Sarah's comments (member since Nov 02, 2008)

Sarah's comments from the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die group.

Far From the Madding Crowd should be replaced with The Mayor of Casterbridge. I was devastated to see that Byatt's Possession was taken out of the new edition while The Virgin in the Garden (snore) is still on there!

Additions: The Lovely Bones and Special Topics in Calamity Physics. And why in the world is Hard Times by Dickens not on there?? Or A Tale of Two Cities? That, in my opinion, is his masterpiece.

And I love Mansfield Park! It's my favorite Austen because it's so different.

Let's discuss please! It is a favorite, but it is dizzying in that I cannot quite wrap my brain around Sarah's character. She is a true enigma, which may be the point-- in so many ways, she represents the era of which she was a by-product.

Thoughts? Favorite quotes? I want it all!

This thread makes me happy :-)
Also, the older I get and the more I read, the more I appreciate Eustacia Vye. When I read The Return of the Native for the first time I thought that it was a poor man's Wuthering Heights. But now-- I don't know, there is something so passionate and Promethean about it!
PS you should all also read the Tomalin biography of Hardy. It is masterful.

Zoe, you should also read Lawrence's "Study of Thomas Hardy" if you haven't already! His descriptions of the ephemeral phoenix and poppy apply especially well to Tess and Eustacia Vye, as well as to the men who fail to fully understand them. Read it!

Zoe,

I agree-- I don't mean to say that Angel is all good and Alec is all evil. Alec does try, for his part, to change, and he does love Tess in his way. The "rape" is also quite ambiguous-- for all we know it may have been consensual. It also occurs in those shades of gray that Hardy loves so much, no doubt to show that Victorian society's conceptions of "pure" and "tainted" are overly simplistic and reductive. By extremes I mean that Alec and Angel both try to pull Tess out of her middle distance-- her blurred existence-- and to far more "Victorian" sensibilities. At various points in the novel Tess dwells in a “vague interspace, to use Hardy's words: on the cusp of girlhood and womanhood, purity and sensuality, night and day, and consciousness and unconsciousness. Both Alec and Angel imprint a degree of violence upon Tess, Alec by exploiting her and Angel by idealizing her. The extremes are not Alec and Angel themselves, but rather the position in which they place Tess.
Tess is even visually described as a mixture-- her maddening lips, her eyes a blending of colors, a girl-woman who is a mix of Pagan sensuality and country-girl innocence. She seeks complementary external surroundings along her journeys, and she also seeks the internal blended state of reverie. Fittingly, when Alec "rapes" Tess, he is described as imprinting a clear-cut and "coarse pattern" on Tess's "gossamer" (therefore diaphanous) tissue. He also pricks her with a rose thorn and stains her with blood-- he is “the blood-red ray in the spectrum of her young life.” Angel is almost more of a violation, because he initially seems to fit into the middle distance at Talbothay's. He then marks her with white instead of read, trying to make her wholly pure and ideal, marking her with diamonds and ornaments that brand her as the perfect, conventional wife. When Tess tells him the truth, he immediately relegates her to the opposite extreme-- sensual deviant. Angel forces Tess wholly toward "maiden," whereas Alec marks her as "maiden no more," but Hardy, in his adoration of his heroine, claims that real women's identities are and should be far more blurry than a mere label.

Tess happens to be my favorite book of all time-- to me, it is constructed like a painting. This idea of the hazy "middle distance" being the ideal fascinates me-- if you notice, Tess's downfall occurs whenever she is forced out of that middle distance and toward one extreme (Alec) or another (Angel). One of Hardy's main points seems to be that the world exists in shades of blended colors, like twilight or dawn, and that reductive conceptualization of humans as good or evil can only cause harm. Hardy appears to be quite ahead of his time in terms of these attitudes!