Thomas Hardy's Subtle Societal Critiques in Tess of the D’Urbervilles

I chose the audiobook of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles on a whim, having heard its title here and there for ages. I went in without any knowledge of the plot, with no preconceived notions at all.  Well, Thomas Hardy took me for quite a ride. I did find it depressing for a while, but the end shocked that right out of me. He really was simply creating more sympathy for our protagonist, it seems.

Don’t be deceived by the charming opening. The scene of Tess’s father learning about his noble ancestry is humorous, and Tess is involved in an old Celtic ceremony—a parade and dance in white dresses—that reminds me of Gabraldon’s Outlander. It’s romantic and even magical-feeling. However, while this scene might help snag readers, it doesn’t so much reflect the rest of the book. Not saying I’d change a word of the beginning, though, as it hooked me too and remains my favorite part of the novel.

I was at first quite impressed with Hardy’s respectful treatment of Tess, feeling that he had such an insight to womanhood that I wondered if ‘Thomas Hardy’ were a pen name for a female author.  However, as the book continued, I shook my head, finding it hard to believe that any woman—though undoubtedly there are some—would truly believe her husband right in all things and would so denigrate her own intelligence. Traits that Hardy presents as perfections of womanhood seem undignified, though I’m sure he means the reverse—in a societal sense. On the other hand, given what happens at the end, perhaps he’s making a point about the dangers of such thinking; maybe he’s saying, “It really isn’t such a good idea, this husband-worship that you seem to think it’s so great for women to do.”

In a sense, it was Tess’s extreme mentality—her need to cast people as entirely good or evil—that led to her mind breaking (in a sense) at the end and explains her conduct better.  Her love interest was even named ‘Angel’, which aligned with her beliefs in him.

I am not in the least trying to excuse Alec d’Urberville’s crimes against her, and I was far more sorry at her fate than at his. However, Tess blamed Alec for choices that Angel made. She blamed Alec for everything that went wrong in her life, even though he’d possibly saved her family from starvation at one point, which is not nothing. Alec behaved very badly towards her in ways, but he did seem to love her as well.

It was somewhat humorous to me that Thomas Hardy seemed to want so much to argue theology—and sort of did, except that many of his arguments were only alluded to, as if he were too scared of reactions to put them in writing! Not saying he didn’t have good reason for this fear… and one wonders if a publisher toned it way down.

I did find some of the extreme scenes refreshing—maybe in part because of their uniqueness, but particularly because of the oddly morbid-but-not-so-heavy thoughts that accompanied them. When Angel sleepwalks with Tess in his arms, she serenely wonders if he’s going to drown her; she lets him put her in a crypt, and all the while she knows she’s in danger but is more curious than afraid. She trusts him so much, and he is so godlike to her, that even if he were to kill her, she’d think it must be the right thing to happen. The scene is actually uplifting, in a strange sense, after the preceding despair.

Thomas Hardy ever so often surprises the reader in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but let me warn readers that there are relentlessly depressing periods predominating the latter part of the book, especially (whereas I liked how resilient Tess was at the beginning). The worst thing you could do is stop reading shortly before finishing, as then you’d miss the twist at the end of the story.

I am not sure if I recommend the novel, but I suppose I do, as I know of nothing else truly like it. It was a bit depressing, but certainly interesting, how Thomas Hardy challenges some of society’s wrongful ways of thinking.

'Picketing the President' by Mary Nolan Brown Is an Uplifting, Quick Read

Picketing the President: Delia’s Dilemma—Grandmother Nolan and the Suffragists by Mary Nolan Brown is an uplifting, quick read about a young woman learning to admire her suffragist grandmother.  It’s 1919, and Delia’s been sent to Washington, D.C., with Mrs. Nolan, essentially as a companion. Women’s right to vote is finally being seriously considered after decades of activism, but suffragists are still being arrested for protesting, still being sent to jail.

The book is delightful, however. The suffragists support each other and are unwavering in their cause—but still individuals, not instantly predictable.   Mrs. Nolan is a complex woman: a long-time suffragist even though she’s a Southerner, her Catholic faith makes her entirely opposed to the new birth control options that some of the suffragists advocate.  Mrs. Nolan doesn’t see this as any sort of conflict of interest, however, and she’s prepared to fight for women’s suffrage even to her death—of which there’s some likelihood.  She’s in her 70s and not entirely well, but she returns to jail and participates in the hunger strike that so many suffragists carry out while being detained.  Such a woman of principle!  Ms. Brown lets us see her through Delia’s eyes—as Delia is also finding new friends and a beau her grandmother disapproves of—and I can imagine Ms. Brown hearing these stories from Delia herself.

