Beautiful Tragedy

There was a summer (well, actually the more part of a year) that I had an unhealthy obsession for deep depressing literature. I must have read every sad book I saw. It was the year of My Name is Asher Lev, the year of The House of Mirth and The Children, of Lord Jim, Beowulf, Frankenstein, Howard's End, and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Most of all, that was the year of Thomas Hardy.

While I can't claim to have read everything Thomas Hardy wrote, I believe I have read more than pretty much any other person who counts (meaning I am still sane, but barely). This is because I had the brilliant idea to sign up for the Senior Course--that capstone of the BYU English Major--entitled Thomas Hardy and the Landscape of the Imagination. In my own defense, none of the others sounded all that good, and I really wanted to take a class from Bennion; he was a creative writing prof. Furthermore, at that point I had already read two of the books on the course listing ... although those two books happened to be the happiest ones, so I was misled. Or so I can claim.

To this day I maintain that nothing, absolutely nothing could have prepared me, or anyone, for the sort of experience we were in for in reading, all in a matter of about three weeks, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Woodlanders, and Jude the Obscure. It was bad enough that we had just read Under the Greenwood Tree, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and The Return of the Native. And along with that, for one of my essays I did some additional research on the form and substance of ancient Greek tragedy and how it played in to late Victorian/early Modern British lit. I read Medea and Oedipus. Such cheerful stuff.

Did I mention that in my other class, I was reading James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, along with two other Pollyannas by the names of Katherine Mansfield and Ford Maddox Ford (who subtitled his great novel The Saddest Story--I hated that book)?

Jude the Obscure was hands down the most depressing book I have ever read. Nor can I even come close to imagining a book more depressing. It was so downright hopeless I feel physically ill even remembering it. And Tess isn't even that far behind. Yet, as soon as the semester was over, what did I do? I went to the local library, of course, and checked out the film adaptation--all because it starred Justine Waddell, who was my absolute favorite actress at the time. She sort of has this thing for playing tragic characters. Not only did I watch the entire four hours of misery, I watched it all by myself, in the middle of the night, so that when I woke up from the story there was no person, and no sunshine, to offer the least bit of comfort.

I am very blessed today to have survived that glut of hopelessness and self-inflicted punishment, but every so often I find myself drawn back to Tess--scenes of it on YouTube, little bits of the soundtrack sitting unchecked in my iTunes library, and the yellowing book on my bookshelf, deliberately buried in with all the other literature that I would consider Great, but not The Greatest.

It's a good thing they haven't enabled it on Netflix Instantview.