Implacable Universe and Fatal Destiny in Hardy’s

“Tess of the d’Urberville – A pure woman”

Mimesis – The Greek name for the rhetorical pedagogy known as imitation –
represent the imitation of another’s gestures, pronunciation or utterance, the
imitation of life or nature in the techniques and subject matter of art and
literature. The Theory of Mimesis is now generally regarded as the oldest theory
of art. In the arts, “mimesis” is considered to be re-presenting the human
emotions in new ways and so re-presenting to the onlooker, listener or reader the
inherent nature of the emotions and the psychological truth of the work of art.
Mimesis is thus thought of as a means of perceiving the emotions of the
characters on stage or in the book; or the truth of the figures as they appear in
sculpture or in painting; or the emotions as they are being configured in music
and of their being recognized by the onlooker as part of their human condition.
Mimesis, with its connecting concepts of imitation, simile, and similarity, has
been cited since classical times in the exploration of the relationship between art
and reality. Theories of Mimesis are a strenuously argued account of language
and time, charting the movement of “mimesis” from the Plato’s philosophy of
similarity to modern ideas of difference.
For Plato, art is an ability to do something that requires dexterity, specialization,
and knowledge. For Plato, behind every work of art that we find beautiful there
lay the archetype of beauty itself. The art work is no more than a guide leading
us back to the morphe of beauty. We too can make the passage from physical to
spiritual beauty; then to the beauty of institutions, laws, and sciences; and finally
to beauty pure and unalloyed. Art has, on Plato’s view, an extremely important
role. It can strengthen characters and cultivate virtues, so that it is in fact a
useful delight. But it can also have degenerative, even catastrophic side-effects.
Every purposeful activity producing an output to a plan is, for Plato, mimesis
(“imitation”).
Plato defines tragedy as an imitative representation of a self-contained morally
serious action of such and such duration; in heightened speech whose different
varieties are employed separately; distributed among different parts; not
narrated, but performed by the persons taking part in it; stimulating pity and
terror and thereby bringing about the purging [catharsis] of those same moods.
In other words, it’s a matter of imitating your events from life and the imitations
are supposed to have specific effects on the soul. Thomas Hardy’s masterpiece,
“Tess of the d’Urberville – A pure woman” probably best embodies his stature

1
as a world master in handling the perennial theme of man’s confrontation with
fate, treated by Hardy in terms of the Greek tragedy – Man versus the Gods –
because he believes the ancient, mythological outlook survives in modern times.
Perhaps the greatest representative of late Victorian prose and poetry, Thomas
Hardy was among the novelists who pioneered the transition to 20th Century
English and American Fiction: - carrying further the psychological novel,
initiated by George Eliot, and maintaining some of the latter’s aspects of
determinism; - emphasizing the same of early guilt or sin and their consequence
(subsequently developed in the most important novels of Joseph Conrad); -
resuming the opposition or conflict Man-Divinity (Fate-Providence) in terms
similar to those of the Greek tragedies.
Hardy’s village is not at all idyllic, it is rather the cradle of burning passions, of
complex psychologies, of fatal conflicts. One also gets a few sidelights on the
role that the author ascribes to fate and providence: that of a cruel and capricious
force which amuses itself by playing with the lives of mortals (a fundamental
conception with Hardy which was repeatedly occasioned comparisons with the
ancient Aeschylus and Euripides). The characters in Hardy’s novel of seduction,
abandonment and murder appear to be under the control of a force greater than
they.
“Tess of the d’Urbervilles – A pure woman” (1891) is generally regarded as
Hardy’s finest novel. A brilliant tale of seduction, love, betrayal and murder,
Tess of the d’Urbervilles yields to narrative convention by punishing Tess’s sin,
but boldly exposes this standard denouement of unforgiving morality as cruelly
unjust. Throughout, Hardy’s most lyrical and atmospheric language frames his
shattering narrative.
The novel centers around a young woman who struggles to find her place in
society. When it is discovered that the low-class Durbeyfield family is in reality
the d’Urbervilles, the last of a famous bloodline that dates back hundreds of
years, the mother sends her eldest daughter, Tess, to beg money from relations
with the obvious desire that Tess wed the rich Mr. d’Urberville. Thus begins a
tale of woe in which a wealthy man cruelly mistreats a poor girl. Tess is taken
advantage of by Mr. d’Urberville and leaves his house, returning home to have
their child, who subsequently dies. Throughout the rest of this fascinating novel,
Tess is tormented by guilt at the thought of her impurity and vows to never
marry. She is tested when she meets Angel, the clever son of a priest, and falls
in love with him. After days of pleading, Tess gives into Angel and consents to
marry him. The day of Tess’s wedding to Angel Clare shows how perfectly the
author’s themes – love thwarted by implacable Universe, the ruthless dislocation
wrought by class, the landscape of Wessex, contemporary issues of religion and
morality – are fused with high drama. Tess and Angel have courted each other
through a long summer of heady pastoral luxuriousness. Nature pulses through
them and all the world. But the wedding takes place itself in the dismal grayness
of New Year’s Day and, on their first evening man and wife, each confesses to

