Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Sacrificial Honour

What I really like about Tess of the D'Urbervilles is that our heroine, Tess, is the eponymous character of the story. And one may be questioning, whether you have read this quintessential classic or not, why is that relevant, Rae? Tess isn't the first of our protagonists to have her book named after her, and it doesn't seem like a very pro-feminist stance to argue that this is absolutely crucial to the story.

I must explain.

For those who are unfamiliar with the tale, Tess is not actually called 'Tess D'Urberville' until the latter part of the story—she is in truth designated the name of Tess Durbeyfield, the working class, rural cousin of the former name wherein it is believed to be derived. The D'Urbervilles were an aristocratic Norman family, whose name has since become seemingly extinct and corrupted into variations that are encapsulated by generations of poverty-stricken countryfolk after the D'Urbervilles lost their land, honour, and fame, with the rural descendants (such as the Durbeyfields) having nothing left to show for their ancestry but a spoon and a graven seal.

Mirroring the want to strengthen reputation and family fortune of the Victorian period, Tess is persuaded to marry the young gentleman who lives in a nearby village—Alec D'Urberville—in order to strengthen the prospects of her descendants as well as the family themselves, who have an abundance of children relying upon Tess to lift their spirits into a sense of higher living.

Yet Tess is still believed to be a child during this courtship, the innocent child bride who is a 'mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience'. Not unlike 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', released only a year before Tess, we see two protagonists coddled by their youth and nescience, both privy to manipulation by men who project their innermost sins onto our naive characters (Dorian by Henry's urges to give into his temptations and the curiosity of man, and the raping of Tess by Alec whilst she sleeps) and both characters are amalgamated into variations of the 'Fallen Woman'. Yet, after searching voraciously for the male counterpart online of the 'Fallen Woman', in the end I was unsurprised that I was unable to find an expression that amused me more than the unfortunate modern, crude equivalent of those such as 'man whore' and ‘womaniser’ which, in a world that continues to fight against the oppression of women and the lack of male accountability, has me smiling at the new dictation that comes with being a purveyor of online activism and Gen Z paraphernalia.

The fallacies within Tess probably excite me most— as *spoiler* Alec is not in fact a D'Urberville at all, but a man with working class roots whose grandfather made his fortune and adopted the surname 'D'Urberville' over Stoke—but of course, when you reach such a high position in society, who is going to question you for doing that? Certainly not the rightful descendants, who are so willing to marry their daughter to evade full destitution that they do not question whether the owner of the name is who he says he is. Some may refer to this as the 'blindness of the lower classes', but I think it rather derogatory to describe it as such—in reality, those who belong to the working class were forced (particularly in a time, as I always stress, of making a reputation for one's self) to cater to the wants and whims of the upper classes just to be able to survive (think exploitation of women in industry at the time—both in a monetary sense and the physical sense).

I still think that young Tess, like Dorian, was a victim not only of the class system, but a pawn on a chessboard played by adults beyond her years. Tess gives birth to a child within the next chapter, an obvious subsequent consequence of her raping, and has returned home away from Alec, whom she did not marry. An text guide that I particularly liked reading was this by Cross Reference, which phrases Tess' short life perfectly: 'Tess' great battle is to escape the past', suggesting the gravity of the transgressions of her ancestors (the entitlement of old noble families) and on a more recent scale, Alec's pervasion of her life and how his desire culminates in her ruin. The infant's early demise is seen as an embodiment of this, and though it could represent Tess' fate (the death of innocence) perhaps it existed simply to bear the weight of Tess' ludicrous punishment for her supposed docility in the sins of others.

Yet, after moving away to start a life anew at the Talbothay's dairy farm, Tess falls in love with a gentleman who loves her just as eagerly and scoffs at the idea of old families and tradition, seeking to work on the farm himself and perhaps taking a farm wife despite his high status. He asks Tess to marry him, and though there is nothing more she wants in the world, she feels immense guilt for keeping the secret of her old life and appearing to masquerade as an unworldly virgin, yet she can never bring herself to tell him the truth, until the night of their wedding.

And of course, as a modern, likely more liberal audience, we feel anger at this new gentleman (aptly named Angel, as if he were her saving grace) as he recoils and is disgusted with her past, feeling like he has married an impostor.

Eventually deserting her for over a year, Tess is trapped once more in an endless spiral of melancholy, even finding Alec once more and agreeing to live with him out of desperation— yet upon Angel's return, she attempts to restore peace by murdering Alec, but is then unfortunately subject to sentence by hanging—and once more (though certainly in an exaggerated sense, whether one can ever think murder justifiable) she is enclosed within a system that favours male honour, no matter the crime committed against the vulnerable.