Alec D'Urberville

Characterization of Alec D'Urberville
Hardy's methods of characterising Alec D'Urberville are far less varied compared to those he uses with either Angel and Tess:

• Hardy does signal his life as being extroverted, but Hardy described Alec's superficial personality through clothes and such symbols as his cigars.
• Hardy associates Alec with animals like horses, to demonstrate Alec's mastery.
• Alec is a two dimensional character, remaining much the same. with predictable actions and words.

Alec is a contrast to Angel. Although Alec and Angel are kept physically separate but Hardy compares and contrasts them regarding:

• Physical appearance
• Sensuality
• Coarseness/ Delicacy
• Religious jargon- Alec's register as a Christian convert is similar to the way in which Angel speaks when trying to defend himself or to be clever with Tess.
• Their identities as outsiders who are rootless, living on the margins of society .
• Their modernity- with Alec, modernism is reduced to fashion, the ostentatious use of money to seem ''with it".

Ironically, Hardy used Alec to point out Angel's dereliction of duty as a husband and his failure to appreciate Tess as a lover.

Alec as the villian of popular melodrama. Alec is obviously a sexual predator who is heartless, egocentric and vain. As such, he fits the stereotype made popular by Victorian melodrama, of the villainous outsider who seek the ruin of an innocent for his own pleasure. His stylish clothes, the driving of a fast carriage and the smoking of a cigar are typical melodramatic signifiers.

There are also moments when he seems to really love Tess, and his offers to help are as genuine as his selfish nature is capable of. With Hardy's revisions, he became more stereotypically the sexual predator, a counterpoint to Tess's purity.

This is shown through Alec's:

• Dandyism, that is to say his consious self-image as an idle and dissolute young man.
• Use of money to buy influence over Tess and her family, under the guise of helping them
• Use of disguised and tricks
• Name, which harks back to a false part- Mr Stokes has exploited it for his own prestige and pride (in contrast to Angel's father, who humbly honours the past for its wisdom). Alec himself sees this fake name as a joke and will not pretend anything with Tess.
• 'Honesty in dishonesty', typical of a 'villian' and contrasting with Tess's inherent sense of honesty and pride.

Catherine Earnshaw

From the beginning, Catherine is surrounded by mystery. We only first see her through a brief glimpse at the pages of her diary - 'detached sentences (...) scrawled in an unformed, childish hand.' The readers never meet her; she dies long before the story begins.

As a child, Catherine behaves spontaneously and naturally. She is selfish and believes she may act autonomously. Nelly Dean describes Catherine as 'mischievous and wayward'. Through the course of the novel, we come to know Catherine as an unruly and adventurous rebel, and the only Earnshaw besides her father who cares about Heathcliff. But she is not simply the nature-loving wild child Lockwood reads about; Catherine is also a status-consious social climber whose marriage destroys Heathcliff.

She is Catherine Earnshaw- Catherine Linton- Catherine Heathcliff; three identities that reveal the fragmentation in her character and her life. Catherine Earnshaw is Heathcliff's Catherine and Catherine Linton is Edgar's. But even when Catherine Earnshaw becomes Catherine Linton, she still maintains traces of her former self. This device, Catherine's diary, is very powerful in invoking the reader's sympathy and understanding for the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff.

During her weeks of recovery at Thrushcross Grange, Catherine is made into a groomed and civilized young lady. This is the future Catherine Linton: a privileged and indulged lady of the house.

She chooses between Edgar and Heathcliff and this is essentially a choice between a life of passion and self-fulfillment and a life adhering to social convention and morality. However, it is in keeping with her character, that Catherine believes she can continue her relationship with Heathcliff alongside her marriage. Catherine chooses culture (Edgar) over nature (Heathcliff) and the resulting conflict asserts the error of this decision.

Everything changes when Catherine marries Edgar: not only does she commit romantically to another man; she also leaves Wuthering Heights and raises her social status far beyond Heathcliff's reach. Catherine believes that with Edgar's money she can help Heathcliff get out from under Hindley.