My favorite part, however, was when the suffragists took the train from inhospitable Washington, D.C., to Charleston, S.C., where, to my astonishment, the Charlestonians treated them with true Southern hospitality, providing them spaces to make their speeches, practically parading them about.  Being from South Carolina, born and college-educated in Charleston, I was thrilled to read that. (Though now that I think about it, Charleston might not have felt so welcoming if they’d stayed there, protesting on and on!)

I picked up this wonderful little novel at the Amelia Island Book Festival, excited to see both it and Ms. Brown, who for a short time attended one of my writing groups in Savannah.  I’d been enthused about the story when she was working on it, years ago, and I’d really hoped she would publish.  Now she has, and the novel even won 2^nd place in the CIPA EVVY Indie book contest.  It’s an inspiring book, well worth your time.

    

'Tapestry' received a Book Excellence Award!

Tapestry: A Lowcountry Rapunzel is catching up with Silk! It's been recognized as a Book Excellence Award Finalist in the historical category, just like its forerunner Silk: Caroline's Story last year!

"Out of thousands of books that were entered into the Book Excellence Awards competition, Tapestry was selected for its high-quality writing, design and overall market appeal." (<<<They told me to say that!)

To view this award listing, you can visit:  https://honorees.bookexcellenceawards.com/#!/Tapestry-A-Lowcountry-Rapunzel-Historical/p/532989675/category=145959644

'Tapestry' shortlisted (then semifinalisted, then finalisted) for Laramie Awards by Chanticleer International

 

The Laramie Awards feature 'Americana', and Tapestry: A Lowcountry Rapunzel made the short list, right alongside Susan Higginbotham's latest release.  Quite an honor!  The way they draw this all out does make it a bit more exciting.  Here's the link:

https://www.chantireviews.com/2022/12/29/the-2022-laramie-book-awards-short-list-for-americana-fiction/?fbclid=IwAR1KyFa644dJ44WK7sVqRQyAdgIDlHR5blUwz3ZwE69aDUD-J2TiQgjMPEc

2-17-2023 Update:  Both Susan's and my books made it through to become semi-finalists and now finalists!  https://www.chantireviews.com/2023/02/16/the-2022-laramie-book-awards-finalists-for-americana-fiction/

Shelf Unbound 2022 Award for 'Tapestry', as well!

Proud to be a two-time overall-competition finalist in the Shelf Unbound Best Indie Books Awards. Silk received the 2021 medallion, and now Tapestry is being honored with the 2022 medallion. You can read their interview with me in their magazine on pages 28-33 here:  https://issuu.com/shelfunbound/docs/awards-issue-2022-december-january 

'Agnes Grey' by Anne Brontë Deserves the Utmost Respect

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë is a morality tale, in essence, and provides a nice contrast to a few of my recent criticisms of both Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen. I can’t say that Anne Brontë outdoes her sisters Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Emily (Wuthering Heights) as a novelist, but of the three—or four, if we include Austen—I would certainly choose Anne as my minister, be that religious or governmental. Charlotte doesn’t as fiercely engage core issues, Emily is perhaps not even sane, and Austen is sometimes narrow-minded.

Author Sophia Alexander
with Anne Brontë's 'Agnes Grey'

I leave the story of Agnes Grey with the greatest respect for Anne’s principles, especially relating to her bent for animal rights. Agnes’s solution to a dire situation in which she had limited authority to take charge leaves the reader taken aback with both awe and horror.  Much, much respect to the author of Agnes Grey.

As one reviewer puts it, Agnes Grey is more of an ‘exposé on governessing’ than Charlotte’s more
romanticized view of it in Jane Eyre. Not only that, but it seems that Charlotte actually wrote Jane Eyre after Agnes Grey was written (though Anne’s book was published two months later than Jane Eyre was), both stories about plain governesses. I can’t say that Agnes Grey was as charming as Jane Eyre, overall, but I certainly approve of it heartily, all the while still shaking my head about the disaster of a romantic situation for Jane Eyre.

A state of coquettish affairs eventually arises in Anne’s novel quite similar to what I’ve criticized some of Austen’s works for, but Anne manages it far more gracefully. She acknowledges at once that Agnes wouldn’t have believed the situation plausible herself had she read it in a novel, but that she’d experienced it first-hand—making me believe Anne herself really had! So, my qualms that way were settled in one deft statement by Anne (even if now I wonder how her vindication so absolutely settled the question for me—but I think it’s because she’d proven herself trustworthy already).

Even then, however, Agnes does her utmost to focus on her own behavior, her own reactions. She is always monitoring herself, often scolding herself for being uncharitable or ridiculous. I was impressed when I started to take issue with Agnes, and then Agnes herself takes issue with Agnes! So by the time Anne describes Agnes’s tender, pained feelings surrounding a man that a beautiful woman is only toying with, the reader really is provoked to feel the utmost sympathy for Agnes. Perhaps a bit of scorn for the coquette, too, but that’s not the point. The point is Agnes and the thoughtful sincerity of her affections and morality. Our hearts break for her.

