragedy. Their respective character flaws make it impossible for them to understand each other and where their actions will lead.

Sarah:

Through a variety of mishaps which lead, almost inevitably, one from the other, Tess is finally driven to seek employment at a god-forsaken stony arable farm:

“The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was a stretch of a hundred odd acres, in one patch, on the highest ground of the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets – the outcrop of siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes.”

It sounds like a Dantean description of hell, a circle reserved for ‘impure’ women. Disaster has struck Tess twice now and, if memory serves, each disaster has been preceded by a descent (or fall) into a pleasant vale, and each catastrophe is succeeded by a climb back up to the heights. On this latter occasion the heights are markedly unpleasant, and the subtext is that Tess is being punished. But by whom?

Nancy:

The contrast between the lush world of dairying and romance and the hard world of field work under a harsh master is almost heavy handed. At times I felt like saying, yes, I get the point.

I suppose Tess is being punished, but if we round up the usual suspects there are too many of them. First, she is punished by her own acceptance that she is damaged goods. Then she suffers from Angel learning that she is not the woman he thought she was (true, but he thought wrong). Alec uses the situation for his own benefit. The chorus of neighbors and field workers give us conventional opinions. I sense a deeper bitterness in Hardy. The world is unfair and the rain falls on the just and on the unjust, but most especially on the powerless.

Sarah:

The Convert is a phase of flux. Alec D’Urberville makes a reappearance in a variety of guises, notably this last, pantomime villain-like:

“The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his appearance in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now worn only by the most old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled her as to its bearing. D’Urberville emitted a low long laugh.”

The changeability of Alec and Angel has been amply demonstrated, but it is only with her remonstrative letter to Angel that we finally begin to see a waver in the previously steadfast Tess…

Nancy:

As you say, “a phase of flux.” They are both shifting, as Alec becomes a preacher, but then loses his faith, and Angel off in Brazil reconsiders his attitudes. Even Tess weakens in her love for and faithfulness to Angel. Alec’s is essentially a false nature. He was false when he first wooed Tess; he deceives himself and others when he becomes a preacher; then at the first excuse he abandons holiness. Truth and falsity are a recurrent theme in this book, going back to the old, true D’Urbervilles and the new D’Urberville imposters. Hardy seems to mock them both.

The characterization is brilliant. Alec is sure of himself, but that is because he takes nothing very seriously.

If there’s nobody to say, “Do this, and it will be a good thing for you after you are dead; do that, and it will be a bad thing for you,” I can’t warm up. Hang it, I am not going to feel responsible for my deeds and passions if there’s nobody to be responsible to; and if I were you, my dear, I wouldn’t either.

Angel is sure of himself, but has so little self understanding that he fails the first real test of his beliefs. Tess is pushed this way and that but she at least has a core sense of responsibility that the others lack. The most attractive characters are solid right through. Tess’ mother is permissive, live and let live — that’s what she is. Angel’s father has uncompromising religious tenets, but he really means them, and lives them.

Sarah:

Thank you, Nancy. I still can’t justify my unwonted sympathy for Angel, but your Greek tragedy analogy is helpful. But perhaps we will both feel differently come the end…

Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Dialog – Part II

Sarah (A Rat in the Book Pile) and I continue our joint reading of Thomas Hardy’s novel.

Phase the Third: The Rally

Nancy: When I was a child my maternal grandparents still had a farm in western Pennsylvania. We went there every summer, and my brothers and I helped with the cows and the milking. There was nothing mechanical about it; my grandmother sat on a stool by the cow, pressed her head into its flank, and pulled the teats with very strong hands.

With this background I became absorbed in the routines of the Wessex dairy at which Tess works as a milkmaid, hoping to distance herself from those who knew of her seduction and illegitimate child. It all seems so familiar. At dawn the cows are milked in the barton (barnyard) and then amble out to the mead (pasture or meadow). In the afternoon they are driven back (kids love to do this) and milked again. Meanwhile the milkmaids are skimming — lifting the cream which rises to the stop of the milk after it has been permitted to stand — and making cheese and butter.

Whether or not you were present at milking as a child, pay attention. We are in an agricultural world, in which people use the powers of nature to form their lives. The rhythm of the work day is dictated by the needs of the cows. Mutual accommodation between the animals and the people who tend them produces a comfortable living within a social structure where each knows his place. After her terrible experiences, Tess enters this world with hope.

