The Questioning of a Pure Woman - Tess of the D'Urbervilles

The Questioning of a Pure Woman

     Tess of the D’Urbervilles is not a simple novel about a woman’s life.  It is a novel that questions the foundations of Victorian life and culture.  Hardy creates the character Tess and places her within the confines of Victorian England.  Her life is intended to raise questions on the part of the reader and force the reader to reevaluate the world around them.

The main question that Tess of the D’Urbervilles raises for the reader is why must Tess suffer as much as she does?  Hardy proposes five possible answers to this question: history repeats itself; nature is generally fecund; the loss of faith; the universe does not make sense; and the involvement of fate. 

     Hardy’s first proposition is that history repeats itself.  Throughout the novel we see examples of this repetition.  There is a history of murder in the D’Urberville family. Angel tells Tess the legend of the D’Urberville Coach.  He says, “A certain d’Urberville of the sixteenth or seventh century committed a dreadful crime in his family coach; and since that time member of the family see or hear the coach whenever –“ (Hardy 231).  What Angel left off was that the coach is hear whenever some tragedy is about to occur.  The legend is a beautiful young woman was abducted by one of the D’Urberville family.  When she tried to escape from the coach she was being carried off in, he killed her – or she killed him.  Angel couldn’t remember which.  This incident supposedly gives the D’Urbervilles a predisposition to sudden violent acts.  If a member of the D’Urberville family hears the sound of the ill-fated coach, it is an omen for tragedy.  Tess herself hears the coach after her begin married to Angel.  A tragic chain of events is set in motion after she hears the coach, a chain that has been present throughout the novel.  Tess confesses her relationship with Alec to Angel while at the honeymoon cottage.  Angel decides to leave Tess. 

Tess repeats this tragic history of the D’Urberville coach again by her murder of Alec.  Earlier in the novel, Alec essentially abducts Tess by taking her deep into the woods away where he violates her.  It can also be said that he killed her – or she killed him, just as in Angel’s telling of the legend.  Alec killed Tess by taking away her maidenhood.  That one action took away any possibility that Tess had for a normal life.  Tess murders Alec because of the misfortune she encounters at his hands.  She is a D’Urberville with a predisposition to murder because of her history.

     Death repeats itself quite often throughout the history of the novel.  Each occurrence leads to another tragedy in Tess’ life.  The story opens with the murder of the Durbyfield’s horse because Tess falls asleep while driving.  This scene could also be considered a parallel to the legend of the D’Urberville coach because the horse’s death at the hand of a D’Urberville involving two coaches sets in motion tragic events.  The horse is John Durbeyfield’s means of employment and provider of the family’s income.  After the loss of the horse, Tess is sent to a branch of the D’Urberville family to ask for money.  This house of the Stoke-D’Urbervilles is where Tess first encounters her cousin, Alec. 

The next death is Tess’ child, Sorrow, who dies of illness.  The child dies without a proper baptism, only that of her mother’s creation, so is not allowed to have a proper Christian burial.  The importance of death in Victorian society and the deviation of Tess and her child from the acceptable societal process pushes her further from society and a normal life.  After this death, Tess feels that she must leave Marlott.  She goes to Talbothays where she encounters Angel. 

During her travels Tess comes across a group of wounded pheasants left in the wood by hunters.  Tess cannot stand to see their suffering so she ends it by snapping their necks.  Tess wished that someone would end her suffering just as she eased that of the pheasants.  This death wish is part of the repetitious death in the novel.  When the Durbeyfields left Marlott to find a new home after John’s death, they go to the home of their ancestral D’Urbervilles.  Tess enters into the church and stands before the gate to the tombs of her former family and wonders why she is on the wrong side of the gate.  When Angel is sleepwalking on their wedding night he dreams that Tess is dead then carries Tess to a church and places her into a stone grave.  Finally, at the conclusion of the novel, Tess sacrifices herself to the police at Stonehenge, a historical site for Druidical sacrifices.  The sacrifice leads to her capture and ends in her execution.  Throughout the entire novel Tess suffers because of the pain she must endure while alive. 

John Durbeyfield dying of illness places his remaining family, including Tess, into a state of desperation.  Tess is the only one that can provide for the family.  Alec reappears and offers to take care of Tess and her family provided that Tess would return to Alec.  During the Victorian Era there were not many employment opportunities or women that would pay enough to support an entire family.  Tess does not have a choice, due to the continuing absence of her husband, but to submit to Alec.  He violates her again by exploiting her weakness, he family.  His abhorrent treatment of Tess added to her longing for Angel leads to yet another death.  Tess murders Alec to escape. 

