Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented
The front cover of an 1892 edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, published by Harper & Bros, NY.
Author	Thomas Hardy
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Tragedy
Publication date	1891
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	592
ISBN	NA
Preceded by	The Woodlanders
Followed by	Jude the Obscure

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, also known as Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, Tess of the d'Urbervilles or just Tess is a novel by Thomas Hardy, first published in 1891. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper, The Graphic.^[1] 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. The original manuscript is on display at the British Library,^[2] showing that it was originally titled "Daughter of the d'Urbervilles."^[3]

Summary of the novel

Phase the First: The Maiden (1–11)

The novel is set in impoverished rural Wessex during the Long Depression. Tess is the eldest child of John and Joan Durbeyfield, uneducated rural peasants. One day, Parson Tringham informs John that he has noble blood. Tringham, an amateur genealogist, has discovered that "Durbeyfield" is a corruption of "D'Urberville", the surname of a noble Norman family, now extinct. Although the parson means no harm, the news immediately goes to John's head.

That same day, Tess participates in the village May Dance, where she briefly meets Angel Clare, the youngest son of Reverend James Clare, who is on a walking tour with his two brothers. He stops to join the dance, and finds partners in several other girls. Though Angel takes note of Tess' beauty, he does not dance with her, leaving her feeling slighted.

Tess' father, overjoyed with learning of his noble lineage, gets too drunk to drive to market that night, so Tess undertakes the journey herself. However, she falls asleep at the reins, and the family's only horse wanders into the path of another vehicle and is killed. Tess feels so guilty over the horse's death that she agrees to visit Mrs. d'Urberville, a wealthy widow who lives in the nearby town of Trantridge, and "claim kin." She is unaware that in reality, Mrs. d'Urberville's husband, Simon Stoke, had merely purchased the baronial title and adopted the new surname, and so is not related to the d'Urbervilles.

Tess does not succeed in meeting Mrs. d'Urberville, but her libertine son Alec takes a fancy to Tess and secures her a position as poultry keeper on the d'Urberville estate. He immediately begins making advances, but Tess, though somewhat flattered by the attention, resists. Late one night while walking home from town with some other Trantridge villagers, Tess inadvertently antagonises Car Darch, Alec's most recently discarded favourite, and finds herself about to come to blows. When Alec rides up and offers to "rescue" her from the situation, she accepts. He does not take her home, however, but rides at random through the fog until they reach an ancient grove called "The Chase". Here, Alec informs her that he is lost and leaves on foot to get his bearings. Tess stays behind and falls asleep atop the coat he lent her. After Alec returns, it is left to the reader to decide whether he rapes or seduces her. This deliberate ambiguity makes Tess more than just a "poster girl for simple victimhood."^[4]

Phase the Second: Maiden No More (12–15)

After a few weeks of confused dalliance with Alec, Tess begins to despise him. Against his wishes, she goes home to her father's cottage, where she keeps almost entirely to her room. The next summer, she gives birth to a sickly boy, who lives only a week. On his last night alive, Tess baptises him herself, after her father locked the doors to keep the parson away. The child is given the name 'Sorrow'. Tess buries Sorrow in unconsecrated ground, makes a homemade cross and lays flowers on his grave in an empty marmalade jar.

Phase the Third: The Rally (16–24)

More than two years after the Trantridge debacle, Tess, now 20, is ready to make a new start. She seeks employment outside the village, where her past is not known, and secures a job as a milkmaid at Talbothays Dairy, working for Mr. and Mrs. Crick. There, she befriends three of her fellow milkmaids, Izz, Retty, and Marian, and re-encounters Angel Clare, who is now an apprentice farmer and has come to Talbothays to learn dairy management. Although the other milkmaids are sick with love for him, Angel soon singles out Tess, and the two gradually fall in love.

Phase the Fourth: The Consequence (25–34)

"He jumped up from his seat...and went quickly toward the desire of his eyes." 1891 illustration by Joseph Syddall

Angel spends a few days away from the dairy visiting his family at Emminster. His brothers Felix and Cuthbert, who are both ordained ministers, note Angel's coarsened manners, while Angel considers his brothers staid and narrow-minded. Following evening prayers, Angel discusses his marriage prospects with his father. The Clares have long hoped that Angel would marry Mercy Chant, a pious schoolmistress, but Angel argues that a wife who understands farm life would be a more practical choice. He tells his parents about Tess, and they agree to meet her. His father, the Reverend James Clare, tells Angel about his efforts to convert the local populace, and mentions his failure to tame a young miscreant named Alec d'Urberville.

