Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. -Mark Twain
The full text free: legal download.
Further thematic reflections on the novel.
Sparknotes summary and analysis.
Caution: spoilers.
     Many students of great literature will come across Tom Hardy's magnum opus of the Victorian woman and have a hard time seeing beyond the protagonist's suffering, and, more troubling still, her apparently stubborn refusal to reject the system that belittles and hurts her, poor and female as she is. However, there is more to Tess than meets the eye. She is not so blind or foolish as it would seem. Moreover, Hardy writes her brutal story not to celebrate her misery but to show its philosophical moorings and effectively to unharness it. This he does with much success.
     First, we note that Tess does not believe that she is treated fairly - rather she is quite aware that her station in life is ugly. Her conversation with her younger brother, Abraham, reveals her awareness of the injustice of social inequality. It could be written off as a Victorian sensitivity toward sin, but the universal tone of the subject at hand (other worlds) suggests otherwise.
     "Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"
     "Yes."
     "All like ours?"
     "I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted."
     "Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?"
     "A blighted one." (p.26)

     This being at the beginning of the narrative, I see Tess as being aware of class inequality but entirely ignorant of gender inequality. She maintains a staunchly Victorian attitude toward her sex, namely, that God intends her to be chaste, demure, delicate, subservient to men, and religiously devout. Throughout the entire story she never shirks this God-given identity, and this is her mantle of honor.
     The reader cannot question her integrity - and this is precisely what makes the story so compelling. Unlike The Jungle, which I read in December, the awful and horrific series of events the protagonist endures does not result in moral corruption here. While her naïveté disappears, the strength of her will never falters.
     This vignette concludes a couple pages later, when Tess falls asleep and Prince, the horse pulling her and her brother's wagon, is killed when he runs into a mail-carriage.
     " 'Tis all my doing - all mine!" the girl cried, gazing at the spectacle. "No excuse for me - none. What will mother and Father live one now? Aby, Aby!" She shook the child, who had slept soundly through the whole disaster. "We can't go on with our load - Prince is killed!"
     When Abraham realized all, the furrows of fifty years were extemporized on his young face.
     "Why, I danced and laughed only yesterday!" she went on to herself. "To think that I was such a fool!"
     " 'Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn't it, Tess?" murmured Abraham through his tears.

     The self-reproach that Tess endures for the consequences of slight errors (due to her naivete - this is her only vice) is harsh, to say the least. And this is entirely consistent with the Victorian model of the ideal woman.
     It's discouraging to read about such a noble and selfless character so little rewarded for her virtues. Tess is certainly a Christ-like figure. Look at her end. She is hung for murdering an evil man, the pretty boy who wooed her and stole her virginity. Hardy makes several religious allusions (e.g. the Two Apostles painting) to tie her death to the crucifixion and suggests her death was inevitable, the expression of the blind justice created by a society that successfully exploits the working class every day.
     "Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals... had ended his sport with Tess... The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless; the flag continued to wave silently. As soon as they had strength, they arose, joined hands again, and went on.
     Morally, Tess is as pure and spotless as Christ himself. However, she is woman - without power and the scourge of her society, guilty of all human sin solely because of her sex - and she is not divine - she has no great omniscience or omnipotence to tide her over until God can justify her. She can work no miracles to prove her virtue, and when walking through the wooded regions of southern England, she believes - falsely - that she is out of sync with God himself:
     A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood and could not comprehend as any other.
     But this encompassment of her own characterization.... was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy - a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the while, she was making a distinction where there was no difference... She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly. (p. 85)

     The same language surfaces when Tess's bastard child dies and she asks the vicar for a Christian burial. Social convention makes such a request impossible. The vicar, sympathetic to Tess's dignity and tenderness, brings about an internal battle "between the man and the ecclesiastic," or rather, between his instinctive human impulse and the mechanical social function called propriety.
     He refuses. Tess begs, reasons, threatens, abases herself, and ultimately the vicar tells her that a Christian burial is "just the same" as being thrown into the earth. Convention be damned! And the narrator vindicates the truth in his word, not his mind:
     In spite of the untoward surroundings... Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when she could enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them alive. What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of mere observation noted the words "Keelwell's Marmalade"? The eye of maternal affection did not see them in its vision of higher things.
     Tess's persistent self-doubt continues to plague her. Leaving home in an attempt to make a new life for herself and lift the burden of her presence - the consumption of three squares a day, and the loss of her virginity, the Victorian working woman's only prized possession - she sings some ballads to herself, some psalms, but stops suddenly "and murmured, 'But perhaps I don't quite know the Lord as yet.' " (p. 104)
     It is this self-doubt that cripples her one chance at self-preservation at the key moment when, after telling her husband, Clare, of her past inglories, he utterly rejects her.
     There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of sympathy through which a woman of the world might have conquered him. But Tess did not think of this; she took everything as her deserts and hardly opened her mouth... She might just now have been Apostolic Charity herself returned to a self-seeking modern world. (p. 242-43)
     Clare, too, is no less bound to convention than his wife:
     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. (p. 267)
     In other words, morality is not a question of perfection but of intention. Because Tess is incessantly victimized as a woman, her intentions far exceed her degree of perfection; contrast this with an upper-class male of the same era, who only fails to achieve perfection as a result of his own moral determinations.
     Especially revolting is how Alec d'Urberville (the man who deflowered her, thus ruining her life) repeatedly castigates Tess for his own moral imperfections - a practice that still continues in many socially conservative communities today:
     He stepped up to the pillar. "This was once a Holy Cross. Relics are not in my creed, but I fear you at moments - far more than you need fear me at present; and to lessen my fear, put your hand upon that stone hand and swear that you will never tempt me - by your charms or ways..."
     Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity, placed her hand upon the stone, and swore. (p. 315)

