1In his journal entry for 1 July 1892, Hardy notes: “The art of observation […] consists in this: the seeing of great things in little things, the whole in the part – even the infinitesimal part” (Hardy 1984, 262). His novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles stages the heroine’s struggle to comply with the Victorian ideal of feminine morality, as she strives for redemption after her initial “downfall”. One of the key features of that ideal was perfect domesticity, embodied in the figure of the Angel in the House – a figure which Tess is desperately trying to impersonate throughout the novel, as the subtitle, “A Pure Woman”, already suggests. In that sense, the omnipresence of household objects in Tess could be read as the presence of “little things”, insignificant details, hinting at “greater things” – that is, the struggle for domesticity. Yet the proliferation of objects leads the reader to see them also as part of the aesthetic aspirations of the novel, which is fraught with pictorial reminiscences – especially still-lifes and genre paintings, in which objects play a key role to the extent of sometimes becoming the sole subject of the picture.
- 1 See Yeazell.
- 2 See Jackson-Houlston, Bullen, Gadoin.
2Among these pictorial influences, Hardy had a special interest in Dutch painting, notably from the seventeenth century, also called Dutch Golden Age, which favoured pictorial genres (still-life, vanitas, genre painting) that had hitherto been deemed inferior to history painting in particular. As Barrie Bullen specifies in his article “Hardy and the Visual Arts”, “Hardy’s most prized possessions were several pictures of the Dutch school”, among which an “early seventeenth-century canvas” of “a wooded landscape”, “two Dutch merry-making scenes”, and a “picture attributed to the Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken (1643-1703) – a candle-lit interior with a group of figures” (Wilson 2009, 219). In 1872, Hardy’s “familiarity with the Dutch and Flemish schools of realistic genre painters” (68) even led him to entitle his second novel Under the Greenwood Tree: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School. Besides, Hardy’s interest was part of a more general growing fascination for seventeenth-century Dutch painting in late Victorian England: many Dutch Golden Age painters were rediscovered and introduced to the public during the nineteenth century, by Théophile Thoré especially, who literally went on a treasure hunt to find as many pictures by Vermeer as possible (Todorov 43). As Isabelle Gadoin underlines, Meindert Hobbema’s famous 1689 picture The Avenue at Middelharnis was for instance acquired by the National Gallery in 1871 only, and soon became one of Hardy’s favourite (Gadoin 290). Hardy’s keen appreciation of seventeenth-century Dutch painting has led many critics to analyse the influence of these artists on his literary practice, to secure Hardy’s position as a realist novelist1 or to highlight the aesthetic networks of his novels.2
3Taking its inspiration from these different critics, this study will explore the way the object acts as a catalyst in Tess, signaling these pictorial reminiscences, these “traces” (Goater 329) of Golden Age Dutch painting: as Barrie Bullen explains, Hardy “rarely employs ekphrasis” and even, in his own words, “hated ‘word-painting’” (Wilson 2009, 220). The painted works mentioned will therefore be used to illustrate the way Hardy resorts to indoor, household objects, in order to draw pictures of domesticity, redolent of seventeenth-century Dutch genre and still-life painting; but also to create an aesthetics of objects, which blurs the frontier between animate and inanimate, moving the latter to the foreground – perhaps at the expense of the former?
4The novel does not provide many indoor scenes. Chapter 34 however could be described as the indoor chapter: as Tess and Angel are moving in together after their marriage, the novel offers one of the few domestic scenes between the two lovers.
