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certainly one of the greatest novels ever written Sep 23, 2003 (141 of 149 found this helpful)
I was looking for another edition of TESS and couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the "average customer rating" was only three stars. So I'm taking a moment to correct the balance.
TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES must be as close to a perfect novel as anyone has written in English. It is a genuine tragedy with a girl/woman as tragic hero. It is about life on earth in a way that transcends mere sociology. It has the grandeur of Milton but concerns itself with the lives of mortal beings on earth, as much with sex as with dirt, blood, milk, dung, animal and vegetative energies. It concerns itself with only essential things the way the Bible does. It is almost a dark rendering of the Beatitudes.
The story is built with such care and such genius that every incident, every paragraph, reverberates throughout the whole structure. Surely Hardy had an angel on his shoulder when he conceived and composed this work. Yet it was considered so immoral in its time that he had to bowdlerize his own creation in order to get it published, at first. Victorian readers were not prepared for the truth of the lives of ordinary women, or for a great many truths about themselves that Hardy presents.
The use of British history as a hall of mirrors and the jawdropping detail of the landscape of "Wessex" make it the Great English Novel in the way we sometimes refer to MOBY DICK as the Great American Novel, though the works don't otherwise bear comparison. Melville's great white whale is a far punier creation.
Hardy's style is like no one else's. It is not snappy, as Dickens can be. It is not fluid and elegant, like George Eliot's. It can feel labored and awkward and more archaic than either. It has no journalistic flavor, but is painfully pure and deliberate and dense, echoing Homer or the language of the Old Testament rather than anything we think of as "modern." Don't start with TESS but with FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD, another very beautiful book, where Hardy is at his loosest and wittiest. Once you have the key to his style, then pick up a good edition of TESS with notes, e.g. Penguin, so you get the full richness of all the literary allusions. Hardy's lowly shepherds and farmhands move and breathe in a very ancient literary atmosphere. The effect is not pretentious but timeless.
There is wisdom, poetry and majesty here. Tess stumbling through the dark and taking her last rest at Stonehenge will send chills up your spine like no other reading experience. I wonder if anyone can know why there are novels, why we care about them, or what they are capable of, without reading this one.
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Compellingly sad Nov 30, 2004 (52 of 54 found this helpful)
Recently, my brother and I were discussing the "poverty penalty," the concept that the poor pay more for what they must buy because they have no bargaining power to invite competition, which drives down prices. This is obviously not a new phenomenon, because poor Tess Durbeyfield pays quite a poverty penalty through the course of Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.
This is the first novel of Hardy's I have read, but I chose it after reading "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew" by Daniel Pool, a fabulous book about 18th century daily life.
Hardy's title, as quickly becomes evident, is tongue-in-cheek (he is author of my favorite title of a book, Jude the Obscure, which I haven't yet read) is ironic and mocking. Tess, the lovely and somewhat educated daughter of a cottager in Hardy's British district of Wessex, has the last name of Durbeyfield, but in the first pages of the book, her father, the ne'er-do-well, learns that he is descended from Norman aristocracy, the D'Urbervilles, and there aren't many of them left, except his clan, as the local reverend informs him. He instantly thinks himself very grand and takes it as an excuse to go carousing, which causes Tess and one of her many younger siblings to have to make an early morning journey with the horse for the family's means of making money. Sleeping on the journey, Tess wakes to find the horse impaled in a wreck and killed. Feeling guilty, she agrees to be sent as a poor relation to the Stoke-D'Urbervilles to seek assistance of some kind. (They are "new money" and have bought the name "D'Urberville" to build position for themselves, so they are actually no relation.)
There she encounters Alec D'Urberville, who pursues her vigorously, though she repeatedly eschews his attentions. She takes a job for his mother, watching her fowl, but one evening, separated from her friends in the village on the way home from a Saturday night out in the village, Alec stops accepting no for an answer.
Later she falls in mutual love with a gentleman (the son of a minister) who has rejected the pulpit himself in favor of learning the trade of dairy farming so that he may run his own farm some day. Angel Clare does fall in love with Tess, but at the same time, he doesn't seem to really know her, or want to... he thinks of her as a pure country maid, and has no idea about her past. When she tries to tell him, he shushes her, thinking he knows all about her. When she finally confides in him after the marriage, the results are disastrous and Tess is once again dealing with harsh reality.
