The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Thomas Hardy · A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented · a novel in seven phases and fifty-nine chapters · serialised in The Graphic, July to December 1891, in a cut text · three volumes, Osgood, McIlvaine, 1891, the cut matter restored · scored on the Wessex Edition text of 1912, the last Hardy revised, read from knowledge; no text in hand, quoted only where the words are certain
Mode
Tragic novel of a woman of low degree; pastoral, social realism and fable of chance in one action
Mythos
The May-walking in white, a remnant of a Cerealia; Artemis and Demeter; the serpent and Eve; the coach that only the blood can hear; the victim on the stone at the sun temple
Phase
From a May evening in Blackmoor Vale to a July morning at Wintoncester, by the seasons of farm labour: spring and summer at the dairy, winter on the chalk
Presentation
Fiction told by an omniscient narrator who comments and argues, in seven phases whose titles name the stages of a woman’s life; an epigraph from The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Register
From the comedy of Jack Durbeyfield at the Pure Drop and the dairy folk’s talk through pastoral idyll and Gothic sleepwalking to social realism at Flintcomb, melodrama at Sandbourne and sacrifice at Stonehenge
Scale
One woman’s life, her family and the Clares’ vicarage, and the labour, class, faith and law of rural Wessex as the railway reaches it
Governing Proposition
In Wessex, a village haggler learns from a parson that his name is that of an old Norman family, and his eldest daughter, Tess, is sent to claim kin with a merchant family that has bought the name; used in a wood by its son, Alec, she bears a child who dies, rallies at a dairy in the Valley of the Great Dairies, and marries Angel Clare, a parson’s son, who on their wedding night hears her history and leaves her. Hunger on the chalk and his silence put her back in Alec’s way; Angel returns days too late, she kills Alec, and she is taken at Stonehenge and hanged. The wager of the book is that such a woman can bear the full height of tragedy, that her purity lies in her will and not in her history, and that the law that destroys her is society’s and not nature’s.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Over the novel stands an epigraph from The Two Gentlemen of Verona: “Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed / Shall lodge thee.” Under the title stands its claim, A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented. The book is in seven phases, each named for a stage of a woman’s life: The Maiden, Maiden No More, The Rally, The Consequence, The Woman Pays, The Convert, Fulfilment. The first is long, eleven chapters; the second is four, a bridge; the dairy and the courtship take nearly a third of the book; the last is short and fast.
It begins on a May evening in Blackmoor Vale. A parson tells Jack Durbeyfield, a haggler of Marlott, that his name is that of the d’Urbervilles, an old Norman family, and he goes home calling himself Sir John and drinks at the Pure Drop. The girls of the village walk out in white for the May, a remnant of a Cerealia, and among them is his eldest daughter, Tess. She “spoke two languages”: the dialect at home, and English abroad.
That night Tess is on the road with her brother Abraham and the old horse, Prince. Abraham asks whether the stars are worlds, and whether we live on a splendid one or a blighted one, and Tess answers, “A blighted one” (IV). Then the mail-cart’s shaft runs into Prince’s chest, and she plugs the wound with her hand until she is splashed with blood. Soon after, she is sent to claim kin.
Movement II
The d’Urbervilles of Trantridge are a merchant family who have bought the name; the old blood is a word on a parson’s tongue. The son is Alec. One night in the Chase, in a fog, it happens; the narrator asks, “Where was Tess’s guardian angel? where was the Providence of her simple faith?” (XI), and speaks of a coarse pattern traced on a blank tissue. Whether it is rape or seduction or both, the book does not close.
The second phase is four chapters. Tess goes home, and her child, Sorrow, is born. When it is dying unbaptised she baptises it herself by candlelight among her sleeping brothers and sisters (XIV), and the parson cannot grant it burial. The serial in The Graphic printed neither the night in the Chase nor the baptism; both appeared that year as separate sketches, and the book restored them.
The form keeps the violence out of sight and shows what follows from it. This is the first instance of a rule the whole novel keeps: the Chase is a fog and a sentence, the murder later a stain, the hanging a flag. Where the violence lies, the novel knows, is in its consequence, and in the judgment passed on the one it was done to.
