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Tess of The D’Urbervilles
The novel is about the tragic life of Tess Dubeyfield, who is a pretty,
exceptionally gifted country girl. Her poor and foolish father, who believes
that he is the descendant of an ancient aristocratic family, and who sends
his daughter to work as a maid for a family by the name of D’Urbervilles.
However, she is seduced by Alec D’Urbervilles whom they believe to be her
cousin, and gives birth to an illegitimated child. The child dies in
infancy. Trying to start a new life, Tess goes to work on a dairy farm.
There, she meets Angel Clare, a man of liberal mind and the son of a parson
and she falls in love with him. She accepts Angel’s proposal of marriage,
and on the wedding night, Angels confesses that he has an affair with a bad
woman. Tess forgives him. In answer to Angel’s confession, she tells
everything about herself and Alec. On hearing this, Angel’s prejudice
overcomes him and he deserts Tess for Brazil. Misfortune and hardship come
upon poor Tess and her family. Her father dies and the whole family is
threatened with starvation. After a period of extreme hardship on the
Flintcomb Ash farm, she meets Alec again. Now Alec D’Ubervilles has become a
preacher, still rich and influential. Tess has made some pathetic appeals to
Angel in Brazil but fails and Alec persuades her to live him. Tess is driven
to accept his protection and lives with him. When Angel returns from Brazil
and feels repentant and comes back to tell her he still love her, he finds
her with Alec and turns away, more hurt than before. Tess hates Alec,
because she believes it is Alec that causes her husband to leave her. Then
she kills Alec. After hiding for a short period of time with Angel, Tess is
arrested and hanged.
The main theme is the suffering and struggling of
weakness and innocence in the series of circumstances. Through the tragic
stories dealing with love and marriage, Hardy attacks the every aspect of
the hypocritical bourgeois society in Victorian Age including legal, moral,
educational and religious phenomena of the world of capitalist relations.
The main character, Tess, is the specimen whose misfortunes and tragedy is
inevitably linked up with the disintegration of the peasantry in England at
that age. The tragic fate of Tess and of her family is symbolic of the
destruction of the English peasantry at the end of the 19th century.
Tess, as the subtitle A Pure Woman Faithfully presented
suggests, is a woman of good nature. When she is away from the patriarchal
mode of life, she is sweet-natured, innocent, simple and diligent. Tess has
every quality to make us admire her, her modesty her sensitivity to nature,
the unconditional love with which she takes care of her brothers and sisters
and the simple earnestness and patience with which her performs her duty.
And she shows perfect, nobility, and generosity of sentiment in her
attitudes toward her simple rivals in love. The pure woman of Tess is
vividly revealed to the reader by Hardy:
“Then their
sister…poured forth from the bottom of her heart the thanksgiving that
follows, uttering it boldly and triumphantly, in the stopt-diapason note
which her voice acquired when her heart was in her speech, and which will
never be forgotten by those who knew her.”
(Chapter XIV)
But she is a victim of the social changes. Hardy
vividly presents the process in which she turns from a simple and innocent
girl to a woman who commits so-called criminal or immoral actions. Her
seeming degeneration is the consequence of her poverty as well as the
suppression as well as exploitation of wicked social moral standards and
religious belief as represented by Alec and Angle. She is victimized by
bourgeois morality and social injustice and suffers morally, physically and
spiritually.
Tess has a keen sense of duty for parents and
relatives for whom she is ready to sacrifice her own happiness. When her
family is in the extreme poverty, especially her father dies, there is no
means to maintain their daily existence and then sense of guilty forces to
her go back Alec again. Her low social position is also a factor attributed
to her tragic life.
She is also a girl of pride, dignity and innocent with
an ardent zeal for life and happiness. Motivated by a tenacious zest for
life, she is heroic in her long endurance of hardship and enduring
retribution. At the beginning of the story sees the mishap of Tess and this
mishap becomes the shadow between Tess and Angel in the later part of the
story. Even though, she does not give up her pursuit of happiness. For her,
life is a continuous battle. Although she is defeated by the injustice, she
never fails. At the ending of the story, she expresses her readiness for the
coming fate:
“She stoop up, shook herself, and went
forward, neither of the men having moved. “ I am ready,” she said quietly.”
(LVIII.)
Tess could also be weak. Her weakness and her
passivity attributed to her tragedy. She submits to her parents’ vanity in
seeking out to claim kin, that her courage fails her over and over again
when she is about to reveal her past to Angel and that she returns to Alec
in spite of the wrong the man has done her before. Tess, a pure, pride and
pretty, is a victim of the combined forces of circumstance, heredity and her
own internal struggles.
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