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This project explores how roads function in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, focusing on their significance in the initial and closing parts of the novel and their role in shaping the characters of Tess, Alec, and Angel. The document delves into the symbolic meaning of roads in the narrative, Tess's triple essence, and the importance of the May Day scene.
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Por Silvia García Bencomo Tutor: José Tomás Monterrey Rodríguez
Grado en Estudios Ingleses Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana Facultad de Humanidades Universidad de La Laguna, 2015
The purpose of this project is to study the roads, ways and paths in Thomas Hardy‘s Tess of the d’Urbervilles as structural and cohesive elements of the novel. It is a masterpiece of naturalistic English literature. Tess is a tragedy about a young girl who faces the consequences of being seduced and of becoming a single mother in Victorian countryside England. By describing both the road and the landscape, Hardy emphasizes the symbolic meaning of the story, often anticipating what is going to happen in future episodes, so that the narration of events on roads functions—like the chorus in a Greek tragedy—to clarify the plot, to warn, or to guide the reader. The road reflects the protagonist‘s development through the different ‗phases‘ (as Hardy called them) of her life, and its description is transformed as the heroine is. It becomes Hardy‘s nexus among characters, scenes and settings. This project will study how roads operate in both the initial and closing parts of the novel, as well as their role in adding a deep symbolic meaning to the narrative events involving Tess, Alec and Angel. The road is clearly a symbol of one‘s life. In the novel, roads are used to indicate how Tess‘s life is developing, mostly as a victim of nature, society and sexuality. She is forced twice to exile from her home in Marlott and it is on the road where she wanders to find her place. As it is a naturalistic novel, Hardy‘s treatment of roads and smaller tracks represents an important strategy to show the invisible forces of nature acting upon the individual. Tess cannot escape her destiny as a sexual victim in Hardy‘s Wessex countryside. This project will also pay attention to meaningful elements encountered by Tess on roads, such as minor characters, animals, or objects, like the parson or the shepherd, the pheasants, or the ‗Cross- in-Hand‘ stone. It is divided into four main parts comprising: a general approach to the matter, roads connected with Alec, roads associated with Angel, and an analysis of the labyrinthine web of tracks leading her to Stonehenge. The main aim is to show how roads are central to reinforce the symbolic meaning of Hardy‘s novel.
Key words: nature, paganism, road, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy.
Thomas Hardy‘s Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman (1891) is usually considered a masterpiece of English naturalistic fiction. Although today it is seen as a realistic writing, when it was first published it was a revolutionary novel as it depicted elements of an emergent literary trend in France. In naturalism, characters are subordinated to underlying invisible powers, such as fate, laws of nature, etc., that force them to struggle for survival in a merciless, ruthless environment. The naturalistic movement was partly influenced by Charles Darwin‘s The Origin of Species (1859). In the case of Tess , this influence is very strong, not only owing to the cruelty of nature against the main characters, but also to the impossibility of escaping from the consequences of her social/genetic degradation. Hardy‘s Tess responds to this creative pattern. She was still a simple country-girl when she became a single mother. Then, burdened with a turbulent past, she is abandoned by her beloved husband Angel on the wedding evening, and impelled to become abhorred Alec‘s lover in exchange of welfare for her family. However, for Thomas Hardy, Tess embodies the three types of women characteristic of his fiction: the common natural woman who asks nothing from life, the young woman ready for marriage, and the femme fatale who delights in seducing men, in other words, Tess must be seen in her triple essence: woman and victim of both, her love and sexuality. This complex construction of the character is consistent from the opening scene on May Day until the end when she must comply with her destiny.
A common aspect among Hardy‘s ‗Wessex novels‘ is also the influence of Greek tragedies as their narrative structure^1. In his ‗Wessex novels,‘ or novels of ‗character and environment‘ as he called them, Hardy becomes ―the tragic humanist-realist of Wessex, finding essential human nature in the lives of the rural protagonist […] pitted in conflict with ‗Fate‘ or ‗Nature‘‖ (Widdowson 5). Throughout his latest novels, Hardy explored and exploited the invisible forces of nature acting upon the character by following the patterns of the Greek tragedy, a structural technique that he started to develop in his novel The Return of the Native (1878), as John Paterson comments:
(^1) Thomas Hardy gave the name ‗Wessex‘ to his novelistic space as a means to represent true Victorian countryside life in his fiction. It corresponds to the southern and southwest of England, a territory where the former Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex was located. The name ‗Wessex Novels‘ is commonly given to the six novels of the ―Wessex Edition‖ in 1912: Far from the Maddening Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1896).
