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«Tess of the D’Urbervilles».
The most powerful book is
Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman.
Tess Durbeyfield is the hope of
her poor family. After the horse on which her father’s work depends is killed in an accident, she goes to
work for a rich relative, Alec, who seduces her. Tess improvises a baptism for the child, who dies; the vicar
is reluctant to bury the child (called Sorrow) in consecrated ground. In a later summer, as a dairymaid, she
becomes engaged to Angel Clare, the agnostic son of an evangelical clergyman. On her wedding night, she
tells her husband about her past. Disgusted, although he has been no angel himself, he leaves her. Things at
her home get worse. Working on a harsh upland farm, she meets Alec, who has become an itinerant
preacher but gives it up to pursue her. Her letters to Angel unanswered, she becomes Alec’s mistress for
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the sake of her family. She kills him, then, spends a hidden ‘honeymoon’ in the woods with Angel, who has
returned. She is arrested at Stonehenge and hanged, leaving Angel with her younger sister. ‘“Justice” was
done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.’ This
outraged readers: the book not only attacked social hypocrisy, double standards, the Church, the law and
God, but seemed by its subtitle to condone adultery and murder. Hardy expressed surprise.
The ‘faults and falsity’ in
Tess
(Henry James’s phrase) come from Hardy’s ambiguous use of popular
methods. The crude plot and simple characterization of the ‘shocker’ lured the public into an
ambush where conventional values were upended. The pure woman’s confession that she has been ruined’
by the devilish Alec causes her impure Angel to abandon her. Her innocent fineness then causes the
‘reformed’ Alec to abandon evangelism. The Victorian reader sees that the conventional norms of class,
gender, morality and the supernatural do not work; and that it is natural for Tess to attract Alec and Angel,
and may be natural for her to kill Alec. The use of paradox in the Nineties is not confined to Shaw and
Wilde.
Tess
is crude in plot and in the character of Alec, but not in its natural and imaginative style,
although at times there are awkwardly learned references. After the Chaseborough dance, a village beauty
jealous of Tess challenges her to a fight. She strips off her bodice and bared her plump neck, shoulders, arid
arms to the moonshine, under which they looked as luminous and beautiful as some Praxitelean creation,
in their possession of the faultless rotundities of a lusty country girl. She closed her fists and squared up to
Tess.
Alec rides up and rescues her: ‘Jump up behind me,’ he whispered, ‘and we’ll get shot of the screaming cats
in a jiffy!’ Although a female punch-up is subject for neo-classical laughter in Fielding’s
Tom Jones,
the
Greek sculptor Praxiteles has not much to do with this episode, omitted from
Tess
’s serialization in the
popular
Graphic.
The mention of Aeschylus, as the curtain comes down on Tess, forces a comparison with
Tragedy. But ‘the President of the Immortals’ was not a familiar phrase even to classicists, and is less well
introduced than the mention of Cyrus at the end of
Middlemarch.
Hardy may have thought his pure
suffering woman a more realistic modern counterpart to St Theresa than Eliot’s martyr to idealism,
Dorothea. Having rescued Tess from the frying-pan, and the ‘screaming cats’, Alec loses his way in the
night. Tess is tired, and he stops to give her a rest, lending her his overcoat. He finds out where they are,
and returns. The Chase speaks better of innocence and wrong than this last question. Hardy is best when
he allows description to interpret itself, as in the visionary scenes of courtship at Talbothays Dairy. He is a
great visual and symbolic storyteller, rather than a social analyst in the tradition of the 19th-century
realistic novel. The red-mouthed pure-hearted Tess is a memorable symbolic figure.
The passing away of the sturdy and traditional also occupies the background of
Tess of the
d’Urbervilles
. Jack Durbeyfield, a penniless tradesman, having discovered his ancient d’Urberville ancestry,
sends his daughter Tess to seek charity from a wealthy family that has taken the d’Urberville name. Tess is
seduced by the son, Alec d’Urberville, and has his child, who dies. Several summers later, while working as
a dairymaid, she falls in love with Angel Clare, a clergyman’s son, and marries him. On their honeymoon,
she confesses her seduction by Alec, only to have Clare denounce and leave her. Tess later encounters Alec,
who has become an evangelical preacher. Her beauty tempts him. Wretched and impoverished, she yields
to Alec’s coarse affection and his taunts about her husband’s desertion, and goes to live with him.
Regretting his cruelty, Clare returns to find Tess. She kills Alec to rejoin Clare. They flee but are caught at Stonehenge.
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Tess is tried, convicted, and hanged. In showing Tess as the victim of many forces, the novel relentlessly exposes the
disparities between moral code and moral conduct and between justice and mercy.
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