Hardy's Other Bildüngsroman: Tess of the D'Urbervilles

159 HARDY'S OTHER BILDUNGSROMAN : TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES By Jeffrey Sommers (Miami University, Middletown) Critical appraisal of Tess of the D'Urbervilles has, unfortunately, not made any case for the novel's being a Bildüngsroman. Tess has been called a "fundamentally changeless" ballad heroine; her story has been referred to as "mythological," a "personification of rural Wessex," a representation of the "agricultural community in its moment of ruin." The novel has been termed "an indictment of 'Justice,' human and divine," the "universalization of a single experience," even an "Arthurian romance."1 These views of the novel seem germane, to varying degrees, for Tess clearly is the seduced and betrayed maiden of balladry; she is a member of the agricultural class which experienced such an upheaval in the days of the Industrial and Urban Revolutions ; she is a victim of societal and cosmic forces which neglect her individuality and her purity; she is an archetype of the ill-used wife like Iseult of Brittany. However, in expanding, categorizing, allegorizing Tess's story, it is possible to lose sight of the novel's unrelenting focus on Tess the individual as she attempts to make something of her life. Lascelles Abercrombie recognized this focus, holding that the novel "develops a single theme, the„life-history of one person, and sends this uninterruptedly forward." Hardy, in his time plan for the novel,^ graphically stressed the centrality of Tess's experience as he carefully noted the dates of the novel's events in relation to Tess's age. When Dorothy Van Ghent, in her justly renowned discussion of the novel, neglects discussing Tess herself until the final paragraph of her essay, she merely provides an extreme example of the critical tendency to forget Abercrombie's very wise observation . What Tess attempts to do during the brief portion of her life dramatized by Hardy makes her story one of coming of age - in other words, the novel ought to be viewed as a Bildüngsroman. Susanne Howe, in her study of the Bildungsroman in English literature, stresses the concept of Bildung which she defines as the conscious attempt to acquire self-culture. The process of acquiring this selfculture , writes Howe, involves the youth, or apprentice, in a series of adventures, many of them concluding with reverses caused by the apprentice's own temperament. The youth, with the assistance of "various guides and counsellors," finally adjusts himself "in some way to the demands of his time and environment by finding a sphere of action in which he may work effectively." Four decades later, G. B. Tennyson, in a brief article, focused on the inadequacies of the term Bildüngsroman as it had been applied to the English novel, preferring the more precise term Entwicklungsroman or chronicles of growth. Most useful to Tennyson's remarks is his' suggestion that the only novels profitably studied in terms of the genre, which he continues to call the Entwicklungsroman, are those "most concerned with portraying the way the protagonist comes to a deeper understanding of life." He, like Howe before him, seems to presume that such an understanding will customarily be attained.-3 l6o More recently, Jerome Buckley's Season of Youth, certainly the most important study of the Bildüngsroman. offers, in addition to insightful analyses of individual novels, an abstract of the typical Bildüngsroman , the highlights of which are in the protagonist's leaving home to commence his journey through life and his encountering two love affairs , "one debasing, one exalting." Equally important is Buckley's discussion of the problematic nature of the endings of the novels of the genre (especially Great Expectations. Richard Feverel, and The Mill on the Floss) because he observes, and I think quite rightly, that the conclusion of the protagonist's search for identity is not always successful·.6 Two rather recent articles also offer valuable insights into the genre. Marianne Hirsch's "The Novel of Formation as Genre" notes several features of the Bildüngsroman. which she renames the novel of formation: it focuses on a single protagonist's growth, often rather didactically ; it sets this development in opposition to society; it presents this development in the form of...