Tesss first encounter with the unnatural artifice of moral dogma coincides with her seduction into the corrupt world of Alec d'Urbeville. The Christian slogan in red paint conflicts physically and spiritually with nature, and Tess is the spokesperson for nature:

THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBRETH, NOT 2 Pet.ii.3

Against the peaceful landscape, the pale, decaying tints of the copses, the blue air of the horizon, and the lichened stile-boards, these staring vermilion words shone forth . . . I think they are horrible, said Tess. Crushing! Killing! (p.114-115)

Hardy's attitude towards Christianity is made quite clear:

The last grotesque phase of a creed which had served mankind well in its time. (p.115)

Tess feels guilty about her liaison with Alec. Hardy looks very closely at this feeling of guilt and suggests that it is unnecessary for a number of reasons. Firstly, although she has broken an accepted social law, the villagers of Martlott do not morally censure her. She has an illegitimate child, but they still accept her as an individual, a member of the community, and do not look upon her as an outcast.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly - the thought of the worlds concern at her situation - was founded on an illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind besides herself Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable the livelong night and day it was only this much to them Ah, she makes herself unhappy.' (p.127)

Tess imagines her guilt to be a natural consequence of her actions, not only in the eyes of the community but also in the eyes of nature. Hardy dispels this notion too. While walking in the hills:

She looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference . . . She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly. (p.121)

Her mind is tormented by a crowd of moral hobgoblins (p.120), which have been put there by her exposure to Christianity and which pervert her natural inclinations.

Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations. (p.127)

Hardy's intention with Tess is to test his concept of true natural goodness against the world.

her moral values having to be reckoned not by achievement but by tendency. (p.309)

She had set herself to stand or fall by her qualities (p.341)

Tess adheres to no doctrine or tradition, and represents Hardys direct challenge to both when she confronts the vicar on the subject of her baby's baptism and burial. After baptising her baby herself she (as does Hardy) feels:

If Providence would not ratify such an act of approximation she, for one, did not value the kind of heaven lost by the irregularity. (p.131)

Hardy undermines the authority of the vicar by calling him a tradesman (p.132) and showing how Tesss genuine human feelings sway his nobler feelings against his doctrine. He cannot give the baby a Christian burial, but with the account of Tesss simple sincerity in tending the baby's grave we are made to feel that the refusal was more off a loss to Christianity than to Tess.

Angel Clare's history parallels that of Tess in that he has broken away from his family through exposure to modern ideas. He outrages his father, the straightforward simple-minded . . . man of fixed ideas (p.153) by wishing to use a university education for the 'honour and glory of man' (p.154) and not of God. Just as Tess is breaking away from parochial convention and superstition, he is breaking away from adherence to received dogma.

At Talbothay's Dairy Angel becomes aware of the closeness to natural rhythms involved in the agricultural way of life. He imagines he can appreciate and adjust to this new way of life, but he cannot become part of it. He sees Tess in idealised terms:

What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is! (p.158)

And he cannot accept it when that illusion is shattered

In the growing relationship between Tess and Angel, Hardy stresses the natural inevitability of their passion.

All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale. (p.168)

Copyright: Ian Mackean www.literature-study-online.com