HARDY AND THE RECLAIMED LAND OF EARTHLY PROMISES

A milkmaid, a corn-binder and a lover

Each girl sat down on her three-legged stool, her face sideways, her right cheek resting against the cow, and looked musingly along the animal’s flank at Tess as she approached. The male milkers, with hat-brims turned down, resting flat on their foreheads and gazing on the ground, did not observe her.

Milkmaids observe the new arrival along the animal’s flank. There couldn’t be a more perfect perspective from which to view the competition. Male milkers bury their heads into the same part of the animal. They look downwards, not outwards. A meditative silence. I’ve never read a more zen-like description of any job. 

A little while ago, rabbits, hares, snakes, rats and mice retreated into cornfields, chased by a red-armed reaping machine, unaware that they would soon be viciously massacred by the corn-binders. The binder gathers up the ears of corn like a lover,  kneels on the sheaf while she ties it, beating her skirts back when they’re lifted by the breeze. 

The men do pretty much the same thing, but Hardy is in love with women, with this woman, these women, the labour of women. Tess of the d’Ubervilles is a tragic novel about a woman who dies, but it’s also a novel about place, it’s a sort of love poem to women in the field. Hardy writes so intimately about each of Tess’s temporary employments that it’s hard to tell whether he’s sexualising the work or the worker. He pays a special interest in women workers, that goes a little beyond the woman as land trope. In his own words:

A field-man is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself with it.

Labour of loss

Over the course of the novel, Tess works as:

A kept woman

A milkmaid

A corn binder

A turnip-digger (half the vegetable had already been eaten by livestock, their job was to grub up the second half so that it could be eaten as well)

A reed-drawer (pulling combed corn out of a press)

A second and more disillusioned attempt at being a kept woman

The threshing-machine

Far from the binders and unsolitary reapers, Hardy writes about the essential separateness of the driver of the threshing-machine. The man in the machine is the machine. He is not a local. According to Hardy, neither is he an agriculturist. The lone black figure of the driver, as he is described:

‘What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world, but not of it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather, frost, and sun. He travelled with his engine from farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex. He spoke in a strange northern accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes around him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his Plutonic master. The long strap which ran from the driving-wheel of his engine to the red thresher under the rick was the sole tie-line between agriculture and him.’

In the agricultural world, but not of it.

He served fire and smoke.

As if some ancient doom compelled him to wander here.

A strap the sole connection between agriculture and him.

Feudal villages and their classes

Hardy defines three classes of village:

the village cared for by its lord (the village with a resident landowner)

the village cared for by itself (the village run by freeholders)

the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord (the absentee-owner’s village)

Abandonment

Both times, when Alec d’Uberville dumped Tess and when Angel Clare walked out on his marriage, Hardy became the land to support Tess. While she wandered around thinking of herself as a sinner and a ghost, intruding on the landscape, he was pointing out rabbits and hares and all these living creatures to whom she was not an interloper, not an anomaly. 

In that time, though, Angel Clare was the only person of his class working at the dairy. The dairyman, couldn’t, say, get a second income charging urban apprentices for a little bit of dairy-making practice as well as a short stay in a rural destination and a brief dalliance with an authentic milkmaid.

Of course, the milkmaid Hardy and his readers had their eye on was Tess. Called maidy by the dairyman, Tess was the obvious choice. The personification of that lost dream of a pastoral romance. Sadly, Angel Clare was not. That little spell in the farm is the last little glimmer of hope and charm in the book. The rest is misery and the woeful inadequacy of a person who wanted the romance of being a farmer. Went to the Americas, got sick, came back. Married, discovered his wife wasn’t a virgin because she’d been raped, got sick, left. Tried to cheat on her, got cold feet, gave up. Tried to come back to her, found her, was too late. She killed her rapist, got caught and hung.

This entire horrible stretch goes on relentlessly like steel wheels for a few hundred pages. Hardy runs these steel wheels over the body of Tess. Past, present, future and author all gang up to visit woe upon her. All the while Angel Clare mangles his way through the world, doing just about everything wrong.

Characters

Tess: maiden, very briefly mother, the primeval female energy, passionate and loyal. Victim, victim, victim. A descendant of the feudal lords d’Ubervilles, but also a rural job-shopper of a different kind of dying breed.

Angel Clare: A rural-shopper and failed farmer.

Alec d’Uberville: Title-usurper, rapist and briefly failed preacher.

