finished_summaries/pinkmonkey/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_5_part_1.txt
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 14
chapter 14
{"name": "CHAPTER 14", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20180820050202/http://www.pinkmonkey.com/booknotes/monkeynotes/pmTessD24.asp", "summary": "After Tess gives birth to a baby boy, she decides that it is time to end her self-imposed seclusion. She decides to help in the fields during the August harvest. Her family brings the infant out to her so she can nurse him. One day when Tess returns home, she finds her son very ill and worries he may die. Since the baby has not been baptized, she wants to call the minister, but her father refuses her request. Worried that her son will not have salvation without a baptism, Tess herself christens him in front of her brothers and sisters and appropriately names the child Sorrow. The next morning, the child dies. Tess is relieved to know from the parson that her baptism is acceptable for the child's salvation. She is, however, denied a Christian burial for the baby; therefore, Tess buries Sorrow in the churchyard at a place where all unbaptized and suicides are laid to rest. Then she decorates the grave.", "analysis": "Notes The mornings are lazy and the nights are gloomy for Tess, and there is no relief in between. Her grief and remorse are insurmountable obstacles for her, and life holds little meaning. When her child is born, she gains courage and goes to the field to work. Then her baby grows ill, and Tess must perform a baptismal service for him, since her father will not allow the parson to come. She appropriately names the child Sorrow, which reflects the grief that Tess feels for her own sinfulness, for the baby's life, and for its early death. When the infant dies, Tess is forced to bury Sorrow in a neglected corner of the cemetery. This chapter reveals new images of Tess. She has been made to feel so ashamed of her pregnancy that she has gone into seclusion, giving her way too much time to punish herself. When the baby is finally born, she bravely goes to the fields to work and even nurses the child there with dignity. It is obvious that she cares about the infant and worries about its salvation. She knows, however, that the illegitimate child will never be accepted, which is one reason she calls the baby Sorrow. After Sorrow's christening and subsequent death, she questions the parson as to whether her baptismal service is adequate for the child's salvation. The parson gives her encouraging words, but will not give Sorrow a Christian burial. Tess must, therefore, lay Sorrow in a neglected corner of the churchyard, but she takes great care to decorate the grave. It is important to notice Hardy's descriptive powers in this chapter. He brings the harvest to life with vivid details, and his description of Sorrow's baptism is one of the most touching in the entire novel. It is also important to notice the part that fate has played in the novel by the end of this chapter. It has certainly been unkind to this sweet, innocent country girl. Tess left home in order to help earn money for her impoverished family, she falls into the hands of the sinister Alec who takes advantage of her naivete, she punishes herself severely for her sinfulness, she finds she is pregnant and ostracized from village life, and she finally loses the baby who has caused her so much sorrow. It is no wonder that Tess feels that there is little to live for in Marlott"}


It was a hazy sunrise in August.  The denser nocturnal vapours,
attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated
fleeces within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they
should be dried away to nothing.

The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal
look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression.
His present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the
scene, explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment.  One could
feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky.  The
luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature,
gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that
was brimming with interest for him.

His light, a little later, broke though chinks of cottage shutters,
throwing stripes like red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of
drawers, and other furniture within; and awakening harvesters who
were not already astir.

But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were two broad
arms of painted wood, which rose from the margin of yellow cornfield
hard by Marlott village.  They, with two others below, formed the
revolving Maltese cross of the reaping-machine, which had been
brought to the field on the previous evening to be ready for
operations this day.  The paint with which they were smeared,
intensified in hue by the sunlight, imparted to them a look of
having been dipped in liquid fire.

The field had already been "opened"; that is to say, a lane a few
feet wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole
circumference of the field for the first passage of the horses and
machine.

Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down
the lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top
struck the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were
enjoying sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn.  They
disappeared from the lane between the two stone posts which flanked
the nearest field-gate.

