Hardy's Femme Fatale

Along with the extensive and lyrical descriptions of natural landscape presented in Hardy’s novels, the true stars of the show are his female heroines. Eustacia fromThe Return of the Native and Tess fromTess of the D’Urbervillesare great examples of how Hardy takes two very different women and forms an entire story around their lives. Eustacia and Tess are extremely unalike, but Hardy’s methods of describing their characters and their equally fatal endings bind them together under the genre of the ‘femme fatale.’ While attaining status of femme fatale in the end, both women also stand out in Hardy’s novels because of their thoroughly modern characteristics. In several of his Wessex novels, Hardy juxtaposes the pre-industrial and rural culture of Dorset with the more modern, technological world that was being introduced at the end of the nineteenth century.

Eustacia and Tess are both described by Hardy as needing to get away from their rural lives and move ahead into a more modern world – whether it is a higher, better educated class (as it is for Tess), or a more urban setting (as it is for Eustacia).. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy places Tess in contrast to her Mother, a woman who takes ancient superstitions and pagan beliefs seriously in comparison to her more educated and modernly sensible daughter. In regards to Tess’s large family and the practice of having several children, Hardy writes: “As Tess grew older, and began to see how matters stood, she felt Malthusian vexation with her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many little sisters and brothers, when it was such a trouble to nurse those that had already come” (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 37). Hardy’s mention of Tess having a “Malthusian vexation” with her mother implies that Tess is familiar with the biological and population growth theories of the nineteenth-century scientist, Thomas Malthus. Tess’s “mother’s intelligence was that of a happy child: Joan Durbeyfield was simply an additional one, and that not the eldest, to her own long family of nine when all were living” (Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 37). Right away, readers form the impression that Joan Durbeyfield is an uneducated, lower class woman from the pre-industrial and rural world of Dorset. More >