Paganism, Nature, and Fate in Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Introduction: Stonehenge as Heathen Temple

'It is Stonehenge!' said Clare.

'The heathen temple, you mean? … you used to say at Talbothays that I was a heathen. So now I am at home.'

This description of Stonehenge from Tess of the D'Urbervilles is not merely the poetic imagination at work. Stonehenge is indeed, by any definition, a 'heathen temple'. This great Neolithic monument, situated in an isolated part of Wiltshire in southern England, was constructed between approximately 3100 BC and 1490 BC. It consists of two concentric rings of great undressed stones set upright in the ground, around a horseshoe formed by five huge trilithons (two upright stones with a horizontal stone supported across their top surfaces), with a further arc of smaller upright stones within it, and a flat stone, thought to have been an altar, at the centre. Although much about Stonehenge and other such structures remains unclear, as modern archaeologists admit, the structure and alignment of this monument indicate that its function was ritual, possibly associated with the worship of the sun and the marking of significant moments in the annual cycle of nature:

There is a sufficient body of evidence to suggest strongly that astronomical observation was one, if not the most important, function of many stone circles… Observations… were probably integral to the planning of seasonal festivals. Down to medieval times, festivals were held in spring and at midsummer and, in north-west Europe, at Hallowe'en (the Celtic Samain) and May Day (the Celtic Beltane).

Stonehenge, like other ancient monuments of Wessex such as hill forts and castles, features several times in the writings of Thomas Hardy, both prose and poetry. Hardy was fascinated by archaeology and the societies and cultures of past ages, and particularly with their religious and mystical aspects. In The Return of the Native (1878), for example, he suggests that the custom of celebrating Bonfire Night on 5 November each year with huge bonfires on the crests of Wessex hills is of 'druidic' and 'Saxon' origin rather than relating to the Gunpowder Plot of the seventeenth century; elsewhere, notably in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), he makes great play with rituals that survive into his own age from ancient times.

Stonehenge, situated in the heart of Wessex, constituted an extremely potent source of symbolism for Hardy, as well as providing a setting of unique drama for the climactic scene of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. In the late nineteenth century Stonehenge was little understood, being connected variously with Merlin and King Arthur, Ancient Egyptians, wandering Trojan warriors, the Danes, and the Romans. The monument can thus be said to have constituted a place of memory — a location where the shared memory of a community (both the particular communities about which Hardy is writing and the wider community of those who read his works) could be created, recreated, and built upon as a vehicle for cultural ideas. Hardy uses it as a symbol of great power around which he weaves the life, character, and fate of his heroine, and through which he expresses her place in the wider universal order of things.

Paganism, Nature, and Tess's Identity

Fundamentally, Stonehenge for Hardy stands for 'the natural', and — as Hardy himself made clear — Tess Durbeyfield, described in the subtitle of Tess as 'a pure woman', is pure in the sense of being natural: in her femininity, her beauty, and her motivations. It is therefore fitting that it is at Stonehenge that the climax of the story, the arrest of Tess, takes place. This significance is prefigured in the early part of the book with the description in chapter II of the ritual of 'Club-walking Day', a pagan festival celebrating spring and fertility, in which Tess takes part. The story can thus be said to begin with a moving circle of girls and women in white — among them Tess, marked out by her red ribbon — performing a pagan ritual; it ends within the immobile circle of grey stones, a heathen temple of nature. The primitiveness of both these circles expresses the role that primitive, instinctive drives take in this highly sensual and tragic story, and marks one of the chief oppositional pairings Hardy used as a fundamental structure of the novel: that between 'nature' and 'society'.

The Club-walking dance is the first in a series of events and places with pagan associations that Hardy creates around Tess, and themes of paganism and the forces of nature emerge at several significant points in the book. The seduction of Tess by Alec D'Urberville takes place in an ancient woodland, The Chase, that surrounds the D'Urberville estate. In Hardy's description, the forces of nature to be found there and the primeval energies associated with them are emphasised:

Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above them rose the primeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which there poised gentle roosting birds in their last nap; and about them stole the hopping rabbits and hares.

Repeatedly, Hardy emphasises the oneness of Tess with nature, and relates that oneness directly to her gender. At times he seems almost to absorb Tess into the natural world, breaking down the barriers between the woman and the realm of animals, plants, and the earth. When she goes into the fields to work at the harvest after having Alec's child, she is described in a way that makes the link between womanhood, fertility, the earth, and the cycles of nature explicit. A 'field-man', writes Hardy, 'is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself with it.' After falling prey to Alec's desires, Tess feels guilt and shame and sees herself as a corrupt presence in an otherwise harmonious world; but Hardy in his narrative voice claims that:

she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.

This tendency to position women characters — and particularly young, fertile, sexually alive women — as 'forces of nature' reflects a movement in nineteenth-century literature in which:

young female characters who know too much are often placed literally in, and associated symbolically with, nature… To possess knowledge of nature, whether of her own desires, her physical body, the bodies of males, or of the creatures of the natural realm, indicated that a woman had ventured out into forbidden territory where the sexual and animal lurked.

