Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Hardy

Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891

A poor British girl finds herself seduced and abandoned by a handsome social climber then attempts to find happiness in marriage to a modest farmer. Her past catches up with her with tragic results in this period.

Violent incidents of sexual desire in Alec, an exploitative upper class man, inaugurates Tess’s ‘fall’ that was followed by premature death newborn baby, unsuccessful marriage with Angel that leaves her the mercy of the antagonist. Eventually, it she was sentenced to death by hanging for the vengeful murder of her antagonist. A savage irony is reflected by the words, “Justice had done, and the president of immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.”

Tess of the D'urbervilles is an epic tale telling the tragic life of Tess Durbeyfield and her disasters in love, her tear-wrenching experiences with death and her painstaking efforts to grow into a 'proper' woman.

The book is written in very traditional and, at times, hard to understand English.

The character of Tess, a girl-woman betrayed by the callousness of religion, by social convention and by the men who exploit her, is so lushly drawn, so sympathetically conveyed, that it is almost impossible not to feel crushed by the unfairness of life as she experiences it.

Tess starts out as an emblem of innocence, a pretty country girl who delights in dancing on the village green. Yet the world conspires against her. Seduced by a duplicitous older man, her virtue is destroyed when she bears his child and her future life is shaped by a continual suffering for crimes that are not her own.

In Tess’s case, she stabs Alec d’Urberville, the architect of her downfall.

Story centered about the rape scene—although the scene the since is typically metaphorical in its reticence—‘the coarse appropriates the finer thus’—it speaks volumes about Victorian anxieties relating to sex.

Tess isn’t simply a woman at the mercy of men, society, and nature; she’s also at the mercy of her own passions.

She isn’t a protagonist; she is merely a hapless, frail creature, buffeted by circumstances. is strictly a victim of men and social conventions. It is rather like being locked in. side a poem by Theocritus.

Time passes; characters meet and part; people are shaped by their destiny, or by the forces of the society which surrounds them. Tess, in other words, deals in a most convincing and authoritative manner with those large and general emotions which were once the province of the novel but now no longer are.

Tess, in the process, discloses the tragic destiny of a woman who cannot live and work in conventional society 'my youth, my simplicity and the strangeness of my situation', as she puts it but who is nevertheless blessed by the natural world. The film is about 'false relations' of every kind not simply the successful mercantile family who have adopted the name of 'D'Urbeville', but false relations within society and the people who make it up. The first half of the film is filled with natural sounds; the second with artificial and industrial ones, announcing a change in English life which complements the tragedy of Tess's own. It is not a simple theme.

Tess is nature's child she remains on the outside while the landowners remain within their houses, the priests in their churches; but nature itself can be barren and cruel, and it can also be conquered or destroyed. Like love itself, that love to which Tess tries to cling, it is a blessed state but not necessarily a permanent or even a beneficial one. In a queer way, however, Tess remains in control of her life she may seem like a field of wheat being slowly processed by machinery, but she is both field and machine within herself. She chooses her destiny, and ferociously pursues it: 'Once a victim, always victim'.

All the major novelists like Dickens, Eliot, Thackerey, remains faithful to the society and described social life in their novel; but Hardy’s novel do not fit into the realistic mode. His novel are expression of personal philosophy rather then rendition expression of an outer society. Hardy’s pessimistic outlook, his belief in fate and chance, and other philosophic impression impinge on and disturb the traditional accepted structure of the novel.

Tess’s tragedy is not logical outcome of events. The narrative does not have any cause-and-effect relationship. The events take place as they were pre-determined. Within the novel, Tess is doubly fixed: first as a woman and second within Hardy’s philosophy, Right from the very beginning, Hardy seems to be aware of Tess’s fate.