54 posts tagged “love”

Miss Austen Regrets tries to tell the story of a human being who cannot find a counterpart but nevertheless, feels the need of one. Ironically, it is the story of one of Western Literature’s most formidable Romance novelists, Jane Austen.  It is a movie that asks questions but leaves the answers to you. Should a person marry a person they are three fifths in love with? Two fifths? Fifteen sixteenths? What does an unusually bright person do when they are capable of creating characters in a novel that they could fall in love with but are incapable of meeting someone in the real world that they can. Do they believe? Do they risk growing old believing? “The only way to get a man like Mr. Darcy” says Jane in the movie, “is to make him up.”

Jane Austen died fairly young. And the movie explores the characters in her life and their beliefs about Jane’s decision to pursue literature rather than family, the ideal rather than the present. “’Quite Happy’ is not the end I want to write for my story” she says. But ultimately, that is what she has to settle for. .

“What kind of man could have been worthy of Jane Austen?  That list of men had to have been very, very short.  So short, that Austen may have had to have created and crafted fictional men to fill that void.  Sometimes, when we cannot find what we seek, we create it in our imagination – to fill the void of something we feel and believe should exist.” HERE

“Who would have thought that behind them, within ten miles, London began—that London of the Forsytes, with its wealth, its misery; its dirt and noise; its jumbled stone isles of beauty, its grey sea of hideous brick and stucco? That London which had seen Irene's early tragedy, and Jolyon's own hard days; that web; that princely workhouse of the possessive instinct!” John Galsworthy, Indian Summer of a Forsyte

Possession may be nine tenths of the law but the slightest tincture of it will kill a love affair it appears. I finished John Galsworthy's second Forsyte Saga novel, Indian Summer of a Forsyte, today and I cannot claim to have been unaffected by it emotionally. It furthers the themes begun in the first novel A Man of Possession beautifully capturing the impact of Victorian era assumptions, both conservative and liberal, through the romantic lives of the wealthy Forsyte family.

Indian Summer of a Forsyte takes us into the labyrinth of the mind of a possessive man, Soames Forsyte. The interesting thing about this villain is that he suffers and one cannot help but pity him (or at least I can't). There is a certain irony to the fact that I intensely dislike him and yet find myself feeling more empathy for him than any of the other characters. “'He really suffers,' says Jolyon Forsyte of his cousin Soames in words that resonated with me deeply, “I've no business to forget that, just because I don't like him.” I understand him and dislike him. I think, more than anything because he is a man who cannot understand himself. He is constantly asking why the woman that he so values rejected him, left him, despises him, and comes to hate him. Frankly, he cannot seem to understand how horrible it feels to be regarded as someone's possession. And yet he is convinced that his possessiveness is love.

To Soames Forsyte, the people he “loves” should act like his art. Once paid for, they should stay on his walls where he can look at them when he wants and show them off to people when they stop by.

I have pages of notes to illustrate how Soames Forsyte and his family view their domestic relations in ways not unlike a Lord might view their peasants in a feudal society.

“The third reason why Susan's burial made little stir was the most expansive of all. It was summed up daringly by Euphemia, the pale, the thin: "Well, I think people have a right to their own bodies, even when they're dead." Coming from a daughter of Nicholas, a Liberal of the old school and most tyrannical, it was a startling remark—showing in a flash what a lot of water had run under bridges since the death of Aunt Ann in '86, just when the proprietorship of Soames over his wife's body was acquiring the uncertainty which had led to such disaster. Euphemia, of course, spoke like a child, and had no experience; for though well over thirty by now, her name was still Forsyte. But, making all allowances, her remark did undoubtedly show expansion of the principle of liberty, decentralisation and shift in the central point of possession from others to oneself. When Nicholas heard his daughter's remark from Aunt Hester he had rapped out: "Wives and daughters! There's no end to their liberty in these days. I knew that 'Jackson' case would lead to things—lugging in Habeas Corpus like that!" He had, of course, never really forgiven the Married Woman's Property Act, which would so have interfered with him if he had not mercifully married before it was passed. But, in truth, there was no denying the revolt among the younger Forsytes against being owned by others; that, as it were, Colonial disposition to own oneself, which is the paradoxical forerunner of Imperialism, was making progress all the time.”

Indeed, Soames Forsyte is incapbale of letting go of his wife, Irene. He hangs on to her like Britain would later hang on to India. He regards her as property, and he deeply needs to have a son to pass his property down to.

“There had always been a strongly domestic, philoprogenitive side to Soames; baulked and frustrated, it had hidden itself away, but now had crept out again in this his 'prime of life.'”

“Whether Annette [Soames' new potential wife] had produced the revolution in his outlook, or that outlook had produced Annette, he knew no more than we know where a circle begins. It was intricate and deeply involved with the growing consciousness that property without anyone to leave it to is the negation of true Forsyteism. To have an heir, some continuance of self, who would begin where he left off—ensure, in fact, that he would not leave off—had quite obsessed him for the last year and more.”

In short, it is as though owning property is not enough for a man like Soams. He is not content if he is anxious about whether he will always own it, even after he is gone. Soames cannot understand why property, even human property, will not act like property. And if it won't, he can't understand why the law will not compel said property to comply with its nature and BE property – namely, to remain his wife.

“Of a misty January evening, just before the board was taken down, Soames had gone there once more, and stood against the Square railings, looking at its unlighted windows, chewing the cud of possessive memories which had turned so bitter in the mouth. Why had she never loved him? Why? She had been given all she had wanted, and in return had given him, for three long years, all he had wanted—except, indeed, her heart.”

Soames finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. His wife, Irene has been gone for almost 12 years. She remains single and alone and refuses to divorce him. He understands that his precious Forsyte name would lose 20% of its value if he were to bring scandal to it by divorcing her. In the family courts of England, such a divorce can only be obtained for good reason, and neither of them having committed adultery in any provable way, it would be impossible anyway. Soames considers proposing to a fetching young French woman named Annette, understanding that his substantial fortune may well compensate for the fact that she cannot love him.

“It was not as if Annette could have a real passion for him; one could not expect that at his age. If her mother wished, if the worldly advantage were manifestly great—perhaps! If not, refusal would be certain.”

"We never part with things you know,” says Jolyon Forsyte of his cousin's fixation on getting his wife back, “unless we want something in their place; and not always then." Cousins, Jolyon Forsyte and Soames Forsyte could not be the more diametrically opposed. One loves and feels loved or one doesn't according to Jolyon. There is no purchasing it, either with money or with guilt. Jolyon cannot deny that Soames has a case in law against Irene. Legally, she did sign herself away. But for him, the law of nature cannot be countermanded by the law of society.

“Again Jolyon's reason nodded; again his instinct shook its head. 'What is it?' he thought; 'there must be something wrong in me. Yet if there is, I'd rather be wrong than right.'

"After all," said Soames with a sort of glum fierceness, "she was my wife."

In a flash the thought went through his listener: 'There it is! Ownerships! Well, we all own things. But—human beings! Pah!'

It almost seems as though Soames' money has deluded him. He can purchase anything he wants. He does so every day of his life. It is as though he simply cannot resist the application of the metaphor of buying and owning to his human relationships.

“Memory, flown back to the first years of his marriage, played him torturing tricks. She had not deserved to keep her beauty—the beauty he had owned and known so well. And a kind of bitterness at the tenacity of his own admiration welled up in him. Most men would have hated the sight of her, as she had deserved. She had spoiled his life, wounded his pride to death, defrauded him of a son. And yet the mere sight of her, cold and resisting as ever, had this power to upset him utterly! It was some damned magnetism she had!”

“Nearing his Club at last he stopped to buy a paper. A headline ran: 'Boers reported to repudiate suzerainty!' Suzerainty! 'Just like her!' he thought: 'she always did. Suzerainty! I still have it by rights. She must be awfully lonely in that wretched little flat!'”

And thus Soames gives up his “Annette plan” for a “reclamation of Irene with the promise of money plan” oblivious to the fact that the plan itself is the problem.

“"You went to see her yesterday yourself, I understand" said Jolyon.

"I did," said Soames; "she's my wife, you know."

The tone, the half-lifted sneering lip, roused sudden anger in Jolyon; but he subdued it.

"You ought to know best," he said, "but if you want a divorce it's not very wise to go seeing her, is it? One can't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds?"

"You're very good to warn me," said Soames, "but I have not made up my mind."

"She has," said Jolyon, looking straight before him; "you can't take things up, you know, as they were twelve years ago."

"That remains to be seen."

"Look here!" said Jolyon, "she's in a damnable position, and I am the only person with any legal say in her affairs." [Jolyon is the executor of trust that his father has set up for Irene]

"Except myself," retorted Soames, "who am also in a damnable position. Hers is what she made for herself; mine what she made for me. I am not at all sure that in her own interests I shan't require her to return to me."

"What!" exclaimed Jolyon; and a shiver went through his whole body.

"I don't know what you may mean by 'what,'" answered Soames coldly; "your say in her affairs is confined to paying out her income; please bear that in mind. In choosing not to disgrace her by a divorce, I retained my rights, and, as I say, I am not at all sure that I shan't require to exercise them."

"My God!" ejaculated Jolyon, and he uttered a short laugh.

"Yes," said Soames, and there was a deadly quality in his voice. "I've not forgotten the nickname your father gave me, 'The man of property'! I'm not called names for nothing."

"This is fantastic," murmured Jolyon. Well, the fellow couldn't force his wife to live with him. Those days were past, anyway! And he looked around at Soames with the thought: 'Is he real, this man?' But Soames looked very real, sitting square yet almost elegant with the clipped moustache on his pale face, and a tooth showing where a lip was lifted in a fixed smile. There was a long silence, while Jolyon thought: 'Instead of helping her, I've made things worse.' Suddenly Soames said:

"It would be the best thing that could happen to her in many ways."

At those words such a turmoil began taking place in Jolyon that he could barely sit still in the cab. It was as if he were boxed up with hundreds of thousands of his countrymen, boxed up with that something in the national character which had always been to him revolting, something which he knew to be extremely natural and yet which seemed to him inexplicable—their intense belief in contracts and vested rights, their complacent sense of virtue in the exaction of those rights. Here beside him in the cab was the very embodiment, the corporeal sum as it were, of the possessive instinct—his own kinsman, too! It was uncanny and intolerable! 'But there's something more in it than that!' he thought with a sick feeling. 'The dog, they say, returns to his vomit! The sight of her has reawakened something. Beauty! The devil's in it!'

"As I say," said Soames, "I have not made up my mind. I shall be obliged if you will kindly leave her quite alone."

Jolyon bit his lips; he who had always hated rows almost welcomed the thought of one now.

"I can give you no such promise," he said shortly.

"Very well," said Soames, "then we know where we are. I'll get down here." And stopping the cab he got out without word or sign of farewell. Jolyon travelled on to his Club.

It is almost as though I can hear the sound of Gollum in Lord of the Rings, fawningly whispering “my precious. My precious” as Soames plots his reconquista.

“One woman's much the same as another, after all.' But as he walked he shook his head. No! One woman was not the same as another. Many a time had he tried to think that in the old days of his thwarted married life; and he had always failed. He was failing now. He was trying to think Annette the same as that other. But she was not, she had not the lure of that old passion. 'And Irene's my wife,' he thought, 'my legal wife. I have done nothing to put her away from me. Why shouldn't she come back to me? It's the right thing, the lawful thing. It makes no scandal, no disturbance. If it's disagreeable to her—but why should it be? I'm not a leper, and she—she's no longer in love!' Why should he be put to the shifts and the sordid disgraces and the lurking defeats of the Divorce Court, when there she was like an empty house only waiting to be retaken into use and possession by him who legally owned her? To one so secretive as Soames the thought of reentry into quiet possession of his own property with nothing given away to the world was intensely alluring.”

He tracks Irene down and proposes. He will do anything. Agree to any terms. She may even live separately. He simply wants a son he says.

“"I am not going till you've answered me. I am offering what few men would bring themselves to offer, I want a—a reasonable answer." And almost with surprise he heard her say:

"You can't have a reasonable answer. Reason has nothing to do with it. You can only have the brutal truth: I would rather die. . . . "

“He turned away to the door. But he could not go out. Something within him—that most deep and secret Forsyte quality, the impossibility of letting go, the impossibility of seeing the fantastic and forlorn nature of his own tenacity—prevented him.”

“Soames gritted his teeth. "God knows what it was. I've never understood you; I shall never understand you. You had everything you wanted; and you can have it again, and more. What's the matter with me? I ask you a plain question: What is it?" Unconscious of the pathos in that enquiry, he went on passionately: "I'm not lame, I'm not loathsome, I'm not a boor, I'm not a fool. What is it? What's the mystery about me?"

Her answer was a long sigh.”

The reader is left to fill in the meaning of the sigh but clearly, it has something to do with Irine's wish to never again place herself on the auction block of matrimonial enslavement. And thus are they both trapped by the law.

It is interesting at this point to contrast Jolyon and Soames in the way that they are affected by Irene. Both men regard her as beautiful. Captivatingly beautiful. And charming. Irene is probably what someone without discretion might refer to as an “alpha female” in her Victorian society. Perhaps because of her looks. Perhaps because of her nature. There is something that can only be referred to as quality in her and every Forsyte man in the family can see it. But Jolyon Forsyte was raised by a father who could appreciate quality in women without confusing them with property to be purchased. Soames Forsyte was raised by Jolyon's uncle who had very different views.

Here is Galsworthy's description of the way that Jolyon feels about Irene.

