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.