finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_4_part_2.txt
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 13
chapter 13
{"name": "CHAPTER 13", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD22.asp", "summary": "At first, when friends call on her in Marlott, Tess feels more cheerful; but before long she is the talk of the village. They whisper behind her back and cause her to think about her future, which seems like \"a long and stony highway which she must tread, without aid, and with little sympathy. To avoid their words and stares, she only goes out at night, hoping not to be seen and discussed. Her only relief is her work in the fields; but even as she works, Tess is full of remorse and considers herself a \"Figure of Guilt\".", "analysis": "Notes Tess becomes the talk of the village. The village folk talk about the gentleman who fell in love with her and whisper to each other about the gifts she received from him. It is sad to notice, however, that no one seems to genuinely sympathize with her, not her mother or her friends. As a result, her grief and remorse grow greater until she feels she is a symbol of guilt"}


The event of Tess Durbeyfield's return from the manor of her bogus
kinsfolk was rumoured abroad, if rumour be not too large a word for
a space of a square mile.  In the afternoon several young girls of
Marlott, former schoolfellows and acquaintances of Tess, called to
see her, arriving dressed in their best starched and ironed, as
became visitors to a person who had made a transcendent conquest (as
they supposed), and sat round the room looking at her with great
curiosity.  For the fact that it was this said thirty-first cousin,
Mr d'Urberville, who had fallen in love with her, a gentleman
not altogether local, whose reputation as a reckless gallant and
heartbreaker was beginning to spread beyond the immediate boundaries
of Trantridge, lent Tess's supposed position, by its fearsomeness, a
far higher fascination that it would have exercised if unhazardous.

Their interest was so deep that the younger ones whispered when her
back was turned--

"How pretty she is; and how that best frock do set her off!  I
believe it cost an immense deal, and that it was a gift from him."

Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from the
corner-cupboard, did not hear these commentaries.  If she had heard
them, she might soon have set her friends right on the matter.  But
her mother heard, and Joan's simple vanity, having been denied the
hope of a dashing marriage, fed itself as well as it could upon
the sensation of a dashing flirtation.  Upon the whole she felt
gratified, even though such a limited and evanescent triumph should
involve her daughter's reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and
in the warmth of her responsiveness to their admiration she invited
her visitors to stay to tea.

Their chatter, their laughter, their good-humoured innuendoes, above
all, their flashes and flickerings of envy, revived Tess's spirits
also; and, as the evening wore on, she caught the infection of their
excitement, and grew almost gay.  The marble hardness left her face,
she moved with something of her old bounding step, and flushed in all
her young beauty.

At moments, in spite of thought, she would reply to their inquiries
with a manner of superiority, as if recognizing that her experiences
in the field of courtship had, indeed, been slightly enviable.  But
so far was she from being, in the words of Robert South, "in love
with her own ruin," that the illusion was transient as lightning;
cold reason came back to mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness
of her momentary pride would convict her, and recall her to reserved
listlessness again.

And the despondency of the next morning's dawn, when it was no longer
Sunday, but Monday; and no best clothes; and the laughing visitors
were gone, and she awoke alone in her old bed, the innocent younger
children breathing softly around her.  In place of the excitement of
her return, and the interest it had inspired, she saw before her a
long and stony highway which she had to tread, without aid, and with
little sympathy.  Her depression was then terrible, and she could
have hidden herself in a tomb.

In the course of a few weeks Tess revived sufficiently to show
herself so far as was necessary to get to church one Sunday morning.
She liked to hear the chanting--such as it was--and the old Psalms,
and to join in the Morning Hymn.  That innate love of melody, which
she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest
music a power over her which could well-nigh drag her heart out of
her bosom at times.

To be as much out of observation as possible for reasons of her own,
and to escape the gallantries of the young men, she set out before
the chiming began, and took a back seat under the gallery, close to
the lumber, where only old men and women came, and where the bier
stood on end among the churchyard tools.

Parishioners dropped in by twos and threes, deposited themselves
in rows before her, rested three-quarters of a minute on their
foreheads as if they were praying, though they were not; then sat up,
and looked around. When the chants came on, one of her favourites
happened to be chosen among the rest--the old double chant
"Langdon"--but she did not know what it was called, though she would
much have liked to know.  She thought, without exactly wording the
thought, how strange and god-like was a composer's power, who from
the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had
felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and
never would have a clue to his personality.

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the
service proceeded; and at last observing her, they whispered to each
other.  She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart,
and felt that she could come to church no more.

The bedroom which she shared with some of the children formed her
retreat more continually than ever.  Here, under her few square yards
of thatch, she watched winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets,
and successive moons at their full.  So close kept she that at length
almost everybody thought she had gone away.

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it
was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary.  She
knew how to hit to a hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the
light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of
day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute
mental liberty.  It is then that the plight of being alive becomes
attenuated to its least possible dimensions.  She had no fear of the
shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind--or rather that
cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is
so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece
with the element she moved in.  Her flexuous and stealthy figure
became an integral part of the scene.  At times her whimsical fancy
would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part
of her own story.  Rather they became a part of it; for the world is
only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were.  The
midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and
bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach.  A wet
day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the
mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely
as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds
of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her,
was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy--a cloud of moral
hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason.  It was they
that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she.  Walking
among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits
on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she
looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts
of Innocence.  But all the while she was making a distinction where
there was no difference.  Feeling herself in antagonism, she was
quite in accord.  She had been made to break an accepted social law,
but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such
an anomaly.



CHAPTER 13
At first, when friends call on her in Marlott, Tess feels more cheerful; but before long she is the talk of the village. They whisper behind her back and cause her to think about her future, which seems like "a long and stony highway which she must tread, without aid, and with little sympathy. To avoid their words and stares, she only goes out at night, hoping not to be seen and discussed. Her only relief is her work in the fields; but even as she works, Tess is full of remorse and considers herself a "Figure of Guilt".
Notes Tess becomes the talk of the village. The village folk talk about the gentleman who fell in love with her and whisper to each other about the gifts she received from him. It is sad to notice, however, that no one seems to genuinely sympathize with her, not her mother or her friends. As a result, her grief and remorse grow greater until she feels she is a symbol of guilt