Historical Context
Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 894
Darwin and Social Darwinism
The last fifty years of the nineteenth century saw innovations in science and technology that changed society to a greater degree than ever before. The theory of evolution popularized by naturalist Charles Darwin in his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, published in 1859, had enormous cultural implications. The idea that humans were descended from apes changed accepted views of religion and society. It shook belief in the Biblical creation story and, therefore, all religious beliefs. It shocked the Victorians (those who lived during the reign of the British Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901) to think that their ancestors were animals. They glorified order and high-mindedness, and thought themselves, as British subjects, the pinnacle of culture.
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To make Darwin's theory more palatable, a complementary theory called Social Darwinism was formulated. Proponents of this social philosophy argued that Darwin's ideas of "survival of the fittest" also applied to society. The existence of lower classes could be explained by their inferior intelligence and initiative in comparison to that of the upper classes. Angel refers to this theory when he expresses his surprise that there is no "Hodge" amongst the workers at Talbothays. "The conventional farm-folk of his imagination—personified in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy known as Hodge—were obliterated after a few days' residences." He is surprised to discover in Tess "the ache of modernism." For Tess, Angel, and others of their era, the God of their childhood was no longer able to answer their questions. Darwin's book ended forever the security of a society that could offer unalterable answers to every question; like Angel, many began to put their faith in "intellectual liberty" rather than religion.
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Industrialization and Rural England
When the railroad came to the area of southwest England where Tess was born, the area still led an isolated, almost medieval existence. The railroad made it easier for country folk looking for work to leave the towns where their families had lived for centuries. The railroad also fostered new types of agricultural use of the land. Large dairies such as Talbothays, where Tess worked as a milkmaid, could flourish only because the rapid trains allowed transport of fresh milk to heavily populated areas. When Tess and Angel take milk cans from the dairy to the nearest train station, Tess reflects that the next morning in London "strange people we have never seen" will drink the milk. The trains converted a closely-knit society into one where consumers never met the producers and where strangers lived together in larger and larger groups.
England entered an agricultural depression in the 1870s, brought on in part by the completion of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States in 1869. (This made it easier and cheaper for American goods to complete with British goods.) Rural workers unable to get jobs, flocked to British cities, causing urban population to double between 1851 and 1881. Less profitable farming, meant farms had to become larger in order to turn a profit, so smaller farms were bought out by larger farm owners. Machines, like the steam threshing machine at Flintcomb Ash, made agricultural workers less in demand. The large landowners felt no connection with the families living on their land, so to not renew their leases—as was done to Tess's family on Old Ladies Day—was a question of economic good sense, nothing more. Hardy criticized this practice in "The Dorsetshire Labourer," an essay published in Longman's magazine in July 1883 quoted in Martin Seymour-Smith's biography of Hardy. "But the question of the Dorset cottager," Hardy notes, "here merges in that of all the house less and landless poor and the vast topic of the Rights of Man."
Women in Victorian Society
In Tess Hardy considers both the "Rights of Man" and, with equal sympathy, the rights of women. Women of the Victorian era were idealized as the helpmate of man, the keeper of the home, and the "weaker sex." Heroines in popular fiction were expected to be frail and virtuous. The thought that Hardy subtitled his novel "A Pure Woman" infuriated some Victorian critics, because it flew in the face of all they held sacred. For while the Victorian era was a time of national pride and belief in British superiority, it was also an age best-remembered for its emphasis on a strict code of morality, unequally applied to men and women. The term Victorian has come to refer to any person or group with a narrow, uncompromising sense of right and wrong. Women were not only discriminated against by the moral code, but they were also discriminated against by the legal code of the day. Until the 1880s married women were unable to hold property in their own name; and the wages of rural workers would go directly to the husband, even if he failed to provide anything for his family. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 granted the right to a divorce to both men and women on the basis of adultery but, in order to divorce her husband, a women would have to further prove gross cruelty or desertion. Women who sought divorce for whatever reason were ostracized from polite society. Women, like children, were best "seen, but not heard," or as Seymour-Smith observes, "The Victorian middle-class wife...was admired upon her pedestal of moral superiority only so long as she remained there silently."