Let the truth be told — women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there’s life there’s hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to the ‘betrayed’ as some amiable theorists would have us believe.

I find Tess’ optimism to be compatible with the environment Hardy so warmly portrays. Still, I find his statement tricky to interpret. Is it only women who regain their spirits? Why would “amiable theorists” believe that betrayed women can have no hope?

Sarah: I too enjoyed Hardy’s depiction of the dairy, although for me the magic is a new thing created, rather than a memory evoked.  (Your childhood memories are wonderful, Nancy.)  The earthy and detailed descriptions of animal husbandry suggest to me that Hardy is covertly emphasising the relation between his characters and biological functions, with reference to the “nature” with which humanity found itself reunited in the aftermath of Darwin.  It felt as if he were trying to expose some kind of hypocrisy in this section.

I rather felt that it wasn’t so much only women who regain their spirits as only women that “endure such humiliations,” but if it is only women who regain their spirits then…

And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a Fetichistic utterance in a Monotheistic setting: women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature retain in their souls far more of the Pagan fantasy  of their remote forefathers than of the systemised religion taught their race at later date.

…I think Hardy is suggesting that pagan religions (which are perhaps essentially embedded in this rural existence) resonate with women in a way that phallocentric Christianity does not.  Clearly, by my choice of words, I have some sympathy with this point of view.  Who are Hardy’s “amiable theorists?”  (The narrator/author is hardly neutral at this point!)  Perhaps they are the same ones who self-righteously cite childbirth as women’s punishment for Eve’s transgression.

Phase the Fourth: The Consequence

Nancy: Working temporarily at the dairy is Angel Clare, the youngest son of a clergyman. He is learning the business of dairying by participating in the work. Angel has rejected the family connections of church and university in favor of training to be a farmer. He finds Tess very attractive, and their relationship begins promisingly enough. Although he is of the gentry and she is not, unlike Alex D’Urberville he respects her.

Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life — a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself.

I wonder if this is what Angel Clare really thinks, or what Hardy thinks.

Sarah: We are also told that Angel Clare is precipitate with a “tinge of recklessness.”  I find it credible that Clare perceives Tess in this commendable manner (certainly he is a man who reasons) but will his ideals hold up under pressure?  I’d be inclined to give Hardy the benefit of the doubt at this moment.  I don’t feel that he is compromising character to drive either theme or plot.

Nancy: All through this phase of the novel we follow the growing attraction between Angel and Tess. Angel is concerned about their their differing levels of social status and education. On the other hand, Tess would make an exemplary farmer’s wife. His concept of her includes terms like “virginal” and “chaste.” He also feels that he can educate her to a higher social status; learning that she is a D’Urberville strengthens him in this belief.

Tess, on the other hand is terrified that he may learn of her past. She almost hopes someone else will tell him. At least three times she tries to tell him herself. Once time the message goes astray through chance; the other times Angel trivializes anything she may have to say. Still, she could have persisted.

She had not told. At the last moment her courage failed her, she feared his blame for not telling him sooner; and her instinct of self-preservation was stronger than her candour.

Hardy implies that the difference in their social backgrounds contributes to their mutual misunderstanding. Clare cannot imagine that any girl as lovely as Tess could have had any past of which he would disapprove. Tess cannot imagine that Angel — who repeatedly promises to cherish and care for her — would not be able to continue to do so.

Chekhov has pointed out that if you introduce a gun in the first act, you had better fire it before the play is over. We are about the enter the next phase and its title is “The Woman Pays.”

Sarah: After the earthiness of Phase III, Phase IV seems to be underpinned by pure romance.  Both phases are relatively light-hearted, but as you suggest Nancy, the past is merely in abeyance for these charmed pages of Tess’ life.

My edition refers frequently to the initial serialisation of the novel, which apparently caused the story to be chopped into parts more or less arbitrarily, lacking the serial driven structure that you would find in a novel by, for instance, Dickens.  I hope, at least, that the end of Phase IV was used to good dramatic effect.  Despite previous encounters with the story in many guises, and hence a clear recall of plot development, reaching the end of Phase IV and having to stop was a tremendously effective cliff-hanger!

