The shadow of Stonehenge: paganism, fate and redemption in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles

The shadow of Stonehenge:
paganism, fate and redemption in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

copyright notice | citation information | plagiarism | notes | bibliography

THOMAS HARDY’S Tess of the D’Urbervilles is a powerful story of ineluctable destiny, in which human actors are seemingly powerless in the hands of the forces of heredity and historical fate. Woven into the narrative is a dark thread of paganism, which reaches its climax in the dramatic scene of Tess’s flight to Stonehenge and her arrest at daybreak as she lies upon the altar stone of the monument. This pagan presence in the novel is not merely a superficial element but is deeply interwoven with the story’s themes of destiny, fate, and the struggles of the forces of nature against the constraining influences of society. Stonehenge plays a crucial role in drawing these threads together and dramatizing them at the climactic, and in many ways most tragic, point of the story. Tess herself is almost an emblematic figure representing the vast forces that contend for mastery in the human soul: love, fear, heredity, destiny. The stones of Stonehenge represent both the unyielding nature of the fate that, for Hardy, determines human destinies, but also the redemption through sacrifice that offers the potential for meaning in a universe that can seem to be devoid of anything meaningful.

The great Neolithic monument of Stonehenge, situated in an isolated part of Wiltshire in southern England, was constructed between approximately 3100BC and 1490BC;[1] it consists of two concentric rings of great undressed stones set upright in the ground, around a horseshoe formed by five huge trilithons (two upright stones with a horizontal stone supported across their top surfaces), with a further arc of smaller upright stones within it, and a flat stone, thought to have been an altar, in the center. Although much about Stonehenge and other such structures remains unclear, the structure and alignment of this monument indicate that its function was ritual, possibly associated with the worship of the sun and the marking of significant moments in the annual cycle of nature:[2]

There is a sufficient body of evidence to suggest strongly that astronomical observation was one, if not the most important, function of many stone circles … Observations … were probably integral to the planning of seasonal festivals. Down to medieval times, festivals were held in spring and at midsummer and, in north-west Europe, at Hallowe’en (the Celtic Samain) and May Day (the Celtic Beltane).[3]

Stonehenge, like other ancient monuments of Wessex such as hill forts and castles, features several times in the writings of Thomas Hardy, both prose and poetry. Hardy was fascinated by archaeology and the societies and cultures of past ages, and particularly with their religious and mystical aspects. In The Return of the Native (1878) for example, he suggests that the custom of celebrating Bonfire Night on 5 November each year with huge bonfires on the crests of Wessex hills is of ‘druidic’ and ‘Saxon’ origin rather than relating to the Gunpowder Plot of the seventeenth century;[4] elsewhere, notably in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), he makes great play with rituals that have survived into the life of the Wessex of his own age from ancient times. Stonehenge, situated in the heart of Wessex, constituted an extremely potent source of symbolism for Hardy, as well as providing a setting of unique drama for the climactic scene of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. In the late nineteenth century Stonehenge was little understood, being connected variously with Merlin and King Arthur, Ancient Egyptians, wandering Trojan warriors, the Danes and the Romans.[5] The monument can thus be said to have constituted a place of memory, a location where the shared memory of a community (both the particular communities about which Hardy is writing, and the wider community of those who read his works) could be created and recreated and upon which cultural ideas could be projected; and Hardy uses it as a symbol of great power around which he can weave the life, character, and fate of his heroine, and express her place in the wider universal order of things.

Fundamentally, Stonehenge for Hardy stands for ‘the natural’, and – as Hardy himself made clear – Tess Durbeyfield, described in the subtitle of Tess as ‘a pure woman’, is pure in the sense of being natural, in her femininity, her beauty, and her motivations.[6] It is therefore fitting that it is at Stonehenge that the climax of the story, the arrest of Tess, takes place, but this significance is prefigured in the early part of the book with the description in chapter II of the ritual of ‘Club-walking Day’, a pagan festival celebrating spring and fertility, in which Tess takes part. The story can thus be said to begin with moving circle of girls and women in white (among them is Tess, marked out by her red ribbon), performing a pagan ritual; it ends within the immobile circle of grey stones, a heathen temple of nature. The rough primitiveness of both these circles expresses the role that primal, instinctive drives take in this highly sensual and tragic story, and embodies one of the chief oppositional pairings that Hardy used as a fundamental structure of the novel: that between ‘nature’ and ‘society’.