Literary Style
Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 930
Narrator
Tess of the d'Urbervilles tells the story of a girl who is seduced and has a child who dies. When she meets another man whom she wants to marry, she is unable to tell him about her past until after their wedding. Her husband abandons her, and Tess is driven by despair into the arms of her former seducer. When her husband returns, Tess kills the man she is living with. Hardy uses a third-person ("he/she") narrator with an omniscient (all-knowing) point of view to tell Tess's story. Thus the narrator not only describes the characters but can reveal their thoughts Hardy also uses his power as narrator to offer his philosophical insights on the action. The novel's closing paragraph, which begins " 'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess" is a good example of how Hardy comments on the action. Some critics believe the novel would have been better if Hardy could have remained silent and let the actions of the characters tell the story. At several spots in the novel, Hardy's narrator loses his omniscient ability and comments on the story through the eyes of a storyteller of local history. For example, when he tells the story of Tess and Angel's first meeting, when Angel chooses another girl to dance with him, the narrator says he does not know the lucky girl's name. "The name of the eclipsing girl, whatever it was, has not been handed down," he notes.
Setting
The story takes place in Wessex, an invented territory based on the Dorset countryside where Hardy was born and which fascinated him his entire life. Hardy gives Wessex its own vitality by depicting the region's folk customs (such as the "club-walking" in the scene in which we meet Tess), the "folklore dialect" with its colorful expressions like "get green malt in floor" (meaning to get pregnant), and its superstitions (such as the story of the d'Urberville coach). Hardy's settings seem to mirror the emotions of his characters. Talbothays Dairy, where Angel and Tess's love grows, is described as "oozing fatness and warm ferments" and there "the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization." Everything about Talbothays drips with the moisture of fertility and sensuality. In stark contrast to the dairy are scenes at Flintcomb Ash where Tess goes after she is abandoned by Angel. It is "a starve-acre place" where the fields are "a desolate drab" color and the work is exhausting and demeaning. The scene of Tess's capture is Stonehenge, the famous prehistoric ruins on the Salisbury Plain, consisting of large upright stones surrounding an altar stone. Significantly, it is on this altar stone, thought to have been the site of bloody sacrificial offerings, that Tess lies when the police come to arrest her for Alec's murder. Through his choice of settings Hardy is able to make additional comment on the action of the story without further narrative intrusions. By placing Tess on the sacrificial altar Hardy makes clear that he believes she is an innocent victim. Time of year is also important in the novel as Hardy uses the changing of the seasons over the period of about five years as representative of the changing fortunes of his heroine. It is "a particularly fine spring" when she goes to Talbothays; summer as Angel courts her; and finally winter at Flintcomb Ash where she tries to once more avoid Alec's advances. Time of day is equally as important: unhappy events usually happen in the evening or night.
Symbolism
The settings in Tess of the d'Urbervilles function as symbols in that their names have meanings more important than just geographical points. Mar-lott, Tess's birthplace, for example, alludes to her "marred" or disfigured lot or destiny. Flintcomb Ash, as its name implies, is a hard, barren place. Several characters have symbolic names as well, including the girl that Angel's parents want him to marry, Mercy Chant, who is depicted as religious to a fault, and Angel Clare, who seems to be an "angel" to Tess and her three milkmaid friends, and even plays a harp. The harp, however, we are told is secondhand, and it symbolizes Angel's imperfect character. Throughout the novel Angel and Tess are symbolically associated with Adam and Eve of the Bible. In one of the most commented on scenes in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Tess approaches Angel, who is playing his harp, through the wildflowers and weeds in an unkempt garden with an apple tree. As she approaches, she is unaware of the "thistle-milk and slug-slime" and other disagreeable natural secretions that coat her skirts and arms. Even though Talbothays may seem like Paradise, the reader understands that this Garden of Eden is one that has been spoiled. Later in the novel, more references appear that, again, equate Tess with Eve and Angel with Adam. Alec, on the other hand, appears to Tess as she plants potatoes in a Marlott field. Amid the fires of burning weeds, he appears holding a pitchfork and he says, "You are Eve, and I am the old Other One come to tempt you." Tess is also repeatedly identified with a captured bird. Other important symbolic images in the novel include a bloodstained piece of butcher paper caught in the gate of the Clare residence as Tess attempts to contact Angel's parents in Emminster, the bloody heart-shaped stain on the ceiling at "The Herons" after Tess kills Alec in the room above, and the capture of Tess on the stone of sacrifice at Stonehenge.