“It was like watching a starved plant draw up water, to see her drink in his companionship. So far as they could tell, no one knew her address except himself; she was unknown in Paris, and he but little known, so that discretion seemed unnecessary in those walks, talks, visits to concerts, picture-galleries, theatres, little dinners, expeditions to Versailles, St. Cloud, even Fontainebleau. And time fled—one of those full months without past to it or future. What in his youth would certainly have been headlong passion, was now perhaps as deep a feeling, but far gentler, tempered to protective companionship by admiration, hopelessness, and a sense of chivalry—arrested in his veins at least so long as she was there, smiling and happy in their friendship, and always to him more beautiful and spiritually responsive: for her philosophy of life seemed to march in admirable step with his own, conditioned by emotion more than by reason, ironically mistrustful, susceptible to beauty, almost passionately humane and tolerant, yet subject to instinctive rigidities of which as a mere man he was less capable. And during all this companionable month he never quite lost that feeling with which he had set out on the first day as if to visit an adored work of art, a well-nigh impersonal desire.”

When next Jolyon and Soames meet, the way that Jolyon is able to moderate his possessive instincts and Soames is not is made amply clear.

“"I don't know what makes you think I have any influence," said Jolyon; "but if I have I'm bound to use it in the direction of what I think is her happiness. I am what they call a 'feminist,' I believe."

"Feminist!" repeated Soames, as if seeking to gain time. "Does that mean that you're against me?"

"Bluntly," said Jolyon, "I'm against any woman living with any man whom she definitely dislikes. It appears to me rotten."

"And I suppose each time you see her you put your opinions into her mind."

"I am not likely to be seeing her."

"Not going back to Paris?"

"Not so far as I know," said Jolyon, conscious of the intent watchfulness in Soames' face.

"Well, that's all I had to say. Anyone who comes between man and wife, you know, incurs heavy responsibility."

To Jolyon, Soames is little more than a matrimonial imperialist, treating women like England had treated Ireland and was in the process of subduing South Africa.

[Jolyon] could remember fuming over the bludgeoning of Ireland, or the matrimonial suits of women trying to be free of men they loathed. Parsons would have it that freedom of soul and body were quite different things! Pernicious doctrine! Body and soul could not thus be separated. Free will was the strength of any tie, and not its weakness. 'I ought to have told Soames,' he thought, 'that I think him comic. Ah! but he's tragic, too!' Was there anything, indeed, more tragic in the world than a man enslaved by his own possessive instinct, who couldn't see the sky for it, or even enter fully into what another person felt!”

Soames, incapable of seeing any other approach besides that of the legal argument, flings himself against the heavily barred gates of her will once again:

He could see, then, that she was struggling to preserve her composure.

"I didn't want to startle you; is this one of your haunts?"

"Yes."

"A little lonely." As he spoke, a lady, strolling by, paused to look at the fountain and passed on.

Irene's eyes followed her.

"No," she said, prodding the ground with her parasol, "never lonely. One has always one's shadow." [Soames has been paying to have Irene watched by a detective agency.]

Soames understood; and, looking at her hard, he exclaimed:

"Well, it's your own fault. You can be free of it at any moment. Irene, come back to me, and be free."

Irene laughed.

"Don't!" cried Soames, stamping his foot; "it's inhuman. Listen! Is there any condition I can make which will bring you back to me? If I promise you a separate house—and just a visit now and then?"

Irene rose, something wild suddenly in her face and figure.

"None! None! None! You may hunt me to the grave. I will not come."

"That's your last word, then," muttered Soames, clenching his hands; "you condemn us both."

Irene bent her head. "I can't come back. Good-bye!"

A feeling of monstrous injustice flared up in Soames.

"Stop!" he said, "and listen to me a moment. You gave me a sacred vow—you came to me without a penny. You had all I could give you. You broke that vow without cause, you made me a by-word; you refused me a child; you've left me in prison; you—you still move me so that I want you—I want you. Well, what do you think of yourself?"

Irene turned, her face was deadly pale, her eyes burning dark.

"God made me as I am," she said; "wicked if you like—but not so wicked that I'll give myself again to a man I hate."

Soames is trapped. He is a millionaire. But he is trapped. He is owned without owning. He can neither buy what he wills to possess or buy his freedom from she who possesses him.

“In irons! His whole life, with every natural instinct and every decent yearning gagged and fettered, and all because Fate had driven him seventeen years ago to set his heart upon this woman—so utterly, that even now he had no real heart to set on any other! Cursed was the day he had met her, and his eyes for seeing in her anything but the cruel Venus she was! And yet, still seeing her with the sunlight on the clinging China crepe of her gown, he uttered a little groan, so that a tourist who was passing, thought: 'Man in pain! Let's see! what did I have for lunch?'”

Why does Irene give herself to Jolyon rather than the far wealthier Soames. Ultimately it is because what both men offer is not so important to her as the difference between what the two men expect to take. One will have her. The other will have what she decides to give. The difference can be found in Jolyon's Stoic determination not to “be a Forsyte” which is to say that he will not use money and the law to acquire that which only free will and an ungovernable chemistry can give.

“And while they walked, Jolyon pondered those words: 'I hope you'll treat him as you treated me.' That would depend on himself. Could he trust himself? Did Nature permit a Forsyte not to make a slave of what he adored? Could beauty be confided to him? Or should she not be just a visitor, coming when she would, possessed for moments which passed, to return only at her own choosing? 'We are a breed of spoilers!' thought Jolyon, 'close and greedy; the bloom of life is not safe with us. Let her come to me as she will, when she will, not at all if she will not. Let me be just her stand-by, her perching-place; never-never her cage!'

Contrast that with the lamentations of Soames as he contemplates in shillings and coppers the reputational cost of his having to file for divorce:

“The matter was clear as daylight, and would be disposed of in half an hour or so; but during that half-hour he, Soames, would go down to hell; and after that half-hour all bearers of the Forsyte name would feel the bloom was off the rose. He had no illusions like Shakespeare that roses by any other name would smell as sweet. The name was a possession, a concrete, unstained piece of property, the value of which would be reduced some twenty per cent. at least.”

“He had asked no better than to live in spotless domesticity, and now he must go into the witness box, after all these futile, barren years, and proclaim his failure to keep his wife—incur the pity, the amusement, the contempt of his kind. It was all upside down. She and that fellow ought to be the sufferers, and they—were in Italy! In these weeks the Law he had served so faithfully, looked on so reverently as the guardian of all property, seemed to him quite pitiful. What could be more insane than to tell a man that he owned his wife, and punish him when someone unlawfully took her away from him? Did the Law not know that a man's name was to him the apple of his eye, that it was far harder to be regarded as cuckold than as seducer? He actually envied Jolyon the reputation of succeeding where he, Soames, had failed.”

This next passage, taken from a portion of the novel after Soames has obtained his divorce and married Annette is too good not to quote at length.

“The marriage of Soames with Annette took place in Paris on the last day of January, 1901, with such privacy that not even Emily was told until it was accomplished.

The day after the wedding he brought her to one of those quiet hotels in London where greater expense can be incurred for less result than anywhere else under heaven. Her beauty in the best Parisian frocks was giving him more satisfaction than if he had collected a perfect bit of china, or a jewel of a picture; he looked forward to the moment when he would exhibit her in Park Lane, in Green Street, and at Timothy's.

If some one had asked him in those days, "In confidence—are you in love with this girl?" he would have replied: "In love? What is love? If you mean do I feel to her as I did towards Irene in those old days when I first met her and she would not have me; when I sighed and starved after her and couldn't rest a minute until she yielded—no! If you mean do I admire her youth and prettiness, do my senses ache a little when I see her moving about—yes! Do I think she will keep me straight, make me a creditable wife and a good mother for my children?—again, yes!"

"What more do I need? and what more do three-quarters of the women who are married get from the men who marry them?" And if the enquirer had pursued his query, "And do you think it was fair to have tempted this girl to give herself to you for life unless you have really touched her heart?" he would have answered: "The French see these things differently from us. They look at marriage from the point of view of establishments and children; and, from my own experience, I am not at all sure that theirs is not the sensible view. I shall not expect this time more than I can get, or she can give. Years hence I shouldn't be surprised if I have trouble with her; but I shall be getting old, I shall have children by then. I shall shut my eyes. I have had my great passion; hers is perhaps to come—I don't suppose it will be for me. I offer her a great deal, and I don't expect much in return, except children, or at least a son. But one thing I am sure of—she has very good sense!"

And if, insatiate, the enquirer had gone on, "You do not look, then, for spiritual union in this marriage?" Soames would have lifted his sideway smile, and rejoined: "That's as it may be. If I get satisfaction for my senses, perpetuation of myself; good taste and good humour in the house; it is all I can expect at my age. I am not likely to be going out of my way towards any far-fetched sentimentalism." Whereon, the enquirer must in good taste have ceased enquiry.”

The novel closes with an apt description of how the cultural influence of Queen Victoria in the age of property and acquisition and ownership and imperialism had impacted the romantic lives of two men and two women. It is a poinient scene:

“The Queen was dead, and the air of the greatest city upon earth grey with unshed tears. Fur-coated and top-hatted, with Annette beside him in dark furs, Soames crossed Park Lane on the morning of the funeral procession, to the rails in Hyde Park. Little moved though he ever was by public matters, this event, supremely symbolical, this summing-up of a long rich period, impressed his fancy. In '37, when she came to the throne, 'Superior Dosset' was still building houses to make London hideous; and James, a stripling of twenty-six, just laying the foundations of his practice in the Law. Coaches still ran; men wore stocks, shaved their upper lips, ate oysters out of barrels; 'tigers' swung behind cabriolets; women said, 'La!' and owned no property; there were manners in the land, and pigsties for the poor; unhappy devils were hanged for little crimes, and Dickens had but just begun to write. Well-nigh two generations had slipped by—of steamboats, railways, telegraphs, bicycles, electric light, telephones, and now these motorcars—of such accumulated wealth, that eight per cent. had become three, and Forsytes were numbered by the thousand! Morals had changed, manners had changed, men had become monkeys twice-removed, God had become Mammon—Mammon so respectable as to deceive himself: Sixty-four years that favoured property, and had made the upper middle class; buttressed, chiselled, polished it, till it was almost indistinguishable in manners, morals, speech, appearance, habit, and soul from the nobility. An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money, he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonised hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be. A great Age, whose transmuting influence nothing had escaped save the nature of man and the nature of the Universe.”

“. . . Out in the crowd against the railings, with his arm hooked in Annette's, Soames waited. Yes! the Age was passing! What with this Trade Unionism, and Labour fellows in the House of Commons, with continental fiction, and something in the general feel of everything, not to be expressed in words, things were very different; he recalled the crowd on Mafeking night, and George Forsyte saying: "They're all socialists, they want our goods." Like James, Soames didn't know, he couldn't tell—with Edward on the throne! Things would never be as safe again as under good old Viccy! Convulsively he pressed his young wife's arm. There, at any rate, was something substantially his own, domestically certain again at last; something which made property worth while—a real thing once more. Pressed close against her and trying to ward others off, Soames was content.

And, suddenly, a little behind them to the left, he saw a tallish man with a soft hat and short grizzling beard, and a tallish woman in a little round fur cap and veil. Jolyon and Irene talking, smiling at each other, close together like Annette and himself! They had not seen him; and stealthily, with a very queer feeling in his heart, Soames watched those two. They looked happy! What had they come here for—inherently illicit creatures, rebels from the Victorian ideal? What business had they in this crowd? Each of them twice exiled by morality—making a boast, as it were, of love and laxity! He watched them fascinated; admitting grudgingly even with his arm thrust through Annette's that—that she—Irene—No! he would not admit it; and he turned his eyes away. He would not see them, and let the old bitterness, the old longing rise up within him! And then Annette turned to him and said: "Those two people, Soames; they know you, I am sure. Who are they?"

“But while he stood, grasping her arm, seemingly intent on the head of the procession, he was quivering with the sense of always missing something, with instinctive regret that he had not got them both.”

Regret that “he had not got them both.” John Galsworthy has chosen his words perfectly. For whenever Soames Forsyte says to someone “I love you” what he really means is “I got you.” Galsworthy could not have illustrated it more clearly than he does in his conclusion where we see Soames meeting for the first time his newborn daughter Fleur:

“Relief unspeakable, and yet—a daughter! It seemed to him unfair. To have taken that risk—to have been through this agony—and what agony!—for a daughter! He stood before the blazing fire of wood logs in the hall, touching it with his toe and trying to readjust himself. 'My father!' he thought. A bitter disappointment, no disguising it! One never got all one wanted in this life! And there was no other—at least, if there was, it was no use!”

“"Don't you want to see baby, Soames? She is asleep."

"Of course," said Soames, "very much."

He passed round the foot of the bed to the other side and stood staring. For the first moment what he saw was much what he had expected to see—a baby. But as he stared and the baby breathed and made little sleeping movements with its tiny features, it seemed to assume an individual shape, grew to be like a picture, a thing he would know again; not repulsive, strangely bud-like and touching. It had dark hair. He touched it with his finger, he wanted to see its eyes. They opened, they were dark—whether blue or brown he could not tell. The eyes winked, stared, they had a sort of sleepy depth in them. And suddenly his heart felt queer, warm, as if elated.

"Ma petite fleur!" Annette said softly.

"Fleur," repeated Soames: "Fleur! we'll call her that."

The sense of triumph and renewed possession swelled within him.

