4 - The shaping of character in Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Summary

The characteristic of the principal actors in Tess that enables even the more melodramatic of them to remain viable is that they are not what they seem, and yet ultimately they are what they seem. By this I simply mean that, for example, thinking of Alec only as a vicious seducer overlooks his kindness and good humour and willingness to make amends; but to attempt to take these good qualities as alleviations of his essential impact on the life of Tess would be a still more serious distortion. Thus, for even the most sensitive readers, Alec is the ‘wrong man’ in Tess's life that the narrator indicates he is (5: 46), long before the seduction/rape; and his good qualities are essentially beside the point, although they give his portraiture the substance that makes his treatment of Tess and her murder of him a matter of regret for his sake as well as for hers. A less obvious example concerns Tess's sensual life. On her initial introduction to Alec she is portrayed as having ‘a luxuriance of aspect, a fulness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was. She had inherited the feature from her mother without the quality it denoted’ (5: 45).