In the ceremonial chapters of Egdon Heath and Eustacia Vye, in the set speeches and soliloquies of the heroine, in the novel‘s conscientious observation of the unities of time and space, in its organization (as originally planned) in terms of the five parts or ‗acts‘ of traditional tragedies, The Return of the Native was meant to recall the immensities of Sophocles and Shakespeare. (107)
Throughout the five parts, Hardy evokes also the Greek tragedy through imaginary allusion to Prometheus. As Paterson points out ―Clym and his Egdon Heath are specially affiliated with the banished Titan, with the fallen benefactor of mankind; but is the novel fire imaginary, by inference Promethean, that mostly fully asserts this primary motif‖(110). The moors of Egdon are presented as almost in flames, and the vivid descriptions provided by the narrator almost made Egdon functions as another character of the novel. The same situation is repeated in Tess , where the intense and detailed description of landscapes turns nature into an active, vital element rather than a mere setting. Although the structure of the Greek tragedy is clearly presented in The Return of the Native , in his following novels Hardy will progressively blur this pattern albeit still noticeable. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles , the novelist still applies the structure of the classical tragedy, as it is divided in phases that function as ‗acts‘. Hardy conserves in this novel a theatrical aspect, since the descriptions of this novel seem to perform in front of the audience. Hardy provides a vivid staging of the invisible forces acting on the human being. Likewise, Tess includes hints of this classic genre with elements such as the chorus, which is metaphorically introduced by means of several narrative strategies and devices, especially when Tess is on the road moving from one place to another. These include not only actual roads and tracks but more importantly the people, animals, objects, weather conditions, etc. that Tess comes across, because they are meaningful to the symbolic understanding of the novel.
This project concentrates on the parts of Tess of the d’Urbervilles where characters are moving on roads and smaller tracks in order to study, firstly, how they provide cohesiveness, a nexus to unify the different ‗phases‘ that Tess undergoes, and secondly, how these parts determine the symbolic dimension. Therefore, the first part of this project analyses roads and tracks in order to explore how they operate in the novel: the first subsection provides a general overview of the initial chapters (up to chapter V, inclusive), whereas the second one focuses on a spot called ‗Cross-in-Hand,‘ described at the end of chapter XLVI (389-91), as an example that shows how roads functions in the novel when Hardy combines, in relationship with one single place, the development of the plot, the lives of the characters and
Thomas Hardy has transformed the natural environment in the central element of his literary writings. Hardy concentrates in the smallest details, imperceptible natural elements to plain sight. His images of nature add precise information, thus providing the spatial and symbolic background for the story.
Throughout Tess , the protagonist moves several times from one place to another, and even when she settles in a new household, there are many other smaller tracks where central events take place. Roads and paths are placed in a close setting where the whole story is developed. The dramatic action is restricted to South Wessex and, only on one scene, the protagonists travel to a surrounding town of Mid-Wessex. Moreover, by showing and describing different types of ways, Hardy can express emotions, moods, or predict future events. This first part concentrates on the analysis of roads of the first five chapters of the novel. In the meantime, I would also like to argue that Hardy applies lineal roads when Tess‘s life adopts a monotonous and even predictable aspect. By the contrary, curved tracks imply certain complexity in her future life, as well as, anticipate her fall. Besides, Hardy also describes crossroads or intersection implying a bifurcation not only of the way but also in the lives of the protagonists.
2.1. Opening Road: from Marlott to Tantridge.
As soon as the novel starts, Thomas Hardy makes clear the naturalistic character of the novel, as well as the scenographical and theatrical sense, as Lodge comments (qtd. in Niemeyer 35). In the opening paragraph of this novel, a middle-aged man walking along a road from Shaston to Marlott it is described. Hardy presents this man (Tess‘s father) as a universal human being at any time and at any place, an anonymous individual in the course of history and time. This strategy—presenting the characters through the road—is not only restricted to Tess but it can be seen in previous novels as The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). In this novel, Hardy is presenting a marriage enclose into routine that he is representing through a vulgar, monotonous and lineal road located in the most common and graceless place around Wessex:
…the scene for that matter being one of the might have been matched to almost any spot in any country in England at this time of the year; a road neither straight nor crooked, neither level nor hilly, bordered by hedges, trees, and other vegetation, which had entered the blackened-green stage of color that the doomed leaves pass through on their way to dingy and yellow, and red. (70)
This sense of drabness and boredom is constantly repeated in the descriptions of roads that they come across. The same occurs in Tess , where ways and paths portray the life of the maid, as well as acts as a nexus of the different villages that appears in this novel. Through the road Hardy offers a guided tour through the relevant places of the heart of Wessex.
