Tess of the D'Urbervilles

 

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The world of literature is one that I love particularly because it’s dynamic, transmutative, familiar, and foreign. What I particularly love about reading, especially reading celebrated works of bygone eras, is the potential to find a book that provides a challenge and forces your mind to expand or contract as you read it. I have just closed the cover on a book that did just this, Thomas Hardy’s tragic tale of the evils of social hierarchy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles. 

When simple country peasant, Jack Durbyfield discovers that he has a noble lineage, he is elated and determines to re-establish the wealth and social standing of his ancestors. As a means to accomplish this, he sends his beautiful daughter Tess to the home of their wealthy cousin Alec D’Urberville in the hope that a prosperous marriage will ensue. However, tragedy prevails as the predatory D’Urberville violates Tess and then abandons her as a single mother. Forced to keep her silence, Tess returns to the laborious life of a country peasant, but finds hope of leaving her terrible past behind when she meets and falls in love with the clergyman’s son, Angel Clare. Their love is strong and pure, but when Tess decides to come clean about her past on their wedding night, everything changes…

There are many tragic heroines that colour classic literature: Kathy Earnshaw, Jane Eyre, Lady Audley to name a few and Tess Durbeyfield sits securely within this company. For quite a substantial part of the book, it reads like a romantic drama or gothic romance with Tess being continuously victimised, but then having the warm and sweet promise of a happy ending somewhere down the road. It’s this misdirection that gives the book its power to entice us to read on even as disaster after disaster befalls Tess; the real villain behind her eventual downfall not being men, but social hierarchy and gender roles themselves. Wealth, social status, gender, and moral purity are the driving forces that keep pounding down at Tess like a battering ram, until the reader can’t bear to read any more. How could anyone bounce back from that? Hardy’s teasing promise of a romantic reunification between Angel and Tess is definitely what kept me going, which then made the final phase, ‘Fulfiment’ all the more shocking, tragic, and depressingly satisfying. 

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In a fashion similar to Jane Austen, Hardy inserts a personal voice of the narrator into the novel, providing the world with judgements and social commentaries, however unlike Austen’s sassy and comedic attitude, Hardy’s tone is blunt, harsh, and grossly omniscient; sympathising and empathising with all of his characters rather than showing attachment. 

Much like Lolita or Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tess of the D’Urbervilles was shunned by critics when it first came out; the cold and stark comments on the injustice of social conventions as well as the immorality the narrative depicts being too confronting and ‘not very nice’. But time has worked its magic on the sad story of Tess and while the book is still tragic, confronting, and emotionally distressing, it is also provocative, powerful, and meaningful. 

Author: Thomas Hardy, 1891

Published: Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. 1891