Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Hardy published Tess of the d'Urbervilles in 1891 with the subtitle "A Pure Woman," and Victorian England did not forgive him for it quickly. The novel had been rejected by three magazine editors before The Graphic accepted it in bowdlerized form; the complete text appeared in book form to a reception divided between outrage and recognition that something significant had been written.

What Hardy was doing was unusually direct for the period: writing a novel that condemned the moral double standards applied to Victorian women. Tess is raped (or seduced — Hardy keeps the scene ambiguous, and that ambiguity is part of the argument). She is then treated by her society, and by the man who claims to love her, as permanently damaged by what was done to her. The novel's argument is that this treatment — not Alec d'Urberville's act — is the real violation.

The novel is also Hardy's fullest engagement with what he called "Fate" — the sense that the universe is indifferent to human suffering and that the social systems humans build amplify rather than mitigate that indifference. Tess is crushed by the intersection of bad luck, bad men, and a moral code that serves neither. The famous final line, about the President of the Immortals having ended his sport with Tess, is Hardy's most savage statement of this position.

Tess Durbeyfield — one of the great characters in English fiction. She is physically beautiful, morally serious, intelligent without education, and destroyed not by her own failings but by her situation. Hardy does not make her a saint; she makes choices, some of them damaging. But the novel's insistence — in the subtitle, in the structure, in the final chapters — is that she is not responsible for what the world does to her.

Alec d'Urberville — the man who ruins Tess in the Chase. He is not a simple villain; Hardy gives him a conversion and a return, which makes him stranger and more disturbing. His transformation into an evangelical preacher and his eventual abandonment of that conversion are among the novel's most unsettling passages.

Angel Clare — Tess's husband, who considers himself progressive and free-thinking and turns out to believe all the conventional things when they are tested. His rejection of Tess after she discloses her past is the novel's moral catastrophe, and Hardy does not let him off the hook for it even when he repents.

Joan Durbeyfield — Tess's mother, whose advice to keep quiet about her past contributes to the disaster. She is drawn with the same sympathy Hardy extends to all his characters who are failing within systems larger than themselves.

No. 1 · The Chase. Hardy renders the scene in which Tess is ruined with deliberate obscurity: mist, darkness, Tess asleep or near-asleep, Alec's presence confirmed but the act itself not described. The obscurity is the argument — Hardy is refusing the prurience that would make the scene about violation as spectacle, insisting instead on the aftermath. When Tess wakes to find herself in her situation, the novel's real subject begins.

No. 2 · Angel's confession and Tess's. Tess and Angel confess past transgressions to each other on their wedding night. Angel confesses to a past liaison; Tess forgives him immediately. Tess then confesses her history with Alec; Angel cannot forgive her. The symmetry is Hardy's sharpest structural statement about the double standard. The scene is almost unbearable.

No. 3 · Stonehenge. Tess and Angel, fleeing, arrive at Stonehenge at night. Tess lies down on one of the flat altar stones and sleeps there as dawn comes. The police arrive. The image — Tess on the altar stone, the ancient stones, the law arriving with the sun — is Hardy at his most mythological, and it earns that register because the novel has spent four hundred pages making the myth out of realistic material.

Read this if you are…

• Anyone interested in how Victorian society constructed and policed female sexuality — the novel is the sharpest literary document on the subject.
• Readers who want Hardy at his most ambitious and most angry. This is his major work alongside Jude the Obscure.
• Anyone who can tolerate a tragedy that does not redeem itself: Tess ends without consolation.

Skip it if you are…

• In a period where you need fiction to be hopeful. The novel is devastating and designed to be. Hardy wants you to be angry at the end, not consoled.
• Looking for action over interiority: Hardy's prose is slow and immersive, and the novel's power accumulates over its length.

• Read the subtitle as an argument, not a description. "A Pure Woman" is Hardy's thesis statement. Test it against every event in the novel.
• Angel is the more important figure than Alec. Alec does something monstrous early. Angel does something worse because he does it with full moral awareness.
• Hardy's natural descriptions are moral. The Frome valley is Eden; the winter fields at Flintcomb-Ash are punishment. Track the landscape against Tess's situation.
• The ending is not catharsis. Hardy does not offer the release of Greek tragedy. "The President of the Immortals" is fury, not acceptance.

• Thomas Hardy — Jude the Obscure (1895). Hardy's final novel, which takes the same argument about social cruelty and applies it to a man with educational aspirations. More claustrophobic; the pair are Hardy's fullest statement.
• George Eliot — The Mill on the Floss (1860). A woman crushed between her intelligence and her social options, with Eliot's different moral framework and different conclusions.
• Émile Zola — Nana (1880). The French comparison: a woman whose sexuality destroys her — but where Hardy puts the blame on society, Zola's argument is more ambiguous.

1. Hardy's subtitle calls Tess "a pure woman." On what grounds does he make this claim? Do you agree with his argument?
2. Angel Clare considers himself a free thinker and rejects conventional religion. Why is he unable to apply this to Tess's situation?
3. The scene in the Chase is rendered through mist and ambiguity. What does Hardy gain by refusing to describe what happens directly?
4. Tess's mother advises her not to tell Angel about Alec before the wedding. Is Joan Durbeyfield's advice simply bad, or is it a rational response to how the world works?
5. Alec d'Urberville converts to evangelical Christianity midway through the novel, then abandons the conversion. What is Hardy saying about religion?
6. The final image at Stonehenge combines ancient ritual with modern law enforcement. What is Hardy achieving by ending on this image?