The Club-walking dance is the first in a series of events and places with pagan associations which Hardy creates around Tess, and themes of paganism and the forces of nature emerge at several significant points in the book. The seduction of Tess by Alec D’Urberville takes place in an ancient woodland, The Chase, that surrounds the D’Urberville estate. In Hardy’s description, the forces of nature to be found there and the primeval energies associated with them are emphasized:

Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above them rose the primeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which there poised gentle roosting birds in their last nap; and about them stole the hopping rabbits and hares.[7]

Repeatedly, Hardy emphasizes the oneness of Tess with nature, and relates that oneness directly to her gender. At times he seems almost to absorb Tess into the natural world, breaking down the barriers between the woman and the realm of animals, plants, and the earth. When she goes into the fields to work at the harvest after having Alec’s child, she is described in a way that makes an explicit link between womanhood, fertility, the earth and the cycles of nature. A ‘field-man’, writes Hardy, ‘is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself with it’.[8] After falling prey to Alec’s desires, Tess feels guilt and shame, and sees herself as a corrupt presence in an otherwise harmonious world, but Hardy in his narrative voice claims that:

she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.[9]

This tendency to position women characters, and particularly young, fertile, sexually alive women characters, as ‘forces of nature’ reflects a movement in nineteenth-century literature in which:

young female characters who know too much are often placed literally in, and associated symbolically with, nature … To possess knowledge of nature, whether of her own desires, her physical body, the bodies of males, or of the creatures of the natural realm, indicated that a woman had ventured out into forbidden territory where the sexual and animal lurked.[10]

The closeness of Tess to nature is thus not only a signifier of her potency as a physical, instinctual being but also of the dangers of her state, for herself and others. The implication is that she bears some responsibility for what happens to her; although how far her fate is the product of her own decision and how far it results from drives and instincts that are too deep-rooted to be subject to rational control is left as an open question. One of the attributes of paganism for Hardy appears to be a quality of resignation to one’s fate, an acceptance that human beings are fundamentally at the mercy of the forces of the natural world, supernatural agencies, and destiny itself, and it is particularly noticeable that the female characters in Tess – Tess herself, her mother, the other village girls, the dairy maids at Talbothays – tend to express this view. ‘Well, we must make the best of it, I suppose’ is Tess’s mother’s comment on her seduction and pregnancy, ‘’Tis nater [i.e. nature], after all, and what pleases God’.[11]

Tess is thus an embodiment of the timeless, primeval spirit of Nature, and is deeply embedded in the world of natural energies and forces. This primeval force of nature is embodied in The Chase, which comes to play such an important and tragic role in Tess’s life, the landscapes of her own home valley and of the various places in which she finds work; but above all it is expressed in the intuitive, instinctive, sensual character of Tess herself. Hence her feeling that, when she reaches Stonehenge and lies upon the altar, she has come home.[12] A modern scholar has called Tess ‘an incarnation of nature’ and summarizes Hardy’s conception of her as expressing ‘the life-force, that which is crucial to the existence of human nature’.[13] The narrative of the book ‘continues to stress Tess’s oneness with nature throughout … Tess herself, misled by social conventions, fails to recognise the extent to which her actions have been “purely” natural’.[14] Tess, we are told at another point, is an example of ‘women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature’ who ‘retain in their souls far more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized religion taught their race at a later date’.[15] Tess’s place is to be at one with a pagan, untamed nature upon which the forces of civilization – church, technology, social norms, law – have only a superficial effect. When Tess and Angel Clare take milk from the Talbothays dairy to the railway station, at a time when their love is just beginning to reach its full flowering, the contrast between the urbanized, technological modernity of the train and the rustic timelessness of Tess’s appearance and manner is stressed:

The light of the engine flashed for a second upon Tess Durbeyfield’s figure, motionless under the great holly tree. No object could have looked more foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels than this unsophisticated girl, with the round bare arms, the rainy face and hair, the suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at pause, the print gown of no date or fashion, and the cotton bonnet drooping on her brow.[16]

Tess is literally illuminated by the light of the modern era, but that light cannot penetrate into her essence. She stands beneath a holly tree – itself a tree redolent of paganism and the forces of timeless nature – herself like an animal, a leopard, marked by none of the outward appearances of passing fashion but standing as if rooted in the soil.

