Woman

Weak and Emotional
Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere
vessel of emotion untinctured by experience. (II, p. 9)

But owing to Angel Clare's reticence, to her
absolute want of training, and to her being a vessel of
emotions rather than reasons, she could not get on. (XLVII, p. 324)


"There are very few women's lives that are
not--tremulous," Tess replied, pausing over the new
word as if it impressed her.  "There's more in those
three than you think." (XXIX, p. 180)

Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional
standard of judgement had caused her all these latter
sorrows; and she went her way without knowing that the
greatest misfortune of her life was this feminine loss
of courage at the last and critical moment through her
estimating her father-in-law by his sons.  (XLIV, p. 296)


Devotion to Others

Her affection for him was now the breath and life of
Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere,
irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows,
keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in
their attempts to touch her--doubt, fear, moodiness,
care, shame.  She knew that they were waiting like
wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but she
had long spells of power to keep them in hungry
subjection there. (XXXI, p. 192)

The firmness of her devotion to him
was indeed almost pitiful; quick-tempered as she
naturally was, nothing that he could say made her
unseemly; she sought not her own; was not provoked;
thought no evil of his treatment of her.  She might
just now have been Apostolic Charity herself returned
to a self-seeking modern world. (XXXVI, p. 237)

"The fact is," said d'Urberville drily, "whatever your
dear husband believed you accept, and whatever he
rejected you reject, without the least inquiry or
reasoning on your own part. That's just like you women.
Your mind is enslaved to his." (XLVI, p. 315)

Nature

But those of the other sex were the most interesting of
this company of binders, by reason of the charm which
is acquired by woman when she becomes part and parcel
of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object set down
therein as at ordinary times.  A field-man is a
personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the
field; she had somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the
essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself
with it. (XIV, p. 86)

All the girls drew onward to the spot where the cows were grazing in the
farther mead, the bevy advancing with the bold grace of
wild animals--the reckless unchastened motion of women
accustomed to unlimited space--in which they abandoned
themselves to the air as a swimmer to the wave.  It
seemed natural enough to him now that Tess was again in
sight to choose a mate from unconstrained Nature, and
not from the abodes of Art. (XXVII, p. 170)

Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the
landscape; a fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter
guise; a gray serge cape, a red woollen cravat, a stuff
skirt covered by a whitey-brown rough wrapper, and
buff-leather gloves. 
     . . . . . . . .
Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have
roved as over a thing scarcely percipient, almost
inorganic, there was the record of a pulsing life which
had learnt too well, for its years, of the dust and
ashes of things, of the cruelty of lust and the
fragility of love. ( XLII, p. 275)

Paganism

And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a
Fetichistic utterance in a Monotheistic setting; women
whose chief companions are the forms and forces of
outdoor Nature retain in their souls far more of the
Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the
systematized religion taught their race at later date.

Man's View and use of Woman

Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault,
imaginative to impracticability.  With these natures,
corporal presence is something less appealing than
corporal absence; the latter creating an ideal presence
that conveniently drops the defects of the real.  She
found that her personality did not plead her cause so
forcibly as she had anticipated.  The figurative phrase
was true: she was another woman than the one who had
excited his desire. (XXXVI, p.240)

Tess stole a glance at her husband.  He was pale, even
tremulous; but, as before, she was appalled by the
determination revealed in the depths of this gentle
being she had married--the will to subdue the grosser
to the subtler emotion, the substance to the
conception, the flesh to the spirit.  Propensities,
tendencies, habits, were as dead leaves upon the
tyrannous wind of his imaginative ascendency. (XXXVI, p.241)

She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in
girlhood, looking over hedges, or peeping through
bushes, and pointing their guns, strangely accoutred,
a bloodthirsty light in their eyes.  She had been told
that, rough and brutal as they seemed just then, they
were not like this all the year round, but were, in
fact, quite civil persons save during certain weeks of
autumn and winter, when, like the inhabitants of the
Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made it their
purpose to destroy life--in this case harmless
feathered creatures, brought into being by artificial
means solely to gratify these propensities--at once so
unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards their weaker
fellows in Nature's teeming family. (XLI, p. 274)

But the unthreshed sheaves remaining untouched seemed
countless still, notwithstanding the enormous numbers
that had been gulped down by the insatiable swallower,
fed by the man and Tess, through whose two young hands
the greater part of them had passed.  And the immense
stack of straw where in the morning there had been
nothing, appeared as the FAECES of the same buzzing red
glutton.  From the west sky a wrathful shine--all that
wild March could afford in the way of sunset--had burst
forth after the cloudy day, flooding the tired and
sticky faces of the threshers, and dyeing them with a
coppery light, as also the flapping garments of the
women, which clung to them like dull flames. (XLVIII, p. 327)



Dangerous, Violent

And there was revived in her the wretched sentiment
which had often come to her before, that in inhabiting
the fleshly tabernacle with which Nature had endowed
her she was somehow doing wrong. (XLV, p. 304)

"It may seem harsh of me to dictate like this," he went
on; "but it is better that I should not look too often
on you. It might be dangerous." (XLV, p. 304)

Tess--don't look at me so--I cannot stand your
looks!  There never were such eyes, surely, before
Christianity or since! ( XLVI, p. 311)

His voice sank, and a hot archness shot from his own black
eyes.  "You temptress, Tess; you dear damned witch of
Babylon--I could not resist you as soon as I met you
again!" (XLVI, p. 317)

"How can you dare to use such words!" she cried,
turning impetuously upon him, her eyes flashing as the
latent spirit (of which he was to see more some day)
awoke in her.  "My God!  I could knock you out of the
gig!  Did it never strike your mind that what every
woman says some women may feel?" (XII, p. 75)

 She was conscious of the notion expressed by Friar Laurence:
"These violent delights have violent ends."  It might
be too desperate for human conditions--too rank, to
wild, too deadly. (XXXIII, p. 211)

 "This was once a Holy Cross. Relics are not in my creed; 
but I fear you at moments--far
more than you need fear me at present; and to lessen my
fear, put your hand upon that stone hand, and swear
that you will never tempt me--by your charms or ways."  (XLV, p. 305)

One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to
eat her skimmer-cake, lay in her lap, and without the
slightest warning she passionately swung the glove by
the gauntlet directly in his face. It was heavy and
thick as a warrior's, and it struck him flat on the
mouth.  Fancy might have regarded the act as the
recrudescence of a trick in which her armed progenitors
were not unpractised. Alec fiercely started up from his
reclining position.  A scarlet oozing appeared where
her blow had alighted, and in a moment the blood began
dropping from his mouth upon the straw.  But he soon
controlled himself, calmly drew his handkerchief from
his pocket, and mopped his bleeding lips.

She too had sprung up, but she sank down again. "Now,
punish me!" she said, turning up her eyes to him with
the hopeless defiance of the sparrow's gaze before its
captor twists its neck.  "Whip me, crush me; you need
not mind those people under the rick!  I shall not cry
out.  Once victim, always victim--that's the law!" (XLVII, p. 325-26)