Hardy published his novels in periodic installments in magazines or serial
journals, and his work reflects the conventions of serialization. To ensure
that readers would buy a serialized novel, writers often structured each
installment to be something of a cliffhanger, which explained the convoluted,
often incredible plots of many Victorian novels.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) aroused controversy. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles and other
novels, Hardy demonstrates his deep sense of moral sympathy for England’s lower
classes, particularly for rural women. He became famous for his compassionate,
often controversial portrayal of young women victimized by the self-righteous
rigidity of English social morality.
Hardy lived and wrote in a time of difficult social change, when England
was making its slow and painful transition from an old-fashioned, agricultural
nation to a modern, industrial one. Businessmen and entrepreneurs, or “new
money,” joined the ranks of the social elite, as some families of the ancient aristocracy,
or “old money,” faded into obscurity. Tess’s family in Tess of the
d’Urbervilles illustrates this change, as Tess’s parents, the Durbeyfields,
lose themselves in the fantasy of belonging to an ancient and aristocratic
family, the d’Urbervilles. Hardy’s novel suggests that such a family history is
not only meaningless but also undesirable.
Intelligent, attractive, Tess is the central character of the novel , and
Hardy makes her into a sort of heroine. The narrator sometimes describes Tess
as something closer to a mythical incarnation of womanhood. Tess’s story thus
represents a deeper and larger experience than that of a single individual.
In part, Tess represents the changing role of the agricultural workers in
England in the late nineteenth century. Possessing an education that her
parents lack, Tess does not fit into the folk culture of her predecessors, but
financial constraints keep her from rising to a higher station in life. She
belongs in that higher world, there is aristocracy in Tess’s blood, visible in
her graceful beauty—yet she is forced to work as a farmhand and milkmaid. On the
other hand, her diction is not up to the level of Alec’s or Angel’s. She is in
between, both socially and culturally. Tess is a symbol of unclear and unstable
notions of class in nineteenth-century Britain, where old family lines retained
their importance, but where economic realities made wealth more important than
inner nobility.
Beyond her social symbolism, Tess represents fallen humanity in a religious
sense, as the frequent biblical allusions in the novel remind us. Tess
represents what is known in Christian theology as original sin, the
degraded state in which all humans live, even when they are not wholly or
directly responsible for the sins for which they are punished
Alec d’Urberville
Alec is the nemesis and downfall of Tess’s life. The duplicity of character
is so intense in Alec, and its consequences for Tess so severe, that he becomes
diabolical. Alec does not try to hide his bad qualities. In fact, like Satan,
he revels in them. There is frank acceptance in his admission and no shame.
Alec represents a larger moral principle rather than a real individual man.
Alec symbolizes the base forces of life that drive a person away from moral
perfection and greatness.
Angel represents a rebellious striving toward a personal vision of
goodness. A typical young nineteenth-century progressive, Angel sees human
society as a thing to be remolded and improved, and he believes in the nobility
of man. He rejects the values handed to him, and sets off in search of his own.
His love for Tess, his social inferior, is one expression of his disdain for
tradition.
His love for Tess may be abstract, Tess may be more an ideal to him than a real
woman with a complicated life. Angel awakens to the actual complexities of
real-world morality after his failure in Brazil, and only then he realizes he
has been unfair to Tess. His moral system is readjusted as he is brought down
to Earth.
Themes
The Injustice of Existence
Unfairness dominates the lives of Tess and her family to such an extent
that it begins to seem like a general aspect of human existence .
Christianity offers little solace of heavenly justice. The moral atmosphere of
the novel is not Christian justice at all, but pagan injustice. The forces that
rule human life are absolutely unpredictable and not necessarily well-disposed
to us.
Changing Ideas of Social Class in Victorian
England
Tess of the d’Urbervilles presents complex pictures of both the importance of social class in
nineteenth-century England and the difficulty of defining class in any simple
way. In the Victorian context, cash matters more than lineage, definitions of
class have changed.
Men Dominating Women
One of the recurrent themes of the novel is the way in which men can
dominate women, exerting a power over them linked primarily to their maleness.
Sometimes this command is purposeful. Alec’s act of abuse, the most
life-altering event that Tess experiences in the novel, is the most serious
instance of male domination over a female.
Even Angel’s love for Tess, as pure and gentle as it seems, dominates her
in an unhealthy way. Angel substitutes an idealized picture of Tess’s country
purity for the real-life woman that he continually refuses to get to know.
Variant Names
The transformation of the d’Urbervilles into the Durbeyfields is one
example of the common phenomenon of renaming, of variant naming, in the novel.
Names matter in this novel. The question raised by all these successful or imagined cases of name
changing is the extent to which an
altered name brings with it an altered identity. Hardy’s interest in name
changes makes reality itself seem changeable according to whims of human perspective,
and Hardy renames the southern English countryside as “Wessex”: he
imposes a fictional map on a real place, with names altered correspondingly.