The soil of Wessex is as fundamental for Thomas Hardy’s fiction as the characters that live their lives upon it. His fiction and poetry is deeply imbued with a sense of place, and his Wessex can be said to be not merely a setting for his stories, but almost a character in its own right. It seems at times to have moods and motivations of its own, to be able to express joy and despair, to express the shadow of fate and destiny, and mark and echo the events of birth, death, love and separation. Tess, rich in landscape and natural description, is particularly potent in this respect. For example, when Tess travels from her home valley, Blackmoor Vale, to work at the dairy in the Vale of Froom, the contrast between the shadows and overhanging doom of her old life and the light and freedom she hopes for in the new is clear: the new valley is ‘not so luxuriantly beautiful, perhaps, as that other one which she knew so well; yet it was more cheering. It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the rival vale, and its heavy soils and scents; the new air was clear, bracing, ethereal’.[17] The love which grows up between Tess and Angel Clare at Talbothays Dairy is related to the rich and fertile landscape and made to seem inevitable in such a place: ‘Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate’.[18] Tess’s new love is inevitable; in this respect as in others the role of the natural world in this novel is to constrain her within the bounds of her fate.

Tess is a novel full of fate, and Tess as a character appears to be generally accepting of the direction in which fate is taking her. At an early point in the story, her little brother Abraham asks her if the stars are worlds and, if so, if they are all ‘like ours’:

‘I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound – a few blighted.’
‘Which do we live on – a splendid one or a blighted one?’
‘A blighted one.’
‘’Tis very unlucky that we didn’t pitch on a sound one, when there were so many more of ’em!’[19]

The narrator gives us to think that Tess does not think it unlucky – she simply accepts it as the fact. Omens also play a very potent role in the story; perhaps most notably immediately after Tess’s wedding, when, in an inversion of the natural order of things, a cock crows in the middle of the afternoon: ‘“I don’t like to hear him!” said Tess to her husband’.[20] Such omens add to the ‘pagan’ sense of the novel, suggesting that the characters are at the mercy of primitive and powerful forces. At times such powers seem to be using symbols to mock them, as in the case of the mistletoe, a symbol of romance and fertility with ancient origins, that Angel hangs over their marital bed: ‘Angel had put it there … In his zest and his gaiety he had hung it there. How foolish and in opportune that mistletoe looked now’.[21] Over the following weeks the mistletoe echoes the estrangement and barrenness of the marriage, slowly fading and withering above the bed, until eventually Angel takes it down and crushes it in the grate.[22]

Another, highly significant, example of this pagan symbolism and foreshadowing of fate is the stone pillar at the spot called ‘Cross-in-Hand’, a ‘strange rude monolith, from a stratum unknown in any local quarry, on which was roughly carved a human hand’.[23] Convinced by Alec D’Urberville, now a preacher, that it was once a Holy Cross, Tess is pressured by him to swear upon it that she will never ‘tempt’ him, by her ‘charms or ways’. When Tess asks a shepherd the meaning of the edifice on which she has sworn her oath, he tells her that it has a far darker significance:

‘What is the meaning of that old stone I have passed?’ she asked of him. ‘Was it ever a Holy Cross?’
‘Cross – no; ’twer not a cross! ’Tis a thing of ill-omen, Miss. It was put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor who was tortured there by nailing his hand to a post and afterwards hung. The bones lie underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks at times.’
She felt the petit mort at this unexpectedly gruesome information, and left the solitary man behind her.[24]

This incident prefigures Tess’s own fate, of death by hanging; the public torture of the man echoes her own public shame; and the stone of the monument foreshadows the stones of Stonehenge, among which her journeying and her tragedy will come to an end. This pillar of stone, like the great slabs of Stonehenge, is made from a foreign type of stone from beyond the local area (the great stones of Stonehenge originate in South Wales, 200 miles from their final resting-place in Wiltshire[25]), emphasizing its significance as a messenger from beyond the boundaries of Tess’s ordinary life.

