Prose: Tess of the D'Urbervilles context and themes Flashcards
Themes: injustice/gender roles
Injustice is a key theme of the novel, as Hardy uses it to show Tess receiving a string of injustices that change a narrative. Also, we see a different set of rules thrust upon Tess, Angel and Alec, which is due to their gender and class. Hardy additionally shows injustice through the difficult circumstances that Tess’ family suffer, such as the loss of Prince, the loss of their house, and reputational damages due to Tess’ pregnancy and ruined marriage.
Themes: social criticism
Hardy uses social criticism throughout the novel firstly by the subtitle of the novel “A Pure Woman”, asserting Tess’ ‘purness’ and innocence throughout the novel. He also comments on the strict rules in Victorian society, the double-standarding for men and women, and the falseness of religion, which can be demonstrated through Alec’s transformation and preaching.
Themes: religion
Religion is a key topic discussed in the novel due to the many references to Paganism and Naturalistic religions, basicially other religions than the widely-accepted Christianity of Victorian England. Hardy uses this to criticise the use of religion to justify things. For example, Tess and the other milkmaids in Talbothays attend Church, although it is implies by their dress that this is more about fulfilling an obligation and for the decedency of it, rather than the holding of a pure, true religious belief. This is further shown by the Durbeyfields as them attending their local pub like a church, and with religious connotations, which would be abhorrent for the intended, Victorian audience.
Themes: change (fate and journeys)
Change is an integral part of the novel, and one of the key elements to the narrative unfolding as various different locations, such as Marlott, Trantridge, Talbothays, Cross-in-Hand, Flintcomb Ash, Sandbourne, and Stonehenge all featured. Hardy uses this to show how this constant moving and unfamilarity parallels Tess’ feelings and depending on the setting, depends on what unfolds in the narrative. Fate is also a key element of the novel, as it is something that Tess holds closely, and attributed her downfall and misfortunes to. She tells Abraham that she thinks they are on a “blighted” star, hours before Prince is killed under her jurisdiction. It is used as a tool in the novel to be dismissive of the effects of the strict class and gender divisons, as well as upholding the patriarchy.
Themes: motherhood
Motherhood is a theme expored in Tess of the D’Urbervilles in many different ways. Firstly it is shown through Joan as a mother, who is presented as quite a bad one, as more consumed in the ‘complete fortune-teller’ than worrying aboit her children, which Hardy could’ve done to potentially show that she maybe didn’t want to be a mtoher and felt forced into it due to the strict clss roles of Victorian Society. Also, she is shown as using Tess, her daughter, in any way to improve her own life or social status, with no regard for her daughter’s safety, wellbeing or own opinion. However, Hardy contrasts this image with Tess as a mother to Sorrow, and how she wants to protect her baby, not let it suffer, and ensure it has a proper burial, even going to the lengths of manically trying to baptise them herself on the night it is dying. This shows Tess compassionate and caring nature, which Hardy does to reveal Tess’ true characteristics despite the traumatic incidents that have befalled her.
Context: Capital punishment
-In the 1870s, when the novel is set, there were five capital crimes: murder, treason, arson in a royal dockyard, espionage and piracy with violence.
-At the end of the novel, Tess is convicted of the murder of Alec D’Urberville and hanged at Wintoncester (Winchester) prison. Public hanging was abolished in Britain in 1868.
-When he was eighteen, Thomas Hardy witnessed the public hanging of Elizabeth Martha Brown, a working class woman who had murdered her violent husband, in 1856.
Context: the mechinisation of agriculture
-For millennia, humans used hand tools to farm, such as the flail or the scythe.
In Britain, the mechanisation of farming started in the 1790s, with the invention of the threshing machine.
-By the late 1800s, threshing machines were powered by steam, like the one in Chapter 47 of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
-Hardy often describes the machines using diabolical imagery, suggesting that the use of machinery is having a negative impact on the nature of agricultural work.
Context: Victorian morality
-Queen Victoria ruled Britain and the Empire from 1837 to 1901, offering a ‘perfect’ role model for women and motherhood.
-The ‘sexual norm’ for a Victorian woman was to be a virgin until marriage. Angel is appalled by Tess’s revelation, despite not being chaste himself.
-Victorian society was underpinned by Christian values. The established Church was widely followed; as the novel shows, there were also newer evangelical churches.
-Hardy’s subtitle for the novel, ‘A Pure Woman’, was a challenge to the conventional (and, as he saw it, hypocritical) conceptions of a Victorian woman.
-Biblical indoctrination portrayed them as temptresses- cause of Adam’s downfall in the book of Genesis.
-Charities existed for the purpose of rehabilitating and reforming “fallen” women. Activists employed various tactics, such as providing pamphlets on morality and running homes where women could live in a community and learn skills to help them earn a living. Modern readers will note that responsibility for a woman’s lack of virginity fell solely on the woman; men had no responsibilities toward former partners and frequently failed or refused to provide for their own illegitimate children.
-Hardy questions social and moral hypocrisy.
-The Victorian middle-class image of women were culturally contorlled, as women were denied political power, economic power, sexual feelings, as were expected to conform to seperate spheres for men and women. Hardy’s writing challenges patriarchal authority.
-In Victorian literature and art, the figure of the fallen woman became a focus for contemporary anxieties about marriage and the family, and about the role of women in society. The ‘fallen woman’ was seen in opposition to the ‘angel in the house’.
-Additionally, prostitution was seen as a threat to morality in Victorian England, and was the topic of some art and literature, with a moral message to avoid it kept inside.
Context: The influence of Darwinism
-Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. It challenged widely accepted ideas about creation and man’s place in the universe.
