Thomas Hardy, who always thought of himself first as a poet, was nevertheless the most important novelist of late Victorian England. Dickens had died in 1870. George Elliott, Hardy’s great precursor as a Victorian realist, had died in 1880, and it is Hardy whose novels shine brightest in the last two decades of Britain’s nineteenth century. He wrote five highly acclaimed classic novels: the earliest, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), was ranked as number 48 on the BBC sponsored “Big Read” survey of British readers in 2003, and was ranked number 10 on The Guardian’s list of the “Greatest Love Stories of All Time.” Return of the Native (1878) was the first Hardy novel I read, as a senior in high school, and I remember being riveted by it even then. It has been listed on the BBC list of the “100 Greatest British Novels,” and also is o the Penguin list of their “Readers’ Favorites.” The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) also appears on the BBC greatest British novels list. Perhaps the most acclaimed of Hardy’s novels is his last, Jude the Obscure (1895), which is again on the BBC list, as well as the Guardian list of the 100 greatest novels in English, and the Observer list of the 100 greatest novels of all time. And while I have a great respect for each of these novels, the one I’m choosing to include here, as number 43 on my own list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language,” is his tragic 1891 novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Like most of Hardy’s novels, Tess is concerned with rural characters struggling against social conditions, especially the declining fortunes of the people of rural England, particularly those in his fictional county of Wessex (named after the Old English kingdom of Alfred the Great—essentially Hardy’s own native Shropshire and its neighbors in southwest England). Tess is also about a woman’s struggle against society’s mores on the one hand and the oppressive patriarchy on the other. In that sense it is still probably the most topical of all Hardy’s novels, and has always been the most controversial. It was first published in serialized form in the periodical The Graphic, which censored the most controversial parts of the novel, When the full, unexpurgated novel came out later that year, it received mixed reviews from Victorian critics. Some, like Robert Louis Stevenson, considered the novel “vile.” Today, it appears the most contemporary of Hardy’s great novels.
John Durbeyfield, a poor west country peddlar, is told by a local clergyman that his name is a corruption of “D’Urberville,” and so he and his children ae descended from ancient Norman nobility. John celebrates by getting drunk, so that his sixteen-year-old daughter Tess must drive the family wagon to market. However, when she falls asleep on the road, the wagon is involved in an accident and her family’s only horse is killed. In the hope of improving her lot and her family’s, she visits the neighborhood’s rich widow, Mrs. d’Urberville, to claim kinship with her. The widow’s son Alec finds her employment as keeper of his mother’s chickens, but she must fend off his frequent suggestive advances. One night Alec “rescues” Tess from a fight, taking her away on his horse to an isolated spot, where Hardy implies as strongly as he can without breaking the publisher’s moral code that Tess is raped. She gives birth nine months later to an unhealthy baby, and, being unable to find a priest willing to baptize her illegitimate child, does it herself, christening the boy “Sorrow” shortly before his death.
Years later, Tess has found a job as a milkmaid at a dairy, where the apprentice dairy manager Angel Clare falls in love with her and seeks to marry her. His father, a parson, encourages him, for though Tess is a poor country girl, she seems pious and innocent. Though she tries to tell Angel about her past, he insists that they leave discussing their pasts until after the wedding. On the wedding night, Angel confesses he once had an affair with an older woman. The relieved Tess confesses, thinking Angel will be understanding because of his own past. She is wrong. In a completely believable turn, the woman is assumed to be guilty of her own rape, and is told by her husband that her “want of firmness” is a great flaw. The couple breaks up and Angel goes to Brazil to begin anew. He leaves Tess a small settlement, which is soon exhausted, so that she must take work as a field hand.
Alec d’Urberville begins to pursue Tess again, though she is still married. When her father dies and her family is evicted from their home, he offers to house them on his estate, but Tess rejects the offer. Meanwhile, Angel’s Brazilian adventure has fallen through and he has begun to repent of his treatment of Tess. Returning to Wessex, however, he has trouble finding her. When he does track her down, he finds her living in apparent luxury at the seaside resort of Sandbourne, registered under the name of “Mrs. d’Urberville.”
