Tess of the D’Urbervilles in Easley Library Bookworms

Feb 13, 2008 Werner rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics, books-i-own

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Note, April 21, 2024: I've just revised this review, mostly to reflect a substantive change in my understanding of Hardy's attitude here, based on a reread of another of his novels, Far from the Madding Crowd Hopefully, the changes won't compel anyone who's previously "liked" the review to unlike it!

My rating for this novel is based on Hardy's technical artistry, and on the power of the emotional reaction that the story evokes. I'd have given it only 3 stars if I were basing the rating strictly Note, April 21, 2024: I've just revised this review, mostly to reflect a substantive change in my understanding of Hardy's attitude here, based on a reread of another of his novels, Far from the Madding Crowd Hopefully, the changes won't compel anyone who's previously "liked" the review to unlike it!

My rating for this novel is based on Hardy's technical artistry, and on the power of the emotional reaction that the story evokes. I'd have given it only 3 stars if I were basing the rating strictly on my own personal enjoyment of the book, but that's only because I don't really enjoy heart-tearing tragedy, which this is (happy endings don't abound in Hardy's Wessex). Tess is the sort of heroine I can readily like and respect, but that makes her ultimate fate all the more gut-wrenching.

Like Jude the Obscure, this novel offended Victorian "propriety," in this case by its obvious criticism of the conventional gender-based double standard for sexual sins (Angel's reaction to Tess' following of his example in sharing a wedding-night confession made me want to reach into the pages and shake some sense into him!), and by its contention that, as the subtitle "The Story of a Pure Woman" says, a woman who's borne an out-of-wedlock child --in Tess' case, as a result of what we'd call "acquaintance rape"-- can nonetheless be a pure and decent person. For me (and I think for most readers), these points aren't problematic. Neither am I, and probably most other readers, inclined to shed any tears over Alec's stabbing; while I recognize that he's a human being, my sympathies aren't very engaged on behalf of a rapist and total jerk. (I admit that that's a less compassionate reaction than I should have, but I'm being honest.) Although I've never been a major fan of the insanity defense in criminal law, since I think it's often abused, I think a claim of temporary insanity on Tess' part would have been completely justified. For me, the more problematic element of the story is theological. Hardy's mirroring of his own religious skepticism in Tess and Angel, and his portrayal of Christian conversion as completely ineffectual to bring about any genuine moral transformation in Alec, is obviously uncongenial to me as a Christian reader. So, too, is Hardy's general attitude of existential pessimism.

At the novel's end, Hardy ascribes Tess' fate to the "sport" of "the President of the Immortals," a phrase I originally assumed to denote God. Actually, it's one quoted, as Hardy states there, from Aeschylus. Presumably it refers to Zeus in the original; but here, I now think it's more accurate to conclude that in using the round-about reference, Hardy as an agnostic distances his meaning from a straight-out reference to God as such. Rather, it seems to be simply a kind of poetic (and the author was primarily a poet) personification of an impersonal chance or "fate." (So I would no longer see any vestigial influence of Calvinism from Hardy's youthful religious milieu here.) That's not to deny that the storyline here also shows the role of lousy attitudes and behavior (including, sometimes, her own bad decisions) on the part of more than one character in Tess' tragedy, which have consequences both for them and for others, nor that Hardy sees these as culpable. But I now think it's incontrovertible that Hardy sees chance (and more often than not malign chance) as setting up a lot of the circumstances within which his characters make their choices for good or bad. To my mind, that's not a view which accurately explains the real way in which the universe operates.

But those criticisms don't diminish the human interest of the tale, the force of its moral messages, or the vividness of the characters. This is a very real story about very human characters, and well worth a read --and not just for historical interest in Victorian fiction. But it's probably best read with a tissue box handy, especially if you're inclined to be emotional! ...more

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