Tess of the D

1
Tess of the DUrbervilles

• Phase the Fourth The Consequence
• (Chaps 25 - 34)

2
Overview

• Develops the complex relationships between
  family, class, history, and gender
• Culminates in the double confession on the
  wedding night
• Highlights Victorian double standards regarding
  sexual morality that reproduce systems of
  patriarchal oppression

3
Class and family

• Angels rejection of Tess and her passive
  acceptance of his judgement rooted in their
  mutual idealization that is largely conditioned
  by class differences.
• Culmination of earlier hints in the text of the
  tensions between Angels professed
  liberal-mindedness and his deep-seated
  conventionality
• Use of irony to highlight Angels hypocrisy and
  subconscious class prejudices
• Angel, who claims to hate old families, seizes on
  Tesss dUrberville bloodline as her social
  salvation, but later partly bases his rejection
  of Tess on this same bloodline

4
Class and family

• p.210 the grand card (ie her bloodline) ?
  recalls Mrs Durbeyfields conversation with her
  husband about Tesss trump card
• Different assets that can be played in the
  matrimonial game
• p.189 Mistress Teresa dUrberville
• p.232 Different societies, different manners.
  You are an unapprehending peasant woman Decrepit
  families postulate decrepit wills, decrepit
  conduct.

5
Class and family

• Dissonance between Angels professed and actual
  beliefs, his frustrated class aspirations ?
  highlighted through the symbolic use of clothing
• Class anxieties revealed in his response to the
  gift of godmothers jewellery
• p.220 He remembered His wife was a
  dUrberville whom could they become better than
  her?
• Angels hypothetical remaking of Tess as a woman
  of fashion decked out in evening wear instead of
  her peasant attire (p.220-1)
• Recalls Angels gift of a whole stock of
  clothing, from bonnet to shoes (p.206) for the
  wedding

6
Class and family

• Angels visit to his family in Emminster
• Setting contrast between the Clares vicarage
  at Emminster and the Durbeyfields cottage in
  Marlott
• Highlights the class and cultural differences
  between the two families
• The Clares middle class Evangelical Christians,
  serving the poor (ironically, those in a similar
  financial position as the Durbeyfields)

7
Class and family

• Use of free indirect discourse
• shows Angels awareness of the way he is
  transgressing class boundaries in his
  relationship with Tess and his pride in this
  apparent sign of his freedom from convention
• p.118 The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased to
  exist.
• p.154 Whose was this mighty personality? A
  milkmaids.
• p.156 He loved her ought he to marry her?
  Dared he to marry her? What would his mother and
  his brothers say? What would he himself say a
  couple of years after the event?

8
Class and family

• Shifting narrative perspectives juxtaposed
  against each other to show the changes in Angels
  worldview and personality
• p.158 On their part they saw a great difference
  in him, a growing divergence from the Angel Clare
  of former times He was getting to behave like a
  farmer.
• VS
• p.168 It was with a sense of luxury that he
  recognized his power of viewing life here from
  its inner side and much as he loved his parents,
  he could not help being aware that to come to
  Talbothays, after an experience of home-life,
  affected him like throwing off splints and
  bandages

9
Class and family

• Angels conscious construction of an idealized
  image of Tess for his parents (and his own)
  consumption ? assumes the right to remake her in
  his own image
• p.164 while as to her reading, I can take
  that in hand. Shell be apt pupil enough Shes
  brim full of poetry And she is an unimpeachable
  Christian
• p.189 after I have made you the well-read
  woman that I mean to make you

10
Class and family

• Class assumptions reinforced by patriarchal power
• Tess as a willing blank upon which Angel
  imposes his aspirations ? her assimilation of
  his vocabulary, his accent, and fragments of his
  knowledge (p.175)
• Her assumption of his intellectual superiority
  renders her incapable of resistance against his
  damning judgement of her after her confession

11
Class and family

• Marriage as a means of social advancement for
  women
• Minor characters function as a chorus (similar
  to Greek tragedy) providing different
  perspectives on the issue
• The Talbothays milkmaids ? recognize their
  commonality of experience with Tess and the
  unlikelihood of marriage to a man of Angels
  class
• Tesss continued identification with her fellow
  dairymaids eventually drives her to making her
  confession.

