Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time

Andrew Radford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351879347
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di letteratura comparata

A systematic exploration of Thomas Hardy's imaginative assimilation of particular Victorian sciences, this study draws on and swells the widening current of scholarly attention now being paid to the cultural meanings compacted and released by the nascent 'sciences of man' in the nineteenth century. Andrew Radford here situates Hardy's fiction and poetry in a context of the new sciences of humankind that evolved during the Victorian age to accommodate an immense range of literal and figurative 'excavations' then taking place. Combining literary close readings with broad historical analyses, he explores Hardy's artistic response to geological, archaeological and anthropological findings. In particular, he analyzes Hardy's lifelong fascination with the doctrine of 'survivals, ' a term coined by E.B. Tylor in Primitive Culture (1871) to denote customs, beliefs and practices persisting in isolation from their original cultural context. Radford reveals how Hardy's subtle reworking of Tylor's doctrine offers a valuable insight into the inter-penetration of science and literature during this period. An important aspect of Radford's research focuses on lesser known periodical literature that grew out of a British amateur antiquarian tradition of the nineteenth century. His readings of Hardy's literary notebooks disclose the degree to which Hardy's own considerable scientific knowledge was shaped by the middlebrow periodical press. Thus Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time raises questions not only about the reception of scientific ideas but also the creation of nonspecialist forms of scientific discourse. This book represents a genuinely new perspective for Hardy studies.

Chapter 1
Introduction

In the far north-east sky he could see between the pillars a level streak of light. The uniform concavity of black cloud was lifting bodily like the lid of a pot, letting in at the earth’s edge the coming day, against which the towering monoliths and trilithons began to be blackly defined.

‘Did they sacrifice to God here?’ asked she.

‘No,’ said he.

‘Who to?’

‘I believe to the sun. That lofty stone set away by itself is in the direction of the sun, which will presently rise behind it.’¹

Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare find themselves in the ‘heathen temple’ of Stonehenge, eight miles north of Salisbury, in the penultimate chapter of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). It is one of the best known and perhaps least fully appreciated episodes in Hardy’s fictions. He captures the hushed sanctity of entering a site around which a mass of legends has grown; among them was one that sacrifices were made here to a sun-god who demanded blood to perpetuate his life-giving abilities (Tess 379). The idea of a fertility ritual is difficult to reconcile with the scene Hardy presents: he does not simply evoke the desolate spirit of place – its wild treeless isolation, the wind playing eerily upon the pillars like a gigantic harp, the huge mass of the stones silhouetted against the sky – but he also has Tess fling herself with exhausted relief on the Stone of Sacrifice. Although it is unlikely that this ancient monument was ever a Druid temple,² or that human beings were killed on any of the large, flat stones, it is a belief which Hardy exploits with great imaginative power to show the continuing existence of the past as a mythically relevant force in the present. After her lonely wanderings across the face of Wessex, Tess becomes the sacrificial victim of uncomprehending social laws in a place that may have witnessed countless deaths with the same blank impassivity.³

In this Wessex temple ‘older than the centuries’, Tess feels strangely ‘at home’. At Talbothays, Angel thinks of her as a heathen, and her remote ancestor is called Pagan d’Urberville, a name which gives two different indices: d’Urberville, the illustrious Norman family who came to Britain with William the Conqueror; and the Latin paganus, a rustic or peasant and more commonly one who practises a primitive form of religion. In the fabric of Tess’s deepest being, rather than in her conscious awareness, are woven traces of ancient worship:

…women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature retain in their souls far more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized religion taught their race at a later date. (Tess 109)

In Hardy’s scheme, the pagan Stonehenge is ‘the hub of olden Wessex’,⁴ and represents an order based not on Providence but on death. And death here is not the exacting but precious pledge of new life for the community. Something of society’s guilt may be expiated by Tess’s ‘sacrifice’ amid the elemental grandeur of this location, but the vitality she embodies can never be revived. At first sight Hardy’s sense of occasion seems unmitigatedly bleak.

The ageless enigma of Stonehenge has fascinated many creative writers over the centuries. A field monument visible to all, it is a cultural fossil of prehistoric times and an arresting part of the present-day landscape. The retrospective curiosity that asks how we arrived at a certain place at a certain stage of evolution is perennial, for man is a historical animal with a deep sense of heritage. This heritage has a strong surviving component in the British landscape; it is very much with us, immediate and accessible if often challenging in the signals it emits. So the medieval ‘historian’ Geoffrey of Monmouth furnished an account of Stonehenge which relied mainly on whimsical imaginings,⁵ whilst to the Elizabethan poet Samuel Daniel it remained an awesome and unfathomable mystery.⁶ Wordsworth, in The Prelude (1850), allows a romantic play of fancy around this relic of a long-forgotten past state of things and records an antiquarian reverie during a walk over Salisbury Plain.

Time with his retinue of ages fled

Backwards, nor checked his flight until I saw

Our dim ancestral past in vision clear.

(11. 318–20)⁷

He sees with his inner eye ‘A single Briton clothed in wolf-skin vest,/With shield and stone-axe, stride across the wold’ and conjures up the holy mystery of sacrificial death on an altar ‘fed/With living men’.

