Assignment on;

"A n a l y s i s o f s y m b o l i s m & m a j o r
Characters in Tess of the
d’Urbervilles"

Submitted to:

Madam Arifa Ansari

Submitted by:

Al t a f A hme d She i kh
M.A (Hons.) English Literature
Roll No. ENG/2K6/10
Institute of English Language & Literature.
University of Sindh, Jamshoro.

Dated;
November 2nd; 2009
Introduction

Thomas Hardy is an English poet and regional novelist, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a
novel written by him. The main character Tess is an innocent and pretty country girl
tossed into dangerous situations brought about by fate. Thomas Hardy uses a lot of
symbolic meanings which imply the main character, Tess’ nature, mind and situation.
This article will analyze the symbolic meanings of the novel. In Hardy’s Victorian novel,
Tess of the d’urbervilles is one of the best and most popular works, in this work Hardy
uses a lot of symbols like objects, figures or colors to build suspense of character’s life as
well as represent author’s idea of fatalism and criticism of the reality. Due to its specific
age, the novel is blending of symbolism and realism. This paper analyzes a lot of Hardy’s
symbols in order to make the readers understand the vicissitudes in Tess’s life in
Victorian age.

Life of Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was born in a village near Dorchester, England, and educated
in local schools. He entered a firm specializing in ecclesiastical architecture, winning the
Architectural Association prize for design in 1863. He began writing verse and essays in
1861. His first short story was published in 1865. Many of his first novels were published
in 1871. In 1874 his novel Far from the madding crowd was a commercial success,
allowing him to take up writing full time. In seeking to portray the reality of human
relations in the Victorian era, he found his novels drew increasing charges of pessimism
and immorality. After harsh criticism of Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 1891 and Jude the
obscure in 1895, he gave up prose fiction and concentrated on his poetry. Wessex Poems
appeared in 1898, followed by further books that brought his total of published poems to
well over 900. Hardy’s career as writer spanned over fifty years. His works reflected his
social pessimism and sense of tragedy in human life.

Introduction of Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Written by Thomas Hardy in 1891, this story is about a sixteen year old country girl
named Tess Durbeyfield. After her father discovers they’re related to the wealthy and
powerful d’Urbervilles, Tess is sent to a nearby member of the family to claim she’s kin
and help out her family’s financial straits. Alec d’Urberville is attracted by her, and puts
her in charge of his mother’s poultry— but winds up seducing and then raping her, which
leaves her pregnant. After she returns home, she finds work in the fields and births her
son, Sorrow, who then grows ill and dies. She leaves the area devastated by the loss and
takes up work at the nearby Talbothays Dairy to become a milkmaid. She falls in love
with a traveling farmer’s apprentice by the name of Angel Clare, who she tries to resist
marrying. She does, though, and when they reveal their pasts, he can’t forgive her for
having another man’s child even though she forgives him everything. They split up for a
year, and she takes a harsh job in Flintcomb to make her way. She meets many of the
friends she had in Talbothays Dairy, and settles near them. She finds Alec there one day
as a practicing evangelical minister, but he leaves his position to pursue her hand in
marriage, which she stoutly refuses. After her father’s death, unexpectedly, Tess has the
burden of the family welfare on her shoulders, and they’re shortly thereafter evicted from
their cottage. She believes deep down that Angel has abandoned her, and Alec says it as
well, and Tess knows her family would do well by Alec’s wealth and property. She
agrees to be with him, and when Angel returns and finds her with him, she asks him to
leave and never return. He does, but Tess kills Alec in a fit of rage for his lies. She flees
to Angel and professes what she’s done, and they try to hide and escape the country.
They have a week of bliss together before they’re captured, and Tess is taken away, but
she makes him promise to marry her sister, Liza Lu, after her death, which he agrees to
do.

