Classics and the Western Canon discussion

It has been four years since Tess last saw Alec. She is shocked by the change in his appearance and wonders if he has actually converted. Alec is anxious to make amends to the woman “whom I had so grievously wronged.” Tess blames herself for being attractive to men. Alec suggests she veil her face to remove temptation. Tess tells him about the baby.

Alec shows up while Tess works in the field. He blames himself for what happened but accuses her of being “a blind young thing.” He has inherited his mother’s estate, wants to be a missionary in Africa, and proposes marriage. Tess declines, revealing she is already married. Alec admits he still loves her, tears the marriage license, and criticizes her husband for letting her work. He concludes she is a deserted wife and continues to visit her. He blames her for his decision to abandon the church.

Hardy describes in vivid detail the back-breaking, monotonous work with the threshing machine. The workers, especially Tess, are subservient to the machine. Alec continues to pressure her. She writes to Angel, pleading with him to come home or to send for her. His parents forward the letter to Angel.

Meanwhile, Angel is heading to the coast in South America with the intention of returning to England. His traveling companion chastises him for mistreating Tess. Angel regrets his former treatment of her and remembers her in a positive light. Tess, convinced Angel will receive her letter and come for her, prepares herself for his homecoming by learning his favorite ballads to please him. Her sister shows up to tell her their mother is dying. Tess heads home that night, walks the 15 miles, and arrives home to take care of her mother. She works in the fields and doesn’t notice Alec is watching her since he is dressed like an old-fashioned laborer. By this time, Tess has given up on Angel and tells Alec, “I have no husband.”

Her mother’s condition improves, but her father dies and her family has to vacate their home. Tess feels responsible for her family’s eviction. Neighbors had seen her at the churchyard by her baby’s grave and scolded her mother for letting her live at home. Tess finally admits Angel has treated her harshly and sends him a letter accusing him of cruelty.

Alec offers his garden cottage as a place for them to live. He even offers to send her siblings to school. Tess declines. Alec is desperate to make amends. He tells her he will get his cottage ready for them. Tess doesn’t tell her mother about Alec’s offer.

Moving day arrives and the family is forced to relocate. They load their meager belongings in the wagon and arrive at Kingsbere only to be told their lodgings have been rented out. They unload their belongings near a churchyard wall. Tess is followed by Alec when she enters the church. Meanwhile, Marian and Izz hear Angel is coming home and send him a note saying Tess is being tested and he should help her.

Hardy sets up a strong contrast between the sinister-looking threshing machine that demands to be fed with the fragile human beings performing back-breaking, non-stop work to satisfy its insatiable appetite.

Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve—a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining—the threshing machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.

The scene echoes an earlier one of the train “hissing” into the station with a vulnerable, fragile Tess sheltering under a tree in the pouring rain. Both scenes are powerful descriptions of the human being as subservient to the machine, portraying modern industry as destructive to nature.

Alec blames his egregious behavior on Tess’ good looks. He suggests she veil her face to resist tempting him. Later, he even accuses her of seducing him away from the church:

I was firm as a man could be till I saw those eyes and that mouth again—surely there never was such a maddening mouth since Eve’s!’ His voice sank, and a hot archness shot from his own black eyes. ‘You temptress, Tess; you dear witch of Babylon—I could not resist you as soon as I met you again!

To lay the blame on Tess for his inability to control himself is unconscionable and cruel. But what makes it even worse is Tess believes him and blames herself for men’s lewd behavior:

And there was revived in her the wretched sentiment which had often come to her before, that in inhabiting the fleshly tabernacle with which nature had endowed her she was somehow doing wrong.

I think that is one of the saddest statements in the novel.

In Chapter 45, Tess reveals to Alec she had a baby. He is shocked and ask why she never wrote to tell him. In the following chapter, he shows up with a marriage license and proposes marriage to make amends for his treatment of her. Has Alec redeemed himself by proposing marriage to Tess?

I continue to have little time for Alec. He's like a guy who spends his youth travelling around the world by private jet and then becomes a zero-waster in middle age. Too little, too late.

While I suppose offering to marry Tess is, in his opinion, the decent thing to do, it doesn't get around the fact that she dislikes him, he forced himself on her, she's already ruined, and what's he offering? The chance to be raped more regularly within the institution of marriage?