Presently there arose from within a ticking like the love-making of
the grasshopper.  The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation
of three horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible
over the gate, a driver sitting  upon one of the hauling horses,
and an attendant on the seat of the implement.  Along one side of
the field the whole wain went, the arms of the mechanical reaper
revolving slowly, till it passed down the hill quite out of sight.
In a minute it came up on the other side of the field at the same
equable pace; the glistening brass star in the forehead of the fore
horse first catching the eye as it rose into view over the stubble,
then the bright arms, and then the whole machine.

The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with
each circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to a smaller area as
the morning wore on.  Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated
inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their
refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when,
their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they
were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of
upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and
they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the
harvesters.

The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps,
each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the
active binders in the rear laid their hands--mainly women, but some
of them men in print shirts, and trousers supported round their
waists by leather straps, rendering useless the two buttons behind,
which twinkled and bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each
wearer, as if they were a pair of eyes in the small of his back.

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.

The women--or rather girls, for they were mostly young--wore drawn
cotton bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and
gloves to prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble.  There
was one wearing a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured
tight-sleeved gown, another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the
reaping-machine; and others, older, in the brown-rough "wropper"
or over-all--the old-established and most appropriate dress of the
field-woman, which the young ones were abandoning.  This morning the
eye returns involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she
being the most flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all.  But
her bonnet is pulled so far over her brow that none of her face is
disclosed while she binds, though her complexion may be guessed from
a stray twine or two of dark brown hair which extends below the
curtain of her bonnet.  Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual
attention is that she never courts it, though the other women often
gaze around them.

Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony.  From the sheaf last
finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her
left palm to bring them even.  Then, stooping low, she moves forward,
gathering the corn with both hands against her knees, and pushing
her left gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other
side, holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover.  She
brings the ends of the bond together, and kneels on the sheaf while
she ties it, beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the
breeze.  A bit of her naked arm is visible between the buff leather
of the gauntlet and the sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on
its feminine smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds.

At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged
apron, or to pull her bonnet straight.  Then one can see the oval
face of a handsome young woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy
clinging tresses, which seem to clasp in a beseeching way anything
they fall against.  The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular,
the red lips thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.

It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d'Urberville, somewhat changed--the
same, but not the same; at the present stage of her existence living
as a stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that
she was in.  After a long seclusion she had come to a resolve to
undertake outdoor work in her native village, the busiest season of
the year in the agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that
she could do within the house being so remunerative for the time as
harvesting in the fields.

The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess's,
the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille
at the completion of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on
end against those of the rest, till a shock, or "stitch" as it was
here called, of ten or a dozen was formed.

They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work proceeded as
before.  As the hour of eleven drew near a person watching her might
have noticed that every now and then Tess's glance flitted wistfully
to the brow of the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing.
On the verge of the hour the heads of a group of children, of ages
ranging from six to fourteen, rose over the stubbly convexity of the
hill.

The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not pause.

The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its
corner draggling on the stubble, carried in her arms what at first
sight seemed to be a doll, but proved to be an infant in long
clothes.  Another brought some lunch.  The harvesters ceased working,
took their provisions, and sat down against one of the shocks.  Here
they fell to, the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a
cup.

Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her labours.
She sat down at the end of the shock, her face turned somewhat away
from her companions.  When she had deposited herself a man in a
rabbit-skin cap, and with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt,
held the cup of ale over the top of the shock for her to drink.  But
she did not accept his offer.  As soon as her lunch was spread she
called up the big girl, her sister, and took the baby of her, who,
glad to be relieved of the burden, went away to the next shock and
joined the other children playing there.  Tess, with a curiously
stealthy yet courageous movement, and with a still rising colour,
unfastened her frock and began suckling the child.

The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the
other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with
absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no
longer yield a stream.  All the women but Tess fell into animated
talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.

When the infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat it upright
in her lap, and looking into the far distance, dandled it with a
gloomy indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she
fell to violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could
never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which
strangely combined passionateness with contempt.

"She's fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en,
and say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard,"
observed the woman in the red petticoat.

"She'll soon leave off saying that," replied the one in buff. "Lord,
'tis wonderful what a body can get used to o' that sort in time!"