The closeness of Tess to nature is thus not only a signifier of her potency as a physical, instinctual being but also of the dangers of her state, for herself and others. The implication is that she bears some responsibility for what happens to her; although how far her fate is the product of her own decisions and how far it results from drives and instincts that are too deep-rooted to be subject to rational control is left as an open question. One of the attributes of paganism for Hardy appears to be a quality of resignation to one's fate — an acceptance that human beings are fundamentally at the mercy of the forces of the natural world, supernatural agencies, and destiny itself. It is particularly noticeable that the female characters in Tess — Tess herself, her mother, the other village girls, the dairymaids at Talbothays — tend to express this view. 'Well, we must make the best of it, I suppose' is Tess's mother's comment on her seduction and pregnancy: '"Tis nater [i.e. nature], after all, and what pleases God.'

Tess is thus an embodiment of the timeless, primeval spirit of Nature, and is deeply embedded in the world of natural energies and forces. This primeval force of nature is embodied in The Chase, which comes to play such an important and tragic role in Tess's life, in the landscapes of her own home valley and of the various places in which she finds work, but above all it is expressed in the intuitive, instinctive, sensual character of Tess herself. Hence her feeling that, when she reaches Stonehenge and lies upon the altar, she has come home. A modern scholar has called Tess 'an incarnation of nature' and summarises Hardy's conception of her as expressing 'the life-force, that which is crucial to the existence of human nature.' The narrative 'continues to stress Tess's oneness with nature throughout… Tess herself, misled by social conventions, fails to recognise the extent to which her actions have been "purely" natural.' Tess, we are told at another point, is an example of 'women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature' who 'retain in their souls far more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized religion taught their race at a later date.'

Tess's place is to be at one with a pagan, untamed nature upon which the forces of civilisation — church, technology, social norms, law — have only a superficial effect. When Tess and Angel Clare take milk from the Talbothays dairy to the railway station, at a time when their love is just beginning to reach its full flowering, the contrast between the urbanised, technological modernity of the train and the rustic timelessness of Tess's appearance and manner is stressed:

The light of the engine flashed for a second upon Tess Durbeyfield's figure, motionless under the great holly tree. No object could have looked more foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels than this unsophisticated girl, with the round bare arms, the rainy face and hair, the suspended attitude of a friendly leopard at pause, the print gown of no date or fashion, and the cotton bonnet drooping on her brow.

Tess is literally illuminated by the light of the modern era, but that light cannot penetrate into her essence. She stands beneath a holly tree — itself a tree redolent of paganism and the forces of timeless nature — herself like an animal, a leopard, marked by none of the outward appearances of passing fashion but standing as if rooted in the soil.

Wessex Landscape as Fate

The soil of Wessex is as fundamental to Thomas Hardy's fiction as the characters who live their lives upon it. His fiction and poetry is deeply imbued with a sense of place, and his Wessex can be said to be not merely a setting for his stories but almost a character in its own right. It seems at times to have moods and motivations of its own, to express joy and despair, to cast the shadow of fate and destiny, and to mark and echo the events of birth, death, love, and separation. Tess, rich in landscape and natural description, is particularly potent in this respect.

For example, when Tess travels from her home valley, Blackmoor Vale, to work at the dairy in the Vale of Froom, the contrast between the shadows and overhanging doom of her old life and the light and freedom she hopes for in the new is clear: the new valley is 'not so luxuriantly beautiful, perhaps, as that other one which she knew so well; yet it was more cheering. It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the rival vale, and its heavy soils and scents; the new air was clear, bracing, ethereal.' The love that grows between Tess and Angel Clare at Talbothays Dairy is related to the rich and fertile landscape and made to seem inevitable in such a place: 'Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate.' Tess's new love is inevitable; in this respect, as in others, the role of the natural world in this novel is to constrain her within the bounds of her fate.

Tess is a novel full of fate, and Tess as a character appears to be generally accepting of the direction in which fate is taking her. At an early point in the story, her little brother Abraham asks her if the stars are worlds and, if so, whether they are all 'like ours':

'I don't know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound — a few blighted.'

'Which do we live on — a splendid one or a blighted one?'

'A blighted one.'

''Tis very unlucky that we didn't pitch on a sound one, when there were so many more of 'em!'

The narrator gives us to understand that Tess does not think it unlucky — she simply accepts it as fact.

Conclusion: Fate, Sacrifice, and Homecoming

The final scene of the novel takes place in Wintoncester, where Tess is hanged in the prison after her trial for murder. The hanging is not described directly, but through the eyes and actions of Angel Clare and 'Liza-Lu, Tess's younger sister, whom Tess had asked Angel to marry and look after. The two make their way to a vantage point so that they can see the tower of the prison; they climb the hill 'impelled by an irresistible force' and take their stand — significantly — beside another stone monument: a milestone. When the black flag is raised at the prison, signifying that the execution has taken place, the two react with a gesture that could be understood within the standards of Christian worship but which also carries pagan overtones of bowing down to connect themselves with the earth itself: 'The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, absolutely motionless.' The story thus ends as it began, with a blending of the ancient and modern through a form of religious observance.

This closing detail is emblematic of the weaving of the themes of paganism, nature, fate, and primitive feeling and instinct that characterises the whole of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Those forces come together in the climactic moment of Tess's arrest at Stonehenge, and the great grey stones of that structure — rooted, like Tess herself, in the soil of Wessex — can be said to symbolise the great themes of the story with power and economy: fate, destiny, sacrifice, change, and continuity. Tess was right; in her last few hours of freedom, she had indeed come home.