By God! this—this thing was his! By God! this—this thing was his!”

And so the novel ends. “By God! This thing was his!” the statement that fairly well guarantees … that she will never be.

Question for Comment: How does a person love without nurturing attachment that might eventually make a person feel that they were becoming an object of emotional possession?

Far from the Maddening Crowd: Thomas Hardy

One woman. Three men. The woman, Bathsheba Everdene, Beautiful.

One man, Mr. Boldwood: Too old for her and riddled with insecurities but seriously OCD smitten.

One man, Frank Troy: A player but excessively handsome and charming.

One man, Gabriel Oak: An honest, hardworking, and decent sort with unremarkable looks and devoid of status.

Here is what Hardy says about Bathsheba Everdene:

“There was a bright air and manner about her now, by which she seemed to imply that the desirability of her existence could not be questioned.”p. 14

“Among these heavy yeomen a feminine figure glided, the single one of her sex that the room contained. She was prettily and even daintily dressed. She moved between them as a chaise between carts, was heard after them as a romance after sermons, was felt among them like a breeze among furnaces. It had required a little determination -- far more than she had at first imagined -- to take up a position here, for at her first entry the lumbering dialogues had ceased, nearly every face had been turned towards her, and those that were already turned rigidly fixed there.” p. 80

And here is what she has to say about marriage at the beginning of the novel:

"Well, what I mean is that I shouldn't mind being a bride at a wedding, if I could be one without having a husband. But since a woman can't show off in that way by herself, I shan't marry -- at least yet." p. 27

"Kiss my foot, sir; my face is for mouths of consequence," we can imagine her saying to her suitors. p. 68

Here is what Hardy has to say about Gabriel Oak:

“His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man of sound judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and general good character. On Sundays he was a man of misty views, rather given to postponing, and hampered by his best clothes and umbrella: upon the whole, one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the parish and the drunken section, -- that is, he went to church, but yawned privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed,- and thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to be listening to the sermon.” p. 1

“He had just reached the time of life at which "young" is ceasing to be the prefix of "man" in speaking of one. He was at the brightest period of masculine growth, for his intellect and his emotions were clearly separated ...” p. 3

“Gabriel's features adhered throughout their form so exactly to the middle line between the beauty of St.John and the ugliness of Judas Iscariot, as represented in a window of the church he attended, that not a single lineament could be selected and called worthy either of distinction or notoriety.” p. 5

“Having for some time known the want of a satisfactory form to fill an increasing void within him, his position moreover affording the widest scope for his fancy, he painted her [Bathsheba] a beauty.” p. 12

Here is what Gabriel feels about Bathsheba when she first meets her:

“Gabriel had reached a pitch of existence he never could have anticipated a short time before. He liked saying `Bathsheba' as a private enjoyment instead of whistling; turned over his taste to black hair, though he had sworn by brown ever since he was a boy, isolated himself till the space he filled in the public eye was contemptibly small.” p. 21

Alas, his chances are not good.

“Farmer Oak had one-and-a-half Christian characteristics too many to succeed with Bathsheba: his humility, and a superfluous moiety of honesty.” p. 28

“No man likes to see his emotions the sport of a merry-go-round of skittishness. "Very well." said Oak, firmly, with the bearing of one who was going to give his days and nights to Ecclesiastes for ever. "Then I'll ask you no more." p. 28

Mr. Boldwood is some 16 years older than Bathsheba Everdene and he is clearly suffering (unknowingly) from some form of non-verbal learning disorder and a vulnerability to obsessiveness.

“Boldwood looked at her -- not slily, critically, or understandingly, but blankly at gaze, in the way a reaper looks up at a passing train -- as something foreign to his element, and but dimly understood. To Boldwood women had been remote phenomena rather than necessary complements -- comets of such uncertain aspect, movement, and permanence, that whether their orbits were as geometrical, unchangeable, and as subject to laws as his own, or as absolutely erratic as they superficially appeared, he had not deemed it his duty to consider.” p. 104

To the best of his judgement neither nature nor art could improve this perfect one of an imperfect many. His heart began to move within him. Boldwood, it must be remembered, though forty years of age, had never before inspected a woman with the very centre and force of his glance; they had struck upon all his senses at wide angles. Was she really beautiful? He could not assure himself that his opinion was true even now. He furtively said to a neighbour, "Is Miss Everdene considered handsome?" p. 105

“Bathsheba was far from dreaming that the dark and silent shape [Mr. Boldwood] upon which she had so carelessly thrown a seed was a hotbed of tropic intensity.” p. 108

Boldwood's affections for Bathsheba are the first affections he has ever felt for anyone. Indeed, she is the first woman he appears to have ever noticed. He is clearly out of his depth. One might think of his affections for Bathsheba as monomaniacal.

“Nobody knew entirely; for though it was possible to form guesses concerning his wild capabilities from old floodmarks faintly visible, he had never been seen at the high tides which caused them.” p. 108

“A man's body is as the shell; or the tablet, of his soul, as he is reserved or ingenuous, overflowing or self-contained. There was a change in Boldwood's exterior from its former impassibleness; and his face showed that he was now living outside his defenses for the first time, and with a fearful sense of exposure. It is the usual experience of strong natures when they love.”

“He passed by with an utter and overwhelming sensation of ignorance, shyness, and doubt. Perhaps in her manner there were signs that she wished to see him -- perhaps not -- he could not read a woman. The cabala of this erotic philosophy seemed to consist of the subtlest meanings expressed in misleading ways. Every turn, look, word, and accent contained a mystery quite distinct from its obvious import, and not one had ever been pondered by him until now.” p. 110

“The great aids to idealization in love were present here: occasional observation of her from a distance, and the absence of social intercourse with her -- visual familiarity, oral strangeness. The smaller human elements were kept out of sight; the pettinesses that enter so largely into all earthly living and doing were disguised by the accident of lover and loved-one not being on visiting terms.”p.110

Our third competitor for the hand of the lovely Bathsheba is Sargent Frank Troy. He is an inveterate liar and flatterer with half the integrity of either Gabriel and Boldwood and twice their talent for sweet talk combined.

“After all, how could a cheerful wearer of skirts be permanently offended with the man [Sargent Troy]? There are occasions when girls like Bathsheba will put up with a great deal of unconventional behavior. When they want to be praised, which is often, when they want to be mastered, which is sometimes; and when they want no nonsense, which is seldom. Just now the first feeling was in the ascendant with Bathsheba, with a dash of the second.” p. 148

“He [Troy] spoke fluently and unceasingly. He could in this way be one thing and seem another: for instance, he could speak of love and think of dinner; call on the husband to look at the wife, be eager to pay and intend to owe.” p.151

“I won't speak of morals or religion -- my own or anybody else's, he says,

“Though perhaps I should have been a very good Christian if you pretty women hadn't made me an idolater." p. 154

Ah." well, Miss Everdene, you are -- pardon my blunt way -- you are rather an injury to our race than otherwise.

"How -- indeed?" she said, opening her eyes.

"O, it is true enough. I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb (an old country saying, not of much account, but it will do for a rough soldier), and so I will speak my mind, regardless of your pleasure, and without hoping or intending to get your pardon. Why, Miss Everdene, it is in this manner that your good looks may do more. harm than good in the world."

The sergeant looked down the mead in critical abstraction. "Probably some one man on an average falls in love, with each ordinary woman. She can marry him: he is content, and leads a useful life. Such women as you a hundred men always covet -- your eyes will bewitch scores on scores into an unavailing fancy for you you can only marry one of that many. Out of these say twenty will endeavour to. drown the bitterness of espised love in drink; twenty more will mope away their lives without a wish or attempt to make a mark in he world, because they have no ambition apart from their attachment to you; twenty more -- the susceptible person myself possibly among them -- will be always draggling after you, getting where they may just see you, doing desperate things. Men are such constant fools! The rest may try to get over their passion with more or less success. But all these men will be saddened. And not only those ninety-nine men, but the ninety-nine women they might have married are saddened with them. There's my tale. That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race."

The handsome sergeant's features were during this speech as rigid and stern as John Knox's in addressing his gay young queen.” p. 156

Hardy seems to want us to like Miss Everdene but … she clearly has no defenses against this sort of high octain wooing.

“Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine.” p. 170

By the time these men all play out their cards, we find a confused Bathsheba picking charm over wealth and wealth over character. Fortunately for her, Mr. Wealth kills Mr. Charm eventually, and she winds up with the man she comes to realize she should have picked first, a.k.a. Mr. Character, Gabriel Oak. To sum up their differences, you might say that Mr. Boldwood can think of nothing but Bathsheba, Mr. Troy can think of no one but himself, and Mr. Oak is capable of thinking about everyone's interests. He is niether overwhelmed by himself (as Mr. Troy is) not with the person he loves (as Mr. Boldwood is).

“That man's life is a total blank whenever he isn't hoping for you,” Oak says to Bathsheba of Boldwood.

“Boldwood, who seemed so much deeper and higher and stronger in feeling than Gabriel, had not yet learnt, any more than she herself, the simple lesson which Oak showed a mastery of by every turn and look he gave -- that among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal wellbeing were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes. Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst. That was how she would wish to be.” p.266

At the conclusion of the novel, Hardy makes a case for couples taking more time in their courtship processes. Both Boldwood and Bathsheba fall in love with ideas not people and niether give the real people the time it takes to emerge out of the fog of the idea. And while Gabriel Oak does the same to some extent, he is far more patient and sober about the commitments he makes and the time he will take.

“It may have been observed that there is no regular path for getting out of love as there is for getting in. Some people look upon marriage as a short cut that way, but it has been known to fail. Separation, which was the means that chance offered to Gabriel Oak by Bathsheba's disappearance though effectual with people of certain humours is apt to idealize the removed object with others -- notably those whose affection, placid and regular as it may be flows deep and long. Oak belonged to the even-tempered order of humanity, and felt the secret fusion of himself in Bathsheba to be burning with a finer flame now that she was gone -- that was all.” p. 29

It is only years after his first rejected proposal that Hardy presents us with a couple capable of making an informed decision regarding one another.

“He accompanied her up the hill, explaining to her the details of his forthcoming tenure of the other farm. They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends. Theirs was that substantial affection which arises (if any arises at all)when the two who are thrown together begin first by knowing the rougher sides of each other's character,and not the best till further on, the romance growing up in the interstices of a mass of hard prosaic reality. This good-fellowship -- CAMARADERIE -- usually occurring through similarity of pursuits, is unfortunately seldom superadded to love between the sexes, because men and women associate, not in their labours, but in their pleasures merely. Where, however, happy circumstance permits its development, the compounded feeling proves itself to be the only love which is strong as death – that love which many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown, beside which the passion usually called by the name is evanescent as steam.” p. 357

“The real sin, ma'am in my mind,” says Oak to Bathsheba, “lies in thinking of ever wedding wi' a man you don't love honest and true." p. 321

Gabriel Oak understands the value of alignment, of involving one's entire being in a process and not just one aspect. He understands the dangers of making such decisions on the basis of first impressions, feuding impressions, and easily fooled temporary impressions. Bathsheba scolds her maid, Liddy for still being single,

"You ought to be married by this time, and not here troubling me!"

Ay, mistress -- so I did.” says Liddy, “But what between the poor men I won't have, and the rich men who won't have me, I stand as a pelican in the wilderness!" p. 68

And as Bathsheba Everdine concludes after a great deal of sorrow, tis better to be a Pelican in the wilderness as long as it takes to make decisions about partners with a clear eye.

“That she had never, by look, word, or sign, encouraged a man to approach her -- that she had felt herself sufficient to herself, and had in the independence of her girlish heart fancied there was a certain degradation in renouncing the simplicity of a maiden existence to become the humbler half of an indifferent matrimonial whole -- were facts now bitterly remembered. O, if she had never stooped to folly of this kind, respectable as it was, and could only stand again, as she had stood on the hill at Norcombe, and dare Troy or any other man to pollute a hair of her head by his interference!” p. 248

“Be careful not to awaken love until it pleases” the writer of the song of Songs writes to the daughters of Jerusalem. That seems to be the theme of Far From the Maddening Crowd.

[I have NO idea why VOX is creating these red fonted underlines! Drives me crazy. I can't get rid of them]

I wish I could figure out a way to combine the benefits of watching a movie based on a novel and reading the novel itself. I confess, I enjoyed the dramatized version of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga: A Man of Property, and I found a good deal of the novel tedious when I read it. But there are some passages in the novel that don’t make it through into the film that are really well written. Galsworthy is one of the first writers of the Edwardian Era to begin to seriously challenge the “suffocating” morality of the Victorian Age (and I realize that one could also parse that sentence differently and say that John Galsworthy is one of the first writers to undermine the sanctity of the Victorian family.) Passion and social order are two trains and authors like Galsworthy insist that if you can only get on one, you should choose passion. He himself had an affair and later married his cousin’s wife.

In many respects, he can be placed in the same category as Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, and E.M. Forster. He’s a Rousseau who will follow through with his principles, society be damned.

In many ways, the The Man of Property could be an effective tool for teaching Victorian moral sensibilities and values. The basic story involves a wealthy family (the Forsytes) that represent what, to Galsworthy, is the problem with the Victorian family and society. They have honed their capitalist skills and neglected to invest the time it takes to be emotionally and relationally wealthy. Two cousins, Jolyon and Soames Forsyte take opposing approaches to the way they value people, things, reputation, and happiness. Soames marries to possess a beautiful woman whose principle function in his life revolves around status. Jolyon leaves his wife and is excommunicated from the family in pursuit of a natural affection he has for a domestic servant. The novel traces the arc of wisdom and/or foolishness in these two men’s lives by focusing on the life and hearts of Soames’ wife Irene and Jolyon’s daughter, June.  Through these two characters, we are given to understand how painful the life of passion can be, and yet Galsworthy would seem to indicate that there can be no other alternative if one is to live.

