A pure woman? Tess of the D’urbervilles
Neil King
Neil King examines the idea of Tess as a 'pure' woman, both in the
context of the furious debate this provoked in Hardy's times and shifts
away from a rural 'innocent' world.
Tess Durbeyfield allows herself to be seduced by a rogue, has an illegitimate baby who dies,
keeps her past secret in order to marry another man, becomes the mistress of the rogue when her
husband hears of her past and leaves her, and murders her lover when her husband returns to
forgive her.
A pure woman?
Hardy writes in the Preface to the 1912 edition of Tess of the D'Urbervilles:
Respecting the sub-title [...] it was appended at the last moment, after reading the final proofs, as
being the estimate left in a candid mind of the heroine's character - an estimate that nobody
would be likely to dispute. It was disputed more than anything else in the book. Melius fuerat non
scribere ['It would have been better not to write it'] But there it stands.
In his autobiography, published posthumously, Hardy describes with wonder - and, I suspect,
some delight - that guests at a dinner held by the Duchess of Abercorn were 'almost fighting
across her dinner-table over Tess's character', some regarding her as a 'poor wronged innocent'
and others as a 'little harlot'. In various places Hardy made is quite clear what he thought about
his 'pure woman'. Despite the Latin tag he used above, I suspect that he did not wish the sub-title
unwritten, and enjoyed his provocation of late-Victorian prudery where people - certainly most
men - liked to view women in black and white terms as either pure goddesses or sullied harlots. It
would be interesting to know the male/female split in the Duchess of Abercorn's two groups. In a
letter Hardy wrote:
Reading over the story after it was finished the conviction was thrust upon me [...] that the
heroine was essentially pure [...] purer than many a so-called unsullied virgin: therefore I call her
so [...] But the parochial British understanding knocks itself against this word like a humblebee
against a wall, not seeing that 'paradoxical morality' may have a very great deal to say for itself,
especially in a work of fiction.
Paradoxical morality
And this last point about the book being a work of fiction is important. Tess arouses passions as if
she were a real person - certainly the Duchess of Abercorn's guests behaved as if this were so 1
rather than a fictional literary construction. Hardy's use of the phrase 'paradoxical morality' is
deliberately ambiguous. Elsewhere in letters he describes Tess's 'mistake' and 'fall', yet in Chapter
20 Angel Clare regards her as Eve before the Fall (see below). A close reading of Chapters 5 to
12 indicates that Hardy possibly intended to sustain in the reader a tension between Alec's
behaviour and Tess's compliance with it. Was she seduced or raped? Possibly Alec takes her in a
drug-induced sleep. Any woman who has been raped doubtless feels contaminated and anything
but 'pure'; but Tess is made of stern stuff, and she can 'rally'. One early reviewer of the novel
picked away at Tess's various failures and concluded that:
Though pure in instinct, she was not faithful to her pure instinct.
All of us know that it is easy to be an armchair critic when we are not ourselves playing the game.
Tess's actions must be seen within the social context of a late 19th-century country girl's
vulnerability. Who, in Tess's situation, however 'pure', might not have made mistakes or shown
weaknesses?
From our 21st-century perspective we may well be exasperated at the 19th-century notion that
Tess sacrifices all claim to 'purity' because of what happens to her at the end of Chapter 11; but
the belief that sexual purity equals the sum total of moral purity is not dead - witness George
Bush's perception that Bill Clinton's immorality lay only in his 'affair' with Monica Lewinsky.
JT Laird (see 'Further reading and other resources' on page 65) suggests that, after the original
furore over his designation of Tess as 'pure', Hardy took trouble to alter some of the text in order
to defend his late decision thus to describe Tess: he made Alec's behaviour more villainous in
Chapter 10, leading up to the seduction/rape in Chapter 11, and he removed sentences from
Chapter 38 where Tess contemplates becoming Angel's mistress - yet the motivation Hardy gives
her, even in this expunged passage, is selfless:
As a path out of her trying strait poor Tess might even have accepted another kind of union with
him, purely for his own sake, had he urged it upon her; that he might have retreated if
discontented with her on learning her story. To be a cloud in his life was so cruel to him that her
own standing seemed unimportant beside it; and she could not master herself sufficiently to give
him up altogether.
