Hardy’s “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”: How many have you witnessed?

Tess of The D’Urbervilles is a novel written by Thomas Hardy in the year 1892 in a single volume. Initially, in the year 1891, it was published in the newspaper and later in the form of three volumes. This narrative is about a girl named Tess Durbeyfield, who lives on the countryside with her family drowned in pits of squalor. Her father is a habitual drunkard and her mother is shown taking care of her four minor siblings. The novel kicks start from age when she was sixteen years old to when she was twenty-one years old, approximately. Her father finds out that they belong to a very wealthy family lineage, not Durbeyfield but D’Urberville. She is asked by her family to go visit Mrs. D’Urbervilles, where she meets her wealthy, ill-witted son Alec D’Urbervilles who has nothing for Tess but bad intentions to welcome her. He keeps making inappropriate sexual advances towards poor Tess to which she pays no heed at first, but one night she falls prey to his lascivious pursuits. He rapes her, uses her as his mistress for a couple of months. She gets pregnant and gives birth to her son baptized with the name “Sorrow”. That little baby soon dies leaving with nothing else but broken hopes and a famished family to feed.

She leaves home one more time and goes to another town on the countryside where she works as a milkmaid. There she meets and immediately gets smitten by a young lad named Angel who also falls for Tess’ irreplaceable beauty, intelligence and charm and they end up getting married to one another. However, their marriage soon ends up in shambles. Although not officially, but when they both confessed each other’s flamboyant love-life history with one another, the man couldn’t take it. Tess, however, easily forgave him for having a relationship with a woman in London who was older than him, Angel, wanted a wife who was “pure” and “chaste” in every right. She gets abandoned by him and due to some insufferable circumstances, Tess gets married to Alec D’Urbervilles who was also making her family’s financial needs be met. Meanwhile, Angel returns after realizing his mistake but is left in utter bemusement when he finds out about Tess getting hitched to someone else. Tess, still having that spark of love alive in her for Angel, kills her husband Alec and flees off to another town with him. However, this endeavour doesn’t last for too long, as she gets caught by the police and gets hanged for her punishable crime.

Analyzing the summary of the novel above, we get to see that there is no poetic justice done towards the female protagonist, Tess. This is an apt representation of the follies of a supremely patriarchal construct of the Victorian society, exhibited with unmatchable perfection by Thomas Hardy. Tess, although a girl of extraordinary qualities like steadfastness, passion and a never-ending drive to keep going, was done wrong by the society. This leads us to the social phenomenon called Social Darwinism which refers to “a sociological theory that sociocultural advance is the product of intergroup conflict and competition and the socially elite classes (such as those possessing wealth and power) possess biological superiority in the struggle for existence”, according to Merriam Webster English Dictionary. In attempts to explain this theory, we can introduce a concept coined by Darwin, a sociologist, “survival of the fittest”. In light of social Darwinism, this phrase means that the incongruent shape of the society we reside in depends on the might and privilege associated with the high social class, the class that has a lot of money. Money brings one peace of mind, comfort, a lot less grind and struggle to make ends meet and get stuff done. Money acts as an ample impetus to earn one respect and happiness in a materialistic world like ours. Impoverished people work more and earn less. They earn enough to make ends meet and therefore do not even have enough to save for the future. Hence, every day for them is a new struggle to feed themselves with morsels of food, ensuring shelter above their heads and being clothed to save their honour.

Similarly, what we saw in the novel, is that Tess, although works really hard, hardly has enough to ensure a peaceful future for herself and her family. She constantly got exploited by her family and the outside world because of her need for providing for her family. She got sexually abused, went on emotionally toilsome journeys with respect to getting pregnant with an illegitimate child, giving birth to it and dealing with his death, getting abandoned by her husband and getting sexually exploited by men who kept her on a job. Her need to make ends meet kept her going, no matter how tough the odds went. About Hardy, Widdowson says, that “Hardy was: a widely read intellectual closely familiar with the literary debates of the second half of the nineteenth century. For the purposes of the present essay, we may deduce one – albeit crucial – feature of Hardy’s involvement in these: one which casts him as ineluctably “transitional” between “Victorian” and “Modern” and which suggests the affinity between his work and late-twentieth-century critical approaches. If we read between the lines of the three fiction essays – verified by jottings in his notebooks and by memoranda quoted in The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy – it is apparent that Hardy is actually participating in the pan-European debate about Realism, and that he was opposed to a “photographic” naturalism, favoring instead a kind of “analytic” writing which “makes strange” common-sense reality and brings into view other realities obscured precisely by the naturalized version (74).”

In today’s context, the teachings and representations of Tess and men, in general, tends to be apt in every way possible. We find needy women like Tess leave their homes and families behind in order to find a respectable means of earning money, however, are being wronged by the vultures of the society. We see men at workplaces unabashedly harassing women, assaulting them and having sexual relations with them only at the expense of them not uttering a word, either because of public humiliation or the fear of them losing their job. Hirers like Alec are easily found at every workplace nowadays. Making sexual advances towards a woman and not having any sense of accountability whatsoever, is a prevalent norm. Women, like Tess, are shushed because of their needs, because of their sole bread-earning capabilities and responsibilities. They keep going with the play as long as they have the “privilege” to keep a job.

Similarly, sexist and hypocritical men like Angel are seen in every Pakistani household. No matter how murky their past is, they would always want for themselves a wife who’s a flag-bearer of “purity and virtue” and a mirror image of “Virgin Mary”. They turn a blind-eye to how ever many women they have slept with, but for a wife, they expect their woman to be someone who has never touched a man before. How ironic? Women like Tess, are unacceptable to their husbands like Angel, but carry this innate desire of marrying and boring children with a woman who has had no history. Like Angel, men humiliate their wives by either divorcing them, abandoning them, marrying again or running away from them.

Tess became the woman she was in the face of economic oppression. What she had in life and what she wanted in life was highly dependent on her lowly economic stature. How she was treated by the men in her life was representative of her ill financial background. She was used and abused at the expense of these people because they were aware of her neediness, her not having stealthy and staggering support behind her back and of course, the fact that she was young and naïve. This world that we reside in is an exceedingly unjust and unequal place. People who are blessed with the social good like a dependable income or hereditary inheritance, would always be and have always been at a greater advantage than someone who hasn’t. If god forbid, you happen to be a woman with a need for money, you are at an added disadvantage because this world only looks at women with reductionist lenses on. Misogyny is a prevalent problem, deeply ingrained in the minds of our men and patriarchal women, alike. Women are subjected to casual sexism and unequal rights over money matters and having a say over their bodies, as in this case, the roots of patriarchy would forever seep deep within the grounds of comfort and indifference. A thousand Tesses have been used and abused by the world, a million more will still be, in the future. However, we as a community, have an opportunity to better ourselves and correct our malpractices in terms of inequality, whether it’s in terms of gender discrimination or economic discrimination. Also, I’ll like to add that we should all start holding men accountable for their actions to let them know that they do not belong to a place of entitlement, like they are presently if we do not want any more Tesses to be exploited so inhumanely.

Read about Waiting for Godot here.