Book Review – Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

One of my favourite friends during my college days told me about ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ first. I never got around to reading it at that time. My friend told me a little bit about the plot and it looked sad. So, when I got the chance to read the book recently, I decided to take it. I did a readathon a couple of days back and finished reading it. Here is what I think.

What I think

‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ is about a young woman called Tess who is from a poor family. Tess’ father is a haggler – someone who takes a cart out everyday morning and buys and sells goods. One day the village parson tells Tess’ father that he is a descendant of an old family and his family tree is renowned. Tess’ father is delighted. Tess’ parents discover that there is a rich family by the second name of d’Urberville nearby. They send their daughter there to get in touch with their family roots. They also hope that their daughter can become part of this rich family and maybe get a rich husband. Unfortunately this family has a young man called Alec d’Urberville, who is a rascal. He seduces Tess and gets her pregnant. She gets back to her parents’ place and soon gives birth to a baby. Unfortunately, the baby dies after a few months. Tess continues to live in her parents’ house, but this time as a woman with a questionable past. Then one day she decides to go and work in a distant farm as a milkmaid. She starts from scratch and becomes a competent milkmaid there. She meets a gentleman called Angel Clare, there, who is from a cleric family, but who has decided to get himself trained in different farms and become a farmer by profession. Tess and Angel fall in love with each other. Angel proposes to Tess. Tess is worried that her past makes her unworthy of Angel’s love and she declines his proposal. Angel continues wooing her. Finally, Tess gives in to him and accepts his proposal. Tess and Angel get married. Then on the wedding night, Angel confesses to Tess about his past, on how his past is not spotless, but how he is a changed man now. Tess too confesses to Angel about her past. But Angel is shocked at what he hears. He becomes distant from her and then tells her that they need to be away from each other for a while. Tess is heartbroken. She goes back to her parents’ place a second time. Angel decides to go to Brazil to take his mind off things and also to find out the practicalities of starting a farm in Brazil. Tess goes to work in a different farm, where the work is harder. By this time, Alec d’Urberville has mended his old ways and has become a Christian preacher. But he sees Tess again and he is attracted to her again. He meets her and proposes to her. When she tells him that she is married, he continues wooing her. Does Tess succumb to Alec’s advances? Does Angel forget his wife’s past and return back to her? Does Tess find happiness in the end? The answers to these questions form the rest of the story.

 

I liked ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ very much. It depicts quite beautifully life in a farm in Victorian England and asks questions on love and morals and on how society judges people unfairly. I liked very much the part of the story which talks about life in a milk farm. It takes the reader inside the farm and one can hear the cows, smell the milk, the hay and the grass and hear the milk being churned and the butter coming out. Hardy seems to be a master at bringing village life in front of the eyes of the reader. It was also interesting to read about the superstitions in a farm – for example the fact that butter won’t come out when the milk is churned, if someone working in the farm has fallen in love.

 

I also found most of the characters in the story interesting. I liked Tess very much. I found Alec d’Urberville quite interesting – he seems to be a villain in the beginning, but in the latter part of the story he seems to have reformed and is genuinely concerned for Tess. In the end he is again portrayed as a villain. I was in two minds about Angel Clare – in the initial part of the story, till he gets married to Tess, he comes through as a modern, liberal man, who is ready to stand up for his ideas, even if they are at odds with the world. But when he abandons Tess, I felt that he was quite weak and didn’t stand up, especially when she had trusted him enough to tell him all her secrets. His vacillations continue for the rest of the story and he never regained my affection as a reader. After reading the book, I read the introduction to the book – I always read the introduction after finishing the book, because I want to avoid spoilers – I discovered an interesting sentence there. It went like this : “There are some readers who prefer Alec’s directness and honest amorality to Angel’s fastidious emotions, his hypocritical liberal views, and his peculiar nastiness to Tess when he finds that she is not a virgin.” It looks like this line was written about me – I felt exactly like this!

