Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy: Gothic Elements Analysis

Gothic Elements in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Tess of the d’Urbervilles, is a novel written by Thomas Hardy. It highly relates to the trials of young girl that is trying to help her struggling family, and escape her past, all that with trying to find a husband for herself. Tess of the d’Urbervilles takes place in the countryside of England, and the entire novel is consisted of descriptions of scenes that are highly praised in Gothic novels. Since this is a novel of Victorian period, and not of the Romantic period where Gothic novels came from, Tess of the d’Urbervilles can not for sure be taken as a Gothic novel with all its descriptions and its own scenes and situations happening.

First of all, Hardy is known as a realist, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles is a novel of pastoral tragedy, even though some major and obvious themes are related to a Gothic novel. The first gothic element can be taken to probably be the past of Tess Durbeyfield, and it is spread all throughout the novel.

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Tess Durbeyfield cannot forget her dreadful past and is always looking backwards on it, nor she can escape it all. She can ignore her past at one point, but cannot really escape it, her past is like “the angry wolf”, that is always on her back chasing her around. Not only her memories are the ones that can be a cause of her trouble and struggle with herself, also she is unable to distance herself from the man that wants her for his wife: Alec d’Urberville, who is very persistent to whom she later had to succumb to.

Unlike any of the heroines of the Gothic novels, Tess is not a girl that is really physically trapped in her life but quite the opposite, she is trapped by Alec upon her own cleanliness; her chastity.

One more of the Gothic themes is the actual writing of the novel, with its detailed descriptions. like, where Hardy describes The Chase on the night when Tess is raped by Alec. That silence and darkness is what really makes a great deal of portraying one side of the Gothic elements in the novel, it is all very evil and very supernatural, since the entire scene is all itself very malicious. Since there is this name of the forest “The Chase”, it can represent Tess’s feelings toward her past but also her situation of the rape. Similarly an issue of the passionate love and the actual danger of love is very much common in Gothic novels, as seen in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, which is also a case in this novel too. There is a feeling of lost love all throughout the novel because Tess is actually in love with Angel. This feeling of no remorse and no passion in the end of the novel when Alec d’Urbervilles is killed is very much the story of horror. Not feeling anything for another human being as Tess did at the moment, is very much frightening: no matter what kind of person he was.

Even though, Tess of the d’Urbervilles is not actually a Gothic novel it has all kinds of Gothic themes in it, where Tess is trapped in her mind other than being physically cornered Hardy’s writing is very much menacing and really ominous, and this can really be suggested as a novel of Gothic elements in it even though it is a novel of Victorian era and the time of realist movement, as Hardy was.