Throughout the novel, Galsworthy keeps returning to the Victorian perception of marriage as a matter of contract and ownership and critiquing it. Soames instinct for “possessing” his wife exceeds his momentary and ephemeral feelings of love for her. Jolyon wishes to own and be owned by no one. His soul is in his feelings and passions and he will sell them for no amount. Irene must decide if she will or will not do the same.  June has her father, Jolyon’s predisposition to throw herself entirely into her love for her beau but she suffers the excruciating agony of having done so for a man who has his heart attached elsewhere.

“But this long tale is no scientific study of a period,” we read in the preface,

“it is rather an intimate incarnation of the disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives of men. . . . The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed, present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world.”

One sees this even in Soames’ proposal to Irene: “Will you do me the honor of becoming mine.” He asks. Her financial situation leaves her desperate to say no but inclined to say yeas.

“I will marry you Mr. Forsyte” she replies. HE is not her lover. He is an insurance policy.  

But unlike a piece of property, a human being is not something you own just because you buy it. “Why do you never look at me like you look at him?” Soames asks his wife years later.  “Readers, as they wade on through the salt waters of the Saga, are inclined more and more to pity Soames,” the preface explains,

“and to think that in doing so they are in revolt against the mood of his creator. Far from it! He, too, pities Soames, the tragedy of whose life is the very simple, uncontrollable tragedy of being unlovable, without quite a thick enough skin to be thoroughly unconscious of the fact. . . . taking sides, they [the reader] loses perception of the simple truth, which underlies the whole story, that where sex attraction is utterly and definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity, or reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in Nature. Whether it ought to, or no, is beside the point; because in fact it never does.”

As one of the characters explains, “But it’s the spark. It’s the spark you need.”

Galsworthy characterizes the marriage between Irene and Soames in the following way:

“He had left his wife sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room, her hands crossed in her lap, manifestly waiting for him to go out. This was not unusual. It happened, in fact, every day.

He could not understand what she found wrong with him. It was not as if he drank! Did he run into debt, or gamble, or swear; was he violent; were his friends rackety; did he stay out at night? On the contrary.

The profound, subdued aversion which he felt in his wife was a mystery to him, and a source of the most terrible irritation. That she had made a mistake, and did not love him, had tried to love him and could not love him, was obviously no reason.

He that could imagine so outlandish a cause for his wife's not getting on with him was certainly no Forsyte.

Soames was forced, therefore, to set the blame entirely down to his wife. He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring affection. They could not go anywhere without his seeing how all the men were attracted by her; their looks, manners, voices, betrayed it; her behavior under this attention had been beyond reproach. That she was one of those women--not too common in the Anglo-Saxon race--born to be loved and to love, who when not loving are not living, had certainly never even occurred to him. Her power of attraction, he regarded as part of her value as his property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could give as well as receive; and she gave him nothing! 'Then why did she marry me?' was his continual thought. He had, forgotten his courtship; that year and a half when he had besieged and lain in wait for her, devising schemes for her entertainment, giving her presents, proposing to her periodically, and keeping her other admirers away with his perpetual presence. He had forgotten the day when, adroitly taking advantage of an acute phase of her dislike to her home surroundings, he crowned his labors with success. If he remembered anything, it was the dainty capriciousness with which the gold-haired, dark-eyed girl had treated him. He certainly did not remember the look on her face- -strange, passive, appealing--when suddenly one day she had yielded, and said that she would marry him.

It had been one of those real devoted wooings which books and people praise, when the lover is at length rewarded for hammering the iron till it is malleable, and all must be happy ever after as the wedding bells.

The imagery is instructive. Irene is a castle besieged and taken. How dare she not then belong to he who breached her defenses to possess? Soames’ solution to his wife’s indifference to him is to isolate her. Essentially, to take away any other option to his company. To drive her to him by deprivation of all other sources of affection.

“To get Irene out of London, away from opportunities of going about and seeing people, away from her friends and those who put ideas into her head! That was the thing!”

In short, his goal is possession not love and for that reason, his chances of possession are doomed.

“Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who, competitive, and full of common-sense, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her heart.”

Galsworhty keeps returning to the theme, illustrating, by means of his ability to let us see into the mind of Soames and Irene why this marriage is not working.

“Out of his other property, out of all the things he had collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none.”

“In this house of his there was writing on every wall. His business-like temperament protested against a mysterious warning that she was not made for him. He had married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he could do no more than own her body--if indeed he could do that, which he was beginning to doubt. If any one had asked him if he wanted to own her soul, the question would have seemed to him both ridiculous and sentimental. But he did so want, and the writing said he never would.”

“She was ever silent, passive, gracefully averse; as though terrified lest by word, motion, or sign she might lead him to believe that she was fond of him; and he asked himself: Must I always go on like this?”

“Like most novel readers of his generation (and Soames was a great novel reader), literature coloured his view of life; and he had imbibed the belief that it was only a question of time.”

“In the end the husband always gained the affection of his wife. Even in those cases--a class of book he was not very fond of-- which ended in tragedy, the wife always died with poignant regrets on her lips, or if it were the husband who died-- unpleasant thought--threw herself on his body in an agony of remorse.”

“In Montpellier Square Soames, who had come from the picture room, stood invisible at the top of the stairs, watching Irene sort the letters brought by the last post. She turned back into the drawing-room; but in a minute came out, and stood as if listening. Then she came stealing up the stairs, with a kitten in her arms. He could see her face bent over the little beast, which was purring against her neck. Why couldn't she look at him like that?”

Over and over again, he says to his wife “I love you” but acts in such a way as to convey to her in no uncertain terms that she is his possession and that he loves himself.

“The Buccaneer [the architect who is in love with Irene] asked after you more than once,” he [Soames] said suddenly. And moved by some inexplicable desire to assert his proprietorship, he rose from his chair and planted a kiss on his wife’s shoulder.”

Does he think that she cannot feel what he is saying? Why can’t she look at him with affection? He keeps asking the question but can never seem to answer it. The answer of course is that Soames has banished passion from his conscious life. And without it, he does not really exist. And without existing, he really can not hope to be noticed, much less loved or adored.

“Forsytes, as is generally admitted, have shells, like that extremely useful little animal which is made into Turkish delight, in other words, they are never seen, or if seen would not be recognized, without habitats, composed of circumstance, property, acquaintances, and wives, which seem to move along with them in their passage through a world composed of thousands of other Forsytes with their habitats. Without a habitat a Forsyte is inconceivable--he would be like a novel without a plot, which is well-known to be an anomaly.”

The long and the short of it was that Irene married Soames for all sort of excellent Victorian reasons. He was wealthy. She was destitute. Her beauty for his protection. The marriage was more a business deal than an affectation from the very beginning. I often wonder, when the Bible says “What God has joined together, let no man separate” is it also implying that what God has not joined together should not be joined in marriage? When God places an attachment between people, does it happen at the ceremony or long before?  In the case of Irene and Soames, Irene knows it is a mistake. But Victorian society gave her no skills, no means of independent sustenance. All she can do is enter the arrangement with a promise from him that he will let her out if she cannot make it work.  “Will you let me go?” she later pleads with Soames, “You promised you would let me go if our marriage was not a success. Is it a success?”

“Behave yourself and it would be.” He replies.

To which she can only say “Of course I won’t.”

One of my favorite passages in the novel expresses Galsworthy’s conviction that love has a will of its own. It cannot be bought or purchased in the market. It is not for sale and it is not the servant of anyone’s whim, whether they have money or not.

“The situation which at this stage might seem, and especially to Forsyte eyes, strange--not to say 'impossible'--was, in view of certain facts, not so strange after all. Some things had been lost sight of. And first, in the security bred of many harmless marriages, it had been forgotten that Love is no hot-house flower, but a wild plant, born of a wet night, born of an hour of sunshine; sprung from wild seed, blown along the road by a wild wind. A wild plant that, when it blooms by chance within the hedge of our gardens, we call a flower; and when it blooms outside we call a weed; but, flower or weed, whose scent and color are always, wild! And further--the facts and figures of their own lives being against the perception of this truth--it was not generally recognized by Forsytes that, where, this wild plant springs, men and women are but moths around the pale, flame-like blossom.”

“There is a line in the world,” one of my mentors once told me. “Above the line are people. Below the line are things. People are to be loved. Things are to be used. One should never confuse the two.” There are few people who can live on a diet of being used as though it were a diet of being loved and Irene is not one of them.

Jolyon had paid dearly for his decision to “give all for love” but years later, the family members that cast him out for his refusal to follow out his duty in his loveless marriage slowly come to question the rightness of their decision. James Forsyte is a case in point.

“James had passed through the fire, but he had passed also through the river of years which washes out the fire; he had experienced the saddest experience of all--forgetfulness of what it was like to be in love. Forgotten! Forgotten so long, that he had forgotten even that he had forgotten.”

Again, Galsworthy lets us in on the Victorian mind of Soames Forsyte as he contemplates the possibility of divorce.

“A scandal! A possible scandal!

To repeat this word to himself thus was the only way in which he could focus or make it thinkable. He had forgotten the sensations necessary for understanding the progress, fate, or meaning of any such business; he simply could no longer grasp the possibilities of people running any risk for the sake of passion.

Amongst all those persons of his acquaintance, who went into the City day after day and did their business there, whatever it was, and in their leisure moments bought shares, and houses, and ate dinners, and played games, as he was told, it would have seemed to him ridiculous to suppose that there were any who would run risks for the sake of anything so recondite, so figurative, as passion.

Passion! He seemed, indeed, to have heard of it, and rules such as 'A young man and a young woman ought never to be trusted together' were fixed in his mind as the parallels of latitude are fixed on a map (for all Forsytes, when it comes to 'bed-rock' matters of fact, have quite a fine taste in realism); but as to anything else--well, he could only appreciate it at all through the catch-word 'scandal.'”

What is fascinating is that even as the pursuit of passion seems to destroy the lives of the people in the novel who pursue it, the author celebrates the pursuit even more. The musical score of the film is always celebratory when people live out their “real” [read, emotional] intentions. “There are moments when Nature reveals the passion hidden beneath the careless calm of her ordinary moods” writes Galsworthy,

“--violent spring flashing white on almond-blossom through the purple clouds; a snowy, moonlit peak, with its single star, soaring up to the passionate blue; or against the flames of sunset, an old yew-tree standing dark guardian of some fiery secret.”

But Soames cannot see this. There is no place for this sort of chaos in his ordered universe.

“God forbid that he should know anything about the forces of Nature! God forbid that he should admit for a moment that there are such things! Once admit that, and where was he?”

Forsytes are deceived by their economic and class advantages into believing that they are a superior species to the “commoners” that live on the lower plane of human instinct and passion. They have “risen above all that”. They shrink from the notion that they are every bit the equal of the lower classes as a bat would shrink from noonday sun.  

“The look which June had seen [in the affection between Irene and the architect, Bossiney], which other Forsytes had seen, was like the sudden flashing of a candle through a hole in some imaginary canvas, behind which it was being moved--the sudden flaming-out of a vague, erratic glow, shadowy and enticing. It brought home to onlookers the consciousness that dangerous forces were at work. For a moment they noticed it with pleasure, with interest, then felt they must not notice it at all.”

To Jolyon, the order loving Forsytes are crucial to the functioning of society. Their virtues are precisely what leads to the money that funds the people who want to live their lives in more passionate pursuits. “At a low estimate, three-fourths of our Royal Academicians are Forsytes,” Jolyon tells Bosinney,

“seven- eighths of our novelists, a large proportion of the press. Of science I can't speak; they are magnificently represented in religion; in the House of Commons perhaps more numerous than anywhere; the aristocracy speaks for itself. But I'm not laughing. It is dangerous to go against the majority and what a majority!" He fixed his eyes on Bosinney: "It's dangerous to let anything carry you away--a house, a picture, a--woman!"

Dangerous. But perhaps not prohibitively so. As Jolyon knows, it is also dangerous NOT to go against the majority and the Forsyte ethic or self-protection and emotional restraint.

"My people," replied young Jolyon, "are not very extreme, and they have their own private peculiarities, like every other family, but they possess in a remarkable degree those two qualities which are the real tests of a Forsyte--the power of never being able to give yourself up to anything soul and body, and the 'sense of property'."

Once again, Galsworthy returns to the subject of marriage as ownership. Jolyon gets into a Tevya-like Fidder-on-the-Roof style “on-the-other-hand” argument with himself about what to advise Bosinney.

“Then, too, he distrusted his judgment. He had been through the experience himself, had tasted too the dregs the bitterness of an unhappy marriage, and how could he take the wide and dispassionate view of those who had never been within sound of the battle? His evidence was too first-hand--like the evidence on military matters of a soldier who has been through much active service, against that of civilians who have not suffered the disadvantage of seeing things too close. Most people would consider such a marriage as that of Soames and Irene quite fairly successful; he had money, she had beauty; it was a case for compromise. There was no reason why they should not jog along, even if they hated each other. It would not matter if they went their own ways a little so long as the decencies were observed--the sanctity of the marriage tie, of the common home, respected. Half the marriages of the upper classes were conducted on these lines: Do not offend the susceptibilities of Society; do not offend the susceptibilities of the Church. To avoid offending these is worth the sacrifice of any private feelings. The advantages of the stable home are visible, tangible, so many pieces of property; there is no risk in the statu quo. To break up a home is at the best a dangerous experiment, and selfish into the bargain.

