In Our Time - Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Episode Date: May 5, 2016

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, originally serialised in The Graphic in 1891 and, with some significant changes, published as a complete novel in 1892. The book was controversial even before serialisation, rejected by one publisher as too overtly sexual, to which a second added it did not publish 'stories where the plot involves frequent and detailed reference to immoral situations.' Hardy's description of Tess as 'A Pure Woman' in 1892 incensed some Victorian readers. He resented having to censor some of his scenes in the early versions, including references to Tess's baby following her rape by Alec d'Urberville, and even to a scene where Angel Clare lifted four milkmaids over a flooded lane (substituting transportation by wheelbarrow).The image above, from the 1891 edition, is captioned 'It Was Not Till About Three O'clock That Tess Raised Her Eyes And Gave A Momentary Glance Round. She Felt But Little Surprise At Seeing That Alec D'urberville Had Come Back, And Was Standing Under The Hedge By The Gate'.With Dinah Birch Professor of English Literature and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Impact at the University of LiverpoolFrancis O'Gorman Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of LeedsAndJane Thomas Reader in Victorian and early Twentieth Century literature at the University of HullProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Thomas Hardys Tess of the Derbaville's first appeared in 1891, serialised each week in the graphic from July to November, and simultaneously New York and Sydney. It's one of the greatest of Hardy's novels, some think the greatest. The greatest.

Readers were thrilled or outraged by the character of Tess Derbyfield and the complexities of her sexual desire and desirability, her modesty and allure, and her torture at the hands of her author. Many praised the story highly, while to others it was a clumsy, sordid tale of boorish brutality and lust. Despite the financial success, Harnie was angry that it had to censor his story for serialisation. He soon reinstated the cuts for the book edition, adding the subtitle, A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, with divided opinion even further. with me to discuss tests of the Derville's hour

Diana Birch, Professor of English Literature and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Impact at the University of Louisville, Frances O'Gorman, Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds, and Jane Thomas, reader in Victorian and early 20th century literature at the University of Hall. Diana, can you give us a snapshot of Thomas Harder's early life? Well, the first thing to note is that it was a very rural childhood.

He was born in Dorset, 1840, just three years after Queen Victoria came to the throne, he was very much a Victorian. It was a strong family. His father, another Thomas Hardy, was Stowe Mason, a builder, not hugely successful, but they were not desperately poor. His mother was a very important influence on his life and is the source of much of his thinking about women and about the relations between men and women. Jemima had been a housemaid, had married Thomas and had then devoted herself to the family. Thomas became very early on a clever, literate little boy. Jemima taught him at first. He did have a solid education. He wasn't entirely self-taught. He was

sent to good schools to a commercial academy where he learned some Latin alongside the skills. Alongside the skills that would enable him to earn a living. But it was always very clear, both to him and certainly to his mother, that Thomas was not going to earn his living with his hands, as his father had done. So he was apprenticed to a local architect, the age of 16. A turning point in his life came when he was 21 and went to London. He loved London, took full advantage of all the cultural opportunities is there. And again, the second point to note about Hardy is although the childhood the early years were very rural and he never forgot those years, he would often call himself a Londoner. He was very attached to what London had to offer, that buzz.

And one thing, like a great number of English novelists, like an English writer's like Morwell and Dickens and the Brontes and Jane Austen and many others, he didn't go to university, so he missed that out. In a sense, I would have thought, to his advantage, as a naturally born autodidact, what was the major push towards him moving from being an architect and earning a decent living to keep his mother reassured and deciding, right, I will set up as a writer

because we know his first novels were rejected, his first poems were rejected, all those writing away. What turned the key? He'd always been a reader and was a reader throughout his life. He was immensely moved by what he read intellectually, emotionally, and he was also influenced by friendships, perhaps particularly his friendship with Horace Moul, who was a very unstable in some ways, difficult man.

Hardy was very attached to him, and he was an important intellectual influence that I did, I think he did prompt him to want to take a different turn in his own life. His poetry was turned down and he saw the going thing to make money was novels and he started writing novels and it was, I think, you'll correct me if I'm wrong,

far from the madding crowd, which made a bit of an impact, quite a lot of impact at the time that he was about him, married for the first time, that made him, and his wife reassured him, Emma said, stay with the writing,

and that pushed him on that path. Yes, I think that's true. Emma, his first wife, was very loyal, very supportive, wanted him to succeed. as a writer, despite the fact that it was a riskier option. And again, you're right, far from the Madding Crowd, was the turning point published in 1874.

