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Tess of the D'UrbevillesShelf life: Looking at secular booksTESS OF THE D’URBEVILLES Did you get back from church on a Sunday evening and watch Tess? I tried to, but I couldn’t bear it. Not that the acting was bad, but that I couldn’t cope with the unremitting bleakness. Having the same amount of tragedy as the TV version, but a greater interest in other characters, nature and God, the book is easier to cope with, and actually more interesting. If you’ve not looked at it since your teens, as I hadn’t, or have never tackled Hardy before, let me commend Tess to you. The story of Tess is very simple, but heartbreaking. A young girl is pushed towards some newly discovered wealthy (presumed) relatives by her poor and careless family. The ne’er-do-well son pursues, then rapes her, and she flees, humiliated and pregnant, to her home. So Tess’s blight begins; it intensifies when she meets and falls in love with Angel Clare, who loves her for what she seems to be, beautiful and ‘spotless’, but, when eventually told of her history on their marriage day, cannot accept her ‘defilement’. It gets much worse, but I can’t tell you any more here. Desperation of atheismHardy wrote this book in 1888; 30 years before this he had been introduced to evolution and progressive ideas, leaving him without a belief in God. This atheism completely pervades his themes and plots. For Tess there is no order or hope of heaven to provide any comfort, only blind fate. And yet it seems as though Hardy cannot sustain his avowed lack of faith. He follows Greek tragedy in writing repeatedly about destiny which is far from blind, but instead is personal and often malevolent. Tess thinks, ‘All was, alas, worse than vanity — injustice, punishment, exaction, death’. And more than that, his categories of thought are all theological; guilt and innocence, justice and beauty, creation and fall, forgiveness and atonement. More clearly than many writers today, Hardy really wrestles with his thoughts and shows transparently the desperation of atheism — the lack of any hope without God, and also the impossibility of understanding our universe without God. Peaceful CalvinismIt is telling that, in the story, the only really happy characters are Angel Clare’s parents, the sacrificial Calvinist vicar and his wife, who are portrayed as dogmatic, but gracious and serene. The other religious folk are priggish or hypocritical, but these two seem to live at peace. In creating them, Hardy seems to cast a wistful backward glance at the best of what he has left. Tess of the d’Urbevilles is worth reading because it is a moving, challenging book and because it shows us the tension that the world around us lives in; refusing to acknowledge God, but living as if there is a God to bring meaning. The pain and the awe we feel as we read are actual indications of God’s reality; without him, the death of a child, the beauty of nature and the horror of rape would all be meaningless, unremarkable facts. Sarah Allen© Evangelicals Now - November 2008 |