"A little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming o't, I
reckon.  There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in
The Chase; and it mid ha' gone hard wi' a certain party if folks had
come along."

"Well, a little more, or a little less, 'twas a thousand pities that
it should have happened to she, of all others.  But 'tis always the
comeliest!  The plain ones be as safe as churches--hey, Jenny?"  The
speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined
as plain.

It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy
to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her
flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor
grey nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred
others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises--shade
behind shade--tint beyond tint--around pupils that had no bottom; an
almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character
inherited from her race.

A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the
fields this week for the first time during many months.  After
wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret
that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated
her.  She felt that she would do well to be useful again--to taste
anew sweet independence at any price.  The past was past; whatever
it had been, it was no more at hand.  Whatever its consequences,
time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if
they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten.
Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and
the sun shone as clearly now as ever.  The familiar surroundings had
not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly--the
thought of the world's concern at her situation--was founded on an
illusion.  She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a
structure of sensations, to anybody but herself.  To all humankind
besides, Tess was only a passing thought.  Even to friends she was
no more than a frequently passing thought.  If she made herself
miserable the livelong night and day it was only this much to
them--"Ah, she makes herself unhappy."  If she tried to be cheerful,
to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers,
the baby, she could only be this idea to them--"Ah, she bears it
very well."  Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been
wretched at what had happened to her?  Not greatly.  If she could
have been but just created, to discover herself as a spouseless
mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless
child, would the position have caused her to despair?  No, she would
have taken it calmly, and found pleasure therein. Most of the misery
had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate
sensations.

Whatever Tess's reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress
herself up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the
fields, harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then.  This was
why she had borne herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly
in the face at times, even when holding the baby in her arms.

The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and stretched their
limbs, and extinguished their pipes.  The horses, which had been
unharnessed and fed, were again attached to the scarlet machine.
Tess, having quickly eaten her own meal, beckoned to her eldest
sister to come and take away the baby, fastened her dress, put on
the buff gloves again, and stooped anew to draw a bond from the last
completed sheaf for the tying of the next.

In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were
continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters.
Then they all rode home in one of the largest wagons, in the company
of a broad tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the
eastwards, its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some
worm-eaten Tuscan saint.  Tess's female companions sang songs, and
showed themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out
of doors, though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing
in a few verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry
green wood and came back a changed state.  There are counterpoises
and compensations in life; and the event which had made of her a
social warning had also for the moment made her the most interesting
personage in the village to many.  Their friendliness won her still
farther away from herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and
she became almost gay.

But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on
the natural side of her which knew no social law.  When she reached
home it was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly
taken ill since the afternoon.  Some such collapse had been probable,
so tender and puny was its frame; but the event came as a shock
nevertheless.

The baby's offence against society in coming into the world was
forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul's desire was to continue that
offence by preserving the life of the child.  However, it soon grew
clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the
flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured.
And when she had discovered this she was plunged into a misery which
transcended that of the child's simple loss.  Her baby had not been
baptized.

Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the
consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done,
burn she must, and there was an end of it.  Like all village girls,
she was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully
studied the histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences
to be drawn therefrom.  But when the same question arose with regard
to the baby, it had a very different colour.  Her darling was about
to die, and no salvation.

It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she
might send for the parson.  The moment happened to be one at which
her father's sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest,
and his sensitiveness to the smudge which Tess had set upon that
nobility most pronounced, for he had just returned from his weekly
booze at Rolliver's Inn.  No parson should come inside his door, he
declared, prying into his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it
had become more necessary than ever to hide them.  He locked the door
and put the key in his pocket.

The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond measure, Tess
retired also.  She was continually waking as she lay, and in the
middle of the night found that the baby was still worse.  It was
obviously dying--quietly and painlessly, but none the less surely.

In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed.  The clock struck the
solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and
malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts.  She thought of
the child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double
doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend
tossing it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for
heating the oven on baking days; to which picture she added many
other quaint and curious details of torment sometimes taught the
young in this Christian country.  The lurid presentment so powerfully
affected her imagination in the silence of the sleeping house that
her nightgown became damp with perspiration, and the bedstead shook
with each throb of her heart.