 

While reading the book, one thing that struck me was that for a Victorian writer, Hardy had really flirted with danger and had annoyed the moral police of his era. I had read earlier that some of his novels were controversial, and when I read this book, I knew why. There is a scene in the initial part of the book, where Tess is walking back with her fellow farmworkers after spending an evening of festivities in another village, and she gets into argument with another milkmaid, who after getting annoyed strips herself and stands there trying to upset Tess. Hardy, of course, couches it in vague language, describing the maid as a Praxitelean sculpture. I can’t imagine, for example, George Eliot, writing such a scene. In another place, Tess kisses Angel passionately. The note to this scene says this – “Hardy is well ahead of his time in allowing a woman to be passionate.” However, Hardy only flirts with danger, but doesn’t cross the line. When Alec seduces Tess, it is implied and everything is left to the reader’s imagination. It reminded me of how Theodor Fontane does something similar in ‘Effi Briest’. I also read in the introduction that Hardy had to repeatedly cut such scenes out of the book, before it could be published in a magazine in serial form. Then when it was published in book form, the less ‘wild’ scenes were inserted and in each further edition of the novel, more and more deleted scenes were reincorporated and in the final edition published during Hardy’s time, the ‘Praxitelean’ scene was also incorporated into the book. One can imagine how complex, life must have been for a novelist, those days.

 

One problem I had with the book was in the last part called ‘Fulfilment’. There are going to be some spoilers here and so please be forewarned. In this last part, Angel comes back from Brazil to get back together with his wife, Tess. But he discovers that Tess has become Alec’s mistress, because she and her family had been reduced to poverty and Alec helped them out. But when Tess sees him and feels that she still loves her husband and also feels that Alec is the bad guy, she kills Alec, runs away with Angel and they travel everyday through forests to escape the clutches of the law. Then they reach the Stonehenge and the police catch up with them there. The story in this part of the book read like a thriller. It was so fantastic (in the sense, it was not realistic) and it was very different from the rest of the novel. It was difficult to believe and it seemed like Hardy wanted to influence his readers in a particular way and so had ended the book this way. I didn’t like this part much – it was too artificial and defied belief.

 

Reading ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ made me think about the other three nineteenth century classics which are stories about the ‘fallen’ woman – ‘Madame Bovary’ by Gustave Flaubert, ‘Anna Karenina’ by Leo Tolstoy and ‘Effi Briest’ by Theodor Fontane. I haven’t read any of them except ‘Effi Briest’ and so it is difficult for me to compare them with ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ and see where it stands in comparison to the rest. One way in which it is definitely different from the rest is that the others all talk about women and families which are rich and well-to-do, while Tess is from a poor family. This and the fact that most of the story happens in a farm probably sets apart ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ from the rest.

 

I would love to watch a movie version of the book. I also want to read more Hardy novels. I will probably read ‘Jude the Obscure’, which one of my friends says is her favourite Hardy novel (and which is the book which created more controversy and made Hardy stop writing novels), ‘Two on a Tower’ (which is about a married woman who falls in love with a younger man, who is a scientist too – who can resist a plot like that J) and ‘The Woodlanders’ (I saw the movie version of this book and loved it).

 

I will leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book :

 

It was still early, and though the sun’s lower limb was just free of the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than the touch as yet.

 

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary. She knew how to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind – or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

 

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the day’s close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the twilight of the morning light seems active, darkness passive; in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

 

The past was past; whatever it had been it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten. Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, not sickened because of her pain.

      She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly – the thought of the world’s concern at her situation – was founded on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable the livelong night and day it was only this much to them – ‘Ah, she makes herself unhappy.’ If she tried to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers, the baby, she could only be this idea to them – ‘Ah, she bears it very well.’ Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to her? Not greatly. If she could have been but just created to discover herself as a spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless child, would the position have caused her to despair? No, she would have taken it calmly, and found pleasures therein. Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

 

Have you read ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’? What do you think about it?

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