Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Tess of the d’Urbervilles is the most famous novel of Thomas Hardy and one of the great tragedies of English fiction. Tess Durbeyfield, sixteen, the beautiful, dutiful eldest daughter of a poor, feckless family of Wessex villagers, is sent to claim kinship with a rich family named d’Urberville after her father learns that the Durbeyfields descend from an ancient Norman line. The “d’Urbervilles” turn out to be a nouveau-riche family who bought the name, and their son Alec pursues her and, one night in a misty wood, seduces or rapes her. She bears a child who dies. Later, working at a dairy, she falls in love with Angel Clare, a clergyman’s son of advanced ideas, and marries him; on their wedding night she confesses her past, and he, who has just confessed his own sexual lapse, abandons her. Destitute, she returns to Alec. When Angel comes back repentant, she kills Alec and flees with Angel, until she is captured at Stonehenge and hanged.

Hardy’s subtitle, “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented”, was a deliberate provocation to Victorian morality, which regarded a “fallen” woman as impure. The novel was attacked as immoral and pessimistic, and became a bestseller.

At a glance

The story

One May evening, John Durbeyfield, a lazy, drunken haggler (carrier) of the village of Marlott in the Vale of Blackmore, is told by a parson antiquarian that he is “the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly family of the d’Urbervilles”, whose tombs lie at Kingsbere. He is overjoyed, orders a carriage to take him home, and drinks at the inn. His daughter Tess, a handsome girl with “a mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes”, is dancing in white with the village girls at the May Day club-walk; a young gentleman passing through with his brothers, Angel Clare, joins the dance — but not with her — and looks back as he leaves.

That night, because her father is too drunk to go, Tess drives the family’s cart to market before dawn with her little brother; she falls asleep, and the mail-cart’s shaft pierces the breast of their horse, Prince, who dies. The family’s livelihood is gone, and Tess blames herself.

Her mother, Joan, a superstitious, good-natured woman, sends Tess to “claim kin” with a rich Mrs d’Urberville at Trantridge, hoping for help and perhaps a rich marriage. The “d’Urbervilles” are in fact the Stoke family, whose father, a northern merchant, simply annexed the extinct name. The blind old Mrs d’Urberville gives Tess a job tending her poultry. Her son, Alec d’Urberville, a swaggering, sensual young man with a moustache, at once pursues her, forcing strawberries into her mouth, driving her at terrifying speed downhill, demanding kisses.

One night in September, walking home from a fair, Tess is caught in a quarrel with other drunken workers and accepts Alec’s offer to rescue her on his horse. He rides deliberately astray into the ancient forest called The Chase, leaves her to rest on a bed of leaves in the fog while he goes to find the way, and returns to find her asleep. The narrator does not describe what happens next, but asks: “Where was Tess’s guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith?… Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive… many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.” Whether it was rape or seduction has been endlessly debated; Hardy’s language is deliberately ambiguous, and Tess later stays some weeks as Alec’s mistress before leaving him in disgust.

Maiden No More. Tess returns home, “a girl who had been taught a lesson”. She bears a baby, whom she nurses in the fields at harvest, “a woman’s breast to her child”. The baby falls ill; the vicar will not come to baptise it, since her father bars the door; in the night Tess baptises it herself by candlelight in a washstand basin, naming it Sorrow. The baby dies; the vicar, privately moved, tells her the baptism will do, but refuses Christian burial; she buries it in the corner of the churchyard “where God’s allotment… lets the nettles grow”, with a cross made of laths and a marmalade jar of flowers.

The Rally. Two and a half years later, at twenty, Tess resolves to begin anew and goes south to work as a milkmaid at Talbothays, a great dairy in the lush Valley of the Great Dairies (the Frome valley). In this fertile, “oozing fatness” landscape, in summer, she is happy. Among the dairy workers is Angel Clare, the youngest son of an evangelical clergyman, who has refused to enter the Church because he cannot believe its doctrines and is learning farming in order to become a farmer in England or the colonies. He is gentle, idealistic, intellectual and somewhat cold. Hearing Tess speak of how she can make her soul leave her body by looking at a star, he is struck by her. They fall in love through the long summer, in the dawn mists of the meadows and the twilight garden where she listens, transfixed, to him playing the harp. Three other milkmaids, Izz, Marian and Retty, also love him. When the lane floods on the way to church, Angel carries each girl across in his arms.

The Consequence. Angel proposes. Tess, ashamed of her past, refuses again and again, then accepts, believing herself unworthy but unable to resist. She tries to tell him, but he will not hear of her past. She writes a four-page confession and slips it under the door of his room; it goes under the carpet, and he never sees it. On the wedding morning she finds it unopened and destroys it. They are married on New Year’s Eve; as they leave the church, a cock crows in the afternoon — a bad omen.