I won't recount the rest of the story, but it's clear that the bourgeois (Alec) and the gentry (Angel) have a great deal to do with the pain and hardship of Tess's life; they inflict the poverty penalty on her. The idea of the fluidity of the aristocracy in the 18th century -- Tess is descended from them, but has no rights thereof, Alec has taken the name due to his money, and Angel has rejected the career of his familial role in favor of farming whilst entertaining a very aristocratic (and inaccurate) view of the "peasantry" -- is prominent in the novel, with Tess's inability to care for herself and fulfill her perceived familial goals without resorting to asking for help from those who don't have her bloodline at all. The town of Kingsbere, where Tess's ancestors are said to be buried, figures somewhat in the novel, and one cannot help but think that this symbolizes their use to her as being just as dead as they are.
There are some motifs of paganism in the book... Tess meets Angel for the first time at a May dance, a pagan rite, and she has another climactic plot moment at Stonehenge toward the end of the book. Angel himself seems to reject his father's Christian teachings, and the beliefs of Tess and her society are often deemed superstitious or quaint and encompassing of pagan belief systems. Tess often wishes
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So well done, its uncomfortable to re-read. Feb 1, 2007 (13 of 14 found this helpful)
I see "Tess" as the story of how a beauty is wronged by evil and by arrogance.
But oh, what a story. Hardy's novels read like poetry. Tess is so lovely, innocent and good, Alec so relentlessly hideous, and Angel so pathetically self-righteous, that I find the gradual destruction of Tess (with whom I empathize) at the hands of these two men, to be difficult to experience again, line by line!
What a masterpiece of the human condition, and I'm told, of the female experience. Hardy's bitterly honest portrayal of the worst and best of human behavior is as powerful as any I've found in literature.
When I need a Hardy fix and I don't want to be depressed, I turn to "Far From the Madding Crowd."
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"You Were One Person, Now You Are Another..." Mar 23, 2007 (8 of 8 found this helpful)
When Thomas Hardy first had "Tess of the D'Ubervilles" published in 1891, the controversy that surrounded it ensured for him financial security and status as one of the most popular authors of the time. The novel's scandal was concerned with the plot itself, in which an innocent young maid is seduced by an aristocratic cad, and pays for such an indiscretion with everything she holds dear in her life. In Hardy's journal (as recounted in Margaret Higonnet's introduction in this edition) he records that one of the Duchess of Abercorn's dinner parties ended in an argument between those who believed that Tess deserved her fate, and those that sympathized with her plight. However, by today's standards (in which premarital sex barely registers an eye-blink) one can't help but wonder if such a novel is relevant anymore.
I'm going to argue, that yes, of course it is - if not simply to illustrate how lucky we are to no longer live in a world where a woman can be utterly destroyed through the hypocrisy of the society she lives in. However, there's considerably more to it than that, particularly as the remnants of this ideology remain to this day; and since one of the central themes of the novel is the negative effect of past traditions on the present, this bears keeping in mind.
Tess Durbeyfield is a simple country lass, easily manipulated and with a limited education, but with a keen intelligence and insight into human nature. However, when her foolish father is casually told by the village minister that he is the offshoot of a once-noble family, Tess is thrown into her parent's ambition mechanizations. Made to leave her home and younger siblings, Tess begins work tending chickens at a relative's house whilst attempting to ward off the unwelcome attentions of her devious cousin Alec D'Uberville. However, her resolve slips one night when she is alone with Alec, lost and (as the text suggests) intoxicated, and he takes full advantage of her vulnerability.
Having borne his child and lost it soon after (all without Alec's knowledge) Tess seeks employment elsewhere, and finds a sense of peace and security as a milkmaid in a neighboring village. That is, until she meets the parson's son Angel Clare, a very different kind of man from Alec D'Uberville. Falling in love, (along with every other girl on the farm!) Tess finds herself in a new moral crisis. Should she reveal her secret to Angel? Would he accept her if he knew? Her family (not to mention her common sense) warn her to keep her mouth shut, but can any relationship last if it is based on a lie? Shouldn't she have faith in Angel's testimonies of love to her?