This was the case for the defense, and young Jolyon sighed.

'The core of it all,' he thought, 'is property, but there are many people who would not like it put that way. To them it is "the sanctity of the marriage tie"; but the sanctity of the marriage tie is dependent on the sanctity of the family, and the sanctity of the family is dependent on the sanctity of property. And yet I imagine all these people are followers of One who never owned anything. It is curious!

And again young Jolyon sighed.”

Property. Ownership. Can real relationships really thrive in the formaldehyde of this kind of social bondage? The relationship between Soames and Irene is Galsworthy’s answer.

“Soames was silent for some minutes; at last he said: "I don't know what your idea of a wife's duty is. I never have known!"

He had not expected her to reply, but she did.

"I have tried to do what you want; it's not my fault that I haven't been able to put my heart into it."

"Whose fault is it, then?" He watched her askance.

"Before we were married you promised to let me go if our marriage was not a success. Is it a success?"

Soames frowned.

"Success," he stammered--"it would be a success if you behaved yourself properly!"

"I have tried," said Irene. "Will you let me go?"

Soames turned away. Secretly alarmed, he took refuge in bluster.

"Let you go? You don't know what you're talking about. Let you go? How can I let you go? We're married, aren't we? Then, what are you talking about? For God's sake, don't let's have any of this sort of nonsense! Get your hat on, and come and sit in the Park."

"Then, you won't let me go?"

He felt her eyes resting on him with a strange, touching look.

"Let you go!" he said; "and what on earth would you do with yourself if I did? You've got no money!"

"I could manage somehow."

He took a swift turn up and down the room; then came and stood before her.

"Understand," he said, "once and for all, I won't have you say this sort of thing. Go and get your hat on!"

She did not move.

"I suppose," said Soames, "you don't want to miss Bosinney if he comes!"

Irene got up slowly and left the room. She came down with her hat on.

They went out.

Property. Contracts. Reason. Order. Duty. Listen to this description of Mrs. Baynes, Bosinney’s aunt:

“She believed, as she often said, in putting things on a commercial basis; the proper function of the Church, of charity, indeed, of everything, was to strengthen the fabric of 'Society.' Individual action, therefore, she considered immoral. Organization was the only thing, for by organization alone could you feel sure that you were getting a return for your money. Organization--and again, organization!

“The enterprises to which she lent her name were organized so admirably that by the time the takings were handed over, they were indeed skim milk divested of all cream of human kindness. But as she often justly remarked, sentiment was to be deprecated. She was, in fact, a little academic.

This great and good woman, so highly thought of in ecclesiastical circles, was one of the principal priestesses in the temple of Forsyteism, keeping alive day and night a sacred flame to the God of Property, whose altar is inscribed with those inspiring words: 'Nothing for nothing, and really remarkably little for sixpence.' . . . People who knew her felt her to be sound--a sound woman, who never gave herself away, nor anything else, if she could possibly help it.”

Property. Contracts. Expectations. Duty. Forsytes and their friends expect to pay something and get something. They do not enter into relationships on some tidal wave of passion that they cannot predict.

“Nothing in this world is more sure to upset a Forsyte than the discovery that something on which he has stipulated to spend a certain sum has cost more. And this is reasonable, for upon the accuracy of his estimates the whole policy of his life is ordered. If he cannot rely on definite values of property, his compass is amiss; he is adrift upon bitter waters without a helm.”

And for this reason, they cannot understand those whose hearts must have all of life and all of their lover’s love or nothing. James, a friend of the Forsytes, takes Irene out for a drive to see if he can talk some Victorian sense into her. The following conversation ensues.

“It was not before he had got her more than half way that [James] began: "Soames is very fond of you--he won't have anything said against you; why don't you show him more affection?"

Irene flushed, and said in a low voice: "I can't show what I haven't got."

James looked at her sharply; he felt that now he had her in his own carriage, with his own horses and servants, he was really in command of the situation. She could not put him off; nor would she make a scene in public.

"I can't think what you're about," he said. "He's a very good husband!"

Irene's answer was so low as to be almost inaudible among the sounds of traffic. He caught the words: "You are not married to him!"

"What's that got to do with it? He's given you everything you want. He's always ready to take you anywhere, and now he's built you this house in the country. It's not as if you had anything of your own."

"No."

Again James looked at her; he could not make out the expression on her face. She looked almost as if she were going to cry, and yet....

"I'm sure," he muttered hastily, "we've all tried to be kind to you."

Irene's lips quivered; to his dismay James saw a tear steal down her cheek. He felt a choke rise in his own throat.

"We're all fond of you," he said, "if you'd only"--he was going to say, "behave yourself," but changed it to--"if you'd only be more of a wife to him."

Irene did not answer, and James, too, ceased speaking. There was something in her silence which disconcerted him; it was not the silence of obstinacy, rather that of acquiescence in all that he could find to say. And yet he felt as if he had not had the last word. He could not understand this.”

It is only a matter of time before Soames begins to reveal the actual nature of his relationship with his wife -What Irene has known almost from the beginning. What the Forsyte family has been able to avoid seeing, in time, comes to the surface.

“Soames gripped her arm. "A good beating," he said, "is the only thing that would bring you to your senses," but turning on his heel, he left the room.”

When he thinks of the possibility of divorcing or being divorced, he again cannot seem to think of it in any other terms but that of a “loss of property.” To him, she is a painting that he should hate to have stolen from him. He likes to look at it. To have it.  

“A divorce! Thus close, the word was paralyzing, so utterly at variance with all the principles that had hitherto guided his life. Its lack of compromise appalled him; he felt--like the captain of a ship, going to the side of his vessel, and, with his own hands throwing over the most precious of his bales. This jettisoning of his property with his own hand seemed uncanny to Soames. It would injure him in his profession: He would have to get rid of the house at Robin Hill, on which he had spent so much money, so much anticipation--and at a sacrifice. And she! She would no longer belong to him, not even in name! She would pass out of his life, and he--he should never see her again!”

Soames Forsyte’s next step is critical. He opts to exert his “ownership rights.” She elects to respond by leaving. And in an act of unmistakable symbolic expression, she asserts her refusal to be owned by taking none of his resources with her.

“He stooped over the drawer where she kept her jewels; it was not locked, and came open as he pulled; the jewel box had the key in it. This surprised him until he remembered that it was sure to be empty. He opened it.

It was far from empty. Divided, in little green velvet compartments, were all the things he had given her, even her watch, and stuck into the recess that contained--the watch was a three-cornered note addressed 'Soames Forsyte,' in Irene's handwriting:

'I think I have taken nothing that you or your people have given me.' And that was all.

He looked at the clasps and bracelets of diamonds and pearls, at the little flat gold watch with a great diamond set in sapphires, at the chains and rings, each in its nest, and the tears rushed up in his eyes and dropped upon them.

Nothing that she could have done, nothing that she had done, brought home to him like this the inner significance of her act. For the moment, perhaps, he understood nearly all there was to understand--understood that she loathed him, that she had loathed him for years, that for all intents and purposes they were like people living in different worlds, that there was no hope for him, never had been; even, that she had suffered--that she was to be pitied.

In that moment of emotion he betrayed the Forsyte in him--forgot himself, his interests, his property--was capable of almost anything; was lifted into the pure ether of the selfless and unpractical.

Such moments pass quickly.”

A Man of Property ends with Soames trying to understand the relationship between his view of Irene and his pain.

“And Soames thought: 'Why is all this? Why should I suffer so? What have I done? It is not my fault!'

Soames thought: 'Suffering! when will it cease, my suffering?'

If only he could surrender to the thought: 'Let her go--she has suffered enough!'

If only he could surrender to the desire: 'Make a slave of her-- she is in your power!'

If only even he could surrender to the sudden vision: 'What does it all matter?' Forget himself for a minute, forget that it mattered what he did, forget that whatever he did he must sacrifice something.

If only he could act on an impulse!

He could forget nothing; surrender to no thought, vision, or desire; it was all too serious; too close around him, an unbreakable cage.”

And that, I suspect, is how John Galsworthy viewed Victorian society.

“She only said, My life is dreary

He cometh not she said

She said I am aweary a weary,

I wish that I were dead.” Marianna, Tennyson

I was talking with my Vermont History class today about 17^th Century Vermont History and one of my students was discussing the movie Last of the Mohicans in which there is a brief mention of Castleton, Vermont (a town near where I live). He asserted that while the movie might be useful to a high school history class for getting a feel of the historical setting of the French Indian War in Vermont, it was largely focused on a romance and not on history. It cause me to wonder if perhaps we have altogether eviscerated our high school history classes of romance and to wonder, if we were to interview the people involved in these events we study as history, if we would discover that much if not most of what they did had some root in their affectional lives. I went looking for examples of love letters from the 1600's and 1700's for some confirmation of my thesis and came across a collection of letters written by the Portugese nun, Marianna Alcoforado in the late 1660's.

Marianna Alcoforado was a Fransiscan nun who fell in love with a French officer during his posting in Portugal from 1663 to 1667. She was about 25 years old and this was her first and perhaps only love in life. From her letters, it seems clear that her “Romeo” had suffered from some serious case of cold feet and had beat it back to France as soon as an opportunity presented itself.

Her five letters to him, expressing the anguish of her broken heart, were later published and remain one of those classic texts of expressed attachment that give us reason to believe that love (or is it addiction?) felt pretty much the same in the 17^th century as it does in the 21rst. You can read the letters of Marianna Alcofrado HERE if you wish. I have selected a few quotes form them below to give you the general mood.

“I reject all the testimonies of your love that you can control.”

Could you ever content yourself with a love colder than mine? You will perhaps find more beauty elsewhere (yet you told me once that I was very beautiful) but you will never find so much love."

“I conjur you to tell me why you set yourself to bewitch me as you did when you well knew that you would have to forsake me?”

“How hard it is to make up one's mind to doubt for any time the sincerity of those one loves.”

“You kindled my passions with your transports. Your tenderness fascinated me. Your vows persuaded me, but it was the violence of my own love that led me away.”

“It is true that in loving you I enjoyed a pleasure unthought of before but this very pleasure is causing me a sorrow I knew nothing of. All the emotions you cause me run to the extremes.”

“You well knew that you would not stay in Portugal forever. Then why did you single me out to make me so unhappy?”

“Everyone is touched by my love and you alone remain indifferent.”

“You write me letters at once cold and full of repetitions. The paper is not half filled and you make it clear that you are dying to finish them.”

“I would wish all the women in France to find you agreeable but none to love you. None to please you.”

“Sometimes I think I could even submit to wait upon she whom you love. … I do not dare to be jealous of you for fear of displeasing you."

“The very length of my letter will frighten you and you will not read it.”

“This thought is killing me and I almost die of horror when I think that you were never really affected by all the bliss that we shared.”

“Deliberately and in cold blood you formed a design to kindle my love. You only regarded my passion as your triumph and your heart was never deeply touched.”

“I am torn asunder by a thousand contrary emotions.”

“Doubtless a tragic end would force you to think of me often.”

“How I wish that I had never seen you. Ah! I feel how false this phrase is. . . . promise me a few tender regrets if I die of grief.”

“I ought in those moments of supreme happiness to have called reason to my aid to moderate the deadly excess of my delight and to foretell to me all that I am now suffering.”

“I defy you to forget me entirely.”

“I have not been well for a single moment since you left and my only pleasure has been that of repeating your name a thousand times each day.”

“Your indifference is unsupportable to me.”

“I have found that all the feelings of such a heart are bound up with the idol it created for itself – that its first impressions – its first wounds – can niether be healed or effaced. That all the passions which offer their help and attempt to fill and content it, promise it but vainly an emotion which it never feels again. … Why have you made me feel the imperfection and bitterness of an attachment which cannot endure forever and all the evils that result from a violent love, when it is not mutual?”

“I shall be miserable all my life.”

“I have at last returned to myself from this enchantment.”

Marianna Alcoforado died in 1723 at the age of 87. “For thirty years, she did rigid pennance with much conformity” her obituary says.

The heartbreaker had the letters published in 1669 (though without names), no doubt to serve his vanity and it was only in the early 1800's that his identity and the identity of Marianna were discovered. Posterity has condemned this guy for forsaking this woman's love and “there seems to be no reason why we should reverse the verdict.”

Question for Comment: Do you think a person who causes someone else to form an attachment to them has some sort of moral obligation to them to maintain it? Why or why not?

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure is a novel you should not presume you are going to like but within a few chapters, I felt myself deeply engaged in a conversation with myself while reading it. Its characters feel at times like they are speaking out of the text of a journal I would have kept but perhaps would have been ashamed to show someone. No character represents me perfectly. No character in a novel ever does, but the novel is full of people trying to sort themselves out. What is different about this novel when compared to say, a Jane Austen novel, is how the characters in it do not remain static victims of the decisions made by their previous selves. They often refuse to sacrifice their present lives to the decisions of their past ones. It is for this reason that the novel was widely condemned at the time it was written. It smacks of a lack of commitment to commitment.

Hardy seems to have understood, whether it is true or not, that he would suffer for his “progressivism (or regressivism as you like). “As for Sue and me,” says Jude, “when we were at our own best, long ago -- when our minds were clear, and our love of truth fearless -- the time was not ripe for us! Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us.” And later, “Perhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such experiments as ours! Who were we, to think we could act as pioneers!”

