If I would label Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd a good novel, then Tess of the D’Urvervilles is an excellent one. On publication it caused an outcry for its sympathetic portrayal of a fallen woman. In previous novels of “fallen women” such as Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, characters like Moll are seduced and willingly have sex, although on false pretenses of marriage, which spirals their existence downwards into a life of crime rather than raising them up in social rank like they hoped. This novel is a very different beast. It always reminds us that Tess is virtuous, despite what happened to her and she was forced against her will. Given how much this book challenges the standard tropes of much previous literature dealing with similar topics it shouldn’t surprise anyone that so many found it scandalous, even though, its moral position on the issue is correct. The novel belongs to the literary movement of naturalism, which aims to demonstrate how society’s rules and customs control our fates and which generally critiques unfair social conditions.

Tess is a young woman living with her impoverished parents and a bunch of younger siblings. Her irresponsible good-for-nothing father returning one dark night from drinking learns from the local pastor that he is the direct descendant of a noble family that once ruled the land. Tess’s parents hope to use this knowledge of their former glory to improve their lot in life. They send Tess to the town of Trantridge to claim kin of a rich old woman there who has the last name D’Urberville whom they believe is related to them. Instead she meets the woman’s son, Alec D’Urberville, an immoral dandy who lusts after her, attempts to seduce her, and when that initially fails eventually rapes her after she falls asleep one night. It turns out that these other D’urbervilles are not relations and merely another family that took the name when they moved out into the country after amassing a huge fortune from business.

After this incident and acting as Alec’s plaything for a time, Tess leaves Trantridge to return home, despising the man who raped her. She has child from Alec’s illicit attentions, but it dies. The town whispers about her shame and she herself wallows in her own guilt. All of this leads her to attempt to start a new life by going to another town in which she gets a job as a hand on a dairy farm. While often gloomy, she finds a certain amount of happiness there by making friends with the other milkmaids, Izz Huet, Reddy Priddle, and Marian. All of these women fall in love with Angel Clare, the son of an evangelist, who has abandoned his faith to learn the ways of farming. He is on the farm to learn about dairy. He slowly finds himself attracted to Tess because she possesses a certain depth (due to her tragic experience) that the other women who love him on the dairy farm lack. They court and fall in love. Angel asks Tess to marry him, but is reticent due to the fact that she isn’t a virtuous women by late Victorian standards. She accepts his proposal and debates whether to tell him or not, afraid of his judgment.

On their honeymoon, wanting to confess all his sins and faults, he reveals that he once had an illicit affair. Figuring this would be a good time to clear the air, Tess does the same. He rejects her confession, seeing his wife transformed before his eyes and unable to shake the social convictions that she did some grievous wrong by sleeping with another man before him (even if unwillingly). They part ways. Angel goes off to Brazil to check out potential farmland for his future and get away from the disappointment of his wife. Tess spends all the money Angel left with him and out of pride refuses to appeal to Angel’s family for financial help. So she goes off to hard work at a farm where she reunites with her friends from the dairy farm. She also reunites with Alec D’Urberville who has repented his old ways and become an evangelical preacher due to a conversation he had with Angel’s father and the death of his mother. Upon seeing Tess he abandons his new Christian moralizing and slips back into his old worldly ways. He begins his flirtations again and basically stalks her no matter where she tries to hide. He wants Tess to marry him. Once learning that she is already married he tries to convince her that her husband will never return and has abandoned her for good. Meanwhile, Tess’s father dies, leaving them homeless and more impoverished than ever. Alec promises to take care of Tess’s family financially. She sends an impassioned letter begging for her husband’s forgiveness and full of fear that she will give in to Alec for the sake of her family, but it takes awhile for the letter to reach him in the middle of Brazil.

She eventually marries Alec. Angel has a lot of time to grow and change his views about the world in Brazil. He rushes back after receiving the letter, ready to reconcile with his wife. He finds her in a pleasure town, living with Alec. She tells him it is too late for them to be reconciled. However, after he departs in her frustration over the course of her life and Alec’s constant treachery (rape, convincing her that her husband left her for good, etc.), she kills Alec’s by stabbing him with a carving knife. She finds Angel and tells him what she did. They run off into the woods to hide from the authorities. They get a few days of pleasure together, living life as husband and wife, happy, until the authorities eventually catchup to Tess and arrest her. She implores him to marry her younger sister, Liza-Lu after she is dead. The novel ends with Angel walking hand-in-hand with Liza-Lu to the prison where a black flag flies signifying Tess’s execution.