Nancy: Yes! It was so bad that, after writing my comments above, I leafed ahead a few pages to find out what happened next.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Dialog – Part I

Last year Sarah of A Rat in the Book Pile joined with me in a two-person discussion of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. A fine time was had by both us. Now we are beginning a similar dialog about Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Here is the first of our planned posts.

Nancy (Silver Threads) and I have settled on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles for a joint reading project. While I have read the novel previously (albeit some two decades past) Nancy has not, so we shall be able to contrast her first impressions with my secondary impressions. We are not worrying too much about spoilers as the story must be almost universally familiar.

The novel is divided into phases, with reference to which, for our purposes, it is roughly divisible into four convenient parts.

Phase I and Phase II

Phase I introduces Tess, a country lass and, in the technical sense of the word, maiden. In the course of this fast-moving first phase Tess is shipped out to the D’Urbevilles by her parents who see a chance to advance the causes of their family by prostituting their daughter. (This is my interpretation of Hardy’s meaning, and it may be a point with which to take issue.) Machinations abound on both sides, but while the Durbeyfields (senior) seek to play their cards to advantage Alec D’Urberville is not playing by the rules, and Tess will come to grief in a manner which her parents, with a more realistic assessment of their daughter’s character, might have predicted.

Sarah:

It’s fascinating, through the end notes, to contrast this, the 1912 version of Tess, with the original serialisation which was published in Victorian times. In the original Hardy was obliged to have Tess take part in a fake marriage ceremony in which she was genuinely deceived, and by this means he might ‘legitimately’ refer obliquely to a pregnancy. The updated account of the congress between Tess and Alec, and Tess’ subsequent reflections on the matter are somewhat ambivalent. I wondered, Nancy, how you read this section, both in terms of what Hardy intends to convey, and with reference to his thematic concerns?

Nancy:

My edition is Penguin 2001, with several prefaces by Hardy. The last of these is dated 1912 and uses the expression”the present edition”. Nowhere do I see anything about a fake marriage ceremony. This makes a big difference in my assessment of Tess’ willingness to have the relations with Alec which lead to her pregnancy. As I read the situation, Tess was conflicted about her feelings for Alex, but it was not a rape. When she returns home she says to him:

If I had gone for love o’ you, if I had ever sincerely loved you, if I loved you still, I should not so loathe and hate myself for my weakness as I do now! … My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all.

Tess’ criticism of herself is not for having had relations outside of marriage, but for doing it without true love, as a temporary weakness.

The parents of Tess did not consider it prostituting their daughter when they followed the standard practice at the time to seek an “establishment” for an unmarried daughter, especially if she is attractive. It was a practical solution when the family had not much money and because so little satisfactory employment was available. Actually, the middle and upper classes did it too, seeking family security and advancement (see Trollope). It is hard to criticize the humble folk for having the same aspirations.

Sarah’s response:

I was impressed by Hardy’s ambition. In the times he was writing for it would have been much harder to get people on side with a ‘fallen woman’ as opposed to the exploited victim (which he was pretty much forced to do initially.) He treads a very fine line.  Tess is not devolved of all responsibility and Alec has redeeming features.

I still struggle to have much sympathy with the behaviour of Tess’ mother. She hints that Tess can manoeuvre Alec if she uses sex as a tool, although I admit that she is not judgemental when this backfires. I agree with you that comely daughters were certainly commodities, I will be interested to see if Hardy takes a stand on this point.

Sarah:

In this first section Hardy exhibits all the traits which make him one of my favourite authors. Compassion and empathy and description. His retelling of the “woman’s club-walking,” which is a pretext for May Day dancing works on a variety of levels, not least the most obvious one; Hardy’s ability to recreate in gorgeous detail the bucolic, as applied to both the locale and the people.

I love this description of the women’s attire:

Their first exhibition of themselves was in a processional march of two and two round the parish. Ideal and real clashed slightly as the sun lit up their figures against the green hedges and creeper-laced house fronts; for, though the whole troop wore white garments, no two whites were alike among them. Some approached pure blanching; some had a blueish pallor; some worn by the older characters (which had possibly lain by folded for many a year) inclined to a cadaverous tint, and to a Georgian style.