Angel returns to Talbothays Dairy and asks Tess to marry him. This puts Tess in a painful dilemma: Angel obviously thinks she is a virgin and, although she does not want to deceive him, she shrinks from confessing lest she lose his love and admiration. Such is her passion for him that she finally agrees to the marriage, explaining that she hesitated because she had heard he hated old families and thought he would not approve of her d'Urberville ancestry. However, he is pleased by this news, because he thinks it will make their match more suitable in the eyes of his family.

As the marriage approaches, Tess grows increasingly troubled. She writes to her mother for advice; Joan tells her to keep silent about her past. Her anxiety increases when a man from Trantridge, named Groby, recognises her while she is out shopping with Angel and crudely alludes to her sexual history. Angel overhears and flies into an uncharacteristic rage. Tess resolves to deceive Angel no more, and writes a letter describing her dealings with d'Urberville and slips it under his door. After Angel greets her with the usual affection the next morning, she discovers the letter under his carpet and realises that he has not seen it. She destroys it.

The wedding goes smoothly although a bad omen of a cock crowing in the afternoon is noticed by Tess. Tess and Angel spend their wedding night at an old d'Urberville family mansion, where Angel presents his bride with some beautiful diamonds that belonged to his godmother and confesses that he once had a brief affair with an older woman in London. When she hears this story, Tess feels sure that Angel will forgive her own indiscretion, and finally tells him about her relationship with Alec.

Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays (35–44)

Angel, however, is appalled by Tess' confession, and he spends the wedding night sleeping on a sofa. Tess, although devastated, accepts the sudden estrangement as something she deserves. After a few awkward, awful days, she suggests that they separate, telling her husband that she will return to her parents. Angel gives her some money and promises to try to reconcile himself to her past, but warns her not to try to join him until he sends for her. After a quick visit to his parents, Angel takes ship for Brazil to start a new life. Before he leaves, he encounters Izz Huett on the road and impulsively asks her to come to Brazil with him, as his mistress. She accepts, but when he asks her how much she loves him, she admits "Nobody could love 'ee more than Tess did! She would have laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more!" Hearing this, he abandons the whim, and Izz goes home weeping bitterly.

Tess returns home for a time but, finding this unbearable, decides to join Marian and Izz at a starve-acre farm called Flintcombe-Ash. On the road, she is recognised and insulted by a farmer named Groby (the same man who slighted her in front of Angel); this man proves to be her new employer. At the farm, the three former milkmaids perform very hard physical labour.

One day, Tess attempts to visit Angel's family at the parsonage in Emminster. As she nears her destination, she encounters Angel's priggish older brothers and the woman his parents once hoped he would marry, Mercy Chant. They do not recognise her, but she overhears them discussing Angel's unwise marriage. Shamed, she turns back. On the way, she overhears a wandering preacher and is shocked to discover that he is Alec d'Urberville, who has been converted to Christianity under the Reverend James Clare's influence.

Phase the Sixth: The Convert (45–52)

Alec and Tess are each shaken by their encounter, and Alec begs Tess never to tempt him again as they stand beside an ill-omened stone monument called the Cross-in-Hand. However, Alec soon comes to Flintcomb-Ash to ask Tess to marry him. She tells him she is already married. He returns at Candlemas and again in early spring, when Tess is hard at work feeding a threshing machine. He tells her he is no longer a preacher and wants her to be with him. She slaps him when he insults Angel, drawing blood. Tess then learns from her sister, Liza-Lu, that her father, John, is ill and that her mother is dying. Tess rushes home to look after them. Her mother soon recovers, but her father unexpectedly dies.

The family is evicted from their home, as Durbeyfield held only a life lease on their cottage. Alec tells Tess that her husband is never coming back and offers to house the Durbeyfields on his estate. Tess refuses his assistance. She had earlier written Angel a psalm-like letter, full of love, self-abasement, and pleas for mercy; now, however, she finally admits to herself that Angel has wronged her and scribbles a hasty note saying that she will do all she can to forget him, since he has treated her so unjustly.

