Free Tess by Emma Tennant Page A

to give her the kiss of life – that is, artificial respiration.
    When he has brought her back to life – when he has blown his own breath into her mouth – he will fill that mouth with stones.
    Of Tess’s mouth, the erotic symbol which infatuated both Alec D’Urberville and Angel Clare, Hardy wrote:
    â€˜her mobile peony mouth’
    â€˜the pouted-up deep red mouth’
    â€˜the red and ivory of her mouth’
    â€˜her flower-like mouth’
    â€˜those holmberry lips’
    â€˜surely there was never such a maddening mouth since Eve’s’
    and
    â€˜she was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake’s … The brimfulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time’
    and Angel
    â€˜had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow’.
    Poor Tess. He shaped her ready for the bloody sacrifice to come.

The Beginning of Tess
    Love. ‘The ferocious comedy of England, with its peculiar mark of violence’. Thus Thomas Stearns Eliot; and Thomas Hardy, with his predisposition for women and the gallows, preceded him as a transcriber of the old ballad. Love, betrayal, revenge: raped Philomela to Lucrezia Borgia: Hardy hears the strains as he walks thelanes and streets of Dorset; and as memories come stronger and clearer when they’re of childhood, he revisits Bockhampton, where he grew up, and finds his Tess.
    In 1888 Thomas Hardy is nearing fifty. His marriage to Emma Gifford is one of constant illness (on Emma’s part) and heavy colds (on Hardy’s). He dreams of the village beauties of his youth; in London, in an omnibus, he sees a girl with ‘one of those faces of marvellous beauty which are seen casually in the streets but never among one’s friends … Where do these women come from? Who marries them? Who knows them?’ And at Bockhampton, where his mother still lives, he sees the beauty of Augusta Way.
    Nothing in Thomas Hardy’s life at this point holds any beauty. Three years have passed since he and Emma moved into a house remarkable for its ugliness, Max Gate, at Dorchester, where, due to its elevated position, it is exposed to the full rigour of winds from every direction. True, to the south and southwest it has magnificent views across to Came Wood and the monument to Admiral Hardy; and the downs which overlook Weymouth and the sea. And from the upper windows of Max Gate it is possible to look northwards over the Frome valley to Stinsford church, Kingston Maurward House, and the heath and woodlands surrounding his mother’s Bockhampton cottage. But the landscape is empty and hollow, to the eyes of a man without love. Obsessively, he studies the murder trials of the time and of earlier in the century; he sees, under the quiet, peace and domesticity which is the smiling face of England, its recurring theme of cruelty, murder, reprisal and revenge. In the seedy, new-genteel suburbs, which Hardy, with his great desire to find himself in company as elevated as the position of his new house, Max Gate, would never dream of inhabiting, are the protagonists of the old ballad come back again: Adelaide Barrett, the ‘Platonic Wife’ who slowly administers chloroform to her voyeur-husband who has encouraged her to make love to the young, soulful reverend, George Dyson; Madeleine Smith in Glasgow, of a refined and strait-laced family who force her to announce her engagement to a man she does not love, Mr Minnoch, and her measured administering of arsenic to the lover who couldn’t marry and support her, L’Angelier.
    Love. Thomas Hardy goes to Bockhampton, where as a child he went up to the barn at Kingston Maurward House to hear the old carols sung at Christmas; and from there he walks across to the manor