tess as a pure woman

In Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess, the heroine, has hardships and injustices endlessly heaped upon her, however, she never wallows in self-pity or abandons hope. Pragmatic and selfless, honest and kind, she is clearly shown to the reader to be "a pure woman", as the subtitle of the novel states. Society, human selfishness, and the "President of the Immortals" are all guilty of dragging her inexorably towards her tragic grave, while she is innocent - or nearly so - and fights against her fate to the end.

Ironically, it is because Tess is so pure that she is banished from society, just as Jesus Christ becomes a martyr for truth. Again and again she has the opportunity to improve her own material lot but she is not prepared to compromise her principles. In Chapter XII, on learning of her affair with rich Alec, Tess's mother exclaims, "Any woman but you would have got him to marry thee". Tess, however, will not stoop to a "convulsive snatching at social salvation". Similarly, Tess agonizes over whether to reveal her "Bygone Trouble" to Angel, and is twice warned: “Many a woman...have had a Trouble in their time; and why should you trumpet yours when others don't trumpet theirs?” However, Tess does not follow the advice of her worldly-wise mother. A deeply moral person, she cannot bring herself to conceal the truth, when Angel believes her to be spotless.

Though Tess is not entirely without sin and does make mistakes in her life, in spirit her intentions are invariably good. Twice she is seduced by Alec and lives with him for a period of time, and there is little doubt that the second time at least, as a married woman, she is doing the wrong thing. However, both times she is not thinking of her personal gains or pleasure but of her family, towards whom she still feels a debt, and Alec ruthlessly takes advantage of this weakness to seduce her. After her father’s death, the family is evicted and becomes penniless. Tess, given a second chance, sacrifices her own peace of mind for the well being of her relatives: “My little sisters and brothers and my mother's needs - they were the things you moved me by...and you said my husband would never come back - never!”

Until the moment of her final crime, Tess is prepared to suffer for others, to the extent of abandoning all hope of personal happiness with Angel; yet her most altruistic actions are perversely seen by society as evidence of her immorality. Because of her sacrificial attitude, Tess becomes a natural scapegoat, and those around her find it easy to shake off their own responsibilities. In the very beginning of the novel she is propelled from her sheltered existence into the clutches of Alec, because she wrongly feels entirely responsible for the death of the family's horse and thinks it her duty to support the family after this catastrophe. Similarly, it is out of respect for Angel's preposterous wishes that she refrains from writing to him in Brazil to tell him how she misses him, until it is too late. Furthermore, it is because she can sense an air of reproach in her family when she returns home for the second time that she casts herself out and endures physical hardship and mental pain at Flintcomb-Ash. Her sensitivity to others' emotions undoubtedly plays a central role in the ruination of her life, and so in absolute terms Tess is at least partly responsible for her fate.

There is a slight suggestion in Hardy's writing that Tess's stoicism is derived from pride and self-righteousness. When Angel hypocritically rejects her on account of her past, "if Tess had been artful, had she made a scene, fainted, wept hysterically...he would probably not have withstood her", the narrator comments, “Pride, too, entered into her submission - which perhaps was a symptom of that reckless acquiescence in chance too apparent in the whole d'Urberville family.” However, this is the only reference in the novel to any self-respect feelings in Tess, and until the bitter end she is depicted as unassuming, pragmatic, and determined not to give in to fate like her family or the other Talbothays girls. It is because she worships Angel that she is proud not to contradict him, in the same way martyrs are proud to be tortured for their God.

Throughout the novel, then, Tess is shown to be pure in intention and selfless in all acts, until she surprisingly, spitefully murders Alec. This is the single action that proves to be her ultimate downfall, a totally unnecessary crime of passion. Perhaps any other person in the same situation would have cracked much earlier, perhaps any other person would not have attempted to abide by the rules of personal morality for so long; nonetheless, Tess has no right to take Alec's life.

In terms of the society in which she lives, Tess is to some extent guilty of bringing about her own fate, and is somewhat her own hangman. However, it is this same society that has so unjustly marked her out as unclean, that has so forcefully put the noose around her neck. This society blindly ignores Christian principles, judging her on deeds and not on intentions, and unwilling to forgive her past. “This impure society”, argues Hardy, “punishes the honest and the conscientious”. There is another factor too in Tess's downfall, namely, a fate that has sought in every step of Tess's life to trip her up, a "President of the Immortals" that plays with Tess in the way a cat plays with a helpless mouse. Tess is alone fighting against these huge forces, the social and the natural, heroically defending virtue in the face of rampant vice. It is little wonder she finally cracks. Indeed, it may well be because she finally cracks, because she is human, that the reader admires her and sympathizes with her to such an extent.

