padian 1997 - a daughter of the soil - themes of deep time and evolution in thomas hardy's tess of...

8/7/2019 Padian 1997 - A Daughter of the Soil - Themes of Deep Time and Evolution in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urber

1/10

"A DAUGHTER OF THE SOIL": THEMES OFDEEP TIME AND EVOLUTION IN THOMAS

HARDY'S JESS OF THE D'URBERVILLESby KEVIN PADIAN

*Thomas Hardy is never far from Nature in his Wessex novels,- hispeople reflect the character of the land as much as the land itselfreflects the brooding fatalism of the events in his novels.1 Egdon Heath,

/it has often been said, virtually functions as a dramatis persona inmany of these novels, notably Return of the Native. Tess is describedby the mother-in-law she never meets as a "child of the soil", and outof her element (in Alec's society, amidst Angel's philosophical musings,or on her aborted visit to his parents) she is as disoriented as any ofHardy's characters uprooted from their rural lives.2 Hardy's characters,with notable exceptions such as Eustacia Vye, draw strength from theirnatural surroundings, and Tess is at once most blissful and mostvoluptuous when she moves among the weeds, fields, and forest.5

The extensive literature on Hardy's connection with Nature includesmany valuable insights about the influences of Darwinian theory on

his writing.3 Much of this literature has concentrated on the evolutionaryprocesses of adaptation, natural selection, chance, and preservationthat are found and explored in the writings of Darwin, Huxley, Wallace,Spencer, and other prominent Victorian Darwinians.4 These processesthreatened the social fabric of Victorian England by positing anuncaring, mechanistic universe that did not accommodate divine design,chain-of-being stratification of social class, or providential separationof humans from other animals. The social criis that this materialisticrealization precipitated have been eloquently explored by many writers.And, without doubt, this aspect of Darwinian thought, particularly inits Spencerian incarnation, had the greatest consequences for socialphilosophy in the later Victorian Era. But these evolutionary processesare really only part of what Darwin was talking about, and only part ofwhat Hardy used in his fiction.

There is a deep structure to Darwin's theory that underlies his ideasabout the evolutionary processes that can be observed in domesticatedpopulations - the same ones that Darwin used as justification for hisanalogy between the artificial selection of plant and animal breedersand the natural selection that he visualized throughout the sweep ofgeologic time.5 We commonly think of the populational concept ofNatural Selection, one of Darwin's main contributions to evolutionarythought, as the simple bromide "survival of the fittest", but thisoversimplifies Darwin's view and colours how we perceive Darwinianthemes in literature. Two other concepts, both of which act at

65


2/10

evolutionary scales beyond the population level - are essential tounderstanding his full argument in the Origin of Species and otherworks. First is the acceptance of what John MacPhee

6has called "deep

time" - the recognition that the Universe is almost inconceivablyancient, and so all the processes of the Earth and its life have beengoing on for an enormous span of time. Second, because evolution isa Markovian process,7 everything in the Universe, animate and inanimatealike, bears the mark of its history as it has changed through time. Forthe purposes of discussion I will refer to this concept as "evolutionarylegacy".8 Deciphering these marks, unravelling their history, and seeingthe influence that the past has had on the present is the businessof evolutionary biology. Darwin was well aware of all these points

(in fact, they were central to his thinking), and I argue that Hardyinternalized and used them more than any other Victorian novelist todraw out the contrast between the events that involve his characters'lives and the spatial and temporal background against which they areset. In this essay I will first treat the concept of "deep time", then"evolutionary legacy", and finally show how these interaS' with someof the populational processes that include Natural Selection in thecontext of Hardy's novels, particularly Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

Deep time. The concept of "deep time" recognizes that the ages ofthe Earth and the Universe must exceed any scales of human memoryor history by many orders of magnitude. Before Darwin's day, mostestimates of the age of the Earth (by no means all theologically based)were in the thousands of years, but this figure steadily increased until,by the publication of the Origin in 1859, Darwin was able to mootfigures ranging in the hundreds of millions without shocking most ofthe literate members of his audience. Darwin understood "deep time"as few biologists did (then and now) because he was trained in geologyand paleontology, as well as in biology. He was a close correspondent

and friend of Charles Lyell, and avidly read the three volumes of hisPrinciples of Geology (1831-33) as they successively appeared duringhis voyage on HMS Beagle. Deep time was necessary for theevolutionary processes that Darwin described to do their work ofdeveloping the diversity of organic beings, as well as to shape theEarth itself into its present form. Hardy understood Darwin intimately;his attachment to Nature and to the Earth, like Darwin's, did not dependon regarding human existence teleologically ("Let me enjoy the earthno less / Because the all-enacting Might / That fashioned forth itsloveliness / Had other aims than my delight"). It is precisely this broadexpanse of time, time beyond human comprehension or measure, withall its evolutionary legacy, that provides the dimension necessary forDarwin's processes to realize their potential effects. Deep time andnatural selection have a curious, sometimes apparently conflicting

66

relationship that can best be understood, as I will show, by decouplingthe populational consequences of evolutionary processes from theiractions in individual cases - as Hardy does in his novels.

