Consumer Culture in Tess

Early in the novel, we see that Tess takes some care in how she looks, what she wears, but not more than any other girl at the May-Day dance in the Vale. She has on her "best frock" but it's just a plain white dress, and she has a red ribbon, which does separate her from the group, though arguably more for the symbolic nature of the color than for the commodity status of the ribbon. It seems to me that either way this early adornment, compared to the later costumes both Angel and Alec push her to wear, acts more as foil to consumer culture than an example of it. The decadent consumer culture is not localized from or created in Tess's Wessex, but is rather a cultural import from the large social centers of England, shipped out to the country towns, where Tess does not end up until she is living as Alec's mistress. It seems as if the consumer culture is pushed on her by the two men in her life, or, to say it another way, though Tess may not be interested in it, Angel and Alec are very interested in it for her. Angel buys a series of fancy gifts for her before the wedding, and treats her almost like a doll on their wedding night, asking her to dress up in the clothes he bought her and the family jewels from his father. As Alec's mistress it seems plausible that her outfits are dictated by him, especially as he has always been described with a certain care about his clothes. Is Hardy then criticizing consumer culture and its effect on the "pure" rural country as portrayed by Tess? Hardy himself "attain[ed] almost to dapperness" (ODNB), but the novel concerns itself with the (feminine) unsullied country, with the regional local culture of Wessex and its value, not with middle-class (male) writers who have a knack for social climbing.

Wessex

Wessex is not a fictional place. It's just an old place. Though Hardy changed the specific names of cities, geographic areas, and other noteworthy locals, you can clearly see the similarities between the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of West Saxon, Hardy's Wessex, and the modern shire of Dorset, (and so could Hardy's audience).

Anglo-Saxon Wessex:

 Hardy's Wessex:

Modern Day Dorset: (corresponding to "The Wessex of Tess of the d'Urbervilles" in the Oxford University which I couldn't find a digital image of)

The use of Wessex in Tess highlights the motif of a noble family's decline, of Tess's "decayed aristocratic lineage" (Oxford Univeristy xviii), echoed in Hardy's own family's genealogy, where "the setting and themes of the novel are called up by his diary notes recording visits to the Vale of Blackmoor and reflections upon the social decline of the Hardy family" (Oxford University xvi). 

Wessex, or the kingdom of West Saxon, is an ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom, at the height of its power before the invasion of William the Conquerer and the Normans. What I referenced in class the other day was something we had talked about on the first day of "Writing Medieval Gender." King Alfred the Great was the King of Wessex, and he was the first to "unite" England, circa 937, with the battle of Brunanburh. Alfred made Wessex a center of culture, of learning, and literature. What London and Southern England became later, Wessex was then. Further back, Wessex comes up in Beowulf, with references and parallels to King Aethelwulf, circa 855. 

Reviving the kingdom of Wessex in Victorian England connotes ancient glory and nobility, and I think elevates the narrator's description of the type of intelligence inherent to the region, as coming from the historical inheritance of the Anglo-Saxons and challenging the supposed superiority of those concepts and philosophies which are not localized in Wessex-origin. Tess, as the Clarendon introduction states "expressed most clearly... Hardy's maturing concept of Wessex and its social history" (Clarendon 20). But despite the Anglo-Saxon references and rich history, the noble family to which the Durbeyfields belong does not originate in Wessex. Rather the family Hardy chooses to follow, the d'Urberville knight, "Sir Pagan d'Urberville, that renowned knight who came from Normandy with William the Conquerer" (Hardy, Oxford University 14) is a Norman invader (naming him "Pagan" also bears looking into). I think the ennoblement of original Wessex still stands though. The problems for Tess occur when her Norman lineage is revealed or stressed, and valued over her natural connection to Wessex as herself, or the subverting of her matrilineal feminine heritage in favor of her patrilineal d'Urberville genealogy. 

Love it or Hate it

The introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of Tess by Penny Boumelha starts by talking about the controversy caused by the novel's claim that "Tess has done nothing wrong" (xiii) and its connection to the polarizing nature of the text. Boumelha claims on the very first page of her Introduction that "from the outset [Tess] polarized its readers into supporters and detractors" (xiii).

What I find so interesting about that statement, is that the polarization of Tess's audience is just as alive today as it was when the book was published. When I mention this class, explain what we're doing, and a friend/parent/acquaintance asks the obvious follow up question: "Which book are you working on?" I seem to get one of two responses. Either they love Tess, Tess is the greatest of the choices I could've made (when I was home last Winter I was on a panel at my high school, and was talking about the 19th Century Novel, mentioned what we read for class, started talking about Middlemarch, and the english teacher I was talking to replies with, "Tess is so much better though.") Or, which so far has been more common, I get "Oooooooohhhh... why?" as if it is the most unsavoury reading experience they've ever had, and to which I then attempt to defend my choice.

Yes, there are things I don't like about Tess, there are aspects that bother me, but there are also elements I find incredibly intriguing, powerful, and quite beautiful.

One of the reasons I chose Tess was because of an offhand quote in one of our readings (Kristin Brady, Alec and Tess: Rape or Seduction?) from the 19th Century Novel last fall. It was a quote from a letter Thomas Hardy wrote to Thomas MacQuoid (and my next order of business is to find this letter) where Hardy worries about his characterization of Tess that "I have not been able to put on paper all that she is, or was, to me" (Brady 127). I find this element, of Tess as more than the text she inhabits, particularly in Hardy's experience of her, incredibly intriguing, especially in contrast to what seems to be Tess's ultimate fate of standing symbolically for women in general rather than herself in particular.