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Jacqueline Sullivan
Ms. Winter
05/10/17
NOT ALL MEN ARE SINNERS!: An Expose of the Exploitation of Victorian Women by the
Cheris Kramarae once said, Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings, and
in Victorian times, this tenant is shown to be proven true, time and time again . In the novel Tess
of the dUrbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, Tess Durbeyfield is a young woman who is plagued by
misfortune and tribulation in the forms of poverty, rape, emotional and mental abuse, stalking,
deaths, abandonment, and even the death of her own child. She endures these hardships at the
hands of her strangers, her family, and even her husband, until she is no longer able to cope, and
in a break of psyche, kills one of her abusers. The novel while provoking in its use of these
actions and events illustrates and illuminates the dangerous patriarchy supported by Victorian
Era, as neither society nor religion were in favor of helping and protecting women when they
suffered these forms of torture and abuse. Within and outside the texts of Tess of the
dUrbervilles the Victorian Era was nearly dominated by male influences in every aspect of life,
from physical day-to-day interactions to spiritual beliefs and worship, which created unparalleled
challenges for Victorian women, who were left to wither and fade from existence without
recognition for their struggles. It is through the examples Hardy left us using Tess that we see the
power held over women by men and the religions they created.
In looking through Tess Durbeyfields history, its quite easy to note the recurring pattern
linking men and Tesss troubles. From Parson Tringham, the genealogist who having been
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engaged in tracing the dUrberville family...thought [John] might know something of [the
dUrbervilles],(19) until the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his
sport with Tess,(416) it is Victorian men or a representation of man who act as pestilence to her,
two of the most prominent being Alec dUrberville. Alec, a well-known rogue, [who] hotly
pursues Tess despite her rebuffs. (Moss and Wilson) is portrayed as the novels main antagonist
and Angel Clare, who paradoxically fashions himself into both a proselytizing apostate and a
social iconoclast.(Lovesey) Both men cause great harm to Tess, Alec with the greater physical
trauma through rape, and Angel with the greater mental trauma through abandonment, though
unfortunately neither can be held responsible in court. Alec, at the time the novel was written in
1891, would have been protected by the decriminalization of rape, (42) which was not a capital
crime after 1841 (Lovesey) and while Angel may have been able to divorce Tess, as some
Victorian men did, the termination of the marriage was often not granted, (Moss & Wilson)
and Tess, as a woman, would have found herself socially ostracized for her efforts,(Moss &
Wilson) as other Victorian women would have under the same conditions, if she had even
attempted divorce, and lack of criminal aid was just one of the many, many situations that
Victorian women like Tess faced. Within marriage Women ... were brought up to be either
drudges or toys beneath manor `a sort of angel above him,' (Moss & Wilson) and like Tesss
mother after the death of her father, Upon marriage, a woman surrendered all assets over to her
husband; until the late 1880s, she held no legal claim to her own belongings, and perhaps while
it would have been better for Tess to remain unmarried, even that came with consequences as an
unmarried woman was regarded as a failure in some way, further reinforcing The
commonplace belief was that a woman's place was in the home, and in any case, most women
could not afford, in the financial sense, to leave it, (Moss & Wilson) echoing Angels words to
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Tess, saying All is trouble outside there; inside here content(408), spiraling back to the fact
that women held no legal claim over their property and were practically forced to become
homemakers. Trapped in an escapable whirlpool of legality and lack of rights, with men
cornering the market on manufacturing social rules, it made interaction between Victorian men
and women dangerous, moreso for women than for men depending on the wills of the men.