Evolutionary legacy. The second argument of Darwin's that requiresexplanation is evolutionary legacy. If a great age for the Earth isaccepted, and if organisms change through time while they inheritfeatures from their ancestors, then every organism must bear in itscomposition a mixture of past history and present exigencies. The term"evolutionary legacy" or "historical legacy" is often used in evolutionarybiology to describe characteristics that are possessed simply becausethey are inherited. They are not necessarily useless; they are justinherited patterns (four legs or six; five fingers or seven). This legacy

can apply not just to animate beings, but to the characteristics of alandscape. Darwin's view of evolutionary legacy required deep timefor its unfolding. His "long argument" in the Origin of Species dependsupon this idea, which he applied to the evolution and maintenance ofadaptive structures, of species and higher groups, of biogeographicpatterns, and of geological landforms. His last book, devoted to theaction of worms on soil, was no valedictory work of his dotage, asGould notes, but a graphic demonstration of how the modest butrelentless activities of some of the humblest of creatures, given enoughtime, could determine not only the arability of land but also thereformation of the entire face of the landscape.9

Hardy absorbed Darwin's understanding of evolutionary legacy, andused it to explore several scales of time and history throughout hisnovels, most notably in Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Tess is a novel thatexudes evolutionary themes from its opening to its closing passages,and Hardy is constantly finding new ways to remind his readers thatlegacy is all around us; it is inescapable. Some of the first wordsspoken in the novel ("Good night, Sir John"), which set in motion the

entire ineluctable, tragic mechanism of the narrative, are tied toevolutionary legacy in the form of inheritance. Parson Tringham, thespeaker, is (by Hardyan coincidence) not just a parson, but anantiquarian; and not just an antiquarian who collects potsheds efJacobean furniture, but a genealogist who deals with the histories andevolutionary fortunes of the people of his parish.10 The patterns ofhistory mark those who bear their legacy. Parson Tringham expressesthis in the trivial sense that John Durbeyfield retains the nose and chinof his noble ancestors - "a little debased"; but as we soon see, historicallegacy both enables and haunts the protagonist of this novel, and bringsher to her doom in a way that is not dramatically possible for heragrarian companions.

The scales at which Hardy explores evolutionary legacy in Tessvary from the cultural and genealogical to the geological and even

67


3/10

astronomical. It is perhaps strange to thinkof all these scales together,when they might so clearly be divided into historic and prehistoric, butHardy is constantly moving among them, here pointing out a churchfrom Gothic times, there reminding us ofthe ancient age of the stonesused to build it, effectively allowing the historic to become prehistoric(and vice versa). But there is power in revealing, as Hardy does, theemergent properties ofeach level oftemporal scale. On the one hand,the life and labours of a single farmhand may seem insignificant; butthe actions of groups of them through time transform the landscapeinto well-sculpted fields and farms, which then take on a social andpolitical significance.

In Hardy's novels, evolutionary legacy does not work at a single

temporal scale, nor are only living beings subject to evolution. Thedescriptions ofhills and rocks and valleys, oftrees and flowers andanimals, intrude constantly on the narration. Throughout thesedescriptions, Hardy constantly makes us aware of the history ofthesefeatures of pastoral life: they are ancient, they are traditional, theirorigins are beyond human memory. Grimsditch (op. cit., p.45) notesthat "Hardy is fond ofbeginning his stories with a road, along whicha pedestrian makes his way". These pedestrians, at first mere flyspecksin the distance, become humanized through the course ofthe narrative;but before they can be so transformed, the road itself acquires deepersignificance; it becomes a Roman road, or (like many around EgdonHeath) a far more ancient path or track, or it passes a pre-Christianburial mound, or cuts through Paleozoic strata that impassively regardthe progress of the traveller. Hardy constantly reminds us that we areas ephemeral against the landscape as are the birds, insects, leaves, andflowers that surround Tess and Angel Clare as they succumb to anenvironmentally induced courtship at Farmer Crick's Trantridge dairy.Historical scales operate and emerge: humans modify the landscape,

humans construct farms, fields, towns, cultures, laws, history itself; yettime bypasses in turn each individual human and each culture, againstthe nearly immutable face ofNature. It is as ifHardy were tending acosmic ant-farm.

The nexus oftime and legacy. Even in his early works (for example,the astronomical discussions in Two on a Tower), Hardy expressed asense ofhistory and time in the grand scale ofNature, and he providedconstant reminders that everything in the Universe has a history: notonly humans and their culture, but all oflife, the Earth, and the solarsystem, have changed through time. But to understand the course ofthis evolution, and the depth ofhistory, it was necessary for Victorianscience (and its culture) to realize the vast extent oftime - time countedin the millions and millions ofyears - that would have been necessary,and was assumed by the study ofgeological strata even in the mid-

68

19th century, in order for evolution to have done its work. Darwstruggled with this vastness in Chapter IX of the Origin of Specietrying to put figures on the amount of time it would have takendeposit the European geological strata, or to wear away the chadowns ofthe Weald to their present state. Hardy reflects on what detime meant to the Victorian consciousness in the famous passageChapter XXII ofA Pair ofBlue Eyes, in which Knight tumbles ovthe edge of a terrifying precipice and is left clinging to handfulsroots on the side ofthe cliff. Knight, whose scholarly accomplishmeninclude geology, cannot help contemplating the natural history as waits for aid that may come too late. Hardy begins witn^immediacynatural selection, which for Darwin works exclusively at the individu

level: "At first, when death appeared improbable, Knight could thinof no future, nor ofanything connected with his past. He could onlook sternly at Nature's treacherous attempt to put an end to him, astrive to thwart her". But then, even as the broad sheerness of tnatural face ofthe cliff threatens Knight, he sees embedded in the robefore him a trilobite, gazing through him with its dead compouneyes. And the scales oftime begin to converge ("Separated by millioof years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have min their death"). The trilobite itself is "but a low type of animexistence" from ages with no "intelligence worthy of the name"; stias ari individual it takes on great significance on a human scale, as thgreat course ofpast ages culminates in ^si ng te moment: "The immenlapses oftime each formation represented had known nothing of thdignity ofman. They were grand times, but they were mean times toand mean were their relics. He was to be with the small in his deathHardy completes the reflection on deep time by having the vapanorama ofevolution, from primeval men back through mastodoniguanodons, flying reptiles, and the trilobite before him, flood Knigh

mind, "till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him werepresent and modern condition ofthings". And so the convergencethe scales oftime is completed.11