The sun was so low on that short last afternoon of the year that it shone in through a small opening and formed a golden staff which stretched across to her skirt, where it made a spot like a paint-mark set upon her. They went into the ancient parlour to tea, and here they shared their first common meal alone. Such was their childishness, or rather his, that he found it interesting to use the same bread-and-butter plate as herself, and to brush crumbs from her lips with his own. (Hardy 1998, 217)
5The serenity that characterizes this description – despite the paint-mark on Tess’s skirt, which already stands out – appears as the result of its pictorial quality. This everyday-life scene is indeed captured as a canvas: the “dramatic light” (Yeazell 134) slanting in through the small window brings about a feeling of narrowness and intimacy, echoed by the adjectives (“low”, “short”, “small”) and the fact that the newly-weds are using one plate only – just as they “washed their hands in one basin” (Hardy 1998, 217) earlier on in the scene. This description of a serene indoor scene in soft lighting is highly reminiscent of Dutch genre paintings from the seventeenth century, which were painted on small canvases, such as Pieter de Hooch’s Interior with a Young Couple (ca. 1662-1665; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City). The series of intersecting perpendicular and vertical lines frames the composition of the painting, all the while establishing a close connection between the characters and the objects. The immobility of the door, the chair or the piece of cloth in the woman’s hand echoes and contaminates, as it were, the female character who is standing erect, suffusing the scene with the same out-of-time, peaceful numbness we find in the description from the novel. Youri Kouznetsov describes the impression conveyed by Dutch genre painting as one of “sweet numbness”, while Todorov talks about a “peaceful, immobile world, where time is frozen” (Todorov 134). And indeed a few lines down, Tess and Angel are still “s[itting] on over the tea-table” (Hardy 1998, 218; my emphasis), the piece of furniture somehow structuring the composition of the scene.
6Yet, besides the ominous paint-mark on Tess’s skirt, the apparent peacefulness of the scene was already debunked by the presence of two objects described just before the couple sat down: the pictures of “those horrid women” (Hardy 1998, 217) hanging on the wall, which are the only actual framed paintings ever described in the novel. Barrie Bullen notes that “actual works of art rarely appear in [Hardy’s] texts, and Tess’s inspection of the d’Urberville portraits is unusual in this respect” (Wilson 2009, 220). These are no pleasant sight, with their crooked nose and pointed features. The description of their terrifying looks turns them into haunting ghosts, escaped from the “two life-size portraits built into the masonry” (Hardy 1998, 217) and now hovering ominously over the serene tea-table. As Todorov pinpoints in his Éloge du quotidien, many seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings include the small-size reproduction of another painting, which acts as the key to understanding the unvoiced meaning of the picture – such as Vermeer’s music scene The Concert (ca.1664, missing), which can be interpreted from an erotic perspective thanks to the inclusion of an explicitly erotic painting – The Procuress (ca.1622, Boston) by Dirck van Baburen (Todorov 47). The presence of the two portraits in the novel could therefore be interpreted as the key to an ironic, fatalistic reading of the domestic scene between Angel and Tess, which thus morphs into an oppressive parody of genre painting. And like the heavy portraits riveted in the wall, objects start to mushroom in the house and take on dwarfing or enthralling qualities as the chapter unfolds. On the other hand, the proliferation of objects in Golden Age Dutch genre paintings, such as Cornelis de Man’s The Chess Players (ca. 1670; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest) hints rather at the comforts of home, since they are all in place and ready to be used. The woman is sitting pleasantly, her feet perched on a footrest; the bellows and the logs in the bottom-left-hand corner evoke the warmth of a family hearth.
7In Hardy’s novel, the pictorial description of such abundant objects does not provide the same soothing quality, as evidenced by this passage taking place just before Tess confesses her past:
A steady crimson glare from the now flameless embers painted the sides and back of the fireplace with its colour, and the well-polished andirons, and the old brass tongs that would not meet. The underside of the mantel-shelf was flushed with the blood-coloured light, and the legs of the table nearest the fire. Tess’s face and neck reflected the same warmth, which each gem turned into an Aldebaran or a Sirius – a constellation of white, red, and green flashes, that interchanged their hues with her every pulsation. (Hardy 1998, 223)
8The isotopy of warmth and light, and the details about the fireplace objects introduce a parallel with genre painting. Yet here the pictorial quality given by the references to the colours of the scene leads to a degraded version of a genre painting. The light and colours are vivid and violent, as indicated by strong nouns such as “glare” and “flashes”. The chromatic scale is reduced to one deep colour at first, that of the fire, conveying a feeling of oppressive, monochromatic atmosphere. This is reinforced by the accumulation of words referring to this colour: “crimson”, “flushed”, “blood-coloured”. The excess of colour and light draws the reader’s attention both to the pictoriality of the scene and, also, to its unsettling dimension: the abundance of warmth and of violent hues makes this indoor scene stifling. The presence of the objects also adds to this feeling of a suffocating atmosphere. Indeed, the objects described are at the same time too clean and too old: the clean andirons will get dirty and sooty with smoke and ashes; the brass tongs cannot be used either, since they “would not meet”, the modal insisting on this uselessness, somehow reproaching these tongs for a conscious refusal. Besides, these objects are somewhat heavy objects, as shown by the reference to the metals out of which they are made. These precisions may be linked to Tess’s position in her new domestic life, a connection being made between the objects and herself, as they share and reflect the “same warmth”. These metallic objects keep Tess tethered to her new social position – just as her necklace seems to rope her down, since the hues of its gems are inherently connected to her breathing, suggesting that the necklace sticks to her body. The objects in this scene build quite a different atmosphere compared to their presence in seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting. In Hardy’s novel, they rather hint at an oppressive, stultifying domesticity to which women are to be submitted. The reference to Dutch genre painting therefore acts as a reminder of the discrepancy between these two types of domesticity.