In the novel, Jude is cruelly deceived and manipulated by the “wench” Arabella (Sorry. No better word to use in this situation). He is a self-confessed idealist and romantic who suffers continually from a compassionate instinct and naivete with respect to the ulterior motives of devious people. In short, he trusts people. He will always see the best in them if they do not insist by their behavior that he do otherwise. I can relate to him. Of his first wife, Arabella, Jude says “His idea of her was the thing of most consequence, not Arabella herself” and of Sue Bridehead, the narrarator later says, “The consciousness of her living presence stimulated him. But she remained more or less an ideal character, about whose form he began to weave curious and fantastic day-dreams.” Later, the same theme is reiterated again.

“To be sure she was almost an ideality to him still. Perhaps to know her would be to cure himself of this unexpected and unauthorized passion. A voice whispered that, though he desired to know her, he did not desire to be cured.”

And again, when his aunt comments that even as a child, he had the “same trick of seeming to see things in the air." His impressions of Susan Bridehead are impervious it seems to her behavior sometimes. “Then he stood with his back to the fire regarding her, and saw in her almost a divinity.” I suppose we can all relate. Do we not all feel the same when we fall in love?

It is this trait in Jude however that allows his relationship with Sue to thrive and the same that makes it inevitable that his relationship with Arabella cannot. Arabella has no concern about the importance of trust in a relationship. To her, the marriage certificate and church wedding is all the glue that she needs. She cares not if she maintains trust if she has the piece of paper and social pressure on her side. To her, Jude is as much a hostage as a prisoner. Sue helps Jude maintain his illusions by being in a large measure what he envisions her being. Arabella never much cares once she has got what she wants.

In his preface to the novel, Hardy makes his assertion overt. He believes that a marriage should be “dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to one of the two parties” and his characters are not so much “rushing towards” that conclusion, as dragged towards it. They resist the conventional wisdom of their societies, I suspect because in most cases there is a certain wisdom in it. Hardy is making it impossible for the reader not to empathize with those who are trapped by devious people using the system to their advantage against unsuspecting “victims”. “Their lives were ruined, he thought;” the narrator and Jude surmise,

“ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable.”

Indeed, even the epitaphs at the beginnings of the chapters contribute to the argument.

"Whoso prefers either Matrimony or other Ordinance before the Good of Man and the plain Exigence of Charity, let him profess Papist, or Protestant, or what he will, he is no better than a Pharisee."
-- J. Milton.

The thing that makes the novel such an interesting setting for the argument is that all of Hardy's main characters try desperately to avoid coming to the conclusions that they are eventually brought to. They all try to repress the obvious and they each, Jude, Sue, Philoston (who is almost always referred to by his last name) and even Arabella by the last sentence, set up their various bulwarks to defend their socially approved principles in the face of unrelenting emotional realities but each of them find themselves in situations where “they and their doctrines begin to part company.” “I ought not to have let you come to see me!” says Sue to Jude after she has married the man she does not love. “We had better not meet again; and we'll only correspond at long intervals, on purely business matters!"

"I want to tell you something -- two things," [Jude] said hurriedly as the train came up. "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!"

"Jude," she said. "I know one of them. And you mustn't!"

"What?"

"You mustn't love me. You are to like me -- that's all!"

Jude tries his level best to surrender the feelings he feels but to no avail. “He passed the evening and following days in mortifying by every possible means his wish to see her,” we are told,

“nearly starving himself in attempts to extinguish by fasting his passionate tendency to love her. He read sermons on discipline, and hunted up passages in Church history that treated of the Ascetics of the second century.”

No matter what he does, he cannot picture her as Mrs. Richard Philotson.

“That Sue was not as she had been, but was labelled "Phillotson," paralyzed Jude whenever he wanted to commune with her as an individual. Yet she seemed unaltered -- he could not say why.”

But we know why. He cannot see her as Richard Philotson because she can't. And never could. And in matters of the heart, people like Jude and Sue are far more easily deceived than they can ever be desceptive. “I see through your feathers little bird,” says Jude.

And she responds with honesty. “I have been thinking," she continued, still in the tone of one brimful of feeling,

"that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies....”

Again and again, Hardy stresses that people often do not wind up with their counterparts as often as with their saviors or saviorettes. We all have common reproductive instincts but these are combined with other forces within our personalities, be it the desire to be provided for or the desire to save someone from loneliness or the desire to find employment or the desire to rescue someone in need. Students who are profoundly interested in learning can “fall in love” (or so they think) with teachers. Teachers who have a strong desire to teach can think themselves “falling in love” with their students when what is really happening is just the natural happiness we feel when we are the answer to someone's need for the moment. Jude becomes a victim of Arabella's designs because he cannot see that there is a difference between the desire to rescue someone and the reality of honest love. In Sue, he finds “his other half” and in Jude, Sue finds the same. Of Sue, Jude can say with Sappho “"For there was no other girl, O bridegroom, like her!" Both Sue and Arabella are pretty, a likely enough to make a man think about intimacy, but Sue is an equal and a compliment to him and Arabella is more a “wounded animal” in need of compassion. Here is how Hardy describes Jude's feelings for Sue:

“But Sue was so dear! ... If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience. She was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him from her.”

“The Gospel of Nicodemus is very nice," she went on to keep him from his jealous thoughts, which she read clearly, as she always did. Indeed when they talked on an indifferent subject, as now, there was ever a second silent conversation passing between their emotions, so perfect was the reciprocity between them.”

The institution of marriage is founded on a few interesting propositions. For one, it assumes that when we chose freely, we chose well. But this is not always the case because we rarely are choosing freely when we think we are. And this reality is highlighted by what happens to Jude, Arabella, Susan Bridehead, and Richard Philotson. Because Arabella is not honest with Jude, he does not chose well though he chooses freely. Because Susan is not honest with Richard, he does not chose well though he chooses freely. And when Jude and Sue choose not to challenge the social and religious system they err though they make the choice freely.

Jude threw a troubled look at her. He said, looking away: "It would be just one of those cases in which my experiences go contrary to my dogmas. Speaking as an order-loving man -- which I hope I am, though I fear I am not -- I should say, yes. Speaking from experience and unbiased nature, I should say, no.... Sue, I believe you are not happy!"

"Of course I am!" she contradicted. "How can a woman be unhappy who has only been married eight weeks to a man she chose freely?"

"'Chose freely!'" he replies?

The reader needs only look back on their own relational decisions in life. When they made them, were they free? Hardy challenges the universal application of a social convention (marriage) that is created to work for the middle of the bell curve and only in cases where people are honest and he is saying that it is not fair to the people who are not designed for it or who are not ready for it or who have been lied to to hold them to it. Naturally, this will put him on a collision course with the religious doctrine that says that God joins a man and a woman by means of an officiated ceremony and that once this ceremony takes place (“The transubstantiation of the couple” I call it), the two are made one and cannot be separated.

There is a reason why Hardy was regarded as dangerous to the social order of his day. He still is. Richard Philoston reacts quite naturally to Susan's assertion that she is not and was not ever really “his” and that her love for him was never of the “wife sort”. “It hurts me!” he says, And you vowed to love me" to which she responds,

"Yes -- that's it! I am in the wrong. I always am! It is as culpable to bind yourself to love always as to believe a creed always, and as silly as to vow always to like a particular food or drink!"

She hadn't “the courage of her views” she claims later, the strength to exert herself in the face of his will that she be otherwise. “Sometimes a woman's LOVE OF BEING LOVED gets the better of her conscience,” she argues to Jude in trying to explain,

“and though she is agonized at the thought of treating a man cruelly, she encourages him to love her while she doesn't love him at all. Then, when she sees him suffering, her remorse sets in, and she does what she can to repair the wrong."

"You simply mean that you flirted outrageously with him, poor old chap, and then repented, and to make reparation, married him, though you tortured yourself to death by doing it."

"Well -- if you will put it brutally! -- it was a little like that.”

And Philotson, painful as it is to him, recognizes his part in the tragedy. He has married someone twenty years younger than him who saw in him a “solution” mistaken as a “mate.” And so despite his principles, he lets her go. And he writes to Jude to say that he recognizes the obvious compatibility that exists between she and him (Jude) that does not between him (Philostson) and her. “You are made for each other,” he says,

“it is obvious, palpable, to any unbiased older person. You were all along 'the shadowy third' in my short life with her. I repeat, take care of Sue."

“I was not her gaoler,” he explains to his friend,

“I can't explain any further. I don't wish to be questioned. … For though as a fellow-creature she sympathizes with, and pities me, and even weeps for me, as a husband she cannot endure me -- she loathes me -- there's no use in mincing words -- she loathes me, and my only manly, and dignified, and merciful course is to complete what I have begun....”

Philostson recognizes that in some way, Susan Bridehead was vulnerable to mistaking compassion for love. She was the sort of person who so lived in feelings that it was easy for her to think the feelings of those around her were her own. One sees this most clearly in the passage where she meets Jude's son.

“Then a yearning look came over the child and he began to cry. Sue thereupon could not refrain from instantly doing likewise, being a harp which the least wind of emotion from another's heart could make to vibrate as readily as a radical stir in her own.”

Is this predisposition to believe that we are the originator of feelings that we only absorb common? "I fancy more are like us than we think!" says Jude of his and Sue's “sensitivity problem.” Retracing their steps to the point of their mistakes, they make an attempt to live life as they “should have” earlier but by this time, their pasts, and the appropriation of society, and the consequences of previous romantic entanglements is now working against them. Society will make them pay despite their belief that their great wrong was to “have done that which was right in their own eyes."

To Hardy's credit, the lives of these two lovers is full of tragedy and a tragedy to some measure of their own making. He does not pretend that one can erase a mistake in such a way as to return everything to the place where it was made. I suspect that lacking the ability to undo consequences, simply returning to a decision and making it differently only later is not as simple as one might wish it could be. Maybe it is even more harmful than simply making the best of a bad decision. Children cannot be put back into a womb and un-conceived. Former partners cannot simply go back to life with hearts in tact. Jude and Sue Bridehead pay dearly for trying to escape from the decisions that society insists must be born for eternity. Eventually, she can no longer pay the price, and returns to Philotson in a state of zobmie like anesthesia. "It is my wish!” she says to Philotson when she returns to him, and then “... O God!” as if she were dieing (for indeed, a part of her is).

“Sue, Sue!” Jude pleads, “We are acting by the letter; and 'the letter killeth'!"

This may well be the subtitle of the entire book. "I don't think you ought to force your nature.” Jude insists, “No woman ought to be expected to" to which she responds,

"It is my duty. I will drink my cup to the dregs!"

And Philotson is willing to accept this. It is, to him, better than loneliness I guess. Alas, what a choice to make. And thus is the veil of their temple (Jude's and Susan's) rent in two.

“We'll be dear friends just the same, Jude, won't we? And we'll see each other sometimes -- yes! -- and forget all this, and try to be as we were long ago?"

Jude did not permit himself to speak, but turned and descended the stairs.”

Question for Comment: Do you think you would have made better romantic decisions in life if you had read and discussed more romance novels when you were younger? Or less? Why?

Today, I finished what I confess turned out to be a rather difficult labor of love for me, The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse. I usually enjoy literature particularly when it helps me to better understand a historical era or when my knowledge of the historical era gives me greater insights into the literature. But this was not easy stuff. I confess, my heartstrings do not generally find themselves resonating to Victorian era poetry it seems.

But nevertheless, a few poems presented themselves as something worth remembering for future History class use. Here is Letitia Landon's The Marriage Vow, a rather gloomy look at the tragedy of Victorian era marriages where women with creative minds and wanderlusts might regard their conjugal commitments as a sort of death itself. The poem speak of a marriage that a young woman is not ready for and not really interested in. Something entered into in spite of her will rather than because of it.

The Marriage Vow

The altar, "tis of death! for their are laid
The sacrifice of all youths sweetest hopes.
It is a dreadful thing for women’s lip
To swear the heart away; yet know that heart
Annuls the vow while speaking, and shrinks back
From the dark future that it dare not face.
The service read above the open grave
Is far less terrible than that which seals
The vow that binds the victim, not the will:
For in the grave is rest.

Three months after her own marriage apparently, Letitia Landon died of poisoning (whether accidentally or as a result of suicide, no one knows.)

This anthology also gave me the opportunity to read Elizabeth Barret Browning's Sonnets From the Portuguese and there were portions of that that I could find myself enjoying. Sonnet 21 in particular where we are reminded that we long for expressions of love, not merely memories of such. We can never hear that we are loved enough.

Say over again, and yet once over again,
That thou dost love Though the word repeated
Should seem a “cuckoo-song,” as thou dost treat it.
Remember, never to the hill or plain,
Valley and wood, without her cuckoo-strain
Comes the fresh Spring in all her green completed.
Belovèd, I, amid the darkness greeted
By a doubtful spirit-voice, in that doubt’s pain
Cry, “Speak once more—thou lovest!” Who can fear
Too many stars, though each in heaven shall roll,
Too many flowers, though each shall crown the year?
Say thou dost love me, love me, love me—toll
The silver iterance!—only minding, Dear,
To love me also in silence with thy soul.

Later Browning asks the questions we all ask about those who have loved us in the past - “Were you real or did I just imagine that?”

