Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Themes

Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Themes

1. Injustice and Fate

   • Hardy causes the unfair coincidences that beset Tess, but as narrator he manages to appear as her only advocate against an unjust world. (AO1)
     • Tess's hardships are described as mere sport for the “President of the Immortals,” (a phrase from Prometheus Bound (1.169), by Aeschylus; Hardy finishes the novel by suggesting that the highest power in the universe uses human beings for "sport” which contrasts with the Christian idea of a God who has a benevolent plan for everyone, and connects with the notes of paganism throughout the novel. (AO2/AO5)
       • Hardy muses over the idea that Tess's sufferings are a punishment for her ancestors' crimes, or else that some murderous strain is in her blood, foreshadowed by the d'Urberville coach. (AO1/AO5)
         • Even at her happiest in the Valley of the Great Dairies, her position is likened to that of "a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and no more consequence to the surroundings than that fly". (AO2)
           • Her death by the gallows seems inevitable and the fact Angel is able to replace her with Liza Lu, represents her insignificance, due to her gender and social ranking? It also emphasizes the feeling that society, circumstance, and some external force, whether Hardy or a god, have been working against her. (AO5)
             • CONTEXT: From feminist psychoanalytic film theory 'the male gaze' suggests women are objectified within patriarchy. Links the subjectivity and subjection of women to the process of representation and the pleasure of looking. Femininity is formed through spectacle, masculinity through the gaze. (AO3)
               • Tess is never totally free to act, that their life is predestined, that passivity is preferable to wilfulness. (AO5)
                 • Such a plot is most likely to generate pity and fear in the audience, for “pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves.” (AO4)

2. Nature and Modernity

   • The relationship of humanity to nature is a complex theme within which nature and convention are juxtaposed. Nature is cruel, it is where the "serpent hisses where the sweet bird sings". (AO1/AO2)
     • Hardy attacks Victorian morality, yet we can still recognize a certain malignity in nature as an amoral cycle. Nature is used as a presence and an idea. (AO5)
       • Seasons help structure the novel and people's lives: it's used as the norm against which characters and situations are judged and as pressure or force that acts on the characters "a particularly fine spring came around...it moved her, as it moved the wild animals, and made her passionate to go". Humanity is subject to nature. (AO2/AO5)
         • CONTEXT: Tess of the d'Urbervilles is set in both a time and place of societal transition from the agricultural to the industrial. (AO3)
           • The rural English towns and farm women often represent Hardy's idea of Nature, while machines and upper class men are associated with the modernizing forces of industrialization. (AO1/AO5)
             • Many of the descriptions and situations of the novel focus on the way that the characters and society are being separated from a more ancient lifestyle, “the ache of modernity” that Hardy felt as a loss of innocence. The farming machines are described with ominous imagery that contrasts sharply with the Eden-like Froom Valley. (AO2/AO5)
               • Tess, who is associated with purity, fertility, unfallen Eve and innocent paganism against the judgmental world of contemporary society. (AO5)
                 • Prince the farm horse is gored to death by a modern mail cart, and the dairy workers have to water down the milk so the townspeople can drink it without getting sick. The feeling throughout is of nostalgia for an idealized past; a kind of innocence that has been lost along with the coming of the modern age. (AO5)
                   • Hardy's ambiguous attitude to modernity can be found through his description of the work being done by the harvesters, resulting in the death of "rabbits, hares, snakes, rats and mice/under the teeth of the unerring reaper/the sticks and stones of the harvesters" - could represent Tess (the innocent animals); society surrounds her, and modernity could be the cause of her downfall (Alec). (AO2/AO5)
                     • CONTEXT: Cyrus McCormick's horse-drawn reaping machine was displayed in 1851 at the Great Exhibition and was widely adopted by farmers, displacing the work of human reapers and harvesters (did not have to cut the corn by hand). (AO3)
                       • Diction is fourth, and is “the expression of the meaning in words”. Aristotle is interested in metaphors: “But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor; . . . it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances” (AO4)