It wasn't his first novel. He had been trying to make a name for himself previously. But that one turned the key. That's the one that turned the key. Francis O'Gorman, let's turn to Tessa the Derverville, which is his second last novel. The last one is Jude Upscure, Tester Derville.

He's written several novels after Fawth of Manny Cloud, an increasing reputation, an international reputation, and a sense that he kept saying, I want to go back to poetry, but still, he writes tests. Where did he draw his inspiration for tests of the Derbavilles? I think there's a general answer to that question, and a more exact one. The general answer is that, of course, Hardy had been developing

that subgenre of 19th century fiction, the provincial tragedy for some time and the origins of that, I suppose, in the English tradition, would include George Eliot. Somewhere in the kind of anti-chambers of Tess is the mill on the floss. That notion of taking the ordinary life, or apparently ordinary life, and finding that the emotional complexities and depths of it are extraordinary. In European literature, I suppose, the example of the great example of that would be Madame Beaufortuie.

Which he knew were we talking about. To every book you mentioned, every author you mentioned that, authors he had read and drew into his appreciation. And was conscious of their cultural and aesthetic ambition. More specifically for Tess, in some ways Tess represents the culmination of what he had been thinking about, troubled, blighted women, particularly blighted beautiful women. But you said there was a specific reason. I'd like you to get to that. So the specifics would be two things I think in particular.

One is that Hardy tells us this himself. As a young man of 16, he sees a woman being hanged. He stands next to the gallows in 1856, Martha Brown, who had murdered her husband. and 70 years later he records this public execution in a way which makes it seem as if there was some kind of strange sexual awareness of this apparently beautiful woman and her physical form

as she wheeled pathway backwards and forwards, Hardy says, 70 years later. And I think Tess in some way is a kind of... So let's dwell on that because it's quite important and I know it's a polite programme but we mustn't back up. He found himself erotically aroused by this beautiful woman being hanged. Is that right? So he tells us 70 years after the event. Well, if we are to believe him, then what we can see, I suppose, at some level in Tess,

is a kind of narrative that works out, that kind of exculpates perhaps the guilt for feeling that. So he nourished this, and then he came to a time where he would accuse. And, of course, that time, as you say, is quite a long time later. Was there anything else that specifically pertains to Tess of the Derbaville's that you could see him drawing on? I think there's one particular thing. Again, this is what Hardy says himself, that in July 1889, he's invited by the Goss,

it's Edmund Goss and his wife, to a dinner party. And he meets the wife of Hameau Thornycroft, perhaps one of England's greatest sculptors in the 19th century. and Agatha Thornycroft her husband isn't there is Hardy tells us much later after the event

the most beautiful woman in England and I haven't seen them all of course I haven't seen them or carefully and he says that her image gave to him unconsciously the physical form of Tessa of the Dürbervils

so you've got two beautiful women, one society, beauty and the other hanged. So that's in that background. Jane Thomas, can you summarise the outlines of a not very complicated plot, actually, of Tessa of the Riverbills? No, no, I think it's also worth bearing in mind in answer your question to Francis

that he was an Emanuensis of quite a lot of rural women in his youth because he could write and he wrote their love letters so he will have heard this story over and over again of the seduced and betrayed rural woman. How did he get through that? an interesting sort of hobby, really.

Yes. I think he got a lot of his plots from that. But how did he get that? I mean, he did he go around saying, do you want a letter written, or what happened? I think they just came to him because he was, you know, as Daniel says, living in Bokhampton, and he could read and write.

So he could do that job for them. Question answered. So, John Derbefield is a feckless haggler. He's told by a person that he is a direct descendant of an defeat Norman family, extinct Norman family, the Derbivilles. He and his wife hatch a plot to send their beautiful 16-year-old daughter to claim kin to a branch of the family

that turns out to be spurious. They have no claim to the name, but the Derbyvils don't know that. There she is preyed upon by Alec, the squire. She's seduced or raped. We'll probably go on to that later. She goes back home after having lived as his mistress for a while. where she gives birth to a child who dies shortly thereafter. After a period of self-recrimination and shame, she rallies.

