“He did not reply for some instants. "When the sun shines on the
north front of Sherton Abbey--that's when my happiness will come
to me!" said he, staring as it were into the earth.”
In the Biblical books of Exodus and Joshua, we are introduced to the concept of the Covenant. Specific terms for human behavior in society are laid out, said to be terms demanded by God, and attached to punishments and rewards. In the subsequent histories of the nation of Israel, Biblical historians link the fates of the country to their observance of the covenant. As they abide by it in faith, the fates smile upon them. As they neglect it, the scourges of fate work against them in an iron law of retribution. And the harder they struggle against the pricks of divine displeasure, the more enmeshed they become. As the people of Israel become enamored with the various nature religions of the people’s around them, they loose sight of their covenant obligations and descend into a downward spiral of ignorance and inexplicable (to them) suffering. Only from time to time do heroes stand out with courage among the crowd to show the way to covenantal life.
In a way, Tomas Hardy uses his novels to rewrite this formula. Instead of linking fate to compliance with a religio-social contract (which is what Victorian Era Christianity entailed), Hardy’s fates are linked to the natural rhythms of nature, instinct, and intuition. As characters neglect this natural compass, no matter if they do so for religious purposes or economic or as a consequence of social pressures, they open themselves up to the workings of an antagonistic universe that will not flinch in wrecking its vengeance.
Thus, in the Woodlanders, when we are introduced to the heroine, Grace Maybury, we know that she will have a life of suffering to face.
“Her look expressed a tendency to wait for others' thoughts before uttering her own; possibly also to wait for others' deeds before her own doing. In her small, delicate mouth, which had perhaps hardly settled down to its matured curves, there was a gentleness that might hinder sufficient self-assertion for her own good.”
Grace Maybury, filial child. Grace Maybury, dutiful church-goer. Grace Maybury, devotee of Victorian social morality. We suspect from the outset that Hardy intends to crush her in the machinery of a universe intolerant of imposed sentimentality.
We hope for a universe that will reward us for being “good” by society’s terms. Hardy will not indulge us. “Melbury, perhaps, was an unlucky man in having within him the sentiment which could indulge in this foolish fondness about the imprint of a daughter's footstep,” writes Hardy in his description of Grace’s father, “Nature does not carry on her government with a view to such feelings.”
For those who may not have read the novel The Woodlanders, the plot involves a hard-scrabble village merchant who sends his daughter off to school at great expense to educate her up to a higher social level so as to make a better wife to the yeoman tree planter, Giles Winterbourne. When she returns however, Mr. Maybury gets it into his head that his daughter will now be “wasted” on one such as Giles Winterbourne.
“But here was the fact, which could not be disguised: since seeing what an immense change her last twelve months of absence had produced in his daughter, after the heavy sum per annum that he had been spending for several years upon her education, he was reluctant to let her marry Giles Winterborne, indefinitely occupied as woodsman, cider-merchant, apple-farmer, and what not, even were she willing to marry him herself.”
“Yes, I believe ye. That's just it. I KNOW Grace will gradually sink down to our level again,” he bemoans to his wife,
“. . . and catch our manners and way of speaking, and feel a drowsy content in being Giles's wife. But I can't bear the thought of dragging down to that old level as promising a piece of maidenhood as ever lived--fit to ornament a palace wi'--that I've taken so much trouble to lift up. Fancy her white hands getting redder every day, and her tongue losing its pretty up-country curl in talking, and her bounding walk becoming the regular Hintock shail and wamble!"
Various pressures, social and parental begin to bear down on Grace Maybury, driving a wedge of prejudice between Giles, her childhood sweetheart, and her own heart. "That, then, is the secret of it all," she eventually concludes, "And Giles Winterborne is not for me, and the less I think of him the better."
But these sentiments are but “implanted tastes” as Hardy would let us know.
“He had a strong suspicion that somewhere in the bottom of her heart there pulsed an old simple indigenous feeling favorable to Giles, though it had become overlaid with implanted tastes.”
It is precisely that “simple indigenous feeling” that is Hardy’s concern. It is to him what the covenant was to the Hebrew prophets – the touchstone – the central determinant of whether the seemingly uncaring fates will bless or curse a life. Listen to that voice and you live. Repress it and you die. That is the formula.
