Reason Breeds Insanity

Undressing Tess: The Role of Clothing in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Clothing was a marker of many conditions for Victorians: class, gender, occupation, or event. In Tess Thomas Hardy uses clothing to mark Tess as a woman unbound by social convention. As a fallen woman, Tess’s character is already questionable, so her irreprehensible adherence to social convention is not expected. While reading Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi’s “Introduction to Part I” in Erna Olafson Hellerstein’s Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States, I realized that the constricting of women begins as early as birth. From being swaddled to being corseted, middle-class women typically are restrained by clothing from birth to death. Tess, though she is working-class, is not exempt from being marked by her clothing. In the first encounter the reader has with Tess, she is set apart from the other girls: “She was a fine and handsome girl – not handsomer than some others, possibly – but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape. She wore a red ribbon in her hair, and was the only one of the white company who could boast of such a pronounced adornment.” From the beginning, Tess is marked as a woman who stands out from her virginal friends by the red ribbon fixed in her hair. She continues to be a woman marked by her clothing, or lack thereof, throughout the novel.

I would like to explore these questions throughout the course of my research:

How is Tess marked by her clothing throughout the course of the novel?
How is social success or failure marked on Tess’s body?
How does Tess’s unbound body, including her child nursing in the field, disturb the expectations for bodily containment in the Victorian age?
How does Tess’s clothing indicate her social standing as she moves from virgin to fallen woman to wife to murderer?
Can we see the Victorian social conventions being overturned or upheld by Tess’s clothing?
How does Hardy use Tess’s clothing to comment on Victorian conventions? Does he?

In this paper, I hope to struggle with the role of clothing, and the marker it places on the body as contained or uncontained, within the novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles and the ways in which that particular text compares to Victorian culture at large. I assume that I will find Tess’s body transgressing boundaries of her clothes as well as those of culture.

Extensive discussion of historical sun-bonnets

Sun-bonnet of Tess: “shielded the wearer’s complexion from the sun and wind” (59)
move from describing group of workers to Tess: “the seductive quality of these bonnets is noted by Alec D’Urberville who, tormenting Tess while she is engaged in unpleasant winter work at Flintcomb-Ash, untying the sheaves of corn to be fed to the threshing machine, comments ‘that wing bonnet’: ‘…You field-girls should never wear those bonnets if you wish to keep out of danger.'” (59)

Sunday best versus field clothes (60) field clothes worn repeatedly until worn otu so there aren’t any preserved for historical sake; only sunday clothes b/c they were worn once a week

shoes: pattens (61) TESS’S WALKIGN BOOTS?

hairstyles as part of costume/dress? (62)

ANY EXAMPLES OF MOURNING DRESS?

Fine clothes worn by country girls signal that htye have beenseduced or deceived in Hardy (64)

HOW ARE TESS’S CLOTHES SIGNIFYIGN THAT SHE WAS DECEIVED OR SEDUCED, DO THEY SIGNIFY THAT THROUGHOUT THE NOVEL? HOW DOES HER CLOTHING INDICATE HER SEXUAL PURITY? IN THE FACE OF ALEC? ANGEL? ETC.?

“Indeed, I would go further and argue that dress can reflect economic situation, social class, and cultural orientation and identity.” (324)

“Particular garments stood out in his memory precisely because clothing was a rare and costly commodity, which, for him and probably for many poor people, performed a dual role. Protective clothing was a necessity, escpecially for those agricultural laborers whose jobs involved much walking and workign out of doors in all weathers. Paradoxically, however, it was also a luxury, because after rent, food and fuel had been paid for, there must have been very little left out of the total earnings brought in by a fmaily to spend on clothing—a fact to which the above accounts testify.” (326)

Lots of information abotu smocks and sun-bonnets (328, 331)

“rustic stereotype manifested in traditional representations of milkmaids and gleaners” (334)

“The Dorsetshire Labourer” FIND THIS STORY/BOOK/ARTICLE
rural simplicity of tess—Hardy’s use of the sun-bonnet; perceptions of rural dress because Hardy’s readership was urban and middle class(335)

Alec and his smock-frock (337)
attitudes and changes in dress, hand-crafting of garments (339)

WHAT ROLE DOES THE SUN-BONNET PLAY AS BOTH A NOSTALGIC TOOL AND A SIGNIFIER OF CLASS, TIME PERIOD, CULTURE? HOW IS HARDY’S WRITING SITUATED FOR HIS AUDIENCE; WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH HIS USE OF DRESS? FASHION, ETC? HOW IS THIS PERCEPTION OF TESS’S DRESS TO BE COMPARED WITH HER DRESS IN OTHER PARTS OF THE NOVEL—HER MARRIED TO ALEC CLOTHES, HER CLOTHES BOUGHT BY ANGEL?

Simon Gatrell:
dress is performative (in “The Mayor of Casterbridge) but mostly applicable to Tess as well:
“The baron has certainly made sure that Margery’s costume will force Margery to represent a particular idea of herself to the world; it signifies wealth, class, taste, and it forces others (women as well as men), to look at the wearer of the dress with a kind of respect.” (144)
“Without the fitting body and the informing mind the dress is just an apparition, however beautiful…” (144).
Restraint signified by dress as well as by the separation of the man and women (146). (tight dress, riding with footman rather than riding in coach?

Tess:
“It is often suggested that Hardy chose not to publish “The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid” in book form for more than thirty years, because of the closeness of the narrative in some respects to that of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. And, Indeed, Hardy does re-examine this experience of Margery Tucker through Tess Durbeyfield.” (147)
Tess’s potential is “warped” by Alec’s violation of her but it comes early in the novel, so “that circumstance and Alec fix aspects of her self at too early a point in her development toward womanhood. Dress is an important element in Hardy’s demonstration of this idea. Throughout the novel, Tess herself chooses only dress that conforms to need and function. She has no incentive or opportunity to do otherwise.” (147) WHAT ABOUT WHEN SHE MARRIES ALEC? SHE WEARS A GREY DRESS? IS IT STILL FUNCTIONAL? ” HER NATURAL BEAUTY WAS, IF NOT HEIGHTENED, RENDERED MORE OBVIOUS BY HER ATTIRE. SHE WAS LOOSELY WRAPPED IN A CASHMERE DRESSING GOWN OF GREY-WHITE, EMBOIDERED IN HALF-MORNING TINTS…..” (Hardy 366)
discrepency between Tess and her dress (when her mom initially send her away): “Her dress is deceptive and is nto her own choice, it is designed purely to advance the naive plot of her mother.” (148)

Tess’ dress as angels wife (149) Tess not altered by the clothes Angel buys for her (149)
Tess wearing Angel by wearing his dress (150)
Sexual allure of dress-Alec (151)
Nature of Tess’s clothesmuted colors, soft fabrics, conservative cuts (153)

HOW DOES TESS’S CLOTHING PURCHASED BY ANGEL SIGNIFY THAT SHE IS A FARMER’S WIFE? HOW DOES THIS COMPARE TO HER CLOTHING WHEN SHE CAME BACK FROM BEIGN WITH ALEC?

FOCUS ON: INITIALLY MEETING TESS IN WHITE WITH SCARLET RIBBON
THE FIELD HAND TESS
THE MILMAID TESS
ANGEL’S TESS
ALEC’S TESS
FINAL TESS AT STONE HENGE

POSSIBLE TOPICS: THE USE OF THE CLOAK TO COVER TESS BY ALEC IN BEGINNING ON TRIP, BY ANGEL AT STONEHENGE (BOTH TIMES SHE IS “SACRIFICED”)