Reflecting on Tess's situation, Hardy writes of "the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things"(43. At some level, there is a note of sarcasm in the remark. However, I'm not really sure whether sarcasm does justice to Hardy's reading of Tess's story. Hardy notes how "Nature does not often say 'See!' to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to a happy doing; or reply 'Here!' to a body's cry of 'Where?' till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome outworn game"(43).
Hardy laments such "anachronisms" and speculates as to whether they might "be corrected by a finer intuition, a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us round and along"(43). While he rejects the possibility, his speculation is based on a couple of intriguing assumptions. First, that the world is ordered according to some design or plan, and secondly that it is the goal of society to read that plan and order itself accordingly. In Tess, Hardy continually reminds that society has failed to do so.
In Tess, Hardy continually notes discords between Nature and the Social, Nature and Propriety. Thus, the milkmaids Marian, Izzy, Retty and Tess recognize the "futility of their infatuation" with Angel Clare "from a social point of view...its lack of everything to justify its existence in the eye of civilization (while lacking nothing in the eye of Nature)"(147). Likewise, Tess is tortured by the irony that while Angel
really did prefer [her] in a cursory way to the rest, she who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the homilier ones whom he ignored.(148).
When Tess returns home after the assault by Alec, her mother stoically advises, "Well, we must make the best of it, I suppose. 'Tis nater, after all, and what pleases God"(82). Of course, the blame for much of what has occured might be more properly laid at her own door. Hardy is surely chastising those who proceed without care or forethought and attribute the consequences to God, or nature.
With conditions, Hardy believes in the virtues of nature, or the natural. Part of Tess's virtue or charm for Hardy is her connection to nature. On the nature versus art binary, Tess is virtous to the extent to which she is artless.
Her innocence attracts; however, while attractive, the villains of the novel can't let it alone or nurture it properly. She begins to suffer when others impose art upon her. On the morning she sets off to Alec's, "to please her parent the girl put herself quite in Joan's hands, saying serenely 'Do what you like with me, mother'"(49). After re-working Tess's appearance in the interests of advancing what she sees as Tess's (and her own) best interests, Joan steps back to observe the effect "like a painter from his easel"(50).
Likewise, while presumably drawn to Tess because of her innocence and freshness, for Alec, Tess is an object that requires addition, or art. Like an artist poring over a work, he seems to be constantly gazing at her as an object. Soon upon their initial meeting, Alec is decorating her, gathering rose blooms for her to put on her person, and when "she could affix no more he himself tucked a bud or two into her hat"(42). Afterward, "he watched her pretty and unconscious munching through the skeins of smoke," while she "innocently looked down at the roses in her bosom" (42).
So, while Tess is pure and natural, there doesn't seem to be a social machinery in place that would develop, preserve, or nurture her as such. However, for Hardy, the question might even be larger. Closing out the first book of the novel, he asks:
Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why the coarse appropriates the finer thus, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.(74)
The last phrase again points to Hardy's uncertainty as to their being a natural order to things, suggesting that the order we seek and wish for comes from within us and is not met with in nature. This uncertainty in Hardy is made most prominent in the passages detailing Tess's time after her return from Alec's home. For the most part, to avoid judgemental eyes, she spends her time indoors, only venturing out for long walks in the evening. During these rambles, she imagines that "midnight airs and gusts...were formulae of bitter reproach" and "a wet day was irremediable grief at her weakness"(84).
Regarding Tess's reading of "natural phenomenon," Hardy maintains that "the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were"(84). This would seem to suggest that there is no such thing as nature outside of our conception of it. However, Hardy can't quite put aside a conception of innocence that presupposes a reified reading of Nature. When "walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, [Tess] looked upon herself as a figure of guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence"(85-86). Hardy corrects her, claiming "she was making a distinction where there was no difference"(86).
Nor does Hardy seem to ever give up on the idea of their being some sort of natural order to the world. Or, maybe, he never gives up his conviction that there should be. If he doesn't agree, he's certainly in profound sympathy with Tess when she contemplates the world and her horrible situation in it, and looking out at stars tells her brother Abraham, "They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our Stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and
sound-a few blighted." Abraham asks how she'd characterize their world. Tess replies, "A blighted one"(31).
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