Return to Book Review Menu
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Originally entitled Daughter of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy's Tess of the
d'Urbervilles was published in 1891. The narrative begins with a revelation by a parson
to John Durbeyfield that the latter's surname is a corruption of the name d'Urberville, a
once prominent family name of Norman aristocracy, now extinct. John is a bibulous man
of little motivation, and he lacks the mental acuity to adequately maintain his already
limited household, but his children are healthy, and his wife Joan happily sings as she
performs her mundane chores. In celebrating his newly discovered ancestry, John
becomes too drunk to take the family's harvest to market, and the chore falls upon
pubescent Tess. On the way, Tess accidentally kills the family horse after the chaos
caused by a speeding wagon.
In her simplicity, Joan believes that the newly recognized association with her husband's
wealthy ancestral past commands certain advantages, so she sends Tess to visit a
wealthy widow, a Mrs. d'Urberville of the nearby town of Trantridge. Tess acquiesces
because of the guilt she has for killing her family's primary means of maintaining their
cottage. Unknown to anyone, the widow's claim to the ancestral name is false, but it's
Return to Book Review Menu
this connection that leads to Tess's deflowering by the widow's son Alec, which haunts
Tess for the rest of her life.
After her deflowering and the premature death of her son, whom she names Sorrow,
Tess goes to work on a dairy farm where she meets a group of coworkers. Marian, Izz
Huett, and Retty Priddle befriend Tess, and they dance in and out of Tess's life until the
end. She also meets and secretly falls in love with Angel Clare, the third son of
Reverend James Clare. In his quest for intellectual liberty, Angel embraces a more
liberal interpretation of religious piety whereas his father, Reverend James Clare, is the
paragon of religiously dogmatic acceptance, an incorrigible man of the cloth, irrevocable
in his spiritual infallibility, yet he doesn't harshly judge others who think differently than
he, including his three sons. He does offer unsolicited dogma to perceived wretched
souls with an effort to convert, but he is much more tolerant of others than his cohorts or
even his sons. The senior Clare tries to convert Alec d'Urberville but ultimately fails.
Angel Clare is persistent in asking Tess to marry him, which leads her to believe that he
truly loves her, yet Tess feels unworthy. She tries to communicate the humiliating
circumstance of her forced coitus and resulting miscarriage in a letter she slips under his
door, but he never discovers it. Errantly believing that the marriage can easily be undone
if Angel, as a man of means, desires it, Tess finally acquiesces to exchange vows. On
their marriage night, Angel confesses that he has had an affair with an older woman in
his youth. Hearing this, Tess readily confesses her secret, but Angel is incensed beyond
reconciliation. The couple separates almost immediately. He moves to Brazil to try to
secure his fortune with the ultimate possibility of forgiveness and reunion, and she
remains in the land of Albion. Tess's pride, combined with unanswered letters and the
ensuing miscommunication, as well as Alec d'Urberville's deceit, coaxes Tess to falsely
believe that Angel will never return to her. When her father dies, and her family is in dire
straits, Tess reluctantly marries the man who raped her.
Throughout most of the narrative, Tess struggles in an environment controlled by human
misgivings, but for a brief week or so, Clare and Tess's life is perfect. Upon discovering
Angel's return, and realizing that Alec had duped her once again away from the man she
truly loves, Tess murders Alec. Tess and Angel then hide in the woods―nature in all its
perfection. Upon a fallen monolith of Stonehenge, Tess sleeps, a symbolic sacrifice, and
she awakens ready to be taken into custody. The novel ends as Angel and Tess's sister
Eliza Louisa Durbeyfield watch the black flag rise above the prison wall, indicating
Tess's execution.
Return to Book Review Menu
The theme of the novel that strikes me most is that of the double standard between
genders. Angel's youthful, indulgent affair with an older woman is not only tolerated but
expected, yet Tess's rape is interpreted as unconscionable. When Tess finally acquiesces
to the importunes of Angel Clare and the couple sets the date of their nuptials, the
lengthy passages almost extoll the anticipation as Keats in his Ode On A Grecian Urn:
Ode On A Grecian Urn
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunt about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Return to Book Review Menu
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
-- John Keats, 1819
Tess's unendurable anticipation is thereby eulogized, and it strikes me as I read the
encomium that the words I'm reading were published in 1891, which makes me pause.
Tess is in a turbulent emotional squall, tremulously anticipating with volatile
ambivalence the joys and horrors in the extremes of her fiance's possible reactions to her
dubious clandestine past that the days seem to grow exaggeratedly longer, nearly
imperceptible in its passage, yet her particular story of feeling unworthy and
insignificant is just over 120 years old. Here am I, a character myself in this epic called
Life quickly approaching the fiftieth anniversary of my birth, and I'm thinking that my
sublunary stint is merely a comparable blink of the eye when juxtaposed against the
passage in time between my current manifestation and the time of Tess's creation as a
tragic literary protagonist, and if I think back beyond the Elizabethan period in English
Literature and contemplate Earth's estimated 4.6 billion-year existence, Time becomes
irrelevant. If I would have never read Hardy's novel, I would have never been introduced
to Tess's quintessence. Such is the temporal nature of both of our respective terrestrial
manifestations, which, compared to the vastness of infinity, strongly encourages from
me a more bewitching personal understanding of my insignificance.
Filled with symbolism, the author divides the novel into seven sections of Tess's life:
The Maiden; Maiden No More; The Rally; The Consequence; The Woman Pays; The
Convert; and Fulfillment. The narrative is woven around Tess's family, the family of the
reverend James Clare, and the female co-workers who are the friends of Tess. On the
perimeter of these familial boundaries lurks Tess's seducer Alec d'Urberville. The main
theme of the novel may be less Tess's mutability than Angel Clare's. The former seems
merely a victim of her innocence and her self-determined reaction to live as well as she
Return to Book Review Menu
can despite her deflowering by a libertine whose insouciant hubris as well as her baby's
death makes it easy for her to focus her musings on seclusive Nature and her hermetic
existence within. Angel, on the other hand, must deal with, to him, the hypocrisies of his
father's dogmatic conventions as well as cultural mores that emphasize an impossible
moral standard.
Thomas Harding's Tess of the d'Urbervilles is a lengthy narrative that has as its crux an
emphasis on the conflict between men and women including double standards,
hypocrisy, male dominance, distaff supplication, misunderstanding, and unwarranted
grief swirling within a maelstrom of conflicting spirituality between natural observations
and religious dogma. Set within the milieu of rigid Victorian morality, Hardy delineates
the hardships of the title character who was sexually assaulted at the age of eighteen and
the resulting social misuse by her contemporaries, even when they've shown similar
laxity in morality or have even been the agent of her ostracizing. Throughout the
narrative is woven the rhetorical weft and warp of a philosophical fabric's detailing the
ideal of Free Will. Are we ultimately responsible for the decisions and resulting actions
we make throughout our lives, or are we merely reacting, predictably, to the ebb and
flow of pedestrian terrestrial circumstance? There is also a fascination resulting in the
juxtaposition of enchantment and coincidence.
Russell (Rusty) Allen Taylor
July 2013