Other emblems of Tess’s helplessness have pagan overtones. The steam threshing machine brought in to work on the farm where Tess goes to work after leaving the Dairy, and which exhausts her and her fellow-workers with its demand for corn, is described as ‘the red tyrant that the women had come to serve’ and the engineer who operates it behaves ‘as if some ancient doom compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his Plutonic master’.[26]

It is, then, as an expression of pure Nature that Tess comes, with Angel, to Stonehenge at the end of the novel. Characteristically for a novel full of the obscurity and indistinctness of darkness, sleep and fog, the couple come to the monument in the darkness of the early hours, and before they see it, they hear it:

‘What monstrous place is this?’ said Angel.
‘It hums,’ said she. ‘Hearken!’
He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp.[27]

Earlier, when they were both working at Talbothays dairy, Tess had been drawn to Angel by his playing of the harp, and had crouched in the wildness of the garden to hear the music;[28] but then there had been notes and harmonies symbolizing all the possibilities of new-found love. Now the great grim stones, producing their ‘booming tune’ of just one note, symbolize the closing down of possibilities, the end of freedom, and Tess’s terrible fate. The two characters feel their way forward, but find only a further barrier of the great stones; they are set together like doorways, but doorways that lead nowhere. Angel names the place as Stonehenge, and his remark that it is ‘Older than the centuries; older than the D’Urbervilles’[29] implies the futility of the quest for the supposed noble ancestry of the Durbeyfields that has led Tess to her doom. Once more the significance of this great stone monument as a place of ending, where fate can no longer be evaded, is emphasized.

Tess does not seek to evade her fate, but appears to be resigned to it. She has travelled across Hardy’s Wessex from the lush, fertile, warm southern valley to this cold, hard, exposed northern moor, paralleling her inner journey to the ultimate loneliness of her death. Not long before, we have been told, she had ‘showed her old agility in the performance’ of walking across country, but once Stonehenge is reached it seems her energy deserts her. Despite its initially forbidding aspect, the place is now described in a way that is welcoming and literally warming – as if Tess really has come home:

But Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon an oblong slab that lay close at hand, and was sheltered from the wind by a pillar. Owing to the action of the sun during the preceding day the stone was warm and dry, in comforting contrast to the rough and chill grass around, which had damped her skirts and shoes.[30]

She lies upon the altar-stone at the heart of the monument, and finds there rest and sleep in her last few hours before she is arrested for the murder of Alec D’Urberville. The stone upon which Tess rests is an altar, but also prefigures a grave, with all the ominous associations of a final resting place, ‘so solemn and lonely’.[31] The sixteen policemen who have come to take her accept Angel’s plea to ‘Let her finish her sleep’[32] when they see that she is laid upon the altar. It is a place of sacrifice, where the rays of the sun at dawn strike across the altar and the figure upon it, symbolizing a transcendent martyrdom, a willing surrender to fate, rather than the hunting down of a fugitive:

All waited in the growing light, their faces and hands as if they were silvered, the remainder of their figures dark, the stones glistening green-gray, the Plain still a mass of shade. Soon the light was strong, and a ray shone upon her unconscious form, peering under her eyelids and waking her … She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of the men having moved.
‘I am ready,’ she said quietly.[33]

The final scene of the novel takes place in Wintoncester, where Tess is hanged in the prison after her trial for murder. The hanging is not described directly, but through the eyes and actions of Angel Clare and ’Liza-Lu, Tess’s younger sister (whom Tess had asked Angel to marry and look after). The two make their way to a vantage point so that they can see the tower of the prison; they climb the hill ‘impelled by an irresistible force’ and take their stand, significantly, beside another stone monument: a milestone. When the black flag is raised at the prison, signifying that the execution has taken place, the two react with the a gesture that could be understood within the standards of Christian worship, but which also has pagan overtones of bowing down to connect themselves with the earth itself: ‘The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless’.[34] The story thus ends as it began, with a blending of the ancient and modern through a form of religious observance.

