Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)

The typical 19th century "romance novel", Tess is a young, pretty girl from a poor family who is seduced by her employer and flees in disgrace. Some time later she secures herself a job of dairy-maid and falls in love with the apprentice man there, learning what can be taught. They marry and she reveals her secret, only to be left in disgrace for America. She is once again seduced by her employer when her father dies and leaves the family with nothing, only to murder him upon the return of her husband, whom she had not heard from in several years. ( )

Great, tragic story. ( )

As I skim back through my old lesson plans to write up my most recent reread of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which took place in the context of teaching it, I'm impressed by the number of significant ideas and themes I took note of: evolution, history, women's roles, rape and sexual coercion, truth and selfhood, hidden psychology, and social forces are the ones I noted down-- of course there are many others, too. There's a lot going on in this novel, and you could write papers (or blog posts and blog posts; this is my third) and papers on it and only scratch the surface.

What always impresses about Hardy is his ability to link the cultural to the psychological. (I guess this is really what naturalism is all about, and he was probably its foremost British practitioner.) We perfectly understand the sometimes poor choices that Tess makes, both on the level of the cultural forces operating on her (Victorian society of course had a lot of expectations for the way women should act, which didn't always accord with what they encountered in the real world), and on the level of individual psychology (Tess always has a perfectly good reason to do what she does-- and somehow so does Angel and even Alec!). My students and I came up with the idea of "active passivity" to sum up Tess: she seems to never do anything... but not doing something often requires enormous force of will on her part. She puts so much work into not reacting so that she can fulfill what society expects of her. She's a victim of herself and her circumstances, in a way that really only a Victorian novel can depict.

melodrama - poor Tess ( )

I should have read this in high school when my favourite English teacher could not rave enough about Hardy, but I'm pretty sure I was still recovering from how much it hurt to read [b:The Mayor of Casterbridge|56759|The Mayor of Casterbridge|Thomas Hardy|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311647585s/56759.jpg|2390173] to take it up. I might add here that I'm pretty sure the edition of this book, which I brought to Ottawa with me for class, was given to me by my mother a few years ago. And yet, in a very Hardyish sense of coincidence or Fate, the name on the inside cover appears to belong to the wife of said English teacher.

Hardy's prose is masterful. His love of Tess is nearly tangible. Even while under pressure to read it for a course the book was searingly beautiful and-- It's hard to call it a joy to read on account of how unbearable the tragedy of it is, and yet I loved reading this so much.

It'll be [b:Jude the Obscure|50798|Jude the Obscure (Thrift Edition)|Thomas Hardy|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1287476966s/50798.jpg|2011241] for me next, provided my heart can take it. ( )