Is Angel Clare the real villain of Tess of the D’Urbervilles?

This is an issue that has been plaguing me since studying Tess at A Level. It is easy to blame Alec for Tess’ misfortunes and yet Angel’s actions are the ones that perhaps disappoint the modern reader the most. We expect more of him. Ultimately, Hardy seems to suggest, fault lies in the fates, the malevolent forces that govern the universe. Indeed, Tess’ misfortunes are amplified because of the sense of bad timing that pervades the novel.

The infamous ‘rape’ scene is surrounded, quite literally, by fog – a sort of moral nebulosity. Alec may have taken advantage of a situation but he is perhaps not the force of evil that he is often perceived as. The scene is tragic because of his lust for Tess, something that he does not seem capable of controlling, combined with her naivety. Fault also lies with Tess, and, perhaps as Clarence Darrow may say, ‘back of her’. Darrow’s argument for ‘hard determinism’ would absolve both characters of blame. It is clear to the reader that Tess’s parents, however inadvertently, are essentially pushing her into the jaws of the lion.

Tess, as an ‘untinctured vessel of emotion’, drowns herself in guilt following the death of the family’s horse, Prince. Yet, ‘in the Durbeyfield countenances, there was nothing of the red wrath that would have burnt upon the girl from parents more ambitious for her welfare. Nobody blamed Tess as she blamed herself’. Her parents are perhaps insensitive, naïve themselves, and thus incapable of making Tess aware of the world around her. Her father, though a good source of comedy, is vain and self-obsessed – drunk and immature but it is her mother who, as a viable source of wisdom, truly fails her. Following the fateful events of her time with Alec, Tess cries to her mother: ‘how could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house… why didn’t you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Ladies know what to fend hands against because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o’ learning in that way and you did not help me!’. Tess’ mother was obsessed with the thought of her daughter marrying a gentleman and restoring the good name of the family, that she failed to adequately protect her own child. She was selfish. So Tess is, in a sense, a victim of her upbringing. She is cast as a maternal figure, having to care for her siblings and this endows her with a sense of overwhelming responsibility – and pressure – for the family’s welfare. She is thus not exposed to aids such as books and learning and sheer life experience that may have better enabled her to handle men such as Alec.

Nevertheless, Angel takes advantage of Tess just as much as Alec does, though in a different way. Where Alec’s conquest is predominantly physical, Angel takes advantage of her emotional character, he is just as calculating. In a practical sense, he needs a wife who can assist him with his farming exploits in the colonies and he only takes notice of Tess when she speaks about the soul but is condescending when he speaks to her over such matters – (‘this hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so? All the same, I shouldn’t have expected a young girl like you to see it so just yet…’ and ‘my Tess has, no doubt, almost as many experiences as that wild convolvulus out there on the garden hedge, that opened itself this morning for the first time’) He makes assumptions about Tess’ innocence, and encourages a process of mutual idolization. He never gives Tess the chance to truly let him know her as he is too absorbed in his image of her as a pure, innocent child of nature. Tess, on the other hand, fuels his superiority complex by idolizing him as the height of intellect and goodness, making herself completely submissive to his wishes. To her ‘sublime trustfulness, he was all that goodness could be’ but just as with everyone else, Angel deserts her in the time when she needs him the most, leaving her susceptible to Alec’s advances. Angel’s imagination dominates him to the extent that upon the revelation of Tess’s past he can no longer accept her because she is now a completely different person. His rejection of what is real and physical, in favour of what is ethereal and spiritual makes it impossible for him to accept Tess’s history.

Even Tess is somewhat surprised by Angel’s character in these moments, appalled by ‘the determination revealed in the depths of this gentle being… the will to subdue the grosser to the subtler emotion, the substance to the conception, the flesh to the spirit’. Tess’s revelation may be a direct assault on his character and he may need time to adjust but his behaviour is perhaps too extreme and inhumane. Even when he realises it is possible for Tess to embody both the spiritual ideal and physical and real, he still manages to do so much too late. This is not really his fault, all the characters struggle against forces beyond their control and so can only be deplored to a certain extent. Nevertheless, Angel is the character that disappoints the reader the most because he is an educated young man who could really have saved Tess, yet fails to use his reason to do so. He may not be a villain but his behaviour, in our eyes, is unfair and falls short of the expectation imbued by his name and our initial impressions of him.