Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Tess of the d’Urbervilles, novel by English novelist Thomas Hardy, first published serially in bowdlerized form in the Graphic (July–December 1891) and in its entirety in book form (three volumes) the same year. It was subtitled A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented because Hardy felt that its heroine was a virtuous victim of a rigid Victorian moral code. Now considered Hardy’s masterwork, it departed from conventional Victorian fiction in its focus on the rural lower class and in its open treatment of sexuality and religion.

Summary

After her impoverished family learns of its noble lineage, naive Tess Durbeyfield is sent by her slothful father and ignorant mother to make an appeal to a nearby wealthy family who bear the ancestral name d’Urberville, supposedly introduced to England by one of the Norman knights of William the Conqueror. Tess, attractive and innocent, encounters the family’s dissolute heir, Alec d’Urberville, and secretly bears a child, Sorrow, who dies in infancy.

Later working as a dairymaid, she meets and marries Angel Clare, an idealistic man who rejects Tess after learning of her sexual past on their wedding night. Emotionally bereft and financially impoverished, Tess is trapped by necessity into giving in once again to d’Urberville, but, overwhelmed by feelings of injustice when Angel returns to her, she murders d’Urberville. Tess is later arrested and executed.

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Analysis

Tess of the D’Urbervilles is as famous for its heroine as for its notoriously tragic plot. Originally shunned by critics upon its publication in 1891 because of “immorality,” the novel traces the difficult life of Tess Durbeyfield, whose victimization at the hands of men eventually leads to her horrific downfall. The initial encounter between Tess and Alec has been much debated by readers, with some labeling it as a seduction and others as a rape. Scholars have proposed that Hardy deliberately made the scene ambiguous to circumvent censorship practices that were common at the time.

Tess spares the reader none of the bitterness inherent in English country life, and Hardy’s often romanticized love for the landscape of Wessex is balanced by the novel’s grimly realistic depiction of social injustice. A prominent subtext in the novel is the enclosure of the English countryside and the mechanization of agriculture, with landlord farmers, often absentee, turned rural peasant families from lands that they had worked for generations, as happens to the Durbeyfields in the course of the novel. Hardy also criticized the growth of religious sectarianism in making the decidedly unpalatable Alec d’Urberville a “Ranter” preacher, a practitioner of Primitive Methodism.

In Tess, Hardy presents a world in which the human spirit is battered down by the forces, not of fate, but of social hierarchy. Tess’s eventual death, one of the most famous in literature, is a direct result of human cruelty and as such represents one of the most moving indictments of the lives of 19th-century English women in all of literature.