First. Let me say. Spoilers. As in, only read this post if you've either read this book or are certain you never will. Fair warning.
Now. Where do I start? I picked this up with such joy and put it down with such saddness. But that's not quite right.
I picked it up with expectation, fell in love with the image of frothy-white-frocked maidens on a green field dancing in the twilight, wishing for more partners - and the traveler who paused and danced with every girl he could before hurrying off to catch up with his brothers.
That man turned out to be Angel Clare, and boy... oh boy...
First, can I say, WHAT A SAD STORY this is!?
Okay, now I can go on.
Angel doesn't dance with Tess, and though he danced with many girls, as he ran off he caught her staring and felt sorry he had not danced with this one. But he had to leave.
Let me start from the beginning and put this in my own, un-fancy words. (edit: I know this is long - but hey - it's shorter than the book!)
Tess of the d'Ubervilles begins with a parson telling a poor man about long-dead high-falutin relatives. Scene two: the dance of country girls on the lawn. Then Tess's father is too drunk to take the bees in to be sold the next morning, so Tess does. She falls asleep driving, collides with another cart, and the horse is killed. Bad for poor family's welfare, obviously. Tess blames herself to an extreme. Her parents beg her to go ask help from their newly discovered relatives, who aren't actually d'Ubervilles, but just took on the name - however that works. She does as a punishment to herself. She meets Alec d'Uberville who... I know it's horrible... rapes her. She goes home and her mom is barely sympathetic. *Cue shrug.* "You know - it happens. But why didn't you get him to marry you???"
She stays home, her heart healing, for a couple years, then goes off to be a milkmaid at T-something's farm. Forgot the name. There she meets Angel Clare (can I say right now that I hate that name? What can the author mean by it?). Angel falls in love with her as a specimen of perfect, innocent womanly beauty. Tess's three roommates are in love with him, but he loves only her. He proposes and she refuses. For a couple months he pursues her and she says no, thinking to never marry because truthfully she is the wife of another man, as she sees it. Finally she gives in. She puts off the wedding as long as she can, trying to work up the truth to tell him of the rape. Finally she writes him a letter, which slips under his rug and is never seen by him. Her mother tells her not to tell, but she tries to tell him on the day of the wedding. He says he'll hear it later. That night, he confesses to having been promiscuous with a girl in earlier years, and she forgives him. Then she tells him her sin (sin?? is being raped a sin??) and he blows up. "You are not the girl I knew!!! Tess is dead!" kind of thing. They live awkwardly in the same house for three days. Tess blames herself completely.
One night, Angel sleepwalks into her room and picks her up, moaning, "Tess is dead! Dead, dead, dead!" He holds her at the top of the stairs, and the narrator speaks of how her devotion to him is such that she would not care if he threw her down them. He carries her out to the river and across a narrow bridge, finally laying her in a stone coffin that was a sort of tourist attraction there. She sits up, stirs him into going home, and doesn't tell him what passed, cherishing the knowledge that he does still love her. She sees her loss of him as her due punishment.
Angel leaves for Brazil. Tess goes home, spends the allowance he gives her on her family, and is forced into working again to survive. She takes a horrible hard job and ends up working with two of her old roommates from T's farm. She could go to his parents for money but she's too proud, too ashamed. She does, one day, but she accidentally overhears his two brothers say awful things about her, and turns back, creating, as the narrator points out, "the greatest misfortune in her life," as his parents are actually lovely people. Just after this she meets Alec again. He stalks her. Eventually she writes Angel a letter pleading for him, saying she'd be happy as a slave in his house, just being near him. (does this sound a little like Twilight to anyone else? - Bella's insane obsession with Edward?)
Angel's heart, by the harshness of life in Brazil, is changed. He comes back - but too late. She has married Alec, who saved her family from starvation after her father died suddenly. Upon seeing Angel, though, she is so overcome that she kills Alec and the two go on the run. They have a few happy days together before the law catches up with them, and Tess is hanged. Angel marries her sister Lisa-Lu because Tess asked him too.
The end.
Great, huh? I know your mouth is just hanging open right now. But that's just the way it happened. Just when you thought they were going to have happily ever after, you get a cinched rope. Lovely. Thomas Hardy, apparently, is very fatalistic and saw the world as he portrayed it in Tess. Oh yay. More lovely.
