Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Tess is a (totally and completely doomed) country girl living in the late 19th Century in an English village that seems secluded, even though it's only a four-hour journey from London. Her father learns in the first chapter that he is the last lineal descendant of the D'Urbervilles—one of the oldest, most aristocratic, families in all of England. He foolishly assumes that his aristocratic heritage will suffice to pull his family out of poverty, and so he sends Tess off to "claim kin" (i.e., to borrow money on the strength of their distant family ties) from a wealthy branch of the D'Urbervilles.
Tess
is a very pretty girl, and very "womanly" (i.e., sexy) for her age,
and the son of the wealthy D'Urbervilles, Alec, tries to seduce her. He finds
her too proud and modest to fall into his snares, and so he tricks her into
accepting a ride from him back to the family house at night, and cuts through
the woods. After getting lost (possibly on purpose), Alec leaves Tess to fall
asleep under a tree while he tries to find the path. He comes back, and,
finding her asleep, takes advantage of their solitude to rape her under the
trees.
The
next phase of the book ("Maiden No More") opens with Tess back at her
parents' house in the village of Marlott. She's had a baby as a result of her
connection with Alec, and has secluded herself from her former friends out of a
combination of shame and pride. She works a few odd jobs to make money, and
things are going okay until her baby suddenly gets sick... and dies. Tess is
more worried about the baby's soul than anything else, so she buries it in the
churchyard on the sly.
Time
passes, and most of her friends and neighbors have forgotten about Tess's
troubles. But she hasn't, so she decides to go to a neighboring county to work
at a dairy farm where nobody knows her. One of the other workers at the dairy,
Angel Clare, is the son of a gentleman. Angel is learning about farming so that
he can move to the colonies in America and become a wealthy farmer there. He
and Tess gradually fall in love.
Tess
wants to tell Angel about her past, but she can't bring herself reveal it to
him. Finally, the night before they're supposed to get married, she slips a
note under his door confessing everything. When he doesn't say anything about
it the next morning, she assumes all is forgiven—but really, he never saw the
note. On their wedding night, he confesses to her that he'd had a brief fling
with a strange woman in London long before he'd met Tess. So Tess feels like
she can tell him about Alec, since that wasn't her fault.
But
Angel doesn't see it that way. He's shocked and horrified that she's not a
virgin, and runs off to South America to try and forget about her. Tess is
heart-broken and wanders from job to job, trying to leave her problems behind
her. But her problems keep finding her. Alec runs into her on the road, and
even though he's become a Christian, he becomes obsessed with her again.
Eventually he persuades her to live with him, even though she's legally married
to Angel. But she's given up hope that Angel will ever come back to her.
But
he does come back to her, and when she sees Angel, she stabs Alec in their
hotel room. Angel realizes that he's partly responsible for the murder, and
runs away with her. They flee together across the countryside, and are finally
caught by the authorities at Stonehenge, an ancient monument of huge stones in
the English countryside that was built by the druids or even earlier.
"Justice" catches up with Tess, and she is hanged.
Character
of Tess
Here's
the weird thing about Tess and history. For readers today, it's obvious that
Tess is not only our protagonist, but also the moral center of the novel—the
narrator consistently sympathizes with her, and her moral outlook is
continually shown to be the best one. She's kind of angelic. Right?
But
early critics of the novel believed that Tess was morally at fault for being
raped (um, cancel our tickets on the first Victorian Era-bound time machine,
please) as well as for everything else that happened to her—up to and
including, of course, the murder of Alec.
But
here's the thing: Hardy was a savvy guy, and he knew how critics would respond
to her. He's on the defensive throughout the novel. The narrator is Tess's only
constant friend and sympathizer. Angel, her "true" husband and
supposed soul mate, doesn't understand her until it's too late. Even her own
mother doesn't understand her, as she admits to Angel towards the end of the
novel: "I have never really known her"
Tess
is certainly a difficult character to understand, both for characters in the
novel and for readers. So let's take a closer look at a few passages to try and
clarify a few things.
