Introduction: Modernity and the Crisis of Morals

Abstract

Published in 1891, Thomas Hardy’s novel of tragic heroism, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, stylistically reflects the nineteenth-century mode of literary realism but also foreshadows some of the major moral concerns of early twentieth-century modernism. Hardy’s narrator comments that although Tess’s meagre education in rural Dorset does not equip her with the self-consciousness to articulate her thoughts, she nevertheless feels ‘the ache of modernism’.1 He declares that, without speaking in words of ‘logy and ism’, she realises intuitively her condition and manages to express ‘sensations which men and women have vaguely grasped for centuries’.2 In this way, Tess is shown to tap into an ancient repository of intuitive thought, but also stands on the cusp of a new age of modernity. Her world is marked both by the kind of bleak continuity Shakespeare’s Macbeth experiences as his doom approaches, ‘numbers of tomorrows just all in a line [that] all seem very fierce and cruel’, and the processes of technological change, represented in the novel by the garish new farm machinery.3 The ache Tess feels, although she cannot theorise it fully, derives from the recognition that although technological change is a reality, even in the remote corners of Hardy’s late nineteenth-century Dorset, it will not bring about a manifest improvement in her family’s life. Indeed, social change not only denies Tess real opportunities for self-improvement (other than surrendering to the will of her male suitors), but also fails to offer a clear set of moral values that would help her to contend with such change.KeywordsMoral DilemmaMoral StandardMoral QuestionModernist LiteratureMoral PracticeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.