Evolutionary philosophy in Hardy's development. Hardy slideasily among the scales oftime from years to eons, accepting slow brelentless change through time - evolution - as the natural orderthings. Evolution was not a new idea when Hardy published Tess1891. Hardy was attracted to the anonymous, uncaring mechanistview of the Universe read by many into Darwin's theory - in contrato the ideal, fixed, divinely providential view of scientists suchRichard Owen, who opposed mechanistic transmutation of organbeings into others, and of the Romantic poets, whose ideals had similar origin in the works of the Naturphilosophen who influenceOwen.12 Hardy, like Darwin, saw Nature as anything but malevolen

69


4/10

but he had no trust in divine Providence, as the bitter fatalism of hisnovels shows. In this he echoed Darwm, whose faith was severelyshaken not so much by his fermentationof theory of transmutation,nor even by his shock at the cruelty of humans to each other when heobserved slavery in South America during the voyage of the Beagle,but by the death of his eldest daughter and favourite child. 13 Hardy sawthis uncaring, mechanistic Universe not in the vicissitudes of Nature,but in the mechanisms of society: in the inhumanity of British laws ofmarriage and divorce (a spectre that haunts his novels from The Returnof the Native to The Mayor of Casterbridge to Jude the Obscure), inthe reforms of land enclosure that dispossessed rural people from theirhomelands, and moreover in the crushing anonymity of the Industrial

Age and its heartless machinery.It is important to distinguish between Hardy's harmonious, if not

unencumbered, view of the natural world and his view of the forcesthat govern the world of people, which has seemed to so many criticsoverwhelmingly pessimistic. Roger Robinson (op. cit., p. 149) rightlynotes that Hardy "provides not a version of Darwinism but a workmade up of deeply felt responses to it". Certainly Hardy responded tothe idea that natural processes (forces) shape the destinies of organicbeings through selection, adaptation, and survival - but in ways thatdiffered between humans and other organisms. Darwin wrote in theOrigin of Species (Chapter III) that

We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often seesuperabundance of food; we do not see or we forget, that the birdswhich are idly singing round us mostly live on insect or seeds,and are thus constantly destroying life; or we forget how largelythese songsters, or their eggs, or their nestlings, are destroyed bybirds and beast of prey; we do not always bear in mind, that,

though food may be now superabundant, it is not so all seasons ofeach recurring year.Hardy, like Darwin, saw this struggle for existence as necessary, butnot necessarily malevolent, except on a human scale, where theperspective changes utterly. Again, here is Darwin at the end of ChapterIII on the struggle for survival:

When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves withthe full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fearis felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, thehealthy, and the happy survive and multiply.

Hardy's reaction to this strand of Darwinism is clear: he saw thecountless daily acts of Nature, impassively cruel to an anthropocentricobserver, as morally blank, while at the same time he saw even theleast spiteful, neglectful, or even unconscious acts of humans towardeach other as full of moral responsibility. And he extended this further

70

to the conclusion that evolutionary theory implied that humans areresponsible not just for each other, but for all of nature. Two passagesin Hardy's letters convey this: "The discovery of the law of evolution,which revealed that all organic creatures are of one family, shifted thecentre of altruism from humanity to the whole conscious worldcollectively" (1909); and again in 1910:

Few people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far-reachingconsequence of the establishment of the common origin of allspecies is ethical; that it logically involved a readjustment of altruisticmorals by enlarging as a necessity of rightness the application ofwhat has been called "The Golden Rule" beyond the area of meremankind to that of the whole animal kingdom. Possibly Darwinhimself did not wholly perceive it, though he alluded to it.14

The contrast is strong between the circumstances of natural life andthose of human life. Even so, Hardy's critics persistently misunderstoodthis distinction, and he was forced to take pains throughout his life toaffirm that he was no pessimist. In the posthumously published"Introductory Note" to Winter Words, his last book of poetry, heprofessed astonishment at this gloomy characterization, and furtherasserted (as he had on other occasions, notably the preface to Tess)that "no harmonious philosophy is attempted in these pages - or in anybygone, pages of mine, for that matter". Hardy was making nogeneralizations about Nature - or, for that matter, human nature. Hewas no philosophizer or moralist, and resented the uplifting endings tohis novels and stories that his readers and editors forced upon him.Again and again, in his letters, prefaces, and journals, he regards hisworks solely as a series of "impressions". This conviction, on balance,should be read straight. Hardy shows what can happen to humanscaught between their own desires and society's conventions; but no

forces of Nature - not even Egdon Heath, in its terrible beauty andgrandeur - provide a moralistic discourse in his fiction.

Hardy's scales of evolution: grand and small. To understand thecomplexity of Hardy's immersion in evolutionary theory, it is useful toreview and taxonomize some biological terms that figure in the quotidianpopulational processes of evolution. At the most basic evolutionarylevel is fertility, without which no reproduction, no further history ofa species, can take place. The consequences of fertility are played outthrough the processes of heredity, the transmission of features fromorganisms to their offspring, and the vagaries of the lottery of life. Thefortunes of each new generation15 depend on many evolutionaryprocesses, including extinction, decline and degeneration, progress(which is distinct from progressivism),16 natural selection (in bothhard and soft modes, as described below), and chance (with its humancorollaries, Fate and Coincidence).

