Abstract
Thomas Hardy’sTess of the d’Urbervilles is a novel much misread when it is taken, as it is, as a realistic narrative. But misreading of this kind is what Hardy is writing about. Both the characters and the story reenact, in modern dress, the classical myth of Persephone, but there are few in the modern world, Hardy appears to be suggesting, literal-minded as we are, capable of reading mythically. Each of the characters in the novel misapprehends both his/her own identity and the meaning of the events, and does so each time with deadly consequences. But Hardy is not only illustrating in the errors of his characters the misconceptions of his age, he is making a substantive point about the act of reading itself. Reading is interpretation and whether we see a fallen woman or a mythological deity hinges on our interpretive premises. And our readings also have consequences. To read the story of Tess as a myth is to celebrate her fertility—both her physical fertility as well as her more mystical power to bring a spiritual rebirth. To see her as a fallen woman is to drive her to her death as a sinful social outcast.
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References
See, for instance, Susan David Bernstein, “Confessing and Editing: The Politics of Purity in Hardy’sTess,” in Lloyd Davis, ed.,Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 159–78 and Patricia Ingham, “Fallen Woman as Sign, and narrative Syntax in ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’,” in Peter Widdowson, ed.,Tess of the d’Urbervilles/Thomas Hardy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), pp. 80–89 (rpt. fromThomas Hardy [Feminist Readings Series] [New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989], Chapter V: “Women as Signs in the Later Novels,” pp. 61–78).
Although the word “myth” is sometimes used in connection with this novel in its common, popular, sense to refer to a false idea, as in the essay by Lynn Parker—“‘Pure Woman’ and Tragic Heroine? Conflicting Myths in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles,”Studies in the Novel 24:3 (1992): 273–81—and occasionally more strictly, as in the essay by K.R. Narayanaswamy, who takes a Jungian approach—“Archetypal Myths inTess of the D’Urbervilles,”Panjab University Research Bulletin (Arts) 13:2 (1982): 53–63—and in the book by Shirley A. Stave, who sees the mythic archetype of a great goddess in Hardy’s fictions—The Decline of the Goddess: Nature, Culture, and Women in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995)—the only critical discussion of the Demeter/Persephone myth on the pages of this narrative is, as far as I know, to be found in G. Glen Wickens’s “Hardy and the Aesthetic Mythographers: The Myth of Demeter and Persephone in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,”University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities 53∶1 (1983): 85–106. This essay has much to recommend it but fails, in my view, in a number of ways: by missing some significant parallels between the narrative and the myth; by seeing the myth as no more important than other imagistic patterns; by assuming that Hardy’s use of mythology was inspired by late Victorian aestheticism rather than by currents of thought beginning at the dawn of the century; by concluding, in consequence, that its function is aesthetic rather than thematic and substantive, hence not ultimately essential; and by failing to see the irony in the relationship between the mythic paradigm and the text.
To make it easier to find references to primary works in different editions (including the novels of Thomas Hardy), I shall refer, wherever possible, in parentheses in the text, to Books or Chapters in the works rather than particular pages in a particular publication. OfTess of the d’Urbervilles there are many editions, recent among them John Paul Riquelme, ed., Thomas Hardy,Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ser. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism (Boston & New York: Bedford Books, 1998). The edition itself is excellent, although some will find the essays limited in the possibilities of approaches they represent.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, “On Certain Principles of Art in Works of Imagination,” in hisCaxtoniana: A Series of Essays on Life, Literature, and Manners (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1864), pp. 317–19.
Unfortunately, no single work has investigated the influence of Strauss or Feuerbach in England, but Eliot’s translations, which appeared in 1846 and 1954 respectively, made these volumes highly accessible, and it is clear, from letters for instance, that many nineteenthcentury thinkers, especially in the avant-garde, were familiar with these works, as with other important landmarks in the progress of biblical criticism.
For a discussion of this subject, as it is worked out in this novel, see my “Middlemarch: The Genesis of Myth in the English Novel: The Relationship Between Literary Form and the Modern Predicament,”Religion and Literature 13:3 (1981): 107–154. A different, though ultimately not incompatible, approach to this novel may be found in Roger Travis’s “From ‘Shattered Mummies’ to ‘An Epic Life’: Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies and Dorothea’s Mythic Renewal,” above in this issue [IJCT 5.3]: 367–382.