That really is all I’d better tell you here, since I don’t want to spoil the ending for any of you who have not read the book. Suffice it to say that one reason you ought to read the book is its surprising relevance to contemporary issues of gender, class, and poverty. Tess, as a woman, is subject to sexual harassment at work and is eventually the victim of rape, but in a society that sees her as subject to male hegemony, she can find no comfort from the (all male) clergy who refuse her child baptism, nor from her “double-standard” husband who implies she must have wanted her abuser to rape her. Nevertheless, as an impoverished woman, she is ultimately forced into a consensual relationship with her abuser and rapist out of financial necessity—her own and her family’s.
In a society in which we know that one out of four women will be abused by her domestic partner, and in which nearly half of all female murder victims are killed by their sexual partners, Tess’s predicament is less shocking or “vile” than it may have seemed in 1891. And Hardy puts an incredibly prophetic statement into Tess’s mouth. In Chapter 46 of the novel, when Alec suggests she might be in danger from her surly field boss, she answers, “He won’t hurt me. He’s not in love with me.”
On another, more universal level, Tess is also significant as a modern tragedy. Tragedy, as we know, usually deals with characters who are brought down by some circumstance that they brought about themselves. The question behind tragedy is always the same: what is the meaning of suffering? In particular, in a world that is believed to be governed by a benevolent God, why do the good suffer? But Hardy’s take on tragedy differs from Aristotle’s or Shakespeare’s. For them, the tragic hero was someone with a great deal to lose—a prince or a king or other powerful example, who loses everything because of what Aristotle called hamartia—what Shakespeare’s contemporaries called a “tragic flaw.” Aristotle had only meant an error of judgment, a mistake that had disastrous consequences. In an ordered universe, a mistake like killing your father and marrying your mother was going to be disastrous, even if you didn’t know you were doing it.
Hardy does something different. Tess is no noblewoman with a great deal to lose. She is a poor country girl barely clinging to respectability in menial jobs. But like that other modern tragic hero, Willie Loman, she becomes heroic in her struggles to rise up from her lower class. Hardy raises the idea of a tragic flaw when Angel accuses her of “want of firmness.” But the reader knows this is a ridiculous and unjust accusation. Hardy made his opinion of the charge quite clear when he subtitled his novel “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented.” Nor does the world Tess inhabits suggest one governed by a benevolent Deity. Hardy himself, or at least his narrator, satirizes the notion of a benevolent God after Tess’s rape in chapter 11:
“But, might some say, where was Tess’s guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was on a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked.”
Why call Tess of the d’Urbervilles a tragedy, then? If there is no God to excuse, isn’t it just a book about meaningless suffering? Hardy implies it isn’t. Another theory of tragedy is that it involves a hero who is sacrificed to “cleanse” society. Hamlet, for instance, famously says “The time is out of joint, O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!” Near the end of the book, Tess is found asleep(at Stonehenge) on an altar of stone—as if she is indeed a sacrifice. She does not, however, bring any kind of reform of society. Hardy again satirizes such an idea at the close of the novel, when he says: “‘Justice’ was done, and he President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.”
It could be argued that Hardy’s novel is chiefly a satire of Victorian attitudes. It’s society (rather than God) that gives meaning to the lives of Tess and her contemporaries, and if we go against the “moral” values of society, we will indeed suffer. But it’s undeserved suffering, like that of Oedipus, because it is the uncontrollable forces of class and gender that have doomed Tess.
Tess has been adopted for the stage in more than a dozen different versions, one by Hardy himself in 1924. Five different musical versions have appeared in the past couple of decades, and an Italian opera in 1906. Several film versions have been produced, two of them silent, and five of them Indian versions (it’s hard to explain the subcontinent’s fascination with Hardy’s heroine). The best-known English language film of the novel is Roman Polansky’s 1979 film Tess, which was nominated for six Academy Awards. There is also a four-part BBC adaptation of Hardy’s novel from 2008, particularly interesting for its casting of Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) as Angel.
Despite the Victorian prudery that greeted the novel’s first publication, the myriad adaptations of Hardy’s book are testimony to its great and lasting appeal, over the past 130 years, in all English-speaking areas of the world. I urge you to read the novel yourself. You’ll be glad you did.