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The Damned and the Divine – Religious Allegory in Tess of the…
The Damned and the Divine – Religious Allegory in Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Genesis/The Fall
There are several direct references to ‘Genesis’ in the novel: Tess, like Eve, begins the novel in a state of purity and innocence, as symbolised by the white dress she wears while ‘club-walking’. Later she, like Eve, becomes tainted by sin – sexual experience – and the novel describes this explicitly as having ‘eaten of the tree of knowledge’.
By reminding the reader regularly of the similarities between the novel and the Fall, Hardy elevates Tess’s story to the same status of sacred myth.
Tess offers a portrait of a lost pastoral world progressively encroached upon by modern technologies and, more significantly, by a system of alien intellectual values.
He uses the story of the ‘fall of man’ as a framework for his own secular parable about the decline of rural life in the face of the Industrial Revolution.
The novel is a secular parable about the disappearance of a rural world
Paradise Lost
An area experiencing rapid urban growth, Sandbourne is a typical product of the Industrial Revolution, whose inhabitants are under ‘enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon Profit-and-Loss’.
This world is antithetical to the one Tess once inhabited, as its residents have given up any connection to nature in exchange for materialistic concerns – the loss of the traditional rural world is thus rendered complete.
Talbothay’s Dairy, where Tess first meets Angel, is a prime example of a lush paradise, described in the novel as epitomising ‘the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale’.
In Tess of the d’Urbervilles we can identify a pattern of pastoral decline that evokes, in slow-motion, Adam and Eve’s ejection from Eden.
Hellenes and Heathens
This Hellenic paganism represents the modern world view: rational, abstract and uncompromising – in other words, the very values that propelled the Industrial Revolution forward.
In contrast, Tess’s ‘heathen’ paganism is one intimately connected with the earth – it is ‘aesthetic, sensuous’ and ‘impassioned’. This carnality is at odds with the Hellenic paganism proposed by Angel.
In the novel, Hardy makes a clear distinction, for example, between the paganism of Angel Clare and that of the inhabitants of the countryside. Angel practices a Hellenic paganism, which he has ‘persistently elevated […] at the expense of Christianity’.
The characters themselves embody the ideological conflict between modern and traditional ways of life that prompted the rural decline depicted in Tess. Interpreting the novel this way, Angel is the intellectual spirit of modern progress, while Tess is a living personification of the innocent natural world.
The interactions between Angel and Tess reflect the way the modern industrial world view gradually overpowered the traditional rural one.
Tess submits herself to Angel’s rationalistic doctrine, symbolically mirroring the way in which the old rural way of life came to be dominated by modern industrial principles.
Industrial Rev
Hardy’s novel is essentially pessimistic: rural women and Nature are interchangeable because both are equally defenceless against the onslaught of the Industrial Revolution.
The novel is an account of the birth of a new world, one that has embraced a modern era of capitalism, industrialisation and rationalism in exchange for the sacrifice of its old heathen ways.
Hardy’s appropriation of the Genesis narrative positions Tess as a kind of creation myth.