Introduction main part

2.5.Tess of the d'Urbervilles Characters

The main characters in Tess of the d'Urbervilles are Tess Durbeyfield, Alec Stoke-d'Urberville, and Angel Clare.

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  Tess Durbeyfield is a poor young woman whose father discovers that their family may be descended from the noble d'Urberville line.
  
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  Alec Stoke-d'Urberville is Tess's rich employer, who rapes her. He later becomes a preacher but abandons his religious conversion to take advantage of Tess again.
  
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  Angel Clare is a young intellectual who falls in love with and marries Tess, then abandons her upon learning of her past. After a change of heart, he returns to Tess too late and ultimately witnesses her hanging for murder.
  

Characters

Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 2226
Generally the novel's minor characters sometimes come to life with quick, deft strokes of defining habits or idiom, such as Joan Derbyfield's charming penchant for malapropisms and her outrageously funny fund of historical misinformation, contrasted with her streak of mendacity, even in consenting (implicitly) to Tess's becoming D'Urberville's concubine in order to keep the family afloat economically, or the bitter vindictiveness of Farmer Groby, who is as deferential when questioned by Angel Clare as he is cruel in his treatment of Tess, or the good-natured drunkenness of Marian. But our responses to the novel really depend on how we view the triad of central characters, whom Donald Hall, at the risk of allegorizing the narrative, labels thus: Alec represents the emerging bourgeois mindset and controls the novel's action; Angel represents a pious but superficial liberalism reacting against an oppressive orthodoxy, but one untested by actual experience; and Tess represents "the soil" and "the dead past." As we saw in the past section, the characters form a triangle on the theme of free will and inescapable destiny¹³.