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6 A Choral Mind Trap Hardy and the Homilists One of the most harrowing yet poignant scenes in Victorian fiction is Angel Clare’s symbolic entombment of his bride on their wedding night in Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Though Tess’s bolting upright in the Abbot’s tomb reenacts the climactic moment in Romeo and Juliet when the drugged Juliet awakens in the crypt, the words Angel pronounces over the woman he wraps in a shroud then carries in his arms resonate most powerfully with the ending of King Lear. Angel’s “Dead, dead, dead” is an echo of Lear’s words “Howl, howl, howl” as the old king, carrying Cordelia in his arms, plunges the audience into what one critic calls “the most terrifying five minutes in literature” (Booth, 1983, 11). What ought to be a “smooth ceremony of conclusion” turns into a betrayal of ends that is cosmically disturbing. Kent. Is this the promis’d end? Edgar. Or image of that horror? Albany. Fall, and cease! (King Lear 5.3.263–64) We are preparing to leave the theater, waiting for the play to end happily, as in all earlier versions of the story, when events begin to roll on interminably, crushing every hope and expectation of happiness we have nurtured on Lear’s behalf. We want Lear and Cordelia, as we want Angel and Tess, to be whole. Instead , the play, like the novel, gives us a broken whole. Each work sets up expectations that it systematically disappoints. When Albany, for example, the man of virtue and authority, seems about to distribute rewards at the end of the play by using a formal couplet to signal a return to order, the audience reasonably anticipates a just and happy outcome. a choral mind trap 95 All friends shall taste The wages of their virtue, and all foes The cup of their deservings [bitter woes]. (5.3.301–5) But alas, interrupted by a spectacle too calamitous for words, Albany sees Lear carrying in the body of the dead Cordelia. Breaking off from the expected couplet, Albany can offer the audience only a shattered fragment. And yet the ruined couplet’s promise of order, even when replaced by two anguished deictics (“O see, see!”), attests, as one critic says, “to an orderliness in the play as play that persists even in defeat” (Booth, 1983, 27). Though not the most ghostly of Shakespeare’s tragedies, King Lear is the spookiest, the darkest and most ghastly, because the black king on its chessboard can be identified with no single character in the play. Gloucester comes closest to identifying this black king or sinister power when he says “As flies to wanton boys, are we to th’ gods,/They kill us for their sport” (4.1.38–39). But who can decisively challenge and overthrow the gods? Since the ghosts of King Hamlet and Banquo help vanquish the villains Claudius and Macbeth, the tragedies in which they appear, though more ghostly than King Lear, are also less ghastly or spooky. The diffuse power of evil in Shakespeare’s darkest tragedy is to the villainy of Claudius or Macbeth what J. R. R. Tolkien’s ring-wraiths and Sauron, Dark Lord or Mordor, are to a debased wizard like Merlin in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. $$$ If we are never quite prepared for Angel’s repudiation of his bride, it is for the same reason that an audience is never quite prepared for the ending of King Lear. Vestiges of design remain intact even after all design seems shattered. In Hardy’s novel we are less dismayed by a bridegroom’s symbolically burying his bride on their wedding night than by the way he does it. Instead of carrying Tess across the threshold of their future home, Angel takes his bride in his arms, carries her out of the house, and lays her in a tomb. It is not just Tess we are grieving for. We are grieving for our own vulnerability, and the vulnerability of Angel. Pushing beyond their own assigned limits, the rituals roll across and efface the boundaries separating weddings from funerals, life from death, joy from despair. Thin partitions divide one ritual from the other. Both weddings and funerals use words to do or perform something. “With this ring I thee wed,” “we commit this body to the ground.” Angel’s pronouncing Tess to be dead makes her die. His bride is not...

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