lasses, upper-class rapaciousness, double moral standards for men and women, and so on. In any case that kind of thing is not a fit subject for narrative art. Oh yes it is, says Hardy, and he offers Tess of the d'Urbervilles as the proof.
To get to the sympathetic portrayal of Tess, Hardy introduces the overweening importance that the English attach to social class and the consequences of acting on social priorities. The tenuous aristocratic genealogy that the self-important and indiscreet Parson Tringham assigns to the drunken Jack Durbeyfield works so powerfully on the latter that he is able to disregard Tringham's remark about "several families among the cottagers of this county of almost equal luster" (3). Instead, Jack and Joan Durbeyfield absorb the message of entitlement to social snobbery, and the drunken spectacle that Jack makes of himself is a difference not of kind but of degree from the spectacle that the Durbeyfields make of their modest little family when they coerce Tess into projecting herself into the lives of the d'Urbervilles with marriage and settlements in mind. It turns out that social snobbery had also motivated the late Mr. Simon Stoke to appropriate the fine old d'Urberville name (33). His fortune was made as a merchant, or in trade, which is socially significant because the British gentry class, whose fortunes resided in hereditary lands, considered the class of shopkeepers to be inferior to itself.
The Durbeyfields' scheme to have Tess marry well can be interpreted as the effrontery of the lower classes; Joan has confidence that "if he [Alec d'Urberville]) don't marry her afore [having sex with her] he will after" (47). But bargaining marriageable daughters appears to have been an activity typical of the whole of Victorian Britain, the notion of middle-class women having careers instead of husband and children being foreign to the culture. To be sure, Tess is a working woman, and the novel conveys the f...