Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Victorian Novel, Accordingly Analyzed

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Victorian Novel, Accordingly Analyzed

According to the web article “Victorian Literature”: “If there is one transcending aspect to Victorian England life and society, that aspect is change – or, more accurately, upheaval.”  Indeed, the Victorian era was characterized by a wide range of developments, from industrialization and the severe inequality that it created, to the imperialism of Great Britain, to a decline in faith in the Catholic Church.  The changes occurring in society at large paralleled another trend: for the first time, writers viewed and used literature as a means of advocating for social change.  One such writer was Thomas Hardy, who “created desolate, hopeless worlds where life had little meaning,” (“Victorian Literature”) and “actively questioned the relevance of modern institutions, in particular organized religion,” (“Victorian Literature”).  In his novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, he criticizes a wide range of contemporary social issues, particularly the oppressive treatment of women and the role and relevance of organized religion.  Because of the range of issues that Hardy addresses in the novel and the similarities between his viewpoints and those of other Victorian authors, Tess of the d’Urbervilles could be regarded as an archetypal Victorian novel.

Treatment of Women

Tess of the d’Urbervilles takes place in the late 19th Century, and is set in South Wessex, a county in the English countryside that Hardy romanticizes but makes clear is transforming as a result of the Industrial Revolution.  It follows the downfall of Tess Durbeyfield—a peasant girl who is described as beautiful and responsible to her family, but also prideful to a fault—as a result of the revelation that her family is descended from the formerly aristocratic d’Urberville family.  This revelation compels her family to send her to what they believe to be a wealthy offshoot of the d’Urberville family (as it turns out, this family is not a branch of the original d’Urberville family, but rather a nouveau riche family that adopted the name), leading to her pregnancy by Alec d’Urberville, the son of the deceased patriarch; it is unclear whether Tess is raped or allows him to have sex with her.  Regardless of the exact nature of the incident, it later causes Angel Clare—the forward-thinking preacher’s son with whom Tess falls in love—to abandon her.

In his analysis of the novel, “Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” Scott Rode contends that Alec is characterized as a stereotypical misogynist.  According to Rode, Alec “considers satisfying his sexual need his privilege as a male member of the upper class.  Alec – almost a stereotypical villain with a black pointy mustache – makes a game of seducing women…Rather than conceiving of women as powerful equals, Alec uses women’s sexuality to dominate them,” (Rode).  Rode states that Alec’s attire and womanizing tendencies render him a disagreeable character.  He also notes that Alec attempts to seduce women by using either his wealth or their sexuality to his advantage.  Indeed, Alec does attempt to seduce Tess by stimulating her sexuality: he manually feeds her strawberries (Hardy 37) and teaches her to whistle (Hardy 58-59).  Alec also attempts to use his superior social status in order to seduce Tess.  When he does this, he often invokes Tess’s family, whom Tess feels obligated to aid: “ ‘I have enough and more than enough to put you out of anxiety, both for yourself and your parents and sisters.  I can make them all comfortable if you will only show confidence in me,’” (Hardy 347).  In cases such as this, Alec tempts Tess with a level of financial security that only a patrician such as himself can provide.  His apparent belief that his promises of money will entice Tess demonstrates his belief that sexual conquest is “his privilege as a male member of the upper class,” (Rode).

Although Angel is very different from Alec—in terms of his personality, the manner in which he views Tess, and the manner in which Tess views him—he wrongs Tess just as much as Alec does.  As Conor Byrne, a history student at the University of Exeter, asserts in his analysis of the novel, “Tess of the d’Urbervilles & the Fallen Women in Victorian England,” Angel could be described as a hypocrite: “Although he disavows religion and seems unconventional, Angel in fact adheres to contemporary gender and social prejudices pervading his era,” (Byrne).  According to Byrne, Angel’s treatment of Tess reflects Victorian attitudes towards women.  Byrne discusses these prejudices at the beginning of his analysis:

“The Victorian era (1837-1901) famously espoused oppressive, even stifling, moral values concerning domesticity, sexuality, and femininity.  Building on ancient and medieval ideals of sinfulness and the seductiveness of Eve, women were expected to be chaste, virginal, silent and fair - as Coventry Patmore immortalised in his 1854 poem, they should be an 'angel in the house,’” (Byrne).