What separates Hardy’s evocation of Stonehenge from earlier portrayals is his bold use of this ancient remnant as an opportunity imaginatively to revisit several different bygone periods and to contrive that the modern moment is seen in relation to them, the resulting experience being enriched or qualified by scientific and especially anthropological discoveries. It would be a mistake to assume that his presentation of Tess at Stonehenge is monocular. The image of Tess lying on the altar, her breathing ‘like that of a lesser creature than a woman’, evokes a time of heliolatry and the retributive sacrificial suffering of a primeval ceremony. But Hardy introduces historical and cultural perspectives that complicate the sense of occasion, and in doing so he takes the opportunity to manipulate tone in a sharply unsettling way. At sunrise when Tess wakes, the deputies surrounding her seem as if they are wearing ritual masks. Hardy invokes, perhaps reinvents to invoke, the artifice of ancient Greek tragedy through an ominous chiaroscuro effect: ‘in the growing light, their faces and hands…were silvered, the remainder of their figures black’; and in the novel’s final chapter he famously refers to the ‘President of the Immortals’, a secular version of the Aeschylean god. Tess’s arrest by the deputies has been lambasted for theatricality, and indeed it is blatantly and unapologetically ‘staged’. Yet the staginess is a deliberate ploy, for Hardy impishly – or even sardonically imbues this episode with more than a hint of Wagnerian grandiosity too. Whilst at the other extreme of ‘theatricality’, the disquieting image of the black cloud in the skies above Stonehenge ‘lifting bodily like the lid of a pot’ conveys a spirit of grim foreboding in an image which suggests a naive stage prop of antique melodrama (a cauldron) or domestic comedy (a cooking pot). Hardy has artfully made sure that there is more to this cruel episode than meets the single eye.

Throughout his literary career, Hardy broods over the landmarks of local topography because they are crusted with ancestral imprints and open up fresh possibilities for his art. He wonders if the resonant meaning these imposing structures possessed for the people who shaped them might be recoverable and so stimulate or enhance late-Victorian life, and he employs occasions of anthropological significance to question the value of and the need for historical continuity. If the Stonehenge episode derails glib critical readings, it quite clearly comes at a point in his writing when he could no longer entertain such vestiges as possible tokens of some exacting but positive order which enabled our primeval forebears to establish kinship, a living bond between themselves and their gods, a rewarding future for their community.

Hardy’s discovery through the Stonehenge site of an irretrievable sense of deathliness in the social and personal worlds clashed radically with the rapt conviction of the many Victorian sages and anthropologists, Hegel, Comte and Spencer included – all thinkers whose work Hardy carefully read – who were driven by a staunch belief in the perfectibility of man, postulated constant historical advance, and saw the evolution of human society as one of progressive enlightenment. Hardy’s friend, the folklorist and rationalist propagandist Edward Clodd, enthused: ‘The early history of man shows us how wonderful his progress has been when we compare the Age of Stone with our present happy lot’.⁸ James A. Farrer, in his popular study Primitive Manners and Customs (1879), reflected this mood of smug assurance:

The history of humanity has been a rise, not a fall, not a degradation from completeness to imperfection, but a constantly accelerating progress from savagery to culture; that, in short, the iron age of the world belongs to the past, its golden one to the future.⁹

But Hardy implies that there may be little separating the rites enacted in the temple of primitive blood sacrifice and the atrocities committed at Wintoncester gaol, where Tess is executed in the final chapter. We note continuity of a kind, but it does not reveal man’s ‘glorious destiny of neverending advancement’.¹⁰ He sees instead ‘the essentially cruel heartlessness of Paganism’¹¹ repeating itself in the modern re-enactment. This ‘find’ is in striking contrast to the complacent arguments of those scholars who treated European culture as the capstone of human achievement, and who promoted the idea of progress as logically natural, universal and inevitable.

In general, the more flexibility and scope Hardy allowed himself for time-voyaging, the more likely he was to find irrefutable evidence of the absolute destructiveness of history. And yet, in deciding against the physical, visible remains of the past as stumbling blocks rather than precious signposts, Hardy nevertheless invests Tess’s capture amid the pillars of Stonehenge with a pungency and élan that energize this mute monument of forgotten faiths. At a personal level, Hardy’s disturbing ‘excavations’ made in the Stonehenge scene gratifies his own idiosyncratic sense of imaginative excitement. He locates a counterforce to his stricken sense of social and historical severance in an art that involves irony, incongruous juxtaposition and ‘black’ humour to promote unusual angles of vision. This raises the question of whether the art with which he invests his backward-looking impulse is merely self-indulgent or whether it has public purpose, for the Hardy whose eccentricities of tone and narrative tactic are so oddly enabled and stimulated by the fossil fragments of a lost yesterday is the same figure who in The Woodlanders, Tess and Jude projects himself as very socially-conscious, an aggressively public champion of enlightened liberation against power and privilege.

Hardy’s quarrying of disparate bygone moments during the Stonehenge scene with a mixture of solemn intensity and playful wit epitomizes the eclectic spirit and strategy of a novel absorbed by multiple time-schemes. Indeed, the whole countryside in Tess is symbolic of an infinitely stratified sense of place. Not only does he uncover and explore a bedrock of primeval perception, but he traverses more local and immediate historical terrain. Tess is also a trenchant account of landed gentry d’Urbervilles atrophying over several centuries into squalid and feckless Durbeyfields. From the highborn ancestral past of the d’Urbervilles, we glimpse through Tess’s mother, Joan, another stratum of historical experience, that of the Wessex peasantry – a modern evolved form of the ‘timeless’ rural folk who populated the region long before the aristocratic families arrived. Joan D...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• The Nineteenth Century Series General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Opening the Fan of Time
• 3 Paganism Revived?
• 4 Stories of Today
• 5 The Unmanned Fertility Figure
• 6 Killing the God
• 7 A Bizarre Farewell to Fiction?
• Bibliography
• Index