Places Discussed
Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 704
Wessex
Wessex. Hardy’s fictionalized version of the region around Dorset, a coastal county in southern England, taking its name from the West Saxon kingdom of the sixth to tenth centuries. Hardy introduced Wessex in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). In later fiction, he layered a detailed topography modeled on actual locations with archetypal symbolism. The capital city of Wessex, Casterbridge, mentioned several times in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, is Hardy’s version of Dorchester.
Marlott
Marlott. Village in the north of Wessex on a plain called the Vale of Blackmoor (or Blakemore), modeled on Marnhull, that is Tess Durbeyfield’s original home. Even before she is forced to leave this “fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown and the springs never dry,” mishaps and catastrophes in its environs indeed seem destined to mar her lot in life.
Trantridge
Trantridge. Town east of Marlott, based on Pentridge, where the Durbyfieldses’ supposed D’Urberville relatives live in a redbrick lodge. At the edge of this newly rich estate, Hardy places the Chase, a forest dating back to the time of the Druids that he bases on Cranbourne Chase, once a royal hunting ground. There, primeval shadows and modern corruption collude in Alec D’Urberville’s rape of Tess.
Chaseborough
Chaseborough. “Decayed market-town,” located two or three miles southeast of Trantridge, whose hard-drinking looseness drives Tess into Alec’s company.
Talbothays Dairy
Talbothays Dairy. Destination of Tess’s second journey from home, in the Great Dairies region, which Hardy alternately calls Var Vale and Froom Valley after its double-named river. Lying symbolically in almost the opposite direction from Trantridge, the fertile valley is the scene of Tess’s summer healing and rebirth after her rape. At times, Talbothays seems to be Eden after the Fall, at others a pagan pastoral idyll.
Emminster
Emminster. Little town surrounded by hills in which the religious family of Tess’s husband, Angel Clare, lives. A dominant church tower signals the contrast to Talbothays’ natural, pagan lushness.
Wellbridge
Wellbridge. Village in which Tess and Angel honeymoon in a farmhouse. There her ancestors’ looming portraits represent Tess’s entrapment by her past, and Angel leaves her after she finally reveals part of her past to him.
*Brazil
*Brazil. South American country to which Angel flees to gain new farming experience after he is disillusioned by Tess’s revelation. In addition to reflecting a trend among British agriculturists of the period, Angel’s stay in the New World serves to liberate him from England’s narrow conventions.
Flintcomb-Ash
Flintcomb-Ash. Bleak “starve-acre place” about fifteen miles southwest of Marlott where Tess works at swede-hacking during a harsh winter. Hardy explicitly contrasts Flintcomb-Ash, his fictionalized Nettlecombe-Tout, with “Talbothays Dairy, that happy green tract of land where summer had been liberal in her gifts.” At Flintcomb-Ash, Tess simultaneously endures seasonal hardship, renewed sexual predation by Alec, and mechanical oppression by a demoniac, black threshing machine.
Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill
Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill. Former home of Tess’s highborn D’Urberville ancestors, now buried in its churchyard. The migration of Tess’s family from Marlott to Kingsbere (modeled on Bere Regis) exemplifies village depopulation caused by seasonal work but also symbolizes how Tess’s heritage has a death-grip on her fate.
Sandbourne
Sandbourne. Fashionable resort modeled on Bournemouth where Angel finds Tess after returning from Brazil. Hardy uses this “city of detached mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English Channel” to emphasize his rural heroine’s sense of alienation in living as the wife of the newly rich Alec, whom she kills after she turns away Angel.
New Forest
New Forest. Setting for Tess and Angel’s delayed consummation of their marriage, contrasting with the antiquity of the Chase.
*Stonehenge
*Stonehenge. Circle of stone monoliths placed in prehistoric times on a plain about eight miles northwest of Salisbury, which Hardy calls “ancient Melchester,” in the county of Wiltshire. In this pagan setting, which Angel associates with human sacrifices to the sun, Tess rests on a stone slab before her arrest for Alec’s murder. As the police close in around her, the setting makes her not merely the law’s victim but also a sacrifice to some unjust, even cruel, universal power beyond natural phenomena.
Bibliography
Last Updated on May 18, 2017, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 264
Casagrande, Peter J. Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Unorthodox Beauty. New York: Twayne, 1992. Focuses on Hardy’s intertwining of beauty and ugliness, of moral and aesthetic issues. Examines Victorian attitudes toward women, Tess’s “terrible beauty” and parallels between her suffering and the horse’s death. Analyzes Angel as a mix of convention and newness.