The protagonist of the Tess ‘s opening scene is John Durbeyfield. During his way home, he meets a priest who is going to change the fate of his family. According to the parson, John is the direct descendant of an aristocrat who came to England with William the Conqueror. Thus, he and his offspring are not ordinary villagers but they belong to the lineage of the d'Urbervilles, which had lands throughout the region. This is the starting point of the novel, and what triggers the father‘s greed, as he really believes the story of the priest and will do anything to achieve the real social status belonging to him.
John Durbeyfield follows the road to Marlott, not as a simple haggler but as member of the nobility, even treating a boy who sees on the way as his servant. The reader, as Tess‘s father does, keeps on the road until the narrator offers a panoramic view of the valley of Blackmoor. Down the hill, it is seen a group of young maiden dancing to the music. Among them is Tess Durbeyfield, a naïve girl wearing a white dress described with a "peony mouth and large innocent eyes" (51). Hence, in the first reference to Tess, Hardy has used the environment and nature to lead the reader to his heroine, and to describe the maid‘s physical attributes.
The festivity which Tess and the other maiden are celebrating is the May Day dance. This is a pagan ritual that dates back to the times of Celts and celebrates spring, fertility and, as Keating and Hickey pointed out, ―the purity of this season.‖ The narrator refers to this celebration as ―local Ceralia‖ (49), making allusion to the ancient Roman goddess Ceres and reinforcing the idea of fertility. However, Hardy is not only including this festivity with the folklore associations given in the Victorian Era, but also he is applying the ancient connotation of this ritual, since for the old Celts and Saxons the May Day was a celebration to the Sun and the first of May was for them ―the day of the fire,‖ as Keating and Hickey explain. So, Hardy is playing with the double meaning of this word and presents a pure and
drunker whom nobody believes. Hardy is also portraying in John the social degradation of the d‘Urbervilles, as he is a peasant from the lower class who drinks the incomes of the family.
A path leads now our protagonist home, from where she will go to look for her parent in a nearby inn. This is the first time that a road is mentioned after the opening scene—and therefore after the pagan forces had fallen upon Tess—and what is presented is a ―dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty progress‖ (62). On this occasion, the way shows a gloomy and twisted aspect that anticipates how will be the life of the girl in the future: a tragedy with comings and goings. However, the interesting issue about this description is that Hardy is implying that lanes and streets coexist together in the same space. The novelist is portraying the imminent urban change that is undergoing the rural England. For Hardy, the road was a manner to defend the rural against the modern; for that, his protagonist is seen walking, riding, or on a wagon.
To connect this episode with the next scene, Hardy uses the road again. He places Tess and his brother Abraham in a horse-driven cart crossing an uphill way. After an incident, the girl causes the death of the horse, the only source of family supports. This creates in the maid a sense of guilty that will make her to accept the proposition of working for the d‘Urbervilles, which begins the action of the novel (LitCharts). So, once more it is on the road where a trigger point for the novel happens, and the way is the one that is guiding Tess to the hands of Alec d‘Urberville. Apart from that, the symbolism of Prince (the horse) on the road is reinforcing the idea posed above; the death of this horse, caused by an incident with a modern carriage, represents the progressive death of the rural way of life (LitCharts).
With a sense of guilt, Tess starts her way to Tantridge in order to meet their alleged relatives. Hardy depicts the road of Tess‘s journey with a symbolic language suggesting that something important is coming: ―Tess Durbeyfield route on this memorable morning lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the Vale‖ (75). During her way, the narrator reinforces the innocence of the girl by saying she has never visited any place outside the valley. But the road ends, and Tess ascends on foot a slope that she scales without almost realize, as if she was absent. Here, Hardy predicts and anticipates how is going to be the maid sexual relation with Alec, since she does not know what are they doing and the consequences of that until it is too late.