She then goes to Talbate's dairy to begin her life anew as a dairy maid. There she meets and falls in love with Alec Claire, who's a gentleman farmer. He's rejected. Angel Claire, sorry. He's rejected Cambridge and becoming a minister. The feeling is mutual. Angel believes that in Tessie has secured rustic innocence. and untried lips. After a lot of soul-searching and missed opportunities,

she finally confesses her past to him on their wedding night. Angel rejects her in horror and anger. They part. She falls on hard times. Her family falls on hard times. Alec Derbeville returns again. Praise on her mercilessly. Angel's gone off to Brazil.

He comes back to claim her broken and sick, only to find that she's become Alex's mistress. He leaves. Tess and Alec have a violent argument. She stabs him. She follows Angel and after a five days idyll, in which we assume they consummate their marriage and have a honeymoon, but delayed honeymoon,

she's then arrested at Stonehenge and hanged for Alex's murder. Well, that was terrific. That was really good. And you didn't miss a point. You didn't miss a beat. Thank you very much indeed. Now then, it. Why was that rejected by three serious publishers, including one named after our producer, the Tillotsons?

Yes. Well, the Tillotsons, Hardy had already entered into a contract with Tillotson, and he sent half of the manuscript to them, in good faith. They read it and were appalled by what they saw to be the explicit immorality. In that half, there was the incident in the chase, the birth, of sorrow. The incident in the church, which might have been a rave. Which might have been a rape or might have been a seduction, but I'm sure we can argue about that later if we've got time. I hope so.

And the birth and baptism of the illegitimate child's sorrow. Now, Tillotson was a member of the church and a Sunday school teacher and felt that this was beyond the pale. So they cancelled the contract with no ill feelings on either side. I think Tillotson may even have paid hardy his advance. So then Hardy sends it onto Murray Brothers. They reject it again because of its immorality.

Then he sends it onto McMillan. There's a lovely term here. The editor of McMillan rejected it because of its succulence. It was too succulent. Nowadays they would say, bring me succulents on our publisher. You can make of that what you will. But it's that dwelling in the physical, I think, that they found so difficult. And eventually he landed up at the graphic.

He did. serialising it. Serialising it, but he had to bauderise it before he could send it to the graphic before it would be accepted. And that boudarised version appeared and then later on he got his hands at it and wrote the novel that we all read now.

More or less. More or less. There's a bit of moral lesson there. Right. Dina, what's the drive of the novel as far as you're concerned? The central theme is injustice. Yeah. And the consequences of the injustices visited on Tess in her suffering.

So we are told over and over again that Tess is innately good. She is a generous woman. She is, as Hardy insists in the subtitle, a pure woman. She struggles against what seems an inexorable fate. She doesn't just passively accept what is meted out to her. as Jane says she rallies from the disaster of her illegitimate baby, but it avails her nothing her life ends in disaster and she is hanged. So I would say that what Hardy is driving in this novel

is to evoke in his readers sympathy, understanding, compassion, pity, perhaps even love for this central character. It is very much a novel about test. and it is a novel designed to evoke our anger at what has happened to this good woman and why it has happened. The subtitle could be the wrong woman, but he chooses the word pure just to sort of warn in your eye, isn't it really? Absolutely. That's not an accident. No, I'm actually saying that's an act. It's an act of defiance.

Yes. Yes. And there's the injustice is, that's that's that's powerful. and I agree with the central theme. It's a lot to do with class as well as everything. And a lot to do with the God like Hardy torturing her in my view as time goes on. But that's one thing. But it's balanced by extreme desirability and what to do by being desired. She is desired by almost everybody sets their eyes on her really. And she has to cope with her.

I think Raymond Williams says it brilliantly when he says that she's not in control of how her body speaks to others. and I think part of that succulence is the narrator's kind of focus on her on her fullness of aspect, her luxuriant aspect, in other words she was extremely well developed for a 16-year-old girl, physically well developed. That's made plain. And that becomes both an invitation and a threat.

It is a very physical book. It insists on the life of the body. And that shows itself not only in the way in which Tess is presented, but in the way in which her environment is presented. Oh, yeah, that's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. We'll come to that. I mean, the whole... So there are other themes which, in a sense, support that central theme. Ideas, as you say, about social class, very important,

but also ideas about the changing world of rural labour, education, religion, which we might come back to. So in that sense, the central driving theme of the novel leads the reader into thinking about other associated questions? That takes me to you, Francis, Francis of Gorman. Where in particular do we find the old world clashing with the new, which is one of the many aspects. There are multiple layers of this novel. It's just fantastic.

