Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Wessex in an Age of Transition

Aims

This course aims to:

• help you gain a critical appreciation of literary and historical contexts;
• provide the tools for an exploration of Hardy’s narrative method;
• investigate a variation of themes and techniques through analysis of this text

Course content

As Raymond Williams reminds us in The Country and the City (1973), Hardy was born only a few miles from Tolpuddle, and only six years after the men known as the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, who had tried to found a farm labourers’ union there, had been deported to Australia.  This indicates that the society he was born into, though rural, was not isolated from developments in the cities, but itself subject to change and struggle. His geographical territory, Wessex, first so named in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), has often been mistaken for a timeless backwater, prompting contemporary readers (mainly young women) to write to Hardy asking how they might return to the country life he described. “The series of novels I projected being mainly of the kind called local, they seemed to require a territorial definition of some sort to lend unity to their scene,” he explained in the 1895 Preface to the ‘Wessex edition’ of Far From the Madding Crowd. This novel had early provoked the criticism that it painted too idyllic a picture of farming conditions in Dorset in the 1870s: as you will have found, this can certainly not be said of Tess of the d’Urbervilles! Living and working conditions among poor farm labourers are clearly described as far from idyllic. At the same time, while Hardy wrote in a period when there were still local communities, this text provides evidence of a powerful network of the society as a whole, manifest in references to the newspapers, the railways, education, the law and the economy.

Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), concerned with the complications of change and the world’s random cruelty, is unambiguously a contemporary novel. If the independent and strong-willed heroine of Far From the Madding Crowd challenged Victorian assumptions about young women, Tess, the ‘Pure Woman’, divided not only critics but also families, and broke up friendships. Hardy’s intention had been to “demolish the doll of English fiction”, and while some readers thought him “brave and clear-sighted” and Tess a Shakespearean creation, others called her “vile” and the portrayal of her seasonal countryside activities “Not alive, not true . . . not even honest”.  The novel continues to provoke critical debate, not least on the question to what extent Hardy, in dramatising the “ache of modernism” (Chapter 19), questions the foundations of traditional representation and realist character-drawing. Our discussions will engage with all these issues.

What to expect on this course

The course will be taught in a series of informal lectures and group discussions: your participation is very much encouraged! Recent years have again shown us the value of being able to respond to each other face-to-face in one room.

Course sessions

1. Introduction: Hardy’s Wessex
2. Tess as an agricultural novel of the early 1890s
3. A scandalous tale: contemporary reactions
4. A different kind of heroine: has “the doll of English fiction” been demolished?
5. The complications of the narrative voice

Learning outcomes

As a result of the course, you will gain a greater understanding of the subject and you should be able to:

• develop confidence in your own critical ability through taking part in discussions of texts you have read and reflected on independently
• articulate an informed response to the texts and some of the issues covered
  on the course;
• demonstrate an analytical approach to reading this 19th-century novel.

Required reading

Hardy, T, Tess of the d’Urbervilles