Agnes does her best not to hold a grudge. Later, when the coquette is caught in a bad marriage, Agnes is truly sympathetic but gives her advice that we readers today would despair over. Her advice does seem quite sound for the time—to make the marriage work as best she can, to be the best wife she can be despite the man’s countless terrible faults and wandering ways.  However, let me credit Anne Brontë with this: her next novel is centered on a woman who actually does leave a bad marriage, so I can’t but think that her own advice troubled her somewhat, that perhaps she even felt guilty about the fate of the poor coquette. Anne’s sympathetic, thoughtful soul kept her pushing her own bar.

Bravo on a work that I admire greatly, Anne Brontë! Happy 175th publication birthday this December to Agnes Grey!

P.S. She used the expression ‘kill time’ in this 1847 novel, which sounded quite modern to my ears! But if you do have a little time to kill—the book’s not long at all—you could do far worse than spending it on this thoughtful, poignant, well-written narrative that speaks to both the heart and mind.

 

Fanny Kemble’s Damning Journal about Slavery on a Southern Plantation

Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 by Frances Anne Kemble is a series of journal entries that she wrote in the form of letters. The editor suggests that she didn’t send them at all, that she crafted much of the journal later from brief notes taken at the time, but I am not convinced that she didn’t send the originals to her friend Elizabeth in Pennsylvania after all. It was commonplace at that time to keep a letterbook, recording correspondence for later reference. Her letters were so long that she may have just jotted summaries for some of them, then elaborated on it all for publication over two decades later. This English actress was also a prolific, eloquent writer, and her call for justice and humanity rings clear.

Author Sophia Alexander
with Fanny Kemble's Journal

The journal begins with a moving essay against the institution of slavery, even before she arrives in the South:  “the slaves of a kind owner may be as well cared for, and as happy, as the dogs and horses of a merciful master; but [their happiness] must again depend upon the complete perfection of their moral and mental degradation… if they are incapable of profiting by instruction, I do not see the necessity for laws inflicting heavy penalties on those who offer it to them… the moment they are in any degree enlightened, they become unhappy.”

Her goal is eventually clear as she ventures to reside on a rice plantation with her Southern, plantation-owning husband and two children: she intends to document the abuses that she sees—or perhaps it was simply the purpose of the publication, with some of the journal re-crafted to suit. Since the point of the journal’s publication was to expose the cruelties of slavery, it makes sense that it would begin with a powerful anti-slavery essay. Her accounts go from terrible to worse to even worse so that you begin to question if the original wretched hovel that is eventually likened to a palace in comparison to the later ones was really so wretched after all.  I’m sure conditions were poor, but I’m still not quite sure just how loathsome they really were. While the details left me waffling, Fanny’s powerful writing did convince me more than ever before, in a visceral way, that slavery is a wretched, horrible crime against humanity.

Almost ironically, I’m not convinced, however, that she admits to all the crimes she’s privy to. I suspect she’s trying to protect her daughters’ family’s reputation—for the girls’ custody was given to their father, Pierce Butler, at their divorce. I personally believe she alludes to one, however, that may have fueled some of her rage, and justifiably (if it’s true): Fanny readily admits to the loveliness of a mulatto slave named Psyche—and relates an incident of Pierce giving Psyche’s distraught husband away, almost as soon as they arrive at the plantation. Later, Psyche is placed in an exalted position on a riverboat ride that almost doesn’t make sense if she isn’t Mr. Butler’s concubine. Perhaps I’m reading into it (was I supposed to?), but I could only imagine that Fanny was seeing red. 

Aside from my confusion as to the precipitously ever-increasingly-devastating conditions that each group of slaves that she sees lives in, the editor does point out a few factual inaccuracies, even the dramatization of a killing of a neighbor that did not actually happen while she was on the island, according to newspaper accounts of the day (it happened months before she arrived). Unfortunately, she laments in the published journal how she went to church the following Sunday after the incident, where not a soul alluded to the tragedy, holding that up as proof of how calloused they all were to the brutalities of their feudal existences. I’m disappointed not to believe her entirely honest, because she writes forcefully with an oh-so-important message. However, it really is possible that with twenty years’ distance, she may have mistakenly recrafted some of those letters, remembering only the stark details of the incidents that she knew were discussed in the letters, according to her notes. After all, she didn’t witness the events for herself, even in the journal. She may vividly recall that no one mentioned the event at the church when she actually was there (so recently afterwards) and wondered why the minister wasn’t better admonishing his flock not to commit such acts of violence. I’m not convinced that her account is substantially different from the truth, after all—and I well know how mixed up I can get over the details of events that happened two whole decades ago!

