25 posts tagged “romance”

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.

“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?

“Surely you and I are beyond speaking when words are not enough” Edmund, Mansfield Park

As in all of the other Jane Austen novels I have read thus far, the main characters must sort themselves into pairs and/or reflect upon the ways that they have irrevocable mis-sorted themselves. Fanny Price's mother has to live with a man who fell far short of her idealizations of him. Lord and Lady Bertram have much to be disappointed with in each other I suppose. The young people all must be thoroughly vetted by circumstances to determine their moral worth and thus appropriate partner. Needless to say, much of the novel involves a process of whereby pretenses are stripped away so that the reader can feel satisfied that the fakers and frauds get each other and the people of integrity and moral consistency are happily linked into conjugal unions. In Jane Austen's universe, the wheels of justice and exposure grind slowly but fine and we are left satisfied in the end that the wheat lives happily ever after with the wheat and the chaff with the chaff, if they can stand one another. “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.” Austen concludes, “I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”

“Sir Thomas, poor Sir Thomas, a parent, and conscious of errors in his own conduct as a parent, was the longest to suffer.”

One cannot deny that the ending is karmicly pleasing. Austen concedes that a number of attachments that were made during the course of the romantic melee' had to be untied for the right people to wind up with their counterparts but she deals ever so tactfully with the subject in the following way.

“Edmund had greatly the advantage of her in this respect. He had not to wait and wish with vacant affections for an object worthy to succeed her in them. Scarcely had he done regretting Mary Crawford, and observing to Fanny how impossible it was that he should ever meet with such another woman, before it began to strike him whether a very different kind of woman might not do just as well—or a great deal better; whether Fanny herself were not growing as dear, as important to him in all her smiles, and all her ways, as Mary Crawford had ever been; and whether it might not be a possible, an hopeful undertaking to persuade her that her warm and sisterly regard for him would be foundation enough for wedded love.”

How long is a proper length of time for such attachments to dissolve, Jane Austen will not say but she does infer that the affections of such kinds of young love are absolutely transferable. “I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion,” she writes,

“that every one may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people.—I only intreat every body to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny, as Fanny herself could desire. . .”

Happily ever after. That is the reward for those who have committed themselves to honesty and transparency.

“With so much true merit and true love, and no want of fortune and friends, the happiness of the married cousins must appear as secure as earthly happiness can be.—Equally formed for domestic life, and attached to country pleasures, their home was the home of affection and comfort; and to complete the picture of good, the acquisition of Mansfield living, by the death of Dr. Grant, occurred just after they had been married long enough to begin to want an increase of income, and feel their distance from the paternal abode an inconvenience.”

Say what you will of Mansfield Park, it is a place where the laws of a moral universe can be depended on in affairs of the heart. One just has to be a few hundred pages worth of patient.

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.

The Romantic Mind: Notions for a Course in Romantic Thought and Expression

"The importance of romanticism is that it is the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thought of the Western world. It seems to me to be the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred, and all the other shifts which have occurred in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear to me in comparison less important, and at any rate deeply influenced by it. . . .

"Suppose you had spoken to these persons [The various Romantics]. You would have found that their ideal of life was approximately of the following kind. The values to which they attached the highest importance were such values as integrity, sincerity, readiness to sacrifice one's life to some inner light, dedication to some ideal for which it is worth sacrificing all that one is, for which it is worth both living and dying. You would have found that they were not primarily interested in knowledge, or in the advance of science, not interested in political power, not interested in happiness, not interested, above all, in adjustment to life, in finding your place in society, in living at peace with your government, even in loyalty to your king, or to your republic. You would have found that common sense, moderation, was very far from their thoughts. You would have found that they believed in the necessity of fighting for your beliefs to the last breath in your body, and you would have found that they believed in the value of martyrdom as such, no matter what the martyrdom was martyrdom for. You would have found that they believed that minorities were more holy than majorities, that failure was nobler than success, which had something shoddy and something vulgar about it. The very notion of idealism, not in its philosophical sense, but in the ordinary sense in which we use it, that is to say the state of mind of a man who is prepared to sacrifice a great deal for principles or for some conviction, who is not prepared to sell out, who is prepared to go to the stake for something which he believes, because he believes in it — this attitude was relatively new. What people admired was wholeheartedness, sincerity, purity of soul, the ability and readiness to dedicate yourself to your ideal, no matter what it was. No matter what it was: that is the important thing." Isiah Berlin, the Roots of Romanticism

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s6544.html

The last few weeks I have been playing with the notion of putting together a proposal for a course in Romantic thought and literature. While there is no clear definition of what the Romantic Movement is and who is or is not a part of it, my thought was to survey a number of literary works from Pierre Marivaux to E.M. Forster, examining how the romantics were reacting to the assertions of the Scientific revolution and the Age of Reason that is said to have ensued. Ultimately, Romanticism has gathered up in its ark many things that are simply "anti-enlightenment". The later half of the course will look at how the romantic movement can be seen undergoing modifications after the introduction of Darwin's ideas about human origin and identity.

