Merging Fiction and Reality: Hardy’s Portrayal of a Fallen Woman in Tess of the D’ Urbervilles

Abstract

My paper attempts to simultaneously discuss the reality of the ‘fallen woman’ in the Victorian era and the fiction based on this reality. The narrator of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’urbervilles has long been accused of being the third pursuer of Tess along with Alec and Angel. He has been held guilty of continuously fawning over Tess’s lips and tongue, of rendering her ‘passive’ during the most crucial moments in her life, of holding her body responsible for her violation. My paper attempts to refute such arguments. In order to do so, this paper not only analyses certain important episodes from the novel as described by the narrator but also seeks to make a comparative study between the narrator and the people who were directly involved in the ‘rescue’ of the ‘fallen women’ by setting up penitentiaries for them. The fact that ‘fallen women’ were treated as patients in the homes called ‘penitentiaries’ raises two crucial questions. Why did the Victorian society not consider debauchery and predatory nature of the males as a disease? What did the ‘fallen women’ have to seek penance for? Obviously the self proclaimed harbingers of morality of the Victorian era deliberately avoided answering these questions as that would reveal the hideous selves of those men who were the causes of the ‘fall’ of the women. My paper concludes by showing how the foundation of the narrator’s understanding of ‘fallen women’, unlike the larger section of the society, was not based on hypocrisy.