And it's hard for me, because in my black-and-white Perciever (that's a personality style) mind, I have to either love or reject things, not waver in the middle. I don't know how to. So I'm caught, because the prose of this book was BEAUTIFUL and I really loved reading about half of it. Then it got rather dismal as Tess worked at hard places and our perfect-man-Angel had fallen off his high pedestal. But I thought it was in preparation for the soaring ending, complete with apologies and sunsets.
No.
Why? Why? Why?
I'm gonna share some thoughts from my journal over the last 24 hours:
(The moment I finished:)
Oh my, what a sad book! "The Fulfillment," indeed! [the last chapter was titled that] The fulfillment of his fatalistic agenda! I should not have read it if I'd known the worldview of the author! - Thank God for the after-word - it redeems it somewhat. I suppose I can take some things from it - like that Tess is just the kind of person I want to speak up for - those who destroy themselves with guilt.
Fatalistic. How opposite of me! I do not so much see myself as Tess as see the book on my floor as containing another world fuming with black smoke that obscures my inner sun.
Angel Clare is so abhorrent to me. Why did I not hate both him and Tess earlier? Even Angel Clare's name is abhorrent - feminine, as he was - a scared girl of a man who ran off to Brazil at the first sign of imperfection in his devoted bride. Yet the T's farm scenes were so winning!
Poor Tess - and yet wretched Tess! She let self-condemnation be her undoing. How pathetic!
Alec is of course a jaunty villain, invariably variable, consistently awful. (You'll understand that if you've read it.)
I wondered, while I was reading, why Nature or the landscapes and a confusing attention to random details of theology should be wanted - I see now; the author had an ulterior agenda.
That I would not read books quite so! Books like Enna Burning [I hear it's supposed to end well but it's so dark for Shannon Hale!], , and Tess! Books that burn as much as they light, anger as much as they teach, and expose to such ugliness no matter how beautiful their prose!
It is still settling on me, Tess is dead! Tess, Tess of the white floaty dresses, of the impertinent turn of the head when Alec tried to give her "the kiss of mastery," Tess of Blackmoor Vale, so well described you could breathe the air thick with soil and mist. Tess the oldest, the wisest of all of her siblings and parents. Tess the milkmaid, Tess the tender lover, Tess the truthful. Tess the woebegone. Tess the proud. Tess the heartbroken. Tess of the d'Ubervilles, driven insane by Alec and Angel, two men of evil turns, one by principle, the other by vice. Tess - you comedy of a tragic lover! How can one be quite so selfless as you and still have a self to love with? And how can you walk willingly to your death, so calm, so passive, so believing in the good of those around you and the horridness of yourself?
And why not Izz or M - what's her name - Tess's roommates who loved Angel? Why her sister? So strange. But then the tale is strange. It ought to have ended differently. I was all prepared for the fulfillment. When she stood on the carpet in her fashionable attire at the inn, with Alec upstairs, telling Angel the horrible truth, I could not quite believe it. Tess - the faithful!
It's a hard thing to put a soul through - a story like that! What a wretched, beautiful story, and I must write to Mandi about it in the morning.
(Today:)
It was here, on this seat in my closet by the window - a seat made out of a box of memories topped with my silk sham pillow - that I began "Tess of the d'Ubervilles." It was (is) so beautiful, those starting scenes. Yet I expected the rape to be the reason for redemption, not the cinch of her downfall.
How can I abide this?
I see no other way. I'll have to accept and love it and own that it has a bad ending. I'll re-write it to "Angel comes home, bursting in on her and Alec just in time, Angel raging at him, then raging to Tess about his miserable self, and putting her up in a mansion, and her family also, and their families both getting on as good friends. They would ride the waves of Alec's fury side by side, and together fight for greater freedoms for women, searching the Bible for God's view of women and whose sin rape really is. They would cling to the story of grace for the woman to whom Jesus said, "Go and sin no more." And Alec would drink himself half to death and then leave the country upon hearing that he will be prosecuted for his rape. He goes to Brazil and dies of a fever, and Tess's three roommates eventually marry well." (I mean, two of them tried to kill themselves when Angel left, after all.)
There, tis done. I have a quiet brain now. Nothing is coming. Nothing bubbles up screaming to be spoken of.
And so it is now. I think there's been enough ranting about books on this website for a bit. Maybe next time it'll be a rave and not a rant. Thanks for reading and please tell me your story of reading/thoughts on Tess of the d'Ubervilles in the comments below!