Symbolism in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Hardy’s writing often illustrates the “ache of modernism”, and this theme is notable in
Tess. He describes modern farm machinery with infernal imagery; also, at the dairy, he
notes that the milk sent to the city must be watered down because the townspeople can’t
stomach whole milk. Angel’s middle-class fastidiousness makes him reject Tess, a
woman whom Hardy often portrays as a sort of Wessex Eve, in harmony with the natural
world and so lovely and desirable that Hardy himself seems to be in love with her.
Without her, the handsome young man gets so sick that he is reduced to a “mere yellow
skeleton”. All these instances are typically interpreted as indications of the negative
consequences of man’s separation from nature, both in the creation of destructive
machinery and in the inability to rejoice in pure nature. Another important theme of the
novel is the sexual double standard to which Tess falls victim. Hardy plays the role of
Tess’ only true friend and advocate, pointedly subtitling the book “a pure woman
faithfully presented” and prefacing it with Shakespeare’s words “Poor wounded name!
My bosom as a bed, Shall lodge thee”. However, although Hardy clearly means to
criticize Victorian notions of female purity, the double standard also makes the heroine’s
tragedy possible, and thus serves as a mechanism of Tess’s broader fate. Hardy variously
hints that Tess must suffer either to atone for the misdeeds of her ancestors, or to provide
temporary amusement for the gods, or (with a nod to Darwin) because she possesses
some small but lethal character flaw inherited from the ancient clan. From numerous
pagan and neo-Biblical references made about her, Tess can be viewed variously as an
Earth goddess or as a sacrificial victim. Early in the novel, she participates in a festival
for Ceres, the goddess of the harvest, and when she performs a baptism she chooses a
passage from Genesis, the book of creation, over more traditional New Testament verses.
At the end, when Tess and Angel come to Stonehenge, commonly believed in Hardy’s
time to be a pagan temple, she willingly lies down on an altar, thus fulfilling her destiny
as a sacrifice to the gods; she was actually sacrificing herself for Angel. This symbolism
may help to explain her character as a personification of nature— lovely and fecund,
certainly, but also exploited by the other characters in the novel.

Tess Durbeyfield

Intelligent, strikingly attractive, and distinguished by her deep moral sensitivity and
passionate intensity, Tess is indisputably the central character of the novel that bears her
name. But she is also more than a distinctive individual: Hardy makes her into somewhat
of a mythic heroine. Her name, formally Theresa, recalls St. Teresa of Avila, another
martyr whose vision of a higher reality cost her life. Other characters often refer to Tess
in mythical terms, as when Angel calls her a “Daughter of Nature” in Chapter XVIII, or
refers to her by the Greek mythological names “Artemis” and “Demeter” in Chapter XX.
The narrator himself sometimes describes Tess as more than an individual woman, but as
something closer to a mythical incarnation of womanhood. In Chapter XIV, he says that
her eyes are “neither black nor blue nor grey nor violet; rather all these shades together,”
like “an almost standard woman.” Tess’ story may thus be a “standard” story,
representing a deeper and larger experience than that of a single individual. In part, Tess
represents the changing role of the agricultural workers in England in the late nineteenth
century. Possessing an education that her unschooled parents lack, since she has passed
the Sixth Standard of the National Schools, Tess does not quite fit into the folk culture of
her predecessors, but financial constraints keep her from rising to a higher station in life.
She belongs to that higher world, however, as we discover on the first page of the novel
with the news that the Durbeyfields are the surviving members of the noble and ancient
family of the d’Urbervilles. There is aristocracy in Tess’s blood, visible in her graceful
beauty— yet she is forced to work as a farmhand and milkmaid. When she tries to
express her joy by singing lower-class folk ballads at the beginning of the third part of the
novel, they do not satisfy her— she seems not quite comfortable with those popular
songs. But, on the other hand, her diction, while more polished than her mother’s, is not
quite up to the level of Alec’s or Angel’s. She is in between, both socially and culturally.
Thus, Tess is a symbol of unclear and unstable notions of class in nineteenth-century
Britain, where old family lines retained their earlier glamour, but where cold economic
realities made sheer wealth more important than inner nobility. Beyond her social
symbolism, Tess represents fallen humanity in a religious sense, as the frequent biblical
allusions in the novel remind us. Just as Tess’s clan was once glorious and powerful but
is now sadly diminished, so too did the early glory of the first humans, Adam and Eve,
fade with their expulsion from Eden, making humans sad shadows of what they once
were. Tess thus represents what is known in Christian theology as original sin, the
degraded state in which all humans live, even when— like Tess herself after killing
Prince or succumbing to Alec— they are not wholly or directly responsible for the sins
for which they are punished. This torment represents the most universal side of Tess: she
is the myth of the human who suffers from crimes that are not her own and lives a life
more degraded than she deserves.

Angel Clare

A freethinking son born into the family of a provincial parson and determined to set
himself up as a farmer instead of going to Cambridge like his conformist brothers, Angel
represents a rebellious striving toward a personal vision of goodness. He is a secularist
who yearns to work for the “honor and glory of man”, as he tells his father in Chapter
XVIII, rather than for the honor and glory of God in a more distant world. A typical
young nineteenth-century progressive, Angel sees human society as a thing to be
remolded and improved, and he fervently believes in the nobility of man. He rejects the
values handed to him, and sets off in search of his own. His love for Tess, a mere
milkmaid and his social inferior, is one expression of his disdain for tradition. This
independent spirit contributes to his aura of charisma and general attractiveness that
makes him the love object of all the milkmaids with whom he works at Talbothays. As
his name— in French, close to “Bright Angel”— suggests, Angel is not quite of this
world, but floats above it in a transcendent sphere of his own. The narrator says that
Angel shines rather than burns and that he is closer to the intellectually aloof poet Shelley
than to the fleshly and passionate poet Byron. His love for Tess may be abstract, as we
guess when he calls her “Daughter of Nature” or “Demeter.” Tess may be more an
archetype or ideal to him than a flesh and blood woman with a complicated life. Angel’s
ideals of human purity are too elevated to be applied to actual people: Mrs. Durbeyfield’s
easygoing moral beliefs are much more easily accommodated to real lives such as Tess’s.
Angel awakens to the actual complexities of real-world morality after his failure in
Brazil, and only then he realizes he has been unfair to Tess. His moral system is
readjusted as he is brought down to Earth. Ironically, it is not the angel who guides the
human in this novel, but the human who instructs the angel, although at the cost of her
own life.

