Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy: born 2nd June 1840 died 11th January 1928

This novel, published in 1891, resonates, in surprising but subtle ways throughout our own social strata.  Indeed, the central theme of this work, viewed by many as Hardy’s masterpiece, hinges upon the importance of female virginity before marriage.

This consideration was reflected as recently as the 1981 marriage between heir to the British throne Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.  Despite their twelve-year age difference, and their vastly diverging interests, Lady Diana’s virginity rendered her one of the limited number of candidates acceptable as Princess of Wales, and potential mother to the next  king of Great Britain.   

From its beginning, Tess of the d'Urbervilles is based upon a false supposition.  During a time of major economic depression in the 1870s, Tess Durbeyfield's father becomes absorbed by a hint from his vicar of his possible connection to the similar named family the "d'Urbervilles", who possessed significant wealth.  

Without any further verification, Durbeyfield determines to seek to gain whatever he can from this tangential connection.  Hence, after correspondence, Durbeyfield invests the family’s meager financial resources in sending his lovely, seventeen-year-old daughter, Tess, to visit their “relatives”.

Once having met her, Alec d’Urberville, accustomed to obtaining whatever or whomever he fancies, soon grows amazed by Tess’s ability to resist his amorous efforts.  Slowly, unused to the slightest rebuff, his feelings increase, until they begin edging towards love.

As to Tess, while she does her utmost to avoid becoming one more in a series of discarded conquests, she begins to pulsate.  In theory, she remains on the d’Urberville estate in hopes of her small wages as poultry keeper will compensate her family for its outlay regarding her journey.  Later, during a night in a field, her intimacy with d’Urberville is crystallized.

Hardy leaves it to the reader to determine to what degree, if any, her response is consensual.  During the late Victorian era, the thought of a girl or woman, especially if unmarried, feeling lust and or libido, could not be endured.  Thus, in this and other novels written by authors during the same era, the writer and reader collude in a form of political /moral correctness.

At any rate, this encounter results in Tess, humiliated and pregnant, returning to her village.  Although her baby lives only a few weeks, its conception and birth has made her a pariah.  Any hopes she might have of respect lies in traveling some distance.

Having found work on a dairy farm, she encounters the apprentice minister, perhaps satirically named Angel Clare.  Despite his bountiful choices as to a bride, Tess’s beauty and integrity urges him to propose.  Tess, having become besotted by Angel, fears confession of her indiscretion will impel him to retract his proposal.  (in the most ominous sense, she is right.)

Hence, although Tess and Angel marry, anguish soon besets them.

On their wedding night, Angel admits to a brief but wild interlude with an older woman.  Engulfed by a sense of relief, Tess reveals her encounter with Alec d'Urberville.  Angel, appalled and overwhelmed, explains to Tess her seeming innocence had induced him to ask her to become his wife; her words have flawed his belief in her to the point of his inability to consummate their union.  After several days of strain, Tess urges Angel to leave.  He agrees, promising to strive, from his deepest soul, to find some means of forgiving her.

The remainder of the book involves plot twists too intricate for our purposes here.  To summarize, Alec d’Urberville, finding Tess and her family near destitution, offers to support all of them if Tess will live as his mistress.  She agrees, again ostensibly based on need rather than any erotic wish.

While acknowledging Hardy’s genius, some critics have noted his tendency to force his characters to commit acts almost wholly inconsistent with their previous conduct,  in order to facilitate the conclusion he seeks.  While I will not ruin the ending for future readers, I join with those who maintain Tess’s subsequent actions fall into this somewhat puppeteer pattern.  

Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover

Ted Conover: born January 17th 1958 

While anthropologists often travel into areas where there lives are imperiled, the wildest jungle tribes cannot be more menacing than those held captive in a major American prison.  Yet, as part of his research into various subcultures, Ted Conover undertook the task of becoming a prison guard at Sing Sing for a year. 

(The politically correct term is “corrections officer”, but here I will use the terms “prison guard” and “corrections officer" interchangeably.) 

Although forced to undergo the same training as his fellow corrections officers, Conover’s position differed from theirs in that he knew, although his instructors, and later those prisoners over whom he would be given control guessed that for him this constituted research into the underworld of confined criminals.
  
To some degree, this gave him, in theory at least, some sense of detachment.  Having earned a PHD in anthropology, and written several books on various aspects of the lives of the marginalized, his lifetime income and later pension did not depend upon his job evaluation.  Still, caught in the barely controlled mayhem of Sing Sing Prison, he soon felt as constricted by bureaucracy and menaced by convicts as did his fellow guards.

One early lesson he learned was the power of the dis-empowered. The longer a convict’s sentence, the more carefree he could be when a policy proved inconvenient.  True, yard privileges could be suspended, or if the offense was viewed as grave, convicts could be locked in their cells or sent into “the  hole” of solitary confinement. Still, any incentive to comply or co-operate might be curtailed or halted altogether by the length of a sentence.  

Major disruptions in any cell blocks resulted in a temporary lock-down, its duration depending upon the time deemed vital to have a detrimental effect upon plans of similar future misconduct.  This penalty, while having a quieting effect upon the inmates of the cell block involved, required guards to undertake the most tedious prison jobs, generally done by inmates earning 15 cents per hour.

Simultaneously, the inability of such prisoners to queue up for meals compelled guards to bring food to each individual’s cell, and then pass them through the narrow window in each door.  This, Conover recounts, made him feel more like a waiter than a corrections officer.
  
Food, indeed, could be utilized as a tool of control.  At one point, those convicted of what were viewed as the foulest offenses still had a right to be given a sufficient amount of food to prevent their starvation.  While this requirement was met, it was done in the most indigestible way.  The bread upon which such convicts were forced to subsist was made so distasteful as to be all but impossible to ingest. One officer, asked to evaluate it, found it too palatable; it would need to become even harder to swallow.
  
As a reader, I found one of the most gripping aspects of this memoir to be its candor.  While at first succeeding in keeping his prison work separate from his home life with his wife and two young children, in time, this boundary began to erode.  Compared to the anguish he found himself forced to see, and his own balance between conforming to authorities while being fair to prisoners, Conover started to feel overwhelmed.

The details of his wife’s day and his children’s fussing, at times exhausted his tolerance. By the end of his year as a corrections officer, he began to see how this life, lived on a continuing basis, could decimate families.  Fortunately, Conover’s spouse and offspring only suffered a few verbal bruising's, which could be healed by his reversion to his role as husband and father.  

Still, we, as readers, are left with the question as to what becomes of the family lives of those guards who, via decades on the job, sentence themselves, and to some extent those closest to them to a form of lifelong confinement.