History and the English Individual in Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Abstract

The value of the past in the novels of Thomas Hardy has been the subject of much critical debate. In Hardy in History, Peter Widdowson argues that Hardy was regarded by early readers as a historian of the “true” English way of life, and that this perception contributed profoundly to the making of English national identity. Many other critics have written on the importance of family history, genealogy, or heredity for Hardy, particularly in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). The issue takes on a new appearance when Hardy is contextualized in the anthropological and antiquarian discourses of the late nineteenth century. But while Hardy was very familiar with the ethnologists of the period, it is not at all clear that he shared their assumptions about human nature or past customs. Tess, in particular, illustrates the dark power of history for the English, which is multiplied by the number of links in the chain that connects any particular individual to the past. I would argue that for Hardy, the length of the English past—the very quality that attracted ethnologists eager to define human nature—is the feature that most oppresses the individual English person. Given the rapidity with which Englishness is being redefined in the twenty-first century, and the continuing popularity of Hardy as a source text for what it means to be English, it is important to reconsider this question. Although tours of “Wessex” thrive, and morris dancing and folk music are once again popular, it is not clear that Hardy would view these developments as an unmixed good. Even in the midst of the idyllic sequence at Talbothays, Tess Durbeyfield protests to Angel Clare that she already knows more than she wants to about history: