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.