At this point in the novel, it is the month of October – the season of autumn. Autumn, in Greek mythology, is the season of the year when Persephone has just left her mother Demeter and is sent back to Hades and the Underworld. It is the limbo between spring and winter, winter being the period on earth when mortals suffered from the wrath of Demeter’s loss and sorrow. Throughout the novel, Hardy often parallels Tess to the Greek figure of Persephone. Persephone was stolen away in a carriage by Hades, just as Tess was taken to The Chase in a dog-cart by Alec. Alec even attempts to seduce Tess by feeding her strawberries just as Hades tempted Persephone with pomegranate seeds. October is also the same month when Tess leaves the Chase, or to put it more symbolically, when Tess has already been reaped of her virginity.
As Hardy puts it, “The declining days of autumn which followed her assent...formed a season through which she lived in spiritual altitudes more nearly approaching ecstasy than any other period in her life,” (208). And where there is an assent there is always a descent. It is important that her engagement has come up around this time because Tess has reached her peak at the farm. Like farmers at this time of the year, Tess is reaping the crops that the spring of her rebirth in Talbothays has brought about. Her assent has come to a stop and soon it will be winter when Tess’ pride will bring her to tell Angel of “her with acquaintance with Alec d’Urberville and its results,” (242). Angel’s rejection after her confession leads to Tess’ spiritual winter/downfall.
On a further note, the fact that Tess is in Talbothays is also very symbolic. In fact the extent to which Hardy describes the dairy farm and its fertile grounds is almost too much in its symbolism: the shovelfuls of loam, black as jet…subtilized to extraordinary richness, out of which came all the fertility of the mead and of the cattle grazing there (209). Tess left her home for the second time on a “bird hatching morning in May” (117) to come to Talbothays in search of a new life. The setting of Talbothays is “so lush and fertile as to become a symbolic world” for Tess’ rebirth. She is so fully immersed in the overflowing fertility of the Valley of the Great Dairies that it is natural for her to find new life again. In the valley, it is safe for her to exist. It is a separate world that is protected from the harsher elements of the natural world. It is no coincidence that Marlott and Talbothays are both located in valleys while The Chase is set within a hill-town.
The line, “There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare,” (208) brings to mind that the love that Tess and Angel feel for each other is unnatural They are not meant to be together. “…folks should never fancy other folks be supposing things when they bain’t,” (213) – Dairyman Crick unconsciously comments on the relationship between Angel and Tess. Tess believes that Angel is full of only good, a belief that is proven wrong in the future. “For Angel, Tess represents the idealistic goal of natural innocence, but the natural world no more affirms this relationship than it did condemn [Tess’] former one [with Alec],”. Tess worships Angel’s saintliness; he is “all that goodness could be” (208). But, as the reader knows, Angel is not as entirely good as he seems to be just as Alec is not as entirely bad as he seems. Angel in turn worships Tess for her innocence. He has put her on a pedestal and goes so far as to liken her to Artemis and Demeter. When he discovers that she is not as ‘pure’ as he thought her to be, she has fallen (in his eyes) from this pedestal. He can no longer love her as he once did because he believes that she is not the person that he fell in love with. Angel is the epitome of the Victorian male. His wife must be pure and without blemish but he may do as he pleases. Angel fails to see the hypocrisy he commits when he rejects Tess for her forced affair with Alec. He has committed the same sin with another woman but does not interpret the incident on the same level as he does Tess’ affair.
Commenting on Tess disillusionment of Angel’s love and his Victorian values, Hardy interjects informing the reader that “Angel Clare was far from all that she thought him in this respect: absurdly far indeed; he was, in truth, more spiritual than animal..” (208). To put it more simply, Angel lacks passion. At least of Alec the reader can determine that he held a passion for Tess, albeit of the negative sort. But like Tess he is disillusioned. However his disillusionment is due to the fact of loving truly due to his Victorian nature. Hardy goes on to comment that, “Though not cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot – less Byronic than Shelleyann…” (208). This reference to the poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley is a reflection of the kind of love that Angel is capable of. George Bernard Shaw comments on Byron’s style in the following excerpt from his comedy and philosophy “Man and Superman”:
…he is dumb: he does not discuss himself…he does not even, like Casanova, tell his own story. In fact he is not a true Don Juan at all; for he is no more an enemy of God than any romantic and adventurous young sower of wild oats…Byron was as little of a philosopher as Peter the Great…the resultant unscrupulous freedom of thought made Byron a bolder poet than Wordsworth just as it made Peter a bolder king than George III; but as it was, after all, only a negative qualification, it did not prevent Peter from being an appalling blackguard and an arrant poltroon, nor did it enable Byron to become a religious force like Shelley.