2
an earlier affair as the fire glows with a “last judgment luridness”. Tess tells her
husband of her seduction by the feckless Alec d’Urberville, a supposed
aristocratic relative whose child she bore. Though nature does not condemn her
for what has happened, memories of a child’s eternal damnation persisted. It is
restorative power of nature that brought Angel and a revived Tess together.
Though Angel has discarded most of the Christian beliefs in which he has been
reared (his progress to agnosticism was that of many intelligent young
Victorians) he is horrified to discover that his wife is not, in his opinion, a
“pure” woman. His love freezes under the withering specter of conventional
morality, deserts her and he departs for Brazil. With Angel gone, Tess endures
the purgatory of winter farm work until her family is all but ruined by death of
her foolish father. In order to support them, Tess, flawed by her “reckless
acquiescence in chance”, returns to the ruthless Alec d’Urbervilles. Her love
however is still for Angel, and he returns in chastened humanity, and Tess
herself, hysterically grieving, murders Alec and rushes to give herself to the one
man she loves.
The plot of Tess of the d’Urbervilles turns on a succession of accidents and
coincidences. Again and again, Tess’s tragic fate depends on some disastrous
mischance, a real “drama of pain”. One or two of these may seem possible, after
all is full of mischance, but on top of each other they produce a final effect of
gross improbability.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles is generally regarded as Hardy’s tragic masterpiece
and certainly it is his most ambitious tragic novel. This too is a story of
innocence and sophistication, of man and nature, of history and its relations to
the present, concentrated on the fate of a simple country girl whose parents’
chance discovery of their descent from a once noble line sends her to seek the
assistance of a degenerate supposed relative to whom she surrenders before
parting from him in disgust. The further development of the story – Angel’s
horror at learning the truth at last, his desertation of Tess who is forced back at
last to live with the man who first “undid” her, her eventual discovery that this
man deceived her in assuring her that Angel would never take her back and her
murder of him in desperate hate and regret at what he has caused her to lose – all
this is forced along with a certain glimpses of character and bits of dialogues
which are immediately illuminating, neither the motivation, nor the actual
course of the action is made really convincing. Angel Clare is a much worse
character than Hardy seems to recognize, while the chain of circumstances that
produces the murder with the inevitable hanging of Tess at the end of the novel
seems altogether too contrived. The indomitable Angel Clare is left at the end
with Tess’s younger sister, “a spiritualized image of Tess”, and they move hand
in hand: Angel is evidently determined not to be defeated by fate. But Tess is
hanged; As the policemen take Tess away to trial and execution , so we see how,
in this brutal and implacable world, “Justice was done and the President of the
Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess”.

3
Hardy’s qualities are perfectly revealed in the last part of the book, which closes
the circle: perfect geometrical construction (circular structure) permanent
Presence and direct participation of Nature, adequate style (graphic images and
metaphors as well as eloquent vocabulary), characters well typified by their
speech and gestures – all of these parts of the pervasive cosmic mechanism.
As soon as Tess and Angel are in the presence of Stonehenge, the realistic level
– with its themes and narratives structures – sinks into significance. They step
into myth which is concretely linked to the physical contact with the stone
monument. There is a process of initiation here, they “grope” around and
gradually become acquainted – through their senses: hearing and touching –
with the place defined as “a temple of the winds” and the author defines as “the
pavilion of the night”. It is a concrete place with a mysterious meaning: the
remnant of a very old civilization that worshipped nature by bringing human
sacrifices, thus suggestions the insignificance of man in the face of nature. The
insignificance and the smallnest the pillars “blankly defined” symbolize. The
whole place is a symbol: it is “the heathen temple“ because Tess herself is a
pagan – from the Christian point of view: she disobeyed one of the Biblical
commandments, she committed a crime. All motifs and themes converge in the
scene of pursuers approaching: the coming of light is, in fact, the coming of
death; the soldiers appear at down. The wind dies out and nothing moves
anymore, suggesting Tess’s near death. All is characterized by “reserve,
taciturnity and hesitation”. The scene is now ready for the (ritual) sacrifice. Tess
is indirectly compared to a creature “lesser than a woman” whose breathing is
“quick and small”, thus symbolizing “the animal” to be sacrificed. The Chance,
The Blind Destiny has made its mystic and malign influence felt once more.
The great closing scene at Stonehenge – symbol of an ancient and malevolent
natural world of human sacrifice – presents Hardy-the-architect’s description of
the monoliths. The author’s eye for significant detail is to be mentioned. The
atmosphere is set at this stage; darkness, coldness, wildness and greatness are
supported by the symbolical paraphrases used by Tess and Angel to denominate
Stonehenge: forest of monoliths (hugeness), pavilion of the night (darkness,
loneliness), heathen temple (wildness, no established moral, the idea of
sacrifice). The description of the Great Plain and its symbolic stones (The Stone
of Sacrifice and The Sun Stone) follows. From dusk to down, whole nature
(light, wind, water, stone) accompanies Tess. Hardy describes the elements (still
or moving, dark and light, colorful and colorless) in such a way to suggest
Tess’s thoughts and emotional states. The communion between character and
nature may be followed throughout the text: when Tess is falling asleep
everything is dark, reserve, taciturnity and hesitation are the qualities of the
landscape and at that moment even the night wind has dies out. Then, the reader
is prepared for the moment of Tess’s awakening: the light is growing, the stones
are no more dark, but they are glistening green gray. Some significant phrases
as for example: the light is strong or the sunbeam which shines full on Tess’s

