Shannon Rogers

The Medievalist Impulse of Thomas Hardy

While it is impossible to classify Thomas Hardy as a medievalist in the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelites or Tennyson, it is clear that he maintained an intellectual and literary interest in the period throughout his career. References to matters of medieval interest are evident in his letters and notebooks and his career very nearly begins and ends on a medieval theme. However, in keeping with his unique position as a novelist closing the Victorian period and opening the modern, Hardy's interpretation of the medieval period takes on an urgency and somber tone expressive of the "ache of modernism" his later characters experience. In Hardy's Wessex, a nostalgic longing for a glorious past becomes a destructive urge that prevents characters from adjusting to the present and, therefore, from evolving into the future. Conversely, a false embrace of "modern" thought cannot stand the strain of everyday life. In the end, characters who do not question the world, neither forcing the premature birth of a new world, nor longing nostalgically for one long dead, are all who emerge unscathed.
In the interest of time, I will focus exclusively on Hardy's final two novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Outside of these two novels, Hardy's chief interest in things medieval can be generally summed up in his architectual background. While he did participate in restoration projects as a young man, it is important to note briefly the contempt in which he later held such efforts. In his 1906 essay, "Memories of Church Restoration," Hardy decries the furor to restore, as such work has denied England the opportunity to mark the passage of history in a proper manner: ".. if all the mediaeval buildings in England had been left as they stood at that date, to incur whatever dilapilations might have befallen them at the hands of time, weather, and general neglect, this country would be richer in specimens to-day than it finds itself to be after the expenditure of millions in a nominal preservation during that period."1 In Jude, he introduces this very subject and makes his views bluntly clear and, more importantly, marks just such a passage of time through human history symbolically in the characters of Jude and Tess. Both novels, in very different ways, symbolize the clash between modernity and medievalism and the pain that clash produces in the lives of the individuals. Tess, in fact, even appears to embrace the pre-Christian elements of Wessex as the very means, perhaps of moving into the future. In Jude, similarly, there is a leaning toward a classical pagan past. However, neither viewpoint is necessarily antithetical to medievalism as pagan religions and rituals lingered in Britain far into the medieval period and classical literature was rediscovered at the close of the Middle Ages.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles presents a dual critique of society, for the clash between worlds is not only the temporal one of pagan, medieval and modern mindsets, but the economic one of class. In Tess, newly- minted middle class aristocracy rapes rural England, now stripped of its prior grandeur. Later, modern socialist thought seeks to remake the rural into a purely idealized illusion, one that has little foundation for success. In the end, one part of this rural ideal is sacrificed, but there is hope for salvation for those who remain, now chastened and stripped of illusions. However, while Hardy was obsessed in both his professional and personal lives with issues of class, this is only one aspect of the dilemma the novel presents. It is over this backdrop of economic conflict that the clash of past and present is played out.
The most basic medieval element of Tess concerns her descent from an ancient and fallen family, a circumstance that lies at the root of all of Tess's troubles. In fact, every decision and sacrifice Tess makes is for her family's benefit; hence, it seems only natural that family, past and present, should form the foundation of her downfall. The novel opens with Parson Tringham, "the antiquary," and his explanation of Jack Durbeyfield's connection with the ancient line of d'Urbervillie.2 Involving no money, land, or power, the d'Urberville name is useless. But its mystique gives the dissipated Jack a reason to celebrate ostentatiously and sets the wheel of Tess's fate spinning forward. It is their mighty connections--and the tangible rewards they hope it brings--that prompt the Durbeyfields to send Tess to "claim kin" with the Stoke-d'Urberville family of Trantridge. While Jack seeks cash, Joan seeks an advantageous marriage for Tess. In other words, Jack's goal is economic while Joan's is emotional and connected to fertility and the earth, an important pagan aspect of the novel.
In her relationships with Alec and Angel, Tess's name becomes a source of shame and, even worse, of destruction. Alec asks her not to use the d'Uberville name, realizing his own false pretensions and trying, in the defensiveness of guilt, to underline the difference between them. Yet, despite her social inferiority, her inherent gentillesse rings true: "'I wish for no better, sir,' said she with something of dignity" (54). For her father, that dignity is ironically most powerfully felt under the influence of Rolliver's brew (62, 108-9). As such, spent and probably imagined glory returns to harm the innocent descendants, reiterating Hardy's message that the past has no practical use in the modern world and is only a romantic notion best left to artists and poets.