Shelley’s poetry is known to be more philosophical than Byron’s, a fact which may perhaps be attributed to his belief in free love. But to remain to the point, Angel’s love, like Byron’s poetry, is superficial and does not reach beyond the surface. In fact, Hardy goes on to say that Angel “…could love desperately, but with a love more especially inclined to the imaginative and ethereal...” (208). Angel’s love for Tess is quixotic – an ideal that he has imagined– and it is an ideal that Tess can not live up to. The pedestal that he has put Tess on is sure to fall because its foundation is built on pretense.
Throughout the novel, Hardy uses nature to parallel the events of Tess’ life. So it is fitting that at this moment of “ecstasy” in Tess’ life, nature is present to mirror the disillusionment of Tess and Angel’s love. Tess and Angel are taking a walk on a fine, October day with the “bright sunshine” upon them and their shadows stretching “a quarter mile ahead of them.” Their happiness in this moment blinds them from the inevitable dark and sorrow that their future will bring to them. This moment almost literally foreshadows their imminent fate in the world. The couple go on their walk to cross a bridge “where the reflected sun glared up from the river… with a molten-metallic glow that dazzled their eyes…Upon this river-brink they lingered till the fog began to close round them…” (210). Hardy again shows the reader that Tess and Angel mask themselves from the truth. The fog is closing in around them – their demise is at hand.Tess knows that her “doubt, moodiness, care, [and] shame...[are] waiting like wolves outside the circumscribing light,” (211). Their bubble, so to speak, will soon make a head on collision with reality. As they walk later into the night, Tess’ “soul [seems] to ride” (210) on her laugh, a laugh that is “unlike anything else in nature” (210). Hardy outright states it himself. Their love is unlike anything in nature, it is an anomaly. Being that it is unnatural it is not meant to exist. The imagery that Hardy utilizes convinces the reader of the invention of the couple’s feelings for each other.
Along with nature, Hardy also uses birds as a symbol for Tess. During Tess and Angel’s walk, Hardy remarks that the “buoyancy of her tread [was] like the skim of a bird which has not yet alighted,” (211). Tess, at the moment, is living off an imagination. She has not yet alighted upon the solid ground of reality. She is lost in Angel’s false love for her. Later in the chapter Hardy describes Tess as a “simple girl of life, not yet one-and-twenty, who had been caught in her days of immaturity like a bird in a springe,” (212). In her earlier youth and spring of life, she came to The Chase naive and ignorant of the nature of men. And there at The Chase, she is ensnared by Alec d’Urberville’s charms.
While on the walk, Tess fears for Angel’s reputation thinking that his appearance in public with a mere milkmaid will somehow reach the ears of his friend and thus ruin him in their eyes. Angel, in all his hypocrisy, calms Tess by telling her “a d’Urberville could never hurt the dignity of a Clare!” (210). Angel supposedly despises “…the notion of what’s called a’ old family,” (143), but in reality, Angel plans to play Tess’ name up to his family so that they might be more accepting of her dairymaid status. Here, one can also see comment from Hardy on the noble families of England and the Industrial Revolution. Angel plans to exploit Tess’ ancient bloodline so that his family will accept his marriage. Alec also harvests the benefits of the d’Urberville name and in this manner is much like Angel. “…Alec d’Urberville is equally a creature of industrialism, son of a rich but landless tradesman who usurped a landed name and symbolically expropriated…both the old upper class (true d’Urbervilles) and the old yeomanry (the Durbeyfields) in the shape of the same family.” Alec is symbolic of the Industrial Revolution’s crimes against the peasantry and nature. Alec comes with his father and mother from the city, takes the name of d’Urberville, deceives Tess, and then rapes her. At the beginning of the novel, Tess is considered a child of the soil, but her rape not only takes away her virginity but this title as well. Tess’ rape by Alec can also be seen as the city’s/Industrial Revolution’s exploitation of the countryside.
The reader again witnesses Angel’s hypocrisy when Tess yet once more deems herself too low in status and unworthy of Angel’s admiration. To soothe her he claims that, “Distinction does not consist in the facile use of contemptible set of conventions, but in being numbered among those who are true, and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good report – as you are, my Tess,” (211). Keeping in mind that Angel is a hypocrite, it is ironic that he mentions the “contemptible set of conventions” of the Victorian era because he is chained to them himself. When Tess tells him about Alec, he only sees that she has been with another man and does not see Tess for the pure heart she has and the pure woman that she truly is. Angel thinks he has rebelled against the conventions of society by rejecting his father’s business of religious devotion and running away to become a farmer, but Angel has still managed to stick to the morals of the typical Victorian gentleman.