71


5/10

Fertility runs through Hardy's novels; it is, after all, the business ofrural communities. Tess labours to harvest grain, to milk cows, and topull turnips (in a wintry, desolate field at bleak Flintcomb-Ash thatsimultaneously communicates past fecundity and present barrenness inan infinitely repeated annual cycle). The fields and fens that Hardydescribes are buzzing with bees and butterflies, exploding with pollen-and nectar-laced flowers, vitalized by rains and streams. This is evidentin the famous passage of Chapter 19 in which Tess, trying to observeAngel playing his harp, moves stealthily through a garden of weedsengorged with seminal and vital fluids; and in this opening passage ofChapter 20:

The season developed and matured. Another year's instalmentof flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and suchephemeral creatures took up their positions where only a year agoothers had stood in the place when these were nothing more thangerms and inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forththe buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap innoiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible

jets and breathings.The sense of sex, of ripeness, of the urge to procreate, is nearlyoverwhelming at every turn in the early part of the novel. Even Tess'soversized family represents impecunious fertility. When we first meetTess, she is participating in the annual May Day walk of the lastwomen's club in England to preserve the tradition (note the harbingerof extinction). She wears a virginal white gown, carries in one hand awillow and in the other a bunch of flowers, dual symbols of male andfemale fertility on a day celebrating fetility itself.

17The novel is full

of descriptions of the fertility of Nature, with ploughings, matings,plants in flower all over. Tess herself becomes an unwilling symbol

of fertility when she becomes pregnant. It is an easy transition fromfertility to heredity, in the form of plant and animal husbandry -breeding to encourage beneficial or desirable characteristics and toweed out others. This, of course, was the basis oftheartificial selectionof breeders that in turn formed the basis of the grand analogy ofDarwin's theory of natural selection. But Hardy's characters seldomuse the wisdom of husbandry in making their own choices about matingand procreation.

What do humans pass to their offspring, and why is this legacy socentral to Hardy's Tess? It is instructive to contrast the meanings oftwo words in the context of this novel (though neither is used in it):heredity and genetics.

18Darwin understood the artificial selection of

plant and animal breeders, and used it to build his analogy of naturalselection as responsible for the diversity of past and present life.19

Hardy had a similar understanding of husbandry, but chose to play the

72

genetic potential of hereditary traits against its inevitable dilution ithe flesh and in society, as human emotion and circumstances frequentlconspire to ruin an individual's prospects (Jude's ill-advised marriagto Arabella is a case as clear as Tess's). In human terms, often what inherited (heredity) is more than just corporeal: it is material and sociawhereas the genetic component includes the individual's potential, hior her native ability or acumen that will determine future succesSo, for example, Alec inherits wealth and social position, buconstitutionally he cannot meet its challenges; Tess inherits little, buher personal qualities (and genealogical legacy) gain her manopportunities. Tess's beauty and sensuousness (an initial factor in hesuccess, using "success" as a neutral term) come from her mother, bushe inherits little else from her. Her resolve and determination do nocome from her father, but perhaps from her father's ancient lineage,"racial memory" of characteristics (see below). Alec's title is usurpedso he has no genetic store of resolve to draw on from his parvenparents.

The question of genetic mixing and the consequent dilution obloodline becomes almost mystical in Angel's attitude toward thancient noble families of the region. He tells Retty Priddle (erParidelle) that she will not make a good dairymaid because her oncenoble lineage is worn out, but he encourages and rewards a youngsteknown only asMatt because his anonymous family has no such apparespectres of history to live up to. It may seem curious that Angel doenot realize that all human lineages must be of equal length of descenand therefore of equal historical venerability (or degeneracy); buvenerable age is not only the issue. Quality is maintained in breedinglines by mating individuals with similarly desirable traits (or at leasthe pedigree that maintains that they should be there); this is the genetibasis of aristocracy in nearly any culture. Hardy uses the dilution o"noble blood" ironically when, early in the novel, the young Angepasses over Tess when choosing a partner at the May Day dancing"So much for Norman blood unaided by Victorian lucre", the narratomuses. Angel, a middle-class cynic (fallen idealist), is both enamoureoftheancient aristocracy's venerability and disgusted by its deterioratioand decline.

20In a famous passage in Chapter 19 Hardy describes

garden of weeds that smell pungent but are as colourful as cultivateflowers; this is clearly an allusion to Tess's humble circumstances andbucolic beauty, but also to the strength and hardiness of good ruraEnglish stock, including its people. Tess's stock may have been dilutethrough generations of casual marriage, but she is clearly an atavism a throwback; and this is why, in an evolutionary (deep-historical) senseshe is a character worth building a novel around: she holds thaconnection to deeper time, to genealogical legacy.

73


6/10

Under the-rubric of heredi ty falls not only ancestral traits butancestral memory. Hardy suggests at several points that Tess's resolveand determination come from her distant past, and this is echoed whenTess slaps Alec with her gauntlet when he becomes too forward withhis attentions on the hayrick. The legend of the spectral d'Urbervillecoach crops up at four opportune (if clumsy) places in the novel,notably after Tess's marriage to Angel, when she is frightened by thecoach outside. Angel, who like everyone else except the Durbeyfieldsseems to know the old legend, regards her reaction as just some inherited"dim knowledge". Juliet McLauchlan

21quotes Raymond Blathwayt's

1892 "Chat with the author of Tess", in which Hardy stated that "Themurder that Tess commits is the hereditary quality, to which I morethan once allude, working out in the impoverished descendant of aonce noble family"; and she goes on to cite many other instances ofinherited (often atavistic) behaviours and memories in Hardy's work.

