Tess and Joyce’s Portrait: a Possible Parallel

Abstract

A scene at the end of Stephen Dedalus’ experience on the beach (ch. 4, section 3) in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) bears comparison with another in Tess (1891). The episode in Hardy’s novel occurs at a point in the Third Phase, ‘The Rally’, where the attraction (mainly idealized) between Tess and Angel Clare is just beginning to develop. Aware of the defilement of her body (her ‘corporeal blight’, ch. 19) when she was entrapped by Alec in the Chase, the anxiety-ridden Tess is eager to dismiss the past. She longs to renounce physical emotion and to attain spiritual liberation where the soul is disentangled from the body. This disembodiment, she tells the Dairyman at Talbothays, involves lying ‘on the grass at night and look[ing] straight up at some big bright star; and, by fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds o’ miles away from your body, which you don’t seem to want at all’ (ch. 18). In this trancelike and transcendent state of being, Tess rises into higher realms and partakes of the infinite. She is held in a dreamlike mystic moment of visionary ecstasy and relaxation, which momentarily stills her fear of the actual. She is ‘refining herself out of existence’ — to borrow a phrase from A Portrait. Matter is changed into spirit.