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These guys are with you all the way...

http://photos.ellen.warnerbros.com/gall … s_full.jpg

It'll make your eyes bleed and put the kybosh on milk-maid career...

Have a little preface of the dreadful time that you are in for....

The Rally
Chapter XVII

The dairymaids and men had flocked down from their cottages and out of the dairy-house with the arrival of the cows from the meads; the maids walking in patterns, not on account of the weather, but to keep their shoes above the mulch of the barton. Each girl sat down on her three-legged stool, her face sideways, her right cheek resting against the cow; and looked musingly along the animal's flank at Tess as she approached. The male milkers, with hat-brims turned down, resting flat on their foreheads and gazing on the ground, did not observe her.

One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man--whose long white 'pinner' was somewhat finer and cleaner than the wraps of the others, and whose jacket underneath had a presentable marketing aspect--the master-dairyman, of whom she was in quest, his double character as a working milker and butter maker here during six days, and on the seventh as a man in shining broad-cloth in his family pew at church, being so marked as to have inspired a rhyme- Dairyman Dick

A whole heap of tosh. Syncroniised milkmadness coreography. A scene from Tess, the musical.

I'd look musingly toward taking a giant shred upon the above but I'm oath sworn not speak upon the matter.

Tess is a linear story, a narrow scope and focused entirely upon the miserable plight of that one tragic girl. One long slow death. She's always going to be sacrificed for the sake of the parable, we sense that from the off but have to be dutifully tortured en route.

Whilst 'Two Cities' and 'War & Peace’ are epic in their scope. Both follow a multitude of characters upon inter-woven story-lines that collide, crash and come together. Both full of triumph and despair, love and loathing, life and death. They are a rich and expansive gardens whilst Tess is a single pea in a pot.

Your analysis is deep, thoughtful and very well informed and I do understand the sentiment. I’m also extremely grateful (and a little ashamed) that you took the time to answer my comment so comprehensively in reply to my offhand quip re: damned Tess.

You make a great case for the exterior factors surrounding the novel. I think the issue for me is that I read the novel (as much of it as I can stomach) without any consideration for the author’s agenda; his life and times or social and political constructs.

Hardy is trying hard to make a point, that much is obvious (hence the distinct feeling that I’m being led by the nose in the fashion of a parable).
As I mention, the problem here is me. I read Hardy’s prose for what it is. I digested the words in front of me upon the strength of their own standing and without consideration for any other factors outside of that read. I processed the text as a story independent of any other factors.

Indeed, if one read a religious parable from that same POV, then without the conditioning (the context of the story’s true purpose), it will seem contrived and inane. It’s a bit like acting. I love an actor portraying a role with conviction but then again I hate mime artists. Whilst the gifted and convincing actor convinces me the role is real, the story is real; the mime artist uses very unsubtle tools in order to instruct me how to feel: (ridiculously over exaggerated smile for happy and heavily accentuated frown and downturn mouth for sad) and the greater emphasis upon the feature the greater they believe their craft to be. I find mime artists excruciatingly painful to watch. They make me squirm with embarrassment upon their behalf. To a much lesser degree (but a degree all the same), I find ‘Tess of the D'Urbervilles’ to be like a mimed parable. 

You mention ‘fifty shades of grey’ in another conversation. The female protagonist in that novel likens herself to Hardy’s Tess and this essay explores an opinion upon that commonality (or not).

https://legacyofjane.wordpress.com/2014 … des-abuse/

I haven’t read ‘fifty shades’ myself but my wife did and warned me off telling me I’d hate the writing and definitely wouldn’t understand the morality. I’m no prude, in fact I’m probably a romantic. My sentiment towards the premise or type of abusive relationship within ‘fifty shades’, is (or seems to be) along the line of the author of this essay.

‘Romantic abuse’ upsets me deeply. I’m not pious and supercilious upon the morality aspects; with me it is a deep and instinctive revulsion. In the Bosnian war, rape was a weapon. I cannot begin to express the horror of it (in my eyes). 

There are thousands of reports i.e. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world … 71656.html having been in county with the UN during this period I cannot express how upset I was. The fact that this kind of behaviour comes so readily (almost naturally if left ungoverned by laws and society) to so many men is unfathomable to me. All of my instincts (to the very core) are to protect children, girls and women.

I think it would be fair to say that due to my disturbed psychosis upon the matter, the rape scene in Tess of the D'Urbervilles upsets me deeply. It is written in a non-graphic and ambiguous manner. I know that Hardy had constraints upon him as to what was acceptable for publication at the time; and I fail to consider this. But even though graphic description of the sex crime itself is omitted, he could have done so much more with the physiological terror and the evil aspects rather than brush over these aspect making the incident appear as an almost unspoken injustice rather than the heinous and terrible crime it was. For me it is as if Tess is almost dutifully raped and what follows is a soft sermon to drip feed the consequences of the incident toward an audience incapable of reason.
 
I also think that Hardy’s ‘Tess of the D'Urbervilles’ failed to live up the hype that I’d built for it in my own mind. As a young man I read Dickens’ ‘Tale of Two Cities’ and Tolstoy’s ‘War & Peace’. Both novels enchanted me. I was carried along amongst these characters upon waves of emotion. I lived those stories and they moved me beyond description. I picked up ‘Tess of the D'Urbervilles’ with very high expectations (given its classical acclaim) but was sorely disappointed.  For me (a personal and subjective opinion) both ‘Tale of Two Cities’ and ‘War & Peace’ are a thousand times better than ‘Tess’.

‘Tale of Two Cities’ and Tolstoy’s ‘War & Peace’ are two novels that I couldn’t live without, whilst ‘Tess of the D'Urbervilles’ is a novel that I cannot live with.

far far away

So, Well's hated it too. A suffocating melodrama; a contrived parable.

Personally I found it totally patronising, but if people need or needed this soppy drivel in order to realise that women are people too; then the world is a far worse place than I thought. If a person requires a blunt and contrived parable in order to guide them to feel what they should feel naturally within their heart, then it is sad. So very sad.

“A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest. My very worst work was the bleeding (or was it bleeting) heart novel, ‘Tess of the d'Urbervilles’. A drudge of piece that was penned as a joke and that I can’t believe people have actually taken seriously."

― Thomas Hardy

neologism