The hereditary quality of purebred stock declines through theadmixture of less pure or inferior stock; but as one's stock falls,another's rises. Alec's father acquires through industry and (it is hinted)more than a little deviousness not only considerable wealth, but theancient name of Tess's family. The selective value of adaptive traitswill differ through time as the adaptive regime changes; Tess has theopportunity for upward mobility not just through her unusual beauty,but also through her improved education (she is schooled by a London-trained teacher), of which one benefit is the King's English. She speaksthe local dialect at home, and Hardy describes in ironic evolutionaryterms the conversation between the more intellectually worldly Tessand her mother, who still consults books of superstition: when Tessand her mother are together, "the Jacobean and Victorian eras were

juxtaposed" and a gulf of two centuries of culture collapses between

them. Here, Hardy may see progress in evolution, but it is notprogressivism. The notion that the human condition was continuallyimproving would have been anathema to Hardy, because so much oftime-honoured culture and values is lost in the process. And Tessresists Angel's suggestion to teach her history (Chapter 19): she doesnot want to know that she is "one of a long row only . . . that yournature and your past doings have been just like thousands' aiidthousands', and that your coming life and doings'll be like thousands'and thousands". Ironically, this keeps her from understanding her owngenealogical legacy.

The stamp of history. In this novel, it is not only the ancient noblefamilies that have become extinct. The custom of club-walking, theconsultation of conjurors, the labour-intensive grain harvest, thehereditary occupation of rural cottages - all are passing beneath therelentless tread of history. Tess's improved education and speech

74

symbolize the evolutionary replacement and extinction of provincialculture and dialect. The local accent, we learn in chapter 2, is markedby the rich pronunciation of the syllable "ur", one that occurs both in"d'Urberville" and "Durbeyfield", and is responsible for a pursing ofthe mouth that is particularly becoming in Tess. Hardy was schooledin French and Latin but he studied German only through a periodical,The PopularEducator, when he was fifteen; thus it is a leap of inferento suggest that he knew that the German meaning of"ur" is "primitive,original, primeval", as in Ursprung (origin), Urzeit(ancient times)and Urmensch (primitive man). But on this supposition, it might emergwhy the syllable resounds in both the ancient, noble "d'Urberv///e.s"and the degenerate, perhaps even atavistic (or simply persistently

primitive?) "Dxxbeyfields," names that mirror the family slide frommanor to meadow. The decline from the ancient knights to Tess'sfather is so complete that he is initially not even aware that theyexisted (no racial memory here); they are buried like fossils in Kingsbere(kings' bier) - sub (below) - Greenhill (green hill), as fitting a localefor a crypt as one could ask.

22

In Tess, human legacy (both in the sense of inherited characteristicsand inherited possessions) is put to the test by circumstances of fate,the stalking horse for Hardy's brand of natural selection. Tess returnshome to Marlott after the season of turnip-pulling and threshing atFlintcomb-Ash because her mother is desperately ill. Ironically, sherecovers, but Tess's father dies, presumably of heart failure.23 Withhim goes the family's right to inhabit the house, and so the widow andchildren are summarily put out upon the road. This heartlesscircumstance is a result oftheconversion of small, individually-ownedfarms to large baronial ones - a process known as "enclosure",facilitated by the need for British grain production to keep up withAmerican rates of production, plus the need to use the massivemachinery that made the enhanced rates possible. The local merchantclass had long ago been put out of their homes, Hardy's narratorexplains, to make room for cottagers working on the lands. Thesemerchants had gone to the cities, where they could ply their trade, andwhere they were followed by many of their clients. This process, Hardywrites (Chapter 5), was "humorously designated by statisticians as 'thetendency of the rural population towards the large towns', being reallythe tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery".

Machinery it certainly is, and not just the political machinery ofland ownership and management, but also the machinery of theIndustrial Age, winnowing an artificial selection of its survivors. Thismachinery and the new selective regime that accompanied it broughtabout the extinction of country farms, country ways, country dialects,country music and culture, and hand labour - as witnessed in the

75


7/10

comments of the old farmworkers about the difference betweencollecting grain by hand and feeding sheaves to the maw of the

motorized thresher.Selective regimes, whether artificial or natural, change through time

as the effective environment of an organism changes. An organismcannot prepare for such changes; even staying generally adaptable is noguarantee of success. Natural selection, however, has two modes: hardand soft. Hard selection is catastrophic and indiscriminate, inconsiderateof whom it destroys, as when a hurricane razes an entire forest; it doesnot sort its victims and survivors genetically. Soft selection is moredependent on the ability of the individual.24 This emphasis of softselection is much closer to Darwin's conception of natural selection,and it is the main bright hope of Hardy's Providence. With ability, anindividual has at least the chance of prevailing in the world. Tess'smother sends her to her false cousin's manor under the pretence that hername will gain her favour; yet she confides frankly to her husband thatTess 's looks will be what gains her what she wants - as her own did.Many of Hardy's main characters, through individual ability and acumen,appear to have the chance to make or break their own destiny. This ishow Hardy personalizes the cosmic ant-farm. Tess succeeds at all kindsof labour; Angel fails in Brazil; Alec fails at everything.

