"Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) offers a trenchant critique of the supernatural in general and conversion in particular. Hardy’s text is ambivalent in the sense that ballads, omens, and fantastic and eerie gothic motifs permeate it whilst readers won’t miss references to the biological and geological sciences. Since the text is thus put in a twilight zone, it is crucial to investigate how the heroine Tess practices and experiences the borders between the supernatural and the scientific: She is often beleaguered by omens and superstitions, but confesses that she does not believe in the supernatural. A “sinned”Tess wishes to gain a new life like many religious converts while a scientific Tess rejects supernatural beliefs. The binary opposition between the supernatural and the scientific haunts the text as does the guilt-ridden heroine who just wants to escape the past, and it culminates in Alec’s conversion and backsliding to his original state. How, readers may ask, can the efficacy or mode of conversion be justified? This is the moment when they find that Hardy’s criticism of the supernatural is directed―covertly but strategically―to St. Paul who was famously converted on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). Hardy’s sardonic employment of conversion in Tess leads us to think that, despite his fascination with the supernatural, he distances himself from miracles in the Bible generally and from conversion specifically. We are reminded that he was a man of “scientific humanism”and in the “main line of Victorian rationalism.”With his discrediting of “the doctrines of the supernatural”in Christianity, he is resolutely opposed to conversion. This reading of Hardy contextualizes the supernatural in Tess to reveal the surprising “politics”embedded in his religious discourses."

Thomas Hardy

Tess of the d’Urbervilles

conversion

the Bible

supernaturalism

identifier:BO009500003932