- 3 This “anonymous” quality is particularly noticeable in Frans Hals’s portraits: whereas his numerous (...)
9Tess tries hard, but she does not fit: she will never be the domestic Angel in the House. Her inalterable identity is that of a woman “with a basket and a bundle” (Hardy 1998, 272) – similar to Golden Age Dutch portraits of “anonymous people” (Todorov 18) characterized only by the objects they wear or carry in the pictures.3 Her position is that of an outcast, stuck in a marginal in-betweenness, just like the blood-stained paper floating in front of Angel’s parents’ house when she contemplates the possibility of asking them for help in chapter 44 – she is “too flimsy to rest, yet too heavy to fly away” (Hardy 1998, 298). The veiling of her past, as well as the showy jewels Angel made her wear before her confession, are described by him as a “grotesque prestidigitation” (228). Tess’s inability to fit in is mirrored in her grotesque, yet moving, misuse of domestic objects. The carving knife from the breakfast table at the end of the novel is indeed used not for cooking but for murder. Likewise, the distressing scene of Sorrow’s burial in chapter 14 is made even more stirring by the references to objects:
Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head of the grave […] putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them alive. What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere observation noted the words ‘Keelwell’s Marmalade’? The eye of maternal affection did not see them in its vision of higher things. (Hardy 1998, 97)
10The objects are out of place, just as Tess is doing what she is not expected to do. While the original function of the marmalade jar hints at a proper form of domesticity (cooking), Tess’s use of it is linked to “higher things”, that is honouring a dead child. In so doing, the text seems to suggest an absurd discrepancy between the “maternal affection” expected from women and the down-to-earth way it should be materialised – in domesticity, symbolized by the jar. Tess is here an epitome of “maternal affection”, not because she uses the jar properly (for cooking), but precisely because she misuses it, to honour her dead child. While testifying to Tess’s marginalization, the objects still hint at the dignity she shows facing the unstoppable chain of events she has to cope with.
- 4 Contrary to the few seventeenth-century Dutch exterior genre paintings, in which open doors often a (...)
11Tess cannot escape her fate: all happiness is bound to collapse for her; and again, objects signal this inevitability throughout the novel. Commodified by her mother who embellishes her before meeting the d’Urbervilles – “Do what you like with me mother” (Hardy 1998, 49) –, and by Alec whose first question when meeting her is “Where do you live? What are you?” (41), Tess sees her baby objectified as well when she is about to breastfeed him as she is working in the fields in chapter 14: she is described as “carrying in her arms what at first sight seemed to be a doll” (89). More clearly, Tess and Angel’s chapter of bliss at the dairy is doomed to be threatened by the metaphorical presence of doors – an object, or part of the house, which, when open, seems to announce Tess’s unfortunate choices to come, for instance when she will meet Alec again, magically transformed into a preacher, and of whom she will catch a glimpse through an open door4.
At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the water-fowl. Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters, out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented […] or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of puppets by clockwork. (Hardy 1998, 131)
12The unsettling comparison of such noble birds as the herons with doors introduces here an ominous element in the peaceful setting. The reification of the herons – which is also the name of the place where Tess will stab Alec to his death – is complete in this description as they are turned into puppets, pieces of machinery as the word “clockwork” suggests. The jarring quality of the passage therefore stems from the materialization of danger in the shape of doors and shutters, and at the same time, from the textual annihilation of human figures: the poetic “non-human hours” then take on a literal, much darker connotation, as objects storm the place. Objects are indeed fraught with symbolical functions in the novel; but such is their omnipresence that they also progressively become genuine subjects, leading Hardy to let us hear “the voices of inanimate things” (Hardy 1998, 118).
