Most-read this week: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The most popular article on greycat.org during the last week has been ‘The shadow of Stonehenge: paganism, fate and redemption in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles‘. This essay seems to have a particularly strong following in the Indian subcontinent, for some reason.
Fundamentally, Stonehenge for Hardy stands for ‘the natural’, and – as Hardy himself made clear – Tess Durbeyfield, described in the subtitle of Tess as ‘a pure woman’, is pure in the sense of being natural, in her femininity, her beauty, and her motivations. It is therefore fitting that it is at Stonehenge that the climax of the story, the arrest of Tess, takes place, but this significance is prefigured in the early part of the book with the description in chapter II of the ritual of ‘Club-walking Day’, a pagan festival celebrating spring and fertility, in which Tess takes part. The story can thus be said to begin with moving circle of girls and women in white (among them is Tess, marked out by her red ribbon), performing a pagan ritual; it ends within the immobile circle of grey stones, a heathen temple of nature. The rough primitiveness of both these circles expresses the role that primal, instinctive drives take in this highly sensual and tragic story, and embodies one of the chief oppositional pairings that Hardy used as a fundamental structure of the novel: that between ‘nature’ and ’society’.
For much more on the interweaving of paganism and primitiveness, fertility and fate in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, have a look at ‘The Shadow of Stonehenge’.
Picture: ‘Something seemed to move on the verge of the dip eastward’, illustration by D. A. Wehrschmidt for chapter LVIII of Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). Scanned by Philip V. Allingham (image above resized) for the Victorian Web. [Source]
