TESS'S PURITY

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. For example, Hardy is showing that the traditional Christian view equating virtue and purity with virginity is wrong. Or Hardy is distinguishing between the act and the intention, a distinction Angel Clare finally makes in the novel. 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.

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."