Thomas Hardy defiantly subtitled Tess 'A Pure Woman' and Victorian England bristled
Thomas Hardy's twelfth novel follows a Wessex farm girl who is wronged, abandoned by the man she marries, and finally hanged. Its subtitle called her pure anyway. First serialised in censored form in 1891, the book split critics because it refused to blame its heroine for what others did to her.
It begins with a throwaway remark. A parson tells the poor haggler John Durbeyfield that his name descends from the Norman d'Urbervilles, and John celebrates by getting drunk. Driving to market in his place, his daughter Tess dozes off, the cart crashes, and the family's only horse dies. Out of guilt she seeks help from a rich widow calling herself d'Urberville, whose husband had simply adopted the grand name. The widow's son Alec pursues Tess and, the novel implies, rapes her. Her baby dies after she baptises him herself, naming him Sorrow.
Years later, working as a milkmaid, she falls for Angel Clare, a clergyman's son learning dairy farming. On their wedding night he confesses a past affair; she answers with her story, and he, unable to forgive what he forgave in himself, leaves for Brazil. Poverty drives her to grim field labour and back toward Alec. When the penitent Angel returns, it is too late: Tess kills Alec, flees with Angel, and is captured at dawn while sleeping on a stone at Stonehenge, saying only 'I am ready.'
Readers have seen Tess as an earth goddess, a sacrificial victim or nature personified, and Raymond Williams read her as an educated working woman crushed by landed wealth, liberal idealism and village moralism rather than by machines. Whether Alec seduces or assaults her is left deliberately unclear, perhaps, one scholar suggests, to satisfy publishers and prudish readers. Hardy's own roots in the story ran deep: at 16 he watched Elizabeth Martha Brown hanged for killing a violent husband.
The stage soon claimed the novel. A Broadway version opened on 2 March 1897 and later became a 1913 film, now lost. Hardy publicly disowned one unauthorised London adaptation, then in 1924 wrote his own, casting Gertrude Bugler, daughter of a milkmaid whose beauty had struck him decades earlier.
Source: Tess of the d'Urbervilles