The Durbeyfields plan to rent some rooms in the town of Kingsbere, ancestral home of the d'Urbervilles, but they arrive there to find that the rooms have already been rented to another family. All but destitute, they are forced to take shelter in the churchyard, under the D'Urberville window. Tess enters the church and in the d'Urberville Aisle, Alec reappears and importunes Tess again. In despair, she looks at the entrance to the d'Urberville vault and wonders aloud, "Why am I on the wrong side of this door?"

In the meantime, Angel has been very ill in Brazil and, his farming venture having failed, he heads home to England. On the way, he confides his troubles to a stranger, who tells him that he was wrong to leave his wife; what she was in the past should matter less than what she might become. Angel begins to repent his treatment of Tess.

Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment (53–59)

Upon his return to his family home, Angel has two letters waiting for him: Tess's angry note and a few cryptic lines from "two well-wishers" (Izz and Marian), warning him to protect his wife from "an enemy in the shape of a friend." He sets out to find Tess and eventually locates Joan, now well-dressed and living in a pleasant cottage. After responding evasively to his inquiries, she finally tells him her daughter has gone to live in Sandbourne, a fashionable seaside resort. There, he finds Tess living in an expensive boarding house under the name "Mrs. d'Urberville." When he asks for her, she appears in startlingly elegant attire and stands aloof. He tenderly asks her forgiveness, but Tess, in anguish, tells him he has come too late; thinking he would never return, she yielded at last to Alec d'Urberville's persuasion and has become his mistress. She gently asks Angel to leave and never come back. He departs, and Tess returns to her bedroom, where she falls to her knees and begins a lamentation. She blames Alec for causing her to lose Angel's love a second time, accusing Alec of having lied when he said that Angel would never return to her.

The landlady, Mrs. Brooks, tries to listen in at the keyhole, but withdraws hastily when the argument becomes heated. She later sees Tess leave the house, then notices a spreading red spot — a bloodstain — on the ceiling. She summons help, and Alec is found stabbed to death in his bed.

Angel, totally disheartened, has left Sandbourne; Tess hurries after him and tells him that she has killed Alec, saying that she hopes she has won his forgiveness by murdering the man who ruined both their lives. Angel doesn't believe her at first, but grants his forgiveness — as she is in such a fevered state — and tells her that he loves her. Rather than head for the coast, they walk inland, vaguely planning to hide somewhere until the search for Tess is ended and they can escape abroad from a port. They find an empty mansion and stay there for five days in blissful happiness, until their presence is discovered one day by the cleaning woman.

They continue walking and, in the middle of the night, stumble upon Stonehenge, giving the allusion of Tess as a sacrificial victim to a society that shunned her. Tess lies down to rest on an ancient altar. Before she falls asleep, she asks Angel to look after her younger sister, Liza-Lu, saying that she hopes Angel will marry her after she is dead. At dawn, Angel sees that they are surrounded by police. He finally realises that Tess really has committed murder and asks the men in a whisper to let her awaken naturally before they arrest her. When she opens her eyes and sees the police, she tells Angel she is "almost glad" because "now I shall not live for you to despise me". She is allowed a dignified death through the fact that Angel listens to her (he hasn't throughout the rest of the novel) and through her parting words of "I am ready".

Tess is escorted to Wintoncester (Winchester) prison. The novel closes with Angel and Liza-Lu watching from a nearby hill as the black flag signalling Tess's execution is raised over the prison. Angel and Liza-Lu then join hands and go on their way.

Characters

Major characters

• Tess Durbeyfield — The protagonist, eldest daughter in a poor rural working family; a fresh, well-developed country girl who looks markedly more mature than she is.
• Angel Clare — The third son of a clergyman; Tess's husband and true love. He considers himself a freethinker, but his notions of morality turn out to be fairly conventional: he rejects Tess on their wedding night when she confesses that she isn't a virgin, even though he, too, has engaged in premarital sex. He works at the Talbothay's dairy to gain practical experience because he hopes to buy a farm of his own.
• Alec Stoke-d'Urberville — The libertine son of Simon Stokes and Mrs. d'Urberville. He either rapes or seduces Tess when she is no more than sixteen or seventeen years old, and later pursues her relentlessly. He persuades her to see the reality in her relationship with Angel and convinces her to become his mistress.
• Jack Durbeyfield (Sir John d'Urberville) — Tess's father, a carter in Marlott (based on the Dorset village of Marnhull) who is a lazy alcoholic. When he learns that his family is descended from nobility, he works less and less and starts pretending that he is an aristocrat.
• Joan Durbeyfield — Tess's hardworking mother who has a practical outlook on life. This includes being prepared to use her daughter for her own gains.