This closing detail, emblematic of the weaving of the themes of paganism, nature, fate, and the forces of primitive feeling and instinct that characterizes the whole of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, emphasizes the vital symbolic role played by Stonehenge in this novel. All Tess’s wanderings come to an end at Stonehenge, as if it has acted as an unseen magnet throughout all the events of her short life; as argued above, its pagan presence intrudes into her life and beyond it through such echoes as the dance at the beginning of the story, the stone pillar upon which she swears her forced oath, the milestone at which Angel and her sister grieve for her. Less tangibly, the energies (both narrative and, in a wider sense, spiritual) focused on Stonehenge are reflected in the highly significant role played by nature and the natural, wild world in Tess, and the energies of fertility and reproduction that constantly hum through the story like the wind among the stones of Stonehenge. All these forces come together in the climactic moment of Tess’s arrest at Stonehenge, and the great grey stones of that structure, rooted, like Tess herself, in the soil of Wessex, can be said to symbolize the great themes of the story with great power and economy: fate, destiny, sacrifice, change and continuity.

© Ralph Harrington 2005. This work is protected by copyright and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Licence. This means that you can copy, distribute and transmit this work freely as long as it is attributed to the original author; you may not alter, transform or build upon this work; and you may not use this work for commercial purposes.

Citation information for this essay
Please note that proper attribution is required by the licence conditions pertaining to this work, as well as being good scholarly practice.
Cite as: Ralph Harrington, ‘The shadow of Stonehenge: paganism, fate and redemption in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ (2006)
Location (stable URL): http://www.greycat.org/papers/tess.html

A note on plagiarism
Whatever you do with this essay, do it as far as possible in your words, not in mine, and where you do use my words, acknowledge them as mine. Not to do so is to risk committing plagiarism.

Contact the author.

Notes

1. Barbara Bender, Stonehenge: Making Space (Oxford: Berg, 1998), p. 47.

2. Bender, Stonehenge, p. 53.

3. Lloyd Laing & Jennifer Laing, The Origins of Britain (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 206-7.

4. Herbert B. Grimsditch, Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), p. 86.

5. Laing & Laing, Origins of Britain, pp. 200-1.

6. T. R. Wright, Hardy and the Erotic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 106.

7. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 74.

8. Hardy, Tess, p. 88.

9. Hardy, Tess, p. 86.

10. Pamela Gossin, ‘All Danaë to the Stars: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Women in the Cosmos’, Victorian Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, (1996) p. 71.

11. Hardy, Tess, p. 82.

12. Hardy, Tess, p. 83.

13. Shirley A. Stave, The Decline of the Goddess: Nature, Culture, and Women in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), p. 103.

14. Wright, Hardy and the Erotic, p. 112.

15. Hardy, Tess, p. 104.

16. Hardy, Tess, pp. 186-7.

17. Hardy, Tess, p. 103.

18. Hardy, Tess, p. 149.

19. Hardy, Tess, p. 31.

20. Hardy, Tess, p. 215.

21. Hardy, Tess, p. 234.

22. Hardy, Tess, p. 267-8.

23. Hardy, Tess, p. 310.

24. Hardy, Tess, p. 312.

25. Laing & Laing, Origins of Britain, p. 210.

26. Hardy, Tess, p. 325.

27. Hardy, Tess, p. 392.

28. Hardy, Tess, p. 122-3.

29. Hardy, Tess, p. 393.

30. Hardy, Tess, p. 393.

31. Hardy, Tess, p. 393.

32. Hardy, Tess, p. 395.

33. Hardy, Tess, p. 396.

34. Hardy, Tess, p. 398.

Bibliography

Barbara Bender, Stonehenge: Making Space (Oxford: Berg, 1998)

Pamela Gossin, ‘All Danaë to the Stars: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Women in the Cosmos’, Victorian Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, (1996)

Herbert B. Grimsditch, Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962)

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London: Penguin, 1998)

Lloyd Laing & Jennifer Laing, The Origins of Britain (London: Routledge, 1980)

Shirley A. Stave, The Decline of the Goddess: Nature, Culture, and Women in Thomas Hardy’s Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995)

T. R. Wright, Hardy and the Erotic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989)