“Matters lingered on thus. And then, as a hoop by gentle knocks on this side and on that is made to travel in specific directions, the little touches of circumstance in the life of this young girl shaped the curves of her career.”
From the moment that Grace Maybury deferentially allows her father and all that he represents to influence her, the gears of her calamity begin to grind. Hardy records the terrible moment when the future of Grace and Giles hangs in the balance and both are weighed and found wanting.
“"My silence just now was not accident," she said, in an unequal voice. "My father says it is best not to think too much of that-- engagement, or understanding between us, that you know of. I, too, think that upon the whole he is right. But we are friends, you know, Giles, and almost relations."”
“She added, with emotion in her tone, "For myself, I would have married you--some day--I think. But I give way, for I see it would be unwise."”
“Grace heaved a divided sigh, with a tense pause between, and moved onward, her heart feeling uncomfortably big and heavy, and her eyes wet. Had Giles, instead of remaining still, immediately come down from the tree to her, would she have continued in that filial acquiescent frame of mind which she had announced to him as final? If it be true, as women themselves have declared, that one of their sex is never so much inclined to throw in her lot with a man for good and all as five minutes after she has told him such a thing cannot be, the probabilities are that something might have been done by the appearance of Winterborne on the ground beside Grace. But he continued motionless and silent in that gloomy Niflheim or fog-land which involved him, and she proceeded on her way.”
Neither of them are willing to live courageously. Neither will fight the current of conventionality that has inserted itself between them. Both believe somehow that they are being noble in deferring. And from here on out, the plot begins to array all the forces at its disposal against them, surrendering them to what they apparently wanted more than what they might have had. The words of the Proverbs come to mind.
22 “How long will you who are simple love your simple ways?
How long will mockers delight in mockery
and fools hate knowledge?
23 Repent at my rebuke!
Then I will pour out my thoughts to you,
I will make known to you my teachings.
24 But since you refuse to listen when I call
and no one pays attention when I stretch out my hand,
25 since you disregard all my advice
and do not accept my rebuke,
26 I in turn will laugh when disaster strikes you;
I will mock when calamity overtakes you—
27 when calamity overtakes you like a storm,
when disaster sweeps over you like a whirlwind,
when distress and trouble overwhelm you.
28 “Then they will call to me but I will not answer;
they will look for me but will not find me,
29 since they hated knowledge
and did not choose to fear the LORD.
30 Since they would not accept my advice
and spurned my rebuke,
31 they will eat the fruit of their ways
and be filled with the fruit of their schemes.
32 For the waywardness of the simple will kill them,
and the complacency of fools will destroy them;
33 but whoever listens to me will live in safety
and be at ease, without fear of harm.”
Replace the word “wisdom” with the word “naure” and the word “Lord” with the word “intuition” and you are well into Hardy’s mind. The great difference between the Hewbrew conception of wisdom and that of Thomas Hardy has to do with where wisdom will be found. Is it in nature? Inintuition? In “common sense” and self-awareness? Or is it to be found in a text? In a social code? In an ancient covenant and tradition? Hardy describes Grace Maybury as one “mentally trained and tilled into foreignness of view” – literally divorced from her own self-understanding. There is a brief moment where she senses vaguely the danger of what she is doing and seeks to retreat from the path that her father’s paternalistic classicism has maneuvered her into but the voice of the inner wisdom is too weak and “the frail bark of fidelity that she had thus timidly launched was stranded and lost.”
“Fate, it seemed, would have it this way, and there was nothing to do but to acquiesce.”
The local farmers, being in tune with those rhythms of the natural world better than the refinely educated Grace Maybury, can see who belongs with who but the protagonists themselves cannot. "If they two come up in Wood next Midsummer Night they'll come as one," says one of the local “characters” of Dr. Fitzpiers and Grace.
"Instead of my skellington he'll carry home her living carcass before long. But though she's a lady in herself, and worthy of any such as he, it do seem to me that he ought to marry somebody more of the sort of Mrs. Charmond, and that Miss Grace should make the best of Winterborne."”
All Grace can do is sense that something is not right with the relationship that develops with Dr. Fitzpier, the man that her father considered “best: for her.