It meant that I read it extremely slowly this time. I must have whizzed through it when I was a kid. But there was so much in it. Part of it is like reading dense poetry. Anyway, Francis, where did the old world clash with the new? as you say this is a very complex topic and the old world

clashes with the new in multiple forms so for instance one obvious way is that within the territory the veil of the little dairies and of the great dairies the Jacobian

Hardy's narrator says and the Victorian are juxtaposed in the relationship between Tess What does you mean about that? So there's a 200-year gap in attitude, in social values, in understanding of the world,

actually within the same family. So that's a kind of microcosm for this sort of interface between the past and the model. Can you give us some specific instances? So this would be played out, for instance, in the contrasts between different kinds of agricultural labour. So there is the old world of Crix Derry, which has a kind of edinic quality to it.

All done by hand and by women mainly. Exactly. For some men, but a lot of women involved. In a kind of harmonious relationship, both with each other and with the land. And then later in the novel, there is Groby's Farrashing machine, which one would think would be a piece of agricultural equipment

which would reduce labour. But in Hardy's presentation, this artifact, this kind of Leviathan from modernity, is backbreaking and Tess becomes a kind of possessed by this machine. Her labour is given to it.

But there are other ways in which modernity is a more exciting presence within that area. Tess and Clare go on a long journey with their milk to deliver it to a station and test... The milk that they're taking to the train to get to London

in time for the next morning. Exactly. So suddenly you have this sense of the reach of the capital city out there touching this still kind of ancient world. Yeah, she says, doesn't she? Tomorrow morning, ladies in their fine houses will be using the milk from our crown, so more morning people are doing it.

And she's aware of that. And there's a deeper superstition there. There's a medieval superstition. If the wrong kind of cock hops on the wrong kind of post and crows three times at the wrong time, then all is done. And people are very frightened by this. These omens and that are still very much around, and effective levers in the book, aren't they?

It's a curious feature of the novel here, isn't it? It's that one of the ways in which the past, the antique, is represented, is through superstition and indeed through the kind of shadowy presence of the supernatural, the cockerel that crows in the afternoon, yes. The legend of the Derbeville coach, which is a kind of ancient family legend of a curse. And towards the end of the novel, Tess hears a coach. There's a very strange substrature

of the creepy. One of the things that really fascinates me about this novel is the tension, the creative tension, between, on the one hand, a novel that is very much concerned with the material, with the physical, as we've already discussed,

very hostile to the influence of organised religion, which has a baleful effect on the lives of many characters, but centrally tests, the tension between that and a novel which, as Francis says, contains something other than the physical and the material, is haunted by a sense of a supernatural energy which is also conspiring with the social, cultural, political forces to destroy tests. It's one of the ways in which the novel is, on the one hand, a social commentary, in a very angry one. But on the other hand,

something mysterious. It's one of the sources of its narrative power. Yeah, there's a sort of spirit world, though, isn't it? Jane Thomas, I refer briefly to the subtitle, a pure woman. Can you attempt, of course you can do it, say what hardly meant by that? I've said already, and Diana agrees, thank goodness,

that this was throwing the glove in the face of the public. You might think she's been right, you might think she's a seductress, and she was a bad woman. But pure woman, that's what she is for me. And can you go for that? Well, Hardy claimed it into you in 1892 that he maintained...

The year after the book had come out, yeah. He meant to say, well, the year, the one volume edition, with a lot of... Yeah, that's what I mean, the first edition. First edition, yeah. First one volume. That she retains her innate purity almost to the end.

And by that, I think, what he does, he makes a very strong distinction between inner purity and our, outer purity. Outer purity is what's judged by society. In a purity is your intentions. So his claim is that Tess is in, she hasn't an evil bone in her body, she hasn't an evil thought about anybody or a malicious thought about anybody. And so she remains, she retains that purity. But what happens at the end, I think, particularly when she's predated upon by Alec the second time, and he says this very, very strongly, that she's in the grip of circumstances

and not morally responsible. In other words, her whole family depends upon her. They're broke, they've gone down the... Exactly, and she's at the end of her tether, angel has deserted her, she's no sense that he's ever coming back. And so he makes that distinction between inner purity and outer purity. Yes.

