Tess also represents fallen humanity in a religious sense, as the frequent biblical allusions in the novel remind us. Just as Tess's ancestors were once glorious and powerful but are now sadly diminished, so too did the early glory of the first humans, Adam and Eve, fade with their expulsion from Eden , making humans sad shadows of what they once were. Tess thus represents what is known in Christian theology as original sin, the degraded state in which all humans live, even when - like Tess herself after killing Prince or succumbing to Alec—they are not wholly or directly responsible for the sins for which they are punished. This torment represents the most universal side of Tess: she is the myth of the human who suffers for crimes that are not her own and lives a life more degraded than she deserves .
Alec cannot accept Tess when his illusion of her ethereal being is shattered. Tess must be held to blame for not telling him, though fate, in the letter she wrote him remaining unseen and social pressure from her mother, are also partly responsible. Angel has imagined himself to be an enlightened humanist, but when he discovers his wife's ‘immoral' history he finds that his new attitudes have penetrated no deeper than his intellect. In the following lines, Angel clearly shows his double standard when morality is concerned:
‘In the name of our love, forgive me!' she wispered with a dry mouth. ‘I have forgiven you for the same!'
And, as he did not answer, she said again –
‘Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you , Angel.'
…'O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case.'11
At this point of the novel, the terrified Tess becomes aware of the fact that Angel did not love her very being and that their loves for each other differ. She loves him “in all changes and in all disgraces”; whereas the love he cherished was actually for another woman in her shape. Angel is not aware that, in his moral blindness and stupidity, and in rejecting the woman who is even prepared in her love for him to be his “wretched slave”, he actually denies his right to happiness, and actually rejects that part of himself that is absolutely necessary for the health of his being:
'I do forgive you, but forgiveness is not all.'
'And love me?'
To this question he did not answer. 12
And Tess, as she often does, verbalizes the viewpoint Hardy is expressing through her: 'It is in your own mind what you are angry at Angel; it is not in me. O, it is not in me, and I am not that deceitful woman you think me!' 13
Obviously, the intellectual and free-thinking Angel is the 'slave to custom and conventionality' and the relatively ignorant Tess is the true humanist. It takes Angel a year of traveling and suffering during which 'he had mentally aged a dozen years' 14 before he can throw off his strictly moral upbringing and realize the validity of Tess's viewpoint. As Hardy puts it, “his consistency was, ideed, too cruel.” 15 Moreover, Hardy writes that “with more animalism he would have been the nobler man…Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability.” 16
12 Ibid., p.302
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., p.421
15 Ibid., p.313
16 Ibid., p.315
11 Ibid., p.298
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