Historical context
Victorian society at end of the 19th century in the UK continued the painful social changes involved in the gradual transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial one. It organised itself around gender and class:
The rising middle class in the form of bankers, businessmen and entrepreneurs brought new money to power the factories. They increasing displaced the old land aristocracies which fell into a lower social class: the D'Urbervilles had become the Durbeyfields. Tess's father's fantasy of restored aristocratic lineage was that, an illusion. This portrayal was not well received by Hardy's conservative Victorian society.
Gender was based on biology. Its ideology was founded on the premise of separate spheres which divided men and women into dual entities, the more negative attributes being feminine: strong/weak, sex/reproduction, independent/dependent, public/private.
Literary context
Novels in the Victorian age tended towards a realistic depiction of contemporary social life. Thackeray described the upper-class through Becky Sharp, the social climber. Dickens focused on the under class and their exploitation. Eliot centred attention on the rising middle class. Hardy's fictional niche was the rural class. Each writer reflected on the practical problems of their chosen social environment and also offered criticism of its organisation.
Morality was another common theme in Victorian literature. It shone a light on the double standards of the day where ethical behaviour was coded, but the higher the class the more skeptically it was adhered to. The banker in Middlemarch, the mill owner in Hard Times, Ms. Sharp in Vanity Fair and the false D'Urberville in Hardy's novel were all disdainful of the accepted moral code.
Discussion
The subtitle of the novel in this month's Sitges bookclub reads: A Pure Woman. Quite on the contrary, this tale of Tess can be interpreted as the story of a fall from innocence. It is narrated through Tess's constant feeling of guilt for her rape and the birth of a baby she named Sorrow. The religious theme of blame also touches the other main characters in the book: Angel, who blames himself for deserting Tess, and Alec, who converts to Methodism to repent for the rape.
Another fall theme in the book is the loss of aristocratic lineage: the D'Urbervilles became the Durbeyfields, a descent from nobility to peasantry. Hardy gives the lie to Victorian pretensions to grandeur by exposing Alec as a fake D'Urberville and characterising Tess's peasant father as a quixotic "Sir John D'Urberville" who lives in a parallel reality.
Though the novel centres on Tess it joins other classic stories of the era by offering a realistic depiction of contemporary life. Hardy's fictional choice was the rural class, dedicated to agriculture in a country that was rapidly industrialising. His nostalgic realism captures the fading world of farming and its workers.
Nature plays a background role in Hardy's book. Many chapters set the scene through a description of the season or the weather. In this fashion the narrator primes the reader about the sentiments of the characters, which he then develops. These descriptions of nature envelop the story in a context where the rhythms of life were dictated by the seasons. This regularity was already being broken by the demanding "red tyrant", a primitive thresher that sets the pace for the farm workers. Industrialisation was changing natural time into tyrannical machine time.
Superstition pervades the tale. When no rational explanation is available, fabled interpretations take over. Tess is forced by Alec to swear on a stone that marks the spot where a man had been executed for selling his soul to the devil, a foreshadowing of Tess's condemnation. Supernatural explanations also take a sinister turn and become fate. Her destiny comes in the chapter, "Fulfilment", where the novel concludes by drawing a parallel between Tess's execution and the deterministic finale of a Greek play. However, Tess's execution is not portrayed as a dramatic climax, but more as the passing of a milkmaid. Her lifestory was an prosaic affair, and her death forms part of the "sport" of the gods. Life "went on".
(Published in the Eco de Sitges, Feb.2025)
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