Having just learned from an antiquarian-inclined country parson that his forebears had been loyal knights to several English kings, Jack Durbeyfield, the haggler, lies down on a roadside bank of grass and orders a passing lad to have a horse and carriage sent for him, with a small bottle of rum, and to have Mrs Durbeyfield prepare him dinner. Thus begins the tale of Tess Durbeyfield's family in Thomas Hardy's best-known, best-loved, and in many ways most complex novel. The idyllic “beautiful Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor” (9) in Hardy's legendary Wessex, mapped out in picturesque, if also rather impersonal, details in chapter two, seems to warrant the fulfilment of fairytale dreams for its inhabitants. Nonetheless, the early chapters are punctuated by episodes revealing Tess's divergent assessments of her family's situation, reading like a foreboding of the consequences of Mr Durbeyfield's foolish, dissolute ways and Mrs Durbeyfield's airy head and slovenly housekeeping. As the parents spend the remainder of the market day's meagre earning at a clandestine pub in their home village of Marlott, publishing and celebrating the news of their long-perished grandeur, Tess worries about the next day's work, minds her younger siblings, and thinks of ways of bringing her parents home from the pub. Intelligent and taking pride in her earlier proficiency in National School, Tess does not seem to belong to the rural proletariat any more than she does to her family, yet accepts her condition resignedly and lucidly, having more faith in hard work than in any illusory belonging to some extinct aristocratic line.
First seen earlier that day, participating in a young women's May Day procession and dance, where she stands out for her sensuous beauty, sixteen-year-old Tess seems possessed of a wisdom and sense of responsibility beyond her years. Portrayed as a child of nature, all instincts and receptiveness, she has a purity of a primitive kind, corresponding perfectly to the pre-Christian rite she is involved in, and materialising in the fatalism with which she accepts the accidents of her life. Aware of her eldest daughter's assets, Joan Durbeyfield hopes to send her to claim kin with a rich family bearing the name d'Urberville. Yet Tess resists such plans, which she finds demeaning, and when the next morning her inebriated father is incapable of undertaking a new market trip, she hitches the horse, Prince, and, together with her younger brother, Abraham, she sets out herself rather than let her family miss an opportunity of gaining their livelihood. In the dark hours of the early morning, Prince is hit by the post wagon and killed, and although she manages to deliver her wares, Tess feels responsible for the death of her family's one source of income, and decides to seek work with the d'Urbervilles. At their estate at Trantridge, she at first meets only young master Alec, who is obviously charmed by her freshness and beauty and promises to help. Tess is soon hired to tend Mrs d'Urberville's poultry, but learns that the family have in fact made their money in trade and have bought the name together with the estate rather than inherited it, so she is never acknowledged as more than a servant girl. It is in that capacity that cynical Alec seduces or rapes her on a dark night in a neighbouring wood, the Chase, in circumstances that, in keeping with Victorian reticence, are never fully revealed to the reader.
Titled “Phase the First: The Maiden”, the opening section thus introduces the familial, social and geographical backgrounds that conspire in determining Tess's trajectory to “Phase the Second: Maiden No More”, and even ends with a hint that perhaps Tess's misfortunes were a visitation on the children of the sins of the D'Urberville forefathers (91). Characteristically resilient, rather than attempt to make Alec face up to the consequences of his immorality and reach some sort of settlement, as her mother wishes she would, Tess prefers to return home, where in due time she gives birth to a child. Amidst very ambivalent reactions from her small community, Tess makes efforts to become re-integrated, if not fully accepted. Yet when her small child dies without benefit of clergy, she baptizes it Sorrow, in a lurid and dismal ceremony she performs late at night under the baffled gazes of her siblings, and buries it in an unhallowed corner of the cemetery, thus acknowledging the magnitude of her isolation.
