Lecture 5 Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Critical Commentary on
Phase the Second
Highlights of
Phase the Second: Maiden No More
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Tess after four months departs from the D’Urbervilles
estate and decides to return home.
A changed girl; ‘Verily another girl than the simple
one she had been at home…’
‘Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl
to complex woman.’ [Chapter 15]
Tess tries to explain her departure to her mother.
Mother admits she is partly to blame for her
daughter’s predicament, and resigns herself to
making the best of the situation.
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For a time, Tess is the centre of attention in Marlott.
Tess comes to suspect her friends are gossiping
about her, and she sinks into a state of depression.
By end of Phase the Second, despite her turbulent
experiences, she was not demoralized.
She resolved there should be no more D’Urberville
air-castles.
She would be the dairymaid Tess and nothing more.
Accidentalism and Relationships
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The language of fate is given particular application
to love and marriage. The general feeling about
relationships between men and women is that
meetings which lead to passion and perhaps to
marriage come about through blind chance.
The wrong people get married and real love is fated
to remain unfulfilled or to result in shame and
probably death.
Tess is ‘doomed to be seen and coveted that day by
the wrong man,’ [Note commentary, end of Ch 5]
Focus of Lecture 5:
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Male-female relationships
The economics of sexual relationships between
classes
Representations of Religion as an agent of
patriarchal domination re- ‘Women in Literature’
Critically Significant Symbolism
The novel’s dialogism: Representation of Voices
Tess and Nature; the Tess-universe on solid ground
Class Relationships
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The use of ‘sir’ to a man considered of higher rank,
or to a stranger of equal rank, was obligatory in
Victorian England
Tess addresses Alec this way after his first rough
attempt at intimacy:
‘I don’t want anyone to kiss me, sir.’
Even after she has borne his child, she rejects Alec’s
later offer of marriage with
‘O, no sir – no!’
The response tells us much about class relationships
in this socio-cultural milieu.
Relationship Alec & Tess; Effects?
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Chapter 12 develops further and reinforces
the master male - female slave relationship
‘…and she sat now, like a puppet, replying
to his remarks in monosyllables.’
‘My eyes were dazed by you for a little.’
‘I didn’t understand your meaning till it was
too late.’
Alec: ‘That’s what every woman says.’
Analyzing Effects
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In reading, we build up a sense of
what kind of effects the language is trying to
achieve (‘intention’)
Understanding these textual effects,
assumptions, tactics and orientations is just
to understand the ‘intention’ of the work
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Notice a much more subdued Tess now
comes within reach of the incline near
Marlott,
We are reminded this is where Alec drove a
much more spirited Tess a few months prior.
He verbally abuses her, demanding to
KNOW why she left The Slopes
[Intended] Effects of the writing?
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‘She bowed to him slightly,’
‘You are not going to turn away like that,
dear? Come!’
‘If you wish,’ she answered indifferently. ‘See
how you’ve mastered me.’
She turned her head in the same passive
way,….and he kissed the other side,…’
Read final paragraph of Chapter 13
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It is hard for Tess to undo the ‘kiss of
mastery.’
Tess has had a peasant girl’s training in
submission to patriarchal traditional authority.
Hardy shows how far those pressures are
the product of conventional attitudes and
practices which she has imbibed
Although they are ‘anti-pathetic to her’ Ch 13
The Hunt Metaphor
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A pervasive metaphor is that of ‘hunting’
Several remarks and incidents are
suggestive of Tess as being the ‘huntee’
Throughout, Tess is harried from place to
place at what seems like increasing speed
Even at the very start of her relation with Alec
“the handsome, horsey young buck” drove
up early in the morning in his gig to fetch her”
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Even the division of the novel into “phases”
seems to further reinforce this—the idea of
various phases of a hunt.
When the hunt is comes to an end, we see
Tess finally captured on the sacrificial stone
at Stonehenge
The stone where once like the hart at bay,
the victim’s throat was slit with the knife
The economic dimension
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‘Very well,’ he said, laughing, ‘I am sorry to
wound you.’
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‘Only you needn’t be so everlastingly flinging
it in my face.’
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‘I am ready to pay to the uttermost farthing.’
Parallelism and Antithesis;
and Note intended effects of Syntax
You KNOW you need not work in the fields
or the dairies again.
You KNOW you may clothe yourself with
the best,
instead of in the bald plain way
you have
lately affected,
as if you couldn’t get a ribbon
more than you earn.
[Intended] Effects of the writing?
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Tess: ‘I have said I will not take anything more from
you, and I will not—I cannot!’
‘I should be your creature to go on doing that, and I
won’t!’