Tess’s mother: A beast of the fields, tirelessly demanding money, getting into trouble, living with a drunken husband and shoving her daughter at every passing stranger in the hope of a marriage/settlement/child-with-settlement.

Alec would’ve been a survivor, if Tess hadn’t killed him. He’s the kind of character that usually just gets away with everything. Not so much a destroyer as an agent of destruction. Angel Clare is a survivor, and we know because there’s so many of him around today. Angel Clare’s progeny are running beardedly towards villages even now. 

Tess wasn’t meant to survive, from the start of the novel. She represented a landscape and a world and a womanhood that Hardy already knew was dying, just like Jude represented a similarly lost manhood.

Being an urban interloper in a rural wonderland

In Serbia, we took holidays in the mountains, staying in one of a choice of tiny villages. We lived in little apartments given on rent, which were basically houses bowed out of, evacuated, or built-up. We were surrounded, each time, by lacy tablecloths, plates which you hang up on walls, always popular with the elderly in every country. Flowery crockery, warm beds. 

The villages were not ageing, they were aged. Young people came back about as often as we did. They came on holiday. Buses came by once a week. Whoever stayed was rarely less than seventy years old. Those who were a part of the tourist market were the most active. In one village, we watched a shepherd, learnt how to clean a fish, and rolled around in a forest of flowers on a mountain. 

In another, every evening, we heard this incredible musical call of cowbells, as a big herd made their way through the village. It’s a sound that makes you want to follow, like the call of Pied Piper, all the way back into childhood and deep into a mountain. 

We tried goat milk, sheep cheese, raspberry pie, an incredible array of jams, trout from a local fish farming enterprise, and, since these were not always holidays, participated in workshops and got drunk with the participants and the village alcoholic.

One evening, we saw a very old woman, aged into a tiny black dot with a patch of white hair, standing at the door of her house. She didn’t do anything but that seemed to be her evening ritual, watching the evening. We passed more slowly each evening, heartbroken for that brief spell of passing. Spoke to the neighbours, who said that they were keeping an eye on her.

The exodus from villages leaves a strange emptiness, brings strange guests.

It’s a beautiful thing, to taste bits of a lost world. The acid and strangely addictive taste of sheep cheese. The smell of elderflower. The silent evening gaze of an old woman. 

To want to eat them, though. 

Rain has rotted all the corn so her garland is not gold but greenish and phosphorescent with blight. the acres of rye have been invaded with ergot and this year, eating bread will make you mad. Titania, Angela Carter, Overture and Incidental Music in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Rot. Rain. Blight. Bread. Madness. The picturesque stuff that pastoral dreams are made on. It’s not sourdough. 

The Body of Tess

In the feminist world of Hardy, he runs his threshing machine through the body of Tess, but he is also the land that supports her. It is different from the fertility-goddess dream that runs through women’s bodies when they start looking for an ancestry that is not parented. That myth leads to red tents and pointing fingers at the moon and accidental nudity. Hardy just keeps on offering Tess jobs. Unlike other fertility myths, she does not make a brood of children, and there is only one child to grieve for. But the resilience of Tess is very much the movement of seasons and seasonal work. 

In the most barren place, where she becomes a reed-drawer, she reaches the end and starts to hate her poverty with a real, breaking anger. This land is leeched, the ex-milkmaids are alcoholics and there is very little for the writer to offer and for Tess to eat. 

She takes off then into keptism, keptity, where she lives a strange dream of not wholly living in the place. It is the least presence Tess has ever had, and it’s no wonder that she finally went mad and killed Alec. It doesn’t matter who she killed, though. I blame Angel Clare. 

In the feminist world of Hardy, forests, mists, snails and bees all have sex with Tess. Rape is a forest at midnight. Silence is a baby named Sorrow. In the feminist world of Hardy, we are all waiting for Angel Clare to keep a promise he made when he wanted to join in a dance in a meadow. It is a promise made to the meadow, the dance, the dancers and the maiden. There is no bigger disappointment than the wedding night of Angel Clare and Tess. The book does not recover and does not allow him to return, until the death of Tess. Couldn’t be more absolute. 

Anger

It’s funny that since I was a child, there are two people I have stayed angry with: Angel Clare and Fanny Price. Both don’t know the price of things. The cost of things, especially love, relationships, confessions and most of all abandonment. The deal you have to make with the gods of fertility when you dance with the maidens on the green. The loss of family you have to incur when you steal in for the capture of a heart. Neither of them gave up anything. My ex-girlfriend told me once that we were probably the last two romantics left on earth. Hardy was a romantic. We are in agreement that everything should be sacrificed for romance. 