The fact that this mythological language is a deeply embedded symbolism in the nineteenth-century novel has made it almost invisible to the contemporary reader who tends to assume that Victorian narratives have only a mimetic intent and therefore only a literal meaning. Hence, there has been little done on the uses of mythology in the nineteenth-century novel. Books, for example, like Richard JenkynsThe Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), Frank M. Turner’sThe Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), and Norman Vance’s more recent workThe Victorians & Ancient Rome (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Inc., 1997), excellent as they are in tracking the presence of major classical works through editions, libraries, intellectual societies, and educational institutions, fail to a large extent to grasp their use in the fiction of the period. And most literary criticism, whether of the novel in general or a particular author or book, focusing on mimetic questions, makes little of mythological references and rarely notes them at all, in fact, unless they are explicitly stated. Hardy’s novels are no exception. As Linda M. Shires observes ofTess in her survey of the approaches generally taken to the novel, most have regarded Hardy’s fiction “through a realist, humanist lens” (Dale Kramer, ed.,Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy [Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1999], p. 146). Even such studies as Jean R. Brooks’sThomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), which recognizes poetic elements as integral to Hardy’s purpose, have little to say on the subject of myth.Desperate Remedies, for example, is not even cited in Vance’s book nor isTess in Turner or Jenkyns. And the only work I know of that deals with the myths ofThe Mayor of Casterbridge is the discussion of this novel in Frema Ila Goody’s doctoral thesis,Image, Symbol, and Motif in Six Novels of Thomas Hardy (University of Toronto, 1977). This dissertation is remarkable for its intelligence and insight and it is greatly to be regretted it has not been published as a book. It is my hope to contribute something to remedying this situation in a work I am now completing,The Aesthetics of Poesis: The Making of Victorian Fiction, which lays the theoretic groundwork for the use of mythic symbolism, and in a study of Thomas Hardy,Desperate Remedies: The Forms of Thomas Hardy’s Fictions, which explores, among other things, the mythic frames of Hardy’s works.
Although there is hardly a classical myth that is not found in Victorian fiction, certain myths appear to have answered deeper and more compelling needs in the Victorians’ conceptual universe. One of these is the myth of Persephone and it is unfortunate that no extensive study exists of its place in Victorian thought.
As he neared the end of his life, Hardy set about destroying many of his notebooks and diaries, diminishing even the scanty record we might have had of his readings and thoughts. What remains is suggestive, however. A note, for instance, in one of his notebooks indicates that he was reading Volume I of the first two-volume edition of Sir James Frazer’sThe Golden Bough not long after it appeared in 1890 (seeThe Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Lennart A Björk, 2 vols. [New York: New York University Press, 1985], vol. 2, p. 45). In 1901, he met Frazer himself. See Michael Millgate,Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 412–3. It may be worth noting, in this connection, that John B. Vickery’s study of Frazer’s literary influence—The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973)—has virtually nothing to say about Hardy, missing, I think, this important connection largely, again, because Vickery takes Hardy’s work to be realistic.
The “1867” Notebook, as it has come to be designated from the date appearing in it, quotes two lines from this very poem (seeThe Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, vol. 2, p. 463); in one of his other literary notebooks are entered comments on Pater’s essay (seeThe Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, vol. 1, p. 31).
The best modern edition of the HomericHymn to Demeter is that of N. J. Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). In herThe Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), Helene P. Foley reprints this text along with a very good translation, although the essays may strike some as too often focused only on current critical concerns.
Although he was articled to an architect at the tender age of sixteen, Hardy for many years cherished the hope, much as his hero inJude the Obscure, that he would one day have the chance to enter one of the universities, and having begun the study of Latin early in his teenage years and of Greek later at eighteen, he worked with some diligence, though intermittently, in an attempt to perfect both. But, great as was his gift for language, languages were not his talent. He found the going rather difficult and was never fluent in Greek. See Michael Millgate,Thomas Hardy: A Biography, chapters 2 and 3.
Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1895), p. 109.
SeeThe Literary Notebooks, vol. 2, p. 45.
See, J.T. Laird,The Shaping of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 88.
In hisHardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), Dennis Taylor argues that Hardy provides two languages for Tess, one the dialect of her origins and another she has been taught at the National School she attended, one of whose purposes it was to “promote the spread of a standardized English idiom.” In these languages, Taylor suggests, are expressed two different selves, the Tess who belongs to the land she was born on and the deracinated Tess (pp. 83–4). I would add that these two selves parallel the central conflict between the modern and mythic selves.
The tide appears to be turning, however, as recent feminist criticism begins to be more critical of his abandonment of Tess. See, for example, Nina Pelikan Straus, “Emma, Anna, Tess: Skepticism, Betrayal, and Displacement,”Philosophy and Literature 18:1 (1994):72–90.
For an excellent discussion of Hardy’s treatment in this novel of the subject of social class, see Jerome H. Buckley, “Tess and the D’Urbervilles,”Victorians Institute Journal 20 (1992): 1–12.
An interesting assortment of essays exploring the use of solar myths in nineteenth-century thought and literature, all of them taking a different view from the one I offer here, can be found in the collection edited by J.B. Bullen,The Sun is God: Painting, Literature, and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Especially relevant is Bullen’s essay “The gods in Wessex exile: Thomas Hardy and mythology”.
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For many enlightening conversations as well as specific suggestions and insights on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the myth of Persephone, and myth in general I am indebted and deeply grateful to Professor Jacob Stern of the Classics Department at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
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Bonaparte, F. The deadly misreading of mythic texts: Thomas Hardy’sTess of the d’Urbervilles . Int class trad 5, 415–431 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02687695
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02687695