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LOSS OF INNOCENCE
Patricia Nicol
FINALLY, we’re into May, the month in which we herald summer with Morris men and the like.
Thomas Hardy’s Tess Of The D’Urbervilles begins in ‘the latter part of May’. On a country lane, peddler John Durbeyfield, is addressed as Sir John by the parson, then told he descends from nobility. This expectation-raising revelation will ultimately lead to ruin.
Meanwhile, John’s daughter, Tess, is marching a traditional May Dance with her white-clad Marlott village women’s club. Tess is ‘a fine and handsome girl’, whose ‘mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape’. It is these eyes that draw the attention of Angel Clare, passing through on a walking tour.
Hardy subtitled his book ‘A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented’. Now regarded as one of Hardy’s greatest novels, it troubled some critics at the time with its sympathetic portrayal of a ‘fallen woman’.
Of course, at every juncture, it is a man — be he foolish, mercenary, selfish, cruel or hypocritical — who precipitates the naive Tess’s ‘fall’.
Henry James also made a critique of English society in What Maisie Knew, a tale of warring highsociety divorcees shuttling their blameless daughter between their households and lovers. No real effort is made to protect her innocence.
In The Go-Between, by L.P. Hartley, its adult narrator rediscovers a diary and with it the traumatic suppressed memory of his summer as ‘postman’ for the upper-class Marian and her tenant farmer lover.
‘I felt with a bitter blend of self-pity and self-reproach, that had it not been for the diary, or what the diary stood for, everything would be different. I should not be sitting in this drab, flowerless room . . . I should be sitting in another room, rainbowhued, looking not into the past but into the future: and I should not be sitting alone.’
Today, you would hope the flagrant abuses of power and privilege chronicled here might not happen, or be called immediately to account. But, as most of us know, that’s still not always the case.