The Woman Pays. On their wedding night, at an old farmhouse that once belonged to the d’Urbervilles, with portraits of sinister d’Urberville women on the walls, Angel confesses that in London he once spent forty-eight hours of dissipation with a stranger. Tess forgives him at once, and, relieved, tells him her story. He is devastated. “O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person; now you are another.” He sees her as a “dame of a decaying family”. That night he sleepwalks, carries her in his arms across the river, and lays her in an empty stone coffin in the ruined abbey. After three days he leaves her and goes to Brazil to farm, telling her he will write and that she must not come to him unless he sends for her. He gives her money.

Tess, too proud to ask his parents for help, gives much of the money to her family and works wherever she can. In winter she becomes a field labourer at Flintcomb-Ash, a starved, flinty upland farm — “a starve-acre place” — where she and Marian hack swedes from the frozen ground and later feed a steam threshing machine, “the red tyrant that the women had come to serve”, all day without rest. She walks fifteen miles to Angel’s parents at Emminster to seek help, but, overhearing his brothers’ contempt, turns back without seeing his kindly father.

The Convert. On the way back she hears a wandering preacher in a barn — it is Alec d’Urberville, converted to evangelical religion by Angel’s father. Seeing Tess again, he loses his faith and pursues her with renewed desire, claiming that she has tempted him from the path of righteousness. She strikes him in the face with her heavy leather glove, drawing blood: “Once victim, always victim — that’s the law!” Her father dies; under the terms of his life-tenancy, the family is evicted from their cottage on Lady Day, and with nowhere to go, they camp under the d’Urberville tombs at Kingsbere. Alec offers to provide for them. Tess writes desperately to Angel: “O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not deserve it… I will try to forget you. It is all injustice I have received at your hands.” Without an answer, she yields to Alec for her family’s sake.

Fulfilment. In Brazil, Angel, ill with fever and humbled by experience, has learned from a stranger that Tess’s past need not matter. He returns, haggard, and searches for her. He finds her at Sandbourne, a fashionable seaside resort, living in a boarding house as Alec’s mistress, dressed in a fine cashmere gown. “Too late,” she says: “He has won me back to him.” Angel leaves. Upstairs, the landlady hears Tess’s moaning and argument, then silence, and sees a red spot on the ceiling, spreading, “the shape of a gigantic ace of hearts”: Tess has stabbed Alec through the heart with a carving knife. She runs after Angel and catches him: “I have killed him!… I owed it to you, and to myself, Angel.” Stunned, he believes her and promises to protect her.

They wander for days, hiding in an empty mansion in the New Forest, where for five days they are happy. Then they flee north, and at night reach Stonehenge. Tess lies down on an altar stone — “you used to say at Talbothays that I was a heathen. So now I am at home” — and asks Angel to marry her sister ‘Liza-Lu after her death, and whether they will meet after death; he cannot answer. At dawn, the police surround them. Tess wakes: “I am ready.”

In the last chapter, Angel and ‘Liza-Lu stand on a hill above the town of Wintoncester (Winchester) and watch a black flag rise slowly on the prison tower:

“Justice” was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and went on.

Themes

The double standard. The novel’s central injustice is that Angel, guilty of exactly what Tess has suffered, expects forgiveness and receives it, while he cannot forgive her. Victorian morality condemned the “fallen woman” absolutely and excused the man. Hardy’s subtitle insists that Tess is pure — in her intentions, her loyalty and her nature — whatever has happened to her body.

Fate, chance and the gods. Tess’s life is wrecked by a chain of accidents: the parson’s casual remark about her ancestry, the death of Prince, the letter under the carpet, Angel not dancing with her on May Day. The narrator repeatedly protests against the order of things, and the closing line about “the President of the Immortals” — echoing Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound — denounces a universe that toys with human beings. (Hardy said the phrase was not a statement of belief but a figure.)

Nature and society. Tess is associated with nature — the fertile Valley of the Great Dairies, the cycle of seasons, pagan rituals — and judged by society’s artificial laws. “She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.” The novel contrasts the abundance of Talbothays with the brutal mechanised labour of Flintcomb-Ash.

Class and history. The fall of the ancient d’Urbervilles to the peasant Durbeyfields, the purchase of the name by a new-money family, and the eviction of the rural poor dramatise the decay of old Wessex and the dislocation of agricultural workers in the late nineteenth century.

Angel and Alec. The two men represent opposite failures: Alec, the sensual, predatory “false” aristocrat who treats Tess as a body; Angel, the idealistic, spiritual intellectual who loves an ideal of her, “a visionary essence of woman”, and cannot accept the real woman. “She was another woman in your shape,” he tells her.

Reception and afterlife

The novel was praised and attacked in equal measure; the Quarterly Review condemned it as a coarse, disagreeable story, and Hardy remarked, “Well, if this sort of thing continues, no more novel-writing for me.” It sold widely and remains one of the most read Victorian novels. Roman Polanski’s film Tess (1979), with Nastassja Kinski, is the most famous adaptation; others include the BBC series with Gemma Arterton (2008) and Michael Winterbottom’s Indian-set Trishna (2011).

In conversation

• “Once victim, always victim — that’s the law!” — the trap of a past that society will not forgive.
• “The President of the Immortals had ended his sport” — fate’s cruelty to the powerless.
• A Tess — an innocent woman punished for what was done to her.