“Thomas Hardy”Richard Carpenter
In
Twayne’s English Authors Series Online
Ahmed Adel & Fayrouz Fahmy
Tess of the D’Urbervilles in the Victorian Age:1.1. “Tess of the D’Ubervilles is a frontal attack on some of the bastions of Victorian mores, and was recognized as such. In addition, Hardy emphasized his point by subtitling his novel A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, thus virtually guaranteeing a storm of protest.”
1.2. “In Tess…basic moral assumptions of the Victorian age come in for barbed criticism: the cruelty of a "moral" code which condemns the innocent victim of a seducer (perhaps a rapist) to ostracism while he goes scot free; the double standard that enabled Angel to palliate his own sins while condemning Tess.”
1.3. “Tess is not only once but twice fallen from the point of view of Victorian respectabilities. No matter that she is subjected to intolerable pressure: she has been seduced; she has borne an illegitimate child; she has married, been deserted by her husband, and lived with her seducer.”
1.4. Hardy demonstrated in Tess “the problems that arise from social prejudices and illusions.”
1.5. “The pernicious idea that the members of the "better classes" were really better than the simple country folk is subjected to sharp analysis.”
1.6. “ Not only Tess’s father labors under the illusion that social classes have some intrinsic value in them (like Mr. Melbury), but Alec thinks he can play the seigneur to the peasant girl and Angel believes that there is some mystic purity native to the maid of lower classes, necessary to her desirability.”
1.7. This destructive notion replaces “individual human values with false concepts about society”.
Characters:“The quality of the novel comes from its characters and setting rather than its more conspicuous themes.”
2.1.
Tess Durbeyfield:
2.1.1. “Tess is by far the most admirable person in the novel, and the two men in her life – both presumably above her in the social scale – are shown as the victims of false ideas of human interrelationships coming from their background.”
2.1.2. “Hardy shows Tess the helpless victim not only of society but also of principalities and powers for which no human agency can be held responsible.”
2.1.3. Tess asks Angel at Stonehege if “the heathens sacrificed to God in this place, and he replies that he thinks they sacrificed to the sun. But that they did sacrifice and that Tess is the modern equivalent of those barbaric ceremonial victims are only too clear.” The symbolism that Hardy draws is very clear. Tess herself is a sacrifice, “made to suffer for the mistakes and misdeeds of her world.”
2.1.4. Tess is considered the most “outstanding among Hardy's heroines because she is the only good woman who has the role of a protagonist.”
2.1.5. “She has greater moral and physical endurance than any of Hardy’s other heroins” and has “has the straightforward sincerity, the natural simplicity of those who live close to nature.”
2.1.6. “She also has a dash of recklessness in her character (coming, Hardy implies, from her knightly Norman ancestors) that enables her at long last to turn on her tormentor and slay him.”
2.1.7. “Tess knows nothing of deceit…she can only strike out when its evil is fully revealed to her.”
2.1.8. “Beautiful with a full-bodied femininity, staunch in character, passionate in emotion, Tess is Hardy’s vision of an ideal woman.”
2.2.
Angel Clare:
2.2.1. “His name indicates better the ambiguities of his position, for it is partly fitting and partly ironic. He is a rather saintly man who knows little of the real world, but he is also rather inhuman.”
2.2.2. Angel Clare is a man “pulled in different directions by conflicting motives…”
2.2.3. He is “the most intriguing because of his problems.”
2.2.4. “Angel has a genuine love for Tess which lies beneath his conscious self.”
2.2.5. “Angel is notably inconsistent, too. He is later tempted to take Liz Huett with him to Brazil as his mistress because he feels cynical about women and would be "revenged on society."”
2.2.6. “The irony of such a double standard, as well as its patent falsity, Angel cannot perceive. He complains about the social ordinances of marriage as restrictive, when his own concept of "purity" in his wife binds him more securely than the law.”
2.3.
Alec d’Urbervilles:2.3.1. In the beginning of the novel, Alec d’Urbervilles is “the typical seducer of melodrama… Yet there is something in Alec which goes beyond the mere stock seducer, for he does seem torn between his better and his worser selves, and his yielding to the latter indicates the strength of Tess’s appeal.”
2.3.2. “Alec is in the guise of an evangelist, for who can quote Scripture better for his own ends than the Devil?”
2.3.3. “Alec’s joke – "a jester might say that this is just like Paradise. You are Eve and I am the old Other One, come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior animal" – is perfectly apropos, despite Tess’s protestation that she does not think of him in that way at all.”
2.3.4. “He becomes less human as he becomes more symbolic.”
Hardy, the Novelist:3.1. “Hardy did not intend his novel to be a social tract, but he did want to treat social problems in a mature way.”
3.2. “Part of Hardy’s social criticism is thus aimed at the agricultural situation in which poor people lacked even a modicum of security and were subject to any chill economic wind that might blow along.”
3.3. “Hardy shows Tess the helpless victim not only of society but also of principalities and powers for which no human agency can be held responsible.”
3.4. “The final deplored comment that "‘Justice’ was done," rounds out this philosophical aspect of the novel, emphasising the idea that Tess was not only beset by society but also by the very nature of the universe.”
The Natural, the Social, and Man:
4.1. As Nature overpowers Man, so “The triumph of winter over the fecundity of Talbothays is the prophetic triumph of death over Tess’s life.”
4.2. Nature itself is overcome by the imposing forces of society, as “the dominance of the threshing machine is the triumph of mechanism over the vital qualities represented by life close to nature.”
4.3. “Hardy also includes in his social critique his usual theme of the invasion of the pastoral world by alien forces, here symbolized by the threshing machine, that "buzzing red glutton" with its tender "a creature from Tophet, who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region of yellow grain and pale soil," a throbbing mechanical monster on which Tess works her heart out.”
4.4. This “dominance of the threshing machine is the triumph of mechanism over the vital qualities represented by life close to nature.”
Heredity:5.1. “A subordinate theme of much interest is involved in the question of inheritance.”
5.2. Hardy clarifies this idea, “with some objections to its validity as a principle, but throughout the novel he harps on the idea of heredity and its influence on Tess’s life.”
5.3. He shows how heredity “affects Tess through the "decay" of ancient families. Hardy even implies some warped kind of retribution when Alec seduces, or rapes, Tess as her "mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray" may have "dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of their time".”
Chance:
6.1. “When the letter which Tess has written telling Angel about her past slips under the carpet so that he does not see it before the marriage, we know that Chance has made its mystic and malign influence felt once again. We feel, as Frederick Karl puts it, that Hardy is using Chance as his "weapon to strike through surface reality to areas where the poetry of man offers resistance to the drab starkness of a malevolent universe".”
Fate:7.1. “The ineluctable sense of the earth over which men move and on which they act out their fates is ever before us.”
Conclusion:8.1. “Hardy wrote in Tess of the D’Urbervilles one of the finest novels of the nineteenth century because he lifted the story of a wronged peasant girl into the realm of tragedy through his use of these universal qualities; it became not only the tale of Tess Durbeyfield but also the story of wronged and suffering humanity.”“Tess remains Hardy’s most moving dramatisation of a pure soul struggling with the inscrutable evils of existence.”
