Tess of the d'Urbervilles

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Thomas Hardy wrote Tess of the d'Urbervilles in the late 1880s, at the height of Victorian anxieties about sexuality, class, and religious orthodoxy. Subtitled "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented," the novel provoked controversy for defending its "fallen" heroine's virtue against conventional Victorian sexual morality. It was serialized in bowdlerized form in The Graphic in 1891 before appearing in an unexpurgated three-volume edition the same year and as a single volume in 1892. Hardy set the novel in his fictionalized "Wessex," the West Country region he mapped across his fiction, drawing on the declining fortunes of rural England amid agricultural depression, mechanization, and the erosion of the peasant landholding class. The novel reflects Hardy's engagement with Darwinian ideas of chance and struggle, his skepticism toward organized Christianity, and his sympathy for women constrained by a double standard that punished female sexual experience while excusing male transgression. Tess belongs to Hardy's self-designated "novels of character and environment," a group that also includes Far from the Madding Crowd and, later, Jude the Obscure, and it marks his mature turn toward tragic, philosophically probing fiction increasingly at odds with Victorian reading-public sensibilities.

Tess Durbeyfield, daughter of a poor rural family who learn they are descended from the ancient d'Urberville line, is sent by her parents to claim kinship with the wealthy Stoke-d'Urbervilles. There she is seduced (or raped, in the novel's deliberately ambiguous phrasing) by Alec d'Urberville, bears his child, Sorrow, who dies in infancy, and baptizes the baby herself. Seeking a fresh start, Tess works as a dairymaid at Talbothays, where she falls in love with Angel Clare, an idealistic clergyman's son. They marry, but when Tess confesses her past on their wedding night, Angel, though he has confessed his own premarital lapse, rejects her and departs for Brazil. Abandoned and impoverished, Tess endures hard labor at the bleak farm of Flintcomb-Ash and again encounters Alec, now an itinerant preacher, who pressures her into becoming his mistress to support her destitute family after her father's death. Angel, having suffered abroad and reconsidered his judgment, returns to seek Tess's forgiveness, arriving too late. In despair, Tess murders Alec and flees with Angel; the couple share a brief idyll before Tess is captured, asleep, at Stonehenge. The novel ends with her execution, observed symbolically by Angel and Tess's sister Liza-Lu from a hillside as a black flag is raised over the prison.

• Fate and chance versus free will
• The sexual double standard and Victorian hypocrisy
• Purity and social judgment of women
• The decline of rural England and agricultural change
• Nature's indifference and pastoral beauty
• Class, ancestry, and false gentility
• Religion, guilt, and moral hypocrisy
• Injustice and the individual versus society

• ◆Pathetic fallacy — landscape and weather mirror Tess's emotional and moral states
• ◆Symbolic naming and setting — Wessex locales (Talbothays, Flintcomb-Ash) reflect stages of Tess's fortune
• ◆Authorial irony — Hardy's narratorial commentary undercuts Victorian moral judgments of Tess
• ◆Foreshadowing — recurring omens (the death of the horse Prince, the roses that prick and stain Tess at The Slopes) anticipate tragedy
• ◆Symbolism — recurring objects and images (the family d'Urberville coach, Stonehenge) carry thematic weight
• ◆Chapter/phase structure — the novel is divided into 'Phases' marking Tess's shifting identity and fortune

• ◆Stonehenge — pagan sacrificial altar, marking Tess as a sacrificial victim of society
• ◆The d'Urberville family coach/legend — the burden and illusion of ancestry and class pretension
• ◆The death of Prince the horse — the family's economic ruin and Tess's guilt-laden fate
• ◆Sorrow's grave and baptism — the intersection of religious convention and natural morality
• ◆The black flag at the novel's close — Tess's execution and society's final verdict

Tess of the d'Urbervilles is regarded as one of the great tragic novels of the Victorian era and a landmark in the literary challenge to sexual double standards. Its sympathetic, morally serious treatment of a "fallen woman" influenced later novelists' willingness to portray female sexuality and social hypocrisy without conventional moralizing, and it anticipates the psychological and philosophical concerns of modernist fiction. The novel's fatalistic vision and its critique of rigid Victorian morality also fed directly into the controversy surrounding Hardy's next and final novel, Jude the Obscure, after which Hardy abandoned fiction for poetry. Tess remains a touchstone in feminist literary criticism and in studies of the English pastoral and rural decline tradition.

• ◆Tess (1979 film directed by Roman Polanski, starring Nastassja Kinski)
• ◆Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1998 television film starring Justine Waddell)
• ◆Tess of the d'Urbervilles (2008 BBC/Masterpiece television serial starring Gemma Arterton)

• Far from the Madding Crowd — Thomas Hardy
• Jude the Obscure — Thomas Hardy
• The Mayor of Casterbridge — Thomas Hardy
• Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
• Adam Bede — George Eliot

1. 1Tess was serialized in a censored form in The Graphic in 1891, with scenes such as the seduction and the illegitimate baptism altered or omitted to suit periodical sensibilities.
2. 2Hardy set the novel across his invented region of 'Wessex,' a fictionalized version of the historical West Country of England.
3. 3The novel's subtitle, 'A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented,' was itself a deliberate provocation to Victorian moral orthodoxy.
4. 4Hardy was so discouraged by the hostile reception to his fiction's sexual and religious frankness (culminating with Jude the Obscure) that he turned to writing poetry for the remainder of his career.