I think his "change of heart" is more down to realizing he doesn't have the power over Tess that he once did, and wanting it back.

Alec seems to have a better grasp of the situation than either Angel or Tess. He is highly critical of the way girls are raised:

I say in all earnest that it is a shame for parents to bring up their girls in such dangerous ignorance of the gins and nets that the wicked may set before them, whether their motive be a good one or the result of simple indifference.

He is right about that.

He also criticizes Tess’ total submission to Angel:

The fact is,’ said D’Urberville drily, ‘whatever you dear husband believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject, without the least inquiry or reasoning on your own part. That’s just like you women. Your mind is enslaved to his.

He is right about that.

He considers Tess to be an abandoned wife and is critical of Angel for abandoning her. He is right about that.

He acknowledges he has treated Tess badly and offers her a way out by proposing marriage and respectability. He wants to take her to Africa with him to start a new life together. He even offers to help her family. And he doesn’t seem to be plagued with adherence to the provincial and outmoded standards that strangle Angel.

Alec is repentant, realistic, offers to make amends, and comes out smelling a lot better than the hypocritical, holier-than-thou Angel. By no stretch of the imagination is he perfect. But what more could he do to make amends for the damage he has done?

I'm afraid I take a rather more cynical view of Alec. I'm not denying he may be trying to make amends, but I believe it is powered by his own vanity more than any real concern for Tess.

When he shows up at the farm (getting her in trouble with the overseer), she says "you have refused my last request, not to come near me." He admits he has not thought of her until she appears before him again, so I see him as rather more dazzled by her beauty -- and her unavailability.

When discovering religion he does not do so in a quiet and personal way that might suggest a true change, but in a flamboyant, fire-and-brimstone sense... a continuation of his behaviour as an entitled young bachelor. He abandons his preaching to stalk Tess, who has told him to leave her alone, listens to her husbands religious beliefs with a view to turning them to his own favour, "he pondered again and again over the crystallized phrases that she had handed on to him, “That clever fellow little thought that, by telling her those things, he might be paving my way back to her!”

Then there's this:

He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his weakness. His eyes were equally barren of worldly and religious faith. The corpses of those old fitful passions which had lain inanimate amid the lines of his face ever since his reformation seemed to wake and come together as in a resurrection. He went out indeterminately.

Though d’Urberville had declared that this breach of his engagement to-day was the simple backsliding of a believer, Tess’s words, as echoed from Angel Clare, had made a deep impression upon him, and continued to do so after he had left her. He moved on in silence, as if his energies were benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility that his position was untenable. Reason had had nothing to do with his whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere freak of a careless man in search of a new sensation, and temporarily impressed by his mother’s death.

Then he blames his backsliding on her!

Then he stares at her while she's working. Remember this is a man who raped her! Then he "speaks again in the old seductive voice of the Trantridge time."

She rejects his help again, leaves the farm to return to her parents and he follows her again! Whatever his intentions (and you'd think he might send a letter rather than just popping up all over the place), his actions are those of a stalker.

Emily wrote: "I continue to have little time for Alec. He's like a guy who spends his youth travelling around the world by private jet and then becomes a zero-waster in middle age. Too little, too late...."

Here here! I honestly find Alec D'Urberville one of the most despicable characters I've ever met. He is the reason for nearly all of Tess's troubles. Her father's foolish pride was the start of it, putting Tess into the situation that brought her to Alec, but Alec is responsible for the entire chain of events that followed.

He's a stalker. And he's not repentant. He continues to blame Tess for what happened:

"Of course you have done nothing except retain your pretty face and shapely figure. I saw it on the rick before you saw me--that tight pinafore thing sets it off, and that wing-bonnet--you field-girls should never wear those bonnets if you wish to keep out of danger."

Later in that same scene, Tess says:

"Oh, why didn't you keep your faith, if the loss of it has brought you to speak to me like this!"
"Because you've knocked it out of me; so the evil be upon your sweet head!"

A few lines later, Alec blames her again:

"You have been the cause of my backsliding," he continued, stretching his arm towards her waist; "you should be willing to share it and leave that mule you call husband forever."

I would have slapped him with a leather glove myself if I'd been able to! He's only trying to make amends now because he's still attracted to her (her fault, of course), and he doesn't like feeling guilty about what he did before. Taking care of her family will assuage his guilt. He doesn't care that Tess doesn't love him and doesn't want to be near him. If she says yes (again), he'll get everything he wants.