 

Belovèd, dost thou love? or did I see all

The glory as I dreamed, and fainted when

Too vehement light dilated my ideal,

For my soul's eyes? Will that light come again,

As now these tears come--falling hot and real?

 

I also caught a glimpse of this same longing, loss, and sorrow from Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H.

 

But who shall so forecast the years
And find in loss a gain to match?
Or reach a hand thro' time to catch
The far-off interest of tears?

 

The poem laments the loss of Tennyson's best friend and his sister's fiancé' the 22 year old Arthur Henry Hallum. The above lines are easy for me to relate to. Often the only comfort in a time of loss is a pre-emptive attempt to gain some joy from the gain we try to imagine gaining from the loss. To see some way in which the sorrow will benefit some day and to derive some happiness from that benefit before it arrives. But in the poem, Tennyson simply cannot see how he can possibly recover anything of good from the loss ever.

 

O what to her shall be the end?
And what to me remains of good?
To her, perpetual maidenhood,
And unto me no second friend.

There was a line from Robert Browning's poem Two in the Campagna that I liked (Robert Browning will never be one of my favorite poets)

How say you? Let us, O my dove,
Let us be unashamed of soul,
As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control
To love or not to love?

To me, this is an interesting question I guess. Can people help it if they love someone or don't? If they can't, should they pretend they don't, as though they chose to?

I also ran across a poem by Thomas Hardy that explains his loss of faith in the age of Biblical criticism in which he lived. You can see this transformation from faith in revelation to faith in reason in many of Thomas Hardy's novels. His poem The Respectable Burgher: On the Higher Criticism simply illustrates it.

 

Since Reverend Doctors now declare

That clerks and people must prepare

To doubt if Adam ever were;

To hold the flood a local scare;

To argue, though the stolid stare,

That everything had happened ere

The prophets to its happening sware;

That David was no giant-slayer,

Nor one to call a God-obeyer

In certain details we could spare,

But rather was a debonair

Shrewd bandit, skilled as banjo-player:

That Solomon sang the fleshly Fair,

And gave the Church no thought whate'er;

That Esther with her royal wear,

And Mordecai, the son of Jair,

And Joshua's triumphs, Job's despair,

And Balaam's ass's bitter blare;

Nebuchadnezzar's furnace-flare,

And Daniel and the den affair,

And other stories rich and rare,

Were writ to make old doctrine wear

Something of a romantic air:

That the Nain widow's only heir,

And Lazarus with cadaverous glare

(As done in oils by Piombo's care)

Did not return from Sheol's lair:

That Jael set a fiendish snare,

That Pontius Pilate acted square,

That never a sword cut Malchus' ear

And (but for shame I must forbear)

That -- -- did not reappear! . . .

- Since thus they hint, nor turn a hair,

All churchgoing will I forswear,

And sit on Sundays in my chair,

And read that moderate man Voltaire.

Philip Marston's poem After speaks to me …

A little time for laughter,
A little time to sing,
A little time to kiss and cling,
And no more kissing after.
A little while for scheming
Love's unperfected schemes;
A little time for golden dreams,
Then no more any dreaming.
A little while 'twas given
To me to have thy love;
Now, like a ghost, alone I move
About a ruined heaven.
A little time for speaking
Things sweet to say and hear;
A time to seek, and find thee near,
Then no more any seeking.
A little time for saying
Words the heart breaks to say;
A short, sharp time wherein to pray,
Then no more need for praying;
But long, long years to weep in,
And comprehend the whole
Great grief that desolates the soul,
And eternity to sleep in.

There seems to have been a lot of this heartache in Victorian era poetry it seems. You also see it in A.E. Houseman's poem When I Was One and Twenty

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
'Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.'
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
'The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
'Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.'
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

And in W.B Yeats, I think he speaks of a “beautiful friend” who he hoped would someday be more. But, she apparently used some sort of feminine intuition and saw that some other woman (the woman Yeats writes the poem to) was still burning away in his heart and she left.

Aedh Laments the Loss of Love.

Pale brows, still hands and dim hair,

I had a beautiful friend

And dreamed that the old despair

Would end in love in the end:

She looked in my heart one day

And saw your image was there;

She has gone weeping away.

I find it interesting that the Victorian era was an age of expansion in England, an age of ever growing prosperity and greater rights and increased security. In other words, it was a time when it was a winning lottery ticket to be born English. And there is a good deal of celebrating of England and English life in Victorian verse. But one is reminded that all the growing prosperity did not solve the fundamental needs of human beings who, from the looks of it, could not coin lasting satisfactory relationships from the increase in GDP and Income per-capita that the era provided.

Question for Comment: As you look back on your life, which times have been more difficult for you? Times of relational shortages or financial?

The Sorrows of Young Werther (1784)

It is hard to believe that hundreds of young men have read this book and killed themselves. It is almost as hard to believe that hundreds more haven't. The comparisons between von Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther and Rousseau's Julie: The New Helloise are too numerous to mention. Goethe's book was written some thirteen years after Rousseau's but … the events described in Werther take place only a decade after Rousseau published Julie. In both books a young man is smitten with a vision of perfect womanhood and, it would appear, idealizes the object of their affections to the point where neither feel like living once their beloved winds up marrying someone else. In both novels, the plot is carried by the artifice of letters and in both cases, the protagonist is the victim of profound emotions and appreciations for landscape, weather, art, literature, and the wild untamed romance of passion.

Both pieces give us a “hero” who is too wild to tame himself – too devoted (or addicted) to transfer their affections to any “safer” “sounder” or more attainable end. St. Proux cannot imagine his life being anything but miserable while Wolmar has Julie and likewise, Werther cannot conceive of a life where Albert has Charlotte and he has no one. Both wander the wild places writing in emotional agony contemplating suicide.

"Oh how often have I cursed those foolish pages of mine,” Goethe would later say, “which made my youthful sufferings public property!" It appears that he had written the story to “purge” himself of his feelings toward a young 19 year old woman named Charlotte Buff and her finace Johann Christian Kestner. By having his protagonist kill himself with his rival's pistols, delivered to him by his beloved (Charlotte), he basically gets to say to them “Now see what you have gone and made me vicariously do!?!” while continuing to live. Grin. Alas, he had no idea that the story would sweep Europe with multiple copies and serve as the Cather in the Rye of his generation. One almost feels sorry for her and even more so for poor Johann Christian. How would you like to be the Simon Legree of an international best seller. Goethe may have lost the girl but he sure as $%# got his revenge on Johann.

The first entry in The Sorrows of Young Werther sets the tone for the whole. Werther is a young man of deep (or superficial but numerous) sensibilities. He is ALWAYS feeling something and feeling it deeply.

MAY 10.

A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul, like these sweet mornings of spring which I enjoy with my whole heart. I am alone, and feel the charm of existence in this spot, which was created for the bliss of souls like mine.

“then I often think with longing, Oh, would I could describe these conceptions, could impress upon paper all that is living so full and warm within me, that it might be the mirror of my soul, as my soul is the mirror of the infinite God! O my friend -- but it is too much for my strength -- I sink under the weight of the splendour of these visions!”

MAY 13

“Often do I strive to allay the burning fever of my blood; and you have never witnessed anything so unsteady, so uncertain, as my heart. But need I confess this to you, my dear friend, who have so often endured the anguish of witnessing my sudden transitions from sorrow to immoderate joy, and from sweet melancholy to violent passions? I treat my poor heart like a sick child, and gratify its every fancy. Do not mention this again: there are people who would censure me for it.”

To us, living in the 20^th century where every rock star, poet, and teen hearthrob lays out their guts without the slightest inhibition, none of this seems altogether revolutionary but what you see here is the foundations of that society being laid. Goethe is saying to the teens of his generation, “It is cool to be chaotic.”

Werther is the original rebel. “Say what you will of rules,” he says of his artwork, “they destroy the genuine feeling of nature, as well as its true expression.” Werther is not a person for half-measures, subdued feeling, or half-throttle. When he puts his soul into something, he flings it off a cliff:

“My good friend, I will illustrate this by an analogy. These things resemble love. A warmhearted youth becomes strongly attached to a maiden: he spends every hour of the day in her company, wears out his health, and lavishes his fortune, to afford continual proof that he is wholly devoted to her. Then comes a man of the world, a man of place and respectability, and addresses him thus: "My good young friend, love is natural; but you must love within bounds. Divide your time: devote a portion to business, and give the hours of recreation to your mistress. Calculate your fortune; and out of the superfluity you may make her a present, only not too often, -- on her birthday, and such occasions." Pursuing this advice, he may become a useful member of society, and I should advise every prince to give him an appointment; but it is all up with his love, and with his genius if he be an artist. O my friend! why is it that the torrent of genius so seldom bursts forth, so seldom rolls in full-flowing stream, overwhelming your astounded soul? Because, on either side of this stream, cold and respectable persons have taken up their abodes, and, forsooth, their summer-houses and tulip-beds would suffer from the torrent; wherefore they dig trenches, and raise embankments betimes, in order to avert the impending danger.”

Anyway, Werther's story is a sad one but well told. He most certainly was not the first person to experience a soul withering disappointment in love and will not be the last. In some ways, we all can perhaps say with Werther, “Been there. Done that” though he would insist that his true companions never stop being there and doing that. Werther is not a creature of reason. “You will, therefore, permit me to concede your entire argument,” he says to his friend Wilhelm,

“and yet contrive means to escape your dilemma. Your position is this, I hear you say: "Either you have hopes of obtaining Charlotte, or you have none. Well, in the first case, pursue your course, and press on to the fulfilment of your wishes. In the second, be a man, and shake off a miserable passion, which will enervate and destroy you."

“My dear friend, this is well and easily said. But would you require a wretched being, whose life is slowly wasting under a lingering disease, to despatch himself at once by the stroke of a dagger? Does not the very disorder which consumes his strength deprive him of the courage to effect his deliverance?”

And later that same day,

“I am amazed to see how deliberately I have entangled myself step by step. To have seen my position so clearly, and yet to have acted so like a child! Even still I behold the result plainly, and yet have no thought of acting with greater prudence. . . . If I were not a fool, I could spend the happiest and most delightful life here. So many agreeable circumstances, and of a kind to ensure a worthy man's happiness, are seldom united. Alas! I feel it too sensibly, -- the heart alone makes our happiness!”

To Werther (Goethe), there is is a connection between genius, creativity, and passion … and he is not willing to surrender to reason if it implies the dissipation of genius. He will have suicide over peace.

“Oh! you people of sound understandings," he says,

"are ever ready to exclaim 'Extravagance, and madness, and intoxication!' You moral men are so calm and so subdued! You abhor the drunken man, and detest the extravagant; you pass by, like the Levite, and thank God, like the Pharisee, that you are not like one of them. I have been more than once intoxicated, my passions have always bordered on extravagance: I am not ashamed to confess it; for I have learned, by my own experience, that all extraordinary men, who have accomplished great and astonishing actions, have ever been decried by the world as drunken or insane. And in private life, too, is it not intolerable that no one can undertake the execution of a noble or generous deed, without giving rise to the exclamation that the doer is intoxicated or mad? Shame upon you, ye sages!"

Wether is all sturm and drang 24-7-365. Is there anything new under the sun?

“Werther is the quintessential early romantic. He is extravagantly self-absorbed, hopelessly restless, always out-of-breath about some less-than-rational opinion, and proud of his contradictions, proud of his suffering. He spends much of his time contemplating the way in which his self-knowledge is complicated - the way in which he still does what he knows will make himself and others unhappy. This is because it does not matter what he knows about himself: he will always give way to what he feels.”

http://www.gradesaver.com/the-sorrows-of-young-werther/study-guide/major-themes/

Question for Comment: Charlotte tells Wether to travel and find someone who can return his affections. He opts for her husband's pistols. Is it possible for a character to be just a tad too romantic? Grin.

Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is not simply a novel. It is a way of looking at life.

In Robert Frost's poem, The Woodpile, the author decides to wander out into a swamp where he gets lost. He no longer knows just where he is. He just knows he is far from home. Later in the poem, Frost wonders about how a cord of wood came to be abandoned in the swamp to experience the “slow smokeless burning of decay”. His question is more about life than it is about a woodpile. Why is it that we see glimpses of meaning and order in life when ultimately we also see it being allowed to go to hell in a handbasket? One gets this same observational complaint in Thomas Hardy's work. Often, his characters seem so worthy of happy lives and so unable to attain them. His novel explores the question, “Why?” The novel begins with a group of young women out in the field's dancing, full of hope and promise:

“And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which, though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will. They were all cheerful, and many of them merry.”

In a world governed by a benevolent providence, one would expect them all to achieve these dreams, or, if not, to achieve the happiness by means of things they cannot dream of yet. But in Hardy's world, that divine ordering Providence is replaced by a combination of Darwinian materialistic indifference and ancient Greek fate. The young Tess is innocent, hopeful, and naive. “Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life” he says, “was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience.”

Hardy frequently intrudes on his story to speculate as to whether there are any powers behind the curtains of our lives working things out on our behalf or working against us. He presents Tess Derbeyfield as the flower of innocence and decency, handicapped with poverty and an alcoholic father and lets the machinations of her pedigree, evil, and chance crush her before our eyes.

In the crucial scene where Tess is violated by Alec D'Urberville, an event that will ruin her life in the end, Hardy laments the injustice of life and the way that the coincidences often work against us and not for us.

“In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the hour for loving. Nature does not often say "See!" to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply "Here!" to a body's cry of "Where?" till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome, outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress [read: “evolution”] these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions, it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came. Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.”

