It's interesting that we are often led to discuss the reception of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles. Nowadays, people who read this book have strong opinions which place them on certain ends of the spectrum. You either hate it or you love it. Maybe you love the book but you hate Tess. It's interesting to me that people should form such strong opinions on a classic character like that. Therefore I expected the contemporary criticisms of this novel to likely be negative. Imagine my surprise that by the first couple of reviews I encountered some of the best examples of praise that we've read so far of the novel's we've blogged about.
There isn't really a better way to discuss the aforementioned praise other than to just pick out the specific quotes.
"Mr. Hardy's new novel is in many respects the finest work which he has yet produced, and its superiority is largely due to a profound moral earnestness which has not always been conspicuous in his writing." -- Clementina Black from The Illustrated London News (January 9, 1892)
"Mr. Hardy has written one of his most powerful novels, perhaps the most powerful which he ever wrote, to illustrate his conviction that not only is there no Providence guiding individual men and women in the right way, but that, in many cases at least, there is something like a malign fate which draws them out of the right way into the wrong way." -- R.H. Hutton from The Spectator (January 23, 1892)
"...all things taken into account, 'Tess of the D'Ubervilles' is well in front of Mr. Hardy's previous work, and is destined...to rank high among the achievements of Victorian novelists." -- From The Athenaeum (January 9, 1892)
That's just a few of them. They all had specific points, but they either ended or began with these noteworthy words and that's what stood out to me. This acceptance and praise of Hardy's novel is not lightly given, in my opinion. It seems several of those who claim it to be a great work, also lament that it is not the typical novel a reader expects. Therefore, it's left to be questioned, is Tess of the D'Urbervilles great and reknowned for it's greatness or it's oddness (strangeness, difference, etc)? The writer from The Pall Mall Gazette (December 31, 1891) is one of those who prominently compared Tess to Hardy's other works. He doesn't dislike Hardy's new novel. He only aims to inform the readers that those who take home Tess "for his delectation over the Christmas fire, thinking perhaps to have another Far from the Madding Crowd, may well feel a little shaken as the gay pastoral comedy of the opening chapters is shifted by degrees into the sombre trapping of the tragic muse." This critic isn't the only one who said something like this. Clementina Black said something similar as she discusses the conventional reader and their expectations which Hardy challenges with a break in the traditional pattern with an unhappy ending. However, there's so much talk about fate ("It was to be"). Should we have expected a happy ending after all the difficulties that Tess endured??
I think for the times that Tess was written, people expected novels like this to end with a relatively happy ending and that's why some people, especially James and Stevenson, might have hated or harshly critiqued it. Had Tess gotten away with Angel would they have lived happily though? Tess might have gone crazy from murdering Alec so I think that the novel would have ended in some way not all too pleasant.
ReplyDeleteFrom the beginning, I knew there was not going to be a happy ending and I weirdly think that a happy ending would not have been fitting for this story. I think the reason Hardy chose to end his novel so tragically was to possibly show the ill-fate that are in some cases inevitable in ones life and maybe also to show how disgusting men really are... not too sure :)
ReplyDeleteI think as readers, we do expect a happy ending after all the horrible things Tess went through; however, after reading Hardy's interview I can understand his lack of a happy ending. Like I mentioned in my blog, I think the best authors are the ones who don't think of a whole story and then fill in the details but the ones who start with an idea and let it consume them until it almost writes itself.
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