Literature
has always been reflected the social conditions in the history. As an essential
code, society has been criticized in many different ways by use of a range of
techniques, styles, tools and narratives. The manner adapted by a literary work
is presumably changeable. Seeing that, it can be said that Thomas Hardy, one of
the greatest English novelists, had a unique perspective and style to reason the
society he lived in and the state of mind he had. In his successful novel Tess of The d’Urbervilles, together with
questioning how the universe shapes the faith of an individual and makes the
choices of that individual seem free, Hardy also criticize the society for
creating a miserable life for a woman. To do so, Hardy creates a woman, named
Tess, and puts her “in space and in time” (Hornback, 110). In this respect, the
aim of this paper is to analyze the character Tess in terms of free will,
choices and her relationship with the environment; and to conclude that she is one
of the first examples of alienated modern heroines and a victim of the society
she lives in since she is the embodiment of Hardy’s paradox of the interference
of self and environment into the predestination of our lives.
As
Hornback suggests that Tess “has a mind of her own: a conscious and a
consciousness” (110). She is not an ordinary obedient woman who lives according
to a body of rules of the society. To illustrate, her search for a place to go
(finally finds the Talbothays Dairy) can be given as an example. Although people
around her are about to forget the extramarital affair and the death of the
child of that affair, she cannot forget it. She wants to be estranged from her
hometown since “she could not be confortable there till long years should have
obliterated her keen consciousness of” (Hardy, 136) the closer union with the
rich d’Urbervilles. She wants to follow her destiny, assuming that she creates
her destiny herself. This state of mind not only constitutes a paradox, but it
also gives hints about the heroic nature of Tess since it is acceptable that
“heroism is so much a matter of consciousness” (Hornback, 110). Hence, it can
be concluded that Tess is a heroine who believes that she makes her decisions
by herself.
In
order to confirm that Tess is an independent mind since she makes her choices
consciously, some factors that must be questioned are that Tess’s psychological
state of mind and in what reality she makes her choices. “Does one choose by
oneself and for oneself unhelped by advice or by ‘signs’? What have Chance and
Time to do with freedom?” (Morrell, 139). Roy Morrell also points out that what
Hardy and existentialists such as Sartre and Anouilh have in common is the
question that of man’s freedom (139). The word freedom can be degraded to the freedom of choice for understanding
Tess’s situation. Tess is an intelligent human as it can be understood from her
inner thoughts when Hardy reveals them to the reader. In that respect, Tess’s
choices might be said to be free. Morrell makes an analogy between Sartre’s
sense of free choice and Hardy’s attitude toward it and concludes that:
“Every
choice, including the choice not to choose, is one’s own choice, made alone and
therefore in anguish. One may ask for advice, but in choosing to whom to ask,
one has already chosen what kind of advice one wants (Tess asks her mother
whether she shall confess), and one still knows oneself (as Tess does) whether
one ought to take the advice or ignore it” (140).
On the other
hand, it is also a fact that Hardy has been said to believe in the influence of
environment. It is ambiguous whether Hardy created Tess as a victim of
environment, or of her own choices, however, the resolution of the events in
the novel suggest that it is both her own choices and environment. Or rather, as
Elaine Showalter claims in The Female
Malady that in the 19th Century Britain madness was accepted as
a high incidence condition for woman, may Tess be a mad woman? According to
Hardy’s philosophical thinking, the answer is no. Tess is not the victim of
madness at all, but her own choices and the environment. According to Sartre, nothing can rescue
mankind from himself, “not even the valid proof of the existence of God” (Morrell,
140). In this respect, man “is doomed to be free… without ‘human nature’ or God
to justify him, he is nothing, but what he does” (Morrell, 140). Thus, although
she seals her doom by herself and becomes a victim of environment as well, Tess
can be said to be an independent mind and a free human who does actually perform
a life by her own and then is expected to comply with the traditional “woman
role” that her performative life requires according to the norms of the
patriarchal society.
In
her book Gender Trouble, Judith
Butler asks: “In what senses, then, is gender an act? As in other ritual social
drama, the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated “ (140). The repeated actions that Tess is confronted to
perform is actually what determines her faith in the patriarchal society that
she lives in. She wants to escape from everyone since there is the
reminiscences of her past existence all over the place. As Butler would
suggest, Tess’s actions are to be “public” if she stays where she always is. However,
there is a chance for her to quit herself from the gender performativity that actually
determines her position in the social structure if she travels far away and totally
forgets who she was once. Tess instinctively anticipates that and therefore,
she wants to go far away. If Hardy had desired her to be in a forest chopping
woods all alone, then Tess might have had a little bit of a chance. Contrarily,
Hardy leaves her in her environment and waits to see how she will struggle
between the patriarchal norms and her own will.