Let's turn to the two main men in her lifetime. She goes to the so-called, but completely phony, Derberville family who've just nicked the name by a mistaken belief that they would recognise the real Derbevilles and she goes really

dressed up, primed up by her family walks of course to try to ingratiate herself to get some money to help them out they're getting broker and broker as the book goes on now then she meets with Alex Derbeville right tell us about him

he's a predator as Jane has said and he is seen... He's the son of the family, have they that family? Indeed, wealthy young man, very conventional in his thinking, not seen in a novel as very intelligent, slightly stupid. He is seen in contrast as the story develops with Angel Claire, a creature specifically seen as a creature of light. Alec, this dark figure with his moustache and his...

his sexual appetites and his moral dullness is seen constantly in contrast with Angel Claire. But one of the things that seems to me to emerge as the story develops is that these two figures who seem to be such opposites, Alec with his pitchfork, Angel with his harp, are actually not as different as they might first have appeared. and Alex, Angel, the creature of light, is also a creature of destruction. Oh, Lord, we're getting a bit beyond ourselves. It's fine, it's all right, but let's get it straight here. Pitchforks and it's all right if you've read the book seven times and you're a don't really well. But basically, Alec is an out-and-out luster, and he lusts after he tries to bribe her, he helps her family and that sort of thing.

Angel comes from a family where he's supposed to go in the church, they're a deeply religious family. So that's what we're talking about when there's pitchforks and light, right? So Angel, but what they have in common is that they both prey on her and use her. Exactly. Right. That's what they're probably called. And they are both forces that conspire to destroy her. I think Alex is seen in rather kind of in a sense, simple terms. He's a shallow figure.

Angel may be a little bit more complex. And going back to what we were saying earlier about these references elsewhere, Angel is in part related to a kind of concept of a kind of Greek context here. He's partly a reference to Apollo. I think what's also interesting is something that we often miss is hardly complicates this at the end, going back to what you said about them both praying on her, because where Angel rejects her,

Alec comes back to her and says, he's the one who actually admits to this idea of, purity, he uses this word unbesmerged. He said you remained unbismerged, and this is why I didn't despise you, in fact, I've fallen in love with you. And he goes to do the decent thing, he goes to marry her. He offers

to marry her, particularly when he hears about the child. Of course, it's too late by then, because she's somebody else's husband. But I mean, whatever you think about Alex's ridiculous conversion, I mean, even Tessie's through that, how do you just complicate Alex a little bit towards the end? And I think that's really interesting, because if you

if you're talking about who does the most violence, this is an interesting discussion to have in the classroom. You know, the balance shifts from Angel to Alec, interestingly. His and her child called Sorrow is baptized in the most extraordinary scene inside the house when she realizes the church won't take it. She has a baptism ceremony with our younger brothers and sisters in the middle of the night with a candle and bow of water, and she baptizes him, this child.

It's an astonishing scene. Can I... Can I ask her, it seems to me you could say that Hardy tortures Tess. I mean, she never, ever gets a break, and that's an awfully cried phrase. And I do apologize for it, but it's the quickest way through to the heart of the matter. She doesn't. Even when she at the end goes to see his family, Angel's family, he's in Brazil, he's taken care of her in quite sensible ways,

but she's got too much pride to go back to her family where money waits for her. She thinks they're very grand and very pure, the father's an extraordinary pure man, a pure teacher, church and all the rest of it. When she walks across, she changes from her boots into her shoes and what happens, somebody pinches her boots and so she...

I just thought then, oh, come on, give her a break, but of course you're drawn in, and there's a sort of clanking consistency about the plot, which curiously enough works. Right, what do you think, Francis? I think that's true. I think that you can take a step back from the plot

and describe some features of it which sound in the abstract to be the constituents of a very strange and unsuccessful novel. An example of that would be the presence of sensationalism within the novel. So the most famous example of this

is when Tess is in rented accommodation, Claire knocks on the door having returned from Brazil, they have an exchange, Tess says that she has gone back to Alec, Tess goes upstairs. This is one of the amazing moments in the novel, which, importantly, we don't see. There are quite a few of those.

And she stabs, Alec, and the landlady sitting downstairs, cue, this most extraordinary piece of kind of sensational, melodramatic writing. The landlady sitting downstairs, sees a stain opening up on the ceiling, looks up at it eventually, and sees, Hardie's narrator says,

a gigantic ace of space. A heart of spades. A bloody heart, literally made out of Alex. Lifeblood. Jane. Yeah, well, Larkin accused him of sensual cruelty. I think that's a wonderful phrase.

