The subtitle of this novel by Thomas Hardy is "A Pure Woman". Tess Durbeyfield is an innocent girl led by malevolent circumstance to have a child out of wedlock (she was seduced by Alec D'Uberville), to be abandoned by the good but self-righteous man she truly loves and marries (Angel Clare) and to end up being hanged as a murderer (of her persistent tormentor Alec).
Tess is portrayed as an honest, compassionate, hardworking girl motivated by the desire to help her poverty-stricken family. From Hardy's point of view, Tess is much more sinned against than sinning. She remains pure in heart in spite of the terrible fate that befalls her. Hardy ends his novel thus: "Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess".
Tess is the portrait of a victimized woman.
~Facts on File
Jude the Obscure (1896):
A tragic novel by Thomas Hardy in which the main character, Jude Fawley, is thwarted in his every endeavor to acquire an education and 'the finer things of life'. Poverty, class distinctions, the snobbery of the academic community, Victorian prudery and intolerance all combine to place insurmountable barriers in Jude's way. Add mistakes of judgement, misunderstandings and accidents, misplaced passions, malevolent fate or chance, and you have all the ingredients for the darkest, most pessimistic of Hardy's novels. In fact, Jude the Obscure was recieved with such critical and popular hostility that Hardy never wrote another novel, instead devoting the last three decades of his life to poetry.
Jude is the ultimate victim, truly a man of sorrows.
~Facts on File
Back to the T List