Kramer, Dale, and Nancy Marck, eds. Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy: The Novels. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Discusses Hardy’s plots and rhetoric, with focus on individual novels. Good essay on Hardy’s understanding of Tess as a woman, examining Victorian debates and postromantic ideas. Treats awareness of language as a shaping force.
Moore, Kevin Z. The Descent of the Imagination: Postromantic Culture in the Later Novels of Thomas Hardy. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Uses language and cultural dominance issues to discuss Tess’s quest for beauty and freedom.
Vigar, Penelope. The Novels of Thomas Hardy: Illusion and Reality. London: Athlone Press, 1974. Analyzes Hardy’s techniques and style. Examines Tess of the D’Urbervilles in terms of Hardy’s notion of imaginative flights that emerge from visual effects. Analyzes the novel’s structure in terms of its contrasts—Tess’s purity and guilt, reality and perceptions.
Wright, Terence. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1987. Summarizes critical approaches to Tess of the D’Urbervilles: social, character, ideas, formal, and genetic. Gives overview of criticism on the novel. Synthesizes the best criticism, emphasizing importance of place, ambiguity of causes, human insignificance, and the inevitability of human tragedy, with Tess representing individual and larger tragedy.
Compare and Contrast
Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 352
1890s: The rural population was forced to move toward urban areas as low prices and industrialization of farm equipment made smaller farms less profitable.
Today: Family-run farms are disappearing across the United States at the rate of several hundred a year, primarily due to large corporations controlling food production and pricing.
1890s: The advent of rail transportation from rural to the teeming cities of the late nineteenth century made dairy farming more attractive than crop farming, since production was less weather dependent, costs were lower, and an ever-expanding customer-base was within easy reach.
Today: While small dairies still exist, increasing production costs and lower prices have forced many dairy farmers to sell out to larger concerns, with an average dairy in the western United States milking one to two thousand cows.
1890s: Women could not divorce their husbands, even for having an affair, unless they could prove their husbands had treated them cruelly or abandoned them.
Today: All fifty states permit couples to divorce by mutual consent, although in twenty, pro-family groups have proposed, and in several cases passed, legislation for making divorce harder to obtain when children are involved.
1890s: State supported education was provided for all children, with education being compulsory to age eleven.
Today: Increasing dissatisfaction with public schooling has led to exploration of alternative educational methods, including independent public charter schools and 1.2 million students in home-schools.
1890s: Teacher, rural worker, domestic helper, and nurse were some of the positions open to women seeking financial independence; those who chose nontraditional career paths, such as medicine, were ridiculed.
Today: Although on the average women still earn less per hour than male workers, unlimited career opportunities are now available to them; in 1997, Madeleine Albright became the first woman to ever serve as U. S. Secretary of State, eliminating yet another barrier to advancement for women.
1890s: Women who bore children out of wedlock were considered "ruined"; they and their children could hope for little more than social marginalization.
Today: Single parenting has become commonplace, with more than 30% of U.S. children being born to fathers and mothers who are not married.
Literary Techniques
Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 380
Like most of Hardy's novels, Tess of the D 'Urbervilles is conservative and unspectacular in its literary techniques. It uses the convention of the omniscient narrator with dexterity, providing, as do many Victorian novels, a cordial companion to help the reader interpret the action. As Hardy laments the folly of Joan and John Durbeyfield in mapping out an unfortunate future for Tess and her siblings, we as readers come to rely on Hardy's "voice" for guidance in interpreting the data. He is at his very best in panoramic scenes of social realism, such as the harvest scenes at Marlott and later at Flintcomb-Ash, or the "lady-day" removals that force the widow Durbeyfield and her family out of their cottage.
Like The Mayor of Casterbridge, this novel, although extensively revised from serial to book publication, still bears the impress of the serialized novel, the occasionally anticlimactic moment. Hardy emphasizes the smaller units of meaning by titling sections of the novel as "Phases," often with double or ambiguous meaning, such as "The Rally" for the section describing Tess's journey to Talbothay's to get away from the shame and sorrow at Marlott, in which she falls in love with Angel (thus a positive "rally") but is consumed by her unworthiness to be his life's partner (thus a reminder that her fate denies any rally). Similarly Hardy labels the final phase of the novel, chapters 53 through 59, "Fulfillment." In it he describes the idyllic week of honeymoon Tess and Angel steal at a closed estate (the stealing a fairly heavy-handed symbol for the concept that their happiness in this world of sorrow must be stolen), but he also describes the murder of Alec and eventually Tess's death by hanging—which ironically fulfills the death wish she has harbored since she returned pregnant to Marlott and which manifested itself especially in the powerful scene in which she visits the graves of her D'Urberville ancestors.