What is Hardy’s sense of man‘s place in
the universe? Where does he put Tess in the universe and to emphasize what? According
to Miller, Hardy’s sense of man’s place in the universe “is not too different
from that of his contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche” (20). In Nietzsche’s
philosophy, man is the will; and in a world of unethical determinism, man must control
matters by himself and is to be the center of forces to orchestrate the
universe into samples of values; the man of merciless will can turn his life
from a fading one to a willed one, which would help him escape into a
paradoxical freedom (Miller, 20). By evaluating Tess’s faith, it can be
concluded that Hardy had shared the same perception of the universe with
Nietzsche. However, Hardy’s reaction to that universe is different than
Nietzsche’s. “Hardy, like Schopenhauer’s saint or artist who has lifted the
veil of Maya, is more passive and detached” (Miller, 21). For instance, Tess
stands up to what the patriarchal society puts in front of her as obstacles; she
goes to the field to work after giving birth her illegitimate child, and when
her child dies, she does not hesitate to go to the priest to ask for a proper
burial (Hardy, 133). By making heroic choices, she tries to create her own
faith in the universe. On the other hand, she is not able to escape from the
faith that universe created for her; she meets with both of the men she has had
a relationship before, Alec and Angel, and the obstacles that prevent her from
creating her own faith are still there. In Hardy’s view, man’s power of willing
is “only his embodiment of a tiny part of the vast energy of the Immanent Will”
(Miller, 21). Although Hardy has been accused “of being partial to man, of
taking the evil from man’s shoulders and putting all the responsibility instead
upon the universe” (Morrell, 166), there are also clues about Hardy’s reliance
upon the free will as he thinks “a man’s will is apparently under the control
of his mind and this means that if the other powers around him are in a
momentary equilibrium, he can act freely” (Miller, 21). But in the Tess of the d’Urbervilles, there is not
a balance that enables Tess to be subject to her free will rather than the
universe. Therefore, Hardy’s idea in the Tess
of the d’Urbervilles is that the responsibility belongs to the universe,
rather than man’s power of creating his own destiny. He puts Tess into a
universe where she could hardly walk because of the obstacles. Tess is the
embodiment of the paradox that Hardy has: Is it whether the power of the
universe or the free will that constitutes the plots of our lives?
It is also necessary to question the
gap between Tess and her environment and her relationship with her past to
emphasize the fact that she has some motives that put her into the situation of
modernity. Heidegger observed that
“homelessness is becoming a world fate” (Pappenheim, 9), and Pappenheim suggests
that this metaphor can be used to symbolize modern man’s deepest fear; staying
the same (9). In accordance with that idea, Tess can be considered as a woman who
wants to escape from her past as much as possible, and who does not want to
stay in the condition she is currently in. She constantly thinks of remote
places where nobody would recognize her. When she finds a place like that, then
she starts to think whether it is far off enough (Hardy, 137). While trying to
run away from her past and current realities, she knows she is attached to
them. On the other hand, remained in between the rural and the urban, she
cannot adapt herself into any of the ways of living she can possibly have. From
this point of view, she is the helpless victim of the period she lived in and
for this reason, alienated. She is “awake and strong-willed, yet passive,
stunned” (Brown, 92) and lack of developing herself. According to Sayers, “the concept of
alienation is central to Hegel's account of the development of Spirit, and thus
of the process of human self-development” (2). In this respect, it can be said
that Tess’s only development is about adjusting herself to the changes caused
by the “defeat of agricultural life by nullifying urban force” (Brown, 93). After
the sleep walking scene presents the very first effects of the mechanical
forces, Tess begins to feel “powerless and passive, caught by the machine’s
noise and motion, unable to speak, unable to rest” (Brown, 95). Moreover, it
can also be suggested that she is the one who is the very-well known “patient etherized
upon a table” (Eliot); she may be the purest woman in the world, yet she is
dull and numb without a clear comprehension of the forces that control her.
There are some characteristics that
makes one a hero or heroine and those characteristics can be found in Tess.
First of them is the attitude of the hero to the society. “The significant hero
cannot live or act in isolation from the world, nor can he be a hero if his
situation is solely within society” (Hornback, 109). This characteristic is
seen in Tess’s psychology; when she starts to work for the d’Urbervilles, she
also wants to enjoy her Sundays at the town. She goes there and dances with the
folks of the village, she integrates herself into the conventions of the people
around her. Yet, she cannot completely feel as if she is one of them; when she
wants to turn back to the village, she has to wait for other people to have
them as her accompaniers since the road might be dangerous. While waiting, she
alleges pretexts not to join them in their dance, she waits in front of the
door for the end of the night (Hardy, 99). In other words, she keeps herself
distanced from the others and that makes her a heroine in terms of her
relations with the society. Second of the characteristics of a heroine/hero is
the line she/he walks in the universe. “He –the hero- creates his own fate in
the world” (Hornback, 110). Although Hardy leaves Tess in a paradox of the
determination of her fate, she tries to do whatever she can do to create her
own fate. She is doomed to experience some compelling situations, such as living
with Alec, yet she has the will to change it. Thus, it can be said that Tess
has the second characteristic of a heroine, too. “And despite Hardy’s seeming
attempt to make her the victim of a ruthless, relentless society, or social
code, she becomes a tragic heroine” (Hornback, 109). She even affords to stab
Alec to change her faith. “Along with carrying the burden of a minor social and
historical theme of the transformation of an age, the descriptive elements and
Hardy’s choice of details support and emphasize Tess’s tragedy” (Hornback, 111)
as a woman who wants to be strong enough to carry on her life in the Victorian
Age .
In conclusion, Tess is the incarnation
of the contradiction between the forces of free will and environment. Hardy
probes that contradiction by presenting the tragic story of a modern woman who
has her own consciousness and uses it to try to find a solution, and thus to
create her own fate. While associating her psychological state of mind with the
influences of the cruel society, Hardy also presents her in a cruel universe
that creates her fate which seems to be an outcome of both her own choices and the
social pressures that the 19th Century Britain put on the shoulders
of women.
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