ABSTRACT
In addition to illustrating how the women's club-walk has lost contact with the original sexual and mythic implications of the 'Cerealia', Hardy also excavates more recent historical territory. In the same chapter we are made aware of Tess's embarrassment as she and other white-gowned members of the 'votive sisterhood' (Tess 19) witness the mock grandeur of her father, the shiftless tranter Jack Durbeyfield, riding home from 'The Pure Drop' tavern in his 'triumphal chariot' (Tess 21). The amateur antiquarian Parson Tringham has informed him that he is really 'Sir John d'Urberville', a lineal descendant of a once illustrious family who 'came from Normandy with William the Conqueror' (Tess 14). That a drunken Sir John, riding back to his basic cottage in a 'chariot', has discovered his red blood is really blue, shows Hardyan humour grounded in anxiety and dread, for the consequences of Tringham' s 'revelation' are catastrophic for Tess. Using the anthropological curiosity of 'club-walking', Hardy conducts a bravura thought-adventure through prerecorded history (the remains of a primeval oak forest), Romano-British (Cerealia fertility rites) and medieval periods.
