Abstract
Tess Durbeyfield has her origins within the enclosed landscape of the Vale of Blackmore, ‘an engirdled and secluded region’, as Hardy describes it, ‘bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge’, an area in which ‘the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale’. For the heroine, the vale ‘was to her the world’, and at the outset of the novel she has rarely ‘been far outside the valley’ (TD, 40). As the narrative begins, therefore, the stress is upon the protective boundaries of the vale, with a concomitant consciousness of that ‘livelier sense of Community’ to which Ferdinand Tönnies, in his classic definition of Gemeinschaft, propounded in 1887 just as Hardy began work on his novel, would refer. Indeed, Tönnies pertinently maintains in his study,
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. J. Grindle and S. Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 18. Subsequently cited in the text as TD.
- 2.
Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, tr. J. Harris and M. Hollis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 19.
- 3.
Ibid., 28.
- 4.
Ibid., 32.
- 5.
Ibid., 37.
- 6.
Thomas Hardy, ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’ (1883), in Hardy: Personal Writings, ed. H. Orel (London: Macmillan, 1967), 181.
- 7.
Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, 37.
- 8.
Ibid., 259, 260.
- 9.
David Frisby, Simmel and Since (London: Routledge, 1992), 54.
- 10.
Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, 52.
- 11.
David O. Morgan, ‘The Place of Harvesters in Nineteenth-Century Village Life’, in Village Life and Labour, ed. R. Samuel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 65-6.
- 12.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, tr. J.S. Libett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 112.
- 13.
Ibid., 114.
- 14.
Ibid., 113.
- 15.
Ibid., 116.
- 16.
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 56, 57.
- 17.
Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, tr. H. Ragg-Kirkby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 179.
- 18.
Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, tr. B. Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 889, 848.
- 19.
Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 192.
- 20.
Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 28.
- 21.
Ibid., 28, 29.
- 22.
On the role of eternal recurrence in Hardy more generally, see Roger Ebbatson, Landscapes of Eternal Return: Tennyson to Hardy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
- 23.
Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 86, 89, 90.
- 24.
Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Spatialisation’, in Narrative Dynamics, ed. B. Richardson (Chicago: Chicago State University Press, 2002), 226.
- 25.
T.W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, tr. S.W. Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 137.
- 26.
Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, tr. T. Gora, A. Jardine, and L.S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 56.
- 27.
Ibid., 47.
- 28.
Paul Schilder, ‘Psycho-Analysis of Space’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 16 (1935), 295.
- 29.
Alain Bergala, ‘La Paresse’, Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris: 1990), 114.
- 30.
Soshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 21-2.
- 31.
Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words, tr. C. Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 151.
- 32.
Shierry Weber Nicolsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 131.
- 33.
Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, tr. L. Davis (New York: Station Hill, 1981), 75.
- 34.
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, tr. A. Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 25.
- 35.
J.M. Bernstein, ‘Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life’, in The Actuality of Adorno, ed. M. Pensky (New York: State University of New York, 1997), 157.
- 36.
Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, tr. L. Davis (New York: Station Hill, 1977), 258.
- 37.
Joel Fineman, ‘The Structure of Allegorical Desire’, October 12 (1980), 60.
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Ebbatson, R. (2024). (Un)Binding the Sheaves: Selfhood and Labour in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In: Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_5
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