Thomas Hardy includes two scenes in which the road forks. The division of the road implies a separation, as well as indicates different possibilities or aspects for the person who is on the crossroad. This final assumption is applied to the bifurcation that Alec and Tess find in their way. Both characters reach a point where the road parts in four different tracks. Since this episode takes place almost at the end of the novel, it can be assumed that they symbolize the four different selves of Tess represented in the novel: innocent girl, single mother, wife and lover—Tess‘s final option is to take this road and becoming Alec‘s mistress in order to survive. Moreover, there is another episode where Tess and Clare reach a crossroad. In their case, there are two possible ways: one to Marlott and the other one to Emminster.
When Alec d‘Urberville reappears in the heroine‘s life, Tess has come from Emminster after a failed visit to Angel‘s family. Hardy depicts the maid‘s way back as tedious—―Along the tedious length of Benville lane…‖ (378)—in order to represent a hopeless Tess who is wandering those roads. As she is tired of walking, she stops in a village where a preacher is delivering a service. This man is no other than Alec, who seems to be totally changed because of faith. Tess recognizes him and runs away. She has reached a desert white road, to where Alec has followed her. Both lovers are once again on the road, the natural space where they became one. As it occurs in the first ‗phase‘ of the novel, the road has acted as a nexus among Tess and Alec, leading the woman precisely to the village where Alec is. While they are walking, he tells him the impure thoughts she still evokes in him. During their way, the atmosphere becomes creepy and darker, particularly when they reach a wall with red and blue paintings—a combination of colours that generates purple, a symbol of a suffering love—whit a fragment of the Sixth Commandments. These paintings can be understood as a metaphorical representation of the Greek chorus which is on the road warning Tess, in this case of the malign intentions of Alec. Similar paintings appeared after Tess was seduced by Alec and she decided to abandon Tantridge. However, they can be also a symbolic representation of Tess‘s subconscious as she feels guilty by her former attraction to Alec.
Both characters keep on the road until they reach a crossroad and a stone called ‗Cross-in-Hand,‘ depicted as a monolith with ―a negative beauty of tragic tone‖ (389). The villain cheats Tess telling her this spot was once a Holy Cross. Alec is taking advantage of the stone‘s advanced state of deterioration, which can be analyzed as metaphor of the d‘Urbervilles degradation—the Durbeyfields are the traces of the stone still erected. Putting
until that moment. Besides, the road was where they met and it is on it where they separate, implying the idea that what Hardy started on the road he finishes on the road.
3. WAYS CONNECTED TO ALEC d’URBERVILLE.
3.1. Paths Related to the Plot.
The episodes or scenes concerning Alec are mainly connected to sexuality and temptation. The most important scene relate to d‘Urberville is the one in which Tess sexuality is firstly insinuated in the strawberry fields.
After meeting Alec d‘Urberville in Tantridge, he invites the young woman to see the orchards and, through a small track, he leads her to a strawberry field. In this scene, Hardy boasts of his Romantic influence, using a poetic language in which every detail and description is important to comprehend the whole meaning of the situation. Clearly, the author does not leave anything to imagination since all what he wanted to express, directly or indirectly, is portrayed through nature imaginary. Even emotions are evoked using this device, as in this moment when Alec is trying to seduce his alleged cousin with strawberries. Alec is offering this fruit to Tess and putting it directly in her mouth. The eroticism of this scene is not only given by this action, but also by the description of the environment:
He conducted her about the lawns, and flowers- beds, and conservatories; and thence to the fruit-garden and greenhouse, where he asked her if she liked strawberries…D‘Urberville began gathering specimens of the fruit for her, handing back to her as he stooped; and, presently, selecting a specially fine product of the ‗British Queen‘ variety, he stood up and held it by the stem to her mouth. (80-1)
The sexuality of this excerpt, it is given by the use of ‗flower-beds‘ since Hardy‘s could use other word to depict the landscape that surround them, but with this specific term he is given a complete sexual connotation to the scene and seems to be telling the reader what is going to happen. Moreover, Hardy is describing here a primitive, natural man who is moved by his instincts and his sexual attraction for Tess, while his antagonist, Angel, is presented as a civilized man with moral values rooted in the Christian tradition. Apart from that, this fragment also shows Hardy‘s taste for country‘s activities such as cultivation of fruit, reinforcing his preference for the rural versus the modern. He will let see this penchant for the rural labors in different parts of the story, not only in the figure of Tess, who is always
leaves Tess lying on the roadside while he is going to discover their localization. When Alec goes back with Tess, the narrator describes her as a pure and immaculate creature, wearing a white dress and in sound sleep. The environment becomes erotic, sensual as well as mysterious, since both are wrapped by a fog that is surrounding this intimate moment.