Chance and the human scale. The evolutionary legacy that Hardy'scharacters inherit may enable an almost limitless human potential(as in Jude the Obscure). Yet against individual acumen Hardy pitsFate, and its handmaiden Coincidence, to manipulate the events thatgovern human lives, often with a tragic outcome. Darwin saw theindividuals of all species, and most species themselves, as doomed.He did not, however, regard this as tragic, as discussed above. For himthe "tangled bank" metaphor of species interactions is synergistic: thefates of all organisms are interrelated in the ecological web of life.There is nothing coincidental about the presence or absence of thesespecies, as he noted in Chapter III of the Origin of Species. In theclosing paragraph of the book, Darwin returned to the "tangled bank"to stress the natural "laws" (we might say "processes") that shape theirends. On a human scale, Darwin shared with Hardy a jaundiced viewof Divine Providence, as noted earlier. But Fate, or Chance, for Hardyis vastly different than it is for Darwin. In the novels Fate intervenes,usually to complicate or frustrate the lives of otherwise good andvirtuous people; it provides a maleficent direction to the course of

events.25

Darwin saw chance as a series of determined imponderables: onlyepistemological ignorance keeps us from figuring out the myriad causesbehind it. For Hardy, the picture is far more bleak when he deals on ahuman scale. Fate directs the affairs of men, most commonly to frustrate

76

their dreams, lay waste their accomplishments, and create terriblemisunderstandings. Only the British marriage and divorce lawscommand more of Hardy's antipathy in his novels (and, indirectly, inhis poems) than does "Providence". The individual has no chanceagainst cosmic forces such as these. Is this so radically different fromDarwin's view? After all, what matters in evolutionary biology today(though not, ironically, to Darwin) is not the success of the individua- we are all doomed to die some day - but the continued propagationof the species, the passing on of shared traits, modified to adapt toever-changing surroundings through the vast abyss of geologic time.If we pass on our traits, - our genes, in modern parlance - that is ourbest hope. Yet there is only a gruesome hope in Hardy's Tess, as at the

end of the novel Angel walks off with Tess's sister, who of coursecarries more genetic similarity to Tess than anyone in the world.26 Butthis is the difference between fiction and science. The tragedy of novelsis only possible because we allow ourselves the luxury of ruminatingon the scale of individual lives. Hardy makes the point that we are alllike Knight's trilobite, at once frozen in an eternal anonymity, whilecapable through the individuation of circumstance of a real humanpoignancy that transcends time.

NOTES

1. Among many essays on this subject, particularly in relation to Tess, see H. B.Gpmsditch, Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London:Witherby, 1925), especially Chapters II and IV; H. C. Webster, On a DarklingPlain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), especially Chapter II; RoyMorrell, Thomas Hardy: The will and the way (Kuala Lumpur: University ofMalaya Press, 1965), especially Chapter VII; and especially Bruce Johnson, " Th ePerfection of Species' and Hardy's Tess", in Nature and the Victorian Imagination(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). The novels that most stronglyembody the connection of humans to nature are Tess, Return of the Native, TheWoodlanders, and the parts of Far from the Madding Crowd that centre on

Gabriel Oak.2. Angel (Chapter 19) thinks of Tess as a "daughter of the soil", and Tess' mother-

in-law (Chapter 53) refers to her, in conversation with Angel, as a "mere child ofthe soil". The schism between town and country is deep in Hardy's novels. In

Jude the Obscure Hardy dramatized most deeply the tension and discomfortexperienced by rural people forced by circumstance to migrate to the towns,though he also alludes to it in a different way in Chapter 5 of Tess (see below).

3. Elliot B. Gose, Jr., "Psychic Evolution; Darwinism and initiation in Tess of the D'Urbervilles", Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 18, no. 3 (1963), pp. 261-272; PeterMorton, "Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Neo-Darwinian Reading", Southern Review,7 (1974), 38-50; Bruce Johnson, op. cit. (1977); Roger Robinson, "Hardy andDarwin", in Thomas Hardy: The writer and his background, ed. Norman Page(New York: St Martin's Press, 1980), pp. 128-150; Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots:

Evolutionary narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and nineteenth-century fiction(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). George Levine also touches on thisconnection in Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of science in Victorian fiction(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

77


8/10

4. Morton (op. cit., note 9), among other commentators, has noted that on at leasttwo occasions in his life (1911 and 1924) Hardy contradicted the critical judgmentof Schopenhauer's dominant influence on his thought, citing instead "Darwin,Huxley, Spencer, Comte, Hume, Mill, and others". Webster (op. cit.) explainsbiographically the influence on Hardy, especially during the period 1860-1865,of reading such works as the Origin of Species (1859) and the collection ofviewpoints by liberal theologians entitled Essays and Reviews (1860), concentratingon the indifferent carnage of "natural selection and the bearing it might have hadon Hardy's philosophy. In contrast to this view, Gose (op. cit.) stresses both theDarwinian view of evolution and the "older theory of evolution" that "asserts theconnection of all life and leaves room for the concept of cooperation". However,Gose cites no sources of this view and no evidence that Hardy subscribed to thisview apart from the revealing notebook entries (1909 and before beginning Tess)that "The discovery of the law of evolution, which revealed that all organiccreatures are of one family, shifted the centre of altruism from humanity to the

whole conscious world collectively". Joanna Cullen Brown, in Let Me Enjoy theEarth (London: W. H. Allen, 1990), pp. 290-293, cites other supportive examplesof this more harmonious view of evolution. However, conservative Churchmenstrongly opposed this view, feeling that its Romantic or Transcendental overtonessmacked of pantheism. See A. J. Desmond, The Politics of Evolution (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1989).