Finally, the novel employs the archetypal myth of the scapegoat. Carpenter efficiently describes this dimension as an "archetypal folk tale of the wronged maiden who cannot escape from her past, who finally turns on her seducer to destroy him, and who loses her own life as a result." Most critics and readers would find much with which to agree in this description.
Media Adaptations
Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 69
Tess of the d'Urbervilles was adapted as a film directed by Roman Polanski, starring Nastassja Kinski, Leigh Lawson, and Peter Firth, 1980. The film received many Academy Award nominations, including one for best picture, it won Oscars for best cinematography, best art direction and best costume design. It is available from Columbia Tristar Home Video.
It was also recorded on audio cassette, narrated by Davina Porter, published by Recorded Books, 1994.
Ideas for Group Discussions
Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 591
Most group discussions will undoubtedly and productively focus on questions of guilt and responsibility. Other areas that can be productively explored are the issues of gender roles. How much of Hardy's representation to Tess as a victim of stratified gender roles is intentional? Several omniscient passages in the novel isolate certain behaviors as "feminine," and these are not usually complimentary. Do these passages undermine the sense of Tess as the victim of repressive attitudes toward gender roles? Here are some other questions.
1. At the end of Tess of the D 'Urbervilles, two figures, Angel and Liza-Lu, Tess's sister, pause and kneel to pray when the signal is given that Tess has been executed. Tess suggested to Angel that he marry her sister after she is dead. Does Hardy intend this as a fulfillment of Tess's hopes, an act of loyalty to her memory by both the people she most loved? Or is there a hint of irony here, that Angel and Liza-Lu will go on to the future Tess was denied? Does their implied future together honor or diminish Tess's memory?
2. One of the most impressive scenes in the novel takes place on the way to Flintcomb-Ash, when Tess sleeps in a grove and hears what she in the morning discovers to be pheasants wounded by hunters and left to die. To what degree are the pheasants representative of larger concerns in the novel? How do we account for Tess's systematically strangling all the pheasants she can catch?
3. A highly celebrated passage of the novel concerns the "lady-day" removals that take members of the old peasant class from one job and home to another. Discuss the sociological implications of this passage. Is it a lament for a lost, stable peasantry? A call for reform in England's labor practices? A recognition of an inevitable social change?
4. Murder is never justified. How near is Tess's killing Alec an exception to this generalization? Is it an act of fate, or an act of choice?
5. How successfully does Hardy account for the love the three dairymaids, as well as Tess, feel for Angel Clare? It is clearly something more than puppy-love. What about "Mr. Clare" so spellbinds the young women?
6. Compare Tess's stay at Talbothay's dairy with that at Flintcomb-Ash as variations on Hardy's vision of England's disappearing rural economy. Although there are clear and pronounced differences, are there similarities behind them?
7. What elements of Tess's character or situation might be emphasized by a reader influenced by modern feminist theory or concerns? How consistent with Hardy's assumptions at the time the novel was written do you think such interpretations would be?
8. How credible is Alec D'Urberville's conversion to evangelical Christianity? Does Hardy make this transformation convincing? Or is this change part of Hardy's unrelenting critique of Christianity? Or is the conversion necessary to the plot, that is, simply needed to set up Alex's inevitable backsliding?
9. Tess explores the crypt of the local church, where she finds the burial chamber of the D'Urberville family and the unregenerate Alec, which is the last time we see her before Angel locates her as Alec's mistress. How much credibility does the crypt scene, with its lugubrious associations with mortality, offer to support Tess's capitulation to Alec's demands?
10. At what points in the novel did Tess make real decisions concerning her future life? Was her fate determined by chance, economics, culture, or destiny? Were the choices she made themselves conditioned? Which of these decisions in turn sets into motion a series of incidents that seem to conspire against Tess's happiness?
Bibliography and Further Reading
Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 665
Sources
Harold Bloom, "Introduction," in Thomas Hardy Modern Critical Views, Chelsea House, 1987, pp 1-22.