Minor characters

• Mrs. Brooks — Landlady of The Herons, the seaside boarding house where Tess murders Alec.
• James Clare — A charitable and moral clergyman; Angel Clare's father.
• Mrs. Clare — Angel Clare's mother, a kindly woman. She wants Angel to marry a pure, virtuous, and true Christian woman.
• Felix Clare — Angel's brother, a priest's assistant.
• Cuthbert Clare — Angel's other brother, 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.
• Richard Crick — The owner of the Talbothay Farm for whom Angel and Tess work.
• Car Darch (Dark Car) — One of Alec's former mistresses, discarded in favour of Tess.
• Eliza Louisa (Liza-Lu) Durbeyfield — Tess's younger sister, who closely resembles her. Shortly before her arrest, Tess asks Angel to marry her. Tess says she has "all the best of me, and none o' the bad".
• Farmer Groby — Tess's employer at Flintcombe-Ash, a churlish man who knows about her relationship with Alec. Groby is knocked down by Angel in their sojourn before their wedding, Angel thinking Groby had offended Tess' honour. Groby says to his friend afterwards that he "didn't have the heart" to tell Angel the truth at the time. His recognition of Tess sparks her fears, and reintroduces the threat of her past into the tragedy.
• Jonathan Kail — A Talbothays dairyman who informs Angel and Tess in the D'Urberville mansion right after the marriage, that Retty Priddle tried to commit suicide, Marian got "dead drunk", and that Izz Huett is walking around depressed.
• Abraham, Hope & Modesty — The son and daughters of the Durbeyfields.
• Mrs. Stoke-D'Urberville — The wealthy mother of Alec, a blind widow.
• Izz Huett, Retty Priddle, and Marian — Dairy maids at the Talbothay Farm. Izz is sensible, Retty sensitive, and Marian stolid, but all are in love with Angel Clare and fare poorly after he marries Tess.
• Parson Tringham — An elderly parson from whom John learns about his noble ancestors.
• Sorrow — The illegitimate child of Tess and Alec who lives only a few weeks. Tess loves him, despite her painfully ambivalent feelings about the circumstances of his conception. She christens him herself on the night he dies.

Symbolism and themes

Hardy's writing often illustrates the "ache of modernism", and this theme is notable in Tess, which, as one critic noted,^[5] portrays "the energy of traditional ways and the strength of the forces that are destroying them". Hardy 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 not 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. When he parts from her and goes to Brazil, 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; despite being, in Hardy's view, a truly good woman, she is despised by society after losing her virginity before marriage. Hardy plays the role of Tess' only true friend and advocate, pointedly subtitling the book "a pure woman faithfully presented" and prefacing it with Shakespeare's words from The Two Gentlemen of Verona: "Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed/ Shall lodge thee." However, although Hardy clearly means to criticise 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 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 has been viewed variously as an Earth goddess or as a sacrificial victim.^[6] 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 human sacrifice.

This symbolism may help explain Tess as a personification of nature — lovely, fecund, and exploitable — while animal imagery throughout the novel strengthens the association. Examples are numerous: Tess's misfortunes begin when she falls asleep while driving Prince to market, thus causing the horse's death; at Trantridge, she becomes a poultry-keeper; she and Angel fall in love amid cows in the fertile Froom valley; and on the road to Flintcombe-Ashe, she kills some wounded pheasants to end their suffering. In any event, Tess emerges as a character not because of this symbolism but because "Hardy's feelings for Tess were strong, perhaps stronger than for any of his other invented personages."^[7]

Tess in popular culture

• Art Garfunkel named his first post-Simon & Garfunkel solo album Angel Clare after the character of the same name.
• American writer Christopher Bram wrote a novel entitled In Memory of Angel Clare (1989).
• The British comedy troupe Monty Python mention Tess of the d'Urbervilles on their 1973 comedy record album Monty Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief on the track "Novel Writing", in which Thomas Hardy writes Return of the Native before a live audience.
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles is mentioned towards the end of M.R. James' short ghost story "The Mezzotint" (1904).
• Third Eye Blind's song "Summer Town" refers to "Nabokov, Miller, and Tess' as the favorite fiction of the song's protagonist.
• John Irving's novel A Prayer for Owen Meany mentions the narrator, John, teaching Tess of the d'Urbervilles to high school students.
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles is referred to in Margaret Atwood's short story "My Last Duchess", published in Moral Disorder (2006).
• The English songwriter Nigel Blackwell has placed a number of references to the novel in a number of his songs, including the song titled, "Thy Damnation Slumbereth Not" from the album Cammell Laird Social Club. The E.P. Editor's Recommendation also includes the lyrics "the serpent often hisses where the sweet birds do sing" and "my hands are stained with thistle milk" in the songs "On Passing Lilac Urine" and "Lark Descending", respectively.