5. In making this "grand analogy", Darwin followed the rhetorical model of WilliamPaley's (1802) Natural Theology, standard reading for Darwin and all Cambridgeundergraduates (even into the 20th Century). Paley had argued that, just as theintricate design and purpose of a watch implies a watchmaker, so the perfectionof organisms and their adaptations implied a Creator. See S. J. Gould, "Darwinand Paley meet the invisible hand", in Eight Little Piggies (New York: Norton,1993), pp. 135-152.

6. Basin and Range (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1980). See also StephenJay Gould, Time's, Cycle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).

7. In a Markovian series, each separate event is not independent of previous events;thus, where you can next go in time depends on where you have been. In contrast,if you chart a series of rolls of dice, it will soon be apparent statistically that thenumbers that have already come up have no effect on the result of eachsubsequentthrow; in other words, each throw is ca^ally independent. A Markovian series ismore like a board game: you can throw a die and advance a variable (but finite)

number of steps, but where you wind up will always depend largely on whereyou have just been. The path of evolution is Markovian, though we often describethe incidence of mutations and some other evolutionary features as random.Nevertheless, heredity in its genetic and environmental senses constrainsevolutionary, history and potential.

8. Evolutiona ry biologists typically call this concept "historical legacy" or the"phylogenetic factor" in evolution (when referring to the design of organisms),but discussions with colleagues in the humanities suggest that the term "historical"is misleading in implying merely human history, rather than the entire sweep ofgeologic time to which scientists refer. Also, the term "evolutionary" need not bestrictly biological; as it denotes "change through time" evolution can describe thehistory of a mountain range, a continent, or a solar system, without implying agenetic (i.e., biological) underpinning.

9. "Deep time" is a phrase of John McPhee's {Basin and Range; New York: Farrar,Straus, and Giroux, 1980), elaborated by Stephen Jay Gould in his Time's Arrow,Time's Cycle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). Darwin's last book

78

was The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the action of worms, withobservations on their habits (London, John Murray, 1881); see Gould, "Wormfor a century, and all seasons", Natural History, April 1982, reprinted in Hen'sTeeth and Horse's Toes (New York: Norton, 1983), pp. 120-133. Darwin creditedhis own sense of time to Lyell, whose Principles of Geology (3 vols., London,1830-33) became the standard 19th-century reference.

10. Hardy once researched his own genealogy, looking for traces of his family'shistory and decline. A partial result was the poem "The Pedigree", which appearsin the same volume (Moments of Vision) as the often-quoted "Heredity", with itslines "I am the family face; / Flesh perishes, I live on, . . . leaping from place toplace / Over oblivion". This impression echoes in the faces of Tess, her father,and her ancestresses painted on the walls of the once-manorial farmhouse whereshe and Angel stay after their wedding.

11. Patricia Ingraham ("Hardy and The Wonders of Geology", Review of EnglishStudies, 31 [1980], 59-64) shows the extent to which Hardy lifted the

paleontological panorama of this passage from his copy of the 6th edition of TheWonders of Geology (1848), by Gideon Mantell, the Sussex country doctor andnaturalist who described Iguanodon, one of the first known dinosaurs. The senseof "historical science", first and most eloquently expressed by Darwin in theOrigin of Species, is in contrast to the "ahistorical" sciences of chemistry andphysics, whose principles and patterns presumably operate anywhere and anytimein the known Universe, so are not affected by time (history). Gould (Time's

Arrow, Time's Cycle) discusses how the realization of linear time supplanted inmany human cultures the sole reliance on cyclical (annual, seasonal) time. Hardy'sDorset labourers, though part of a nation with a very strong sense of its history,still principally rely on cyclical time for cues that govern the management of theirdaily lives.

12. Robert Chambers' anonymous and sensational Vestiges of Creation was publishedin/l844. See Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution; Philip Reid Sloan'sintroduction to Richard Owen's Hunterian Lectures of 1837 (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1992); Nicolaas A. Rupke, "Richard Owen's VertebrateArchetype", Isis, 84 (1993), 231-251, and Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Chambers' Vestiges was reissued bythe University of Chicago Press with an introduction by James Secord (1994).Dr Fitzpiers, in Hardy's The Woodlanders, was probably reading translations ofthe German transcendentalists such as Goethe and Schilling.

13. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The life of a tormented evolutionist(New York: Warner Books, 1993).

14. Joanna Cullen Brown (Let Me Enjoy the Earth, op. cit., p.290).

15. Hardy notes of the seven Durbeyfield children that they were "captives underhatches compelled to sail" with their parents, and "who had never been asked ifthey wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hardconditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield".Compare in this context the grisly murder-suicide of little Father Time in Judethe Obscure, who dispatches himself and his siblings "because we are too menny".In both cases Hardy is not discussing the workings of natural laws, but of humanfate.

16. Progressivism is the notion that evolution brings improvement; progress is a moreneutral term in science, implying only the change that accompanies any temporaldevelopment of a process. For contextual details see A. J. Desmond, "Designingthe dinosaur: Richard Owen's response to Robert Edmond Grant", Isis, 70 (1979),pp. 224-234.

