Tess Critical Responses

critical responses to tess of the d'urbervilles

Mark Asquith - Abandonment

Mark Asquith - Abandonment

"Angel abandons her, masking his prurient disgust at her sexual history with spurious Christian principles"

Lisa Alther - Rape and countryside

“Alec’s violation of Tess parallels the violation of her region’s age-old way of life by city-based industrialists, who were introducing mechanized farming (such as the threshing machine Tess feeds at Flintcomb-Ash), buying up family farms, and transforming agriculture.”

Mary Jacobus - blameless Tess

“A sustained campaign of rehabilitation makes Tess’s so blatant a case of double standard of sexual morality applied to men and women, and Tess herself is so blameless, the tragedy of the ordinary becomes the tragedy of the exceptional- blackening both man and fate in the process.”

Ellen Rooney - Tess’ sexuality

"As a victim of her own sexuality, which is her seductiveness, she can remain pure"

Kristen Brady - Tess victim

"Tess was more of a passive victim of male aggression and idealisation than an active participant in her own disastrous fate"

Ellen Rooney - rape

"Rape is an extension of seduction"

Peter Widdowson - Tess

"Tess is merely the construct of male socio-sexual images of her desired form"

Sarah Maier - domestication of Tess

"Angel does not wish to educate Tess in order to encourage her emancipation; the education that he has in mind would further domesticate her."

Hardy - about Tess

"I... lost my heart to her as I went on with her history."

Tony Tanner - red

"It dogs her, disturbs her, destroys her. She is full of it, she spills it, she loses it. Watching Tess's life we begin to see that her destiny is nothing more or less than the colour red."

Feminist Critics - Tess classification

They say Tess is too complex a woman to be understood by a society that classifies women under the headings ‘virgin’ or ‘whore’.

James Heffernan - underestimating Alec

‘To read Alec as a rapist is grossly to underestimate him. Like Satan, the role he jestingly but also revealingly plays, he seeks not to pinion the body of his victim but to master her mind, to exploit her weakness'.’

Elizabeth Day - Tess + nature

‘Cast out by a morally hypocritical society, Tess identifies most strongly with the natural world.’

Martin Seymour-Smith - question

‘The question raised by the novel is this: what would a woman be if she were released from male oppression and allowed to be herself?’

Jane Shilling - Tess’ self

‘Whatever happens to her, however cruel her destiny, she has a clear sense of herself, and the strength to remain true to it. Which is more than can be said for either of the men whose passion is the instrument of her tragedy.’

A. Alvarez - Tess and landscape

‘Landscape is continually brought to life, not for its own sake but, like a sounding board, in order to deepen and intensify whatever it is that Tess is experiencing.’

James A. Heffernan - blood

The sprouting blood that she helplessly tries to staunch could well prefigure the blood he shed in tearing her hymen

Penny Boumelha - Hardy’s narration

Tess brings out an unusually overt maleness in Hardy's normally genderless narrative voice

Hazen - Alec’s murder

‘The murder of Alec is an act of defiance and protest.’

Brady - who is Tess?

‘She is both the betrayed maid and fallen woman.’

Merryn Williams, 1972 - vulnerability

“Tess is doubly vulnerable because she’s a working class and a girl. She is liable to be reduced to that of a mere sexual object”