From the above analysis, we can get a general knowledge about Tess. In Hardy’s eyes, though Tess lost her virginity, she was still a pure woman, and she was the representative of all pure women. On the other hand, though she murdered Alec, she was not a murderess but a fighter against fate. As a dutiful daughter and passive victim, she is a fighter against fate and other tragic issues. She is a heroic martyr.

A PURE WOMAN

Hardy added the subtitle, A Pure Woman, at the last moment. It has created problems for readers and critics ever since the novel's appearance. The title offends many on moral grounds, for whom Tess is a "ruined," immoral woman. Others are puzzled intellectually; what is Hardy's basis for calling her pure? Hardy defended the subtitle in an 1892 interview with Raymond Blathwayt:

 ... I still maintain that her innate purity remained intact to the very last; though I frankly own that a certain outward purity left her on her last fall. I regarded her then as being in the hands of circumstances, not morally responsible, a mere corpse drifting with the current to her end.

 The subtitle has been defended in various ways. One of the most common defenses is the suggestion that Hardy is showing that the traditional Christian view equating virtue and purity with virginity is wrong. Another common explanation of the subtitle is that Hardy distinguishes between the act and the intention,. This is a distinction Angel Clare finally makes in the novel. Or is it possible that Tess is pure in her character as Apostolic Charity, that her soul remains unstained regardless of what happens to her body? Irving Howe offers a more subtle explanation:

in her incomparable vibrancy and lovingness, she comes to represent a spiritualized transcendence of chastity. She dies three times, to live again:--first with Alec D'Urberville, then with Angel Clare, and lastly with Alec again. Absolute victim of her wretched circumstances, she is ultimately beyond their stain. She embodies a feeling for the inviolability of the person, as it brings the absolute of charity nearer to the warming Christian virtue of charity. Through a dialectic of negation, Tess reaches purity of spirit even as she fails to satisfy the standards of the world.

 Howe goes on to suggest that our compassion for Tess weakens our judgement, so that finally "we do not care to judge Tess at all." This interpretation dismisses the whole question of her purity. For F.B. Pinton, her purity derives from her victimization:

... she is the victim of chance--of heredity, physical and temperamental; of the position she was born into, and all the other factors that impinge on her life. She could not be held responsible for them; she was, in Hardy's words, "a pure woman."

ANGEL

 For Angel, Tess's purity, which he equates with virginity, is the crucial issue. After her confession, Tess looks so "absolutely pure" that a stupefied Angel urges her to lie, to tell him her confession is not true (page 238). He is able, at this point, to see only the external, not her soul. Ironically, the passage about the virtuous woman which his father reads from Proverbs makes no reference to virginity; instead, it identifies qualities and behavior which would fit Tess. To make this point, Hardy omits some of the text, though the Reverend Clare would certainly have read the passage in its entirety. Hardy comments on Angel's judgment of Tess's purity:

No prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of his was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency.... In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire. (page 267)

 A well-traveled, open-minded stranger persuades Angel that he judged Tess too harshly and that his concept of purity was too rigid. How convincing is Angel's change, which is summarized in a page or so? Are other influences than the stranger working to change Angel? After his rejection of Tess on their honeymoon, he wonders briefly whether he has judged and treated her unfairly. Would his disappointment in Brazil and the suffering he experienced and observed there throw a softer light on Tess's confession? Would their long separation give his love for her the opportunity to assert itself? And so he returns to England and to Tess.

ALEC

 Ironically it is the fleshly sensualist Alec, not the intellectual, spiritual Angel, who never doubts Tess's purity, "I never despised you; if I had I should not love you now! Why I did not despise you was on account of your being unsmirched in spite of all; you withdrew yourself from me so quickly and resolutely when you saw the situation; you did not remain at my pleasure..." (pages 326-7). Does Alec's appreciation of her virtue implicitly criticize Angel's view of her?