Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles displays the doubt and religious skepticism of the late Victorian period. I’m teaching it right now. It is more overt in its engagement with religion than Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations and more problematic.
Here’s an outline of the plot using the covenant model.
- Tess Durbeyfield, a beautiful country girl, appears fated for trouble beyond her deserving. She is assaulted by her supposed relative Alec D’urberville and bears a child that dies. Her husband abandons her when he discovers her past. Left alone and fearing for her family, Tess returns to her assaulter, whom she murders when her husband returns. The narrator stresses in the book’s final paragraph, “‘Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Æschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.”
- The very people who should defend Tess work against her. Her parents, John and Joan, send her into the pit of the lion then dismiss her when she returns home besmirched. Alec, her supposed relative,
- Tess’s purity is at the heart of the book: should Angel judge her for what Alec did to her? Society does. The narrator remains skeptical about God existing or caring about Tess if he did. Angel has a change of heart regarding Tess’s purity.
- Hardy wants to understand the apparent incommensurability of sin and punishment, so he imposes heavy penalties on his characters. While Alec and Tess die, Angel ends the novel a withered shell of his former self. Sin alone cannot explain these characters’ fates.
- The novel ends with Angel potentially marrying Tess’s younger sister, Liza-Lu. Angel doesn’t believe in the afterlife. According to Angel, the pair will not reunite in eternity.
Experiments in Criticism 