Tess of the d'Urbervilles

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The front cover of a 1892 edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, published by Harper & Bros, NY.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: a Pure Woman Faithfully Presented is a novel by Thomas Hardy, first published in 1891. It was initially serialized, in a censored version, in a family paper called The Graphic. It is Hardy's penultimate novel, followed by Jude the Obscure. Though now considered a great classic of English literature, the book received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual mores of Hardy's day.

1 Plot summary
2 Characters
- 2.1 Major characters
- 2.2 Minor characters
3 Symbolism and themes
4 Trivia
5 Adaptations
6 Footnote
7 External links

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The title character is a beautiful country girl, Teresa "Tess" Durbeyfield, the daughter of uneducated (and rather shiftless) peasants. Her unhappy fate is set in motion by a chance remark from the local parson, an amateur genealogist, who one evening addresses her father, John Durbeyfield, as "Sir John." The parson then explains that "Durbeyfield" is a corruption of "d'Urberville", the name of an extinct noble family. The elder Durbeyfields, looking for a way to wring an advantage from their illustrious ancestry, decide to send a very reluctant Tess to "claim kin" with the local d'Urberville family (a nouveau-riche bourgeois family who actually have no connection to the original d'Urbervilles, having appended the ancient name to their real surname of "Stoke" to create the illusion of blue blood).

Tess begins working on the d'Urberville estate, and immediately attracts the unwanted attentions of the playboy son, Alec. In a rape or seduction (the scene is open to interpretation), Tess becomes pregnant. She returns home shortly afterward, against Alec's wishes, and bears a child whom she names "Sorrow." The baby, however, soon dies, freeing Tess to make a new start. In hopes of leaving her disgrace behind, she takes a job at a dairy forty miles away.

While employed as a milkmaid, Tess meets Angel Clare, the virtuous younger son of a minister. Although the two are from different social classes, they fall in love, and Angel repeatedly urges Tess to marry him. Tess knows he perceives her as an innocent country maiden but, afraid of losing his love and admiration, finds it extraordinarily difficult to tell him her secret. At length, she agrees to the marriage.

On the wedding night, after Angel asks forgiveness for a past sexual indiscretion of his own, she finally finds the courage to make her confession, thinking her "offense" to be exactly the same as his. To her horror, Angel is so deeply mortified that his attitude toward her changes completely. When she protests "I thought you loved me, my very self!" he declares, "The woman I have been loving is not you" but "another woman in your shape." At this stage, certain he has been deceived by an artful hussy, Angel is completely unable to reconcile his love for Tess with his new knowledge of her. The two separate a few days later; Angel tells Tess he will come to her if he decides he can endure living with her.

Tess briefly returns to her family, but, finding this unbearable, she goes to work again as a day laborer on other farms. During these months, Alec d'Urberville makes another appearance, claiming to be a reformed sinner and begging her to marry him. Tess rebuffs him with loathing and continues her difficult, lonely existence, performing backbreaking field work all winter and waiting for Angel to relent.

In the spring, John Durbeyfield dies. The surviving Durbeyfields lose the lease on their cottage and are made homeless, forced to travel the countryside with all their possessions searching for lodgings and employment. At this point, Alec d'Urberville re-appears and a desperate Tess finally agrees to become his mistress so that she can support her family.

Angel Clare, meanwhile, has been in Brazil, where a disease nearly kills him. After much thought, he returns to England to find Tess and renew their love. He discovers her living in a seaside hotel with Alec d'Urberville, beautifully dressed but miserable. Tess, in despair, sends Angel away, and goes back to her room, weeping. When Alec scoffs at her misery and insults her husband, she stabs him to death, then forms the wild hope that the murder will somehow purify her in Angel's eyes. She goes after him and they flee together. They spend the night while hiding in a guest house; many believe this implies that they finally consummate their marriage. Spied by the cleaning woman, they are forced to move on, eventually reaching Stonehenge. Here, Tess asks Angel to take care of her younger sister, 'Liza-'Lu, who is "a spiritualized image of Tess." Soon after, the police arrive to make their arrest. In the last scene, as Angel and 'Liza-'Lu watch outside the walls of a prison, a black flag ascends a flagpole, signalling the completion of Tess's execution.