Movement III
The Rally takes Tess to Talbothays, a dairy in the Valley of the Great Dairies, where she works among the milkmaids and the dairy folk. Angel Clare is there too: a parson’s son who has lost his faith, the most modern man in the book. In a garden of rank weeds she listens to his harp (XIX); the narrator speaks of “the ache of modernism”.
The two walk out before milking in the dawns, in the “spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light” (XX), and he names her Artemis and Demeter. He carries the milkmaids one by one through a flooded lane (XXIII). The milk goes up to London by the railway (XXX). The valley is fat and the summer long, and Tess’s fortune rises with the season.
She writes her history in a letter and pushes it under his door, and the letter slides beneath the carpet (XXXIII), unread. The wedding goes forward under the shadow of the d’Urberville coach that only the blood can hear. The machinery of chance is visible here, and the book means it to be the law.
Movement IV
On the wedding night Angel confesses a past of his own, and Tess forgives him. Then she tells hers. He answers, “You were one person; now you are another” (XXXV). The judgment that undoes her is passed not by the man who wronged her but by the man who loves her, and in the terms of a law that is society’s and not nature’s.
That night Angel walks in his sleep to a coffin in the abbey (XXXVII); then he leaves for Brazil. The Woman Pays: Tess goes on the land as a migrant labourer to Flintcomb-Ash on the starved chalk, hacking swedes and drawing reed through the winter. At Emminster she overhears his brothers, and the boots she left in the hedge are taken (XLIV).
The threshing machine comes, “the red tyrant” that the women serve (XLVII), with its migrant engineer. Alec returns, converted; at the allotment fire, pitchfork in hand, he tells her he is the serpent and she Eve (L). “Once victim, always victim” (XLVII). Lady Day uproots the cottagers, and Alec’s conversion does not last.
Movement V
Angel comes back from Brazil and finds her at Sandbourne, days too late, with Alec. At The Herons the landlady hears what passes upstairs, and on the ceiling the stain spreads, “like a gigantic ace of hearts” (LVI). Tess has killed Alec. The murder is not shown: it is a sound and a mark.
The flight with Angel goes through the New Forest, and at night they come to Stonehenge, the wind humming through the stones; Angel calls it a heathen temple, and Tess sleeps on the altar stone. At dawn the police come, and she says she is ready (LVIII). The May-walking that opened the book has its end in the victim on the stone at sunrise, and the seasons that carried her fortune have carried it round.
From a hill above Wintoncester the black flag is seen over the town. “‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess” (LIX), and the d’Urberville knights and dames “slept on in their tombs unknowing”. The phase is called Fulfilment. The tied cottage and the Lady Day hirings are history; the law that judged her by her history and not her will is not.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract and see. Take out the Chase and nothing follows; take out Talbothays and the confession has nothing to destroy; take out Flintcomb-Ash and Alec’s return, finding her where hunger and Angel’s silence have put her, has no ground. The seven phases are a sequence of consequences. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the machinery that delivers them: the letter of confession that slides beneath the carpet (XXXIII), the overheard talk of the Clare brothers, the boots taken from the hedge at Emminster (XLIV), Angel’s return days too late. Hardy means chance to be the law, but several of these feel placed rather than compelled; and stretches of authorial essay state what the action already shows.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A woman is judged by a law that is society’s and not nature’s, and the judgment, enforced more cruelly by the man who loves her than by the man who wronged her, is the destruction. The subtitle is the thesis, and the book earns it: the purity is in the will, not the history. Angel, the most modern man in the book, has just confessed the same thing and been forgiven when he says, “You were one person; now you are another” (XXXV). Beside it stands a class order in dissolution, and “Once victim, always victim” (XLVII) holds beyond the plot. Held off the top because the narrator argues the case as well as shows it, and the cosmic indictment is partly a stance laid over what the social disclosure already proves.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Height recurs in several keys. The dreadful: Prince killed by the mail-cart shaft, Tess plugging the wound with her hand until she is splashed with blood (IV); the baptism of Sorrow by candlelight among her sleeping siblings (XIV); the stain on the ceiling at The Herons, “like a gigantic ace of hearts” (LVI). The warm: the dawns at Talbothays, in the “spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light” (XX), when Angel names her Artemis and Demeter; the weedy garden where she listens to his harp (XIX). The grand: Stonehenge at night, the wind humming in the stones, and the black flag over Wintoncester (LVIII to LIX). The sleepwalk to the abbey coffin (XXXVII) is among the strangest heights in the English novel. Held a step down because the sixth phase sags between its peaks.