The American Intoxication: Discontinuity, Vision, and Tragic Experience in Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Abstract Since the era of exploration, America has symbolized a rift in history. Hardy uses 'America' to symbolize the absence of history and to initiate visionary activity experienced as present and joyous reality, intoxicating but illusory. An American motif appears throughout Hardy's career, first in 'When I Set Out for Lyonnesse,' then in A Pair of Blue Eyes, marking his courtship of Emma Gifford, which in turn gives the motif biographical point. An irreducible term in the aesthetics of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the motif shapes that novel's representation of tragic experience. As exemplifi ed in Walt Whitman's 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,' the American 'actualism' illuminates Angel Clare's love for Tess at its visionary height. The final American trope is Brazil, a site of ideological exchange in which the narrator substitutes for Clare's hobbling conventions an ethic that mirrors the fluidity of consciousness.