It underscores one of Hardy’s themes in this novel. Subtitled A Pure Woman, the novel strips Tess of ‘purity,’ almost from the outset, so we may infer that Hardy means to redefine ‘purity’ beyond the narrow Victorian purview. Another, not unrelated, concern of Hardy’s is with societal structure and convention and authority. Is it pertinent that the novel begins not with Tess but with her father and the parson?

Nancy:

I love the scene with the parson and old Durbeyfield’s discovery that he is the true descendant of an ancient and honorable family. Later, when we meet the current D’Urbervilles we meet a family which is neither ancient nor honorable and has the use of the name under false pretenses. Alex performs a double deception, not letting his mother know that Tess is a D’Urberville and not letting Tess know that he is not. Without that opening scene these later discoveries would not have had such impact. Also, the parson’s address of “Good night, Sir John” is ironic, but is taken entirely seriously by old Durbeyfield. The theme of truth and falsity, the genuine and the fake is strong in my reading up to this point.

Sarah’s response:

The contrast between the true D’Urberville and the fake is quite complex, though. When Alec lies with Tess there is a passage about the D’Urbervilles of old doing the same, and less gently, as they return from valiant acts of courage. Hardy seems to hint at a cruel poetic justice.

I suspect that Hardy will turn out to have a problem with the parson and religion. The association of the parson with a social construct of no practical application may not be trivial.

Sarah:

Phase II is entitled Maiden no More and in this shorter and less dramatic episode, an almost soft focus account of Tess’ subsequent travails details her ignominious return, her pregnancy, motherhood, the loss of her child and an assault on her Christian faith.

A surprising aspect of this section is the almost casual acceptance by all of Tess’ plight. Do you think Hardy deliberately ratchets down the tension here? If so, how is he progressing his moral argument in this section?

Nancy:

I also noted a change in tone in this section. The ultimate disgrace has taken place, but everyone is moderately calm about it. As her mother says, “‘Tis nater, after all; and what do please God.” Tess’ father is a little more severe, but then he is the last of the D’Urbervilles. Most of the grief is felt by Tess, and this must be Hardy’s intention. I compare this with a standard Victorian plot where the pure but naive young woman is betrayed by her true love for a false man. Tess did not have a true love for the false man. Perhaps the drop in tension is to let the reader see that Tess judges herself more harshly than others do. Tess believes that she betrayed herself and was not a victim or her finer feelings but of weakness.

Sarah’s response:

Thank you Nancy. Your final paragraph is a fine summary of the plot so far.

What I Read in December 2012

John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. I had thought I was pretty good with numbers, but Paulos would like to get me onto a higher plane with logarithms and probability. His ideas are worthwhile and most of his complaints are valid, but he is a bit of a scold.

Laura Lippman, Charm City. Tess Monaghan continues to develop her skills as a private investigator in Baltimore — “charm city.” If you are following the series, this is the book in which Tess acquires Esskay, the rescue greyhound. She also has a boy friend but that relationship is not working out as well as the one with the dog.

Philip Roth, The Counterlife. The two Zuckerman brothers grow up together in New Jersey. Henry becomes a dentist; Nathan becomes a famous novelist. One lives, one dies. Two live, two die. Lives are exchanged, lives are fantasized. Characters are created, characters die, characters just up and leave.

Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott. Another biography of the 19th century author, read as part of my continuing preparation for my ABC course: Alcott, Boston, Concord.

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale. Wry 1930s novel about love and the literary life. No, not love exactly, but gentility and what it permits the class-bound characters to know of love.

Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge. I like Hardy and his stories of country people, people who are not so simple as they may first appear. Still, life goes hard for his characters. They may be the authors of their own doom, but does it need to be so bad?

Louisa May Alcott, Eight Cousins. One of Alcott’s books for young people, written several years after her very successful Little Women. One girl, Rose, plus seven Campbell boys make up the eight cousins. The sequel, Rose in Bloom, follows Rose into young womanhood.

Sinclair Lewis, Main Street. Life in Gopher Prairie is not easy for a young wife who does not know what she wants, but does know that she can’t find it in this dusty small town in the upper Midwest.

Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria ha Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years. Some promoter must have written that subtitle. Nevertheless, this story of malaria convinces me that malaria has been important in human history and is not going to away any more than the mosquito is going to go away.