Hardy was an atheist so it is not surprising that he rejects the Christian church in this novel. Tess sobs when Angel praises Tess for her virtues of truth, honesty, justness, and purity. She has heard these “strings of excellencies” preached to her at church these past years and each time she does her “young heart aches.” Even though Tess truly possesses all these traits, she does not fall under any of them according to the ideals of the Church and Angel. And although Tess still attends Mass, she has already rejected the Church. Upon the death of her child Sorrow, she broke all ties with the Christian religion.
Aside from being an atheist, Hardy was also a fatalist. Upon Angel’s appraisal of Tess’ character, she begs of him, “Why didn’t you stay and love me when I was sixteen, living with my little sisters and brothers, and you danced on the green? Oh, why didn’t you, why didn’t you!” (211). Why did Angel not stay and save her from her the destiny and tragedy that came upon her at The Chase? Even Angel’s name implies a certain guardian like quality. But Angel did not dance with her on May Day because fate did not see it fit for the two to be together. It is fate that killed Prince, forcing her to go to the Chase. It is fate that brought “the wrong man the woman” (88), (i.e. Alec and Tess). That Angel and Tess are together now is in defiance of natural order. In chapter thirty-one, Angel asks Tess to set the wedding day, but the business and the reality of the marriage sends Tess to scatter. Subconsciously, she knows that she and Angel are not meant to be together. When Angel asks Tess, “When shall the day be?” (212) her response is simply, “I like living like this,” (212). Their union will destroy them. On another note, Hardy considers Tess to be too good and pure for this world. Fate will separate her and Angel and fate will take her from this world because she was not meant to live in it. “…many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order” (88) – the comment that Hardy makes after Tess’ rape best sums up the fatalist theme of the novel. Hardy goes on to say that perhaps Tess’ fate is intertwined with that of her ancestors who probably committed the same crime as Alec. Fate, he implies, is simply making the rounds and completing the circle. Tess must suffer for the sins of her forefathers.
After Angel and Tess are disrupted by the fireplace, Tess steals away to the bedroom that she shares with the Marian, Retty, and Izz. Gathered in their white nightgowns, they talk to Tess of her coming marriage to Angel. The girls are not jealous of Tess because it is impossible for them to hate someone who is so good and pure as Tess is. At this time, the three girls perform a ceremony of sorts on Tess:
…by a sort of fascination the three girls one after another, crept out of their beds and came and stood barefooted round Tess. Retty put her hands upon Tess’ shoulders, as if to realize her friend’s corporeality after such a miracle, and the other two laid their arms round her waist, all looking into her face. (214)
The whole act conjures up a pagan-like quality. The white gowns that the girls are dressed in recalls images of the May Day dance when the maidens of Marlott would uphold the local tradition of the Cerealia. In fact, the club is described as a “votive sisterhood of some sort” (23) – similar to a wicca gathering. The girls in their symbolic white gowns, surround Tess with their own purity. Tess worries that she is tainted because of Alec, but as the milkmaids show the reader, she is actually enveloped in her own purity. Even the fact that there are three dairymaids is symbolic. The number three is a biblical reference used throughout the book. Three cocks crow when Angel and Tess on the day of their marriage. It is three weeks after their marriage that Angel and Tess part. The hour of day at three o’clock is often used in the novel to denote an instance when something bad has occurred or will occur (e.g. when Tess and Alec meet again under the “three-o’clock sun”). The sincerity of the three dairymaid friends for Tess’ happiness is, however, unlucky for Tess. Ironically, it is at this moment that she deems it necessary to tell Angel of her past. Marian tells her, “…you ought to be proud. You be proud, I’m sure,” (215). She is now resolved to tell all to Angel because her pride deems it necessary.
Chapter thirty-one of Tess of the D’Urbervilles easily ties itself together with Hardy’s other fifty-eight chapters. He uses a tragic plot structure to make several social comments on religion, the Industrial Revolution, and the Victorian. Hardy maintains a high level of artistic integrity throughout the novel and painstakingly makes a point to have every word of it fit into his grand scheme.
Bibliography
Hall, Donald. Afterword. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. By Thomas Hardy.
N.p.: Unversity of Michigan, n.d. 417-427.
Shaw, Bernard. Man and Superman. Cambridge, Mass.: The University Press, 1903; Bartleby.com, 1999. .
Tess of the D'Urbervilles. 37th ed. New York : Penguin Group, 1980.
Tess of the D'urbervilles/ HARDY. Masterplots. N.p.: n.p., n.d.
Thomas Hardy." Critical Survey of Long Fiction. N.p.: n.p., n.d.
Bishnupriya Ghosh, ”Critical Evaluation” Tess of the D’Urbervilles/HARDY, Masterplots
Charles E. May, “Thomas Hardy,” Critical Survey of Long Fiction
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, August 1999, November 10, 2003, http://www.bartleby.com/157/100.html
Donald Hall, Afterword on Tess of the D’urbervilles, Tess of the D’urbervilles, Peguin 1980 ed.