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The novel opens with a May-walking of girls in white, a remnant of a Cerealia, and closes with a sacrifice on what Angel calls a heathen temple, the victim on the stone at sunrise; between them it is built as a seasonal myth, Tess’s fortune rising at Talbothays in spring and summer and falling on the frozen chalk in winter. Alec at the allotment fire, pitchfork in hand, says he is the serpent and she Eve (L); Angel names her goddesses; the d’Urberville coach that only the blood can hear hangs over the wedding. Tess stays particular throughout, a milkmaid with a dialect who hacks swedes for a living. Held below the top because Hardy too often names the archetype he is building, and the family legend serves more as omen than as structure.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is the Victorian realist novel and its fallen woman, in whom the form had always read a moral (Hetty Sorrel, Little Em’ly), and Hardy’s own pastoral Wessex. The swerve is to give the fallen woman tragedy in the Greek sense, with the dignity and the cosmos that implies, and to call her pure on the title page; to put an unbaptised child and a mother’s lay baptism at the centre; to make the murderess the heroine and the hanging the end. The stake was real and paid: two magazines declined the novel on grounds of propriety, and The Graphic took it only with the seduction and the baptism cut. Held below the top because the departure in form is smaller: the narration, the phases and the omniscient voice are inherited tools, sharpened rather than broken.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge changes. The seven phase titles tell a woman’s life as stages of a kind, from The Maiden to Fulfilment, and the irony of the last title is the book’s argument in a word. The seasonal order makes the moral story a natural one, and so makes the social judgment look unnatural. The great events are withheld from view: the Chase ends in a fog and a sentence on a coarse pattern traced on a blank tissue (XI); the murder is known through a landlady’s ear and a stain; the hanging is a flag. The form shows not the violence but its consequence, which is what the novel knows about where the violence lies. Held off the top by the argued passages, where the form becomes a container for essay, and by coincidences it tolerates rather than requires.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: more than a century of reading without exhaustion. The Chase remains open, rape or seduction or both, and the book’s own words, the fog and the narrator’s ironies have sustained a debate that has not closed. Tess’s purity, Angel’s guilt and his redemption, Alec’s conversion and relapse, and whether the narrator’s love for Tess is itself a kind of possession have each been argued from the text, the last by the feminist readings since the 1970s. D. H. Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy (written 1914) read the novel as a metaphysic; Tony Tanner (1968) opened its pattern of red, from the ribbon to the ace of hearts; Raymond Williams read its labour and class. Held below the top because the open questions cluster round the Chase and the narrator, and the pattern, once seen, is seen.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is the English novel of the late nineteenth century. The force: the book claimed for a farm labourer’s daughter, sexually used and socially condemned, the full height of tragedy, set her inside an indifferent cosmos instead of a moral providence, and took the Victorian novel’s sexual reticence as an object of attack rather than a condition of writing. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: with Jude the Obscure (1895) it stands at the hinge where the Victorian novel gives way to the modern; Lawrence’s novels of sexuality and the land descend from it, by his own long engagement; the twentieth century’s tragic regional novel and novel of the wronged woman take it as their type. How far its controversy loosened magazine and library censorship is not settled. Held below the top because its force deepens realism rather than reorganising the form.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival over about a hundred and thirty-five years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole, in versions Hardy himself made and dated, from 1891 to 1912; nothing is lost, and the plurality of texts is a matter for editors, not a charge on the work. Presence: in print continuously since 1891, among the most widely read and taught English novels in schools and universities, translated widely, and adapted repeatedly, by Hardy himself for the stage and by Roman Polanski on film (1979), among others. Fabric: the tied cottage, the Lady Day hirings and the steam threshing machine are history, and the book is read for what they pressed on a woman. Held off the widest figure because its presence beyond the English-speaking world is narrower than that of the very few novels of its century read everywhere.