The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [305]
The death of Winterborne, as a projection of Hardy's own lost, rooted self, is symbolically a terrible moment. At least in the previous books it had been only the rootless ones who died, while Winterborne's previous incarnations, Dick Dewy, Gabriel Oak and Diggory Venn, had each come to a happy ending. One of the most moving moments in all Hardy is that where Grace Melbury realises, only after Giles is dead, that it had all along been plain little Marty South, with her hair shorn off, who was Giles's true mate: `You and he could speak in a tongue that nobody else knew ... the tongue of the trees and fruits and flowers themselves. That, and Marty's final farewell over Giles's grave ('No, no, my love, I can never forget `ee; for you was a good man, and did good things') are Hardy's elegy for the instinctive world he had lost for ever, where man is at one with nature and faith is the knowledge of that fact.
Disintegration: The final stage
As the sequence of Hardy's novels neared its conclusion, it is interesting to note how their changing mood had reflected the pattern of the fantasy cycle. Having begun with the youthful `anticipation stage' of Under the Greenwood Tree, they had continued with a 'dream stage' in the eventual imagined happiness of Far from the Madding Crowd. They had worked up through the `frustration stage' of The Return of the Native to the gathering nightmare of The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Woodlanders. Now they were to culminate in the two most terrible selfrevelations of all.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1888), subtitled A Pure Woman, was the only one of Hardy's major novels to centre round the fate of a heroine rather than a hero. Tess Durbeyfield, a beautiful country girl from a poor and simple Dorset home, becomes bewitched by her father's story that she belongs to a great and ancient family. Going out into the world, she successively falls prey to the two socially superior men, the `dark masculine' seducer Alec D'Urberville and the weak, moralistic, hypocritical Angel Clare, with whom, in different ways, she is so fatally mismatched. We have seen both these types before, in the predatory Troy/Wildeve figure and the religiose Clym Yeobright. But now there is no strong, good-hearted, male figure, like Gabriel Oak, to provide `light' contrast to their darkness. He has finally dropped out of Hardy's inner landscape with the death of Winterborne. Now, for Tess, there is nothing left but these two oppressive dark male opposites competing to destroy her: until the nightmare finally becomes so intense that she is driven to murder the cruel monster who was originally responsible for her downfall and is hanged for the crime.
It is not surprising that Tess was Hardy's own favourite character, for she really was the deepest projection of all of his own inner feminine. And once we see her in that light, how even more poignant does her story become. We see Tess, the `persecuted maiden, Hardy's anima, wandering blindly and distractedly across the face of an ever bleaker and more inhospitable Dorset countryside, looking for a home and a resting place where she might be whole, but eventually so tortured that she kills and is killed. In Hardy's oft-quoted phrase at the close of the book, `the President of the Immortals' had `ended his sport with Tess'. But of course the real power manipulating Tess from one improbable coincidence to the next, remorselessly stacking up the odds against her to such deadly conclusion, was not some vengeful deity, that God in whom the atheist Hardy no longer believed. It was Hardy himself. Even in the story we can only too easily see aspects of Hardy in both the men, unworthy of her, who make her their victim. D'Urberville is that recurring, heartless predator who represents the shadow of his unrealised