Tess in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and the African mistress in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness demonstrates the triumph of the female spirit despite attempts by males to control the female body. Tess, although alienated by the men in her life, asserts her dependence by challenging the masculine notion that denies women's voices and by controlling her final destiny. The African mistress defiantly asserts her presence in the world of European males. Although women play a more prominent role in Hardy's novel than in Conrad's, the presence of a powerful feminine aspect permeates both works.
One of the means by which men attempt to control women is by molding them into idolized images. Thus Tess is wary of Angel when, in a burst of romanticism, he refers to her as his Artemis or Demeter. Tess informs Angel that she prefers to be Tess. Tess seems able to sense that Angel's linking her with divinity precludes his ability to deal with her as a mortal: " . . . Angel does not only see her as an attractive prospective wife, he sees her as an embodiment of the pure figure from the romantic pastoral myth. She represents his pagan romantic hope in the flesh" (Watt 151). Inevitably, when Tess confesses to Angel her past transgression, he is unable to accept her as an errant, repentant human being: "Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to impracticability . . . The figurative phrase was true: she was another woman than the one who had excited his desire" (Hardy 191-192). Only when it is too late does Angel change his romanticized view of Tess.
In revealing her own mortality, Tess crushes Angel's romantic dream. In idolizing Tess, Angel attempts to submerge her true identity. One critic of Hardy even suggests that Angel is typical of men who fantasize about women but are incapable of loving in the physical sense: "For all Angel's protests to the contrary, his position is really founded o...