Is Tess being stubborn? Yes. I doubt I would be as strong as she is under the circumstances. Would the practical choice be to accept Alec's offer? Yes. But Tess is pure in her convictions, and I find that Hardy continues to be sympathetic to her choices. He portrays Alec as the figure of a devil when he appears beside her to work in her father's field in the dark:

The fire flared up, and she beheld the face of d'Urberville.
The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqeness of his appearance in a gathered smock-frock, such as was now worn only by the most old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled her as to its bearing. D'Urberville emitted a low, long laugh.

Yes, this passage is written from Tess's point of view. But Hardy clearly is leading us toward sympathy for Tess's position, not Alec's.

The threshing scene was so drawn out and evocative, I was almost sweating and feeling the vibration of the machine myself. I was certain Tess was going to fall into the thresher--or throw herself in. When Izz noticed from the ground that Tess's hair had fallen down, I thought it would catch somehow and pull her in. And there's Alec, watching. That scene tells us all we need to know about Tess's feelings toward him. She would rather work herself nearly to death than accept his advances. But this story, like the sheaves, has worked its way down to the end, and what's left at the bottom is a bunch of rats.

Susanna wrote: "Kathy wrote: "He's a stalker. And he's not repentant. He continues to blame Tess for what happened."

I agree. I consider Alec the original gaslighter."

Couldn't the same thing be said about Angel? Doesn't he also abuse Tess emotionally and psychologically and reinforce her feelings of self-doubt?

Again it maybe depends a little on the version you're reading. It could be said of Angel certainly. In my preferred version, I see him more as a beautiful soul made foul by the influence of social conventions.

One of the reasons I love Hardy is he plays this trick of light and dark, beauty and misery, which for some (masochistic?!) reason really appeals to me. I really need to believe in Angel's fundamental loveliness to feel proportionately miserable about what happens to Tess and him later. If Angel's terrible, the book is basically one note of misery from start to finish and much less interesting for me personally.

Roundabout way of saying, Team Angel!

I hate both men, but somehow I'm madder at Angel.

LiLi wrote: "I hate both men, but somehow I'm madder at Angel."

Me, too :)

Tamara wrote: "LiLi wrote: "I hate both men, but somehow I'm madder at Angel."

Me, too :)"

Why Tamara and LiLi? I'm just curious. To me, Alec is such a villain!

Is it because Alec is such a sociopath and so wholly self absorbed that you don't expect anything of him? Where Angel has some sort of moral conscience and should be expected to do better?

Or is it because by making Tess believe in him, Angel ends up hurting her even more?

To me, it seems like Angel is tragically unable to see past the social conventions of his time. He's so blinded by them and unable to see outside of them that he acts against his own nature by blaming Tess for things that are mostly out of her control. And the double standard for gender behavior is so deeply ingrained in him that he can't see past it. He's unbelievably cruel, but it's because he's blind to his own prejudices and cultural assumptions. If you picked him up and dropped him in the middle of a different culture, outside of his circumstances, he might have grown and adapted and learned to become a more enlightened and better man.

You could pick Alec up and drop him into any culture, and he would still be a selfish monster. He's such a shark. The minute he had power over anyone, he'd immediately destroy them if he got anything he wanted out of it.

Alec is the sort of person I really despise.

Though, it's true sometimes that the people who can hurt you most are the ones you let in; so an Angel might do even more damage than an Alec, despite the fact that he isn't quite as much of a monster.

Greg wrote: " If you picked [Angel] up and dropped him in the middle of a different culture, outside of his circumstances, he might have grown and adapted and learned to become a more enlightened and better man.."

And in fact this is more or less what happens, as he comes across more open-minded companions in South America.

Greg wrote: “And the double standard for gender behavior is so deeply ingrained in him that he can't see past it. He's unbelievably cruel, but it's because he's blind to his own prejudices and cultural assumptions.

Yes, but that’s no excuse for his cruelty, is it? All manner of cruel and inhuman behavior can be justified by pleading blindness to one’s prejudices and cultural assumptions.

Greg wrote: “If you picked him up and dropped him in the middle of a different culture, outside of his circumstances, he might have grown and adapted and learned to become a more enlightened and better man.