But, I mean, for all of that, yes, you know, he does lay it on a bit fit. But by heavens, it works, doesn't it? Well, yes, it works. I mean, and he is obviously, not obviously, I don't know, or far more neither, you guys. But he's totally, um, I think, consumed by Greek tragedy, where once the furies get going, there's no stopping them.

And for some reason or other, the furies have got going against Tess. And it's awful to watch. It is a sort of torture. It is. I mean, I think you're right, but there's a kind of contrast between the furies and the fates. And, of course, we could argue about that final line, the President of the Immortals, which hardly always claim was ironic. And what he calls man in senseless circumstance.

You know, he says his novels are one plea against man's inhumanity to man, woman, he separates that off, and the lower animals. And his aim in these novels is to incite sympathy. And, okay, you might think he over does it. But, you know, you can't read that novel if you've got a heart and the sensitivity. I mean, the amazing thing is there's all the, and I think the word clanking, I'm going to stick with it, clanks through. And he does that, oh, God, they're going to land about so an injury, which is wonderful. But she lies to have her last leap on what is the sacrificial. alter and you think, but yet when she dies, you're sort of full of tears, aren't you?

You're just thinking, oh no. I mean, it's been happening since page three. We're on page 422 and you know it's been coming. And when it does come, you can't have had it, really. He's more personally invested, I think, with Tess than with any other character, possibly apart from Jude. It's almost unbearable, but what makes it bearable is that there is always something else happening in the novel which gives the reader a different.

kind of experience and often pleasure. Sometimes humour. Yes. It has an extraordinary visual power. The way in which you are led into looking at what is around Tess, what is around the other characters, gives a context for this kind of remorseless, relentless suffering, which I think means that the experience of the reader

is not quite so grindingly oppressive as it would otherwise be. Francis, you want to come here? I think it does touch on one of the serious, more abstract concerns of the novel. I mean, one of the things that we can say in general, I suppose, about many Victorian writers is that they are asking versions of the same question, which is, is there a plan? And Hardy asks that question more or less explicitly, starting with his invocation of Wordsworth,

and Wordsworth's notion of nature's holy plan. And the novel, in all kinds of ways that its most kind of intellectual, I suppose, could be seen as working out an answer to that question. Is there some kind of direction, some kind of purpose, which is not only that of the novelist's imagination? And although we can have some arguments about the presence of the supernatural, perhaps in the novel doing something else, the clear answer appears to be at the end no

and just this is this is very simplistic Dane but it's a sort of question it's as if Alec is lost personified as well as other things an angel is purity personified but both them as Diana said I thought exactly right earlier on they're going in the same direction but Alex is lost

enables him to act very badly I mean we've got to ask the question did he or did he not rape her that's going to come up please we haven't got but Angel is full of he idealises her he's still got the idealisations of his religious background

even though he doesn't want to go to university doesn't want to be in church so that holds him back and it's the torment of doubt in him that actually almost sort of I was about to say crucify that's far too heavy that there's another torture yes well despite his best intentions he does reverse

I think to his old teaching and particularly to his ideas about women. But in terms of idealisation, whether or not you think Hardie's idealising tests and in many ways she is an ideal personification of a rural milkmaid that she becomes, I think that devastating critique of what happens when you do idealise women in Angel,

but also early in a pair of blue eyes in the character of Henry Knight and he's rehearsing that story way back then with a pair of blue eyes. It is well it is devastating. I mean he does, you know, he manages to undo the very process that he himself might be accused of in that

character of angel. He changed his mind about the key time in the plot, didn't the key moment. The key moment is when Alex takes her into a wood how much is worn out and she falls asleep and then we move on the next paragraph. Now in one edition

he'd given her a sleeping draft in another he sort of raped her in the addition I read, she lies down asleep, but a little short sentence, and it is a much better sentence than that. And then there's a next paragraph. Now then, what happened? We can't know.

The one thing we can be certain of is that whatever happened was not of Tess's choosing. That whether it was an explicitly physical rape, or whether because she was exhausted, because her resistance was worn out, she kind of gave in, we can't know. Because, of course, there's a sense in which nothing, happens except in Hardie's imagination and in our imagination.

Well, the baby comes out of it, that's quite something. Yes, but, you know, the baby, I mean, all of these things are fictional constructs. Yeah, but I'm reading a novel. I think novels aren't just fictional constructs. So the life of people we believe it. True. And our imagination goes out to them. They come as real as you three.