While most of the course would be spent reading and discussing a set of some of the most influential novels about the role of nature and passion in opposition to structure and rationality, some references to the romantic movement within art and music and some critical analysis will also be considered. Ultimately the objective would be to think about what the relationship between tradition, religion, mysticism, reason, emotion, and human affection is. It would also set out to try and understand how forces in a broader culture shape the way that we live our internal lives and pursue “romantic” relationships, nature, and divergent aspects of our personalities. Here are some of the works I had in mind.

TEXTBOOKS:

Romanticism (Introductions to British Literature and Culture)

Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism

POST ENLIGHTENMENT

Pierre Marivaux (Drama): The Triumph of Love (1732) The Game of Love and Chance (1730)

Jean Jacques Rousseau: Julie: The New Helloise (1761)

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Wether (1774)

Robert Burns: Clarinda Letters (1787-1788)

Beethoven (Music): Eroica (1804)

Jane Austen: Persuasion (1817), Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Hudson River School (Art): Thomas Cole, Frederich Church, Albert Bierstadt (1825-1875)

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights (1847)

Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre (1847)

Charles Dickens?: Our Mutual Friend (1864-65)

George Elliot (Mary Anne Evans): Middlemarch (1871) Daniel Deronda (1876)

Post DARWIN

Thomas Hardy: Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891)

Jack London: The Sea Wolf (1904)

Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth (1905)

E.M. Forster: A Room with a View (1908)

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?

There are many angles from which to look at the novel Wuthering Heights. For some reason, I find myself intrigued with the psychological and spiritual impact of loss as illustrated in the life of Heathcliff. For those that have not read the novel or seen the film, Heathcliff is an adopted son, a favorite of his adoptive father but despised by his “brothers” in a way not unlike the sons of Jacob hated Joseph. When his father dies, his brother turns him into a farm hand and subjects him to years of abuse. It appears that he stays because of his deep and abiding friendship and love for Catherine, Heathcliff's adoptive father's daughter.

“The curate might set as many chapters as he pleased for Catherine to [memorize] by heart, and Joseph might thrash Heathcliff till his arm ached; they forgot everything the minute they were together again.”

Unfortunately, it is the brother's intention to turn Heathcliff into a nobody, a nothing, a virtual Cinderella and it becomes impossible for Catherine to consider marrying him as a result. Catherine's decision to marry the local aristocrat, Edgar, is explained by her with a lengthy appeal to reason, logic, aesthetics, economics, and even ego. But there is something deeply troubling even to herself about the way that all these forms of logic will not align with that aspect of her nature that she calls “soul.”

“All seems smooth and easy: where is the obstacle?” asks her friend, Nelli of the decision to accept Edgar's proposal,

“'HERE! and HERE!' replied Catherine, striking one hand on her forehead, and the other on her breast: 'in whichever place the soul lives. In my soul and in my heart, I'm convinced I'm wrong! . . . .. . . It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire. . . . My love for [Edgar] Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I AM Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”

Later in the novel, as Catherine lays dying, Heathcliff accuses her of betraying herself.

“WHY did you despise me? WHY did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you - they'll damn you. You loved me - then what RIGHT had you to leave me? What right - answer me - for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, YOU, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart - YOU have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you - oh, God! would YOU like to live with your soul in the grave?'”

Bronte's depiction of the two reminds one of the Platonic explanation of love as an experience of single souls separated that, upon finding their other halves, feel inexpressible joy. “I am Heathcliff,” says Catherine. “How would you like to live with your soul in the grave?” asks Heathcliff Catherine as she dies?

What is interesting to me I guess is how the separation of Heathcliff and Catherine affects them both. One is able to forgive. The other isn't. Heathcliff's heart gets twisted by the experience. His life never really recovers.

I was watching the movie The Assassination of Richard Nixon starring Sean Penn the other night and I could trace the same exact trajectory. The anger that Sam Byck experiences in losing his wife to another man leaves something truly bent in his soul. There is an anger there, a wound, a scar. It leaves a destructive, bleeding, infectious, wound that gets turned into a rage that seems to demand a victim. Watching Sam Byck trying to deal with his anger is much like watching Heathcliff turn into a vengeful, spiteful, vampirish, villain. Like watching as the electrical energy of a vast storm cloud assembles itself into a destructive force that will, in time, strike the highest trees that dare intrude into its field. In Samuel Byck's life, that someone was Richard Nixon. In Heathcliff's life, it is anyone that ever had anything to do with the pain he has experienced. It is not clear that Heathcliff was born Byronic, but he certainly becomes so. No one could argue that he had become “pleasant”. What one sees is an intellect that tries to serve both his vengeance and his lost love.

Paralyzing. He never escapes the oppositional forces of his own psyche.

Question for comment: How does one forgive something that never stops inflicting damage?