Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy
 Overview
• Author
• Thomas Hardy
• Year Published
• 1891
• Type
• Novel
• Genre
• Tragedy
 Perspective and Narrator

• Tess of the d'Urbervilles is told by a third-person

limited omniscient narrator, who focuses on the
thoughts and feelings of Tess, Angel, and
occasionally Alec. This point of view presents the
characters, even at times the antagonist Alec,
sympathetically, and causes readers to withhold
judgment.
• Tense
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles is written in the past
tense.
 About the Title
• Tess Durbeyfield, the protagonist of Tess of the
d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully
Presented, learns her family name was
originally d'Urberville—the name of an
ancient noble family long extinct. The
subtitle—A Pure Woman Faithfully
Presented—is a social comment indicating the
author's belief that Tess, a rape victim, is
"pure" despite being a fallen woman by the
standards of the day.
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles tells the shocking tale of an
uneducated peasant girl whose inexperience leads to her
rape by the son of a local nobleman. Tess gives birth to a
child who dies and ends up murdering her rapist. She is
then executed for the crime. First in serialization and then
in publication as a book in 1891, the novel scandalized
19th-century readers. It continued to generate controversy
even after author Thomas Hardy was forced to remove
some of the more provocative scenes.
• Today Tess of the d'Urbervilles is recognized as a moving
and poetic depiction of a girl trapped by circumstance and
class. Its criticism of social conventions and its universal
themes of destiny and betrayal have made it one of Hardy's
best-loved and most enduring novels.
• Many readers found the subtitle, A Pure Woman Faithfully
Presented, offensive.
• When Tess of the d'Urbervilles was published in book form, Hardy
added the subtitle A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented. Readers
who viewed Tess as an immoral woman were offended by the
subtitle, particularly the idea that Tess, who bore a child out of
wedlock, was "pure." Critics posit that Hardy was disturbed by the
changes he had to make in the story when it was serialized and felt
the book version was more faithful to his vision. As for the word
pure, Hardy claimed about Tess:
• I still maintain that her innate purity remained intact to the very
last; though I frankly own that a certain outward purity left her on
her last fall. I regarded her then as being in the hands of
circumstances, not morally responsible, a mere corpse drifting with
the current to her end.