I mean, test us as real as any of you here. But we can never come up with an explicit and definite answer as to what happened in the chase. We can't. We can't. Because, because, and as Francis has said, there are several moments like this in the novel, the crucial actions take place, as it were off stage. It's one of the many things he learned from Greek tragedy, you know, that you don't actually perform it in front of the eyes of your audience or reader. But in a sense, because the consequences are so disastrous, you could say that the question of whether it was an explicit rape or whether it was some kind of forced seduct. doesn't in the end matter to what happens to Tess.

I think that it's worth saying, isn't it, that the first readers of this novel in the graphic version did really experience a very different account of this because in that version, we don't see anything of the seduction rate, whatever it is that simply omitted. What we know is that when Tess goes back home, that she says that she had been, tricked by Alec into a false marriage

by a friend who pretended to be a registrar and that they had lived together for a few weeks, she says in the graphic version. There's no baby, but there is a clear indication that there was some kind of relationship. But you wipes that out. Now why does he wipe it out and why does he have the version we have, Jane? I think that's a very interesting question.

Of course it matters to Tess what happens to her. but I think for Hardy, it's asking a question of the reader. Does it make her any less pure if she was forced into sex or if she consented, however reluctantly? Does that matter? Because I think in the end, this novel is about redemption and renewal and second chances. And it's a very political novel about double standards, double sexual standards.

Yeah, Alex confesses the night after night that he'd been on a... Angel does, yeah. Sorry, Angel, he'd been on a two or three day. carry on in London with a strange woman, prostitute he means, and the just says that's fine. And he says it's not the same. How can you say it's the same? And of course the reader says,

of course it's the same. And it is that question about, do we have, it's a big moral question, a big modern question, does anybody have the right to let bygones be bygones and start again? And of course, if you're a rural woman in Hardee's time and you're a fallen woman, which is a very topical issue at the time,

the answer seems to be no and this is what Hardy is railing against. Well no, I think it's interesting that he isn't just no because of her mother is very, very honest who she off, says, well, oh, she tells her off like anything for it. The social answer is, yes, yes.

But says, oh, these things happen, you're going on with it, will you go and make a tea? Nature and what do you, God. Yes, yes, Francis. I think it's sometimes described, isn't it? It sometimes thought of as a novel which somehow depicts that enormous construct of Victorian sexual values

and that Claire in somewhere or another represents those. But actually, the truth is that Claire isn't Victorian enough. That is to say that he's a modern person in all kinds of ways. He's secular. He's interested in the scientific nature of farming. But the thing that he's the residuum from the past is his socially conventional view that his wife should be the first person to sleep with his wife. And the first person who does sleep with a wife is the husband in nature.

That's another thing. I'd like to get on to one more thing. We're having much time down, I want to ask this. In my view, reading it, one of the reasons I was reading it so slowly is because I, there are paragraph after paragraph of the most intense writing about the countryside that you could come across in prose. And actually, if you put the sentences in lines, it would read magnificently as Whitmanesque poetry. It's just extraordinary the detail he pounds in again and again.

Do you feel that? Yes, and it's interesting. You should mention Whitman because Hardy's reading Whitman at this time. In fact, he quotes Whitman to do with Angel. He quotes crossing Brooklyn Ferry. And I think that's absolutely true. And it's sort of tempting just to dwell on the Talbotethe's sections, which are beautiful.

Where she goes and works at a diary. Yeah, the Aquasthorn. But those descriptions of a rural winter in the Starvaker farm of Fincomash. And the two girls crawling over and the birds from the Arctic. And also the way he communicates what it really, feels to be wet, wet through with the piercing rain is tremendous. It's just the countryside. I brought up in a country town and walked around and saw things,

but I didn't see what he saw. I mean, it's like he had this penetrative lens on his forehead for most of his life, really. Didn't miss a thing, did his shadows, light, shapes, clouds, his constable, his turner, he's amazing. On the one hand, you know, it is intensely beautiful. and it is one of the redeeming factors in this kind of otherwise painful experience

of reading of Tess's destruction. But on the other hand, it is never idealised. And a point that I think is worth making about the pastoral environment in Tess of the Derville's is it as a place where people work. This is a novel that has a great deal to say about earning a living or indeed failing to earn a living. And the Wessex that Hardy described,

which it's very easy to sentimentalise. It's a very varied place, or different kinds of Wessex is. It's fertile, it's beautiful, it can also be relentless and grim. And it's full of labour. There's no stinting the amount of labour that these people go through

and you wonder how she could have put up with those immense days doing this back, literally backbending, backbreaking. Because she's also exploited by Farmer Groby, who's an interesting minor character. He's the one who forces her to go on the Threshing machine. It takes up that whole notion, doesn't it, of work in the 19th century, being redemptive, being productive, and turns it on its head. So what we see is work that is ceaseless.