The infant's breathing grew more difficult, and the mother's mental
tension increased.  It was useless to devour the little thing with
kisses; she could stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about
the room.

"O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!" she cried.
"Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the
child!"

She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured incoherent
supplications for a long while, till she suddenly started up.

"Ah! perhaps baby can be saved!  Perhaps it will be just the same!"

She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have
shone in the gloom surrounding her.  She lit a candle, and went to
a second and a third bed under the wall, where she awoke her young
sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied the same room.  Pulling
out the washing-stand so that she could get behind it, she poured
some water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting their
hands together with fingers exactly vertical.  While the children,
scarcely awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger
and larger, remained in this position, she took the baby from her
bed--a child's child--so immature as scarce to seem a sufficient
personality to endow its producer with the maternal title.  Tess then
stood erect with the infant on her arm beside the basin; the next
sister held the Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church
held it before the parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her
child.

Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her
long white nightgown, a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging
straight down her back to her waist.  The kindly dimness of the weak
candle abstracted from her form and features the little blemishes
which sunlight might have revealed--the stubble scratches upon her
wrists, and the weariness of her eyes--her high enthusiasm having
a transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her undoing,
showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity
which was almost regal.  The little ones kneeling round, their sleepy
eyes blinking and red, awaited her preparations full of a suspended
wonder which their physical heaviness at that hour would not allow to
become active.

The most impressed of them said:

"Be you really going to christen him, Tess?"

The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.

"What's his name going to be?"

She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a phrase in
the book of Genesis came into her head as she proceeded with the
baptismal service, and now she pronounced it:

"SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost."

She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.

"Say 'Amen,' children."

The tiny voices piped in obedient response, "Amen!"

Tess went on:

"We receive this child"--and so forth--"and do sign him with the sign
of the Cross."

Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently drew an
immense cross upon the baby with her forefinger, continuing with
the customary sentences as to his manfully fighting against sin,
the world, and the devil, and being a faithful soldier and servant
unto his life's end.  She duly went on with the Lord's Prayer, the
children lisping it after her in a thin gnat-like wail, till, at the
conclusion, raising their voices to clerk's pitch, they again piped
into silence, "Amen!"

Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy
of the sacrament, poured forth from the bottom of her heart the
thanksgiving that follows, uttering it boldly and triumphantly in the
stopt-diapason note which her voice acquired when her heart was in
her speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her.
The ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a
glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each
cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils
shone like a diamond.  The children gazed up at her with more and
more reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning.  She did
not look like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering, and
awful--a divine personage with whom they had nothing in common.

Poor Sorrow's campaign against sin, the world, and the devil was
doomed to be of limited brilliancy--luckily perhaps for himself,
considering his beginnings.  In the blue of the morning that fragile
soldier and servant breathed his last, and when the other children
awoke they cried bitterly, and begged Sissy to have another pretty
baby.

The calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained
with her in the infant's loss.  In the daylight, indeed, she felt her
terrors about his soul to have been somewhat exaggerated; whether
well founded or not, she had no uneasiness now, reasoning that
if Providence would not ratify such an act of approximation
she, for one, did not value the kind of heaven lost by the
irregularity--either for herself or for her child.

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired--that intrusive creature, that
bastard gift of shameless Nature, who respects not the social law;
a waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who
knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom
the cottage interior was the universe, the week's weather climate,
new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human
knowledge.

Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal, wondered if it were
doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child.
Nobody could tell this but the parson of the parish, and he was a
new-comer, and did not know her.  She went to his house after dusk,
and stood by the gate, but could not summon courage to go in.  The
enterprise would have been abandoned if she had not by accident met
him coming homeward as she turned away.  In the gloom she did not
mind speaking freely.

"I should like to ask you something, sir."

He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the story of the
baby's illness and the extemporized ordinance.  "And now, sir," she
added earnestly, "can you tell me this--will it be just the same for
him as if you had baptized him?"

Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he
should have been called in for had been unskilfully botched by his
customers among themselves, he was disposed to say no.  Yet the
dignity of the girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined
to affect his nobler impulses--or rather those that he had left in
him after ten years of endeavour to graft technical belief on actual
scepticism.  The man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the
victory fell to the man.

"My dear girl," he said, "it will be just the same."

"Then will you give him a Christian burial?" she asked quickly.

The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby's illness, he
had conscientiously gone to the house after nightfall to perform the
rite, and, unaware that the refusal to admit him had come from Tess's
father and not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity
for its irregular administration.

"Ah--that's another matter," he said.

"Another matter--why?" asked Tess, rather warmly.

"Well--I would willingly do so if only we two were concerned.  But I
must not--for certain reasons."

"Just for once, sir!"

"Really I must not."

"O sir!"  She seized his hand as she spoke.

He withdrew it, shaking his head.

"Then I don't like you!" she burst out, "and I'll never come to your
church no more!"

"Don't talk so rashly."

"Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don't? ...  Will it
be just the same?  Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but
as you yourself to me myself--poor me!"

How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he
supposed himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman's
power to tell, though not to excuse.  Somewhat moved, he said in
this case also--

"It will be just the same."

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's
shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light,
at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that
shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow,
and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides,
and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.  In spite of the
untoward surroundings, however, Tess bravely made a little cross of
two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with flowers,
she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when she could
enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot also
a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them
alive.  What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of
mere observation noted the words "Keelwell's Marmalade"?  The eye of
maternal affection did not see them in its vision of higher things.



CHAPTER 14
After Tess gives birth to a baby boy, she decides that it is time to end her self-imposed seclusion. She decides to help in the fields during the August harvest. Her family brings the infant out to her so she can nurse him. One day when Tess returns home, she finds her son very ill and worries he may die. Since the baby has not been baptized, she wants to call the minister, but her father refuses her request. Worried that her son will not have salvation without a baptism, Tess herself christens him in front of her brothers and sisters and appropriately names the child Sorrow. The next morning, the child dies. Tess is relieved to know from the parson that her baptism is acceptable for the child's salvation. She is, however, denied a Christian burial for the baby; therefore, Tess buries Sorrow in the churchyard at a place where all unbaptized and suicides are laid to rest. Then she decorates the grave.
Notes The mornings are lazy and the nights are gloomy for Tess, and there is no relief in between. Her grief and remorse are insurmountable obstacles for her, and life holds little meaning. When her child is born, she gains courage and goes to the field to work. Then her baby grows ill, and Tess must perform a baptismal service for him, since her father will not allow the parson to come. She appropriately names the child Sorrow, which reflects the grief that Tess feels for her own sinfulness, for the baby's life, and for its early death. When the infant dies, Tess is forced to bury Sorrow in a neglected corner of the cemetery. This chapter reveals new images of Tess. She has been made to feel so ashamed of her pregnancy that she has gone into seclusion, giving her way too much time to punish herself. When the baby is finally born, she bravely goes to the fields to work and even nurses the child there with dignity. It is obvious that she cares about the infant and worries about its salvation. She knows, however, that the illegitimate child will never be accepted, which is one reason she calls the baby Sorrow. After Sorrow's christening and subsequent death, she questions the parson as to whether her baptismal service is adequate for the child's salvation. The parson gives her encouraging words, but will not give Sorrow a Christian burial. Tess must, therefore, lay Sorrow in a neglected corner of the churchyard, but she takes great care to decorate the grave. It is important to notice Hardy's descriptive powers in this chapter. He brings the harvest to life with vivid details, and his description of Sorrow's baptism is one of the most touching in the entire novel. It is also important to notice the part that fate has played in the novel by the end of this chapter. It has certainly been unkind to this sweet, innocent country girl. Tess left home in order to help earn money for her impoverished family, she falls into the hands of the sinister Alec who takes advantage of her naivete, she punishes herself severely for her sinfulness, she finds she is pregnant and ostracized from village life, and she finally loses the baby who has caused her so much sorrow. It is no wonder that Tess feels that there is little to live for in Marlott