Lecture 1 Tess of the d’Urbervilles
A Pure Woman (1891)
by Thomas Hardy
Pause and Ponder
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Conflict
is what stories are all about.
A story is a philosophy put into images.
– Albert Camus (famous French writer)
Focus of Lecture 1
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Synopsis of the novel
Some important background: Hardy the Victorian
Sage,
Victorian Culture and Ideas
Initial pointers for reading the beginning
Landscape & Symbol;
Poetry in Prose
Tess as a woman in literature—how is she
represented?
Plot Summary
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The novel is divided into seven sections or
‘phases’
Tess Durbeyfield, an innocent country girl,
is persuaded to visit a rich family who are
believed by her parents to be distant
relatives.
Alec d’Urbervilles, her supposed cousin,
arranges for her to work as a poultry girl, and
then seduces her.
Cont
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Tess returns home to have her child, but it
dies, and some years later she leaves home
to work as a dairy maid on a distant farm.
There she meets Angel Clare, (the son of a
clergyman), who long before had seen her
briefly as he passed through her village.
They fall in love, and without knowing
anything of her past, Clare offers to marry
her; with some reluctance, Tess accepts him.
Summary cont
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When Tess tells Clare of her past on her
wedding night, he decides they must part.
Angel goes to Brazil, while she goes back
after a time to work on a farm.
After an unsuccessful attempt to make
contact with Clare’s parents, she by chance
meets the man who earlier on seduced her.
Alec d’Urbervilles is now reformed, and
converted to being Christian preacher.
Summary cont
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Alec offers to marry her, and abandons his
preaching to follow her.
In desperation, Tess writes to Clare, but,
getting no reply from him, and being worn out
with her work, and distressed by the
hardships of her life following more
especially her father’s death,
she is eventually won back to Alec.
Summary cont
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When Clare finally does return home, he finds his
Tess living with Alec in lodgings in a seaside town on
the south coast of England.
Ashamed at having given way to Alec’s
persuasiveness,
and full of remorse for having despaired of her
husband,
Tess murders Alec with a carving knife and follows
Clare.
Plot summary concluded:
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For some days Tess and Angel Clare live
together in an empty house in the country;
Disturbed, they take to the road again, and
are found at the ancient monument,
Stonehenge, by policemen.
The police arrest Tess.
For the murder of Alec, Tess is HANGED.
Note the novel’s stark ending.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Novelist, Poet, and Victorian Sage
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Hardy went to the theatre, the opera, and
especially to art galleries.
He kept a notebook on painters and
paintings
Had a gift for keen visual observation
which begun in the countryside and further
trained in architecture, as well as through his
love for art
Hardy as Victorian Sage
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Intellectually, Hardy was a very advanced man for
his time.
He kept up with new ideas and new advancements
in politics, philosophy and science;
Ideas of Comte, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill,
Thomas Henry Huxley, Herbert Spencer
Making it almost impossible to retain the notion of a
transcendent, governing Providence
Thus giving rise to his pessimistic outlook on life
Hardy’s Victorian Century
and its intellectual ferment
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Darwin and Darwinism; Darwin’s Origin of
Species (1859); first book to support the
evolutionary hypothesis with a mass of
scientific evidence.
A new view of nature—each new advance in
biology and geology seemed to show that
Nature was “Red in tooth and claw.”
Hardy was one the first readers of Darwin
Feeling the “ache of modernism”
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The emerging new picture—that no God
entered beneficently into this bleak,
disorderly and destructive state of affairs
Disillusioned view of Life: Hardy reflects this
agonizing picture of nature in his novels.
Since there is no God to give meaning to life,
Man is alone in the Universe, no better off
and no worse off than other creatures
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There is no divine plan; It’s a world of matter;
Everything happens by blind chance;
The universe is indifferent to humanity, to our joys
and our sorrows;
The human is thus more a victim of forces within
oneself, and the environment.
Hardy’s Atheism? Agnosticism?
Hardy thus could find no easy comfort in orthodox
Christian religious belief.
He even wrote a poem entitled ‘God’s Funeral.’
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TD as a novel, attacks the churches and their
clergy for making promises of redemption
that Hardy believes can not be fulfilled.
Humankind is at the mercy of an unheeding
universe; an unheeding world of Nature;
‘we be on a blighted star’ (Chapter 4)
Nature does not often say ‘See!’ (Chapter 4)
“Blind chance” is the way of the world
What little happiness there is…
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One thread which does seem to run through
Hardy’s writing —
Times of happiness are elusive and fleeting
And therefore to be cherished e.g. Tess’s
time as a milk maid at Talbothays’ Dairy
That love and friendship are fragile
But amongst the most precious of human
experiences
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There is a deep compassion for those whom
life has treated badly.
Most memorable characters are sufferers,
characters such as Tess, and her family;
Victims partly of their own weakness and
partly of circumstance,
Which we may choose to call Fate or Chance
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The natural world exacts its full penalty in the
consequences of misfortunes
and wrong choices;
That is the essence of tragedy
Tess is the story of a girl doomed to misery in
an indifferent world, despite being good.
Hardy is celebrated as a great tragic writer
A Christian theocentric world view
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The mass of ordinary people continued to
believe in a beneficent, divine creator
Believed in the commandments of the Bible
Victorian culture and the cult of chastity
Tess falls. She violates the Christian based
moral codes and conventions of her time.
But she is an absolute victim of
circumstances, and thus beyond their stain
Keep in mind
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Throughout the novel, Tess is portrayed as a
part of nature
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And that though society may judge her to
have “fallen”
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Nature cannot do so.
Walking, traveling, movement?
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‘On an evening in the latter part of May a
middle-aged man was walking homeward
from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the
adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor.’
Novel opens with a description of a man
staggering on ‘rickety’ legs down a road.
‘There was a bias in his gait which inclined
him somewhat to the left of a straight line.’
Reading with Insight—
the opening of Chapter 1
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It is John Durberfield’s daughter, Tess, we
will see walking throughout the novel.
Always Tess has to walk, to move, usually to
harsher and more punishing places
Her walking gets harder and nearer darkness
We see her too on ‘rickety’ legs, staggering
And always to the left of that straight line
Landscape as Symbol in TD
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The geographical landscapes of TD have a
symbolic purpose
Each provides the frame and background for
the stages in the life of Tess
They function as external symbols,
(symbolizing the interior experiences of her
soul)
[Intended Effects]
Place and season guide the reader’s
response
Sound and Sense:
Language of Hearing
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Hardy’s prose is that of a poet;
Hardy believed that good prose should have
a poetic quality
‘The shortest way to good prose is by the
route of good verse.’
Hardy has a good ear for sound owing to his
experience of music.
Watch out, LISTEN for, sonic effects
Symbolical Significance of title:
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Rural and the Urban
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‘Urbs’ in Latin, means ‘City’
‘Ville’ in French, means ‘Town’
Tess Durbeyfield (ordinary country girl
Becomes Tess D’Urberville