In “Phase the Third: The Rally”, after a long period of mourning, Tess takes up a position as dairymaid at a farm called Talbothays, in the lush, fertile valley of the river Froom or Var. Unknown to the inmates and labourers of the dairy farm, she is soon courted by a young gentleman, Angel Clare, who works there as an apprentice. Although the son of an exemplary, if somewhat narrowly doctrinaire, clergyman, and although he himself is well educated, Angel Clare has had a rather agitated, doubt-filled youth. His thinking revolves around the Greece/Palestine (Hellenism/ Hebraism) dichotomy that Mattew Arnold articulated in Culture and Anarchy (1869), concluding that the western world might have been a much better place had Greek civilisation, rather than Christianity, had the greater impact on its moral values. Realising that he could not, in good faith, take holy orders and renounce his inquisitive thinking in favour of what he calls “an untenable redemptive theolatry” (149), Angel has decided to learn about farming and then establish himself either in the English countryside or in the Colonies. At Talbothays his gentlemanly manners and good looks are admired by all four unmarried dairymaids, but he soon makes his preference for Tess manifest and even proposes to her repeatedly, though apprehensive of his parents' disapproval of her social background. Disclosure of her noble ancestry partially appeases his apprehensions, and her innate intelligence encourages him to undertake her education. Tess proves a most receptive and able pupil: her English improves considerably, as do her manners and sensibilities, and she absorbs many of her tutor's ideas, including his scepticism of institutional religion. Nonetheless, she rejects him for as long as she can, despite her own passionate love for him, as she is painfully aware that had her past been known she would be ostracised as a fallen woman. Yet when she asks her mother's advice in the matter, Joan writes back asking her to promise not to reveal her misfortunes to Angel. Torn between such contradictory impulses and loyalties, Tess in the end assents to marry Angel Clare, but still makes several failed attempts to confess to him what in a conventional light were regarded as her sins. Shortly before the wedding she even writes it all in a letter that she slides under his door, but the letter is caught under a carpet and Angel never sees it.
On New Year's Eve they are married in front of a very small gathering of friends and leave for a mill in the same vale, where Angel hopes to learn the trade. On the wedding evening, alone in the old mansion where they have rented a room, under the inexorable gaze of d'Urberville family portraits, Angel confesses that before coming to Talbothays he had spent a short period in London, in the illicit company of an older woman of loose morals, and asks Tess's forgiveness for this. Encouraged to discover that he, too, has a similar experience to atone for, Tess in her turn reveals her own shameful, painful past. Far from showing the same kind of understanding with which his lapse has been met, Angel puts an abrupt end to their marriage and makes arrangements for her to return to her family and for himself to travel to South America. Asked whether she might write to him, he dissuades her from doing so unless in extreme situations. “Phase the Fourth: The Consequence” thus comes to an end, and a new one, ominously titled “The Woman Pays” begins for Tess.
Returned once more to her family, Tess gives them whatever money Angel has set her up with and soon finds herself in need of a job. No pastoral Talbothays opportunity presents itself this time, and she ends up doing very harsh work in all kinds of weather at Flintcomb-Ash Farm, working for a ruthless farmer and surrounded by little sympathy. Nature itself seems to have lost its empathetic configuration: the descriptions of Flintcomb-Ash Farm, with its bare, rock-strewn, windy fields in winter, facing up to an equally featureless, impassive sky, seems to foreshadow the much later landscapes of surrealist painting (see for instance the beginning of chapter XLIII). When the poverty and hard work become unbearable, Tess makes an attempt to contact Angel's parents in Emminster. As she waits for them to return from church and then dine before she can call on them, she overhears Angel's brothers criticising Angel's decisions – both his choice of a wife whose appropriateness has aroused suspicion, and his escape to the colonies – as causes of his imminent ruin. Fearing that she would be received as the principal source of Angel's undoing, Tess gives up her plan and starts on her way back to Flintcomb-Ash.