Well, thank you very much, Diana Birch, Francesa Gorman and Jane Thomas. Next week we were talking about Titus Oates and his Popish plot. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I really enjoyed that. I found it hard. I find it hard work, really.

Because you've got to spend. No, I read it again. I've been, I've read it a million times. I read it again for this programme and like you, I was slowed right down. Slowed down, aren't you? By the detail. And it's absolutely wonderful. It's so dense. It's so rich.

And so it's like Tess, you know, Tess is such a variable character. She's not fixed. Nor is the novel. It's not fixed. But actually, although she is an attract, she is the attractor of all eyes to the sense. that she disfigures herself. So it's not to me... We don't really know what she looks like.

No, no. It's interesting, isn't it? When Claire is talking to his mother about what Tess looks like, Clare says, I see her distinctly,

and then gives us the closest that we get to a description, which includes that thick rope of hair. At eyes, she says, violity, bluey, blackish. Like you think,

gosh, that's almost a fact. And Mrs. Claire says, yes, I see her. And it's a kind of almost funny moment where Hardy's kind of putting this back to the reader and thinking, well, I don't see her. And then she says, of course, she's pure and virtuous, an angel sort of mask. The interesting thing about Angel in relation to that, I mean, we've talked a lot about Tess's physical attraction. But Angel has that too. There is this extraordinary business of all of the Milkman. I mean, it's not entirely.

Excuse me, excuse me, not made. You said milkmen. Sorry, I'm in a different truck then, I'm not. Well, yes, yes, quite. Yes, yes, quite. Not one of them is written. But it's not entirely credible, but it's very much part of what Angel represents,

this kind of extraordinary fusion of a man who reverts to something very conventional, as Jane has said. But actually also, someone who has this almost supernatural power over women, like Apollo. Like Apollo. But I think it's one of the greatest books about desire. in the English language. I have to say that the description of falling in love

and that section where the three milkmaids are sort of, I mean, you might find it a little bit sensuous, but they're writhing under this passion for Angel. And what happens to them afterwards? They all go to the bad, you know, when Angel rejects. Very destructive moment. What I wanted to say was this direct line in terms of the victimisation of women,

I think goes right the way through to Tony Morrison's beloved when you think about Sethi. I mean, obviously, writhing under a more pernicious system by far, but she's a very similar kind of character in many ways, I think. Well, it is the torment, it is the torturing of women. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I know.

You all know better now. At the time he was in a marriage he did not like, and he was bitter about it, and Emma, who supported him massively, and was totally rejected, and he went upstairs and nothing to do with her, and so on and so forth, when he did his writing, and so he's bringing that to bear, isn't it?

It's a great deal. And then at the end, he does a play, He dramatises it and the Hardy players put it on and he becomes obsessed with Gertrude Bugler who plays the part of Tess because she becomes the embodiment for him of Tess. So much so that Florence Hennaker destroys this girl's, you know, chance of going to London

because it would like, because Hardy's in his 80s by then, it would excite Mr. Hardy too much. I think you should stay at home with your baby. But he becomes obsessed and he's knocking on the door of various actresses, Ellen Terry and various other people saying, you must pay my Tessie, you must play He becomes really obsessed with her towards the end.

There is something very odd going on there. But alongside that, Hardy, and I think this is one of the things that makes him attractive. He's always on the side of women, really. Yeah. You know, whatever. I think there is truth in that, but there is also a cruel streak in Hardy's imagination, isn't that? Yeah, it's also true. He takes a woman, a beautiful woman who has this kind of tremulous presence

from everybody falls in love with and he punishes her in that narrative and then he asks why and then he invites he constructs around it a kind of almost theological philosophical argument actually there is a profound streak

of cruelty in Hardy's conception and you see it's making a point two on a tower you see it elsewhere yeah two on a tower is extraordinary yeah yeah it is yeah

well thank you here's Simon the descendant of the Tillerson rejected the book Are you really? We wanted about it. I'm trying to lay on him. I should be rejecting your manuscripts, but I'll be offering you to your copy. Thank you. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free.

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