What is 'pure'? Tess in her setting
So was Tess 'pure'? What does 'pure' mean? Is anyone 'pure' in any sense? One way of viewing
Tess's innocence is to see her within the context of the innocence of the pure 'old' Wessex
countryside of which she is a native. Both of them are to be betrayed: the countryside disfigured
by ugly modernisation; and Tess crushed between two conventional men, the casual, uncaring
caddish Alec D'Urberville and the cold, narrowly high-minded Angel Clare.
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Tess's 'purity' may be looked at through Hardy's description of the places of which she is a part.
Take, for instance, the following passage from Chapter 20, which depicts a vibrant Tess and
Angel in the early morning:
Being so often - possibly not always by chance - the first two persons to get up at the dairy-house,
they seemed to themselves the first two persons in all the world [...] The spectral, halfcompounded, aqueous light which pervaded the open mead, impressed them with a feeling of
isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve [...] At this dim inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to
Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, and almost regnant
power, possibly because he knew that at the preternatural time hardly any woman so well
endowed in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his
horizon; very few in England. Fair women are usually asleep at midsummer dawns. She was
close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.
Admittedly most of this is seen through Clare's biased eyes, but the allusion here to the state of
innocence in the Garden of Eden can only be seen to indicate purity, to which is added Angel's
perception of a regal bearing in Tess. The passage continues:
The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along together to where the cows lay,
often made him think of the Resurrection hour. He little thought that the Magdalen might be at
his side. While all the landscape was in neutral shade his companion's face, which was the focus
of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence about it.
The reference to the Resurrection broadens the aura of religious purity from the Old to the New
Testament. The reference to the 'Magdalen' is more equivocal: it must be presumed that, for
Angel, Mary Magdalene represents purity of love - her love for Jesus; she is often revered as the
most beloved female saint after Mary the Mother of Jesus; yet she is also identified as a fallen
women, an adulteress and/or a prostitute. There is historical debate as to the nature of the real
Mary Magdalene, and Hardy could hardly have been unaware of the conflicting resonances he
has built into the text by this reference. A little further on in Chapter 20, Angel continues to
idealise Tess:
She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman - a whole sex condensed into
one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which
she did not like because she did not understand them.
'Call me Tess,' she would say askance...
'Call me Tess'
She insists on the purity of her own name as sufficient, uncontaminated by other idealisations.
Proud and independent ('I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!' - Chapter 35), she is head
and shoulders above the other characters in the novel, and Hardy developed a great affection for
her. The critic Irving Howe has written:
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Tess is that rare creature in literature: goodness made interesting... She comes to seem for us the
potential of what life could be, just as what happens to her signifies what life too often becomes.
She is Hardy's greatest tribute to the possibilities of human existence, for Tess is one of the
greatest triumphs of civilisation: a natural girl.
For 'natural', may we read 'pure'? May we see her purely as a victim, like the white horse, the
pheasants, the animals who are killed at harvest time? Hers is a 'poor wounded name', but one
which remains a proud and dignified beacon to the end. According to Hardy, Tess suffers from
'the cruelty of lust and the fragility of love'. He calls the seventh and final phase of the novel
'Fulfilment'. Fulfilment of what? Of justice? Of death? Of pure love? Or something else?
At the beginning of the final paragraph of the novel, where he tells us that Fate has finished
sporting with its victim, Hardy declares that ''Justice' was done'. He places inverted commas
around 'justice', inescapably pointing at a 'paradoxical morality': 'justice' is appropriate in one
sense, but not in another - implicitly more important - one. Before the novel begins, Hardy places
no qualifying inverted commas around the word 'pure'.
Article Written By: Neil King was Head of English at Hymers College, Hull. He is now running
a small professional theatre and role-play company.
This article first appeared in emagazine 41, September 2008.
https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine/articles/15041
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