Thomas Hardy gave his penultimate novel its subtitle upon publication in 1891, not at its original composition in 1889, when the book was titled Too Late Beloved. He was forced to censor it for newspaper serialization, publishing two chapters as short stories before binding them into book form, Chapter Eleven (the rape) as "Saturday Night in Arcady," and Chapter Fifteen as "A Midnight Baptism." But Hardy could not hold back the purity of his text, even as Tess Durbeyfield could not deny her purity as a woman.
Angel Clare meets a mysterious stranger who travels with him in Brazil, an Englishman who has seen the world, who will rapidly die of fever, but not before hearing Tess's story and declaring that "morality…lay not among things done, but among things willed."
In his Preface to the Fifth Edition, published in July 1892 (eight months after his original preface), Hardy firmly states that he did not mean to use the word "pure" as it is used in Christianity but as it is in Nature. In nature, things happen which are not thought of, which the animals and plants have no control over, but still the trees grow, the flowers bloom, the squirrels and ants collect food for the winter, the birds sing their grand melodies in summer. Life is as it is, but they fulfill their core natures, no matter what. They know what they are and do not try to be what they are not. In this sense, they have no regard for the world.
Tess Durbeyfield is one of only two characters in her novel who is the same way. She knows her heart and mind and refuses to conform to any other notions. She has no pretensions, like Jack. She has no ambitions, like Joan. She has no wish to exploit or affect others, like Alec. She has no grand sense of mission, like Angel and the other Clares. She has no unfostered romantic delusions, like Marian, Izzy, and Retty. She has no thought of fitting into a role in society, like Crick. She simply IS, and she moves through life doing nothing but being herself. The catch is that since Tess is self-possessed and self-identifying to such a grand degree, she is both ambivalent and, paradoxically, susceptible to instruction (as Patricia Ingham of Oxford says). How can someone of such a purity and identity be so swayed, it should be asked? Living a life centered in personal definition without following the plans of others leaves Tess with no plan of her own. She weighs every turning point in her life with consideration and no certainty as to what to do, but by being so in tune with her emotions, she is inclined to respond to situations emotionally rather than intellectually. One of the strongest emotions people feel is guilt, so when Tess feels guilty, she goes along with the plans of the person she thinks she has wronged as a form of personal reckoning. Most crucially, her guilt over the death of Prince leads her to follow her family's wishes and seek out the d'Urbervilles. Another emotion is duty. Since Tess is in rural Wessex and comes from a poor family, she is a hard worker by nature. And of course, there is love. Tess's ambivalence is lost when she realizes the depths of Angel's passion for her. In him, she finds her only sense of certainty, of faithfulness, which will in the end drive her to murder.
It is a purity in tune with that of nature, and Tess is constantly linked to the natural and the free. She is first seen in a ritualistic, natural dance, and last seen in an ethereal peace at Stonehenge. In between, nature overwhelms her (she is raped in a forest), breathes life into her (her emotional recuperation comes in long, long wanderings in the Vales), gives her purpose (her interactions with cows), and places her in full bloom (Angel falls for her after seeing her for months in a pastoral lifestyle). In the constructions of man, she is lost and out of place…she murders Alec in a seaside pleasure village completely artificial, and is slowly seduced on a farm where everything to her is too new. And when Tess is sad or defeated by life (after the rape, the death of Sorrow, her rejection of Angel, Angel's rejection of her, the months of despair at Flintcomb-Ash), her movements become "mechanical" or "automatic" or "unconscious." Soulless as the machines which creep onto the landscape in the final, tragic phases. (Her pleading first letter to Angel ends with a paragraph where her words suggest a lack of communion with nature.)
But despite the sex and violence which will condemn her, Tess remains pure, for her will is constant and true. Even the rape, though a sin against her, is also the culmination of her sexual awakening (Ingham), and the murder of Alec is reflective of her will to be with Angel, her true love. Only Angel approaches her in purity, in his overriding desire to think for himself, his communion with nature, and his flowing passion. But though Angel has rejected his family's way of life, he still has their righteous sentiments, and so condemns Tess for her "sin," just as Alec will condemn Tess for "tempting him." Their hypocrisies stand in contrast to her goodness, although Angel repents in the end.
Hardy's ardent denial of the purity as Christian is crucial. His next novel, Jude the Obscure, would be his last, as he was unable to stomach people's revulsion to his ideas on male-female relations and organized religion. Tess of the d'Urbervilles is firmly against the Christian-centric morality of Victorian England. Part of Tess's purity and self-possession is that she comes to reject the presence of God for a belief in the spirit of all which surrounds her (similar to Carlyle in Sartor Resartus). At times this grieves her (she cannot join in with her siblings' hymns) but mostly it empowers her. There are three especially powerful chapters in the novel, and the first is the aforementioned "Midnight Baptism" where Tess blesses her dying infant son in front of her siblings, who stand in awe of her presence.
Hardy goes from derision to anger regarding organized religion. He detests the Clares' rigid adherence to their belief system, BUT he respects their sincerity. He rips into Alec for his brief, fashionable repentance as a Methodist preacher, which is destroyed by Tess's logical arguments against faith and his own unquenchable lust for Tess. Otherwise, there are smaller examples: the painter who posts Scripture passages in giant letters by rote, or Crick, who goes from rustic dairyman to a semblance of a fine gentleman (self-denial) on church days.
The conflict between Tess's purity and the outside world is partly expressed in Hardy's structuring the book around seasons and color. Times of verdure and harvest see Tess alive and at peace, while cold, storms, and darkness, times for physical inactivity and restless minds, bring about misery. And the colors…Tess is often dressed in white or surrounded by white or turning pale in the times of her ambivalence, which, as I said, are moments of great purity for her. In opposition to white is red, the red of her mouth which tempts Alec and Angel, the red of blood, Prince's blood as he dies, the blood which flows from Alec first when Tess slaps him, then when she stabs him and it spreads across the white ceiling in the third great chapter. And the name d'Urberville itself, with all its attachments, which Jack brings up in his unrefined English every time he appears. Tess carries the d'Urberville ruthlessness and passion in her (Ingham), unlike the false d'Urberville Alec, but the name both says nothing about her and determines her future life, as her parents, Alec, and Angel are all affected in different ways by her ancestry. She is indeed of the d'Urbervilles, if not by choice.
There is a strong sense of fatalism running through the novel. "It was to be" is one of the common country expressions among the Wessex denizens, and for Tess, who in five years suffers from coincidence and bad timing, there is little she can do but remain herself and make the best of things. Plans and dreams are as important as the name d'Urberville: not at all. And how can there be a God, Hardy implies, if nothing has much meaning behind it?
I could go on about other things, but as Nabokov says, you can only reread a book, not read it. I have only grasped the architecture of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, not its deepest meanings. So for now I leave with the final image of Angel praying over the executed Tess (under a silent black flag) with Liza-Lu, Eliza Louise, the younger sister of whom Tess says "she has all the best of me without the bad of me." She is pure, full of duty and her own conviction. She will stay with Angel, and add her own personal belief in God to the equation.
(The other great chapter, by the way, is when Angel meets Izz Huitt on the first stage of his journey to Brazil. In a few pages of conversation by turns urgent and innocuous, and the surprising denouement, Hardy captures human thought process in a way few writers ever approach.
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