Tribute to Isabel

[_Blixa]

Zeezrom deserves a lot of credit for being such a creative reader - he encourages me to absorb the writing through many senses. If anyone is lucky to a member, it's me.

No kidding. I am continually amazed at the fresh perspective zeezrom brings to every thing he looks at, reads or comments on. I have learned a lot from him.

[_zeezrom]

Why isn't there a smiley with hearts flying off?

[_Dr. Shades]

Have you ever thought how much better life would be if you could relax a little?

Yes. Many, many times.

Shades,

Did you know there are lurkers who refrain from posting because they might feel like their writing is being scrutinized?

No, I didn't. I hope that isn't true.

[_zeezrom]

Shades,

Did you know there are lurkers who refrain from posting because they might feel like their writing is being scrutinized?

No, I didn't. I hope that isn't true.

It wasn't fair of me to assert that. I really don't know for sure if this is the case.

[_honorentheos]

I re-read Jude or Tess pretty much every summer, this time I read both. Tess is still lingering in my mind from August.

Blixa -

I read Jude in high school for AP English. When I finished it, I knew I loved it and was haunted by it for...months? years? still? But I couldn't have put into words why. Not then anyways. I should reread it.

With that in mind, what brings you back to Hardy so frequently?

[_Blixa]

I re-read Jude or Tess pretty much every summer, this time I read both. Tess is still lingering in my mind from August.

Blixa -

I read Jude in high school for AP English. When I finished it, I knew I loved it and was haunted by it for...months? years? still? But I couldn't have put into words why. Not then anyways. I should reread it.

With that in mind, what brings you back to Hardy so frequently?

That is a pretty big question. I can sketch out an outline of an answer, maybe.

I began seriously reading Hardy relatively late. I'd read two novels (The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Return of the Native) in High School and found them maddening. The inevitability of tragedy, the inexorable logic and terrible consequences of social and material conditions were not what I wanted to read about as a young person.

I only read his entire oeuvre in grad school; I took an extensive Hardy seminar at the beginning of my doctoral work. I was originally working on 19thC and 20thC British literature and in fact, my exams covered those areas (I later developed as a student in different and broader direction). At this point I was interested in Modernist irony and Hardy, as he bridges two centuries, is usually taken as a precursor of later authors, like Lawrence and Woolf, that I initially assumed would be my focus. Also, Paul Fussell in The Great War in Modern Memory begins with Hardy as a "clairvoyant" of the sensibility that would emerge from the shock and disillusion of the Great War.

I return mostly to Jude and Tess and the poems because of a couple of things. Hardy is a master stylist. Some of the best single lines of poetry and descriptive paragraphs I know are in his work. I also like Tess and Jude because they are masterworks: everything of Hardy is found within them. Hardy was a tender documentarian of women's terrifying lot. On that count he is a better naturalist than Zola. The index of class relations also cuts across the lives of his characters and his attention to that crossfire, in which Jude and Sue and Tess are caught, is astonishing in its moral generosity toward all the players. Jude is also a novel about the lure of and desire for knowledge, for academic training. Its harrowing account of those things is born out in my own experiences. And Sue? What to say about Sue Bridehead but that at one point in my life I thought I might very well be her. I could never make her horrifying final choices, but the fears that drove her there are emotions I know from the inside out.

Hardy is close to my heart. If I do get around to writing about landscape, which I hope to once I get some other giant writing projects off my plate, I will have to return to Tess and Stonehenge among other things in the Wessex terrain...

[_honorentheos]

Thanks Blixa. I appreciate the extra insight.

At this point I was interested in Modernist irony and Hardy, as he bridges two centuries, is usually taken as a precursor of later authors, like Lawrence and Woolf, that I initially assumed would be my focus. Also, Paul Fussell in The Great War in Modern Memory begins with Hardy as a "clairvoyant" of the sensibility that would emerge from the shock and disillusion of the Great War.

That's very interesting. One of the many things I've enjoyed while reading this novel were the multiple prefaces written by Hardy as subsequent editions came out. In what I have as the Author's Preface to the Fifth Edition, this comment by Hardy jumped out at me: (speaking of critics of the novel) "Others dissent on grounds which are instrinsically no more than an assertion that the novel embodies the views of life prevelent at the end of the nineteenth century, and not those of an eariler and simpler generation - an assertion which I can only hope may be well founded."

At the end of this same preface, he closes with, "So dense is the world thronged that any shifting of positions, even the best warranted advance, galls somebody's kide. Such shiftings often begin in sentiment, and such sentiment sometimes begins in a novel."

Given what you say, I wonder how aware Hardy was that his views would be seen as a precursor for a more experienced and even less "simple generation"'s outlook?

Hardy is a master stylist. Some of the best single lines of poetry and descriptive paragraphs I know are in his work. I also like Tess and Jude because they are masterworks: everything of Hardy is found within them. Hardy was a tender documentarian of women's terrifying lot. On that count he is a better naturalist than Zola. The index of class relations also cuts across the lives of his characters and his attention to that crossfire, in which Jude and Sue and Tess are caught, is astonishing in its moral generosity toward all the players. Jude is also a novel about the lure of and desire for knowledge, for academic training. Its harrowing account of those things is born out in my own experiences. And Sue? What to say about Sue Bridehead but that at one point in my life I thought I might very well be her. I could never make her horrifying final choices, but the fears that drove her there are emotions I know from the inside out.

I just finished Phase III of Tess yesterday. I mentioned this to Zee elsewhere that I didn't realize how thirsty I had been for writing with this perfect combination of beauty with enough "depth" to be satisfying while not so heavy as to be dulling. It's pure enjoyment to read.

