Tess of the d'Ubervilles - Talbothay and Tess's Struggle
In Tess of the d'Ubervilles, Tess is spiritually homeless. She wanders from place to place, doomed by her guilt to suffer personal ruin. Most of her temporary domiciles are backdrops for unhappiness and uncertainty, but her time at Talbothay's Dairy is ostensibly a period of bliss. What purpose does this segment of the text - which on the surface seems so hopeful - serve? When she begins to work for the dairy and is wooed by Angel Clare, Tess is pulled asunder by two competing forces: nature and society. The happiness and innocent sexual blush she discovers at the Edenic Talbothay solidifies Tess's shift toward natural impulses. These impulses are strong enough to temporarily subdue Tess's crippling shame, and thus establish the text's central moral conflict.
The Talbothay interlude allows Tess to put off making the final plunge into marriage for as long as possible. In a literary limbo, Tess can enjoy her physical awakening without the stain of sin that her previous consummation with Alec had imposed. Were it up to Tess, she would remain in this state of neo-virginity forever, for in it she is anonymous. She is not given the opportunity to live in this state for very long, of course. Angel's ambitions - and these are grand in a conventional sense, despite his misleading antipathy toward social climbing - compel him to make Tess promise to marry him, preparing in her a channel for natural will that allows her to set aside fear of Angel's rejection should he find out about her past. While she at first resists his advances and resigns herself to living without him, she is ultimately vulnerable to desire. We watch nature subsume Tess's i...
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Tess's natural side wins over, but she is then set up for a bitter end because she abdicates herself to Angel's moral indignation, blind to her own natural goodness. This is the tragedy of the text. Because the two sides of the "social chasm that [divide] our heroine's personality" cannot be brought into accord, Tess must lose everything. The Talbothay period shows what a happy community might look like - what her life might have been were it not for the albatross of shame. Talbothay is a shiny foil for the social brutality present in every other phase of Tess's short life.
Works Cited and Consulted
Beer, Gillian. "Finding a Scale for the Human." Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Ed. Scott Elledge. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1991.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Ed. Scott Elledge. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1991.
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The community and her unsupportive parents’ cold treatment towards Tess following these events emphasize the hegemonic male perspective of society towards women. Furthermore, Hardy shows how women are seen by society through the male gaze as sexual objects, as Tess is blamed for Alec’s lack of self-control. He attempts to justify his cruel actions as he calls Tess a “temptress” and the “dear damned witch of Babylon” (Hardy 316), yet he later says that he has “come to tempt [her]” (340). Tess is also objectified by Alec when he says that if Tess is “any man’s wife [she] is [his]” (325). The narrator’s repeated sexualized descriptions of Tess, such as her “pouted-up deep red mouth” (39), further demonstrate how women are commonly seen through the male gaze in society.
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