The novel’s final chapter, which reveals Tess’ tragic end, occurs in Winchester. There’s a beautiful description of the city: “In the valley beneath lay the city they had just left, its more prominent buildings showing as an isometric drawing - among them the cathedral tower, with its Norman windows and immense length of aisle and nave, the spires of St Thomas’, the pinnacle tower to the College and, more to the right, the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale. Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine’s Hill, further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging above it.”
This is part of a eulogistic final chapter which terminates the story abruptly, with little interest in the technical proceedings which lead to Tess’ execution. One imagines these proceedings would have fascinated Dickens and been a key part of his telling of the story, but the difference between the vision of the two authors, contemporaries, albeit from different generations, is immense. In terms of novelistic structure, Hardy flows in the line of Dickens, but in terms of world view, they diverge like separate rivers from the same confluence, one remaining in the nineteenth century, the other heading towards the raging sea of the twentieth century.
Three observations:
Curitiba
The issue of empire underpins so much of the nineteenth century novel, from Jane Eyre to Middlemarch to Vanity Fair. Enterprising men go abroad to make their fortunes and bring back unconscious issues which will plague the twentieth and twenty first centuries. One of the three key characters in Tess is Angel Clare, who also ventures abroad to seek his fortune. But he doesn’t go to the empire. He heads to Southern Brazil, via Curitiba, where nothing goes right for him. Hardy broaches the flip side of the colonial dream. Angel’s flight is a mistake and is touched by the death of a companion and barren soil. Reading the novel I almost imagined him as the counterpoint to those immigrants who have gone the other way, heading to Europe in a bid for glory, only to find the soil rocky and the streets paved with alienation. Hardy’s localised oeuvre stands in contrast to a great globalised movement which fuelled the rise of the Victorian novel. The supposed benefits were mined from colonialism, but Angel’s fate, (and by implication, that of Tess), explores the dark side of this process.
Whitman
Hardy cites Whitman in the novel. It’s one of those culture shock moments, almost as strange as if he had referenced the Velvet Underground or Caetano Veloso. There’s something so solipsistic about the Hardy world, so introverted, and yet on the other side of the mirror, lurks Whitman, a pantheism which is father to the thought of the 21st century. The roots of change are embedded in Hardy’s world in a manner that the characters themselves are scarcely aware of.
Bonny and Clyde
The novel offers Tess and Angel a (slightly) redemptive finale, as they find an epiphany in a deserted house before stumbling into the heart of the pre-industrial, pre-modern Britain, which is Stonehenge. In the brief time the novel permits them together, it is clear that they have stepped out of their societal constraints, crossed over to the other side. They are outlaws on the run, but they are also prototypical romantic heroes, closer to Baudelaire and Verlaine than Pip or Oliver Twist. It is a touching and beautiful sequence, after all the sadness the book has put them through, but it is also a declaration of war against a society whose moral scale has lost its centre, a warning shot across the bows of a seemingly stable world, trapped in hypocrisies, waiting to be ruptured.
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