“She admitted the advantage; but it was plain that though Fitzpiers exercised a certain fascination over her when he was present, or even more, an almost psychic influence, and though his impulsive act in the wood had stirred her feelings indescribably, she had never regarded him in the light of a destined husband. "I don't know what to answer," she said. "I have learned that he is very clever.”
Should we marry someone we regard as “very clever” simply because of some parental agenda? Hardy thinks not.
“She could not explain the subtleties of her feeling as he could state his opinion, even though she had skill in speech, and her father had none. That Fitzpiers acted upon her like a dram, exciting her, throwing her into a novel atmosphere which biased her doings until the influence was over, when she felt something of the nature of regret for the mood she had experienced—“
Grace is unable to believe what she is unable to explain. But such is the case with most of us in a post Enlightenment society. And in many ways, the father who pressures her is himself a victim:
“Melbury's respect for Fitzpiers was based less on his professional position, which was not much, than on the standing of his family in the county in by-gone days. That implicit faith in members of long-established families, as such, irrespective of their personal condition or character, which is still found among old-fashioned people in the rural districts reached its full intensity in Melbury. His daughter's suitor was descended from a family he had heard of in his grandfather's time as being once great, a family which had conferred its name upon a neighboring village; how, then, could anything be amiss in this betrothal?
"I must keep her up to this," he said to his wife. "She sees it is for her happiness; but still she's young, and may want a little prompting from an older tongue."
Having eviscerated his daughter of her self-confidence, Maybury has left her with no rudder. No compass. What he has done is made her vulnerable to whatever external force pressures her the most. And in this case, it is the philandering heart of Dr. Fitzpiers.
“The intoxication that Fitzpiers had, as usual, produced in Grace's brain during the visit passed off somewhat with his withdrawal. She felt like a woman who did not know what she had been doing for the previous hour, but supposed with trepidation that the afternoon's proceedings, though vague, had amounted to an engagement between herself and the handsome, coercive, irresistible Fitzpiers.”
“His material standing of itself, either present or future, had little in it to give her ambition, but the possibilities of a refined and cultivated inner life, of subtle psychological intercourse, had their charm. It was this rather than any vulgar idea of marrying well which caused her to float with the current, and to yield to the immense influence which Fitzpiers exercised over her whenever she shared his society.
Any observer would shrewdly have prophesied that whether or not she loved him as yet in the ordinary sense, she was pretty sure to do so in time.”
Should someone marry because most folks think they are pretty sure that love will ensue? Hardy thinks not. This trading of what is as though it were a substitute for what should be is precisely what Hardy objects to. If you have read Hardy’s novels, you get to the pivitol dialog between Grace and Fitzpiers and you watch, as one outside the events, observing a train approach a missing bridge that the passengers believe is there.
“"But could it not be a quiet ceremony, even at church?" she pleaded.
"I don't see the necessity of going there!" he said, a trifle impatiently. "Marriage is a civil contract, and the shorter and simpler it is made the better. People don't go to church when they take a house, or even when they make a will."
"Oh, Edgar--I don't like to hear you speak like that."
"Well, well--I didn't mean to. But I have mentioned as much to your father, who has made no objection; and why should you?"
She gave way, deeming the point one on which she ought to allow sentiment to give way to policy--if there were indeed policy in his plan. But she was indefinably depressed as they walked homeward.
“He left her at the door of her father's house. As he receded, and was clasped out of sight by the filmy shades, he impressed Grace as a man who hardly appertained to her existence at all. Cleverer, greater than herself, one outside her mental orbit, as she considered him, he seemed to be her ruler rather than her equal, protector, and dear familiar friend.
. . . .The disappointment she had experienced at his wish, the shock given to her girlish sensibilities by his irreverent views of marriage, together with the sure and near approach of the day fixed for committing her future to his keeping, made her so restless that she could scarcely sleep at all that night.”
“But since you refuse to listen when I call . . .”
Once more, on the day before her wedding, she tries to struggle free from the grip of her filial mesmerism.
“I have been thinking very much about my position this morning--ever since it was light," she began, excitedly, and trembling so that she could hardly stand. "And I feel it is a false one. I wish not to marry Mr. Fitzpiers. I wish not to marry anybody; but I'll marry Giles Winterborne if you say I must as an alternative.”
But she implores rather than insists and in so doing, declares her life to be the second life of another.