These repetitions of death pave Tess’ path of misery.  If one of these deaths had not occurred, Tess would not arrive at the end of the novel with her death as the final event of the novel.  The constant repetition of death and the desire for death does not justify or answer the question of Tess extreme suffering.  The repetition of history only provides one part of the explanation of why Tess must suffer as she does.

            The second proposition Hardy makes to answer the question of suffering is also a repetitious pattern.  There is an analogy between Tess’ experiences and the general fecundity of nature.  Tess is a part of nature with the power of reproduction.  Her actions with Alec in the wood are perfectly natural.  They are part of the circle of life that is repeated everyday throughout nature.  However, in the human, civilized world there is no room for natural, savage people.  Tess only suffers from her guilt because of societal ideals. 

     This idea of Tess being part of nature is echoed in the scene where Tess is brought her child to feed while harvesting grain.  Tess is again part of nature.  Tess as a field-woman is “a portion of the field; she has somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding and assimilated herself with it” (Hardy 103).  Part of Tess’ misery is that man is generally distant from nature, while she herself is close to nature.  Tess feels more like the wounded pheasants than the hunters.  She is just as much a victim of humanity as the pheasants.  Tess has broken no natural law by losing her maidenhood, but she has broken a social law and must suffer at the hands of men as punishment. Hardy writes at the end of Phase the First, “There lay the pity of it.  An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune at the Trantridge poultry-farm” (Hardy 89).  Tess must suffer because she cannot be a part of acceptable society.

     The third proposition is that Tess suffers due to her loss of faith.  The moment before Tess violation Hardy writes, “But, might some say, where was Tess’ 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 in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be waked” (Hardy 89).  We, as readers, hope that Angel will be Tess’ missing guardian angel.  However, Angel is not truly an angel of the Victorian God.  He did not join the clergy as his other brothers did, but chose instead to become a part of nature.  Nature does not always follow the laws of Victorian society because nature does not convict Tess for her sin on society.  Angel questions the old world faith of his father.  The irony of his name is that Angel is not a guardian, but a fallen angel.

     This passage also mentions Elijah as he taunts the worshippers of Baal in 1 Kings (18:26-28).

And they took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and called upon the name of Baal from morning even until noon, saying, O Baal, hear us.  But there was no voice, nor any that answered.  And they leaped upon the alter which was made.  And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, “Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or a peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.  And they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lances, till the blood gushed out upon them.

     This biblical passage is almost identical to the passage Hardy wrote of Tess guardian angel.  In the biblical passage Baal does not exist.  Therefore, in the violation passage, Tess’ guardian angel does not exist.  Elijah is the ironical Tishbite to whom Hardy refers.  Hardy says that the god that Tess believes in is as immaterial as Baal.  When she sacrifices herself at the end of the novel at Stonehenge, the Christian god she believes in does not answers with a fire that consumes the sacrifice.  The Christian god sleepeth.  Tess suffers because she has no guardian angel or Christian God to look out for her.
     The fourth proposition is simply that the universe does not make sense, a model of analytical philosophy.  Analytical philosophy assumes that there exists some underlying order to the world.  The mismatching of men and women throughout the centuries is a strong argument against the existence of an order to the universe.  Hardy writes, “We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied or even conceived possible.  Enough in that present case, as in millions, it was not two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently about the earth waiting in crass obtrusness till the late time came.  Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks, catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies” (Hardy 55).  There in not a philosophical system that controls the universe.

Tess has two mismatched relationships in the novel.  She travels from Marlott to Trantridge, back to Marlott, to Talbothays, to Flintcomb-Ash, to Marlott, to Sanbourne, and finally to Stonehenge.  Miller says in his article “Repetition as Immanent Design” that, “Life for Hardy is a wandering detour across a gap opened up in time and place by the distance between each person and his or her missing half” (Miller 77).  Tess is searching for her missing half.  First, the wrong man covets her.  Tess becomes a symbol for all betrayed women.  She must suffer simply because she alone and betrayed.

The fifth proposition is that of the inclusion of fate.  Many events in the novel seem to happen just at the right moment.  At the beginning of the novel, Angel encounters Tess by accident while she is at a May dance.  Angel is invited by the girls to dance, but he does not dance with Tess.  If he had chosen Tess to be one of his dancing partners the novel would not have followed the same course as it does.  This is not the only instance of fate.  Angel just happens to be at the very dairy farm at which Tess finds employment later in the novel.  Angel singles her out from other milkmaids because of an unexplained recognition.  “And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar, something which carried him back into the joyous and unforeseeing past, before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens grey.  He concluded that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell.  A casual encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been, and he was not greatly curious about it.  But the circumstance was enough to lead him to select Tess in preference to the other pretty milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous womankind” (Hardy 137).  The fate of the previous meeting, however brief, and the fate of their both being employed at the same dairy lead Angel to choose Tess as the object of his affections.