Tess herself realizes the incongruousness of the distant past in relation to her own present as she scorns her ancestors and "the dance they had led her" (118). In her disdain of her ancient history, she also vows to forget her recent past and to move forward with her life, and so "[s]he dismissed the past--trod upon it and put it out as one treads on a coal that is smouldering and dangerous" (210). However, the honesty of her love for Angel drives her to confess all and her revival of the past becomes her downfall. Angel is unable to assimilate an actual modern situation into his weakly-held modern principles and so he reverts to medieval morality. In rejecting Tess, he has forgotten his own earlier revelatory observatious of her natural philosophy--one which was as old as the earth, but seemed new when transfigured into modern vocabulary (140-41). He is surprised to find the ache of modernism in one so sheltered and "is bewildered to find such a sophisticated consciousness in so simple a nature."3 Yet, Hardy points out deliberately that what they both feel are "sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries" (141). Their ache becomes an artificial one, as the unknown future has always stood before humanity, filling them with a confusion of hope and dread.
Despite her rejection of her ancestors, Tess does experience a superstitious hope that their presence may somehow bring her luck at Talbothay's in the first chapter of "The Rally." The mourning for her lost innocence nearly past, "she wondered if some strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land ..." (116). However, her modern turn of mind soon scoffs at such foolish notious. Her father's ridiculous attachment to his lost glory make it obvious to her that there is nothing for her in the shrouded past of her family. "'Pooh--I have as much of Mother as Father in me!' she said. 'All my prettiness comes from her and she was only a dairymaid'" (118).
Hardy had made this very point himself earlier in the novel, remarking that "the personal charms which Tess could boast of were in main part her mother's gift, and therefore unknightly, unhistorical," (31) and Joan even remarks to her husband that Tess's trump card is her face, not her ancestry (64). Indeed, so useless are the d'Urbervilles that they do not even manage to secure Angel as a dance partner for Tess at the May Day club walking (28). The irony is later revealed in Angel's romantic fascination with old families which stands in opposition to his philosophical loathing of their past oppressiveness. Hardy's implicit point is that, had Tess the money to stand out from the crowd, she could. have better utilized her ancestry, even with the socialist Angel Clare.
When first she realizes her attraction to Angel, Tess fears her lineage will reduce her in his eyes (143, 144). She understands that it is her "supposed untraditional newness" that attracts him to her. Yet, for his own part, Angel feels an unexplained sense of nostalgia when he sees her, while simultaneously thinking she is "fresh" and "virginal" (137). His nostalgia is two-fold as he has, in fact, seen her face before at the club walking so many years before. However, he is also feeling a symbolic longing for things past, for things lost--namely, the mystique of Tess's virginity and the pristine name of her forbearers. His nostalgia becomes a powerful reality once Angel learns of Tess's past. He had, until their wedding night, expressed nothing but delight in her ancestry, even deciding to spend their honeymoon in a d'Urberville mansion. He is fascinated by the contradiction Tess represents to him. She is a child of the soil, a fresh and modern bloom of a girl, but her lineage is older and nobler than his own. Despite his philosophical dislike of such families, he revels in the aura of romance attached to her name. This is an essential contradiction in Angel himself and only an imagined one in Tess.
It is this very fragile philosophical foundation of which Hardy is most critical, so much so that he returns to it in Jude the Obscure. Angel's weakly-held ideals disappear when confronted with the reality of Tess, one which he believes conflicts with his image of her. He immediately blames her much-vaunted ancestry. In his hypocrisy,. he even wonders why, "[w]hen he found out that Tess came of that exhausted ancient line and was not of the new tribes from below, as he had fondly dreamed, [he] had not stoically abandoned her in fidelity to his principles?" (278). Angel conveniently forgets that, in reality, lineage has very little to do with who Tess is. Much later he recants again and reexamines the differences between practical and romantic notions of ancient lines. In essence, Angel's behavior is a condemnation of the entire repressive morality of the Victorian period itself; a morality that stood in conflict with the needs of a modem world. A society that would condemn an innocent girl for being raped, as Angel does, is out of step with the natural order, one which Hardy sees as the only viable order for the world. Tess is, in essence, a condemnation of medieval Christian moralities artificially imposed on a modem world.
It is only in the medieval pagan world that woman and nature properly conjoin; Victorian society, not cognizant of woman's role as anything beyond an idealized exemplary one, condemns all that does not conform and is, therefore, in opposition to nature. Hardy continually equates women with the pre-Christian, pagan world of mother earth, while men rule the artificial (and hypocritical) realm of society. Throughout, men condemn Tess--her father, the parson, Angel--while women accept her for who she is. It is no accident that the sole participants in the May Day dance are women, an event that is clearly a pagan celebration (23-24). Hardy later remarks that "women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature retain in their souls far more of the Pagan fantasy" (120). Tess loses touch with this essential inner voice when she allows herself to be overwhelmed with unfounded shame in her own "ruin." Although "she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence... she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly" (101). The "moral hobgoblins" she fears are connected to the "God of her childhood", implying that Christian religion--with its attendant morality--and Nature are not compatible, a point reiterated by Angel Clare's rejection of Tess. The irony is compounded by their marriage, a Christian regulation of natural urges, in which Angel has vowed to take Tess "for better, for worse."