Her candor is not my only point of hesitation in recommending this journal. The other issue is actually a form of brutal candor that she overuses—regarding her own prejudiced perceptions and opinions of the slaves themselves. Often incredibly insulting, she seems to feel superior in education, attractiveness, and morality even as she desires them to know and believe they are her equals. She sometimes shows a certain obtuseness when she claims that they believe they are inferior just because they say so, as if not realizing that they are saying what they imagine she wants to hear. She repeats her dismay at this often—though I wonder if she’s actually just trying to draw a picture of the abject wretchedness of slave existence.  She seems far too clever not to catch on… but then again, she seems to operate with a sort of forthright zeal and very well may take others too much at face value.

I don’t often sense that she has much real respect for the slaves, excepting a few of the more skilled and knowledgeable workers.  She’s overwhelmed with pity, however—especially for the new mothers who have to go back to work in the fields at just three weeks postpartum, the neglected elderly, etc. At least a couple of the women (maybe several) have mulatto children, having been raped by the overseer, as Fanny tells it—and even under the best-possible case scenarios, power differentials make this deplorably problematic.

Fanny makes a powerful, convincing argument in a letter included in the appendix that the brutal isolation of these plantations negates the argument that practical reasons will preserve the slaves: “it is sometimes clearly not [in] the interest of the owner to prolong the life of his slaves; as in the case of inferior or superannuated laborers… Who, on such estates as these, shall witness to any act of tyranny or barbarity, however atrocious?... the estate and its cultivators remaining… under the absolute control of the overseer, who, provided he contrives to get a good crop of rice or cotton into the market for his employers, is left to the arbitrary exercise of a will seldom uninfluenced for evil by the combined effects of the grossest ignorance and habitual intemperance… among a parcel of human beings as like brutes as they can be made.”

I did find this journal fascinating. The gorgeous, familiar landscape descriptions help to balance out the degrading conditions of the slaves, keeping us from falling into absolute depression. There are numerous anecdotes and observations, tales of visits to neighbors, and accounts of the wilderness. The lines that amused me most, as I rather identified with them, were these: “I sometimes despise myself for what seems to me an inconceivable rapidity of emotion, that almost makes me doubt whether anyone who feels so many things can really be said to feel anything… it is, upon the whole, a merciful system of compensation by which my whole nature, tortured as it was last night [her husband had forbidden her to bring him any more complaints from the slaves], can be absorbed this morning in a perfectly pleasurable contemplation of the capers of crabs and the color of mosses as if nothing else existed in creation… I have no doubt that to follow me through half a day with any species of lively participation in my feelings would be a severe breathless moral calisthenic to most of my friends—what Shakespeare calls ‘sweating labor.’ As far as I have hitherto had opportunities of observing, children and maniacs are the only creatures who would be capable of sufficiently rapid transitions of thought and feeling to keep pace with me.”

I’m inclined to believe that Fanny adhered to the essential truths in writing this journal, and where she stretched the truth, if on purpose, it was for a greater cause. Apparently some have even credited its publication in 1863 with dissuading the British from supporting the Confederacy in the American Civil War, so it very well may be one of the most significant pieces of political propaganda that most of us have never heard of!

Word of Warning: I enjoyed Fanny’s voice overall, but I am certain I would have had much more trouble with much of it if I were black. As it was, I was still sometimes ashamed of how overtly racist she sounded when she expressed her aesthetic tastes, not entirely attributable to the situation she found the slaves in. The slaves are described in the most degrading terms, quite often.  For that matter, the Irish are, too, if not quite as often.

I also took issue with her brief condemnation of the local white plantation women breastfeeding their own babies in a prolonged fashion, the local standard being to nurse them past their second summer. It was nice to learn that it was the norm, however, at the time.

Note: Their plantation home still stands on Butler Island near Darien. After I began reading Fanny’s journal last year, my husband and I ventured out to see the property, which we believed to belong to the Nature Conservancy (according to signs on the house and the land). I contacted this organization upon seeing the rapidly dilapitating condition of the house, but it turns out they no longer own it. I’m glad we got there while we still could. We saw so much majestic wildlife there, as she describes in her journal as well. Fanny talked about taking daily walks on the dikes through the rice patties, and so I was delighted with walking the overgrown dikes myself, following in her footsteps that way.

Additional Note: I purchased this book at a Georgia State Park gift shop, but it seems that Fanny Kemble published many more memoirs in her lifetime, this one simply being the most famous. I’m curious to read more. Perhaps I’ll start with the one about her girlhood.

I’m also mildly curious to read her daughter’s rebuttal to this journal—she spent far more time on the slave plantation and married an English minister—though I’m not so keen to read a vindication of slavery (if that’s what it is). Still, it would be interesting to see where their accounts agree.

Extra-Special Additional Note: I’m publishing this blog on Fanny’s 213^th birthday, a sort of ‘Happy Birthday!’ to the dynamic Ms. Kemble (born on the 27th of November in 1809).