Transcript Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Phase the Fourth – The Consequence
(Chaps 25 - 34)
Overview
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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
Class and family
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Angel’s 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
Angel’s professed liberal-mindedness and his deep-seated
conventionality
Use of irony to highlight Angel’s hypocrisy and subconscious
class prejudices
Angel, who claims to hate old families, seizes on Tess’s
d’Urberville bloodline as her social salvation, but later partly
bases his rejection of Tess on this same bloodline
Class and family
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p.210: ‘the grand card’ (ie her bloodline)  recalls
Mrs Durbeyfield’s conversation with her husband
about Tess’s ‘trump card’
Different assets that can be played in the
matrimonial game
p.189: ‘Mistress Teresa d’Urberville’
p.232: ‘Different societies, different manners. You are
an unapprehending peasant woman… Decrepit
families postulate decrepit wills, decrepit conduct.’
Class and family
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Dissonance between Angel’s 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
godmother’s jewellery
p.220: ‘He remembered… His wife was a d’Urberville: whom
could they become better than her?’
Angel’s hypothetical remaking of Tess as a ‘woman of fashion’
decked out in evening wear instead of her peasant attire
(p.220-1)
Recalls Angel’s gift of ‘a whole stock of clothing, from bonnet to
shoes’ (p.206) for the wedding
Class and family
Angel’s 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)
Class and family
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Use of free indirect discourse
shows Angel’s 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 milkmaid’s.’
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?’
Class and family
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Shifting narrative perspectives juxtaposed against each other
to show the changes in Angel’s 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’
Class and family
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Angel’s 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. She’ll be apt pupil enough… She’s 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’
Class and family
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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
Class and family
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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 Angel’s class
Tess’s continued identification with her fellow
dairymaids – eventually drives her to making her
confession.
Class and family
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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 don’t Trumpet theirs?’
Class and family
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Contrast between Tess and Mercy Chant  shows
the extent to which marriage to Tess would go
against the Clare family’s expectations
Symbolic name: indicates a Puritanical nature, an
inhibition at odds with Tess’s natural sensuality
Tess – duality, history and destiny
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Repeated references to Tess’s D’Urberville 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 d’Urberville family (cf. ch1, p.9)
Highlights the decay of the D’Urberville family
fortunes, and the duality in Tess’s character
Tess – duality, history and destiny
Use of foreshadowing
 Portraits of the D’Urberville women literally hanging over Tess
and Angel  symbolic of a specifically female history that is
oppressive and ominous (p.216)
 Disturbs the notion of Tess’s ‘purity’ by drawing attention to
those aspects of Tess’s character that parallel those of her
ancestors
 ‘Can’t be removed’ (p.217)  inescapability of history
 Ominous references to the legend of the d’Urberville coach
Tess – duality, history and destiny
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Animal imagery  surfaces a wildness / potential savagery in Tess
Juxtaposed against the narrative’s original insistence on Tess’s
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
snake’s’
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’)
Tess – duality, history and destiny
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Tess’s contradictory impulses towards self-abnegation and selffulfillment 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…’
Tess – duality, history and destiny
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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’
Tess – duality, history and destiny
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The difficulty of understanding Tess’s 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 Tess’s
subjective experience with Angel’s attempts to comprehend her
Sexual morality
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Angel’s 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 woman’s voice 
narrative silence that obliterates Tess’s story while
allowing Angel’s to be told in full
Sexual morality
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p.74: ‘An immeasurable chasm was to divide our
heroine’s 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 Tess’s identity
is tied to her chastity (or lack thereof):