Tess of the D’Urbervilles
is
considered to be a remarkable tragedy and one of the most influential and
well-received books in world literature for its tragic portrayal of Tess, the protagonist, a girl, intelligent, natural and good, destroyed by
the operation of cruel and indefensible social attitudes and conventions of
Victorian phenomena. In the novel, Hardy portrays a poor, innocent, and country girl who is victimized by the combined forces of Victorian patriarchal
society— the injustice of social law, the hypocrisy of social prejudice and the
inequality of male dominance, and demonstrates his profound sympathy for Tess, symbolic
of rural women who were mercilessly ravaged in the male-dominated world. Tess’s
tragic fate has evoked generations of readers’ sympathy and aroused their
interests in her twisted life journey full of setbacks and mishaps.
Tess’s tragic fate
is closely connected with two men’s betrayal and mastery. The bourgeois hypocrisy
and the male dominance incarnated in Angel and Alec co-operate in driving Tess
to destruction. In the conventional world with a severe view on virginity and
chastity, the sense of self-guilt and self-reproach haunts her through her life
journey. After the sexual violation, the rigid society gives her no chance for regeneration.
As Hardy suggests in the novel, patriarchal society, the habitat of the heroine,
is the root of her tragedy, shaping her miserable fate. He indicates that Tess
is the example of the destructive effect of society’s pressures and conventions
upon a naturally pure and unstained country girl and that Alec and Angel are
personifications of destructive attitudes towards women.
Hardy witnesses
the injustice of social law and the ill effect of male dominance over women and
dramatizes them in the novel through the miserable life of Tess who is crushed
by the comprehensive vicious power of society. In the perspective of the
conventional world, Tess is an unforgivable sinner whose “terrible sins” are doomed;
however, Hardy, cherishing “a thousand pities” for Tess, calls her a pure
woman. This is the irony against the hypocritical conventions of the Victorian Age,
which restricted man’s nature to such a large extent as it oppressed people, especially
women, who were trodden at the bottom of society. Tess is driven to offend the
social law, but she responds to the natural law, to her nature. Her sexual involvement
is normal in natural law, but she has to face the prejudice of severe social codes
and respond with rebellion. Tess is naturally pure if she is socially “degraded”.
Hardy insists that Tess is victimized by rigid social law, hypocritical prejudice,
and men’s narrow-minded attitude towards gender, marriage, and chastity. Social
prejudice is the decisive factor which tortures Tess and gives her no chance to
regenerate from her setback and designates Tess as a decadent” woman, leaving
her no place to live anew. She is rejected by society and cannot regain
respect from others and resume her social status. As an outcast of Christian
society, she is bound to be destroyed.
Tess’s misfortune
is, in a sense, related to male dominance and the concept of male superiority.
Her unbearable pressures come from male dominance personified in Alec and Angel
in the male-centered society, where everything complies with the male wish and
man-favored principles. The male mastery phenomenon can find expression in the
novel when Tess indifferently tells Alec after his seduction, “See how you’ve
mastered me!” and her complaint to her mother also helps apprehend men’s
manipulation over women, “Why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men-folk?”
It is also reflected in Alec’s warning Tess, “Remember, my lady, I was your
master once; I will be your master again”. In a society where men enjoy
superiority and privilege, women are no doubt living at the mercy of men. They
must submit to men's wish otherwise, they will be punished by the social law
and tortured by public opinions. Tess’s miserable fate is nothing but a terrible
game played on females by males. Her fierce protest against male-dominated
social law leads her to her final execution.
Alec, the
archetypal seducer in Victorian melodrama, after his violation of Tess’s
virginity, does not realize his sin; what’s more, he blames Tess for tempting
him with her beauty. He does the wrong and shifts it onto the victim. The
social consensus does not condemn or punish Alec. Instead, it disdains and hunts
Tess wherever she goes. The innocent pay for the guilty; the sinned suffers
for the sinner. Moreover, Alec, the real sinner, is later converted to be a
preacher instead of being criticized and punished by religious consensus. The
sinner can become a saint but the innocent is deprived of the right of being a
normal member of the society. The male sinner loses nothing and he lives as he
used to, safe and sound; what’s more, he later becomes a preacher publicizing
God’s edict, but the female sinned is surrounded by discrimination and rebuke
from society.
Alec and Angel
serve as the embodiment of men’s inhumanity towards women. Alec bestially violates
Tess by sexual attacks; Angel cruelly tortures her by his priggish rejection.
Alec’s barbarism and Angel’s hypocrisy, interdependent on each other, are the
two irresistible forces driving Tess to her dead end. If Alec physically ruins
Tess by depriving her of her virginity, Angel spiritually destroys her by depriving
her of her courage for life and pursuit for love. Angel does not believe in the
primacy of rank, social status, and belief, which clashes with traditional
English morals. However, he cannot completely break with his clergy family and
its influence. It is this ambiguity that attracts dairy girls and
simultaneously hurts them, especially Tess who is the biggest victim. Angel’s
rejection gives her a much harder blow than Alec’s sexual violence.
On the wedding
night, after their confessions of their pasts, Tess forgives his romantic dissipation
with a woman in London, but Angel refuses to forgive Tess for her “disgraceful”
past. Angel’s refusal is in striking contrast with Tess’s generous forgiveness.
They commit the same behavior but receive different consequences. Angel’s
desertion clearly exemplifies the “double moral standard” that prevails in Victorian
society in relation to the sexual lives and feelings of women. In any sexual involvement
beyond marriage, it is women who always pay a price Alec’s sexual violation destroys
Tess’s virginity, which means so much to a girl in Victorian society that she
will be pushed to the prejudicial mire if she loses it out of wedlock.
In the novel,
readers can find that due to her first fall—sexual involvement with Alec, Tess
is regarded as an unconventional and unrestrained “fallen” woman and despised
and belittled wherever she goes. When she returns to Marlott, various censures
attack her. In the church, “the people who had turned their heads turned them again
as the service proceeded; and at last, observing her they whispered to each
other”. She knows what they gossip about and feels so greatly hurt that she
decides she will go to church no more. In the field, Tess still can’t escape
from the gossip about her sexual deviation and her baby—the fruit of sin. A
cloud of guilt envelopes her. Under the great pressure of social prejudice,
Tess is driven to leave home to try her fortune drifting from place to place.
She cannot escape the censure and condemnation, which company her like her own
shadow. She is hunted everywhere. Tess cannot survive the deadly disaster from
her unconventional conduct; moreover, her family is also involved in cruel
punishment.
.
It is Angel’s prig
selfishness and male superiority that plunges her into a dire situation, where
she is obliged to fall into Alec’s trap again. Misfortunes in Brazil crush his
dream and call him back to reality; instructions from others help him realize
his egoism and unfairness towards Tess. It is not until too late that he returns
and forgives Tess, but it can hardly help the situation. Tess is already on the
verge of destruction; his return only intensifies and quickens her death. After Tess stabs Alec from her accumulated
grief and grievance for being ill-treated by him she was sentenced to death by
hanging by the protectors of Victorian society, a society where only the woman
sins and only the woman pays.
Tess epitomizes a
country girl who is ruined by social prejudice and male dominance centered on
the “double moral standard” of sexuality applied to men and women in the late
nineteenth century. Like a straw on the torrent of ethic- prejudice, she is
easily engulfed by the evil power of the society. She is the victim of narrow-mindedness
toward the concepts of chastity and virginity, and she is also the sacrifice of
male dominance in patriarchal Victorian society.
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