“The day loomed so big and nigh that her prophetic ear could, in fancy, catch the noise of it, hear the murmur of the villagers as she came out of church, imagine the jangle of the three thin-toned Hintock bells. The dialogues seemed to grow louder, and the ding-ding-dong of those three crazed bells more persistent. She awoke:
the morning had come.
Five hours later she was the wife of Fitzpiers.”
Hardy could not be more brilliant than when he describes the sheep-dog like forces that drive people into decisions that run counter to their inner wisdom.
“Then, when my emotions have exhausted themselves, I become full of fears, till I think I shall die for very fear. The terrible insistencies of society--how severe they are, and cold and inexorable--ghastly towards those who are made of wax and not of stone. Oh, I am afraid of them; a stab for this error, and a stab for that--correctives and regulations framed that society may tend to perfection--an end which I don't care for in the least. Yet for this, all I do care for has to be stunted and starved."
It is only in hindsight, as Fitzpiers true character is revealed, that she begins to understand the mistake that she has made. He regards her as “another species” and begins to regret having “mated with someone below him.” He forms emotional and sexual liaisons with a local aristocrat and runs off to Italy with her. “I stooped to mate beneath me, and now I rue it." He says. Both of them consider themselves to have lost “their path.”
“But though possessed by none of that feline wildness which it was her moral duty to experience, she did not fail to know that she had made a frightful mistake in her marriage. Acquiescence in her father's wishes had been degradation to herself. People are not given premonitions for nothing; she should have obeyed her impulse on that early morning, and steadfastly refused her hand.”
But Hardy is not done with her. “Him she could forget; her circumstances she had always with her.” And Hardy’s machinery of fate is not done grinding her deference to social convention down either. He has had his way with the tradition of the father’s choosing their daughter’s marriage partners. Now he is going to go after the idea of marriage as an irrevocable bond that should be sacrosanct in the face of non-existent attachment. Through the ruminations of Grace’s father, we begin to hear the voice of Thomas Hardy asking why social conventions should hold such sway when people suffer thereby.
“Melbury's heretofore confidential candor towards his gentlemanly son-in-law was displaced by a feline stealth that did injnry to his every action, thought, and mood. He knew that a woman once given to a man for life took, as a rule, her lot as it came and made the best of it, without external interference; but for the first time he asked himself why this so generally should be so.”
“Was not the Sabbath made for man and not man for the Sabbath?” we can almost here Hardy asking his readers?
“Impelled by a remembrance [Grace] took down a prayer-book and turned to the marriage-service. Reading it slowly through, she became quite appalled at her recent off-handedness, when she rediscovered what awfully solemn promises she had made him at those chancel steps not so very long ago.
She became lost in long ponderings on how far a person's conscience might be bound by vows made without at the time a full recognition of their force. That particular sentence, beginning "Whom God hath joined together," was a staggerer for a gentlewoman of strong devotional sentiment. She wondered whether God really did join them together.”
It is impossible not to think of Rousseau’s Emile as Grace and her father talk about the damage that had been done by so removing her from nature and bringing her up in school:
“You ought to care. You have got into a very good position to start with. You have been well educated, well tended, and you have become the wife of a professional man of unusually good family. Surely you ought to make the best of your position."
"I don't see that I ought. I wish I had never got into it. I wish you had never, never thought of educating me. I wish I worked in the woods like Marty South. I hate genteel life, and I want to be no better than she."
"Why?" said her amazed father.
"Because cultivation has only brought me inconveniences and troubles. I say again, I wish you had never sent me to those fashionable schools you set your mind on. It all arose out of that, father. If I had stayed at home I should have married--" She closed up her mouth suddenly and was silent; and be saw that she was not far from crying.
Melbury was much grieved. "What, and would you like to have grown up as we be here in Hintock--knowing no more, and with no more chance of seeing good life than we have here?"
"Yes. I have never got any happiness outside Hintock that I know of, and I have suffered many a heartache at being sent away.
Hardy gives his hero and heroine another chance at love but, like Jude and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure, their second test would require greater fortitude against social convention than the first. And though they draw close to making the fateful decision, neither can do it when they find themselves at the brink of it. [Plot spoiler alert] In the end, they defer to social convention and Giles sleeps in the rain, contracting the illness that will kill him.
