Tess and Saint Tryphena: Two Pure Women Faithfully Presented

Abstract

Thomas Hardy grew up in the busy, practical atmosphere of the country builder’s business his father had inherited. All around him, his relatives worked in wood, brick, stone, mortar and plaster. Sometimes they were commissioned to put up new buildings, but more often they adapted and renovated the fabric of an old one to serve contemporary needs. The Hardys were also a family of story-tellers and musicians, father and son playing their fiddles side by side at country dances and local festivals, sometimes for hours on end. Not surprisingly, Hardy later found it natural to improvise, to adapt, and to generate variations in his own work, both as an architect’s assistant and afterwards as a writer. In both prose and poetry, Hardy was drawn to refashioning established materials, and found a particular satisfaction in forging links between the present and an imaginatively heightened past. Some of Hardy’s novels appear to have in their genesis two elements which seem to have been indispensable to fire his imagination. One was an artwork from earlier times, and this could be a work of literature, a genre of painting, or a theatrical model. The other element was a cast of actors drawn from Hardy’s private emotional life who could energize the roles in a personally significant way.