For all its pathos, Hardy’s work also displays tactful use of comedy. The opening scene where Tess’s father, John Durbeyfield, learns of his lost noble heritage and the pretentious airs he puts on is extremely comical given the dark consequences in which this knowledge ultimately leads. The exaggerated female reactions of Tess’s various friends to Angel Clare touching them or giving them attention is also rather funny. Ultimately, though, this novel is a very dark and ironic book.

Tess’s entire life is defined by one terrible event; the social rules prevent her from ever escaping her lost of chastity before marriage. Even worse, it fails to recognize that she was raped. Not only does it affect her socially, but certainly it must have been a traumatic event. All the events in the novel happen because of bad decisions usually spurred on by social conditions. It is a bad decision, one with far-reaching consequences, to send Tess to the fake D’Urbervilles, but her family is forced to this recourse due to their poverty and the loss of their horse. Angel makes a poor decision to abandon his wife, but he destroys his own happiness by giving credence to social judgments of time, despite his tendency to challenge social conventions in his opinions and philosophies. Hardy points out how one bad decision and one bad stroke of luck can haunt the rest of your life.

Another theme is hypocrisy. Angel’s intellectual rebellion against the accepted philosophies and opinions of his time fail to stand up when tested in a real situation. He cannot get beyond the social consequences and rules when considering Tess’s situation. Even worse, Angel exhibits the grossest hypocrisy, judging Tess for her sexual misconduct right after confessing his own sexual liaisons with another woman. This implies a different standard for men than for women. And to make matters even worse, he engaged in those illicit affairs willingly, whereas Tess was forced.

Besides unfair social standards, Hardy seems interested in the idea of virtue. True virtue for him is what a person does with their present and future (their actions today), not their past or their temporary impulses or what society dictates or faux-Christian morality. This is the realization that Angel has that leads him to return to Tess. The novel presents the sinful Alec’s reformation to an evangelic Christian into another impulse for him. He never stops being a creature of appetites. The book describes the appeal of this change as a new sensation he had never experienced rather than a true change of his wicked and manipulative nature, although Alex does at first believe his own transformation to be sincere. Tess also mocks him for the change, pointing out it is always the most sinful who adopt Christianity at the end of their lives so they can have pleasure on earth and by reforming also have pleasure in heaven. As she suggests such people’s goal is always personal pleasure rather than generally caring about the well-being of others.   Tess, despite the terrible event that happened to her that makes her guilty in society’s eyes, is presented as innocent and virtuous throughout the novel. She always keeps her faith with her husband, refusing to betray him despite his betrayal of her, until the very end when she gives into Alec.

Hardy masterfully uses allusions in his novels. Alec himself jokingly calls himself a snake there to temp Tess who is his Eve. However, this isn’t the Bible’s snake, but Milton’s snake, the devil. Alec is the novel’s satan, tempting and manipulating, showing the evils of the flesh over a pure “spirit.” Since Angel is a borderline atheist, I put “spirit” in quotes; what I really mean by “spirit” is a deeper moral essence and virtuous character. Alec rapes Tess, and Angel’s test is how he responds to this knowledge. Alec tempts Tess by convincing her that her husband is gone for good and offering to save her impoverished family that she temporarily gives in.

Playing on this Adam and Eve imagery, Tess transforms into a veritable Christ and undergoes a sacrifice for society’s sins. This sacrifice is symbolically underscored by two images within the text in which Angel while sleep walking brings her to a sacrificial altar and at the end when she is captured by the police on stonehenge for murdering Alec. She must sacrifice herself supposedly for her sin, but the real irony is that the sin is society’s for its judgment.

At the end she gives her flesh to Alec, but retains her spirit for Angel. Hardy invokes imagery that she had abandoned her body to essentially be dressed up and used by Alec however he pleases, but that Alec doesn’t possess her spirit. Her only crime is having a beautiful face. Constantly throughout the novel, she is judged or underneath the pervasive male-gaze for her exceptional looks, but her beautiful countenance only proves a curse to her. She sees beyond the flesh, to spirit and soul of a person. When her husband returns from Brazil, his body is ravaged from disease and practically a skeleton on flesh, but as the text tells us to her he hasn’t been transformed at all ad in her eyes that sees into his spirit (the true nature of things), he looks to her exactly like he did on the day they first got married. This is a powerful novel full of symbolism and dripping with meaning funneled through a depressing story and tragic characters.

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