Now. Where do I start? I picked this up with such joy and put it down with such saddness. But that's not quite right.
I picked it up with expectation, fell in love with the image of frothy-white-frocked maidens on a green field dancing in the twilight, wishing for more partners - and the traveler who paused and danced with every girl he could before hurrying off to catch up with his brothers.
That man turned out to be Angel Clare, and boy... oh boy...
First, can I say, WHAT A SAD STORY this is!?
Okay, now I can go on.
Angel doesn't dance with Tess, and though he danced with many girls, as he ran off he caught her staring and felt sorry he had not danced with this one. But he had to leave.
Let me start from the beginning and put this in my own, un-fancy words. (edit: I know this is long - but hey - it's shorter than the book!)
Tess of the d'Ubervilles begins with a parson telling a poor man about long-dead high-falutin relatives. Scene two: the dance of country girls on the lawn. Then Tess's father is too drunk to take the bees in to be sold the next morning, so Tess does. She falls asleep driving, collides with another cart, and the horse is killed. Bad for poor family's welfare, obviously. Tess blames herself to an extreme. Her parents beg her to go ask help from their newly discovered relatives, who aren't actually d'Ubervilles, but just took on the name - however that works. She does as a punishment to herself. She meets Alec d'Uberville who... I know it's horrible... rapes her. She goes home and her mom is barely sympathetic. *Cue shrug.* "You know - it happens. But why didn't you get him to marry you???"
She stays home, her heart healing, for a couple years, then goes off to be a milkmaid at T-something's farm. Forgot the name. There she meets Angel Clare (can I say right now that I hate that name? What can the author mean by it?). Angel falls in love with her as a specimen of perfect, innocent womanly beauty. Tess's three roommates are in love with him, but he loves only her. He proposes and she refuses. For a couple months he pursues her and she says no, thinking to never marry because truthfully she is the wife of another man, as she sees it. Finally she gives in. She puts off the wedding as long as she can, trying to work up the truth to tell him of the rape. Finally she writes him a letter, which slips under his rug and is never seen by him. Her mother tells her not to tell, but she tries to tell him on the day of the wedding. He says he'll hear it later. That night, he confesses to having been promiscuous with a girl in earlier years, and she forgives him. Then she tells him her sin (sin?? is being raped a sin??) and he blows up. "You are not the girl I knew!!! Tess is dead!" kind of thing. They live awkwardly in the same house for three days. Tess blames herself completely.
One night, Angel sleepwalks into her room and picks her up, moaning, "Tess is dead! Dead, dead, dead!" He holds her at the top of the stairs, and the narrator speaks of how her devotion to him is such that she would not care if he threw her down them. He carries her out to the river and across a narrow bridge, finally laying her in a stone coffin that was a sort of tourist attraction there. She sits up, stirs him into going home, and doesn't tell him what passed, cherishing the knowledge that he does still love her. She sees her loss of him as her due punishment.
Angel leaves for Brazil. Tess goes home, spends the allowance he gives her on her family, and is forced into working again to survive. She takes a horrible hard job and ends up working with two of her old roommates from T's farm. She could go to his parents for money but she's too proud, too ashamed. She does, one day, but she accidentally overhears his two brothers say awful things about her, and turns back, creating, as the narrator points out, "the greatest misfortune in her life," as his parents are actually lovely people. Just after this she meets Alec again. He stalks her. Eventually she writes Angel a letter pleading for him, saying she'd be happy as a slave in his house, just being near him. (does this sound a little like Twilight to anyone else? - Bella's insane obsession with Edward?)
Angel's heart, by the harshness of life in Brazil, is changed. He comes back - but too late. She has married Alec, who saved her family from starvation after her father died suddenly. Upon seeing Angel, though, she is so overcome that she kills Alec and the two go on the run. They have a few happy days together before the law catches up with them, and Tess is hanged. Angel marries her sister Lisa-Lu because Tess asked him too.
The end.
Great, huh? I know your mouth is just hanging open right now. But that's just the way it happened. Just when you thought they were going to have happily ever after, you get a cinched rope. Lovely. Thomas Hardy, apparently, is very fatalistic and saw the world as he portrayed it in Tess. Oh yay. More lovely.
