HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE H18/98 022798 "-TESS-QUERIES
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From: "Falck-Yi, Suzanne" <falckyis@waldorf.edu>
To: "'HARDY-L@mailhost1.csusm.edu'" <HARDY-L@coyote.csusm.edu>
Subject: May Day and "Tess"
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 1998 16:56:21 -0600

To the Hardy list,

My students have just started reading Tess this week, and today the
class began when they asked me if it's true that a cat ate Hardy's
heart!  Quite an unexpected question from the class, to be sure, but
it's wonderful to know how the stories of their peers' trip to Max Gate
last summer have been circulating around our campus.....

But on to the matter at hand:  I've been talking with the class about
Hardy's fascination with retaining a sense of the past, and I have a
question about the club-walk.  From Chapter 2:

	The forests have departed, but some old customs of their shades
remain.  Many however linger only in a metamorphosed or disguised form.
The May-Day dance, ... was to be discerned, on the afternoon under
notice, in the guise of the club-revel, or "club-walking", as it was
there called.

What is the connection between what appears to be a more ancient ritual,
the May-Day dance, and this fast-fading tradition of the club-walk?
When would these traditions have started, and how rare would a club-walk
have been at the time of the novel?

Suzanne B. Falck-Yi
Waldorf College
falckyis@waldorf.edu

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Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 20:28:14 -0500
To: HARDY-L@coyote.csusm.edu
From: Sharon Steinberg <cd000910@mindspring.com>
Subject: Tess


Hello, all -- I am taking a post-graduate course in Victorian literature
and am slated to give an oral presentation on Tess in April.  I have gotten
some good articles, but I would appreciate any input about Tess as strong,
Tess as a victim, a survivor, a pawn, in a patriarchal world;  I am also
thinking of working on Hardy's use of folklore and balladry, and would
welcome your thoughts on that subject and how it connects with the main
ideas of the novel.  I ran the idea of writing about Hardy's use of
folklore by my professor and his response was, "What are you going to do
with it?"  Also known as, "so what?"  Any ideas?
Thanks!
						Sharon

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Date: Wed, 11 Mar 1998 09:59:27 -0500
To: HARDY-L@coyote.csusm.edu
From: Donald ulin <ulind@indiana.edu>
Subject: Bibliog: Tess, women, folklore

Tess isn't the novel people generally look at for folklore in Hardy, but I
do think there's a lot there.  (Even aside from the obvious image of the
May Dance at the beginning, there are all the allusions to popular beliefs
and practices in the Dairy and elsewhere.)  On the other hand, it's an
obvious one to look at regarding the issue of women in a patriarchal world.

Here are a few sources on both those subjects.  I find Nunokawa and
Silverman very interesting (though they are so similar that it's a little
peculiar that N. doesn't cite S. in his essay, which he must have seen).

Myer, Michael Grosvenor. "'Traditional' Lullabies in Victorian Fiction:
Wuthering Heights and Tess of the D'Urbervilles." Notes and Queries 35
(233).3 (1988): 319-20.

Nunokawa, Jeff. "Tess, Tourism, and the Spectacle of the Woman." Rewriting
the Victorians : Theory, History, and the Politics of Gender. Ed Linda M.
Shires. New York: Routledge, 1992. 70-86. 

Silverman, Kaja. "History, Figuration and Female Subjectivity in Tess of
the D'Urbevilles." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 18.1 (1984): 5-28.

Straus, Nina Pelikan. "Emma, Anna, Tess: Skepticism, Betrayal, and
Displacement." Philosophy and Literature 18.1 (1994): 72-90.


Good luck,

Don Ulin
Indiana Univ.

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