[edit] Characters

[edit] Major characters

Tess Durbeyfield - The protagonist and principal character of the novel around whom the story revolves. She is an innocent and pretty country girl tossed into dangerous situations brought about by fate.
Angel Clare - The son of a clergyman who marries Tess. He considers himself a freethinker, but his notions of morality turn out to be fairly conventional. He works at the Talbothay's dairy to gain practical experience because he hopes to buy a farm of his own.
Alec D'Urberville - The son of Simon Stoke and Mrs. D'Urberville. He seduces Tess and causes her many sorrows. In the end, Tess kills him.
John Durbeyfield - Tess' father and a carter in Marlott (based on the Dorset village of Marnhull) who is lazy and given to drinking. When he learns that his family is descended from nobility, he gives up his work entirely and starts pretending that he is an aristocrat.
Joan Durbeyfield - Tess' hardworking and modest mother who has a practical outlook on life.

[edit] Minor characters

James Clare - A charitable and moral clergyman who is Angel Clare's father.
Mrs. Clare - The kind mother of Angel Clare who insists on a pure, virtuous, and true Christian wife for Angel.
Felix Clare - Angel's brother who is a priest's assistant.
Cuthbert Clare - Angel's brother who is a classical scholar.
Mercy Chant - the young lady that Angel's parents had thought to be the perfect wife for him. She later marries Cuthbert.
Elisa Louisa Durbeyfield - Tess's younger sister who is called Liza Lu. Tess wants Angel to marry Liza Lu after her own execution.
Abraham, Hope, and Modesty - The son and daughters of the Durbeyfields.
Mrs. Stoke D'Urberville - The mother of Alec and a blind widow who is wealthy.
Richard Crick - The owner of the Talbothay Farm for whom Angel and Tess work.
Izz Huett, Retty Priddle, and Marian - Dairy maids at the Talbothay Farm who are all in love with Angel Clare and who fare poorly after he marries Tess.
Mr. Tringham - An elderly parson from whom John learns about his own ancestors.
Mrs. Brooks - Landlady of the Herons where Alec is murdered by Tess.
Sorrow - The child of Tess and Alec who dies in infancy. When the local clergyman refuses to minister to him, Tess christens and buries him herself.

[edit] Symbolism and themes

Hardy's writing often illustrates the "ache of modernism", and this theme is notable in Tess. He describes modern farm machinery with infernal imagery; also, at the dairy, he notes that the milk sent to the city must be watered down because the townspeople can't stomach whole milk. Angel's middle-class fastidiousness makes him reject Tess, a woman whom Hardy often portrays as a sort of Wessex Eve, in harmony with the natural world and so lovely and desirable that Hardy himself seems to be in love with her. Without her, the handsome young man gets so sick that he is reduced to a "mere yellow skeleton." All these instances are typically interpreted as indications of the negative consequences of man's separation from nature, both in the creation of destructive machinery and in the inability to rejoice in pure nature.

Another important theme of the novel is the sexual double standard to which Tess falls victim. Hardy plays the role of Tess's only true friend and advocate, pointedly subtitling the book "a pure woman faithfully presented" and prefacing it with Shakespeare's words "Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed/ Shall lodge thee." However, although Hardy clearly means to criticize Victorian notions of female purity, the double standard also makes the heroine's tragedy possible, and thus serves as a mechanism of Tess's broader fate. Hardy variously hints that Tess must suffer either to atone for the misdeeds of her ancestors, or to provide temporary amusement for the gods, or (with a nod to Darwin) because she possesses some small but lethal character flaw inherited from the ancient clan.

From numerous pagan and neo-Biblical references made about her, Tess can be viewed variously as an Earth goddess or as a sacrificial victim. Early in the novel, she participates in a festival for Ceres, the goddess of the harvest, and when she performs a baptism she chooses a passage from Genesis, the book of creation, over more traditional New Testament verses. At the end, when Tess and Angel come to Stonehenge, commonly believed in Hardy's time to be a pagan temple, she willingly lies down on an altar, thus fulfilling her destiny as a sacrifice to the gods. This symbolism may help to explain her character as a personification of nature--lovely and fecund, certainly, but also exploited by the other characters in the novel.

[edit] Trivia

In the original, censored version of the novel that appeared in The Graphic, Alec d'Urberville deceives Tess with a sham marriage before becoming her lover. As soon as she discovers the trick, she leaves him.^[1]

[edit] Adaptations

The book was successfully adapted for the stage twice. An 1897 production by Lorimer Stoddard was a great Broadway triumph for actress Minnie Maddern Fiske who later starred in a 1902 revival and a 1916 motion picture of the production. Another adaptation by playwright Ronald Gow, becoming a triumph on the West End in 1946 starring Wendy Hiller. It also been adapted several times for television and film. The best-known example is Tess, filmed in 1979, directed by Roman Polanski. The most recent and faithful adaptation was the miniseries "Tess of the D'Urbervilles", produced by A&E and directed by Ian Sharp in 1998.