Alec d’Urberville

An insouciant twenty-four-year-old man, heir to a fortune, and bearer of a name that his
father purchased, Alec is the nemesis and downfall of Tess’s life. His first name,
Alexander, suggests the conqueror— as in Alexander the Great— who seizes what he
wants regardless of moral propriety. Yet he is more slippery than a grand conqueror. His
full last name, Stoke-d’Urberville, symbolizes the split character of his family, whose
origins are simpler than their pretensions to grandeur. After all, Stokes is a blunt and
inelegant name. Indeed, the divided and duplicitous character of Alec is evident to the
very end of the novel, when he quickly abandons his newfound Christian faith upon
remeeting Tess. It is hard to believe Alec holds his religion, or anything else, sincerely.
His supposed conversion may only be a new role he is playing. This duplicity of
character is so intense in Alec, and its consequences for Tess so severe, that he becomes
diabolical. The first part of his surname conjures associations with fiery energies, as in
the stoking of a furnace or the flames of hell. His devilish associations are evident when
he wields a pitchfork while addressing Tess early in the novel, and when he seduces her
as the serpent in Genesis seduced Eve. Additionally, like the famous depiction of Satan in
Milton’s Paradise lost, Alec does not try to hide his bad qualities. In fact, like Satan, he
revels in them. In Chapter XII, he bluntly tells Tess, “I suppose I am a bad fellow— a
damn bad fellow. I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad, in all
probability.” There is frank acceptance in this admission and no shame. Some readers
feel Alec is too wicked to be believable, but, like Tess herself, he represents a larger
moral principle rather than a real individual man. Like Satan, Alec symbolizes the base
forces of life that drive a person away from moral perfection and greatness.

Conclusion

Tess is like Prometheus in that she seems to have been a “toy” of the gods of morality
and religion in Victorian England, and she had to be sacrificed for the good of mankind.
All of Tess’ life is the result of either an accident, fate, or the intervention of the gods. In
fact, some critics feel that the circumstances leading to Tess’s tragic life and death are too
contrived, are unrealistic, and unbelievable. Whether realistic or not, Fate has intervened
in Tess’ world and shaped the course of her life. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a powerful
story of ineluctable destiny, in which human actors are seemingly powerless in the hands
of the forces of heredity and historical fate. Woven into the narrative is a dark thread of
paganism, which reaches its climax in the dramatic scene of Tess’ flight to Stonehenge
and her arrest at daybreak as she lies upon the altar stone of the monument. This pagan
presence in the novel is not merely a superficial element but is deeply interwoven with
the story’s themes of destiny, fate, and the struggles of the forces of nature against the
constraining influences of society. Stonehenge plays a crucial role in drawing these
threads together and dramatizing them at the climactic, and in many ways most tragic,
point of the story. Tess herself is almost an emblematic figure representing the vast forces
that contend for mastery in the human soul: love, fear, heredity, and destiny. The stones
of Stonehenge represent both the unyielding nature of the fate that, for Hardy, determines
human destinies, but also the redemption through sacrifice that offers the potential for
meaning in a universe that can seem to be devoid of anything meaningful.

In the novel, Tess is portrayed as a brave girl, hard-working, sweet -natured and innocent,
yet she is free from the influence of social conventions and moral standards of the day.
Her purity obviously is not welcomed at that time, so Tess is actually a victim of her
society. Hardy created the heroine Tess in Tess of the d’Urbervilles just to criticize the
society in her time. Hardy’s works are known as “novels of character and environment.
“Tess is a tragic person simply because she is not accepted by the society in which
agriculture is menaced by the forces of invading capitalism. So in a way, Tess’ fate is
decided by her society. On the whole, Tess of the d’Urbervilles is full of the sorrow of
aesthetic feeling and existence. She fulfills her perfect but short life through agony.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 Hardy, Thomas. 1994. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. London: Oxford University

WEBSITES

@ Http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/thardy.htm.
@ Http://www.greycat.org/papers/tess.html
@ Http://www.humanistictexts.org/Hardy.htm