Butler, Lance St. John, Thomas Hardy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
Donald Davidson, "The Traditional Basis of Thomas Hardy's Fiction," in Hardy A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Albert J. Guerard, Prentice-Hall, 1963 pp.
Gittings, Robert. Young Thomas Hardy. London: Heinemann, 1975.
Gregor, Ian. The Great Web. London: Faber, 1974.
Guerard, A. J. (ed.). Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963.
Albert J. Guerard, "Introduction," in his Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1963, pp 1-9.
Florence Emily Hardy, "Background Hardy's Autobiography," in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, 2nd edition, edited by Scott Elledge, Norton, 1979, pp. 343-63.
Hardy, F. E. The Life of Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan, 1962.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Norton Critical Edition, WW Norton, 1979.
John Holloway, "Hardy's Major Fiction," in Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Albert Guerard, Prentice-Hall, 1963, pp 52-62.
Martin Seymour-Smith, Hardy A Biography, St. Martin's Press, 1994
Review of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, in Anthenaeum, January 9, 1892.
Review of Tess of the d'Urbervilles in Times (London), January 13,1892.
Dorothy Van Ghent, "On Tess of the d'Urbervilles," in Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Albert J. Guerard, Prentice-Hall, 1963, pp 77-90.
For Further Study
Byron Caminero-Santangelo, "A Moral Dilemma: Ethics in Tess of the d'Urbervilles," in English Studies, Vol 75, No 1, January, 1994, pp. 46-61. Caminero-Santangelo begins by noting that the world of Tess is a post-Darwinian one in which ethics have no basis in nature. He then goes on to argue that the novel's "ethical center" can be located in a "community of careful readers" who will recognize the injustice in the novel and emulate Tess in challenging it.
Peter J. Casagrande, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Unorthodox Beauty, Twayne's Masterwork Studies, 1992. In this book-length study, Casagrande argues that Hardy, in exploring the question of why innocents suffer, finds beauty in Tess's suffering at the same time that he deplores that suffering.
Graham Handley, in Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Penguin, 1991. Handley analyzes Tess in terms of "narrative structures." He gives particular weight to the roles of the characters in the novel, and also examines the novel in terms of such things as its "figurative patterns" and "themes."
Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, 1967. Howe provides a lengthy discussion of Tess, including a comparison between Hardy's novel and Bun-yan's Pilgrim's Progress.
Lionel Johnson, "The Argument," in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, 2nd edition, edited by Scott EUedge, Norton, 1979, pp. 389-400. A portion of poet Lionel Johnson's acclaimed early analysis of Hardy's fiction in which he examines Hardy's attitude toward Nature, his depiction of the Wessex country folk, and his fatalistic view of life.
Hugh Kenner, "J. Hilhs Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire," in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 2, September, 1971, pp. 230-34. In the course of reviewing a book by scholar-cntic J. Hilhs Miller on Hardy, Kenner provides his own perspective on Hardy's merits and importance.
Andrew Lang, review of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, in Longman's, November, 1892. An early review in which the critic finds little to praise in the novel.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, University of California Press, 1980. A landmark study focusing mainly on the visual arts in Renaissance Italy, and first published in 1873.
Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle, Viking Penguin, 1990. Showalter's study discusses gender issues in 1890s Britain and draws several parallels with the U.S in the 1980s.
Peter Widdowson, editor Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Macmillan, 1993. A collection of essays meant to represent a response to Hardy's novel from a range of critical positions, in particular Marxism, feminism, and poststructural-lsm.
Terence Wnght, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Macmillan, 1987. This short book is divided into two parts. In the first, Wnght surveys various critical approaches to the novel, which he divides into five basic categories In the second, he attempts to synthesize what he considers to be the best elements of all these approaches into a single reading of the novel.
Bibliography
Last Updated on May 7, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 264
Casagrande, Peter J. Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Unorthodox Beauty. New York: Twayne, 1992. Focuses on Hardy’s intertwining of beauty and ugliness, of moral and aesthetic issues. Examines Victorian attitudes toward women, Tess’s “terrible beauty” and parallels between her suffering and the horse’s death. Analyzes Angel as a mix of convention and newness.
Kramer, Dale, and Nancy Marck, eds. Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy: The Novels. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Discusses Hardy’s plots and rhetoric, with focus on individual novels. Good essay on Hardy’s understanding of Tess as a woman, examining Victorian debates and postromantic ideas. Treats awareness of language as a shaping force.
