Passage Illustrated: Suitable to the All-Hallows' Number

Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world’s active hours had grown strong, she crept from under her hillock of leaves, and looked around boldly. Then she perceived what had been going on to disturb her. The plantation wherein she had taken shelter ran down at this spot into a peak, which ended it hitherward, outside the hedge being arable ground. Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched out — all of them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability of nature to bear more.

Tess guessed at once the meaning of this. The birds had been driven down into this corner the day before by some shooting-party; and while those that had dropped dead under the shot, or had died before nightfall, had been searched for and carried off, many badly wounded birds had escaped and hidden themselves away, or risen among the thick boughs, where they had maintained their position till they grew weaker with loss of blood in the night-time, when they had fallen one by one as she had heard them. [Seventeenth instalment, Chapter XLI, 511; in the 1897 edition, "Phase the Fifth," 359]

Commentary: A Sharp Decline in Fortunes and Social Status

Nearly two months' worth of instalments have elapsed since Syddall's last contribution. The angular pose of Tess's torso and her mask-like expression, so different from her rounded form and physiognomy in the September 5th plate, He jumped up from his seat, and went quickly towards the desire of his eyes, accord well with the weirdness of the scene on All Hallows' Eve in the woods, some eight months since Tess and Angel parted. In Chapter XL he sets off for Brazil, and we now see her on this November afternoon reduced to "a basket and bundle in her own porterage" (XLI: 510). Her "flattened purse" is the result of her family's requiring forty of the fifty pounds she had received from Angel's bankers in order to repair their cottage's thatched roof, rafters, and ceiling. Recent wet weather has prevented her from doing remunerative field work, and pride has prevented her from pawning Angel's jewels, enlisting her parents' aid, or returning to Talbothays. As she approaches Chalk-Newton to join Marian on an upland farm, Tess wears "the wrapper of a fieldwoman" (XLI: 510), mirroring the sudden decline in her fortunes.

The scene which the plate describes symbolizes Tess's loss of youth, love, and optimism as she is surrounded by beautiful, dying game birds through whose fate Hardy and Syddall present an analogue for the fate of Tess herself. Dry leaves underfoot, the foliage of holy bushes, dense deciduous trees, the sounds of wild creatures in the surrounding undergrowth, and the boughs overhead establish the prevailing mood of the scene in the "plantation." The most significant detail in Syddall's establishing the lugubrious mood is Tess's skull-like face:

If all were only vanity, who would mind it? All was, alas, worse than vanity — injustice, punishment, exaction, death. The wife of Angel Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt its curve, and the edges of her eye-sockets perceptible under the soft skin, and thought as she did so that a time would come when that bone would be bare. “I wish it were now,” she said. [Chapter XLI, 511; in the 1897 edition, "Phase the Fifth," 359]

Penury and deprivation are driving the solitary Tess to her fate as surely as the pheasants have been victims of a shooting-party of aristocrats. Like the dying game-birds she has sought refuge in the plantation to escape the persecution of "the well-to-do boor" (510) whom she encountered on the road. Syddall makes Tess's identification of her plight with that of the "harmless feathered creatures" (XLI: 511) one of the most striking moments in the narrative-pictorial text of the magazine serial; and this three-quarter page illustration is the largest and most effective of Syddall's five contributions. Jackson relates Hardy's anti-pastoral theme to the reader's growing awareness of Tess's inevitable tragedy. "Tess's clutching at her skirt seems to undercut the horror of her recognition" (Jackson 110) of society's "arbitrary law" having "no foundation in the moral nature" (XLI: 511).

Note: The next two illustrations for this serial version of Tess of the D'Urbervilles are by different illustrators. Please click here for the complete list.

Bibliography

Allingham, Philip V. "The Original Illustrations for Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles Drawn by Daniel A. Wehrschmidt, Ernest Borough-Johnson, and Joseph Sydall for the Graphic (1891)." The Thomas Hardy Year Book, No. 24 (1997): 3-50.

Allingham, Philip V. "Six Original Illustrations for Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles Drawn by Sir Hubert Von Herkomer for the Graphic (1891)." The Thomas Hardy Journal, Vol. X, No. 1 (February 1994): 52-70.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles in the Graphic, 1891, 4 July-26 December, pp. 11-761.

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman. Vol. I. The Wessex Novels. London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 1897.

Jackson, Arlene M. Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981.

Vann, J. Don. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles in the Graphic, 4 July 26 — December 1891." Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: MLA, 1985, pp. 88-89.

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Created 21 January 2001

last updated 12 May 2024