The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge may both have been as gloomy as the English moors, but Hardy contrived happy endings for at least some of the characters. In Tess, however, Hardy declines any pretense of nicety, submitting his hapless protagonists to increasingly tragic circumstances, culminating in a bitter denouement.
Tess, ill-advised ingenue of the English countryside, is raped by a licentious aristocrat, Alec D'Urberville, and the resulting infant dies shortly after its birth. Tess seeks employment as a dairymaid miles from her home, to escape the scorn of her neighbors and earn money for her impoverished family. A young well-to-do man, Angel Clare, falls in love with her and convinces her, despite her misgivings, to marry him. On their wedding night, Clare confesses to her a night of debauchery in the city, and so, assured, Tess reveals to him her similar past. But Clare is distraught by her revelation, and leaves her.
D'Urberville returns to pursue her in this vulnerable state, and she passively relinquishes herself to him in her hopelessness when he offers to provide for her impoverished family. Clare, repentant, finds them together. Tess kills her lover, rejoins her husband for a few weeks of pleasure, and is subsequently discovered and hanged.
Hardy's prescient pessimism anticipates, or perhaps ushers in, the effects of Darwinism on Western beliefs in the 20th century. Clare, son of an evangelical minister, professes an appreciation of Christianity but denies the verity of its supernatural elements. Tess readily assumes his "rational" views, having always harbored a faith tenuous at best. D'Urberville undergoes a radical conversion halfway through the novel, becoming a traveling preacher. But a brush with Tess, and her iteration of her husband's philosophies is enough to kill his emotional Christianity. Upon renouncing his beliefs, he renews his assault of Tess. "'O why didn't you keep your faith, if the loss of it has brought you to speak to me like this!'" she cries to him.
What Tess doesn't understand is that it just cannot be that way. One cannot have a standard without authority behind it; there is no moral code without God. Clare, full of ideals and clearly endowed with a sense of right and wrong, expects Tess to forgive him his pre-marital dalliance without any qualms, but finds himself unable to to the same for her. He later accepts her companionship, though she has added to her offenses murder. His self-fashioned ethics are startlingly inconsistent.
Hardy purports to write an indictment of ineffable Fate, but all he truly demonstrates is the futility of relativism.
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