Hardy and Unorthodox Beauty

BOOK REVIEWS treatment of the five is such that it prompts a reader to want to read or reread the works of these excellent novelists right away. John J. Pappas Purdue University North Central Hardy and Unorthodox Beauty Peter J. Casagrande. Tess of the d'Urbervilles: Unorthodox Beauty. New York: Twayne, 1992. xvi + 123 pp. Cloth $20.95 Paper $7.95 PETER CASAGRANDE is well known for his several substantial and successful studies of Hardy. His present long-term project is a study of Hardy's creativity, and this Masterwork Study on Tess would appear to form an initial movement into that project. The statement has much to recommend it for a first-time reader of the novel (who, I take it, is the target audience for this Twayne series of explications), in particular Casagrande's firmly founding his book upon the text of the novel itself. The bearing of many passages is identified, and Casagrande's thorough and clear tracing of his theme through those passages cannot help but lead to deeper responses when those first-time readers return to the novel (as one fondly hopes they will), possibly with other critics' interpretations based on quite different theoretical orientations. Casagrande seizes the opportunity of this assignment to explore one of Hardy's strongest characteristics, the creation of aesthetic pleasure through a concentration on disagreeable subjects. The aesthetic principle he believes the novel embodies is that the most mundane details— including grossness and violence—have an appeal consonant with that of beauty and suasiveness. Thus, for example, the shimmering of the horse Prince's coagulating blood after he has been speared by the shaft of the speeding mail cart is emphasized by Hardy as a means of enforcing the horrific connotations that Prince's death has for Tess's life. Another example is the emphasis upon form and lines in the novel's last description , of Wintoncester, during Tess's execution. Perhaps the scene most relevant in the most ways to Casagrande's theory is Tess's walk through the tangled, fetid undergrowth and weeds of the garden while entranced with Angel's harp-playing. Casagrande's aim is to crystallize the impact of Hardy's practice by condensing it to a single word, thereby making it possible to evoke the principle without redundant explanation. "Beaugly" is the term coined by Casagrande for what is conveyed in the subtitle—a mixture of beauty and ugliness, or "terrible beauty," or "paradoxical beauty in ugliness," 357 ELT 36:3 1993 "beauty in Tess's suffering," or simply "unorthodox beauty." Perhaps the capstone is: "Hardy weds beauty to ugliness in several of its forms: cruelty, deceit, fatal violence, betrayal." This comes close to being a play on words similar to tragic sublimity: a commingling of extremes which brings out the embedded opposite of each quality. But, whatever it is, it is not a Casagrande-imposed quality in Hardy, for as he points out, in his autobiography Hardy says that "the province of the artist is precisely 'to find beauty in ugliness'." Casagrande believes that what differentiates Hardy from many moralists is the notation that not only does beauty exist in ugly manifestations, but that in art one takes pleasure in it. The point, according to Casagrande, is that the situation requires the reader to respond "indeterminately" or "impressionistically," not moralistically: Tess's unique appeal is the beauty of her defeat." The structure of Casagrande's book (after prelirninary Twayne stuff and the introductory sections, which include the analysis of the death of Prince) is to discuss the beaugly aspects of five other major episodes in Tess: Alec's violation of Tess amidst the dark loveliness of The Chase (chapter 11); Tess's baptism of her dying infant (chapter 14); Tess's impassioned encounter with Angel in the weedy beauty of the garden at Talbothays dairy (chapter 19); Angel's rejection of Tess on their wedding night before the shifting colors of a dying fire (chapters 34-36); and Tess's execution for the murder of Alec (chapter 59). Casagrande is an alert reader, and there are many good things in the book, such as the astute remarks about Hardy's preference for the...