Adaptations

Theatre

Hardy himself chose Gertrude Bugler, a Dorchester girl from the original Hardy Players, to play Tess in the first theatrical adaptation of the novel; he even wrote the script in 1924 (Woodhall, 2006). The Hardy Players (now re-formed in 2005 by Bugler's sister Norrie) was an amateur group from Dorchester who re-enacted Hardy’s novels. Bugler was highly acclaimed (Tomalin, 2006), but she was prevented from taking the London stage part by Hardy's wife, Florence Dougdale, who was jealous of her; Hardy had said that young Gertrude was the true incarnation of the Tess he had imagined. Years before writing the novel, Hardy had been inspired by the beauty of her mother Augusta Way, then an 18-year-old milkmaid, when he visited Augusta's father's farm in Bockhampton. Hardy remembered her when writing the novel. When Hardy saw Bugler (he rehearsed The Hardy Players at the hotel run by her parents), he immediately recognised her as the young image of the now older Augusta (Woodhall, 2006).

The novel was otherwise successfully adapted for the stage twice.

• 1897: A production by Lorimer Stoddard proved a great Broadway triumph for actress Minnie Maddern Fiske, was revived in 1902, and subsequently made into a motion picture in 1913, of which no copies remain.
• 1946: An adaptation by playwright Ronald Gow became a triumph on the West End starring Wendy Hiller.

Opera

1906: An Italian operatic version written by Frederic d'Erlanger was first performed in Naples, but the run was cut short by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius. When the opera came to London three years later, Hardy himself attended the premier, at the age of 69.

Film

The story has also been filmed at least seven times, including three for general release through cinemas and four television productions.

• Cinema:
  • 1913: The 'lost' silent version, mentioned above (in theatre), starring Minnie Maddern Fiske as Tess and Scots-born David Torrence as Alec.^[8]
  • 1924: An extant silent version made with Blanche Sweet (Tess), Stuart Holmes (Alec), and Conrad Nagel (Angel).^[9]
  • 1979: Roman Polanski's film Tess with Nastassja Kinski (Tess), Leigh Lawson (Alec), and Peter Firth (Angel).^[10]
• Television:
  • 1952: BBC TV, directed by Michael Henderson, and starring Barbara Jefford (Tess), Michael Aldridge (Alec), and Donald Eccles (Angel).^[11]
  • 1960: ITV, ITV Play of the Week, "Tess", directed by Michael Currer-Briggs, and starring Geraldine McEwan (Tess), Maurice Kaufmann (Alec), and Jeremy Brett (Angel).^[12]
  • 1998: London Weekend Television's 3-hour mini-series Tess of the D'Urbervilles, directed by Ian Sharp, and starring Justine Waddell (Tess), Jason Flemyng (Alec), and Oliver Milburn (Angel), the latter himself Dorset-born.^[13]
  • 2008: A 4-hour BBC adaptation, written by David Nicholls, aired in the United Kingdom in September and October 2008 (in four parts),^[14] and in the United States on PBS Masterpiece Classic in January 2009 (in two parts).^[15] The cast included Gemma Arterton (Tess), Hans Matheson (Alec), Eddie Redmayne (Angel), Ruth Jones (Joan), Anna Massey (Mrs. d'Urberville), and Kenneth Cranham (Reverend James Clare).^[16][17]

Notes

Tomalin, C., (2006), Thomas Hardy, London: Viking

Woodhall, N., (2006), Norrie's Tale: An Autobiography of the Last of the 'Hardy Players', Wareham: Lullworde Publication

External links

• Tess of the d'Urbervilles at Project Gutenberg
• Cliffs Notes analysis of Tess of the d'Urbervilles
• A hypertextual, self-referential, complete edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the film version, at IMDb.com
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles free MP3 audio recording from LibriVox.