Literary works comment on society - Essay Example

Religion and Tess of the d'Urbervilles Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) is a novel in which larger forces conspire against the sympathetic main character to create an emotive and tightly-crafted tragedy of the late Victorian era. Religion is one of the devices through which Hardy characterizes his protagonists: Tess, in particular, espouses an unusual connection between Christianity and Paganism. She blindly (faithfully) accepts the atheistic teachings of her husband; at the same time, Tess sees religion and spirituality everywhere: she compares Alec d'Urberville's mother to a “bishop” at the “Confirmation” of her hens (Chapter IX), baptizes her baby in the absence of a cleric (Chapter XIV), and in the penultimate chapter insists that at Stonehenge, “now I am at home” (Chapter LVIII).

These all show her vacillation between tradition and modernization, comfort and progress, and that Tess is unable to decide which is right for her. The new order seems to ignore emotion, but the idea of condemning the baby Sorrow to eternity in purgatory for the sake of her anti-Christian beliefs makes “her nightgown damp with perspiration” (Chapter XIV). Tess becomes the unsure frontrunner of the new, twentieth-century combination of Christian doubt and personal spirituality. Tess is personified as a “daughter of Nature” (Chapter XVIII), with religion as a function of civilization, and as such she cannot quite choose which authority to be persuaded by: tradition deems that she should follow Christian law closely, although certain allowances are made in her hometown.

For example, near the start of the novel, Tess participates in Cerealia, a festival for the Goddess of the Harvest (Chapter II). However, Angel represents a higher form of culture, which has transcended religion and found bleak cynicism, and for a while Tess adheres to his views: she tells him that “I thought as you thought – not for any reasons of my own, but because you thought so” (Chapter LVIII). Unfortunately they promise too little hope for a woman whose life was wrecked by one man's violence, which remains an issue of atheism today.

Although I do not believe in life after death, I can understand her pain when she asks Angel “do you think we shall meet again after we are dead?” when she will shortly be executed for the murder of Alec (Chapter LVIII). Like Tess, I have struggled with religion, although unlike her I hope to live long enough to resolve this situation. As a child I was taught my parents' religion, and grew up accepting that their beliefs were right, but this changed as I grew older. Tess' atheism came from an external source, but I am luckily educated enough to have come up with this concept internally.

I still struggle to reconcile the religious teachings of my upbringing with more modern thought, and think of myself as a very spiritual person concurrently. I identify with Tess as a soul caught in a very unusual time, with various people pulling her this way and that, and I believe that many other people would as well. Religion continues, on the whole, to be a dividing rather than a uniting force in the twenty-first century, and we could easily follow Tess's example, although perhaps in a different way.

Our society will continue to suffer from harmful religious division if we do not put human empathy above godly faith. Works Cited Hardy, T. (1891). Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/110.