In a village she finds the community assembled to hear the sermon delivered by an itinerant recent convert, who turns out to be Alec d'Urberville. Having been converted by old Mr Clare, Alec seems briefly intent on the salvation of his soul. Noticing Tess in the crowd, he overtakes her after the end of his sermon and makes her swear on the tombstone of some ill-fated criminal that she would never tempt him again. Taken aback by his sudden and implausible conversion, Tess expostulates bitterly on dogma without faith and morality, proving to have assimilated much of Angel Clare's scepticism. Tess's newly found intellectualism, however, proves detrimental to her, as Alec seeks her out at the farm and announces that her arguments had convinced him of the shallowness of his new beliefs, and that he intends to resume his relationship with her. From now on, his pursuit of her is unrelenting, and when her parents fall ill and she is forced to return to Marlott, he constantly insists on offering help. After her father's death, the Durbeyfields soon find themselves in need of a new home, the old one having been leased to them for the duration of John Durbeyfield's life and the neighbourhood being generally averse to harbouring a woman of doubtful morality. Their attempt to move to the little town of Kingsbere, seat of the D'Urbervilles of old, fails disastrously, and, as she realises that she cannot provide for her large family, Tess eventually gives in to Alec d'Urberville's persistent offers of shelter and help in exchange for a resumption of their affair. The Durbeyfields are thus safely installed in the garden house at Trantridge, while Alec and Tess travel together as man and wife.
The denouement, or “Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment”, begins. Having failed to find a convenient situation in South America, Angel Clare returns to England, gaunt with illness and gnawed by doubts regarding his behaviour to his wife. Tess had written him two letters, one begging him to return or write for her to go to him, when Alec resumed his pursuit of her, and a second, in despair, accusing Angel of cruelty when she realised that she would not be able to support her family if they had to move from Marlott. Gradually persuaded of the wrongfulness of having judged Tess on the strength of what had been done to her rather than of her own good intentions and pure heart, Angel soon decides to seek her out. He eventually finds her in a boarding house at Sandbourne, living there with Alec as Mrs D'Urberville. The encounter, in the downstairs parlour, is excruciatingly painful, with an uncomprehending, emaciated Angel being told by a richly dressed Tess to go away again and forget her, as she is now no longer worthy of his love. As Angel leaves, the suspicious landlady furtively follows Tess upstairs and spies through the keyhole for as long as she dares. Afraid of being caught at it, however, she withdraws to her rooms downstairs, from where she first hears Tess leaving the house and then sees a bloodstain widening on her ceiling. The authorities are subsequently alerted that Tess has stabbed Alec with a carving knife and fled.
Tess overtakes Angel on the road outside the town and tells him that she has killed Alec, animated by an indistinct conviction that this murder would guarantee Angel's forgiveness of her past. Angel finds this hard to believe but takes her off the highway and through unpopulated forests, away from the coast and ports where he thinks she might be sought. After two days of walking and hiding, they take refuge in an empty mansion, where they live undisturbed for several days, while the weather stays rainy. When the weather mends, however, they are discovered by the old woman in charge of airing the rooms and must flee again. The next night they stop at Stonehenge, where Tess lies down on the sacrificial monolith and asks Angel to promise he would marry her sister, 'Liza-Lou, a younger, fresher, more spiritualised version of herself. While she sleeps the police surround the temple and at dawn apprehend her. The novel closes with Angel and 'Liza-Lou walking hand in hand, away from Wintoncester (Winchester), in whose prison tower a black flag is raised to signal that “‘Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess” (508).
Singularly unsatisfactory and deliberately poorly written, the last chapter openly resists the easy moralising of Victorian novels and rejects the satisfactions of catharsis. In keeping with the non-Christian ethos evident throughout the novel, Tess's end does not serve any narrowly didactic purpose, nor does it succumb to conventional notions of high tragedy. The couple walking off hand in hand at the end is a dismal, unconvincing, if not downright grotesque, replica of the happiness Angel might have found with Tess; no sense of closure and satisfaction can be derived from this mock-happy ending. More sinned against than sinner, the protagonist is consistently portrayed as resignedly accepting incidents dealt out to her by a destiny with no rhyme or reason. Readers often refer to this destiny as juggernaut-like, but Hardy's writing resists ready ascription of blame to incontrollable supernatural forces and invites instead a careful consideration of Tess's own – albeit limited – agency and the socio-economic realities of Victorian England that force individuals into certain existential patterns, as well as of the impact of perspective on perception. The closing chapter, with Tess's execution taking place elsewhere and merely announced by the flag, and with a minor Tess walking off with the hero, leaving the ancestors unmoved in their remote vaults, seems particularly designed to raise the question of the plausibility of any ending, whether happy or righteous, given the circumstances.
