Tess in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Name -            Bhatt Dhara J

Roll No:  -        2

M.A.Part-2 -   Sem-4

Paper -             02, Ec-405

Paper Name – Thomas Hardy

Topic for Assignment      -

Tess in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles

--Victim Of social prejudice Male Dominance in Victorian Patriarchal Society---

Submitted To: Dr.Dilipsir Barad

  Department of English,

  Bhavnagar University,

  Bhavnagar.                 

Tess in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles

--Victim Of social prejudice Male Dominance in Victorian Patriarchal Society---

Introduction

In, Thomas Hardy wrote in his notebook,

“The best tragedy—the highest tragedy in short—is that of the worthy encompassed by the inevitable. The tragedies of immoral and worthless people are not of the best.”

                       Tess of the D’Urbervilles can be considered to be such a remarkable tragedy as its author defines. As one of the most influential and well-received books in world literature, Tess brought Hardy great fame and honor as well as incurring harsh rebukes from conventional society. In the novel, Hardy portrays a poor innocent country girl who is victimized by the combined forces of Victorian patriarchal society— the injustice of social law, the hypocrisy of social prejudice and the inequality of male dominance, and demonstrates his profound sympathy for Tess, the protagonist, symbolic of rural women who were mercilessly ravaged in male-dominated world. Tess’s tragic fate has evoked generations of readers’ sympathy and aroused their interests in her twisted life journey full of setbacks and mishaps.

“Double moral standard”

                         

“Double moral standard” in sexuality applied to men and women pervade Tess’s life pilgrimage. Tess’s tragic Fate is closely connected with two men’s betrayal and mastery. The bourgeois hypocrisy and the male dominance incarnated in Angel and Alec co-operate in driving Tess to destruction. In the conventional world with a severe view on virginity and chastity, the sense of self-guilt and self-reproach haunts her through her life journey. After sexual violation, the rigid society gives her no chance for regeneration. As Hardy suggests in the novel, “patriarchal society, the habitat of the heroine, is the root of her tragedy, shaping her miserable fate.”

He sympathizes with Tess by arguing that

“Most of her misery had been generated by her conventional aspect.” 

                         He indicates that Tess is the example of the destructive effect of society’s pressures and conventions upon a naturally pure and unstained country girl and that Alec and Angel are personifications of destructive attitudes towards women.

On May, Hardy wrote,

“That which socially is a great tragedy, maybe in Nature no alarming circumstance.”

                        A hardy witness the injustice of social law and the ill effect of male-dominance over women and dramatizes them in the novel through the miserable life of Tess who is crushed by the comprehensive vicious power of society. In the perspective of the conventional world, Tess is an unforgivable sinner whose “terrible sins” are doomed; however, Hardy, cherishing “a thousand pities” for Tess, calls her a pure woman. This is the irony against the hypocritical conventions of the Victorian Age, which restricted man’s nature to such a large extent as it oppressed people, especially women, who were trodden at the bottom of society. Tess is driven to offend the social law, but she responds to the natural law, to her nature.

Male Dominance and Double Moral Standard

                    In a society where men enjoy superiority and privilege, women are no doubt living at the mercy of men. They must submit to men’s will, otherwise they will be punished by the social law and tortured by public opinions. The conceptions of male-dominance and male-superiority pervade Victorian society, imposing pressures upon women who are taken as inferior beings. Tess’s miserable fate is nothing but a “sport” of “the President of the Immortals,” a terrible game played on females by males.

                  In a sense, Tess is tinctured with a tint of feminist who tries to get free from men’s control and find individuality. Tess’s tragedy in a way springs from the conflict between males and females in which females are usually sacrifice.

                                      Alec and Angel serve as the embodiment of men’s inhumanity towards women.Alec bestially violates Tess by sexual attacks; Angel cruelly tortures her by his priggish rejection. Alec’s barbarism and Angel’s hypocrisy, interdependent on each other, are the two irresistible forces driving Tess to her dead end. If Alec physically ruins Tess by depriving her of her virginity, Angel spiritually destroys her bydepriving her of her courage for life and pursuit for love. Alec’s sexual violation destroys Tess’s virginity, which means so much to a girl in Victorian society that she will be pushed to the prejudicial mire if she loses it out of wedlock. “An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother’s door to try her fortune atTrantridge poultry-farm”. Deprivation of virginity makes Tess feel herself as an anomaly in the society, alienated from the moral codes. Obsession of her selfguiltand self-reproach haunts her all her way to death, which conventionally doomed. It is the cost of a horse. A horse can be replaced, but there is no restoration of lost virginity, which foreshadows the pitiful tragedy of the protagonist.