3. Social Criticism

   • Hardy used Tess of the d'Urbervilles as a vessel for his criticisms of English Victorian society of the late 19th century. (AO1)
     • The novel's largest critique is aimed at the sexual double standard, with all the extremities and misfortunes of Tess's life highlighting the unfairness of her treatment. Society condemns her due to society's arbitrary rules which would oppress an unclean woman because she was raped, while Angel's premarital affair is barely mentioned. (AO5)
       • CONTEXT: The title of the novel challenges convention - it was traditional at the time to see Tess as an “impure woman,” the title's addendum “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented” immediately reveals the author as his protagonist's defender against condemnation. (AO2/AO3)
         • By delving so deeply into Tess's sympathetic interior life and the intricate history of her misfortunes, Hardy makes society's disapproval of her seem that much more unjust. (AO5)
           • The emphasis on ancient names is played to absurdity with John Durbeyfield's sudden pretensions upon learning of his ancestry, and the newly rich Stoke family adding “d'Urberville” to their name just to seem more magnificent. (AO2/AO5)
             • CONTEXT: Hardy derived the fictional names from the real name Turberville - lords of the manor during the 13th century - Durbeyfield is close to the derivative Turbeyfield. In this era, there was an obvious divide in social classes, and the peasantry were taken advantage of by the nobility (it was a common practice). (AO3)
               • Tragic model: the protagonist is described as an outsider, which is a hamartia, often translated “tragic flaw". Society recognizes this about Tess, and criticize her for it. (AO4/AO5)

4. Paganism and Christianity

   • CONTEXT: Hardy struggled with his own religious beliefs, and that struggle comes through in his work. He idealized the paganism of the past but was also attached to his family's Christianity, and generally he accepted some sort of supernatural being that controlled fate. (AO3)
     • Tess herself is usually portrayed as an embodiment of that pagan innocence, a sort of English Nature goddess. She first appears performing the fertility ritual of May-Day, which was a celebration of the newness, and beauty of the spring season. It symbolised purity 'white frocks' and an awakening - for Tess, it was, as she discovered her heritage and a sense of foreshadowing was cast when she saw Angel. (AO2/AO5)
       • Tess as a pagan of innocence can be when she is bedecked in flowers from Alec, whistling to Mrs. d'Urberville's birds, and mercifully killing the wounded pheasants. (AO1/AO5)
         • Angel describes her as a “new-sprung child of nature” and compares her to mythical women like Eve, Artemis, and Demeter. There is another side of Tess's “divinity” as well, however: the role of sacrificial victim, which is a figure associated with both paganism and Christianity. (AO2)
           • CONTEXT: Like Jesus, Tess is punished for the sins of another, assuming the weight of guilt for Alec's crime. (AO3/AO5)
             • When the police finally come to arrest her for murder, she is lying asleep at Stonehenge like a sacrifice on an altar (AO5)
               • CONTEXT: Stonehenge was thought at Hardy's time to be a heathen temple.
                 • The protagonist must be “true to life and yet more beautiful” (idealized, ennobled). Tess is idealized by men due to her beauty and paganist innocence. (AO4)

5. Women

   • Tess often plays the part of a passive victim, falling asleep and inadvertently killing Prince, falling asleep before her rape, and falling asleep at Stonehenge where she is arrested. (AO1)
     • She and many of the other female characters also act as symbols of fertility, nature, and purity. They are linked with the lushness of Talbothays and the bleakness of Flintomb-Ash, as well the fertility ritual of May-Day. (AO5)
       • Emphasis on the power of men over women, in terms of both society and strength. Alec obviously dominates Tess in many terrible ways, but Angel also wields power over the women at the dairy, driving Retty and Marian to a suicide attempt and alcoholism. (AO5)
         • Tess is only an active agent when: she writes angrily to Angel, and her final murder of Alec takes it to the extreme, underscoring Hardy's critique of the oppression of women in Victorian society. Tess is only able to actively escape her male oppressor by murdering him = execution. (AO5)
           • Hardy ultimately celebrates the individual woman over a symbolic whole. Tess is not an “everywoman” or a symbol of fertility, passivity, or oppression, but a unique individual. (AO5)
             • Angel's relationship with Tess shows this tension between idealized image and living reality. He falls in love with his version of Tess, which is the Nature goddess and symbol of innocence, but when the real Tess reveals her troubled humanity and becomes truly alive for him, Angel rejects her. For Hardy, however, Tess remains both a symbol of many things and an individual soul, and it is because of this that she is so successful and sympathetic as a character. (AO5)
               • CONTEXT: Sex was not a discussed topic, and women/girls were expected to be brought up with traditional values. Girls would know little about sex and their bodies "Women's bodies, hidden in long, voluminous clothes. were almost as much of a mystery to themselves as to men" (Perkin). Sexuality contradicted the accepted notions of purity and looked down upon. Women were expected to be governed always under men from father to husband. (AO3)
                 • Society's expectations of women could relate to "consistency” (true to themselves). Once a character's personality and motivations are established, these should continue throughout the play. (AO4)