Hardy--May-Day

The May-Day celebration that takes place at the beginning of Tess of the D’Urbervilles is meant to epitomize the protagonist’s initial virtue and maidenhood. The Victorians celebrated May-Day to welcome the arrival of spring as well as the general “purity” of the season. Because of this, the young maidens of the village played a central role in the celebration of the holiday; by dressing in white and participating in the May-Day dance, they exemplified the “newness” and “beauty” of the spring season. As Thomas Hardy himself observes of the May-Day dance in Marlott, “Its singularity lay less in the retention of a custom of walking in procession and dancing on each anniversary than in the members being solely women” (Tess of the D’Urbervilles 49). It is through this blatant symbolism that Tess Durbeyfield’s purity and naiveté are demonstrated.

Indeed, Hardy’s construction of Tess is as the ultimate innocent; the full title of the novel is, of course, Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman. It is through the jubilant celebration of May-Day that the reader sees the personification of this characterization. Tess’s “fall from grace” in the following section of the novel becomes all the more tragic—her brutal rape becomes a microcosm for the natural world. In this sense, the Hardy enthusiast can see how the celebration of May-Day personifies Tess’s moral and psychological state before her cruel fall. Heath Flower
The Maypole

However, there is a problem with this purely sentimental reading; the May-Day celebration was originally a pagan holiday. The early Celts and Saxons celebrated May 1st as Beltane, or the “day of fire.” Thomas Hardy makes reference to the holiday’s obscure origins through the use of sun imagery. The author notes of the May-Day maidens, “each and every one had a private little sun for her soul to bask in” (50). This subtle allusion to the original function of May-Day demonstrates Hardy’s awareness of the holiday’s mysterious derivation; part of the “pagan spirit” is still alive in the minds of these seemingly proper Victorian maidens.

The concept of May-Day as a pagan holiday demonstrates an important complication in Thomas Hardy’s symbolic construction of the first passage of the novel. Put along side the other pagan symbols in the text, May-Day represents a sinister, more naturalistic progression of the seasons than the residents of Marlott realize. Indeed, it is on this day that Tess first realizes her status as a D’Urberville—an insight that will ultimately lead to her tragic demise. In this sense, May-Day can also be interoperated as a day of “awakening”—Tess is called to face the legacy of her aristocratic ancestors, for better or for worse.

The disparity present between the Victorians’ chaste celebration of May-Day and the holiday’s pagan origins, demonstrates the complexity of Thomas Hardy’s representation of Tess’s initial condition. The seemingly contradictory nature of the two interpretations actually harmonize to illustrate the protagonist’s mental state at the beginning of the novel. While Tess Durbeyfield is indeed a “pure woman,” she is also driven by an instinctual, somewhat pagan, yearning for a more romantic lifestyle; the combination of these two symbolic constructions adequately chronicles the tragedy behind Tess’s fall.