Fate steps in again when Tess tries to inform Angel of her past with Alec.  She writes a letter of confession then slips it under his door.  Fate takes the letter and makes sure Angel never reads it.  The letter slides under the carpet where is cannot be seen.  If the letter had been read the wedding probably, judging from Angel’s later reaction, would not have occurred.  Tess would not have been left a bride without a husband.  She would not be driven back to Alec, which leads to his eventual murder and her execution.  Fate determines the course of Tess’ life and leads her on the path of utmost suffering.  Tess must suffer because the “President of the Immortals” enjoys his sport with her.

None of these propositions alone can answer the question of why Tess must suffer as she does.  The answer requires a combination of all five propositions. 

Another question raised by the novel is what makes Tess a pure woman?  The subtitle to the novel, The Making of a Pure Woman implies that Tess is not pure at the outset of the novel, but has become pure by the conclusion.  Victorian society was appalled by the suggestion that a fornicator, bearer of an illegitimate child, religious skeptic, adulterer, and murder could be a pure woman.  In fact, Havelock Ellis wrote on his reservations about Tess of the D’Urbervilles.  He writes, “I was repelled at the outset by the sub-title.  It so happens that I have always regarded the conception of purity, when used in moral discussions, as a conception sadly in need of analysis…  It seems to me doubtful whether anyone is entitled to use the word “pure” without first defining precisely what he means, and still more doubtful whether an artist is called upon to define it at all, even in several hundred pages.  I can quite conceive that the artist should take pleasure in the fact that his own creative revelation of life poured contempt on many old prejudices.  But such an effect is neither powerful nor legitimate unless it is engrained in the texture of the narrative; a label cannot stick it on.  To me that glaring sub0title meant nothing, and I could not see what it should mean to Mr. Hardy” (Jacobus 45).  To those who accept the Christian definition of purity, Hardy’s use of the term for Tess was an outrage.  To those who didn’t accept the definition, its use was irrelevant.  Again, there are multiple answers to the question of Hardy’s use of the term. 

The first answer lies in Hardy’s own definition of purity.  According to Hardy Tess should be judged by the rules of nature since she is a part of nature and not of Victorian society.  Tess, at no point in the novel, acts in ways that would not be acceptable in nature.  In fornicating and caring for her child in the manner she does Tess acts as any creature of nature would.  Through the events of the novel Angel Claire, as well as the reader, becomes aware that, “The beauty of a character lay not in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; the true record lay not among things done, but among things achieved” (Jacobus 46).  Tess’ intentions during the entire course of the novel are pure.  She cares for and attempts to provide for her child and family.  Each of her so-called sins arises from honorable intentions.  Even her final murder of Alec comes about so that she may again join the man to who she is legally wed.  By this definition of purity arising from intent, Tess is honest, innocent and pure. 

The second answers lies within the very religious confines rejecting her purity.  According to Christian religion, purity exists only in women who retain their maidenhood until after marriage.  Tess does not retain her maidenhood and therefore cannot be considered pure.  However, Tess is purified through her suffering.  Without going through each of the trials in her life, Tess would not have become the person she is at the end of the novel.  Tess has become pure because she is willing to act on her most natural instinct, to free herself from captivity.  The closer that Tess gets to nature, the more pure she becomes.  The laws, class systems, and religion of society no longer corrupt her.

Hardy is using Tess of the D’Urbervilles to call for a reevaluation of religion and of social law.  The religion of Victorian England rejects Tess because she acts, not as a pious member of society, but a creature of the world.  Hardy is saying through Tess’ life and trials that a person can still be good even though they do not follow the Christian god without question.  Because of the hypocritical aspect of Victorian Christian Tess is pushed to the outskirts of society.  Because of the Victorian Christian ideas of what make a good person, Tess is considered to be worthless.  Hardy proposes that simply because fate has acted against Tess throughout her life, she is not a bad person.

Hardy also calls for a change of society.  Most of the events that occur in Tess life that are tragic involve not only fate, but also societies views.  Tess is a migrant farm worker.  She is worthless in Victorian society.  She is not of a good class or good breeding.  Angel is relieved when he discovers that Tess comes from the D’Urberville family.  She has a respectable family name and therefore will be acceptable for inclusion into the Claire family.  Hardy again demonstrates through Tess life and trials that a person need not be of good breeding and respectable family name to be a good person.

When all of these views are combined, we understand why Tess must suffer as she does and how she is pure.  Thomas Hardy required Tess to suffer entirely throughout her life to prove her worth and value as a person.  Her responses demonstrate that Tess in inherently good.  Her goodness, honesty, and innocence are her purity.  If someone such as Tess is a good, pure person no matter what the circumstance, then the systems in place that deem her worthless and tainted need to be reevaluated.