The great enigma of this passage is if Tess was raped or just seduced by Alec, a controversy issue that opened a debate that is still a hot topic. As the narrator describes, d‘Urberville, attracted by Tess‘s beauty, ―knelt, and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers‖ (119). He seems to be taking advantage of her while she is defenseless. However, the narrator describes ―gentle roosting birds‖ and ―hopping rabbits and hares‖ which seem not shocked or disturbed by seeing an act of violence. Thus, the environment approves of and encourages this natural instinct. Kristin Brady goes further and affirms that ―the sexual relationship had continued beyond the single encounter in The Chase. Whether it began as a rape or seduction, Tess had subsequently ‗been stirred to confused surrender awhile‘‖ (163). So, Tess‘s sexuality was awakened that night by Alec. For Brady, what makes her different from other literary maidens and heroines is precisely her sexuality (160). Hence, Tess and her seducer are not antagonists rather than two young creatures moved by their animal instincts. The road is the natural element where their instincts are satisfied; the way evokes a sexual primitivism that the narrator reinforces calling The Chase ―the oldest wood of England‖ (116).
The scene concludes with the end of the first ‗phase‘ and Tess is ―Maiden No More‖. She is seeing walking on a road carrying a heavy basket, a symbolic representation of the consequences of that sexual relation: her pregnancy. In this case, the road is not only a structural element but also serves as a nexus between a young innocent Tess and the adult woman who carries a burden, out of sin and passion.
During her way home to Marlott, a man offers to carry her basket but Tess refuses his help. This man is in the process of painting on a wall ―thou, shalt, not, commit adultery‖—one of the Ten Commandments that God gave Moses as rules to live by—but when she looks to the writing he has not yet written the last word. The way Tess feels guilty by it suggests that she was not raped by Alec, but she is coping with part of the responsibility in that act. By seeing the man painting those words, Tess starts to be conscious of the offense committed against her family. As explained previously, the sign-writer has no relevance for the plot itself but his intervention is what makes Tess (and the reader) conscious of her actions. Therefore,
he resembles the chorus that Hardy includes echoing Greek tragedies. This individual marks an evolution in Tess‘s life, as the maid is now aware that she is a sinner whose social life is in decadence. There is no place for a fallen woman, like Tess, in society. Patricia Ingham compares Hardy‘s heroine with a ―Magdalene figure,‖ a prostitute in the eyes of society (82). For Ingham, the narrator defends the maid‘s innocence as she was just responding to her impulses: ―since she is no sexless he construes her as all sex‖ (83). Thus, Tess‘s sexuality, awakened in the pagan ritual of May Day, is part of her maturity not only as a woman but as a natural creature who is led by her primitive instincts.
After the episode of the painting, Hardy employs the road in order to connect Tess‘s next episode. In a lane ―just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top struck the west hedge midway‖ (136), it is seen Tess Durbeyfield. The narrator depicts a calm, sweet yet dry environment, and Hardy‘s heroine seems to be the personification of Mother Nature by doing the most beautiful and delicate act: breastfeeding a baby. The bastard child is the materialization of Tess‘s sexual intercourse with Alec; the baby is the Durbeyfield‘s shame, the fruit of her offense to her family and a creature born out of misery. That is why she decides to call him Sorrow when she baptizes him at home because of the imminent death of the baby. As a traditional maid, our protagonist‘s desire is to bury her son in a graveyard, so she takes the track to the church. Just by pure coincidence or by fate, she meets the priest on the road. The vicar, motivated by the compassion that Tess produces in him, accepts. The gloomy road is the only partner which accompanies our heroine to bury her death son. The young girl presented by Hardy in earlier pages has nothing to do with the courageous mother who baptized her son at home, went out at night alone with her death child and pleaded her son‘s redemption.
