TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES: A RELIGIOUS APPROACH ON FATE, MORALITY, AND REDEMPTION
TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES: A RELIGIOUS APPROACH ON FATE, MORALITY, AND REDEMPTION

Summary/Abstract: “Tess of the d’Urbervilles, novel by Thomas Hardy, first published serially in bowdlerized form in the Graphic (July – December 1891) and in its entirety in book form (three volumes) the same year. It was subtitled A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented because Hardy felt that its heroine was a virtuous victim of a rigid Victorian moral code. Now considered Hardy’s masterwork, it departed from conventional Victorian fiction in its focus on the rural lower class and in its open treatment of sexuality and religion”.2 Like each and every masterpiece of its genre, Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a classic 600 page novel which manages to draw a reader’s attention from the very beginning but not in a positive way, on the contrary in a negative one. As one of Thomas Hardy’s critics once noted, the first thing that strikes you is the bleakness3 of the novel.Considered by many critics as a quite depressing piece of literature, Hardy’s tragic love story is for sure a testimony of an English age when morality had a dual character and sin was treated differently according to the sex one had.

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