Regarding content, one thing I find draws me to him is his offhanded way of suggesting convention and civilization don't automatically mean "good". He seems to do this often through the capitalization of "Nature" with a subtle suggestion that what is causing sorrow, pain, or difficulty in one of our character's lives may be due to unnatural causes only. For example, I liked how he slips in a comment while describing the difference in station between the milkmaids and Angel Clare, of higher social station, and how it influences the maids' collective romantic feelings for a potential future with him:

The full recognition of the futility of their infatuation, from a social point of view; its purposeless beginning; its self-bounded outlook; its lack of everything to justify its existence in the eye of civilization (while lacking nothing in the eye of Nature);

His use of biblical language in poetic ways while hinting throughout that perhaps this is not to be taken for belief in their scriptural efficacy ("Three Leahs to get one Rachel"...) draws me in closer to the narrative.

Hardy is close to my heart. If I do get around to writing about landscape, which I hope to once I get some other giant writing projects off my plate, I will have to return to Tess and Stonehenge among other things in the Wessex terrain...

I had read he was well known of his geographical accuracy. I hadn't realized until beginning that he makes this as much a character of the novel as many human actors are. Again, Nature with a capital "N"?

[_honorentheos]

zeezrom,

As I've been reading further in the novel I thought of another comparison between Corianton - not with our villian but with our hero Angel.

In chapter XXV Hardy gives us a window into Angel's character by contrasting it with his older brothers. How fitting that Angel should have two just as Corianton does, and that the two elder brothers have followed the letter of their father's view of the world in similar ways as Helaman and Shiblon might have done.

First, comparing Mr. Clare the father to Alma the Younger, Hardy tells us this about the pastor:

Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty years, has wellnigh dropped out of contemporary life. A spiritual descendant in the direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his mind once for all in the deeper questions of existence, and admitted no further reasoning on them thenceforward. He was regarded even by those his own date and school of thinking as extreme; while, on the other hand, those totally opposed to him were unwillingly won to admiration for his thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he showed in dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for applying them. He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St John, hated St James as much as he dared, and regarded with mixed feelings Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. The New Testament was less a Christiad then a Pauliad to his intelligence--less an argument than an intoxication. His creed of determinism was such that it almost amounted to a vice, and quite amounted, on its negative side, to a renunciative philosophy which had cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and Leopardi. He despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles, and deemed himself consistent through the whole category--which in a way he might have been. One thing he certainly was--sincere.

Is it difficult to see an Alma the Younger being of such a mind-set? After all, he set aside his secular position early in the book of Alma to focus on preaching the word of God.

Hardy tells us this regarding the brothers:

...his two brothers, non-evangelical, well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest fibre, such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by the lathe of a systematic tuition. They were both somewhat short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies; and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on their shelves. When Correggio's Holy Families were admired, they admired Correggio's Holy Families; when he was decried in favour of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal objection.

Alma describes both of his older sons as steadfast, keeping the commandments, and in whom he hopes to have great joy ( a kind of insult for a parent to tell a child, in my opinion. HOPE to have great joy? What about having joy right now?).

Angel's view of them could easily apply to a Helaman or Shiblom:

Felix seemed to him all Church; Cuthbert all College. His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the mainsprings of the world to the one; Cambridge to the other. Each brother candidly recognized that there were a few unimportant score of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated rather than reckoned with and respected.

They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their visits to their parents. Felix, though an offshoot from a far more recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less self-sacrificing and disinterested. More tolerant than his father of a contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he was less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own teaching. Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded, though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.

What I found interesting is that this and the next chapter tell us something interesting about Angel that might shed light on the question you raise about an Isabel/Corianton relationship. To Hardy, Angel seems the furthest from his father in practise and orthodoxy, but Angel sees in his father's practise (how he lives his beliefs) a hero - someone who puts other firsts and, rightly or wrongly, lives what he believes to a fault.

I think it's fitting that at the end of chapter XXVI Hardy describes Angel as closest to his father in spirit:

Indeed, despite his own heterodoxy, Angel often felt that he was nearer to his father on the human side than was either of his brethren.

Why is that? I think it's because Angel is open to the questions of life and finding his own answers while his brothers simple accepted their father's answers without question: and thus were stunted in their own spiritual growth. They are turned by the lathe of society as Hardy said, a product of a manufactured, industrial process. Angel, on the other hand, is a true human being. Living, breathing, seeking and learning.

This particular phrase stuck with me when I read it and I've been mulling over, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on it:

If these two (meaning his brothers) noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed their growing mental limitations.

It is immediately following this that Hardy describes the one being "all college" and the other "all church". Of Angel, Hardy wants us to understand he is becoming a product of life lived outside of manufactured process - life lived by universal rules self-discovered not social convention:

Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the great passionate pulse of existence, unwarped, uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds which futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to regulate.

So, what makes Angel interesting as a Corianton to an Isabel? I think it's Angel's basis for ethical behavior towards her, described very early on in XXV:

Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life--a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born.

This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic First Cause--her all; her every and only chance. How then should he look upon her as of less consequence than himself; as a pretty trifle to caress and grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest seriousness with the affection which he knew that he had awakened in her--so fervid and so impressionable as she was under her reserve; in order that it might not agonize and wreck her?

As universal rules to live by go in regards to learning how to treat others, I'd say a person could do much, much worse.

[_zeezrom]

Excellent, Honor. I love it.