URBAN DEPRAVITY, RURAL UNSOPHISTICATION: HEREDITARY TAINT IN HARDY'STESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES

Abstract

Critics have used various approachesto explain the paradoxes or inconsistencies evident in the characterization of Angel Clare in Thomas Hardy'sTess of the D'Urbervilles(1891); however, by examining the social purity movement and its response to increasingly popular theories of degeneration at the fin de siècle, we can understand the interplay of contradictory ideas at work in Angel. The tension between the supposedly modern, secular viewpoints that Angel exhibits in the beginning of the narrative and his unexpected return to a conservative and misogynistic ideology upon Tess's confession of her “fall” puzzles readers, fellow characters, and perhaps even the narrator of the novel itself, who accounts for the alteration as simply the hypocrisy of a man who “was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings” (Hardy 265; vol. 2, ch. 39). Oliver Lovesey suggests that the reason why “Clare somewhat bombastically renounces his father's Christianity, but . . . still stumbles on elements of traditional social morality” and why he “bypasses the resurrection, but cannot negotiate around Tess's ‘unintact state’” is that Tess's “virginity replaces the resurrection in his religion of unbelief” (913–14). Lovesey argues that Angel displaces religious faith in Christ's resurrection onto a material substitute, Tess's virginity, and that the revelation of her lack of virginity then catapults him into a despair akin to the despair of annihilated spiritual belief, “the void of an unbeliever's hell” (924). While I am also concerned with Angel's fetishization of virginity, I believe that it is significant that his obsession with purity extends beyond Tess's virginity to encompass rural space as a whole, a space in which Tess's virginity constitutes but one part. The very capaciousness of Angel's devotion to purity situates him squarely within the environmental binaries characteristic of later theories of urban degeneration.