Tess of the D’urbervilles

I have a serious problem when it comes to reading “classic” works of literature: I simply cannot make a decision about which inimitable tome to read first. Like most self-proclaimed booklovers, I tend to hoard all of those pleasing, Signet paperback editions of classics, with their shiny covers and classical paintings. They make up the majority of my personal library and most of them remain unread—although I love to take them out and hold them, read the description on the back for the ten millionth time, and gaze lovingly at the cover. Despite all of the fetishistic attention I lavish on these humble little paperbacks, I don’t read them as much as I should. Inevitably, I pick up a more contemporary novel–something I can read and actual absorb at lightening speed, thus working my way through great piles of these books in a short time.

However, on those rare occasions when I actually decide to undertake a classic, it is almost always such an amazing and delightful experience, that I decide to swear off contemporary fiction and set out reading the canon. Such was the case with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles. Published in 1891, Tess tells the story of a beautiful young peasant girl whose family unexpectedly learns that they are descended from one of England’s ancient, knightly families. Despite this fact, Tess’s mother and father continue to spend most of their time “down the pub,” as it were, thrusting the family’s wellbeing on young Tess’s shoulders.

Like most 19^th century novels, Tess of the D’urbervilles is chock full of events and incidents, choices and conversations, people and places. To go over them all would be foolish. It is enough to say that Tess, in the course of trying to save her family’s honor, is raped in the woods by a roguish gentleman who simply cannot resist her charms. Rather than going completely downhill from here, the story goes up and down, again and again, and the reader is genuinely unsure of what’s going to happen to our dear heroine, whose delicate balance of misery and hope is so potent it’s almost unbearable to read.

Thomas Hardy is a very unusual writer. When Tess was first published in the 1890s, it was met with much dismay by its Victorian audience, who were shocked by the novel’s frank attitude about sex. In his “Explanatory Note to the First Edition,” Hardy writes:

I will just add that the story is sent out in all sincerity of purpose, as an attempt to give artistic form to a true sequence of things; and in respect of the book’s opinions and sentiments, I would ask any too genteel reader, who cannot endure to have said what everybody nowadays thinks and feels, to remember a well-worn sentence of St. Jerome’s: If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than the truth be concealed.

I don’t know about you, but that modest little drop of defiance cements my love for Thomas Hardy. Seriously, how brave and noble of him (as a man) to tell such a sensitive, nuanced story of a woman whose life is completely ruined as a result of her being raped. In the time when this book was published, it would have been considered some fault of Tess’s own that led to her being raped—a historical fact that I had serious difficulty getting around. One of the most heartbreaking moments in the whole novel comes when 16 year-old Tess goes home and tells her mother what happened to her:

“Oh Mother, my Mother!” cried the agonized girl, turning passionately upon her parent as if her poor heart would break. “How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men folk? Why didn’t you warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o’learning in that way, and you did not help me!

Now, maybe Tess’s spirit wasn’t completely broken at that point, but mine was. For we wise readers know the ways of these classic 19^th century novels, and we know better than to expect more than some terrible tragedy.

Despite its vivid misery, the novel is also full of breathtaking descriptions of the English countryside in every season and every hour of the day. Tess spends several months working on a dairy farm, and the picture Hardy paints of that happy time and the warm souls she works with were enough to make me seriously consider farm life. Similarly, before we reach the sorry end of Tess’s tale, Hardy gives us a kind of reprieve with a beautiful sequence of events that reads almost like a dream.

Tess of the D’urbervilles is a very strange and wonderful combination of heart-hardening pessimism and sweet, dashing romance. Tess Durbyfield and her surroundings will become so real and natural to you, that it will be hard to leave them when it’s over. But, as I often do after reading a classic, I felt like my life had seriously improved as a result of reading this book. Like I was a freaking better person or something. I know that sounds a little ridiculous, but just indulge me, will you? If nothing else, Tess will make you feel like you’ve learned a lot about the best and worst parts of the world and the people in it, and, really, what more could you ask for in a novel?