Tess's
physicality is referred to so frequently in the novel that it's hard not to
think of her attractiveness as her defining characteristic. And a bunch of
characters in the novel aren't able to see past her smokin' good looks. The
scene in which she first meets Alec D'Urberville is the first instance of this:
She
had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just now; and it was this
that caused Alec D'Urberville's eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was a
luxuriance of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a
woman than she really was. She had inherited the feature from her mother
without the quality it denoted. It had troubled her mind occasionally, till her
companions had said that it was a fault which time would cure. (5.63)
The
"luxuriance of aspect" and "fullness of growth" is a polite
way of saying that Tess is curvaceous, and surprisingly developed for her age.
Okay, let's do away with euphemisms: she's rocking a pretty large cup size.
Later
on, when Alec runs into Tess again, he can't stop talking about her mouth:
"Surely there never was such a maddening mouth since Eve's!"
(56.125). Why does Hardy mention this? Because it's important to point out that
Alec's obsession with Tess is purely physical, and his physical attraction to
her has to do with her beauty.
But
Angel is physically attracted to Tess, too. What's the difference? Let's look
at the passage in which Angel is staring at Tess (unbeknownst to her) and
studying her face:
How
very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all
was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that
this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and
cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely;
her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man
with the least fire in him that little upward life in the middle of her red top
lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. (24.8)
Angel
is generally an ethereal, spiritual person—less interested in physical
realities than he is in the spiritual or ideal aspects of things. And in
general, that's how he views Tess—until he really looks at her face, and
especially her mouth. Notice the "yet" in the second sentence. The
"yet" suggests that her face is "lovable to him" in spite
of the fact that it's physical, and not ethereal. So, yes, he's sexually
attracted to her, because no "young man with the least fire in him"
could help it, but she is lovable to him in spite of it, and not because of it.
Tess
herself views her own physical beauty with pride, only to think that Angel is
proud to have a pretty wife. At other times, she is self-conscious and
embarrassed about her good looks. When she travels alone after Angel has left
her, she goes so far as to disguise herself so that she'll be able to avoid the
unwanted remarks and leers of men on the road. She snips off her eyebrows and
ties a bandage around her chin . She somehow sees her own physical
attractiveness as a sin—it's something she cannot help, but her physicality
tempts men, and causes them to accuse her of deliberately tempting them, as
Alec does: "You temptress, Tess; you dear witch of Babylon!" .
Ideal Or Real
The
descriptions of Tess's physicality, and the different attitudes towards it
taken by the three main characters, lead to another question about Tess's
character: is she a kind of mythic "every woman," who can stand in
for some universal female experience, or is her experience unique? Some
characters see her as ideal and mythic, but she insists that she's not—she's
just a regular girl. Let's look at some of the passages that suggest the
ambiguity:
Tess's
eyes are "neither black nor blue nor gray nor violet; rather all those
shades together, and a hundred others, which could be seen if one looked into
their irises—shade behind shade—tint beyond tint—round depths that had no
bottom; an almost typical woman" . Her eyes are every color of the
rainbow, and then some? How does that work?
Her
eyes are somehow universal—they make her an "almost typical woman."
Looking into her eyes is like looking into the eyes of any woman, anywhere—and
from any time—but only "almost." Hardy backs away from saying that
she is a "typical woman," and says she's only almost a "typical
woman."
Angel
calls her by the names of ancient Greek goddesses. Demeter is the goddess of
the earth and of fertility—this makes sense, because Tess has already
repeatedly been associated with fertility rituals .
Artemis is the Greek goddess of hunting, and of the moon, and—ironically—of
chastity.