13As the voices of inanimate things grow louder, the characters are sometimes silenced, creating an inversion of properties. As Angel leaves the dairy in chapter 25, a series of hypallages has the parts of the house itself cry out Tess’s mute despair. In a sort of “object” version of pathetic fallacy, gables, brick, windows, mortar, door beckon, smile, coax, breathe forth “Stay!”, while Tess remains silent and is reduced to her professional position – albeit in a poetic, sentimental way – as “a milkmaid” (Hardy 1998, 154).
14Progressively, objects manage to take up more and more space; and in highly visual descriptions, they become the subjects of paintings highlighting their durability contrary to human characters. As Isabelle Gadoin suggested in her analysis of Far from the Madding Crowd, the word “vanity” crops up throughout Hardy’s novels and may act as a caption for a literary vanitas (Gadoin 296). This is what can be found in chapter 34: the jewels offered by Angel, which Tess is wearing while confessing her past, trigger a pictorial reflection upon vanity. Angel muses over these luxurious items, “these showy ornaments”, and acknowledges that “they gleamed somewhat ironically now” before thinking eventually that “it was but a question of vanity throughout” (Hardy 1998, 220).
The ashes under the grate were lit by the fire vertically, like a torrid waste. Her imagination beheld a Last Day luridness in this red-coaled glow, which fell on his face and hand, and on hers, peering into the loose hair about her brow, and firing the delicate skin underneath. A large shadow of her shape rose upon the wall and ceiling. She bent forward, at which each diamond on her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad’s; and […] entered on her story. (Hardy 1998, 225)
15A sense of ending and mortality prevails in this passage, and the whole scene revolves around the jewels. The passing of time is suggested by the reference to the “ashes” which, as the remains of a fire, insist on the inevitability of burning away and progressive decomposition, the violence of which is reinforced by the striking “Last-Day luridness” the glow from the coals is endowed with. With the accumulation of words referring to colours and contrasting light and shadows, Hardy is almost overdoing it here, clearly paving the way for the vanitas in which Tess and her jewels appear. The reflection on mortality is put to the fore through the “firing” light peering through Tess’s hair, whose pate – and skull – is protected only by “her delicate skin”. But the most striking element borrowed from this pictorial genre is evidently the presence of the necklace Tess is wearing. The figure of the woman wearing or touching jewels (while looking at herself in a mirror) is recurrent in vanitas paintings, such as Paulus Moreelse’s Vanitas, A Young Woman Seated at Her Dressing Table (1632, private collection). The grotesque comparison between Tess’s glittering necklace and “a toad’s” glistening skin debunks the prestige implied in the jewels, thereby stressing again the discrepancy between these vain ornaments and the confession Tess is about to make – as is also suggested by the adjective “sinister” applied to the no-less ironical “wink” of the necklace. The presence of the toad itself refers to the tradition of vanitas and still-life painting, in which debasing animals (such as a mouse or a rat) often appear to emphasise the vanity of man, whose flesh instincts are as violent as these animals’. The object signals the pictorial dimension of this scene, echoing the tradition of vanitas, as it hints at the decomposition about to take place – that of Angel’s love and respect for Tess after her confession.
16After Tess’s confession, the description of objects moves onto yet another pictorial tradition, devoid of human figures and highlighting objects: still-lifes. The inanimate things appear frozen, unchanged, contrasting sharply with the dramatic watershed that has occurred in Tess and Angel’s relationship.
Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and furtive, as though associated with crime. The fireplace confronted him with its extinct embers; the spread supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of untasted wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not being able to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to be done? (Hardy 1998, 235-236)
17A change has thus taken place in the setting as well – the ashes of the fire from the precedent scene have been moved onto the colour of the dawn, and the fire is now but “extinct embers”. It looks as though the objects here had attentively witnessed the scene and mirrored this change. Yet in this excerpt they are no longer witnesses. They become the subjects of the scene, and Angel is but a spectator. This impression is conveyed by the verb “confronted”, which gives the fireplace an actual, almost conscious presence, the noun “fireplace” being the subject of the verb. The objects on and around the table however do not really look affected by the change that has occurred (if the wine has turned “flat and filmy”, the glasses themselves have not changed, nor have they been moved). A freezing spell seems to have been cast on these objects, causing them to be immortalised in their position, as evidenced by the nominal phrases and the verb “stood”. Even the element that has altered, the wine, is somehow caught up in an inert state: the alliteration in [f] (“full”, “flat”, “filmy”) endows the description of the glasses of wine with a monotonous, unchanged rhythm, which is in keeping with the frozen aspect of the other objects, precisely designated with definite articles, whereas the new dawn, synonymous with change, is “a dawn”. Therefore, the immobility of objects and their position as the subjects of the scene, give to the passage the appearance of a still-life painting, as the phrase “their eternal look” also suggests.
