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Tess of the D’Urbervilles 233
merely the negative reflection of the positive features of the female. The
male functions to produce sperm to give to the female’ (Herschberger).
As far as the sexual side of the book goes, this could have been Hardy’s
epigraph. It is another sense in which his heroine is a ‘pure’ woman.
Some of the sweetest pictures of Tess are tactful reinterpretations
of this ‘woman’s view’ of biology; here is Tess on that June evening
when she wanders out ‘conscious of neither time nor space’ and hears
Angel’s harp:
‘Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head.
Dim, flattened, constrained by their confinement, they had
never appealed to her as now, when they wandered in the still
air with a stark quality. like that of nudity. . . . The outskirt
of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left
uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank
with juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and
with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive smells—weeds
whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a polychrome as
dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went stealthily as a
cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle
on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her
hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon
her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on
the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she
drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.’
This little still life of fecundity, reminding us in passing, perhaps,
that of all our authors Hardy is the only considerable poet, is repeated
again and again at this ‘phase’ in Tess’s development. Living ‘at a
season when the rush of juices could be almost heard below the hiss
of fertilization’, she exhibits to Angel Clare ‘a dignified largeness
both of disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly
because he knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so
well endowed in person as she was likely to be walking in the open
air within the boundaries of his horizon’. Again when he comes across
her shortly after this, ‘The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from
her. It was a moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at
any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh,
and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.’