As we've moved forward this semester in our study of the long nineteenth century, we have noted how advances in scientific knowledge challenged Christian beliefs. Darwin's theory on the origin of species shook the belief that God had created the world in its ideal form that had not changed since the moment of creation. The continued discovery of fossils also brought to light the idea that God could allow something that He created to die out. These challenges to belief led to a sense of pessimism that pervaded the literature of the time. Writers like William Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy instilled this pessimism in their writings by distorting and corrupting religious allusions in their poems and novels, including Wordsworth's "Michael" and Hardy's Tess of the D'urbervilles. Both of these works contain allusions to the Old Testament story of the binding of Isaac, which both authors use to show that the appearance of the angel at the end of the story doesn't fit into the reality of the world the authors live in.
The allusion to the binding of Isaac is much more obvious in Wordsworth's "Michael." Michael and Isabel are the couple who are granted a child, Luke, in their old age. Michael is asked to sacrifice his son not to God, but to money, sending him into the city to earn money to pay back a debt so the family won't have to sell part of their land. As Michael lets his son go, despite Isabel's objections, an angel doesn't intervene with a replacement sacrifice. Luke never returns from the city and Michael is left to die on his land without his son. The promise of prosperity that God gives to Abraham in the biblical covenant is foregone in Wordsworth's poem, suggesting that such covenants cannot exist in the reality Wordsworth writes about.
Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'urbervilles depicts a similarly bleak portrait of reality as Tess struggles through her life as a fallen woman. While the novel's story doesn't include such an explicit retelling of the binding of Isaac, Hardy's language when Tess and her brother Abraham are traveling to town at the beginning of the novel recalls the covenant God makes with the biblical Abraham. As they travel through the night, Abraham "[leans] back against the hives, and with upturned face [makes] observations on the stars," recalling the image of Abraham looking up at the stars as he speaks to God in the Old Testament. But unlike the stars in the Bible, which provide Abraham hope for prosperity, the stars in Hardy's novel are bodies "whose cold pulses [are] beating amid the black hollows above, in serene dissociation from these two wisps of human." The humans of Hardy's novel are greatly distanced from the natural world and, by extension, from God. Abraham in Hardy's novel must pose his questions to Tess, while Abraham in the Bible can pose his questions directly to God. The rest of the conversation between Tess and Abraham allude to the fact that the novel's characters and the world itself are now distanced from God and his promises. While describing the stars as other worlds, Tess claims that "most of them [are] splendid and sound--a few blighted." Abraham follows up this statement asking if they live on a splendid star or a blighted star. Tess answers without hesitation that they live on "a blighted one," which suggests the disparity between the world full of promises the biblical Abraham lives in and the world of pessimism that Hardy's Abraham lives in. Hardy's Abraham looks up at the stars and doesn't see a promise for prosperity, but a remembrance of their ill luck that "[they] didn't pitch on a sound [star]." This contrast between the biblical Abraham and Hardy's Abraham suggests that the world has changed and God no longer makes promises, placing the pessimism of Hardy's writing against the original biblical story to show that the biblical story and its promise can no longer fit into the pessimistic world that Hardy writes about.
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