18This scene from the novel is reminiscent of still-lifes, such as Pieter Claesz’s Still-life with Wine Glass and Silver Bowl (1635; Gemäldegalerie, Berlin), which foregrounds the disproportionate presence of the objects and, in so doing, stresses the ephemerality of (vain) pleasures and the absence – or at least, the powerlessness – of human figures, just like the empty chairs from the novel – the object of absence par excellence. This oppressive dimension of the indifferent objects is very close to the suggestive force they are given in still-lifes, which makes the tragic tone of the novel even more harrowing as it is progressively devoid of human presence. In chapter 35, this invasion of objects and their powerful presence even turn them into hellish beings more likely to be found in one’s nightmares.
The fire in the grate looked impish – demoniacally funny, as if it did not care the least about her strait. The fender grinned idly, as if it too did not care. The light from the water-bottle was merely engaged in a chromatic problem. All material objects around announced their irresponsibility with terrible iteration. (Hardy 1998, 227)
19Yet, as Hardy advocated “Art as disproportion” (Higonnet 29), the aggrandizing of objects is also a way for the novel to voice the beauty of the insignificant, to which Tess appears particularly sensitive. When Tess’s family are being forced out of their dwelling in chapter 52 and are waiting outdoors for another house, with all their possessions, the objects are given a genuine living presence.
Tess gazed desperately at the pile of furniture. The cold sunlight of this spring evening peered invidiously upon the crocks and kettles, upon the bunches of dried herbs shivering in the breeze, upon the brass handles of the dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all been rocked in, and upon the well-rubbed clock-case, all of which gave out the reproachful gleam of indoor articles exposed to the vicissitudes of a roofless exposure for which they were never made. (Hardy 1998, 362)
20Tess’s displacement here again parallels the way the indoor objects themselves are displaced outdoors. Yet it is also a sign of Hardy’s beautiful fascination for the microcosm, the world of details. A sense of exposure and uneasiness prevails in this passage with the peering light and the herbs that look cold in the breeze. The repetition of the word “upon” insists on this violent ill-treatment of the objects. Besides, their accumulation is both physical – they are “a pile of furniture” – and textual, as the length of the sentence and the enumeration of nouns suggest. This accumulation makes the presence of the objects very strong, as though they were genuine living beings. The contrast between the fine materials referred to – “the brass handles” or “the well-rubbed clock-case” – and the way the objects are treated create a very moving tone. To me, this excerpt discloses Hardy’s refusal of any polarization, as the objects that may be deemed insignificant are given as much importance – and beauty – as the human figures.
21Purely realistic approaches to Hardy’s novel could lead one to overlook the abundant presence of objects in Tess or, at the very least, to see them as mundane realia, sheer tokens of an accurate description of country life in late Victorian England. Yet Hardy’s insistence on these domestic presences, and the way they are connected to the pictoriality of his writing, invites the reader to take another look and examine their importance. As parts of Hardy’s reappropriation of Golden Age Dutch painting, objects are used both to create pictorial reminiscences and to question the stability and legitimacy of such values as domesticity. Far from erasing human presences, the importance given to objects is a sign of Hardy’s highly humane and sensitive perception in his novels.
22As Tess is walking towards Angel’s parents’ house and finds herself facing again the Vale of Blackmoor, the narrator notes that “[b]eauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized” (Hardy 1998, 297). But all in all, I would argue that Hardy’s close, sometimes humble attention to little things and his aesthetics of objects in Tess of the d’Urbervilles are a way for him to offer a pictorialization of the ordinary, revealing that, to him, beauty does also lie in the thing.