Describing this homely village event as a 'Cerealia' Hardy is referring back to the pagan ceremonies of the Romans who performed it in honour of the goddess Ceres in the hope of increasing the fertility of the crops and the people. Information about such rituals might have come from many sources, but we know that he read Frazer's later very famous study of primitive legend, The Golden Bough.
Frazer began the book thus
Hardy, who knew Turner's work had often seen his painting The Golden Bough on his trips to the National Gallery.
Turner's painting contains a pagan dance in the sunlight on the shores of Lake Nemi.
And emerging from the side is the Cumean Sibyl bearing a branch of mistletoe, or what Pliny called 'the golden bough'. The sibyl was one of the assistants of the god Apollo, whose temple can be seen on the hills to the left.
There is the suggestion, then that the sunlit scene in Marlott has something of a solar element to it, yet it was here that Tess grew up and it was here that she came to love the land and its people.
The accidental death of the horse Prince brings the family into a financial crisis, and Tess reluctantly volunteers to contact the rich family of d'Urbervilles living to the east on the edge of Cranborne Chase.
She leaves the comfort of her own valley and in a rite of passage passes first on foot then in a van into another kind of land.
The d'Urbervilles, though she does not know this, are members of the nouveau riche who have simply taken the name to give themselves some kind of credibility. They have moved to a house outside Chaseborough (Cranborne) which has none of signs of ancient lineage that Tess had been expecting
The house, like its owners, and particularly like the son, Alec d'Urberville, is an interloper into this ancient part of the county, and the house stands out against the forest as a strange and anomalous object.
It is in the forest behind the house that Alec seduces Tess, and it is here that a reminder of the dark and pagan past is provided by the presence of the Druidic mistletoe in the ancient oaks.
Pregnant, Tess returns to her home village and after a period of misery returns to the field work during harvest. She is welcomed back by the villages who treat her pregnancy as a misfortune but not a tragedy, and her return to the life of that society is signalled by the appearance of the morning sun.
After the death of her child, Tess decides that she can no longer linger in her childhood home and makes her way south to take up dairy work in the valley of the Froom.
Once again she is accompanied by images of the sun; her simple Christian faith lies happily alongside her paganism, as she arrived in a land where she feels more at home than she has ever done. During the early morning sun rise at Talbothays dairy she falls in love with Angel Clare. Many of the events of the development of the love between Tess and Angel have a mythological dimension, as for example their early meetings in the fields around the dairies.
As the solar year progresses, so does the power not only of their passion but of the other young people in Talbothays.
Tess's adoration of Clare reaches a climax on their wedding day in a moment that Hardy envisages through the powerful sun-drenched painting of Turner.
But as the sun sinks, so does its positive power decline, and as they reach Wellbridge Manor for their honeymoon …
The sun largely disappears from this novel at this point as Clare journeys westward, and Tess goes into emotional exile in Flintcomb-Ash
The landscape of the chalk uplands at Flintcomb-Ash in its featureless barrenness have something in common with the darker moods of Egdon Heath
And when Tess walks to Emminster in the vain hope of support from Angel's parents, she passes through the landscape of 'The Cross-in-Hand' an equally desolate and forbidding location.
Tess finally succumbs to the temptations put in her way by Alec d'Urberville. He agrees to look after her poor and homeless family if she will go and live with him. They retire to the new vulgar seaside town of Sanbourne (Bournemouth). Returning from South America, Angel goes to find her. She murders Alec and the couple set off through the New Forest, through Melchester and onto Salisbury Plain.
The operatic penultimate scene of the novel draws upon a number of the themes of the novel including the insistence on solarism. The druidic history of Stonehenge reminds us of the presence of 'druidic misteltoe' in the Chase and the bunch of mistletoe that Angel hung above the bed in Wellbridge. The sound made by Stonehenge in the wind takes us back to the harp that Angel played at Talbothays and which subtly linked him to the harp-playing sun god, Apollo. Finally a painting of Stonehenge by Turner that Hardy saw at the Royal Academy must have suggested the idea of this as a startlingly dramatic location for his novel.
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