Another large complication in the life of Tess and Victorian Era women was religion. As
religion was an indicator of the very tribe, genus, and species (179) of ones upbringing, to be
a good Christian in Tesss time was to be a pinnacle of appropriate culture, though, one had to be
careful as there were several versions of Christianity to choose from. Many joined the
Evangelical movement, which proved very popular among the working classes as it offered a
morally earnest attempt to bring religion back to the people unmediated by the established
church, and emphasised the absolute truth of the Bible, the centrality of the Fall and Original
Sin, and redemption through faith alone rather than good works,(Asquith) and they were
represented by the Clare family. Then there was the grim, fanatical sect (Moss and Wilson) that
was the Methodist Church, represented in the novel by the villainous Alec d'Urberville [who]
becomes a preacher for a Methodist group (the Ranters.) (Moss and Wilson) The Christian
faith, however, was not the only belief system coming to life. Still left over from the Age of
Enlightenment was a large faith in the sciences as the answer to all, and Positivism a new form of
belief which replaced god with a scientific understanding of mankind, (Asquith) which were
embodied by Angel Clare himself, were quite popular as well, and Paganism, remnants of a
bygone era remained alive and embodied through Tess herself. However, with the exception of
perhaps Paganism and Positivism, each of them had extensive views of the purity of women
and that, no matter if their chastity was broken by their own will or not, forgiveness [did] not
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apply to [Tesss] case,(244) nor any similar case. Women who broke social normality like Tess
and attempt[ed] to find solace in a church service [were] met with a gossiping band of
parochialism. (Asquith) They, in the eyes of the church, symbolically or physically must be
punished. (Asquith) Fittingly enough, what women must abstain from, it is actively shown that
men arent given punishment for the same crime. Whereas women were to be model Christians,
passionless creatures and those that felt sexual longings were deemed low-breed, what
Victorian men often deemed as improper at home they actively sought on the streets or, as the
novel demonstrates, in the woods. (Moss & Wilson) Both Alec and Angel committed acts that
destroyed their purity, yet Alec goes unpunished up until his death, and Angel is forgiven by
Tess, but no one forgives Tess herself for actions that were not her own. The actions, or rather,
lack of actions to create equality between similar crimes further perpetuated a woman's place
Though it is easy to become caught up in the horrors and the misfortune displayed within
Tess of the dUbervilles, it is both poignant to remember the society and culture within which the
novel was written, and critical to note the ways in which this novel helped to shape and influence
the same society after its publication. Thomas Hardy began his novel in 1888 at a time when the
late-Victorian obsession with virginity had turned into a mania (Lovesey) and was encouraged
by a reactionary movement against laxness in the Church ...during the 1700s. [and] persisted
into the 1800s, (Moss and Wilson) and while he heavily centered characters and events in the
novel around people and events in his own life and most likely as well as media and print that
were publicised around the era, like the painting Young Women Going To A Procession, by Jules-
Adolphe Breton,these incidents are most likely what led Hardy to start the rewriting of the
central Western myth of women's place and origin. He did so by framing his narrative to mimic
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but also to divert from the myth as it appear[ed] in Paradise Lost, (Daniel) one of the most
powerful novels of the last two centuries at the time. Our Tess Durbeyfield, our Eve is menaced
by two destroyer-lovers. She is seduced by Satan-Alec; and then, in vivid contrast to Paradise
Lost, she is repudiated by an Adam who... relegates his mate to oblivion (Daniel) However, not
all is as it seems; Hardy's rewriting of Paradise Lost is revealing. Milton, from this angle,
appears not as the defamer of women but as their magnificent justifier and that, In defense
of women, Hardy, notoriously a novelist of ideas, returns to "the Genesis myths," ...the source of
"a belief in the progressive decline of man and nature," (Daniel) and subsequently chooses to
defy the myth. It acts as a direct assault on the anti-progressive culture of the time,
criticiz[ing] the smug, middle-class emphases on virginity and self-denial, (Shumaker) while
consequently raising questions about the truth of a woman's place in society. Though a
conclusion to the argument of a woman's rights and place have still not been won today, we can
say that, what-ever his definitive opinion of "Woman," Hardy opposed cultural forces that were
intent on destroying [them], and that his work in Tess of the dUrberville was riveting and
In conclusion, Tess of the dUrbervilles was a reactionary piece of the late 19th century
dedicated to exposing and forcing commentary about the social standing and treatment of women
in Victorian society, during which anti-progressive movements and media ran rampant. Thomas
Hardys use of his character Tess Durbeyfield to highlight the dangers and pitfalls the women of
the Victorian Era had in marriage, work, and social conduct by repeatedly subjecting her to the
absolute worst possible outcomes and scenarios leads us not only to pity her but to realize the
full extent of the minefield that women of her era were expected to navigate. Taking it even
further, Hardy gets us to question why these actions and reactions are considered normal in
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society, why the domination of men in every interaction creates a vast power difference that,
while it hurts primarily women, does carry negative consequences for both sexes. At the end of
the day however, Tess is a novel, and the past is the past. Its certainly not like any of the ideals
and notions of that era have trickled down to our present day, permanently staining the fabric of
Works Cited
Lovesey, Oliver. "Reconstructing Tess." Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 43, no. 4,
Asquith, Mark. "Putting faith in Tess: religion in Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Mark Asquith
explores the religious scepticism which permeates one of Hardy's most popular novels." The
English Review, vol. 19, no. 3, 2009, p. 21+. Literature Resource Center
Moss, Joyce, and George Wilson. "Overview: Tess of the D'Urbervilles." Literature and Its
Times: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them,
vol. 2: Civil Wars to Frontier Societies (1800-1880s), Gale, 1997. Literature Resource Center
Daniel, Clay. "Science, Misogyny, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles." Twentieth-Century Literary
Criticism, edited by Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 229, Gale, 2010.
Shumaker, Jeanette. "Breaking with the Conventions: Victorian Confession Novels and Tess of
the d'Urbervilles." Literature Resource Center, Gale, 2017. Literature Resource Center
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Elements of Literature: Sixth Course, Literature of Britain with
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d'Ubervilles: a pure woman. New York, Signet Classics, 2006.
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Breton, Jules-Adolphe. Young Women Going to a Procession. 1890, oil on canvas, Private
Collection.