Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Tess of the D’Urbervilles 243
Tess’s physicality has been thoroughly insisted on since she is the
flower of her sex and race: so much so that it sometimes suggests her
as older than she is. She is thoroughly natural, a ‘pure’ woman, and ‘her
exceptional physical nature’ causes her to ask Angel to marry her sister
after she has been hanged, as if she were some generous tree, giving off
another branch of life. By this request, too, to which Angel evidently
accedes, she urges him to join her on the other side of convention: of
her own crime Hardy had at once commented, ‘She had been made
to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment
in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.’
It must be clearly established, too, that Angel Clare was far more
anti-conventional than a modern reader (certainly a modern American
reader) might assume. Dairyman Crick tells us that he is ‘one of
the most rebellest rozums you ever knowed’, he is described as ‘un-
Sabbatarian’ and ‘preferred sermons in stones to sermons in churches’.
At one point the adverb ‘communistically’ is used of him, the word
only having acquired English currency around 1850. But Angel fails
at the brink and can only go the whole way ‘Too late, too late!’ (in
Tess’s terms before the murder).
The story is archetypally simple. A young country girl is seduced,
has an illegitimate child which dies in infancy, marries another and tells
her husband the truth before consummation of the wedding. The latter
cannot tolerate the idea and abandons her to go to Brazil. Now at this
turn in the narrative we may, in fact, tend to judge Angel too harshly. But
his identity and whole relationship with the world depended on things
being what they were. Tess tells him she has a child by another man.
As James Baldwin puts it of another regional writer, William Faulkner,
‘Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always
known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.’
Pestered by her first lover, Tess gives in to live with him since he
will then support her family—the words ‘He bought me’ in the 1892
text were expunged by Hardy from the later Wessex edition. On
her husband’s return and subsequent discovery of her new menage,
Tess kills her paramour, has a few days’ elegaic happiness with her
new-found husband and is apprehended for her crime lying, like a
sacrificial victim, on an altar at Stonehenge, an episode of overcrude
symbolism for many critics. She is hanged.
We see that Hardy carefully arranged for chance to interfere with
Tess’s first confession of her supposed fault and then for Angel, before