“A dreadful enlightenment spread through the mind of Grace. "Oh," she cried, in her anguish, as she hastily prepared herself to go out, "how selfishly correct I am always--too, too correct! Cruel propriety is killing the dearest heart that ever woman clasped to her own."
“Her timid morality had, indeed, underrated his chivalry till now, though she knew him so well. The purity of his nature, his freedom from the grosser passions, his scrupulous delicacy, had never been fully understood by Grace till this strange self-sacrifice in lonely juxtaposition to her own person was revealed. The perception of it added something that was little short of reverence to the deep affection for him of a woman who, herself, had more of Artemis than of Aphrodite in her constitution.”
It is hard to find a more fitting portrayal of Thomas Hardy’s prophetic message to his society. He would have Victorian England live lives with less Artemis (god of reason) and more Aphrodite (god of passion). For Hardy, the one person who does so in The Woodlanders is the unfortunate Marty South, lifelong friend and and co-worker of Giles Winterbourne. “Marty South alone, of all the women in Hintock and the world, had approximated to Winterborne's level of intelligent intercourse with nature,” says Hardy,
“In that respect she had formed the complement to him in the other sex, had lived as his counterpart, had subjoined her thought to his as a corollary.”
The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon that wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been with these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze. They had been possessed of its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to read its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing; to them the sights and sounds of night, winter, wind, storm, amid those dense boughs, which had to Grace a touch of the uncanny, and even the supernatural, were simple occurrences whose origin, continuance, and laws they foreknew. They had planted together, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which, seen in few, were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet. From the light lashing of the twigs upon their faces, when brushing through them in the dark, they could pronounce upon the species of the tree whence they stretched; from the quality of the wind's murmur through a bough they could in like manner name its sort afar off. They knew by a glance at a trunk if its heart were sound, or tainted with incipient decay, and by the state of its upper twigs, the stratum that had been reached by its roots. The artifices of the seasons were seen by them from the conjuror's own point of view, and not from that of the spectator's.
"He ought to have married YOU, Marty, and nobody else in the world!" said Grace, with conviction, after thinking somewhat in the above strain.
Marty shook her head. "In all our out-door days and years together, ma'am," she replied, "the one thing he never spoke of to me was love; nor I to him."
"Yet you and he could speak in a tongue that nobody else knew—not even my father, though he came nearest knowing--the tongue of the trees and fruits and flowers themselves."
In the end, it is Marty South that stays faithful to Giles even after he dies. "Now, my own, own love," she whispers to his gravestone after Grace decides to move on with her life.
"You are mine, and on'y mine; for she has forgot 'ee at last, although for her you died. But I--whenever I get up I'll think of 'ee, and whenever I lie down I'll think of 'ee. Whenever I plant the young larches I'll think that none can plant as you planted; and whenever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider-wring, I'll say none could do it like you. If ever I forget your name, let me forget home and Heaven!--But no, no, my love, I never can forget 'ee; for you was a GOOD man, and did good things!"
In the film version of the woodlanders, Giles and Marty capture the essence of the novel in the following exchange:
Marty: Oh, Giles, if only you could tell your heart to be free.
Giles: You can't tell the heart. The heart hopes. Most of all where it's hopeless.
I can't believe you put all these reviews out at once! It is like being given a 5 pound box of dark chocolate truffles. The first one is heart-breakingly delicious. The second is sweet. The third makes you feel you can never eat another chocolate and yet more than four pounds remain.
I only gave sufficient attention to the first review: on art and Romantic ideas. I recognize much of the current view of artists in the description you gave. I think feeling special and unique becomes very hard to separate from feeling superior and I personally would have been better served being made aware of my commonality with others than my specialness.
After that the reviews begin to spin and merge. I read Jude the Obscure this year and swore to read no more Hardy. My intention is reinforced by the sameness of the moral sentiments presented in the two books you mention.
Posted by: mommalibrarian | 09/18/2011 at 02:47 PM
"I read Jude the Obscure this year and swore to read no more Hardy. "
Most people I know would agree with you. For some reason I like to wallow in Hardy novels. Grin.
He is a Romantic hardliner. Be a Romantic or prepare to meet your doom. Grin.
Glad you enjoyed them.
P.
Posted by: Philip Crossman | 09/18/2011 at 05:00 PM