In fact, Alec succeeds in exploiting Tess partly because of this trait in her character. She feels constantly solicitous throughout the story about the welfare of her brothers and sisters. She is keenly conscious of her duty as the eldest child in the family. One of Tess’s most outstanding traits of character is her steadfast and unfaltering devotion to her family. “when they were together, the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed”. Between Tess’s mother and Tess, says Hardy, there was a gap of two hundred years:

She is considerably ahead of her mother as regards knowledge and outlook. Although she has a tendency to believe in omens, she is not superstitious like her mother. She has passed the sixth standard in the national school under a London-trained mistress, and she speaks two languages: the dialect at home, more or less and ordinary English outside and to persons of quality. He called her Artemis, Demeter add other fanciful names…….” Contrast with Her Mother “but a visionary essence of woman a whole sex condensed into one typical form. On certain occasions Tess was no longer the milk-maid, In spite of the “animalism,” however, Angel Clare finds something unearthly in her. Her lips and teeth could be compared to roses filled with snow. He had seen nothing to equal the beauty of her mouth which, to any young man with least fire in him, would have been distracting, infatuating, maddening. Angel Clare is also greatly attracted by her physical charms, her “real vitality” and her “real warmth”. “It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was”. When she meets Alec for the first time, her attractiveness of face and figure cause his eyes to rivet themselves on her. Phases of childhood lurked in her aspect still. Tess is described early in the novel as a cute and handsome girl whose mobile mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape. “Among Hardy’s woman Tess claims attention first, not only by reason of popularity, but more specially in that her creator distinguished her by the appellation of a pure woman”. Tess : Her Gentle and Sympathetic Nature.Tess: Her Heroic Endurance of Her Misfortunes.

Tess D'Urberville by Thomas Hardy