Social Prejudice and Ill Effect

Tess of the D’Urbervilles is the product of Hardy’s fascination with women of beauty, energy and intelligence who find themselves trapped between these gifts, the aspirations such gifts justify, and their society’s assumption that respectable women must be either submissive or obtrusively and harmlessly aspiring. With few exceptions, Hardy’s most interesting characters are his unconventional women including Tess who, so unconventional both before and after, is, predictably both the conventional ruined maid of fiction and a ruined maid like no other that has existed in British fiction. (Casagrande 8)

                                In Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Unorthodox Beauty Peter, Casagrande J mentions that Tess is one of the typical characters in Hardy’s novels who are trapped between their personal aspirations and social assumption and eventually ruined because their unconventional practice confronts with moral codes of the orthodox society and that it is the common motif in many English fictions in which the heroines, usually beautiful and clever, become the scapegoat of social rituals. Tess

Tells such a story and Tess is such a character. In the novel, readers can find that due to her first fall—sexual involvement with Alec, Tess is regarded as an unconventional and unrestrained “fallen” woman and despised and belittled wherever she goes. When she returns to Marlott, various censures attack her. In church, “the people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service preceded; and at last observing her they whispered to each other”.

                            Angel sees Tess as “a visionary essence of woman—a whole sex condensed intones typical form”. He calls her “Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names.” Angel’s idealization of Tess separates him from reality. He cannot perceive Tess from the natural perspective, failing to find her natural essence as a true individual in the objective world. In his sight, she is transformed into an intelligent image, a condensation of ideals. Contrary to Alec’s view of sexual object, Angel takes Tess as an incarnation of his womanly purity. Her physical relationship with Alec is replaced by a spiritual one with Angel. She becomes a victim of Angel’s prejudice on marriage. His unrealistic viewpoint on love and marriage enables him to drift in spiritual air and prevents him from marrying Tess both in flesh and soul. Their separation is culturally destined. Tess is doomed to become the scapegoat of Angel’s Fantasy.

                            Angel highlights “double moral standard,” which is thoroughly reflected in his attitude towards Tess the moment he is told of her past, and in his final rejection of Tess due to the same reason. This episode is one of the most important and wonderful parts of the novel, which climaxes the conflict in the novel. On the wedding night, after their confessions of their pasts, Tess forgives his romantic dissipation with a woman in London, but Angel refuses to forgive Tess for her “disgraceful” past. Angel’s refusal is in striking contrast with Tess’s generous forgiveness. They commit the same behavior, but receive different consequences. Angel’s desertion clearly exemplifies the “double moral standard” that prevails in Victorian society in relation to sexual lives and feelings of women.

Conclusion

Tess epitomizes a country girl who is ruined by social prejudice and male dominance centered on the “double moral standard” of sexuality applied to men and women in the late nineteenth century. Like a straw on the torrent of ethic prejudice, she is easily engulfed by the evil power of the society. She is the victim of narrow-mindedness toward the concepts of chastity and virginity, and she is also the sacrifice of male dominance in patriarchal Victorian society. Tess’s tragedy is the archetype of women’s tragedies which are involved with sexuality. Different societies regulate different criteria of “accepted” women. Woman is culturally constructed, rather than biologically defined. Tess is the reflection of the society and Tess is the representative of the women trodden at the bottom of society in certain period of English history. Tess is doomed to perish under the great social injustice towards marriage and sexuality. Her tragedy is triggered by her father’s dream of family glory and closely related with two men’s betrayals and two “falls”, which form the fabric of the story. Alec and Angel are reincarnations of the destructive “double moral standard,” personifying the unjust moralities on women. They are the embodiment and vehicle of combined social forces during the social transformation of England. They cooperate to destroy Tess as a “fallen” woman, a kept mistress and a murderess, respectively by physical invasion and spiritual oppression. Many critics observe that Tess is a novel which challenges the existing social order—a defense of the “fallen” woman as a victim of social prejudice. In Victorian Society, the progress of the moral success of an acceptable woman goes from virgin to conventionally married mother. Tess, as a girl mother and obliged mistress, strays from the well-accepted way of her society. She is predestined to tragedy. It is the invisible pressures emanating from rigid social convention and unfair ethic principles that shape her tragedy and drive her to her end. She is victimized by the combination of social prejudice and male-dominance in patriarchal Victorian society. Tess’s story, to some extent, reflects the rigidity of convention, the harshness of social law and the prejudice of morality in male dominated patriarchal society. Tess deserves the reputation of “the best tragedy—the highest tragedy”, which is defined by the author. In the worldly view, Tess is a “fallen” woman; however, she is essentially pure and naturally unstained. Tess is pure woman as Hardy’s subtitle describes. Tess is tragic but pure.