It is this confrontation of conventional modes of reading that Hardy pursues as he constantly orchestrates multiple perspectives on his heroine. Both Alec and Angel only manage very reductive views of Tess – one very carnal, the other hieratic and idealised – that reveal more about the beholders than about their object. The narrator, whose sympathetic stance is announced in the Shakespearean epigraph – “…Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed / Shall lodge thee” – attempts a more comprehensive portrayal that does not merely scratch the surface of established gender roles – the angel in the house vs. primitive, earth-bound, amoral sensuality. Yet his very sympathy seems to get in the way of his attaining a complete understanding of her personality and of attaining a completely ‘realistic' or “faithful” representation.
Addressing a readership whose jaded literary sensibilities favoured clichés and moralising criteria of artistic worth, Hardy poses a problematising, multifaceted challenge to current worldviews and aesthetic fashions alike, to both humanist prescription and photographic realism which he deems aesthetically simplistic. According to Linda Shires, for Hardy “Art is a disproportioning – (i.e., distorting, throwing out of proportion) – of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities, which, if merely copied or reported inventorially, might possibly be observed, but would more probably be overlooked. Hence ‘realism' is not Art” (148). If this seems to herald the beloved “defamiliarisation” of the much later Formalist critics, it also sheds light on Hardy's relationship to the Victorian novel. Shires suggests that “Hardy's aesthetic demands that readers grasp reality as objectively varied, changing, filtered by multiple and contradictory subjective impressions, and yet indubitably and solidly there when apart from human consciousness” (147). This amounts to a radical debunking of both the romantic pathetic fallacy and the monolithic naturalism of his day, as it incorporates that “historical break between experience and value” that John Ruskin had detected in modern art (147; also 160). The rural Wessex that Hardy describes in this novel is richly textured and anachronistic, defying current representational conventions. It is an oddly pre-industrial setting in which only a few of the harbingers of industrialisation (the railway, the threshing machine) put in an episodic and marginal appearance. Yet the resonant poetry of these descriptions is not a function of the landscape's unspoiled pastoral quality as much as of the imbricated rapports that humans establish with the land – aesthetic, economic and historic.
First published in volume form in November 1891 and subtitled “A Pure Woman, faithfully presented by Thomas Hardy” on an afterthought, the book had been previously published in part in a number of periodicals: the Graphic, the Fortnightly Review and the National Observer. Its great – albeit for some scandalous – success on first volume publication was followed by several re-prints in quick succession. While the first edition was accompanied merely by an “Explanatory Note”, the fifth and later editions were prefaced by the author's bitter litany of the resistance the novel was met with from various quarters, despite its general public success. Along with the critical misunderstanding and public ill-will that attended the publication of Jude the Obscure (1896), this cold reception determined Hardy to renounce novel writing and devote the last thirty years of his life to the writing of poetry and of his autobiography. By 1895-96 (the years of the publication of his collected Wessex Novels, or “Novels of Character and Environment”), however, his standing as a major novelist had been definitively established and Tess was quick to become one of the greatest public favourites in English literature.
Works Cited
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Penguin
Popular Classics, 1994.
Shires, Linda M. “The Radical Aesthetic of Tess of the
D'Urbervilles”, in Dale Kramer, ed. The Cambridge
Companion to Thomas Hardy. Cambridge UP, 1999, pp.
145-163.
3099 words
Citation: Schneider, Ana-Karina. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 23 February 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=1679, accessed 16 October 2024.]