12
Class and family

• The Clare and Durbeyfield mothers reinforce
  class structures and attitudes towards sexual
  morality
• Both attempt to socialize their children into
  accepting conventional gender norms and
  ironically reproduce the norms that hold women in
  subjugation
• p.264 Angel is she a young woman whose
  history will bear investigation?... there are few
  purer things in nature than an unsullied country
  maid.
• Mrs Durbeyfield ? p.191 Many a woman some of
  the Highest in the Land have had a Trouble in
  their time and why should you trumpet yours when
  others dont Trumpet theirs?

13
Class and family

• Contrast between Tess and Mercy Chant ? shows the
  extent to which marriage to Tess would go against
  the Clare familys expectations
• Symbolic name indicates a Puritanical nature, an
  inhibition at odds with Tesss natural sensuality

14
Tess duality, history and destiny

• Repeated references to Tesss DUrberville
  heritage
• Point to the weight of history that Tess cannot
  escape and that will determine her future both
  her personal sexual history, and her family
  history
• The wedding night - Symbolic setting
• At Wellbridge, a farm-house which was once the
  manorial seat of the dUrberville family (cf.
  ch1, p.9)
• Highlights the decay of the DUrberville family
  fortunes, and the duality in Tesss character

15
Tess duality, history and destiny

• Use of foreshadowing
• Portraits of the DUrberville women literally
  hanging over Tess and Angel ? symbolic of a
  specifically female history that is oppressive
  and ominous (p.216)
• Disturbs the notion of Tesss purity by drawing
  attention to those aspects of Tesss character
  that parallel those of her ancestors
• Cant be removed (p.217) ? inescapability of
  history
• Ominous references to the legend of the
  dUrberville coach

16
Tess duality, history and destiny

• Animal imagery ? surfaces a wildness / potential
  savagery in Tess
• Juxtaposed against the narratives original
  insistence on Tesss essential innocence and
  goodness
• Complicates the notion of Tess as a pure woman
• Reversal of the woman-as-prey / victim motif
• p.169 he saw the red interior of her mouth as
  if it had been a snakes
• p.187 the suspended attitude of a friendly
  leopard at pause
• p.173 All the girls drew onward. the bevy
  advancing with the bold grace of wild animals
  the reckless unchastened motion of women
  accustomed to limitless space in which they
  abandoned themselves to the air as a swimmer to
  the wave (note pun on unchastened)

17
Tess duality, history and destiny

• Tesss contradictory impulses towards
  self-abnegation and self-fulfillment are rooted
  in the conflict between the natural and the
  socially-conditioned
• Natural imagery ? reminders of the equally strong
  opposing forces of social convention and natural
  impulse that Tess is caught in between, and that
  eventually destroy her
• p.195 keeping back the gloomy specters that
  would persist in their attempts to touch her
  doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew
  that they were waiting like wolves just outside
  the circumscribing light

18
Tess duality, history and destiny

• Water imagery ? suggests the inexorable nature of
  desire
• p.180 Men had been cutting the water-weeds
  higher up the river, and masses of them were
  floating past her moving islands of green
  crowfoot
• p. 194 Her feelings almost filled her ears like
  a babble of waves, and surged up to her eyes.
• p.201 The water was now high in the streams,
  squirting through the weirs, and tinkling under
  culverts the smallest gulleys were all full
• p.211 the mastering tide of her devotion to him

19
Tess duality, history and destiny

• The difficulty of understanding Tesss
  contradictory behaviour and personality is
  stressed using metaphors of reading and
  interpretation
• p.175 Clare conned the characters of her face
  as if they had been hieroglyphics.
• p.217 Looking at her silently for a long time
  She is a dear dear Tess, he thought to himself,
  as one deciding on the true construction of a
  difficult passage.
• Use of shifting narrative perspectives ?
  juxtaposes Tesss subjective experience with
  Angels attempts to comprehend her

20
Sexual morality

• Angels narrative framed by attestations of his
  virtue, morality and honesty (buttressed by
  quotations from both Christian and pagan St
  Paul and Horace)
• Deceptive apparent doubling that highlights the
  hypocrisy of the Victorian double-standard
  (p.224 He seemed to be her double.)
• A symbolic silencing of the womans voice ?
  narrative silence that obliterates Tesss story
  while allowing Angels to be told in full

21
Sexual morality

• p.74 An immeasurable chasm was to divide our
  heroines personality thereafter from that
  previous self of hers
• p.214 she you love is not my real self, but
  one in my image the one I might have been!
• p.228 You were one person, now you are
  another. Echoes other points in the text when
  Tesss identity is tied to her chastity (or lack
  thereof)