Why Tess of the D’Urbervilles Matters

I did not read Thomas Hardy until prison. I think my high school's junior college prep English class had to read Tess of the D’Urbervilles and I seem to recall disgruntlement. Frankly, it was not my favorite of the Hardy novels I read at Fort Dix FCI. That honor probably belongs to The Mayor of Casterbridge for I thought I learned a bit about the novel and how I might express some of my ideas about Indiana. I will leave my comments on that and the other Hardy novels I read for a later date since I  have hopes my notes on my reading may still exist. Plainly put, I thought then Tess a bit insipid, a victim's victim.

Then I read The Perpetual Timeliness of Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Janet Beard. I can see where I missed serious points about Hardy's novel.

Tess has figured out what anyone who’s listened to a few true crime podcasts or watched an episode or two of Law and Order knows: it’s always the husband (or boyfriend or other intimate acquaintance). Yet the terrible fact that the perpetrators of sexual abuse and violence are most often close to their victims is still too often neglected in our culture, in favor of easier stories with simpler villains. Tess knows the truth, though, as do the anonymous ballad writers of history, memorializing the murdered girls killed by their lovers, at times with the implication that murder might be a convenient way for the men to end an unwanted pregnancy. Of course, (spoiler alert!) the only murder in Tess is committed by the heroine herself when she finally ‘snaps’ and kills her abuser. The consequences of living in a misogynistic culture are complicated, which is another subject I explore in The Ballad of Laurel Springs. Often women are victims of violence, but sometimes that violence ricochets outward.

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What scandalized Victorian readers about the book is of course what makes it seem so modern: the acknowledgement of how a woman is judged by society after being the victim of sexual assault or violence and the assertion that the awful effects of poverty are not moral failings but rather the cruel consequences of circumstance. One hundred and thirty years later, our society still too often flinches from accepting these truths. I hope that one day I can reread Tess again simply for the pleasure of Hardy’s story and prose and no longer for the timeliness of the subject matter.

My plea in mitigation is that I may have been annoyed by the very modernity Ms. Beard writes about and thought Tess should have known better when how she behaved was the only way she could have at the time of the novel.

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