Though Catherine is important to the story, she is only around for about half of the novel. She is more of a ghost, a fixation, and a memory than a character we get to know well. Buried between Edgar and Heathcliff, Catherine is in death, as she was in life, stuck between two lovers.

Angel Clare

Angel Clare is the youngest son of the Reverend and Mrs Clare. He goes against what the family had intended for him, a career in the ministry, like his father and brothers. Instead, Angel pursues a career that seems opposite of what his family would like for him- farming. His education comes from his schooling and from his personal experiences. He seems more in tune to the true natuee of religion, but in a more practical sense, unlike his university-educated brothers. Farming puts Angel on a level with the common folk who inhabitthe rural English countryside. He even rejects the popular notion of farm talk as "Hodge," or - as Hardy describes it- "the pitiable dummy portrayed in the newspapers, Angel arrives at Talbothays to educate himself in the workings of a farm and falls for an unpretentious dairymaid, Tess. Angel enters the novel at the very beginning, as the nameless young man who dances with the girls of Marlott and then disappears, nameless to the girls and readers.

Angel is a good man. He begins his relationship with Tess by offering to tutor her in history or any subject of her choosing, to make up for her lack of higher education. She gently refuses, bty he cannot help but fall in love with a gentle girl. His gentlemanly ways also come to the fore when he offers to carry all four dairymaids ove a swollen creek when the girls are on their way to church. It is a perfect excuse for all of the girls - Izz, Retty, Marian and Tess - to get closer to their desire, Angel Clare himself. He is sincere in his search for a good, hard-working woman who will be a help to him on his own harm. His choice of Tess seems an obvious one to him. However, his family has chosen Mercy Chant, a fine lady and woman, to be his bride. He is disappointed in their choice because he has no need for a frilly lady on a farm; instead , he must have a wife willing to work the same jobs and hours as himself. Angel chooses Tess without ever having his family meet her.

Angel is Hardy's voice of agnosticism and the views of religious "freethinkers," those who reject of "the tenets and traditions of formal religion as incompatible with reason." The movement looks to associate with religion but without its formal ties to a church per se. Angel could be construed as a deist; that is, he sees God as a creative, living force, but he rejects formal religion. We see this when Hardy writes, "Angel preferred sermons in stones to sermons in churches and chapels on fine summer days." He chose Tess for her ability to be a good wife for a farmer,not for her religious views. Says Hardy, "Angel never would have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice." When describing Tess to his parents, Angle makes it a point to tell his parents that Tess is a good Christian woman : Angle waxed quite earnest on that rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which he had been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and the other milkmaids, because of its' obvious unreality amid beliefs essentially naturalistic.

Angel thus represents the practical, no-nonsense facet of religion that Hardy himself would have championed.

Tess of the D'urbervilles

Hardy's heroine is the daughter of John and Joan Durbeyfield of Marlott in Wessex; the eldest of seven children. The subtitle to the novel, "A Pure Woman' emphasises her purity, but critics debate whether a woman who is seduced by one man, marries another one who abandons her and then kills the first, could be considered "pure". At the start of the novel, Tess is of the lower end of the soical class, where women were admired for their chastity and devotion to the household. But purity aside, she is, with rare exception, praised by critics who admire her steadfast hope under adversity. To some, like Donald Davidson in the Southern Review, she is like a figure from a folk ballad "the deserted maider who murders her seducer with a knife," while to others including Irving Howe in Thomas Hardy, she is " a girl who is at once a simple milkmaid and an archetype of feminine strength. Tess is an astute character living in a demoralizing Victorian society that degrades women tremendously. Through Tess's emotions, thoughts, and actions, we are able to see the brutal standards that men hold for women. To Angel she is "a regular churchgoer of simple faith; honest-hearted, exceptionally beautiful."

Tess is a young and virtuous girl that represents the change between the old agarian lifestyle and the new industrial one. She is primary a daughter of nature upon whom urbanity will leave its lasting marks. The narrator himself sometimes describes Tess as more than an individual woman, but as something closer to a mythical incarnation of womanhood. In part, Tess represents the changing role of the agricultural workers in England in the late nineteenth century