Tess is last seen in the pagan temple of Stonehenge, another pre-Christian symbol, albeit a man-made one. Tess feels at home here and remarks that not only were her mother's family shepherds, but Angel had often called her a pagan (415). Tess's conclusion is inevitable and she sleeps upon the stone of sacrifice, despite Angel's efforts to urge her onward. Having urged Angel to marry her sister, she is able to answer the policemen in the affirmative, "'I am ready'" (417). She is indeed ready, for the restrictive and flawed Victorian world with its medieval morality is no fit place for Tess, who remains a pure woman. While tragic, Tess's fate is expected. The clash of the time she represents with the one she inhabits makes her death almost a relief to the reader. In the hypocritical modern world of Hardy, what Tess represents is antithetical to so-called progress. Yet, there is some hope on Hardy's part that the marriage of modernity--released from the bonds of medieval morality--and pagan medieval pastoralism will give birth to a unified, perfected future.
No such hope remains at the end of Jude the Obscure. In this final novel of Hardy's, only callous modernity emerges unscathed, while those who consciously search for answers are brutally crushed by a hypocritical society. As in Tess, there are empty dreams in bygone things. For Jude, it is the medieval city of Christminster and his romantic perception of what it represents. As noted, Hardy himself had his own romantic attachments to medieval architecture. However, Jude's undoing is his insistence on acting on such attachments--of making romantic notions practical realities. Jude's own medieval Christian temperament suits the ancient Christminster but the town--like the world--has moved on. Sue Bridehead, on the other hand, is a curious mixture of Classical paganism and free-thinking modernity. Unfortunately, like Jude and Angel Clare before him, her attitudes are tenuously held and fragilely defined. Under stress, she experiences a reversal of Jude's own reaction--he becomes modern, rejecting Christianity, while she embraces religion with hysterical fervor. In and out of their lives passes Jude's wife Arabella, who emerges from an apparently sheltered rural background to represent the true modernity in the novel.
Not uncommonly for Hardy, the most looming presence in Jude is the town of Christminster and the secondary other towns through which Jude passes. These towns not only give Hardy an opportunity to make use of stone masonry--and hence Gothic restoration--as Jude's profession, but also to employ settings as symbols of the useless romanticized past. The first old town that fails to meet Jude's needs is Marygreen. Though rural and backward, the town was no stranger to Hardy's despised enemy, radical restoration.4 Being artificially gothic, Marygreen clashes with Jude's sincerely medieval temperament. He pines instead after the city "veiled in mist"--his Avalon, Christminster (22-23). Every decision that Jude consciously makes from the moment he first sees the town is calculated to place him inside the city gates. He learns Latin and Greek and apprentices as a stone mason so that he can be near the colleges (37). Hardy deliberately uses Jude's training, and his expertise in every kind of masonry, to further illustrate Jude's complete blindness to the reality of Christminster. Trained to know better, he ignores the signs of falsehood, signs that go deeper than the false faces of buildings. Approaching the first "mediaeval pile," Hardy remarks, "[w]hen he passed objects out of harmony with its general expression he allowed his eyes to slip over them as if he did not see them" (83). Jude does realize that mainly "copying, patching, and imitating went on here," but he attributes it to a "temporary and local cause" (90). Blinded by his dreams, "[he] did not at that time see that mediaevalism was as dead as a fernleaf in a lump of coal; that other developments were shaping in the world around him, in which Gothic architecture and its associations had no place" (90).
In this particular passage, Hardy finally makes completely explicit the lesson he symbolically presented in Tess. "The deadly animosity of contemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held in reverence was not yet revealed to him" (90). Like Tess, Jude represents an earlier time, one which is incompatible with Victorian modernity. However, Tess's medieval paganism is Hardy's own answer to modernity, the only salvation he can find to society's hypocrisy. Jude, on the other hand, initially represents Christian medievalism, which is antagonistic to future social progress in two ways. Firstly, the revitalization of lost and probably illusory ideals is impractical in Hardy's view. It is akin to Gothic restoration, as to do so is to artificially halt the natural passage of history. So contradictory are the two that Hardy emphasizes the "rottenness" of Christminster's buildings, writing "[it] seemed impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit and superseded chambers" (84). Secondly, Hardy obviously finds Christian society to be repressive, hypocritical and dangerously patriarchal.