79


9/10

17. Hardy's familiarity with the anthropological backdrop has been traced by Gose(op. cit.), Grirnsditch (op. cit, Ch. Ill), and Rosemary L. Eakins ("Tess: the paganand Christian traditions", in The Novels ofThomas Hardy, ed. Anne Smith: London:Vision Press, 1979, pp. 107-125), among others. It is of interest in the explorationof historical themes that the understanding of traditions deteriorates through timeas much as physical or biological features do. The women of the walking-clubseem to have little consciousness of why they are performing this ritual, whoseorigins are certainly pre-Christian; the presence of so many elder women in thegroup (almost certainly composed originally of young girls) testifies to this. JohnDurbeyfield does not even realize the nobility of his ancestors; his grandfather issaid to have avoided the subject because they were thought to have been unsavoury(indeed, some more recent ancestors may have been, as the ancient ones no doubtwere in their time). These episodes recall the incident of the mummers'-play in

Return of the Native, in which all the participants play their hoary roles inperfunctory fashion, except Eustacia, to whom the tradition is entirely new and

the passion genuine.18. Biologists would distinguish between these terms. Genetics is the science of the

hereditary material, DNA. Heredity is the heritability of features that can betraced to genetics. It is important to remind ourselves that genetics was unknownto both Darwin and Hardy (at least till his later years: Mendel's experiments werenot rediscovered until the turn of the century). Hence "heredity" simply meantthose features passed from parents to offspring, and Victorian ideas about theirmechanics often involved humoural physiology and the sorts of fluid or plasmicflow that resonate so strongly in Hardy's description of the garden of weeds inTess, cited previously.

19. See note 5. Paley justified "intelligent design" by the simple analogy that, just asany structure as complex as a watch implies a watchmaker, so the complexity andperfect adaptation of the organisms in the living world imply a Creator. Paleyneeded the grand scale of plenitude to justify his analogy; Darwin needed theacceptance of vast time. On Hardy's views of genetics and heredity, Peter Morton(op. cit.) has written most convincingly about the mechanisms involved, and hasnicely dissected the influences of Lamarck, Darwin, and Weismann onphilosophical thought regarding transmission of inherited features. He notes thatHardy's novels are not simple stages for Darwinism, pointing out (p. 39) that"Hardy's use of fresh data concerning heredity and degeneration and sexualselection is in the strictest sense aesthetic, for these themes actually commingle

with and order the narrative flow".20. It is interesting that in this novel and even in poems such as "The Pedigree" and

"Heredity", Hardy, like Angel Clare, does not see that all lineages are equallyancient, and that "nobility" or the acquisition of a name is (in one sense) merelyan arbitrary milestone in human genealogy.

21. J. McLauchlan, Tess ofthe D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) (Oxford: Blackwell,1971), pp. 33-41. See also Grirnsditch (op. cit.), Chapter IV.

22. Bere Regis (the fictional Kings-bere), the actual site of the Turbeville tombs,is a village on the River Piddle just below Hardy's Greenhill (Woodbury Hill,an ancient hill fort that is the site of the fair in Far from the Madding Crowd),and King John had a hunting lodge there; it also crops up in The Trumpet-

Major.

23. Compare John Durbeyfield's death of a weak heart to the death, early in thenovel, of the family's horse (ironically named Prince, another echo of nobility),whose heart is pierced in an accident with the mail wagon. Thus Fate removes thetwo sources of gainful support from the hapless family.

80

24. In ecology, the "effective environment" ofa species includes not only the physicalbiome in which it lives, but also the sum of the species interactions in which itengages, including predation, competition, mating, and other biotic factors. SeeL. Van Valen, "Adaptive zones and the orders of mammals", Evolution, 25 (1971pp. 420-428). On the constant change in this effect^tnvironment, see L. VanValen, "A new evolutionary law". Evolutionary Theory, 1 (1), (1975), pp. 1-Van Valen designated this feature of evolution the "Red Queen's hypothesis"after the character in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass who noted t"it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place". The distinctionbetween hard and soft selection is due to the population geneticist Bruce Wallace.In his formulation, hard selection removes unconditionally inferior genotypes;soft selection merely replaces relatively inferior genotypes by superior ones. Inecological terms, brought from the genotype level to the phenotype level, hardselection is like saying at the start of a course that only eight people in the classcan receive A's. Under soft selection, for example, everyone with a grade of 90

or above receives an A.25. In the sense discussed here, Fate refers to the patterns (and the forces behind

them) that determine the course of events. Coincidence is a special case.of theaction of Fate that entails some significance to the plotline, usually^onic.Coincidence would have no meaning to Darwin, because no organisms but humanswould see any significance in their fates. Chance, however, has a powerful meaningin evolution (note the discussion of hard and soft selection above), even thoughmost patterns that humans label Chance have particulate determinants (as Darwin'sexample of the feathers shows).

26. This note of artificial happiness was almost certainly a sop to the demands ofVictorian readers for at least a glimmer of hope at the culmination of the story.Dorothy Van Ghent stated the point more cynically and perhaps more validly: ".. . ^ie philosophy of an evolutionary hope has nothing essential to do with Tess'sfate and her common meaning; she is too humanly adequate for evolutionaryethics to comment upon, and furthermore we do not believe that young girlsmake ameliorated lives out of witness of a sister's hanging". ("On Tess ofthe

D'Urbervilles", in A. J. Guerard, ed., Thomas Hardy: A Collection ofCritEssays. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1963.) It is possible to be analytic about thepotential role of kin selection in the Victorian novel, but in the end such anexercise is pointedly anachronistic, except in the most informal and patrimonialsense (though see Hardy's The Well-Belovedfor an even more extreme, and som

would say ghastly, infatuation with three generations of the same woman'sincarnation). Anyway, Victorian marriage laws would have prevented Angel frommarrying his deceased wife's sister, so their future relationship could only bePlatonic.

81


10/10

THE

THOMAS HARDY

JOURNAL

VOL XIII OCTOBER 1997 No 3

ISSN 0268-34 IS 4.00

padian 1997 - a daughter of the soil - themes of deep time and evolution in thomas hardy's tess of...

Documents