Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)

Abstract

Tess of the d’Urbervilles has continued to be the subject of much critical controversy and speculation in spite of the ‘commandingly simple outline of the book’.¹ Different elements of the novel have been wrenched apart to do duty for vastly differing moral, philosophical, and aesthetic assumptions to which the novel as a whole is not susceptible. The result has been a bewildering variety of Tess, each version trying to encapsulate the narrative invention into a quasirational theory deduced from abstracted features of the story. The novel has been read as an indictment of Christianity, as simple social polemics—a frontal attack on the Victorian establishment—or, more recently, it has been seen as having for its telos the inner drama of individual consciousness. The novel is very obviously an exposé of religious and social obscurantism as it is also, equally vividly, a demonstration of the loneliness and uniqueness of each individual soul in a harsh and unresponding world, but to identify the entire perceived world we have here with either of these critical formulas seems somehow to obscure and deny that world.