“Where was Tess's guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps... he was sleeping and not to be awaked.... 'It was to be.' There lay the pity of it.”

“Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.”

Hardy poses the question of Job again: Why do rotten things happen to good people? Where is the justice in this world? "I shouldn't mind learning why—why the sun do shine on the just and the unjust alike," Tess asks at one point in the novel, "But that's what books will not tell me."

Why horrible things happen to Tess D'Urberville is a mystery that Hardy can only offer conjectures at.

“One may, indeed, admit the possibility of a retribution lurking in the present catastrophe. Doubtless some of Tess d'Urberville's mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray had dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of their time. But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter.”

At the conclusion, he simply makes reference to the fickleness of the gods.

“"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.”

Clearly, Thomas Hardy does not believe that traditional religions can be called on to answer these questions any more. From his perspective, even if they could be regarded as satisfying answers, the logic of them cannot hold up to experience and their side-effects are not worth it. He prefers to see life best lived in harmony with the rhythms of nature rather than in the confines of theology. “Women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature,” he says approvingly, “retain in their souls far more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized religion taught their race at later date.” For Hardy, life is something that sends us so many opportunities and so many challenges that one cannot afford to burden oneself in responding to them with social, religious, and moral obligations that detrimentally affect one's abilities to benefit from the opportunities and overcome the challenges.

Tess D'Uberville, though well schooled in grammar and theology, laments the absence of a practical education in the ways of nature.

"O mother, my mother!" cried the agonized girl, turning passionately upon her parent as if her poor heart would break. "How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn't you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn't you warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o' learning in that way, and you did not help me!"

In time she comes to regard the wisdom conveyed in weekly sermons as irrelevant at best and harmful at worst. Indeed, it is her religion and the rules of her society that constantly inflict pain upon her after her unfortunate victimaization and pregnancy – a pain that Hardy does not feel she would feel if she looked at herself as a being of nature rather than a creature of social convention. “Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges,” he writes,

“watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism, 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.”

It is social conditioning and not nature that imposes on her the crippling guilt that wrecks havoc on her life:

“Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done, burn she must, and there was an end of it. Like all village girls, she was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully studied the histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences to be drawn therefrom. . . . Alone in a desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to her? Not greatly. If she could have been but just created, to discover herself as a spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless child, would the position have caused her to despair? No, she would have taken it calmly, and found pleasure therein. Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.”

The process of shaking off conventional religious ideas and exchanging them for either classical or pantheistic ideas is further advanced in Angel Clare than in Tess but it is a similar process.

“Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly (to adopt the safe phrase of evasive controversialists), preferred sermons in stones to sermons in churches and chapels on fine summer days.”

Angel tells his father that he can no longer ascribe to the fundamental core beliefs in Biblical inspiration and thus cannot see himself becoming a minister. His arc involves returning to nature as a source of guidance in his life and it is no accident that it is Tess' essential connection to nature that attracts him to her just as it is Mercy Chant's commitment to organized religion that repels him from the course his parents have chosen.

"What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!" he says to himself of Tess, simply glad that Tess is enough of a church goer to give his decision some “cover” with his parents. He knows the trajectory that she is on though and it is no accident that Angel Clare and Tess D'Urberville conclude their lives together at Stonehenge rather than in a church.

Hardy draws his most striking contrast when he describes Angel's relationship to his father and two brothers:

“Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty years, has well nigh dropped out of contemporary life. A spiritual descendant in the direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his mind once for all in the deeper questions of existence, and admitted no further reasoning on them thenceforward. He was regarded even by those of his own date and school of thinking as extreme; while, on the other hand, those totally opposed to him were unwillingly won to admiration for his thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he showed in dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for applying them. He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St John, hated St James as much as he dared, and regarded with mixed feelings Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. The New Testament was less a Christiad then a Pauliad to his intelligence —less an argument than an intoxication. His creed of determinism was such that it almost amounted to a vice, and quite amounted, on its negative side, to a renunciative philosophy which had cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and Leopardi. He despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles, and deemed himself consistent through the whole category—which in a way he might have been. One thing he certainly was—sincere.

To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush womanhood which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Var Vale, his temper would have been antipathetic in a high degree, had he either by inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it. Once upon a time Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his father, in a moment of irritation, that it might have resulted far better for mankind if Greece had been the source of the religion of modern civilization, and not Palestine; and his father's grief was of that blank description which could not realize that there might lurk a thousandth part of a truth, much less a half truth or a whole truth, in such a proposition. He had simply preached austerely at Angel for some time after.

. . . After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical, well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest fibre, such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by the lathe of a systematic tuition.

They were both somewhat short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies; and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on their shelves. When Correggio's Holy Families were admired, they admired Correggio's Holy Families; when he was decried in favour of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal objection.”

. . . As they walked along the hillside Angel's former feeling revived in him—that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself, neither saw or set forth life as it really was lived. Perhaps, as with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good as their opportunities of expression. Neither had an adequate conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and gentle current in which they and their associates floated. Neither saw the difference between local truth and universal truth; that what the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.”

“Niether saw or set forth life as it was really lived.” This is perhaps the touchstone of Thomas Hardy's criticism of life lived by religious scruples and social conventions rather than by common sense, natural philosophy, and reason. No doubt many who look at life through the eyes of Parson Clare would see the tragedy that befalls Tess D'Urberville as a consequence of straying too far from the path of righteousness laid out in the Holy writ. Hardy would see it as the consequence of being too influenced by the same. It is as if he is suggesting that Tess and Angel would have lived happy lives together if they had simply refused to let anything interrupt nature. If they had simply responded to the feelings that they had for one another the first instant they met at the dance in the very first scene, everything would have worked out.

Hardy's religion is a religion of Adam and Eve and not of Moses and Paul. When Tess and Angel find themselves in places of nature, as in the opening festivities in the field, at Stonehenge, or under the stars, they are at peace. When they think too much of their social and religious conditionings, they suffer.

“At first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray, and violet, while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have regarded Adam.”

Note the contrast to the passages about their Edenic happiness and how they compare to passages about their relationship to organized religion. "You quite misapprehend my parents, Angel tells Tess,

“They are the most simple-mannered people alive, and quite unambitious. They are two of the few remaining Evangelical school. Tessy, are you an Evangelical?"

"I don't know."

"You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very High, they tell me."

Tess's ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard every week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare's, who had never heard him at all.

"I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I do," she remarked as a safe generality. "It is often a great sorrow to me."

Ultimately, it is Angels concern for what his society, his family, and his religious community will think that destroys the love between he and Tess. Under the baleful influence of conventional morality “the pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former fires.”

“God's not in his heaven:
All's wrong with the world!”

The irony is that to Thomas Hardy, the more the perception of God held by the likes of Parson Clare, Mercy Chant, and the evangelical version of Alec D'Urberville rules the world, the less likely one is experience heaven on this earth. Again and again, his characters must be called back to nature and away from established religious mores if they are to find relief for their troubles and wisdom for their challenges.

“So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the inherent will to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against enjoyment. . . . She was ashamed of herself for her gloom of the night, based on nothing more tangible than a sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature.”

Over the course of her experiences, Tess begins to lose her belief that Nature is something one can use God to change and begins to believe that nature is something that must be adapted to. This is most evident in her conversation with the evangelical Alec D'Urberville:

"How can I pray for you," Tess said, "when I am forbidden to believe that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my account?"

"You really think that?"

"Yes. I have been cured of the presumption of thinking otherwise."

"Cured? By whom?"

"By my husband, if I must tell."

"Ah—your husband—your husband! How strange it seems! I remember you hinted something of the sort the other day. What do you really believe in these matters, Tess?" he asked. "You seem to have no religion—perhaps owing to me."

“"I believe in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, and so did my dear husband… But I don't believe—"

Here she gave her negations.”

Perhaps Hardy's most interesting criticism of religion in the novel (to me) is how religion so often evaluates a person's moral worth by their past deeds rather than by their present intentions. Angel comes to see this habit as his principle logical failure in regard to Tess.

“Why had he not judged Tess constructively rather than biographically, by the will rather than by the deed?” he says.

“The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

How, then, about Tess?”

And Tess encourages him in this “natural” instinct. “Don't think of what's past! I am not going to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what to-morrow has in store?" she asks.

"And—and," she said, pressing her cheek against his, "I fear that what you think of me now may not last. I do not wish to outlive your present feeling for me. I would rather not. I would rather be dead and buried when the time comes for you to despise me, so that it may never be known to me that you despised me."

This is perhaps the saddest aspect of the story to me. Had these two young people not been taught to feel how they should feel, they would have simply allowed themselves to feel what they did feel … and I suspect Hardy would have had things turned out wonderfully for them.What if someone were to rewrite Tess of the D'Urbervilles so that at the dance int he first scene, Tess had seen Angel, acted on her attraction, and simply said to him, "You know, there is something special about you. Would you mind if I walked with you to where you are going?"

Question for Comment: Rarely does one see religion in a positive light as it is expressed in Thomas Hardy's variously religious characters and thus Hardy's novels are often considered “dangerous” to those with religious perspectives on life. Would you agree?

Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway can, I confess, be tedious to read. Indeed, it was tedious. Sometimes, it felt like I imagine a hunter might feel like, sitting in a tree stand scrutinizing the forest for every movement for hours on end, wondering when a particular movement will turn out to not be simply a breeze in the trees but an actual deer. You look up to take aim and it is gone, a moment of meaning-rich opportunity in a landscape of triviality. Single moments of what one wishes all of life could be.

Throughout the novel, the brains of the characters are constantly chattering and murmuring like the never-ending sound of a brook running or like the chimes of a clock you hear so often you stop hearing . . . and every so often, the heart can be seen through it if the rest has not put you to sleep. A s Lady Rosseter says right at the end, “What does the brain matter, compared with the heart?"

“For this is the truth about our soul, [Peter] thought, our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves ...”

It is hard to think of a better way to describe what it feels like to read this novel. Flashes of pure heart are revealed in a sea of internal and external conversation that can hardly be distinguished from “noise”. “Nothing has really happened until it has been described” Virginia Wolf once said, but so much of what she describes seems so abominably unworthy of remembering (to me). People in the novel are grasping at the moments of their lives that gave them joy and regretting the rest – they simply pass time. Do I really need to know everything that everyone is thinking in this novel? When it barely matters to them? As Woolf wrote to painter Jacques Raverat, it is "precisely the task of the writer to go beyond the formal railway line of sentence and to show how people feel or think or dream . . . all over the place.'"

At the heart of this story lies two people who had once been in love (perhaps), reflecting years later, on what they meant to each other, why they had acted as they had in forsaking one another, and what they were to each other now. It seems evident that Clarissa thinks her greatest happiness would have been found in a life with her best friend Sally (who she thinks of when thinking back to her happiest memory) but as this cannot even be considered, she ruminates about her decision to marry Richard Dalloway instead of Peter Walsh. Clarissa explains her decision to herself in the following words:

“So she would still find herself arguing in St. James's Park, still making out that she had been right--and she had too--not to marry him.  For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.  (Where was he this morning for instance?  Some committee, she never asked what.)  But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when some one told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India!”

“She could see what she lacked.  It was not beauty; it was not mind.  It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. . . . They had always this queer power of communicating without words.”

In their brief meeting, her conscious thoughts wander from reminders of why she could not have lived with Peter to the conviction that she had never been able to live without him:

“Feeling as she sat back extraordinarily at her ease with him and light-hearted, all in a clap it came over her, If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day! It was all over for her.”

And though he speaks to her in the same meeting of his work, his travels, his marriage, his present affections for another woman, he can't escape what he has never been able to escape:

“Beneath, she was . . . purely feminine; with that extraordinary gift, that woman's gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.  She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her.  But it was Clarissa one remembered. . . . Clarissa was pure-hearted; that was it.  Peter would think her sentimental.  So she was.  For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying--what one felt.  Cleverness was silly.  One must say simply what one felt. . . . One could not be in love twice, he said.”

Niether of them  really escape the first original “something” that had been there from the start. Despite years of burying it in other things, in activity, in other people, in endless hours of reflections about life, about people, about the environment, the weather.

“After that, how unbelievable death was!--that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . .”

The novel ends with the following lines.

"I will come," said Peter, but he sat on for a moment.  What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself.  What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was.”

The fact that Clarissa is probably gay (as was Virginia Woolf) would have made it all impossible though and for that reason, I find myself asking “Why read this novel” - so full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

Earlier today, I watched the movie The Hours (the original title of Virginia Woolf's novel). It is a story about three women in three different eras. They each find themselves “stuck”. They each loved by someone who deserves their love but who they cannot love completely and unreservedly. Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman) has a husband who is devoted to her but she cannot reciprocate his devotion. He has permission to try but not to succeed. I felt for him. Laura Brown (played by Jullianne Moore) has a husband and child who adores her but she cannot reciprocate. He too has permission to try but not to succeed. Clarissa Vaughn (played by Meryl Streep) loves her best friend, Richard, but the two of them were apparently unable to navigate their attractions to people of their own respective genders and cannot be everything to each other as one suspects they would have wanted to.
 
It is a profoundly sad movie really. It is about the horrible dilemma of people who find themselves trapped loving those they cannot love entirely, being loved by those who they cannot respond in kind to. Commitments that can never work. It is about the pain of abandoning what you love more than anything else.

If the book and the movie can help people to navigate out of this swamp, more power to them.

Question for Comment: In Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom tells Tatania that "reason and love keep little company together now-a-days". Is this still the case?