Thomas Hardy 20 Years Later
I'm in class reading Thomas Hardy again. I'm also 20 years wiser.
My friend Shelbey was right. “Great literature grows with you.”1 Kiese Laymon nails it too:
“I learned you haven't read anything if you've only read something once or twice. Reading things more than twice was the reader version of revision.”2
I thought of both of their words last night as I sat in my first class with Amy Wong, a Victorian Lit scholar and Oakland-based professor of English. She is teaching "Hardy in a Time of Change,” a four-session reading group hosted by The Center for Fiction. We are covering Tess of the D’Urbervilles (a reread for me) and Jude the Obscure. It’s casual. It’s cool. My friend
, who easily convinced me to sign up, is doing it with me!MJ,
, and Kiese Laymon all had a hand in my decision to revisit Thomas Hardy now. Tess is a “book-of-my-life.”3 Twenty years later, I can still feel its resonance in my psyche, but I don’t understand why. I hope this class will help me figure that out.If it doesn’t, that’s ok. Rereading Tess now feels right. It also feels like good déjà vu and a form of time travel. Best of all, I’m actively living what Shelbey and Kiese Laymon promised in their writing about rereading. This book certainly has grown with me, even if I can’t fully articulate why. Rereading this feels like life in revision.
Three reasons why Tess is hitting differently now
Zoom. Reliving this college classroom experience from my kitchen table is peak comfort, a socially anxious introvert’s dream setup.
My age, reading skills and life experience. These have all improved. Youth’s rose colored glasses are off! THINGS are hitting way differently.
See footnotes for thoughts on Angle4 and humor5.
No Socratic method! Amy Wong is clearly brilliant, and she doesn’t play stump the chump. She’s not withholding her expertise in discussions for the sake of making me sweat for my answer. (Oh, how I hated that at 19!)
Example: Last night, when I asked a fairly amorphous question about all the book’s vessel imagery I’ve annotated so far, she instantaneously shared what she thought. She gave me a string of lovely, straightforward insights. How glorious! I mean, did I really get a chance to pick the brain of a Victorian Lit scholar like Amy Wong? (Pinch me, I did!)
What I’m annotating:
the color red
In class last night, I had a chance to bring up the over-the-top but lovely infusion of the color red in Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
In the first 60 pages, red is a big deal! Here’s a taste:
Tess’ is frocked in white when we meet her but conspicuously dons a red ribbon in her hair.
There’s a lengthy, fairly graphic early paragraph about her father’s heart disease.
The narrator spends lots of time describing the blood of Prince, Tess’ mortally wounded horse, and how it pooled on the road.
Then there’s the strawberry Alec force feeds her. Creepy!
Plus the roses Alec stuffs in Tess’ clothes and hair as departing gifts. No thanks!
The bad omen of an errant rose thorn pricking Tess’ chin. Her red blood, her life force, dribbles out. Ominous!
After I listed this out, Amy Wong waxed poetically about how even though Thomas Hardy is known for writing pessimistic, tragic realism, he also can’t be contained by genre and literary taxonomies. Hardy likes melodrama! He is a poet with a thespian soul and a flare for dramatic foreshadowing. This pattern of red in his scenes is indicative of these stylistic tendencies. It also helps explain why this time around Tess feels like such a cinematic rereading experience to me.
This is from Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy. He also talks about revision and rereading in this Lit Hub essay.
“Book of my life” is a core part of the lexicon of The Stacks Pack (the Patreon community for
’ The Stacks Podcast), and it’s a turn of phrase we meaningfully throw around on our Discord channel.Angel! He’s been as bad as Alec this whole time! What was I thinking back in 2005 when I crushed on him?
Um, I really think Thomas Hardy is trying to be funny and absurd with his irony.
Now I’d like to read Tess!
I've only read a couple of Thomas Hardy novels, the House of Seven Gables and Return of the Native, and really enjoyed them both. I have Tess' and Jude the Obscure on deck, patiently waiting to be read.