The Durbeyfield family are poor and simple people, but their ancestors were the d’Urbervilles, an ancient and noble family. When the Durberfields meet with misfortune, they send their eldest daughter to visit her wealthy cousin and ask for help. However, the wealthy cousin has a young son, Alex Stoke-d’Urberville, who finds Tess very attractive…
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) grew up in a Dorset village, surrounded by the countryside that he describes so vividly in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. His father was a builder and master mason. Hardy studied architecture, then worked for five years as architect in London.
A few years before Hardy went to London, in 1859, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published. Throughout his childhood and early youth, Hardy had been a devout Christian. But, while he was living in London in 1860s when intellectual circles were full of debate about the origins of mankind, he began to have serious religious doubts. In 1867 he returned to Dorset, having lost his faith. His first published novel – Desperate Remedies – appeared in 1871. From then on he produced a book about every two years for the rest of his life. He published fourteen novels and many volumes of poetry and short stories. His finest novels are A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Tess is the best known and best loved of all his works.
After Jude the Obscure, Hardy stopped writing novels. The poetry that he wrote during the last thirty years of his life is as fine as his fiction, and many modern poets claimed that Hardy was a major influence upon them. He stopped writing novels because of the hostile criticism he had received for the audacious sexual politics of Tess and Jude. The heroine of Tess is a ‘fallen woman’ and the hero and heroine of Jude live together and have children despite the fact that both are married to other people.
The subtitle of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a A Pure Woman. This outraged many Victorian readers. Tess gave birth to an illegitimate child; therefore, the Victorian readers and reviewers believed, she could not possibly be called a pure woman. One reader burnt the book and sent Hardy the ashes by mail. The subtitle highlights one of the novel’s central points: that we should judge people by their intentions rather than by the outward facts of their lives. Hardy makes it perfectly clear in the novel that Tess does not intend to submit to Ale d’Urberville’s passionate advances. The scene in The Chase is veiled in mystery. Was Tess raped or seduced? We are never told clearly, but various details suggest that she was seduced.
The most subtle and beautiful of these details is a symbolic foreshadowingof the scene in The Chase. It takes place when Tess first meets Alec. He asks her if she likes strawberries, and she replies ‘Yes, when they are in season.’
The symbolic parallels, between the strawberry Alec offers her now and the physical love he will offer her later, are clear. But the most interesting aspect of the scene lies in another parallel: that between the strawberry and Tess. Alec asks his question in a greenhouse, a place shere ripening is accelerated. It is too early in the season for strawberries, but Alec’s greenhouse has rushed the process of ripening. Thus in a subtle and poignant symbolic image, Hardy reminds us that Tess is only seventeen and not yet ready for sexual life.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a rich and complex novel, in which Hardy broods on the connections between character and fate. Are social conventions to blame for Tess’s tragedy, or was her fate determined by her d’Urberville blood? Sometimes Tess’s story seems to be about men’s abuse of women and aristocrats’ abuse of peasants. At other points it seems a bitter tale written by a man whose faith in a benevolent God had been replaced by belief in a malevolent Fate. Hardy does not give us answers: he asks these vast and disturbing questions and sets them in motion around the simple, appealing, and vulnerable figure of Tess.
Thomas Hardy and Tes of the d’Urbervilles
Chapter One - A Noble Family
Chapter Two - Maiden
Chapter Three - Maiden no more
Chapter Four - Sorrow
Chapter Five - The Dairy
Chapter Six - Love Grows
Chapter Seven - The Consequence
Chapter Eight - The Woman Pays
Chapter Nine - The Convert
Chapter Ten - Fulfilment
Keywords: Durbeyfield|d’Urbervilles|Noble|Romance|Black Cat English Readers|Reader
