'In Tess of the D'Urbervilles Tess's passive temperament and fatalistic view of life make her, to a large extent the author of her own misfortunes.'How far do you agree with this statement about Tess's character and role in the novel?

Authors Avatar

‘In Tess of the D’Urbervilles Tess’s passive temperament and fatalistic view of life make her, to a large extent the author of her own misfortunes.’

How far do you agree with this statement about Tess’s character and role in the novel?

This question about Tess has been a topic for literary criticism for decades. Critics views on Tess vary from:

“She rises through seduction to adultery, murder and the gallows.”

To

“As we know Tess, the milkmaid heroine, has fallen from virtue through no fault of her own.”

In my opinion of Tess, the second view is a more true and relevant quotation to describe Tess.

   Tess writes only a small part along with the many authors that write her misfortune. In fact I believe that you can take any of the main characters from Tess and you would find that they were either partly or largely to blame for her misfortunes whether their intentions where good or bad. For example; Jack Durbeyfield, Tess’s father; he is a proud, sometimes irresponsible and poverty stricken man. It is Jack who doesn’t take Parson Tringham’s advice to “do nothing” and so instead of bringing his family to fortune, which are his intentions, he becomes proud and brings his own family to misfortune.

“In fact from that very instant Durbeyfield begins ‘doing’ to such an extent that in the course of five years he completely undoes, not only himself and his family, but a number of other people as well, and his own daughter Tess is the principal victim.”

Jack is partly to blame for Tess’s misfortune of accidentally killing prince. If Tess had a responsible father he would have been able to take the beehives to Casterbridge and Tess wouldn’t have been obliged to. Joan is also partly to blame for Tess’s first misfortune. When Joan goes to get Jack from Rolliver’s she has no intention of bringing him home early so he would be able to take the beehives:

“To discover him at Rolliver’s, to sit there for an hour or two by his side an dismiss all thought and care of her children during the interval, made her happy.”

  However, Tess does have pride that stops her from asking ‘some young feller’ (as suggested by her mother) to take the bee hives to Casterbridge for her family. It could be said that Tess has inherited her sense of pride from her father:

Join now!

“…See the vanity of her father’s pride;”*

But this doesn’t mean that in this case her sense of pride is misplaced. On this journey we experience Tess’s fatalistic view of our world being a ‘blighted star’.  This view doesn’t really change what happens to Tess, it is just a brute fact; Tess’s circumstances are pretty bad and they are about to get much worse. It doesn’t really make any difference to Tess’s future whether Tess knows that her circumstances are bad or not. It only helps us to understand her character.

  It is Joan’s ‘project to send Tess and ...

This is a preview of the whole essay