Thomas hardy (1840-1928) - "tess of d'ubervilles"

THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)

(Biography).

THOMAS HARDY was born in High Backhampton, in the English west country near Dorchester, and he died in 1928 between the two great world wars of our century.

He come from a modest family. He was largely a self-thought man ,and study Greek and read classic literature .In 1859 he read Charles Darwin's "ORIGIN OF SPECIES" .

In 1878 encouraged by his wife Emma , whom he married in 1887 , he left the west country and the world of architecture and went to live in London where he was received as a celebrated author.

(Works).

His first novel was  "THE POOR MAN AND THE LADY" . Then write : "DESPERATE REMEDIES" , "UNDER THE GREEN WOOD TREE" and "A PAIR OF BLE EYES".

His first critical success, come with "FAR FROM THE WIDDING CROWN" .

His later novels include "TESS OF D'UBERVILLES" and "JUDE THE OBSCURE" .

"TESS OF D'UBERVILLES".

' 'Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, in the Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess'.

(Plot).

The tragic story of Tess resembles a ballad or folk song; her life follows several phases: innocence,

seduction, idyllic love, desolation and finally, sacrificial death.

Tess is a poor country girl who, seduced by her employer, is forced to run away and give birth to an illegitimate child which then dies. After the death of her child she finds happiness in the innocent pastoral setting of a dairy farm. Here she falls in love with Angel Clare, he too a fugitive from the world outside the farm, who asks Tess to marry him.

A series of events prevent Tess from telling Angel of her past life before their marriage, but on their wedding night he confesses a similar past experience to her, which she forgives immediately, and so she confesses her seduction to him. Angel Clare ,embodying the double standards and hypocritical values of Victorian society, is unable to forgive Tess and he leaves her in horror and surprise.

Tess enters into another phase of her life: abandoned and impoverished, she is finally forced, to return to her ex‑employer and seducer, Alec D'Urberville, whom she eventually murders when she discovers that he had lied to her about Angel Clare possibilities of his returning to her.

The tragedy ends with Tess hunted down across the ancient Wessex countryside, caught and finally hanged, a victim both of fate and of the age. Angel Clare is recon­ciled with Tess in the end, but it is too late.

(Comment).

Tess's life is determined by her social position as a poor woman and later as a mother of an illegitimate child. Her destiny is determined by a series of mechanisms that force the story forward to an inescapable end, her death, in which she becomes the sacrificial offering to the ancient gods of fate and destiny and to the hypocrisy of the Victorian world.

The plot utilizes aspects of melodrama and the sensational novel of the mid‑Victorian period; seduction, murder, revenge and retribution are thematic departures from the Realist tradition with its everyday stories and personal tragedies. The plot also recalls the structure of a Greek tragedy, the common folk who inhabit the Wessex countryside functioning as a Chorus that surrounds the action of the tragic protagonist. The implicit references to Greek tragedy are explicitly announced in the last chapter of the novel.

After Tess's death the narrator suddenly intervenes in the text with the comment:

''Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, in the Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.'

In the same way that the plot is conceived differently from the Realist plot, there is a different view of character.

Characters are not conceived with psychological realism ,but are emblematic and described with detachment. Characterization is subservient to plot in a deliberate way which underlines the individual's lack of free will and Hardy's personal belief in the evolutionary nature of destiny.

Alec D'Urbeirville resembles the typical villain of Victorian melodrama; he represents the negative forces of modernity. Angel Clare is seen as the cerebral, intellectual, life denying force that contrasts with the physical, emotional, life-affirming spirit of Tess. Tess herself is likened through the language to an elemental force, a natural power that is beyond simple personality, she is 'Woman', timeless and mythic, fertile and stoical, a force that even after her death, remains part of the land and history

Thomas Hardy created in his novels the fictional area of Wessex which corresponds to the real West Country that he knew so well.

In Tess, the land functions as a symbolic parallel to human existence: Tess's betrayal, torture and death correspond to Hardy's vision of the betrayal, torture and death of the land. The ruin of the 'pure woman' Tess is constantly seen in terms of the ruin of the pure earth. Hardy reveals a view of nature and the natural world, recognizing in it something implicitly 'good' and possessed of a spirituality that the city and modernity have lost

Wessex is filled with the remains of the distant history of the land; the folklore and customs of the people are described; the monuments and ruins, Roman and Druid,        strange shaped flints found in the fields, and the mysterious Egdon Heath, appear throughout the story not just as a landscape, but as protagonists in the telling of the tale. History and modernity are intertwined symbolically and emblematically.

The fate of Tess is preannounced by the contact she has with the mysterious Heath and the sacrificial ruins of Stonehenge. The inclusion of these 'historical traces' gives at the novel a legendary quality that reinforces the sense of a folk tale.

Tess's seducer, Alec D'Urberville, represents the nouveau riche of Victorian society, a family that has bought the name and the estate of an old, impoverished family. Tess represents the innocence and carthy nature of the old world, and although she murders Alec, it is he and all that he represents that eventually destroys her. The modern world destroys the old world

It is through this conflict, symbolic and personified, that the drama takes place. For Hardy, modernity is inescapable and he views its significance with pessimism. The inescapable nature of modernity is reflected in the death of Tess who cannot escape her final destiny

The novel has been described as 'Poetic' because of the extended descriptive elements and the use of symbols and emblems that create the form of the story.

The author introduces symbolically many of the most important themes in the novel:

the phases of Tess's life, like the phases of the moon, eroticism and the power of sexual drive, the interplay between nature and the individual, the cosmic aspect of the language, its ability to move outwards and upwards, from the specific to the general and the movement toward a final destiny already foretold through the use of symbols of presentiment.

To this he adds the recurrent images of sacrifice and blood and describes the sexuality of Tess in symbolic form, relating her to the fertility of the land and the animals with which she works.

The narrator of Tess exists as an observer, distant from the characters and the story ,ever present and yet unwilling to enter into explanations. E.M. Forster commented that Hardy 'conceives his novels from an enormous height'.

The narrator presents the information and never comments on it. From this point of view the naturalist style is again different from the moralism of the Realist text.

Apart from the full title of the novel "Tess of the D'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman" , the author offers no explicit moral judgment on Tess and her behaviour nor on her two lovers, Alec and Angel Clare, yet the reader is guided towards understanding on an implicit, linguistic level.

The use of symbols, allegorical references and metaphors define the characters and their actions without the need of a strong authorial tone.