Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A pure woman pulled down to ruin by family and love
The subtitle of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles' is "APure Woman." By choosing this title, the author suggests that the ideassociety has about purity are fundamentally misguided. Society says thatTess is not pure because she is not a virgin. However, Hardy suggests thatTess is the only pure and good human being in any of the societies in which At first, Tess only wishes to help her family's fortune, doing herfather's bidding against her better instincts, by going to work for Alexd'Urbervilles. However, at the end of her tenure with him she is "a maidno more" in Hardy's words, after experiencing sexuality with thissupposedly distant relation. The danger of a lower class woman 'catching'a lower class man was a commonly expressed fear in literature of theperiod. (Armstrong 241) Even in Hardy's own later work, Jude the Obscure,the protagonist is trapped in his first marriage with an unsuitable womanwho desires social standing and fortune, as a result of her alliance with Hardy is quite cagey about whether what transpires between Alex andTess is a rape or not. Tess tells Alex that the "sin" was more his than
html) When Angel reproaches her immediately afterwards he accuses her ofdishonesty, asking why she did not tell him, then remembering that she didtry to initially, but he silenced her. Ironically, her claim to an old name would never haveimpressed Alex, had she not been a beautiful young girl who could be takenadvantage of. Thus, Tess' goodness and her beauty is taken advantagetwice"first by her family, who places her in Alex's hands in hope ofenriching their own coffers, and second by Angel, who gives her hope for abetter life, encourages her to trust him, and then cruelly discards heruntil it is too late. Denied an education and a place in the world, her natural impulsesbecome perverted. What is even more devastating, however, is the fact that not onlydoes it not matter in the eyes of gossiping women. He presses herto confess what may have transpired in her past, "It cannot--O no, itcannot!" She jumped up joyfully at the hope. She lives in a rural part of England where members ofher own working class, denied "a common share in the immaterial" havebecome "presently¦grown into the men who demand with menaces a communism ofthe material," or the common, earthly, bodily elements of the purelyphysical (as seen in her father) and where the aristocratic classes arejust as cold in their harsh moral judgments of women. True, she is notsomeone who is sexually pure, but she is someone who has suffered and isstill a good person. " In fact, Hardy originally consideredcalling the novel, "too late beloved" as its subtitle, rather than "a goodwoman. It also matters,whether Tess is a virgin or not in the eyes of Angel Clare, the man shecomes to trust and love later in the novel. What is so hypocritical aboutthe way that Tess is regarded as a sexual being, too, is that Angel himselfadmits that he too, in his past, has sinned. a woman gives the wholeof her heart-the man only gives the remains of his, and very often there isonly a little left.
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Acceptance Essays