And it's hard for me, because in my black-and-white Perciever (that's a personality style) mind, I have to either love or reject things, not waver in the middle. I don't know how to. So I'm caught, because the prose of this book was BEAUTIFUL and I really loved reading about half of it. Then it got rather dismal as Tess worked at hard places and our perfect-man-Angel had fallen off his high pedestal. But I thought it was in preparation for the soaring ending, complete with apologies and sunsets.
No.
Why? Why? Why?
I'm gonna share some thoughts from my journal over the last 24 hours:
(The moment I finished:)
Oh my, what a sad book! "The Fulfillment," indeed! [the last chapter was titled that] The fulfillment of his fatalistic agenda! I should not have read it if I'd known the worldview of the author! - Thank God for the after-word - it redeems it somewhat. I suppose I can take some things from it - like that Tess is just the kind of person I want to speak up for - those who destroy themselves with guilt.
Fatalistic. How opposite of me! I do not so much see myself as Tess as see the book on my floor as containing another world fuming with black smoke that obscures my inner sun.
Angel Clare is so abhorrent to me. Why did I not hate both him and Tess earlier? Even Angel Clare's name is abhorrent - feminine, as he was - a scared girl of a man who ran off to Brazil at the first sign of imperfection in his devoted bride. Yet the T's farm scenes were so winning!
Poor Tess - and yet wretched Tess! She let self-condemnation be her undoing. How pathetic!
Alec is of course a jaunty villain, invariably variable, consistently awful. (You'll understand that if you've read it.)
I wondered, while I was reading, why Nature or the landscapes and a confusing attention to random details of theology should be wanted - I see now; the author had an ulterior agenda.
That I would not read books quite so! Books like Enna Burning [I hear it's supposed to end well but it's so dark for Shannon Hale!], , and Tess! Books that burn as much as they light, anger as much as they teach, and expose to such ugliness no matter how beautiful their prose!
It is still settling on me, Tess is dead! Tess, Tess of the white floaty dresses, of the impertinent turn of the head when Alec tried to give her "the kiss of mastery," Tess of Blackmoor Vale, so well described you could breathe the air thick with soil and mist. Tess the oldest, the wisest of all of her siblings and parents. Tess the milkmaid, Tess the tender lover, Tess the truthful. Tess the woebegone. Tess the proud. Tess the heartbroken. Tess of the d'Ubervilles, driven insane by Alec and Angel, two men of evil turns, one by principle, the other by vice. Tess - you comedy of a tragic lover! How can one be quite so selfless as you and still have a self to love with? And how can you walk willingly to your death, so calm, so passive, so believing in the good of those around you and the horridness of yourself?
And why not Izz or M - what's her name - Tess's roommates who loved Angel? Why her sister? So strange. But then the tale is strange. It ought to have ended differently. I was all prepared for the fulfillment. When she stood on the carpet in her fashionable attire at the inn, with Alec upstairs, telling Angel the horrible truth, I could not quite believe it. Tess - the faithful!
It's a hard thing to put a soul through - a story like that! What a wretched, beautiful story, and I must write to Mandi about it in the morning.
(Today:)
It was here, on this seat in my closet by the window - a seat made out of a box of memories topped with my silk sham pillow - that I began "Tess of the d'Ubervilles." It was (is) so beautiful, those starting scenes. Yet I expected the rape to be the reason for redemption, not the cinch of her downfall.
How can I abide this?
I see no other way. I'll have to accept and love it and own that it has a bad ending. I'll re-write it to "Angel comes home, bursting in on her and Alec just in time, Angel raging at him, then raging to Tess about his miserable self, and putting her up in a mansion, and her family also, and their families both getting on as good friends. They would ride the waves of Alec's fury side by side, and together fight for greater freedoms for women, searching the Bible for God's view of women and whose sin rape really is. They would cling to the story of grace for the woman to whom Jesus said, "Go and sin no more." And Alec would drink himself half to death and then leave the country upon hearing that he will be prosecuted for his rape. He goes to Brazil and dies of a fever, and Tess's three roommates eventually marry well." (I mean, two of them tried to kill themselves when Angel left, after all.)
There, tis done. I have a quiet brain now. Nothing is coming. Nothing bubbles up screaming to be spoken of.
And so it is now. I think there's been enough ranting about books on this website for a bit. Maybe next time it'll be a rave and not a rant. Thanks for reading and please tell me your story of reading/thoughts on Tess of the d'Ubervilles in the comments below!