According to Byrne, Victorian women were expected to be chaste and demure.  These expectations originated from a combination of Judeo-Christian teachings and bygone customs.  Angel’s support of these standards causes him first to fall in love with Tess and later to desert her.  According to “The Apprehensive and Suppressed Soul of the Fallen Woman in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” by feminist academic Noorbakhsh Hooti, Angel “[falls] in love with a moral quality rather than a woman,” (Hooti 632).  Because Angel falls in love with Tess in part due to his belief that she is pure, he ceases to love her when she tells him that Alec impregnated her.  His attitude towards Tess immediately after this revelation is one of such resentment that “he looked upon her as a species of impostor; a guilty woman in the guise of an innocent one,” (Hardy 236).  The fact that Angel compares Tess to a criminal indicates that he views her past with Alec as a crime.  This belief is somewhat hypocritical: shortly before Tess tells Angel about her experiences with Alec d’Urberville, Angel reveals to her that he once engaged in a brief dalliance with a stranger, a misdeed for which Tess forgives him.  The fact that Tess pardons Angel for a misdeed similar to the one for which Angel deserts her reflects Victorian social standards, according to Hooti, who writes that “His inconsistency demonstrates the unconscious hypocrisy of the moral codes,” (632).

Ultimately, Tess could be considered a victim of these moral codes.  Rode expresses this idea, writing: “She is hemmed in by the opposing and mutually exclusive binaries of the Victorian conceptualization of…women either as a feminine ideal of purity to be placed upon a pedestal or as a whore to be despised and cast off,” (Rode).  Although originally the product of Christian teachings—according to Byrne, they arose from a fear of female sexuality borne of “the seductiveness of Eve”—these perceptions of women have become so deeply integrated into secular society that even Angel Clare, a lapsed Christian and progressive thinker, adheres to them.  Therefore, it is unclear whether Hardy attributes the victimization of women to religion, society in general, or both.  Although it is unclear what institution Hardy blamed for the moral standards to which Victorian women were held, it is very clear that he viewed these standards as arbitrary and as such despised them.  This viewpoint is evident in Tess’s awareness that “she had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly,” (Hardy 87).  Although she is ashamed of having been impregnated by Alec, Tess recognizes that the social laws that she has broken do not apply in nature, and are therefore somewhat arbitrary.  Tess is not the only character who does not believe that she has committed an offense; in his analysis of the novel, titled “Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” Ian Mackean notes that “although she has broken an accepted social law, the villagers of Marlott do not morally censure her. She has an illegitimate child, but they still accept her as an individual, a member of the community, and do not look upon her as an outcast.”  The reactions—or lack thereof—of the inhabitants of Marlott to Tess’s pregnancy by Alec are demonstrated when Tess breastfeeds her illegitimate child during an intermission in the village’s harvest:

“The men who sat nearest considerably turned their faces towards the other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no longer yield a stream.  All the women but Tess fell into animated talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair,” (Hardy 92).

The sight of Tess breastfeeding her illegitimate baby seems to be a somewhat awkward presence to the other laborers, who turn away from Tess and ignore her.  However, the farmhands do not reprimand Tess for having bore a child out of wedlock (or for breastfeeding the child in public) but rather fraternize with each other as they otherwise would.  By describing the laborers’ indifference to Tess’s having given birth to a child out of wedlock, Hardy shows that humans are capable of refuting the stringent moral standards that they created, and that, since the people of Marlott continue to regard Tess as pure after her experiences with Alec, the reader should as well.