4
face make the reader feel, as Tess feels, that everything has become clear, that
the heroine does whatever she has to, so the memorable phrases “It is as is
should be” and “I am ready” climax the whole passage.
The Stonehenge scene illustrates once more the idea that in Hardy’s novels
nature does not help the character, but it only projects the human tragedy on the
primordial axes. The pillar with the hand print symbolizes Tess’s guilt of
adultery and murder. Alec says that it was erected by the druid’s for some
punishment, while others say it was a cross. Tess was arrested after sleeping by
it. Tess’s baby symbolized Tess’s bad circumstances which were out of her
control. It symbolizes innocence in a sense, since this baby was innocent having
done nothing wrong, but it was punished by society for coming from such an
evil act. Having been raped, Tess was also innocent of the crime, but she was
still punished and pushed aside by society.
Hardy depicts human feelings facing up to the onslaughts of malign power. He
was a serious novelist attempting to present though fiction a view of life and one
entirely different from that of his great contemporaries Tennyson and Browning.
Most frequently his mood was own of disillusioned pessimism, excellently
summed up in this novel. Hardy hovered between the view of man as a mere
plaything of an impersonal and malign Fate and man as a being possessing free
will, in whom character is fate. Hardy’s preoccupation on with his “philosophy
of life” is seen in the way in which he intrudes himself into his novels to point
an accusing finger at destiny or to take the side of his protagonists and in the
over – frequency use of coincidence, through which he seeks to prove his case.
Too often his plots hinge upon a sequence of accidents which have the most dire
consequences and, therefore, while he seldom fails to inspire in hid readers his
readers his own deep pity for the sufferings of his characters he frequently fails
to attain the highest tragic levels. Allied with this use of coincidence are a
fondness for the grotesque or unusual and a weakness for the melodramatic. Yet
he handles striking situations with great firmness of touch and a telling realism
and all his best novels contain individual which are unforgettable. The heroine’s
passivity, which suggests her symbolic role, that of a victim, is a good example
of Hardy’s dark philosophy and his attitude toward the human nature as opposed
to Fate/Destiny is known to have been one dictated by fatalism and determinism
in this particular case; fateful circumstances (blind fate) prevent Tess from
finding happiness and the heroine can only find rest in death, she accept her
destiny without a blink. When she is rebelling against fate, she ends badly, she is
punished for her disobedience. Tess rebels not only once she rebels against Alec
and leaves him, rebels against her poverty and goes to work on a farm, rebels
against her own sin and finally, she makes her greatest mistake: she breaks the
pattern, she kills the man who destroyed her life. The idea of a Universe
governed by a blind wheel which man cannot understand is revealed throughout
the novel.
Early critics attacked Hardy for the novel’s subtitle, “A Pure Woman”, arguing

5
that Tess could not possibly be considered pure. They also denounced his frank,
for the time, depiction of sex, criticism of organized religion and dark
pessimism. Today, the novel is praised as a courageous call for righting many of
the ills Hardy found in Victorian society and as a link between the late-Victorian
literature of the end of the nineteenth century and that of the modern era.
The subtitle to the novel, “A Pure Woman” emphasizes her purity, but critics
debate whether a woman who is seduced by one man, marries another one who
abandons her, and then kills the first, could be considered “pure”.
This book deals with the oppression of an innocent girl. Most of the
consequences she faced were not consequences of her own actions which makes
this story somewhat of a tragedy in that sense giving the book a mood that you
can try to make for yourself a good life, but you do not determine your own
outcome.
From the social point of view, Tess’s tragic end stands for the sad condition of
the old peasantry, destroyed by the intruding bourgeoisie in 19th century
England. Tess’s fate mirrors the destruction of the agricultural class in England.
The novel is considered one of the supreme achievements of English fiction.
The tragic passions of an obscure country girl perfectly integrate Hardy’s
abiding concern with love thwarted by an implacable universe and the ruthless
desolation wrought by class. The landscape of Wessex, evoked with great poetic
power, relate the particular to the universal with consummate mastery, while the
particular also allows Hardy to engage with contemporary issues of religion and
morality.

References:

1. Hardy, Thomas, “Tess of the d’Urberville – A pure woman”,

Macmillian&Co, Limited St. Martin’s Street, London, 1950;
2. Plato, The Doctrine of Mimesis (from Philosophy courses);
3. Sanders, Andrew, The Oxford History of English Literature, Claredon
Press, Oxford, 1992;
4. Stevenson, Randall, Modern Fiction, Hervester Wheatsheat, London, 1992;
5. Bantaş, Clonţea, Brînzan, A guide of English Literature, III rd edition,
Amarcord, Timişoara, 1998.