Title : A Scientific Reading Of the Protagonist’s Tragedy in Thomas Hardy’s Tess Of The D’urbervilles

Author(s) : Choedphong Uttama

Pages : 28-44

Abstract in English : Thomas Hardy’s novels are known for the
portrayal of their protagonists’ ill fortune
and tragedies. Attempts have been made to
understand the pessimism that pervades
his novels through the study of the harsh
life of the rural proletariat, the class into
which many of his protagonists fall, or of
Victorian society itself which, with its
forms of social constraint, limited people’s
life and was a cause of unhappiness. This
paper offers an alternative way of
understanding the pessimism in Tess of the
d’Urbervilles (1891) through a scientific
reading of the protagonist’s tragic life. By
contextualizing this novel in the Victorian
period when advances in science
challenged religious belief and by
considering the author’s interest in
science and his ambivalent attitude
towards religion, this paper aims to show
that the calamitous life of the protagonist
can be explained by the theory of natural
selection in which living things are
controlled by chance and randomness as
opposed to religious belief which holds
that God is behind human destiny. This
reading also ties in with the theory and
power of heredity which denies the
individual any real choice, making the
protagonist unable to control her own
actions. The last approach will look at
mesmerism which can shed light on the
most important and controversial scene in
the novel and which greatly contributes to
the protagonist’s tragedy.