Role of Religion

Another Victorian concern—or, in this case, a set of concerns—addressed in Tess of the d’Urbervilles is the relevance and role of religion.  According to the online article “Dualism & Dualities - The Victorian Age,” by Maria Antonietta Struzziero, “faith was still considered a fundamental part of everyone’s life, so most people went to Mass at least once a week and they were really interested in religious stories and debates. However, some intellectuals followed agnosticism or atheism,” (Struzziero).  Being one of these intellectuals, Hardy was one of the critics of organized religion.  At the same time, he was unsettled by the ideas expressed by Darwin in his publication, On the Origin of Species, fearing that “this new scientific explanation of life on Earth would diminish the dignity of man as the favourite creature of the Lord,” (Struzziero).  This concern is evident in the fact that the job that Tess takes at the d’Urberville mansion is to tend to the collection of fowls owned by Alec’s mother.  The fact that this job requires her to attend to animals demonstrates the fear that Hardy harbored regarding the consequences of Darwin’s revelation that humans descended from animals and, therefore, lacked the superiority that they had long believed that they possessed.  Hardy also expresses fear of this development when he depicts the fowls’ dwelling, which had previously been home to a farming family:

“The lower rooms were entirely given over to the birds, who walked about them with a proprietary air, as though the place had been built by themselves, and not by certain dusty copyholders who now lay east and west in the churchyard…The rooms wherein dozens of infants had wailed at their nursing now resounded with the tapping of nascent chicks.  Distracted hens in coops occupied spots where formerly stood chairs supporting sedate agriculturalists.  The chimney-corner in which the hens laid their eggs; while out of doors the plots that each succeeding householder had carefully shaped with his spade were torn by the cocks in wildest fashion,” (Hardy 54-55).

Hardy’s description of chickens roaming about a house once inhabited by humans, his mention of the destruction of the, and his statement that the fowls act as if they own the house, help to convey a sense of concern regarding the reduced status of humans.

In addition to brooding over the reduction of the status of humans to that of animals, Hardy questioned the implications of the lack of divine influence in the affairs of humans.  During the scene in which Alec impregnates Tess, Hardy bemoans the failure of a divine being to prevent the incident from occurring:

“But, some might say, where was Tess’s guardian angel?  where was the providence of her simple faith?  Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked,” (Hardy 74).

Hardy speculates on the whereabouts of a higher power during the scene in which Alec impregnates Tess, frustrated by the inability of divinity to prevent the incident from occurring.  His descriptions of a divine being performing very human actions, such as talking, pursuing, traveling, and sleeping, create an unflattering depiction of such a being, in this way indicating skepticism of the legitimacy of divinity.  Hardy also questions the legitimacy of a higher power through the reaction of Tess’s mother to the news of her daughter’s pregnancy by Alec: “ ‘Well, we must make the best of it, I suppose.  ’Tis nater, after all, and what do please God!’” (Hardy 84).  In his analysis on Tess of the d’Urbervilles, given the same title as the novel, literary critic Anthony Domestico notes the inanity of this viewpoint: “We are, of course, meant to reject this rather facile appeal to nature as an explanation for Tess’s intense suffering; it is surely a despicable God that would be pleased by the blighting of a young girl by a lustful parvenu.”  According to Domestico, Hardy viewed the belief expressed by Mrs. Durbeyfield as ridiculous, refusing to believe that Alec’s impregnation of Tess could please a divine being.  As such, it appears that the occurrences of horrors such as Alec’s impregnation of Tess plagued Hardy, causing him to question not only the role of a divine being, but the existence of one as well.

Hardy was also concerned about the role of organized religion in Victorian life.  His first criticism of Christian theology in Tess of the d’Urbervilles occurs after Tess’s illegitimate child, whom she names “Sorrow,” dies, and Tess approaches the local vicar to inquire whether the baptism that she performed on Sorrow was sufficient to prevent him from being sent to Hell:

“ ‘And now, sir,’ she added earnestly, ‘can you tell me this—will it be just the same for him as if you had baptized him?’

Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he should have been called in for had been unskillfully botched by his customers among themselves, he was disposed to say no.  Yet the dignity of the girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined to affect his nobler impulses—or rather those that he had left in him after ten years of endeavor to graft technical belief on actual skepticism.  The man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory fell to the man.

‘My dear girl,’ he said, ‘it will be just the same,’” (Hardy 98-99).

By conveying the priest’s thoughts, Hardy criticizes religious teachings and questions the legitimacy of organized religion.  According to Ian Mackean, “Hardy undermines the authority of the vicar by calling him a 'tradesman' (p.132) and showing how Tess's genuine human feelings sway his nobler feelings against his doctrine.”  Hardy also criticizes Christian theology by portraying the vicar’s senses of compassion and adherence to Church teachings as opposing forces, which is ironic because compassion is one of the foundations of the Judeo-Christian family of religions (and most other religions, for that matter).  The discussions that take place between Alec and Tess after Alec temporarily converts to Christianity also reflect Hardy’s discontent with what he believes to be superfluous Church teachings.  During these discussions, Tess explains to Alec that “ ‘I believe in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount,’” (Hardy 332) and expresses a belief that “ ‘you can have the religion of loving-kindness and purity at least, if you can’t have—what do you call it—dogma,’” (Hardy 342).  In both of these instances, Tess clarifies both her rejection of Christian theology and her adherence to the moral principles upon which this theology was founded.  In doing so, she indicates that morality and theology are naturally separate entities, and that the religions that amalgamate them are somewhat arbitrary.

Hardy uses the character of Alec d’Urberville to criticize religion in another manner: according to Ian Mackean, “Religious belief is further undermined by the rapid conversion, then de-conversion of Alec d’Urberville.  He believes himself to be sincere, but Hardy shows his fanaticism to be a passing fad,” (Mackean) when Alec’s religious convictions subside as a result of a chance encounter with Tess.  Alec is fully aware of the cause of his abandonment of religion, acknowledging that “ ‘I was on the way to, at least, social salvation till I saw you again!…I was as firm as a man could be until I till I saw those eyes and that mouth again,’” (Hardy 334).  He is aware that his chance encounter with Tess caused him to abandon his religious pursuits.  However, he believes that his religious convictions rendered him “as firm as a man could be,” (Hardy 334) when in fact he abandoned his faith relatively soon after being reunited with Tess.  The readiness with which Alec abandons his pursuit of a higher power in order to pursue a human being serves as a final indictment of the legitimacy of the Anglican Church.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the concerns that Hardy expresses regarding religion in Tess of the d’Urbervilles appear to be reflective of those of his peers.  Anthony Domestico indicates one of these concerns:

“God, whether He exists or not, has evacuated Himself from this world. We are left to fend for ourselves in a world that is dominated by Nature rather than divinity, by passion and impulse rather than reason or piety,” (Domestico).

According to Domestico, Hardy was concerned about the removal of God from human affairs, knowing that, in a world without divine intervention, humans would be at the mercy of nature and other humans.  Many of his peers shared this concern; according to Struzziero, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species caused some people to fear that “this new scientific explanation of life on Earth would diminish the dignity of man as the favourite creature of the Lord,” (Struzziero).  Hardy’s concern about the theology of the Anglican Church, another common concern in the Victorian era, appears to have been rooted in his discontent with the strict moral standards associated with the era, which Struzziero attributes to an attempt “to regain the Puritan austerity and severity of the past.”  Overall, Hardy’s concerns regarding religion are very much intertwined with those regarding the treatment of women: Alec’s impregnation of Tess serves to demonstrate the absence of divine intervention from human affairs, and the dogma which Hardy criticized appears to have inspired the Victorian moral standards that he condemned.  As intertwined and complex as these societal issues were, however, Hardy maintained a certain level of optimism regarding them.  When analyzing Tess’s discussions with the temporarily converted Alec, Anthony Domestico indicates that Hardy believed that “Even if institutionalized religion is questioned, even if divine revelation is not believed in…a separate sphere for ethics and morality can still be maintained.”  Not only does Hardy seem to have possessed a certain degree of optimism regarding human nature, it appears that he questioned the relevance of organized religion because of this optimism.