But
Tess is too complicated to be summed up as either of those characteristics—as
an "earth goddess" or as the "goddess of chastity." Neither
one of them is really true, and neither one of them gets at her complexity as a
person. Both are, to use the academic term, reductive—they reduce her to a
single, simple term or idea. Tess doesn't know who Artemis or Demeter are, but
she knows she doesn't want to be reduced like that, so she says, "Call me
Tess." Her desire to be called by her own name is her way of asserting her
own individuality—she's not an ideal woman, and she's not reducible to a single
term or idea. Her own name is the only way to capture her complexity as a
character.
But
even after Angel stops trying to reduce Tess to these overly simple ideas, he
still refuses to acknowledge her complexity as a character: whenever she
references her past, he laughs it off, as though she could have no history
before coming to Talbothays. How could such a fresh, pretty country girl, he
thinks, have any kind of dark past or history to tell? What stories could that
exterior hide?
One
example is when she starts to tell him about Alec, and he makes light of it,
saying 'Tell it if you wish to, dearest. This precious history then. Yes, I was
born at so and so, Anno Domini—" (30.35). So, in a way, Angel fails to see
past Tess's exterior as much as Alec does. The difference is that Angel can't
see past his idealized vision of Tess as a timeless, ideal woman (who would
therefore have no history), and Alec can't see past his vision of Tess's
gorgeous looks.
Tess's
Spirituality:
Part
of what early critics of Tess of the D'Urbervilles objected to was Tess's lack
of traditional Christian doctrine. If she blamed herself for being raped, and
spent the rest of her life shunning men and trying to atone for her
"sin," they might not have objected to her so much. In that case, the
novel would have become a cautionary tale about the dangers of being just too
sexy.
But
Tess realizes that what happened to her really wasn't her fault—she didn't even
know what sex was before she went to Trantridge. She had no way of defending
herself against Alec because she didn't fully understand what he wanted. She
realizes that she's the victim and, in a moment of mental anguish, she asks
herself why she should suffer so much:
Never
in her life – she could swear it from the bottom of her soul – had she ever
intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgments had come. Whatever her sins,
they were not sins of intention, but of inadvertence, and why should she have
been punished so persistently
So
Tess doesn't blame herself—which early readers saw as problem number one. In
addition, she's not all that well schooled in Christian doctrine. She goes to
church regularly, but doesn't always understand what she hears there. Her faith
pertains more to what she sees in Nature (with a capital "N") than
what she hears in church. Angel teasingly calls her a pagan when they're at the
dairy together, and Tess recalls his remarks when they're at Stonehenge just
before her arrest.
Tess
feels a connection to the ancient, primeval, mysterious stone circle, and says,
"One of my mother's people was a shepherd hereabouts, now I think of it.
And you used to say at Talbothays that I was a heathen. So now I am at
home". Tess feels connected to the pagan history of Britain through her
mother's family, and that's an association that Hardy has stressed from the
beginning of the novel.
Tess
gets all her prettiness from her mother, but that "gift" is
"therefore unknightly, unhistorical" (3.13). Because her mother is a
commoner, and isn't related to an ancient, noble family like her husband, Jack
Durbeyfield / D'Urberville, Tess's prettiness is likewise common, or
"unknightly." But to call it "unhistorical" seems problematic—the
history of her mother's family might not be written in history books, or found
by antiquarians like the Parson Tringham who discovers the Durbeyfield's
connection to the D'Urbervilles, but that doesn't mean that it has no history.
In
fact, Hardy frequently alludes to the ancientness, or even the timelessness, of
Tess's femininity. Her mother collects ancient ballads, and seems to represent
all the old traditions of Britain—the May Dance, for example, is a relic of an
even older fertility ceremony dating back to pagan times and the worship of the
ancient Roman goddess Ceres . That ceremony connects Tess to her matrilineal
heritage (her lineage through her mother) as opposed to her patrilineal
heritage (you guessed it—her D'Urberville lineage through her father). And
Tess's matrilineal heritage connects her to ancient, druidical, pagan times.