The Trouble With Tess: Chapter XLVII

It's a cold, wet day for July. I'm sitting in my living room with a can of caffeine-free Diet Coke (don't worry…stronger libations to follow), some Ralph Vaughan Williams on the Bose system, and my computer on my lap. This afternoon will be spent in an attempt to deduce a literary detective story…

This is the opening paragraph from Chapter XLVII, Phase the Sixth ("The Convert"), from Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles:

"It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at Flintcomb-Ash Farm. The dawn of the March morning is singularly inexpressive, and there is nothing to show where the eastern horizon lies. Against the twilight rises the trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly here through the washing and bleaching of the wintry weather."

Nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's beautiful writing, with Hardy's powers of natural observation running on four cylinders. However…when this is the ONLY PARAGRAPH in a 464-page novel which is written in PRESENT TENSE, it makes the curious English Lit student suspicious. What made this paragraph, which has no bearing whatsoever on the main story, a freak in the book's nature?

Chapter XLVIII takes place four years after the story began. What follows this opening description is the coming of a giant machine to Groby's farm, a "red tyrant," to which Tess must feed the stalks of corn for feeding and grain separation. She spends the entire day at this labor, and during the dinner-hour Marian and Izz spot a man in a tweed suit, twirling a cane. Marian brings Tess dinner, debating whether or not to mention anything, when Tess spots him anyway and recognizes him as Alec. Alec, in great excitement and menacing force, informs Tess that he has given up his career as Methodist preacher, partly because of Angel's logical arguments against organized religion which Tess quoted to him at their last meeting, partly because he cannot deny his lust for Tess. He urges her to run away with him, promising to help her and make her his wife. Tess argues in vain, but ultimately grabs her leather glove and slaps him in the face, drawing blood. Alec does not punish her, but instead, grasping her shoulders, tells her that she will be his again one day. As the threshers rise from the floor, Alec departs, and Tess returns to throwing the corn into the feeder "as one in a dream."

I consider the following:

-One of the major conceits of the novel is Tess's shared purity with nature. Until now, the Wessex countryside and its farms have been depicted pastorally, a Georgic idyll of lovely vales and simple agriculture. But at Groby's farm in desolate Flintcomb-Ash, the corn feeder is modern technology of a sort rarely seen in Marlott or the Crick dairy. Also, it is tended by an engineer with a different accent and no interest in the activities of the farm, there only "in the service of his Plutonic master." It is the coming of the future.

-After Tess has been spending hours tending to the corn, during the lunch break, "the old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past days when they had been accustomed to thresh with flails on the oaken barn-floor; when everything, even to winnowing, was effected by hand-labour, which, to their thinking, though slow, produced better results." Meanwhile, Tess labors on without respite.

-After spending phases two through five absent from the novel, Alec returns in phase six, initially as a reformed Methodist minister trying to lead others to repentance. But on seeing Tess again, his religious enthusiasm weakens and he in Chapter XLVII becomes his old self, a rich, aimless man eager to have his way with Tess.

-The chapter ends with Tess slapping Alec, "a scarlet oozing appeared where her blow had alighted." This is the first time Tess has resorted to violence, and it foreshadows Chapter LVI when another scarlet oozing will seep onto the white ceiling of the house in Sandbourne, as Tess hurts Alec for good.

Tess is at one with the natural state of Wessex at this time, but Chapter XLVII sees the destructions of the future and the past converge on her: a future of domineering machines which will disrupt the harmony between man and nature Tess feels so conscientiously, and a past where her happiness and love were destroyed, would be destroyed, by the fierce desires of Alec, who has gone back to his old self…and by his old self's actions ruined Tess's marriage to Angel, her other great harmony. If the past is miserable and the future not looking much better, indeed bringing her own end faster and more dramatic than she thinks, the present must be a time and place of nothingness, where Tess has nothing to look forward to and precious little feelings. Such a time and place is Flintcomb-Ash, where she has been laboring far too long.

Therefore, Hardy may have put the opening paragraph of this crucial chapter in the present tense to emphasize the as-yet-unknown importance of this day in Tess's life, a day where she begins firmly in the present, but will have cause to experience the lost hopes and dismay of the past and taste the even more crushing disaster the future will bring.

Furthermore, one of Hardy's major themes in Tess of the d'Urbervilles is his attack on the moral values held by modern Victorian society: the codes and attitudes of the present which reinforced sexual repression and the Madonna-Whore dichotomy. Chapter XLVII ends with Tess symbolically lashing out at these values by slapping Alec, who seduced her, raped her, tried to self-righteously "save" her, and now places the reasons for his leaving the church on her shoulders (where he even grabs her by) for tempting him back to his old ways. It is a brave, Davidesque stand against a sneering dandy of a Goliath, but it is a fight Tess is destined to lose. Thus, Hardy describing the forlorn, cold, mechanical nothingness of Flintcomb-Ash in the present tense to lead off this chapter is a doubly powerful way of depicting the forces aligned against Tess, an all-too present version of the present.

The paragraph also may make sense as a culmination of Chapter XLVI, which concerns two visits Alec makes to Tess on the farm in February. First, still a preacher, he admits the wrong he has done her (he is genuinely distressed to know her husband left her because of his actions) and urges her to come with him as his wife, so that they may save each other. He even stands up to Groby when the latter has his usual harsh way with her. Still Tess demurs. Alec returns a half-enraged, half-pathetic wreck, who gives up his religious obligations in hope of persuading her to accept him. Tess refuses again, this time quoting Angel's carefully thought-out arguments against organized doctrine which she learned by rote in her time with him. Alec accuses Tess of making him backslide with her temptress ways, then recovers himself and takes leave of Flintcomb-Ash, swearing he will not see her again…only to begin pondering the logic behind Angel's philosophy.

So in Chapter XLVI Hardy depicts a different, striving-for-goodness Alec—and Alec full of plans for the future. Chapter XLVII sees Alec return to the mode of life he had in the past. In this context, the present-tense opening of the chapter may also be symbolic of this structural method of emotionally turning back the clock for a character in dramatic fashion.

Critics such as Irving Howe and Frederick Pinion (from Scott McEathron's Sourcebook) also point out that the threshing machine is symbolic of the modern world as "impersonal…dehumanized" (Howe) and representative of the thoughtless causes and effects which rule the plot, the "It was to be" fate with which Tess and her fellow Wessexians accept their lots (Pinion). And to quote McEathron, "Bruce Johnson gestures more broadly toward the machine as an emblematic threat to the 'primeval energies' that Hardy seems to be associating with Tess [her unity with nature], and thus to 'an ideal mode of consciousness' which has been lost with our modern alienation from nature." The threshing machine, a symbol the wonder of the present and herald of the coming future, is trebly Tess's enemy. What better way to launch her further on the road to her doom than too introduce it in the present tense?

A last bit of evidence for right now. A thorough search online left me with no other scholars who have commented on this sudden break into pure lepsis for Hardy, but according to the original records of the Graphic magazine, Chapter XLVII appeared in the November 28, 1891 issue to LEAD OFF part 20 of the original, censored serialization. Only people who had become completely caught up in Tess's adventures would have stuck by the novel to this point, meaning that Hardy's sudden cutting into present tense would have been a signpost of things to come. Coincidentally, the original, uncensored printing of Tess in novel form occurred the same month.

These would all be excellent jumping-off points, but after a thorough Google book search, it still seems odd to me that nobody has caught this yet and commented on it!

Chalk one up for the files of this lit-loving Philip Marlowe.