Thomas Hardy’s ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ is a novel that I have put off reading for a long time, and I think a large part of the reason for this comes from the initial impression I had of the story as a teenager. I can remember there being a storyboard for the novel outside of my English classroom in secondary school, and stopping to read it multiple times before going to class. It struck me as being overly morbid and dramatic and, as someone who was much more comfortable in the literary world of Jane Austen at the time, where all the heroines eventually get their ‘happily ever after’, I found poor Tess’ ending particularly bleak and disturbing. It was a novel I just didn’t feel comfortable reading.
It was only recently, when reading Delia Owens’ ‘Where the Crawdads Sing’, that I drew some parallels with the story in ‘Tess’, and finally decided to give the novel a go. I am so glad that I did, and also that I waited to read it.
There were so many elements about this book that I fell in love with. First and foremost, the characters in the novel are beautifully complex, and none more so than Tess herself. The novel charts the course of her life over a period of several years, during which time she endures some incredibly harrowing experiences, and struggles to find happiness and acceptance when judged against society’s rigid moral standards. As the main character in novel, the reader spends a lot of time with Tess, following her internal struggles, thought processes, and ways of rationalising events and decisions. I have seldom finished a novel wherein I felt I had such a good understanding of the character.
I must admit, when I first started reading the novel, I wasn’t overly keen on Tess, finding her character too passive and indecisive, despite feeling a lot of empathy for her situation. However, as Hardy beautifully observes, “[…] women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye.” By the end of the story, my view had been completely changed with the development of Tess’ character, and I couldn’t help but admire her strength, resilience, and perseverance in trying to lead an independent, ‘virtuous’ life. It was particularly engrossing to follow how her rationalisation and reaction to the events in her life changes and matures over time; most notably her realisation that she has been wronged by Angel in his treatment of her on knowing about her past.
I believe this complexity of the characters, and the way in which Hardy gives the reader a deep understanding of their inner thoughts and maturation during the course of the novel, is one of the main reasons why it made much more of an impact on me now that it probably would have done fifteen years ago. I also found that a lot of the social criticisms and observations that Hardy makes probably acquired a deeper meaning, and hit home more for me than they would have done if I had read the book when I was younger. One observation which particularly stands out, and captures not only Angel’s overly idealistic vision of Tess, but also the wider moral standards against which men and women are judged, is the passage “In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.” At some level, I think we have all experienced, or can relate to, the feeling of being judged by unrealistic expectations, and being overlooked for who we truly are.
Another element of the book which really surprised me was how immersive the descriptions of the rural communities and agricultural labour in which Tess participates are. For this reason, two sections of the novel I really enjoyed reading were the periods that Tess spends working at Talbothays dairy (where she also encounters and falls in love with Angel) and Flintcomb-Ash farm. The Talbothays section of the novel stands out as being a period in which Tess finds relative happiness amongst the community at the dairy, despite her inner conflict when it comes to allowing a romantic relationship to develop with Angel, whilst the Flintcomb-Ash section really brings home the physically gruelling nature of the agricultural labour. Added to this is the mental exhaustion and turmoil that the re-emergence of Alec d’Urberville brings. For me, this was the point in the novel where my respect and admiration for Tess was cemented.
Although far from being a light read, ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ surprised and challenged me in a way that I wasn’t expecting. Complex, perceptive, and much more than the overly dramatic tale I initially perceived it to be, this was a novel that was worth the wait to read.
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