However, you've probably already guessed that the story doesn't have a happy ending, and this is a tragedy in the old grand tradition. When young Tess is seduced by a man her fate is sealed. She is a fallen woman, carrying the shame of her indiscretions throughout the rest of her life. However, the novel is remarkable because of Hardy's ability to find light amongst all the grimness. In the depths of Tess's drudgery and despair, we feel her moments of tranquility and appreciation of the beauty that surround her. Likewise, in moments of joy and peace, there is the underlying dread of the secret threatening to rare its ugly head. The emotions stirred in reading this novel are relentless - not to put anyone off from reading this novel, but I was in a constant state of agitation and discomfort in reading; that's how vivid the circumstances of the novel were. I mean that as a good thing of course; books these days are like movies - you sit, you watch, you more often than not feel nothing. But I was truly moved by "Tess of the D'Ubervilles" and her story; and I can't remember the last time I became so invested in a character and her happiness. Despite the pain it brought me in reading it, "Tess of the D'Ubervilles" was worth every agonizing word.
In many ways this is a fe
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The Pure Heroine Mar 31, 2006 (10 of 11 found this helpful)
(Warning: Tells Plot of the Story)
Through many revisions and editions, Tess of the D'Urbervilles A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented By Thomas Hardy still holds readers captive over a hundred years later. Tess's plight though childhood innocence to womanly revenge is similar to other fairy tales and classic novels. It is said to be a love story for young girls or an adults' treasure of allusions and serious themes. Tess grows up fast, having to deal with the wrongs of mankind, her social class, a noble lineage, and the renewal of her true self. Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a novel that can surpass the ages as a heartbreaking tale for any reader who believes in redemption and compassion for the all-encompassing heroine.
In 19th Century Britain, Tess searches for a little pleasure out of her wronged life. Through many novels, Thomas Hardy has told the stories of characters and flaws. Hardy's insight to a woman's life is remarkable. He shows the injustices women have received and the stereotypes that follow women still today. Without knowing the narrator to be a man, it could easily have been a woman who told this very feminine tale. The book was very controversial at the time of its release in 1891. Parts were censored and seen as obscene because of it's sexual views. Hardy continually revised the story, changing the interpretations of the main characters. He did this through including information on some facts and removing statements on others. Alec D'Urberville could be seen in one edition as only the antagonist, not the villain he is in this version. His alterations lead to the 1912-13 edition that is usually the book available now.
Hardy focuses on many themes throughout the book, mostly on the feminine role and social class. Tess Durbeyfield realizes her social struggle when she caused an accident to happen sending her family into financial need. With the recent discovery of their family's lineage to be that of the once very prominent D'Urbervilles, Tess is sent off to her wealthy relatives. The relatives in reality are not D'Urbervilles, only a family that had taken the name because questionable activity was attached to their old name. Alec D'Urberville realizes Tess's financial need and uses it against her to join him at his mother's estate. Gender roles are brought up when Joan Durbeyfield, Tess's mother, believes that "her face" (53) is her one advantage. Only D'Urbervilles advantage is greater. He holds the blackmail of economic need over Tess's head until he eventually takes advantage of her. "An immeasurable 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 at Trantridge poultry-farm" (74). The pregnant Tess, as an unmarried woman isolated from others, escapes home to have her baby. Tess tries her hand as a field worker where women "were the most interesting of this company of binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature" "A field-man is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field" (87-89). Roles are defined by gender again as women being earthly and beautiful, men having no goodness, and in the end the man still gets the better of the woman.
Tess's baby dies, leaving her to start over at Talbothay's Dairy. Finding real love in Angel Care, he convinces Tess to marry him. She tries to tell him of her past only to have him refuse to hear her each time. After their wedding, Clare admits his previous sexual experience asking for forgiveness and receiving it. When Tess relates her story, he can no longer be with her, claiming that "forgiveness does not apply to the case. You were one person; now you are another" (228) "the woman I have been loving is not you" (229). Men's double standards are shown. Clare leaves her for Brazil to decide if they could fix matters. During his long extended absence, Tess