Hardy's "Pure Woman": Aspects Of The Image Of Tess

As an excellent novel of Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles has become a classic loved by generations of readers. The novel deals with the tragic heroine's sexual impurity by sanitizing it and by endowing her with the middle-class virtues of self-sacrifice, altruism and domestic efficiency. This paper tries to analyze the image of Hardy's 'pure woman' - Tess from multiple perspectives, especially from that of feminism. Tess is the most satisfying of all Hardy's heroines as well as one of the greatest women in the annals of English literature. There is no absolute in Tess's personality: she is both pure and ruined; she is both idealistic and sensual. It seems that Tess herself brings together most of Hardy's women characters. She can be viewed as an independent, active heroine who chooses martyrdom. She can also be seen as a victim either of society or of her own nature, who has no choice but to let herself be destroyed. Tess is an example of the destructive effect of society's pressure and conventions upon a nature naturally pure and unstained. Thus Tess always remains a tragic heroine who brings readers much attraction and thought.From a feminist perspective, this paper seeks to reveal the root cause of Tess's tragedy, which is embedded in the unfair conventional social values of a male-dominated society, and covered by superficial explanations such as her imperfect character and the poverty of her family. In a male-dominated society, women's purity with virginity as its prerequisite is one of the significant semiotic values. After losing her virginity, Tess is denied spiritually and morally and falls prey to the conventional thinking that 'once sinned, sinned forever'. It is obviousthat Hardy opposes the conventional concept of taking virginity as the absolute criterion of women's purity. Sympathetic to his heroine, Hardy points out the social absurdity in judging Tess's morality by a mere biological fact. Moreover, Hardy touches upon the unfairness of the double standard for women and for men. While a whole life of debauchery on the part of the male sex is considered venial and natural, a single false step on the part of the female is regarded as unpardonable. A woman is even advised and encouraged to put up with her husband's infidelity. In the novel, Hardy defies the convention by offering a new perspective through which he vindicates Tess and declares her to be pure. But this does not mean that he cares little about Tess's violation. In idealizing Tess, Hardy reduces her into a mere symbol and he even needs to use her death to emphasize the notion of her purity. This paper holds that Hardy transcends the Victorian convention by labeling the physically impure Tess as a pure woman regardless of the hostile criticism of his time. Although as a progressive humanist writer, Hardy is ahead of his time, he si ill can not break from the prevailing masculine thinking. Thus he can not find a way out for Tess to renew herself, and can only create her as a piece of dead art.This paper has four chapters. The first chapter is about the impurity of the 'fallen woman' following dogmatically the conventional criterion of women's purity. The second chapter describes Tess as a pure woman, arguing that it is Tess's sense of duty to her family on the decline that leads her to become Alec's sexual object and later it is her devoted love to Angel that makes her the murderess of Alec. The third chapter is about the artistic figure of Tess, concerning her natural beauty and conventional virtues, as well as her characteristics as a new woman and a sexualsymbol. The fourth chapter is to read Tess from the perspective of feminism. The paper concludes that the combined force of the unfair conventional social values and the psychological shackles women put on themselves through their cowardly compliance with the social injustice makes a pure woman like Tess a victim instead of an independent woman who can control her own fate.