What strikes me the most about Tess at this point in her (unfortunate) life is that almost all of the knowledge that she has come in contact with has caused her to look even more negatively on herself and what has happened to her. Even though she is only a child when we first encounter her, she is forced to grow up and deal with very adult emotions and advances of love made by Alec d’Uberville. At the age of a teenager/young adult, Tess then has to deal with childbirth and the subsequent death of her child a few months later. As a result of these very advanced and troubling experiences, Tess can’t seem to gain or find any true wisdom about herself or her position in the world that would help her come to terms with what has happened to her. All she has is extreme self-doubt and a skewed personal image on account of someone else’s (Alec’s) wrongdoings. For example, one of the first times that Tess has an interaction with Angel Clare, she is found telling him that “Izzy Huett [or] Retty” would “make a good farmer’s wife, and that the she ought to recommend them, and obscure her own wretched charm” as if she is trying to protect Clare from the awful person that she thinks she is (154). She has such a disillusioned image of herself as a result of her experience with Alec, and this prevents her from saying yes to marrying Clare for quite a long time. Even when she does say yes, she confesses that “she you love is not my real self, but one in my image; the one I might have been” implying that who she is is unworthy of love (220). Of course, Tess’s worries of her past affecting Clare’s love for her turn out to be true, causing to her become even more firm in her beliefs that she is not desirable because of her past. While Tess has gained a lot of knowledge about her position, it’s all negatively based because of the social structures implemented around her. Her own mother, Joan Durbeyfield even tells her “that on no account do you say word of you Bygone Trouble to him,” which only reinforces that what happened to Tess is something that she should be ashamed of (199). It’s very troubling that no one in Tess’s life is able to help her through what has happened to her: she is only given more grief as a result of the advice and reactions that others have given to her, especially her husband. He reaffirms her earlier distress of the fact that Clare is marrying a “Tess who might have been” by saying “you were one person; now you are another” after she confesses her past to him (232). It makes me wonder how Tess’s life and self-perception would have been different if the people around her gave her actual wisdom about her past situation instead of this bogus knowledge that only causes her to feel worse.
What gets me is that the idea of this last name, d’Uberville, turns her family into crazed-emotionally bound people who will do anything to satisfy the eyes of society. The irony of this last name is just that the only great royalty in this family is shown from parenthood unto Tess. They claim this great heritage to propose an honorary image, to only discover quite the opposite, and with this unfolding in front of Tess, is this part of why she reserves herself? The is last name has only brought her misery, and is the barrier between true happiness, and her great heritage stands behind what makes her dark. I just feel bad for Tess! Society is what made her family crazed in the religion and class driven society, and she cannot escape it, or at least won’t allow herself to.
I agree completely! We continuously see situations were Tess puts herself down and diminishes her self-worth, both in her own mind and by expressing this to others, and there are very few moments of positive self-reflection by Tess. All her negativity stems from the social expectations that she feels she has failed to meet. I find it interesting that despite this internalization of social values, she is the only member of her family that is not mesmerized by the idea of claiming the d’Urberville name and raising their status. Her father may have felt trapped by their poverty, but ever since trying to establish a relation to the d’Urbervilles, Tess has lost a tremendous deal of her agency and so becomes buried in shame, all due to happenings that she had no control over.