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The command is uneven at the extremes, and both are real. At the top, the set pieces, among the best in English prose fiction: Prince’s death, the baptism, Angel carrying the milkmaids through the flooded lane (XXIII), the sleepwalk, the threshing machine, “the red tyrant” that the women serve (XLVII), Stonehenge. The landscape writing is load-bearing, and the eye for light, weather and labour is exact; the talk of the dairy folk and the Durbeyfields is alive. At the bottom: the Latinate abstraction and the awkward sentence every reader of Hardy knows, philosophical asides that thicken the prose, the visible hand in the coincidences, and Alec’s conversion and his speech, close to stage melodrama. The plotting is serial plotting, with its hooks. A craft at this level does not floor; it does not reach a sustained finish.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Jack Durbeyfield drunk at the Pure Drop, calling himself Sir John (I to III), and Tess on the altar stone at Stonehenge (LVIII). One law governs them: blood, chance and appetite run under a social order that pretends to moral sense, and the comedy of the first and the sacrifice of the last are one fact seen at two distances. The range is wide and held, from rustic comedy and pastoral idyll to Gothic sleepwalking, social realism and melodrama. Charged: the book states its cosmos in more than one way, and the ways do not always agree. The force is sometimes chance, sometimes heredity, sometimes the gods’ sport, sometimes society alone, as the scene suits. Alec’s conversion obeys the law poorly, and his return is plot more than necessity.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Held, not listed. Consciousness: Tess’s from within, her shame, her pride, her love, her numbness at Flintcomb. The family: the Durbeyfields’ feckless dependence on their eldest, the Clares’ vicarage, the brothers. Labour in more forms than almost any English novel holds: haggling and hauling at Marlott, the harvest and the reaping machine, dairying at Talbothays, swede-hacking and reed-drawing on the chalk, the threshing engine and its migrant engineer. Class: decayed blood, bought blood, the rural poor and the new professional son. The sacred: the lay baptism, the parson who refuses burial, Mr Clare’s evangelism, Alec’s conversion, Angel’s lost faith, the May-walking and the sun temple. The law, in the hanging; history, from Norman knights to the milk train to London (XXX). Held a step down because the town and the nation are glimpsed, not held.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Unconcealment, The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and The Encompassed at 8.9. A text whole in Hardy’s own versions and in continuous print since 1891; a disclosure that a woman is destroyed by society’s law and not nature’s, spoken by the man who loves her; heights from Prince’s death and the baptism to the dawns at the dairy, the sleepwalk and Stonehenge; a seasonal myth built from the May-walking to the sun temple; and labour, class, faith, family and law held in one woman’s life.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2, held by the machinery that delivers consequence: a letter beneath a carpet, an overheard talk, boots taken from a hedge, a return days too late, and essay that states what the action shows. Next above it, The Made and The Inner Law at 8.5: set pieces at the top of the English novel beside abstraction, asides and melodrama, and a cosmos stated as chance, heredity, the gods’ sport and society by turns.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.9, The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last two by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.2, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.9. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, at 8.7, which The Inevitable, The Made and The Inner Law hold down.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, scored as one novel in seven phases and fifty-nine chapters, in the text Hardy last revised, the Wessex Edition of 1912. The novel was serialised in The Graphic from July to December 1891 in a text from which the seduction and the baptism had been cut; those episodes appeared separately in 1891, as “Saturday Night in Arcady” in the Fortnightly Review and “The Midnight Baptism” in the National Observer. The book came out in three volumes from Osgood, McIlvaine at the end of 1891 with the cut matter restored, and Hardy revised it for the one-volume edition of 1892, the Wessex Novels of 1895 and the Wessex Edition of 1912. The earlier texts are context; the differences between them, chiefly in how explicitly the Chase and the dance are handled and in topographical and verbal detail, are not claimed line by line and move no score. The novel is in English and every axis is scored on Hardy’s English; no translation stands between. The text is not in hand, and words are quoted only where they are certain, briefly. Citations are by chapter, in Roman numerals; the chapter numbers are given from knowledge and may stand a chapter off in places. Facts that could not be verified, among them the novel’s length, the exact span of its action, the particulars of its refusal by two magazines, the restoration of the dance in 1912, the early reviews and the dates of the lesser adaptations, are not given.