If Thomas Hardy were alive today, his viewpoints—or at least those expressed in Tess of the d’Urbervilles—would be somewhat unorthodox.  On one hand, he was unsettled by a scientific discovery (Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution”) and compared urbanization to “the tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery,” (Hardy 364).  On the other hand, he criticized what he perceived to be excessively strict moral standards and excessive religious dogma.  As unusual as his overall worldview might be by modern standards, however, it was typical of writers in the Victorian era, an age in which “change was happening faster than many people could comprehend,” (“Victorian Literature”) and “some writers greeted these changes with fear,” (“Victorian Literature”) while others “embraced the new world that was coming into being, thrilled at the progress of science and society,” (“Victorian Literature”).  Hardy discusses many issues associated with the Victorian era, especially the treatment of women and the role and relevance of religion, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.  In this novel, he advocates for change with regards to the former issue and simultaneously expresses a desire for and a weariness of change with regards to the latter.  Because Hardy addressed many issues of the time in the novel, and did so in a manner typical of Victorian writers, Tess of the d’Urbervilles can be considered an archetypal Victorian novel.

Notes

• it is unclear whether Tess is raped or allows him to sex with her: My 12th-grade English class, which read the novel, discussed the scene at length, reaching the consensus that Tess was not completely raped by Alec, nor did she fully consent to his having sex with her, but that his carnal knowledge of her was due to what one classmate described as "confused acquiescence."  According to another student, Tess consciously opposes letting Alec have sex with her, but allows it instinctually, adding complexity to her character and allowing Hardy to criticize Victorian behavioral standards.  The teacher agreed with this student, stating that Tess could not be a complete victim because, if she were, the novel would cease to be a commentary on society and be reduced to what the teacher described as a "pity party."
• that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke: According to the "Notes on the Text" section of the publication of the novel that was used, Hardy makes a reference here to Elijah's oration to the priests of Baal in I Kings 18:27, (Hardy 422).

Works Cited

Byrne, Conor.  “Tess of the d'Urbervilles & the Fallen Woman in Victorian England.”  blogspot.com.  N.p., 29 Aug. 2013.  Web.  8 May 2015.  <http://conorbyrnex.blogspot.com/>.

Domestico, Anthony.  “Tess of the d’Urbervilles.”  The Modernism Lab at Yale University.  Yale University.  N.d.  Web.  5 May 2015.  <http://modernism.research.yale.edu/>.

Hardy, Thomas.  Tess of the d’Urbervilles.  1891.  New York: Bantam Dell, 2004.  Print.

Hooti, Noorbakhsh.  “The Apprehensive and Suppressed Soul of the Fallen Woman in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”  Theory and Practice in Language Studies 1.6 (2011): 630-634.  Web.  5 May 2015.

Mackean, Ian.  “Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles.”  London School of Journalism.  London School of Journalism.  N.d.  Web.  10 May 2015.  <http://www.lsj.org/>.

Rode, Scott.  “Sexual Identity on the Road in Tess of the D’Urbervilles.”  Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 1.1 (2005): n. pag.  Web.  5 May 2015.  <http://www.ncgsjournal.com>.

Struzziero, Maria Antonietta.  “The Victorian Age.”  Dualism and Dualities.  Liceo Scientifico Statale "De Caprariis”.  N.d.  Web.  8 May 2015.  <http://www.scientificoatripalda.it/>.

“Victorian Literature.”  The Literature Network.  N.p., N.d.  Web.  25 April 2015.  <http://www.online-literature.com/>.