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Thursday, July 22, 2010

I can't be the first to detect anti-Semitism in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, can I?

So "Tess of the "D'Urbervilles" is in the line of the Dickens novel, in which by some strange twist of fate thankless, boorish, egomaniacal parents (especially fathers) always seem to have sweet, beautiful, devoted children (usually daughters) - it's Little Dorrit moved to the English dales. Tess's father is dumb enough to believe that he's the last descendent of the D'Urbervilles, and when he and his wife learn that there's a distant relative living nearby the send Tess off to curry favor. She doesn't want to go, but calamity strikes: take beehives to market in the predawn (because her father got drunk and overslept), Tess falls asleep and her little wagon collides with the mail wagon, killing the Darbeyfield horse -- a true Hardyesque scene of seriocomic gore, with the horse bleeding to death in the darkness, still tethered. Guilty, Tess is willing to meet her wealthy relative and perhaps be taken into favor. Then we learn that the relative is a complete fraud, who made a fortune and then moved to Wessex and faked the D'Urberville name to appear to be old gentry rather than nouveau riches. The young man of the family is taken by Tess's beauty and, faking his mother's signature, offers her a job on the estate. Can I be the first? - I doubt it and hope not - to detect some anti-Semitism here, as Thomas Hardy describes the fake D'Urbervilles using a lot of anti-Semitic code words and clues: they earned their fortune through "money lending" (horrors!, whereas banking is all right I guess), the patriarch's name is "Simon" Stokes, the son is described as "swarthy," and other not-so-subtle hints. Nothing worse than a Jew pretending to be landed gentry, is there? With good old Darbeyfield it's comic, but with the Stokes-D'Urbervilles (they recently dropped the Stokes) its sinister and malevolent.

3 comments:

  1. "Nothing worse than a Jew pretending to be landed gentry"

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  2. No, you are not the first. It makes me sad, too, because his stance regarding so many things social and political in this novel (and others) is so profoundly challenging to the status quo. And to read this now, 20 years after my first reading, and having started to see this more in British Victorian novels (and perhaps the more clearly for having a Jewish boyfriend an so being more tuned in to antisemitism as a result), pains and saddens me.

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    Replies
    1. Sorry it took me a few days to publish your post.

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