-Thomas Hardy, a keen amateur scientist, read Darwin’s work, and his novels reflect the fin de siècle trend towards pessimism and religious scepticism.
-Tess of the D’Urbervilles could be said to illustrate a ruthless, post-Darwinian society, in which characters who cannot adapt to social change do not survive (Natural Selection).
-Hardy’s descriptions of hardship at Flintcomb-Ash, where labourers choose to work only when better jobs are unavailable, depict a life of struggle.
Context: Emigration to Brazil (1870s-1900)
-In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Britain underwent a demographic crisis as the population increased rapidly.
-Brazil, which had been an independent nation since 1825, abolished slavery in 1850. This created an economic crisis and a demand for agricultural workers.
-Immigration gradually intensified: about 71,000 Europeans emigrated to Brazil each year between 1877 and 1903.
Angel Clare goes to Brazil to seek his fortune as part of this migration pattern after his separation from Tess. His venture fails.
Context: Class
-She is not impure because she is poor; rather she is exposed to dangers that arise because her family’s poverty places her in a vulnerable position.
-Moreover, both the wealthy Alec d’Urberville and the more philosophically inclined middle-class Angel Clare commit immoral, irresponsible, and cruel acts, further imperiling Tess. Alec rapes her and leaves her pregnant; Angel admits to sexual relations before marriage—his doing, unlike Tess’s—and then abandons her when she admits to a similar event.
-Hardy highlights the lost aristocratic history of Tess’s ancestral family: their ancient nobility and its possessions are in ruins, and its surviving son, Jack Durbeyfield, is a lazy drunk with few, if any, morals.
-Although Angel is a critic of the nobility, he is impressed by Tess’s lineage. But because Angel comes from a class that tends to regard rural laborers as simple, he places them only slightly above farm animals. Angel is even surprised when Tess has complex thoughts. But when Angel learns about Tess’s past, he blames her behavior on congenital weakness: essentially, since her formerly noble family fell into decline and poverty, he thinks that she must have a genetic tendency toward moral weakness.
Context: Hardy’s Wessex
-Thomas Hardy’s Wessex is a fictional region of England that strongly suggests the real landscapes of the southern and southwestern parts of the country.
-Keeping some real place names but changing others, he established boundaries that stretch along the coast north to Oxford (which he calls Christminster) and from Windsor (which he calls Castle Royal) to Taunton (which he calls Toneborough) in the west.
-Marnhull is the real-world location of Marlott
-Hardy did not mind if readers matched up real and imaginary places but cautioned them that his landscape was fictitious and he would not guarantee the “details” to be correct.
Context: Symbolism
-Prince acts as a symbol of the d’Urberville family, in that he has a noble name but is reduced to menial labor to survive. His death is also a symbol of the theme of Nature versus modernity, as Prince the rural horse is gored to death by a modern mail cart.
-Furthermore, the seal and the spoon with the d’Urberville crest are the only things the Durbeyfields have left from their noble heritage. The smallness and uselessness of the items is a symbol of how the d’Urberville name means nothing anymore in terms of real wealth or influence.
-Additionally, the d’Urberville coach is an old legend of the family which Angel mentions and Alec later explains to Tess. It concerns some ancient d’Urberville who abducted a beautiful woman and then inadvertently killed her when she tried to escape his coach. Whenever a d’Urberville hears the sound of an invisible coach it is supposed to be a bad omen, or even to forebode that murder is about to be committed. The coach is a symbol of foreshadowing. Tess cannot escape the cruel things that happen to her, no matter how “pure” she remains at heart. The coach also symbolises the ancient idea of being punished for one’s ancestors. This is pointed out by the narrator when the Durbeyfields are evicted from their home, perhaps because of the many houses the old d’Urbervilles had taken from peasants. Tess’s murder of Alec is also associated with this legend, as the symbol of the fateful coach implies both that she is the woman capture in Alec’s “coach” and that, as a d’Urberville she always had an inescapable murderous strain in her blood.
Context: the Pastoral
-Tess of the D’Urbervilles contains elements of the pastoral genre – a mode of literature that presents man and nature as living harmoniously. Tess of the D’Urbervilles can also be described as a work of realism, with Hardy representing things as they are rather than idealising rural life.
- The pastoral as a whole depicts an idealised form of the shepherd’s lifestyle – herding livestock around open areas of land according to the seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. The target audience is typically an urban one.
-The pastoral can be broken down into 3 parts: the historical form (motifs derive from historical Greek and Roman poems), pastoral as an area of content (contrast of urban and rural), and the prejorative (the pastoral vision is too simplified and thus an idealisation of the reality of life in the country).
-The Pastoral in literature is used by the author to employ various techniques to place the complex life into a simple one.
-In pastoral literature, women are traditionally associated more with the body than the mind, this has lead to the association of women and nature. Landscapes are often viewed as female and womb-like, being the source of life.
-Pastoral journeys (featuring retreating from a court, city, etc. and returning with gained insight or knowledge) was a popular narrative pattern for pastoral texts. Additionally the pastoral discourse of retreat, about retreating to the countryside is used, but Pastoral literature creates an arcadia, not necessarily a replication of rural life. It was one frequently sought by modernity, and one which uncovered the orgins for wanting an urban life, not escaping it.
Context: genre of novel
-The novel is a traedgy, which is shown through Hardy’s characterisations of his characters.It’s shown through inevitability (the phases and the reference to Aeschylus), a harmartia (potentially her pride, passivity, beauty?), Tess as a tragic victim, peripeteia through Angel, Alec as a tragic villain, setting, status, fate, and catharsis (Angel and Liza-Lu, potentially world unchanging? [hegelian]).
-Literature was moving towards modernism at the time of the novel
-The novel is a Bildunsroman novel