It is through the character of Sue Bridehead that Hardy confronts the issue of religion and the related one of marriage. She lacks respect for Christminster and what it represents as she does for most institutions. Sue rearranges his Bible chronologically and later, she pushes him to reject Christminster itself as outdated and old-fashioned. "'An intellect at Christminster is new wine in old bottles. The mediaevalism of Christminster must go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go'" (158). She admits to a grudging nostalgic fondness for what it represents, but her practicality outweighs such sentimentality for a romanticized past. For Sue, such a past includes pursuit of the holy orders Jude hopes to take, in her eyes another outmoded tradition. Yet, her rejection of what Jude holds sacred is too strident, nearly hysterical and, ultimately, untenable. Like Angel Clare, she has defined herself in opposition to the world, believing herself to be modern. But a negation does not a philosophy make and under stress the foundation crumbles.
Sue is deliberately antagonistic to the hypocritical Middle Age mentality she must endure in the society she inhabits. Hardy illustrates the essential incompatibility of medieval and modern when Jude and Sue quarrel over her promise to marry Phillotson. While he longs to sit in a cathedral for comfort, while she turns to the railway station. Jude marvels at her modern attitude, yet Sue sees herself as a negation rather than a creation of civilization (154), remarking "'I am not modern, either. I am more ancient than mediaevalism, if you only knew'" (142). She sees herself as a Classical pagan, in her mind the antithesis of all modern culture represents. Yet her efforts to flaunt her paganism are childish and ineffectual. She impulsively buys the statues of the god and goddess of sexual desire but keeps them hidden within her very Christian room (102). Her purchase has made her feel daring, but her secrecy negates the negation she believes she is achieving.
Sue's other attempts at negating modemity are equally destructive. Her views of marriage are extremely liberated in one sense, but her repressed sexuality makes her liberation illusory. Marrying Phillotson she sees as a show of her freedom. Her inability to consummate the marriage, however, imprisons them both in repressed tension. When she leaves Richard for Jude, an extremely modern action, her continued repression causes similar anguish. When she eventually agrees to sleep with Jude, her timidity and regrets run counter to the very free-thinking modern concept of pre-marital sex. Rather than a positive urge to revitalize a dynamic pagan philosophy, Sue instead sees a negative; an absence of action, morality, and structure. In the end, she is reduced to a paranoid fear of the very thing she has fought against through the entire book. In essence, she has negated herself. Jude, on the other hand, finally sees a truth in Sue's abandoned philosophy, but in so doing, he also negates the self he has always been. The two characters who survive the philosophical clash are the erstwhile spouses, Arabella Donn and Richard Phillotson. While the character of Phillotson is difficult to categorize so simply, both are perhaps the only true moderns in the novel. Arabella personifies all that is negative in the modern world, yet ironically she passes though it unscathed. She is from a rural background, much like Tess, but has worked in a tavern before she meets Jude and returns to this occupation to support herself after she ends her bigamous union in Australia. A woman preferring work to the support of a man is a modern enough concept, but her chosen occupation underlines her extreme liberation. As physical desire personified, Arabella embodies the ultimate freedom of the modern woman--earthy, capable, and independent--but her heartlesssness makes her modernity distasteful.
Like Arabella, Richard Phillotson represents modernity. Their positions in the novel are parallel in that they are both ill-chosen and unwanted spouses. However, Phillotson's role is in opposition to Arabella's own as he is the voice of modern progress. He is an older man, a victim of the same disappointment Jude experiences in Christminster. Unlike Jude, he does not allow his dreams to defeat him. He is stable, responsible, caring; philosophically, however, Richard is very progressive. He weighs Sue's happiness against his own and allows her to leave him for Jude, even at the expense of his own professional and social reputation.
As Arabella seems to represent the individual negativity possible in modern thought--the selfishness and callousness too much individuality can engender--Phillotson is the positive side of the coin. Unfortunately for him, his modernity is not the sort rewarded by his repressive society with its medieval standards of morality. He has made his personal dealings in an open and honest way, as had Tess, and he pays. As his own reward, however, Phillotson survives.
The resolution of both novels is bleak, yet Hardy offers a small glimmer of hope; one which requires the abandonment of medieval Christian principles. The repression and hypocrisy such ideals naturally engender in modern society constitute a force of destruction, one which crushes the individual will, resulting in misery. Like the falseness inherent in radical restoration or in a modern enthusiasm for Gothic architecture, medieval morality is a force that has survived past its time. For Hardy, there is a great deal to admire in the distant past. But, beautiful as it may be, the natural order is toward progress. As renewing crumbling medieval edifices robs humanity of true knowledge of its past and the opportunity to move forward architecturally, so the act of clinging to outmoded moralities denies society the ability to progress intellectually. Through sloughing off the Christminsters of the world and all they represent, the wine of human experience can be uncorked and free to age, spilling over fruitfully into the living world.

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