That can be said about anyone, including Alec since he is as much a product of his male-dominated, class-oriented culture as is Angel. If we excuse Angel for behaving poorly on these terms, we must be ready to excuse Alec on the same terms. And I'm not willing to do either.

Traveling to a different culture to gain enlightenment is not a prerequisite for behaving with decency and compassion. Angel demonstrates he is lacking in both in his treatment of Tess before he returns from his trip of “enlightenment.”

It seems to me if Angel had any sense of decency and compassion before his “enlightenment,” he would recognize Tess as a victim and treat her with kindness. I fault him because he has a greater responsibility to show compassion and tenderness toward Tess because of her feelings for him. The poor girl is so blinded by her passion for him that she believes every word he utters to her own detriment. She showers him with unconditional love.

His whole attitude is riddled with hypocrisy and a double standard. He fails to recognizes his liaison with the London woman is by choice, whereas Tess had no choice with Alec. He accuses her of intentionally waiting until they are married to reveal the truth about her past when he did exactly the same thing but fails to see it.

Angel conveniently abandons her while he traipses off to find himself and sort out his feelings. Meanwhile, Tess is left behind. She suffers, is plagued with guilt, struggles at work, is responsible to help her family emotionally and financially. And she continues to love Angel with a passion and learns his favorite songs in anticipation of his return!

I have no sympathy for Angel. He has hurt Tess so much more than Alec ever did. His conduct is reprehensible. And his trip of enlightenment has done little to redeem him, in my opinion.

Tamara wrote: "That can be said about anyone, including Alec since he is as much a product of his male-dominated, class-oriented culture as is Angel."

Yes, but I do not mean the past causes. I mean the possibility for future redemption. Angel has the kernel of goodness in him that makes redemption or enlightenment possible. It doesn't change or lessen his guilt. I just mean, the next person who likely encounters Angel after the end of the book, he will treat better. That's what I mean by redemption, not an erasure of guilt but an internal change for the better

Any reform on Alec's part is bound to be a farce. If Alec had lived and he encountered someome else, he would probably have harmed them too.

Angel is capable of real guilt or remorse, where Alec is not. Granted, that doesn't do Tess a bit of good in the end though.

Tamara wrote: "It seems to me if Angel had any sense of decency and compassion before his “enlightenment,” he would recognize Tess as a victim and treat her with kindness. I fault him because he has a greater res..."

I get it. It makes sense to me that Angel hurts her more than Alec does. I am angry with him too.

I also completely agree on the double standard and hypocrisy, though I wonder if maybe an extremely large proportion of males in that era would have had the same beliefs and reactions? Not all of course. Rebels like William Godwin (or Hardy for that matter) were thinking in ways far beyond their time. But upwards of 90% maybe (who knows what the number would be, I just suppose it might be quite high)? Even some of the most forward-thinking Victorian male writers occasionally show gender thinking that has a disturbing shading to it.

I still dislike Alec more and am even more angry with him, but I do understand where you're coming from. Thank you for explaining so I could understand your perspective better! It makes a lot of sense to me.

Emily wrote: "And in fact this is more or less what happens, as he comes across more open-minded companions in South America."

Ha, thanks Emily! :) I had actually forgotten about that part.

Greg wrote: "I still dislike Alec more and am even more angry with him, but I do understand where you're coming from. Thank you for explaining so I could understand your perspective better! It makes a lot of sense to me.."

One of the beauties of literature is that it lends itself to different interpretations. The only requirement is that every interpretation must be grounded in the words of the text. We don’t have to agree on an interpretation as long as our reading is supported.

I understand where you’re coming from even though I don’t share your feelings about Angel. But I appreciate your position. I especially appreciate the passion you demonstrated in presenting it. I get such a thrill when I see someone getting so passionate about a work of literature since I so seldom see it happening. So thank you for sharing your views and your passion.

One of the reasons Tess holds up so well today is that there is still a double standard and hypocrisy when it comes to women and men's sexual histories, women are well known to downplay the number of partners they've had while men are more likely to exaggerate; there is no male word for "slut," and so forth. Although nowadays Angel's double-standard would be hard indeed, it isn't difficult to exaggerate the situation much to have it continue to make sense. Alec, of course, is still the kind of man you can encounter in the wild.

Exactly, Emily. I so wish I could take Thomas Hardy out for a pint and a conversation. Though it would probably depress him to see how little has changed.