When Alec and Tess meet again, she is now an abandoned woman trying to survive without the protection of her husband. Now she is aware that Alec is a sexual threat, a predator, as Laura Claridge defines him (74). Supposedly, he is repentant of the damage and suffering he causes in Tess, and to make amend of her mistake, Alec decides to propose her marriage again and again. Alec follows Tess for the roads of Wessex, until the death of her father when he offers to help financially Tess‘s family since he is his husband by nature. He is humiliated by a new refusal of the woman, but his obsession with the protagonist will make him to persecute Tess in her move to Kingsbere, after she is forced to leave Marlott. Once in her new village, Tess decides to take the lane to the d‘Urbervilles Aisle, and visit one of the buildings belonging to her family. The place is depicted as gloomy, dark and picturesque but
As it can be seen in the previous section, roads related to Alec d‘Urberville have a closer connection with nature and with primitivism. When Tess is under the influence of the villain, Hardy shows a creature of nature that follows her desires. Nevertheless, the maid that is depicted while she is under the spell of Angel Clare is trying to be a civilized woman, a lady. Tess Durbeyfield has evolved because of the events occurred in her life, that forced her to grow up too early. Due to these events, the Tess who Angel meets is far from being an innocent girl but a woman with experience.
4.1. Constructing a Way.
4.1.1. A Love on the Road.
From the opening of the novel, the road is the connecting element between Tess and Angel. As presented in the first part of this research, the couple met while Angel Clare was on the road with his brothers. They do not see each other again, until the moment in which Tess is conducted along a curved track to Talbothays, the place where their love will flourish.
A Hardyan feature throughout the novel is the use of scenery ―to create an echoing dimension for the narrow, folk-ballad tragedy in which Tess is trapped‖ (Álvarez 19). This characteristic can be seen when the heroine arrives at Talbothays. The significance of the environment is shown in a vivid imaginary, creating a tridimensional space and transporting the reader to Froom Valley. The protagonist, who rather recedes into the background when the narrator is providing a panoramic view of the landscape, merges with the environment as if she were a creature of nature:
Not quite sure of her direction, Tess stood still upon the hemmed expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings than that fly. The sole effect of her presence upon the placid valley so far had been to excite the mind of a solitary man… (159)
Talbothays is described as lush, green, and fertile, representing Tess‘s happiness (as well as her biological impulses) in these lands. The maid‘s natural beauty draws the attention of every man, including Angel Clare. Shortly after their meeting, the natural space will
become the scene of the idyllic romance between Tess and Angel. The visionary power by which Hardy‘s depicts the two lovers falling in love implies a delicate language that remains poetry. For Álvarez ―at critical moments of the book, narrative and description and feeling fuse together in a peculiar complex way to produce effects which are, literally, beyond those customarily found in prose fiction…‖ (16). Therefore, the relationship of Tess and Angel is comprised in a natural environment that resembles the romantic poetry.
Nature is also used to reproduce the biological forces that move Tess‘s sexual desire. According to Patricia Ingham Tess‘s sexuality is not only evoked through others, she is aware of her own ‗impassionate nature‘ (82). Angel is the object of the protagonist‘s desire, and she is also the personification of the man‘s urgency for a physical encounter since both are part ―of an organism called sex‖ (204). An example of an erotic and sensual moment is seen when Angel is playing the harp and Tess is delighted by his music, as Orpheus enchanted Hades and Persephone with his. The exaltation of the moment is reinforced by the natural elements that create an intimate and romantic atmosphere:
Dim, flattened, constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed to her as now, when they wandered in the still air with a stark quality of nudity…The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass which sent up mist of pollen at a touch… She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistly-milk and slug-slime, andrubbing off upon her naked arms… (178)
Here Hardy is using the environment as a metaphor of the ardent love Tess feels for Angel. The natural space is depicted as ―juicy‖ and ―damp,‖ so the vegetation itself is portraying the physical passion the protagonist is experimenting. Besides, the outskirt of the garden is a clear symbol of the maiden‘s sexuality, since through this resource the author is telling that the young woman has her sexual desire asleep (after the consequence of her intercourse with Alec), but it is flourishing because of Angel. Likewise, Hardy is advocating this eroticism with words such as ―nudity‖ and ―naked,‖ and reinforcing this entire atmosphere by describing Tess as a cat, a feline associated to sexuality and femininity, and therefore associating the girl with animal and primitive instincts.