Alec: ‘One would think you were a princess from
your manner, in addition to a true and original
D‘Urberville—ha! ha! Well Tess dear’
Alec seems unable to recognize
Tess’s right to refuse him.
Commentary—Note:
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Alec drains the female vitality out of a woman
Gives Tess only sensation
Only experience in the senses, a sense of
herself
But nothing to her soul or spirit
Thereby exhausting her, draining all that
energy
Hardy implies the meanness
and cruelty of
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Patriarchal human law and
Patriarchal human custom,
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(As much as the malignity of blind chance)
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All of which has prevented Tess from being
her right and natural self as a person.
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Symbolism of the colour ‘Red’
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Tess is approached by a man who appears
to be an artisan
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carrying ‘a tin pot of red paint in his hand.’
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The man turned as he spoke to an opening
at the roadside leading into pasture. [a stile]
Patriarchal voice of Religious Decree
[The man] began painting large square
letters on the middle board of the three
composing the stile
placing a comma after each word,
as if to give pause while that word was
driven well home to the reader’s heart—
THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT
Note word choice: ‘Vermilion’—
‘the brilliant red colour of this pigment’
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‘Against the peaceful landscape, the pale, decaying
tints of the copses, the blue air of the horizon, and
the lichened stileboards, these staring vermilion
words shone forth. They seemed to shout
themselves out and make the atmosphere ring.
Some people might have cried ‘Alas, poor
Theology!’ at the hideous defacement—the last
grotesque phase of a creed which had served
mankind well in its time.
Effects
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But the words  entered Tess
with accusatory horror.
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It was as if this man had known her recent
history; yet he was a total stranger.
The Patriarchal Textbook of Life
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‘Do you believe what you paint?’ she asked
in low tones.
‘Believe that tex? Do I believe my own
existence!’
‘But,’ said she tremulously, ‘suppose your
sin was not of your own seeking?’
He shook his head.
‘I cannot split hairs on that burning query,’
Tess’s Tremulous Voice
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One of Hardy’s most favourite words was the
word ‘tremulous’ [Latin tremulus]
Characterized by or affected with trembling;
shaking or quivering; timid or fearful
Which he applied specially to the quality of
the voice
Characters such as Tess under stress of
emotion speak ‘tremulously’
Note end of Chapter 29; Connections?
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Angel Clare: ‘Our tremulous lives are so different
from theirs, are they not?’ he musingly observed to
her…
(Referring to the other three dairy maids)
‘Not so very different, I think,’ she said.
‘Why do you think that?’
Tess: ‘There are very few women’s lives that are
not—tremulous,’ Tess replied, pausing over the new
word as if it impressed her.
Hardy’s Voices; Hardy as—
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Sceptical philosopher
Local historian
Topographer
Antiquarian,
Mediating between his ‘folk’—the agricultural
community of Wessex
And his readers—his metropolitan learned
peers
Patriarchal Religious Convention;
Intended Effects?
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So the baby was carried in a small deal box,
under an ancient woman’s shawl, to the
churchyard that night, and buried by lanternlight, at the cost of a shilling, and a pint of
beer, in that shabby corner of God’s
allotment where He lets nettles grow and
where all unbaptized infants, notorious
drunkards and others of the
conjecturally damned are laid. [Chapter 14]
Effects
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Begins with subdued literal description of the
pathetic particulars of the child’s burial.
A hint of irony in the shilling and pint of beer
Irony becomes more pronounced in the comment
‘That shabby corner of God’s allotment where He
lets nettles grow’
Arising from the conventional idea that the cemetery
is sacred, holy ground
And thus implicitly God is then held responsible for
the behaviour of His earthly impious representatives
Tess associated and identified
with NATURE throughout the novel
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This is enforced by insistent allusion to flora
and fauna (both literal and figurative)
Appearing early in the novel with ‘roses at
her breast; roses in her hat…’ Ch 6
Her hair is ‘earth-coloured’ Ch 5
Her mouth is ‘flower-like’ Ch 16
Effect: Encourages us to think of Tess as
essentially ‘in touch’ with Nature
As novelist & critic David Lodge notes:
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Tess’s character is defined and justified by
metaphors of flora and fauna, and the
changing face of the earth both directs and
reflects her emotional life.
But it is also true that Nature is quite
indifferent to Tess and her fate.
Nature is simply ‘there.’ But indifferent.
Its moral neutrality emphasized by the
intrusive voice of the philosophical narrator.
End of Phase the Second, we read:
On one point she was resolved:
She would be the dairymaid Tess, and
nothing more.
Closing sentence—
 It was unexpended youth, surging up anew
after its temporary check, and bringing with it
hope, and the invincible instinct towards selfdelight. [Note voice and tone of narrator]
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