     And Tess, named the temptress of the garden and the witch of Babylon, continues steadfastly to defend her husband of his innocence.
     Tess is repeatedly accused by d'Urberville to have rejected or recanted the true faith. Angel Clare, her husband, having studied theology and having readied himself to serve as clergy, ultimately chose a path closer to nature, with less deceit and hypocrisy on the way. While he and Tess were close, he imparted to her his more liberal understanding of matters theological. Later she hears d'Urberville expostulating a fundamentalist vision of salvation - he had turned preacher during their years apart - and she has a brief occasion to pass on what her husband told her, which to her instincts rang true, since (I suggest) it gave priority to morality over dogma.
     D'Urberville ceases to be a preacher as quickly as he became one, telling Tess her words instantly eroded his religious conviction. As soon as he saw her, he says, he instantly realized his conversion had been a lie, because he knew he would trade it all to possess her again. He admits to the thinness of traditional Christianity but cannot see how morality can exist without it:
     [Tess] tried to argue and tell [d'Urberville] that he had mixed in his dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct. But owing to Angel Clare's reticence, to her absolute want of training, and to her being a vessel of emotions rather than reasons, she could not get on. (pp.334-35)
     Is Hardy offering a critique of the Victorian philosophy of the sexes, or a statement about the nature of religion generally? I'm inclined to find both in this classic work.
     On the one hand, we see a clear indictment of the nineteenth-century model of womanhood. It takes a woman comfortable in the diverse avenues of social manipulation - thus betraying the very ideal she pretends to achieve - to play the desired role convincingly. For the high-minded, working-class woman, however, such niceties are impossible, for if you truly buy in to the model, you cannot maneuver your way out of the social sins you will surely commit. The ideal is fundamentally flawed in its conception and demands a hypocrisy to operate - and this very inconsistency is what destroys its spirit.
     On the other hand, Tess's religion is true and her intentions pure. Through her character Hardy espouses a religion of morals rather than of propositions. Clare rejects the religion of his father - the very same religion that Alec embraces, but to no avail for his spirit - suggesting that traditional Christianity is vanity, perhaps even destructive (but I am not sure if Hardy takes it this far).
     All three main characters - Tess, Clare and Alec - come into contact with natural religion - primarily moral and wonderfully simple in nature. Tess embraces it from the start, and at most the thicket shrouding the truth in darkness is hacked away. Clare experiences a true battle between the two - his mind embraces natural religion, but when confronted with social law returns to the ungodly propriety taught falsely as religion. In the end he realizes the error of his ways and turns around - too late, alas, to save his wife. The damage had been done and nothing could undo it.
     Last, Alec was Tess's opposite, in that he was fundamentally irreligious or immoral. For a while religion hid his true nature, but never had the power to change it. He pondered both propositional religion and moral religion, could never understand the latter, and in the end rejected the former as being equally incomprehensible.
     Ultimately all three characters are true to their inner identity, and no professing or pondering will change it. What a different story it would have been if Tess had given up her religion (and if anyone had just cause to do so, it was her), or if Alec had converted his heart to the religion of grace, or if Alec had never grasped Tess's true quality and rejected her finally.
     Much like Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamozov, Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles can be read as a guide to the three kinds of people in the world: those who embrace moral (true) religion, those who embrace propositional (false) religion, and those who live in confusion and contradiction by attempting to use the rules of the latter to grasp the former. It is only when you finally let go of your need to understand everything that you can experience true morality.
     Romantic? Absolutely. Simple? In theory, yes. But the book displays age-old wisdom beautifully and that's what's most important.