“Sermons in Stones”: The Return to Nature in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Abstract

“ S E R M O N S IN S T O N E S ” : T H E R E T U R N T O N A T U R E IN T E S S O F T H E D ’ U R B E R V IL L E S G. GLEN WICKENS Bishop’s University E v e n within a corpus of texts as large as the nineteenth-century English novel, we would be hard pressed to find a more polyphonic work than Tess of the d’ Urbervilles (1891). With its conflicting voices and constantly shifting perspectives, Tess clearly belongs to what Mikhail Bakhtin sees as the second and most important line of the novel’s development. A novel in this tradition must represent the plurality of its era’s languages or ideological voices, bring­ ing them into a unity that is not logical and semantic but paradoxical and purely stylistic: a “ heteroglot” or “contradictory unity.” 1 Expecting the narrator of Tess to be self-consistent, critics have heard con­ fusion rather than complexity in the unadjusted impressions of a voice that reflects and refracts the “views of life prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century.” 2 Furthermore, “ the confusion is not merely in the abstractable philo­ sophical content of the novel, but inextricably woven into its verbal texture.” 3 The assumption here is precisely what the study of intertextuality seeks to discredit: that a text is “ an autonomous artifact which harmoniously recon­ ciles the possible attitudes towards a given problem,” rather than “ a dialogue with other texts.” 4 The lack of thematic unity in Tess, most apparent in its “ exploration of a number of ideologies of nature,” 5 is very much an intertextual matter. The narrator’s words about his object, the theme of nature, are inevitably entangled in someone else’s discourse about it, and always directed at the anticipated answer of the listener or reader whose apperceptive back­ ground, like the author’s, is made up of contradictory utterances on the same theme. The identity of the novel depends not on the exclusion of a “commentary which belongs to another order of discourse,” 6but on the way different modes of discourse are displayed and juxtaposed. If some discourse (s) anterior to the novel forms the background necessary for the author’s or narrator’s voice to sound, his words, in turn, create the context or frame necessary for a character’s speech to be heard. In both cases, we have not just speech within speech but discourse about discourse. In Tess, Hardy introduces a literary man, Angel Clare, to foreground a E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x iv , 2, June 1988 critique of literary discourse as such. Present in many major novels, this type of character “ looks at life through the eyes of literature and . . . tries to live ‘according to literature’ ” (D I 413). By examining the intertextual dialogue in one of Angel’s excursions at Talbothays, we may begin to hear something other than confusion in Hardy’s treatment of nature. After living in London, Angel, who praises “pastoral life in ancient Greece” (179), returns to his native county and selects Talbothays dairy as a place to start a career in agriculture. Whatever his practical aims might be, his under­ lying motivation makes him, like every character in Tess, not so much an individual as an ideologue, “ a sample product of the last five-and-twenty years” (369). The emotional price of his intellectual liberty is a variant of Tess’s “ache of modernism,” “ feelings,” as the narrator says, “which might almost have been called those of the age” (177). The “ chronic melancholy” that accompanies the “decline of belief in a beneficent power” (169) impels Angel to seek in nature what he can no longer find in the “ old systems of mysticism” (462). In a scene that literally shows the “difficulties of passage” (202) that Tess and her pagan friends experience one “ Sun’s-day” (201) morning on their way to Church, Hardy also suggests that Angel’s transition from his Evan­ gelical upbringing to his avowed...