Moore, Kevin Z. The Descent of the Imagination: Postromantic Culture in the Later Novels of Thomas Hardy. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Uses language and cultural dominance issues to discuss Tess’s quest for beauty and freedom.
Vigar, Penelope. The Novels of Thomas Hardy: Illusion and Reality. London: Athlone Press, 1974. Analyzes Hardy’s techniques and style. Examines Tess of the D’Urbervilles in terms of Hardy’s notion of imaginative flights that emerge from visual effects. Analyzes the novel’s structure in terms of its contrasts—Tess’s purity and guilt, reality and perceptions.
Wright, Terence. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1987. Summarizes critical approaches to Tess of the D’Urbervilles: social, character, ideas, formal, and genetic. Gives overview of criticism on the novel. Synthesizes the best criticism, emphasizing importance of place, ambiguity of causes, human insignificance, and the inevitability of human tragedy, with Tess representing individual and larger tragedy.
Literary Precedents
Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 353
The somewhat lengthy list of coincidences in the novel, which individual readers can extend to triple or quadruple its length, would indeed seem to support the assertion that Tess's life is fated, that she, like Frank Norris's McTeague (of the novel of the same name, 1899; see separate entry) is a plaything of fate and that her story is essentially a de casibus tragedy, or a tragedy of fate. Her confrontation with destiny would then be what an important character in King Lear (1605), the great tragedy often associated by critics with Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge describes in this stark simile: "As flies to wanton [naughty] boys are we to the gods,/They kill us for their sport."
Of course this great description tells only a part of the theme of King Lear. While the Earl of Gloucester reads the text of his own error-filled life as a confirmation of his own hypothesis that we are all the playthings of fate, the true tragic figure, Lear himself, has to come to an even more painful self-knowledge that by the decisions we often make we set into motion sequences of events that can ultimately overwhelm us. An indication of the true tragic stature of Tess of the D'Urbervilles is that something quite like, but not identical, to this meditation on fate and character occurs in this, Hardy's greatest novel. Tess is indeed the victim of fate. But she is also the victim of foolish parents, perverse gender roles in Victorian culture, a dysfunctional clergy, and as the poet Donald Hall so persuasively argues, "an industrial tragedy" in which the peasant culture is being assimilated into the evolving bourgeois society. Most critical for this argument, however, is that Tess's own pride, naivete, and poor decisions set into motion events that overwhelm her—much as happens in the greatest of Elizabethan tragedy. One of Hardy's most respected biographers, Carl Weber, states that while preparing to write his newly-contracted novel about a fallen milkmaid, he "clarified his thoughts as to what 'heroic stature' was by re-reading Sophocles and by meditating on the essence of tragedy in literary art."
Adaptations
Last Updated on May 6, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 309
One of the most impressive adaptations of the Tess story occurred during Hardy's lifetime. Seymour-Smith and other biographers report that a prominent British banker, Baron D'Erlanger, collaborated with noted Italian librettist Luigi Illica for an operatic treatment. It was first staged in Naples in 1906, then in London four years later. The Queen attended the premiere, as did Hardy, his wife Emma, and Florence Dugdale, Mrs. Hardy's companion and Hardy's mistress!
There have been a few cinematic treatments of Hardy's novel, the most recent being Roman Polanski's Tess, released by Columbia studios in 1980. Nastassia Kinski portrays Tess. It is a solid adaptation of first half of the novel, but one that accentuates Tess's complicity in the affair with Alec much more than Hardy does and omits important details in Alec's return into Tess's life, particularly his conversion to evangelical Christianity. Although the film represents an inevitable simplification of Hardy's theme, this dramatization captures the rural countryside well, brings out Hardy's concern with the evolution of rural England from a peasant to a bourgeois culture visually, and lingers effectively over the hardships Tess undergoes as a rural peasant woman in the late nineteenth century—its most compelling visual images are the stark, cold, wretched harvest of the turnip field in Flintcomb-Ash, and the subservience to the new threshing-machine, what Hardy calls "the red tyrant whom they had come to serve."
Curiously enough an important portion of Tess is itself adapted from Emma Hardy's novel, The Maid on the Shore (date uncertain, possibly around 1875; Hardy preserved his wife's typescript). In that manuscript Claude elopes with a peasant girl and eventually gives his bride a casket of valuable jewels, willed by his dead mother to whoever would become his bride. This is undoubtedly the source for the casket of jewels willed him by his godmother that Angel gives Tess on their wedding night.
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