I wanted to take a closer look at the portrait of Alec D’Urberville in Thomas Hardy’s Tess. Alec is an archetypal rogue of fiction, one in a long line of roues that can be traced back to Robert Lovelace in Richardson’s Clarissa and beyond. These men are always attractive, but dangerous and amoral. Alec is largely a two-dimensional character. As early as Chapter 12 he tells Tess

“I suppose I am a bad fellow—a damn bad fellow. I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad, in all probability.” (77).

So one has to ask, is there anything else to him than a symbol of male oppression and sinfulness?

I’m going to look more closely at how Hardy represents Alec. When he first meets Tess he is dressed as a young country gent:

“The driver was a young man of 3 or 4 and twenty, with a cigar between his teeth; wearing a dandy cap, drab jacket, breeches of the same hue, white neckcloth, stick-up collar, and brown driving gloves” (52).

Earlier we are told he has “a well-groomed black moustache with curled points” which completes the picture – this is someone confident in his appearance and his attractiveness to the opposite sex, over-dressed for the role of driver. This establishes a template for virtually every time Alec appears – he is never recognised straightaway by Tess. Or to be more precise his identity is never immediately acknowledged by the narrator, usually because he appears in disguise.

If Tess and Angel are consistently characterised as Adam and Eve, both before and after the Fall, Alec is the tempter. In his multiple disguises he promises her riches or a better life.

“”About the children – your brothers and sisters,” he resumed. “I’ve been thinking about them”. Tess’s heart quivered – he was touching her in a weak place. Since returning home her soul had gone out to those children with an affection that was passionate.....if your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do something for them; since your father will not be able to do much I suppose”.

(Tess angrily rejects him, and in response )

“D’Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge, where he pulled off the long smockfrock and red neckerchief which had mainly disguised him”.

350

He disappears from the narrative for a several chapters while Tess and Angel are falling in love at the dairy, only to return in dramatic fashion. At the end of chapter 44, coming back from an unsuccessful visit to Angel’s parents, Tess meets Alec preaching to a small crowd. He is a reformed man and has found god. She hears him before she sees him, and it dawns on her that the voice, preaching “a vehement form of the views of Angel’s father” is that of Alec. (305-6). From this point he begins to haunt Tess, seeking her out time and again. He next appears (314) as “a black speck” and is “perceived to be a man in black…in a semi-clerical costume” (my emphasis). He tracks her down to her cottage, and then pesters her while she works on a threshing machine:

“Just before the dinner-hour a person had come silently into the field by the gate, and had been standing under a second rick watching the scene, and Tess in particular. He was dressed in a tweed suit of fashionable pattern, and he twirled a gay walking-cane”. (327).

We don’t have long to wait before Alec resumes his persistent attempts to persuade Tess to resume her relationship with him. She returns home to Marlott where her mother has been taken ill. One evening she is working on the family’s small-holding when she becomes aware of someone working alongside her in the twilight:

“Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak to her. Nor did she think of him further than to recollect that he had not been there when it was broad daylight….by and by he dug so close to her that the fire-beams were reflected as distinctly from the steel prongs of his fork as from her own. On going up to the fire to throw a pitch of dead weeds upon it, she found that he did the same, on the other side, the fire flared up, and she beheld the face of D’Urberville. “

Alec’s demonic appearance, pitchfork and all, is re-emphasised. Once again he is in disguise – almost one might say in fancy dress:

“The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of his appearance in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now worn only by the most old-fashioned of the labourers, had a ghastly comicality that chilled her as to its bearing. …

“A jester might say this is just like paradise. You are Eve, and I am the old Other One come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior animal. I used to be quite up in that scene of Milton’s when I was theological.”

349

Their penultimate meeting is in Kingsbere church, among the tombs of the ancient D’Urbervilles. Tess is looking round the old church, home to her ancestors:

“She musingly tuned to withdraw, passing near an altar-tomb, the oldest of them all, on which was a recumbent figure. In the dusk she had not noticed it before, and would have hardly noticed it now but for an odd fancy that the effigy moved. As soon as she drew close to it she discovered all in a moment that the figure was a living person; and the shock of her sense of not having been alone was so violent that she was quite overcome, and sank down nigh to fainting, not however till she had recognised Alec D’Urberville in the form.

(363).

What are we to make of this presentation of Alec? The references to his demonic appearance aren’t that hard to decode (!) but the narrator’s persistent failure to identify him on his first appearance in each scene is more problematic. Is this just a stylistic quirk, a way of allowing the reader to guess his identity before it is confirmed, giving the false impression that the reader is slightly ahead of the narrator in their understanding of the story? Possibly, but if this was all that is going on it would be quite a tired device. When a mysterious stranger appears in the Sherlock Holmes stories (by comparison) the real surprise is when it is not Holmes in disguise. We quickly learn that it will be Alec who appears out of the gathering darkness whenever someone appears.

With regard to his disguises and costumes, I think these are a way for the author to signal Alec’s instability and unpredictability, the mercurial nature of his character and his insincerity. He presents himself to the world in the way he wants to be seen, and when that character has served its purpose it is discarded. He may even be sincere in his presentation, but it is no less shallow and superficial for all that. It is this that makes him so dangerous.

Literature has worse villains than Alec D’Urberville, but it is hard to feel sorry for him when Tess finally extracts the retribution he has coming to him.

I’d be interested what any readers of this post make of Alec – is there more to him than the stage-villain with a curled moustache and a cloak?