AN EXPERIMENT IN TRAGIC FORM: ANTHROPOLOGICAL RITUAL AND SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION IN TESS OF THE D’URBERVİLLES

Year 2009, Volume: 22 Issue: 1, 71 - 93, 03.01.2011

Michael Zeitler

Abstract

“Sacred Spaces: Anthropological Ritual and Symbolic Representation in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” draws parallels between Tess and J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which Hardy discussed with Edward Clodd in 1890 and began reading in 1891. Like many of Frazer’s early and enthusiastic readers, Hardy was familiar from the mid 1870’s with such anthropological concepts as “survivals,” “animism,” “fetishism,” “solar myth,” and “vegetation spirit.” By the 1890’s, however, the traditional agricultural community with its long held customs based on direct contact with nature’s seasonal cycles – the culture defined by Hardy in Far From the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native, for example – was rapidly disappearing, and references to
primitive ritual no longer had a collective meaning in “modernized” Wessex. The Golden Bough, however, in revealing the psychological potency in the symbolic structure in primitive ritual, would point not only Hardy but a generation of writers in a new direction. Frazer supplied ethnography with a compelling narrative: a community, in order to ensure its survival, makes the ritual sacrifice of one of its highly positioned individuals at a designated time and place and participates in the guilt and benefits of that sacrifice. If Frazer suggested the dramatic and narrative possibilities of primitive ritual and custom, Hardy’s 1890 reading of J.A. Symonds’s recently published Essays Speculative and Suggestive encouraged his experimentation with their symbolic employment in fiction. Together, Frazer and Symonds suggest the possibility of a fiction both realistic and tragic. Hardy would tell the story of rural Wessex’s decline as the struggle and sacrificial death of one of its ideal members, the symbolic representations of primitive Britain emotionally heightening an inherently tragic plot. Throughout the novel, a series of scenes – the May dance, the death of Prince, the Chase seduction/rape, the wedding mistletoe, the monolithic Cross-in-Hand, the novel’s powerful climax at Stonehenge, and Tess’s execution by hanging – establish a symbolic connection between Druid ritual and Tess as a sacrificial and tragic figure When Frazer begins by telling the story of the King of the Wood at Nemi, he does this in a tone which shows that something strange and terrible is happening here. And that is the answer to the question “why is this happening?” Because it is terrible. 

Keywords

EXPERIMENT, ANTHROPOLOGICAL, RITUAL

AN EXPERIMENT IN TRAGIC FORM: ANTHROPOLOGICAL RITUAL AND SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION IN TESS OF THE D’URBERVİLLES

Abstract

“Sacred Spaces: Anthropological Ritual and Symbolic Representation in
Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” draws parallels between Tess and J.G. Frazer’s
The Golden Bough, which Hardy discussed with Edward Clodd in 1890 and
began reading in 1891. Like many of Frazer’s early and enthusiastic readers,
Hardy was familiar from the mid 1870’s with such anthropological concepts
as “survivals,” “animism,” “fetishism,” “solar myth,” and “vegetation spirit.”
By the 1890’s, however, the traditional agricultural community with its long
held customs based on direct contact with nature’s seasonal cycles – the
culture defined by Hardy in Far From the Madding Crowd and The Return of
the Native, for example – was rapidly disappearing, and references to
primitive ritual no longer had a collective meaning in “modernized” Wessex.
The Golden Bough, however, in revealing the psychological potency in the
symbolic structure in primitive ritual, would point not only Hardy but a
generation of writers in a new direction. Frazer supplied ethnography with a
compelling narrative: a community, in order to ensure its survival, makes the
ritual sacrifice of one of its highly positioned individuals at a designated time
and place and participates in the guilt and benefits of that sacrifice.
If Frazer suggested the dramatic and narrative possibilities of primitive ritual
and custom, Hardy’s 1890 reading of J.A. Symonds’s recently published
Essays Speculative and Suggestive encouraged his experimentation with their
symbolic employment in fiction. Together, Frazer and Symonds suggest the
possibility of a fiction both realistic and tragic. Hardy would tell the story of
rural Wessex’s decline as the struggle and sacrificial death of one of its ideal
members, the symbolic representations of primitive Britain emotionally
heightening an inherently tragic plot. Throughout the novel, a series of
scenes – the May dance, the death of Prince, the Chase seduction/rape, the
wedding mistletoe, the monolithic Cross-in-Hand, the novel’s powerful
climax at Stonehenge, and Tess’s execution by hanging – establish a
symbolic connection between Druid ritual and Tess as a sacrificial and tragic
figure.When Frazer begins by telling the story of the King of the Wood at Nemi,
he does this in a tone which shows that something strange and terrible is
happening here. And that is the answer to the question “why is this
happening?” Because it is terrible.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough

Keywords

EXPERIMENT, ANTHROPOLOGICAL, SYMBOLIC

References

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