When Tess finally abandons the earth Angel Clare rests her on a chopping block, in Stonehenge, and we have a sacrificial victim in place of a pastoral victim. The steel wheels belong to the threshing machine, but it is the moment of abandonment, the movement of, that brings about the Downfall of Tess. It makes you wonder, what is the nature and quality of Angel Clare’s interest in land? And Fanny Price’s interest in women? Is Angel Clare’s interest in land Fanny Price’s interest in women?

Looking at the movement of land, and Tess’s many jobs, I think that barrenness is simply a question of the end of romance. Tess’s fertility was cuckoo-spit and snail trails. Barrenness was the end trail of a long line of jobs, an empty field, a land that did not give back what it promised. 

Land

Looking at the barrenness of the cold place where reeds are drawn, where Tess and her fellow milkmaids turn into hungry alcoholics, I wonder if promises to land must be kept. The village cared for neither by itself or its lord seems to be leeched of love, but how bountiful other villages were, how rich. 

How painful it was to travel, to slowly start depleting yourself of that wealth, to admit the absoluteness of Angel Clare’s betrayal. There was option b) to take financial support from his parents, but that was not the promise made. It looks like Angel Clare rejected Tess, but her rejection was absolute, and ended with a mistressing option and Alec d’Uberville. Her family fades in and out of her circuit like a caravan; the misfortunes and the gains seem almost farcical. Now there is money to borrow, now there is nothing. How accepting these people are of Tess’s fortunes. 

When Tess dies, she offers her promising sister to Angel Clare. Another movement of fertility, beauty, family wealth, and yet without the counting capacity of Angel Clare and his family. 

Promises

In my family, we were wonderfully freed from the burdens of wealth, inheritance, property, land, titles, surnames. That did not mean that we were free of promises. There was an exacting line, that the price of freedom is freedom, and the price of mobility is mobility. Consciously or unconsciously, it has been kept.

In a Chinese anthology of fairy tales called Smearing the Ghost’s face with ink, I found this passage about a disputed property, inheritance, land:

Two shamefaced brothers who have been fighting over the land say:

We are now like men waking from a dream, we are very much ashamed, and wish to die, and there is no place of repentance. Neither of us brothers now wishes to receive the fields. 

The official says:

If you do not want the fields, what shall be done with them?

The brothers reply:

We are willing to present the fields to a monastery to be used for incense and oil for the reverence of Buddha. 

The official strikes the table and shouts:

Disgusting! Disgusting! This is most unfilial. When you talk about presenting the fields to a monastery, I out to use the large bastinadoes and beat you to death. 

Your father worked hard all his life, he was industrious and very economical, enduring much hardship before he could purchase these fields for the sake of his children and grandchildren.

Before you understood this, you strove together and quarrelled and accused one another; and now that you do understand you want to hand them over to priests, so that they may sit down and eat and be at rest. Will your father’s spirit in the lower regions be able to close his eyes and be at rest? 

Your father’s spirit. I also found the brothers’ shame and incense and oil useless. A resting spirit, a shifting land, a field of emotion, these things are more vital. What was this wishy-washy emotion but abandonment? 

Your wife said:

Now, because of a feud over a field you have caused my son to be taken away, what sort of fertile fields do you want to talk about? I only regard them as a sandbank out in the sea, or a cave away up in the high mountain. What is the use of them? Tomorrow you must go away and bring my children back. 

A fertile field, a cave, a sandbank. If land changes shape from emotion, then why not human? Ghosts, incense, oil, monasteries and Angel Clare, fly away with them!

The maiden

In another book of fairy tales, I found a maiden from a world of spirits preparing to visit land, terra, earth. Her wings had to be clipped, and her colours were of stone – chalcedony, obsidian, marble. Before she left, she wept bitterly, and her father told her – you must not hate this impure middle earth, poisonous though it may be. Poisonous though it was, to her, she set off with clipped wings and colours of stone. 

Now, how will this impure middle earth meet this maiden, will it garland her with blight, will it feed her with acres of rye?

All the drenched babies in Titania’s pinafore coughed and sneezed. The worms in the rosebuds woke up at the clamour and began to gnaw.

Author: Priyadarshini John
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Ubervilles
Smearing the Ghost’s Face with Ink: A Chinese Anthology of Fairy Tales
Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales

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