feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/gradesaver/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_1_part_2.txt
feat_book_id: Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 13
feat_summary_id: chapter 13
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 13", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210410060617/https://www.gradesaver.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/study-guide/summary-phase-2-chapters-12-15", "summary": "Tess Durbeyfield's return to Marlott became the subject of gossip. In the course of several weeks Tess revived sufficiently to get to church. When she goes to church, she notices others around her staring at her and whispering; she knows what their whispers concern and feels that she cannot come to church anymore. The only exercise that Tess takes is after dark when she can be alone. She perceives herself as a figure of Guilt introducing into the haunts of Innocence.", "analysis": "Tess's return to Marlott becomes the subject of gossip in the town precisely because it is such a stunning reversal of fortune for the girl. Although she left to claim kinship with a noble family, she returns to Marlott in a lower social standing than before, unmarried yet pregnant with Alec d'Urberville's child. The weight of this disdain for Tess as well as her own personal guilt lead her to shrink from society, finding refuge only in the natural habitat around her. Hardy makes clear that Tess feels herself a sinner for what occurred to her and that her personal pain and regret outweigh any social opposition she may face"}
text: 
  
  The event of Tess Durbeyfield's return from the manor of her bogus
  kinsfolk was rumoured abroad, if rumour be not too large a word for
  a space of a square mile.  In the afternoon several young girls of
  Marlott, former schoolfellows and acquaintances of Tess, called to
  see her, arriving dressed in their best starched and ironed, as
  became visitors to a person who had made a transcendent conquest (as
  they supposed), and sat round the room looking at her with great
  curiosity.  For the fact that it was this said thirty-first cousin,
  Mr d'Urberville, who had fallen in love with her, a gentleman
  not altogether local, whose reputation as a reckless gallant and
  heartbreaker was beginning to spread beyond the immediate boundaries
  of Trantridge, lent Tess's supposed position, by its fearsomeness, a
  far higher fascination that it would have exercised if unhazardous.
  
  Their interest was so deep that the younger ones whispered when her
  back was turned--
  
  "How pretty she is; and how that best frock do set her off!  I
  believe it cost an immense deal, and that it was a gift from him."
  
  Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from the
  corner-cupboard, did not hear these commentaries.  If she had heard
  them, she might soon have set her friends right on the matter.  But
  her mother heard, and Joan's simple vanity, having been denied the
  hope of a dashing marriage, fed itself as well as it could upon
  the sensation of a dashing flirtation.  Upon the whole she felt
  gratified, even though such a limited and evanescent triumph should
  involve her daughter's reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and
  in the warmth of her responsiveness to their admiration she invited
  her visitors to stay to tea.
  
  Their chatter, their laughter, their good-humoured innuendoes, above
  all, their flashes and flickerings of envy, revived Tess's spirits
  also; and, as the evening wore on, she caught the infection of their
  excitement, and grew almost gay.  The marble hardness left her face,
  she moved with something of her old bounding step, and flushed in all
  her young beauty.
  
  At moments, in spite of thought, she would reply to their inquiries
  with a manner of superiority, as if recognizing that her experiences
  in the field of courtship had, indeed, been slightly enviable.  But
  so far was she from being, in the words of Robert South, "in love
  with her own ruin," that the illusion was transient as lightning;
  cold reason came back to mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness
  of her momentary pride would convict her, and recall her to reserved
  listlessness again.
  
  And the despondency of the next morning's dawn, when it was no longer
  Sunday, but Monday; and no best clothes; and the laughing visitors
  were gone, and she awoke alone in her old bed, the innocent younger
  children breathing softly around her.  In place of the excitement of
  her return, and the interest it had inspired, she saw before her a
  long and stony highway which she had to tread, without aid, and with
  little sympathy.  Her depression was then terrible, and she could
  have hidden herself in a tomb.
  
  In the course of a few weeks Tess revived sufficiently to show
  herself so far as was necessary to get to church one Sunday morning.
  She liked to hear the chanting--such as it was--and the old Psalms,
  and to join in the Morning Hymn.  That innate love of melody, which
  she had inherited from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest
  music a power over her which could well-nigh drag her heart out of
  her bosom at times.
  
  To be as much out of observation as possible for reasons of her own,
  and to escape the gallantries of the young men, she set out before
  the chiming began, and took a back seat under the gallery, close to
  the lumber, where only old men and women came, and where the bier
  stood on end among the churchyard tools.
  
  Parishioners dropped in by twos and threes, deposited themselves
  in rows before her, rested three-quarters of a minute on their
  foreheads as if they were praying, though they were not; then sat up,
  and looked around. When the chants came on, one of her favourites
  happened to be chosen among the rest--the old double chant
  "Langdon"--but she did not know what it was called, though she would
  much have liked to know.  She thought, without exactly wording the
  thought, how strange and god-like was a composer's power, who from
  the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had
  felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and
  never would have a clue to his personality.
  
  The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the
  service proceeded; and at last observing her, they whispered to each
  other.  She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart,
  and felt that she could come to church no more.
  
  The bedroom which she shared with some of the children formed her
  retreat more continually than ever.  Here, under her few square yards
  of thatch, she watched winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets,
  and successive moons at their full.  So close kept she that at length
  almost everybody thought she had gone away.
  
  The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it
  was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary.  She
  knew how to hit to a hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the
  light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of
  day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute
  mental liberty.  It is then that the plight of being alive becomes
  attenuated to its least possible dimensions.  She had no fear of the
  shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind--or rather that
  cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is
  so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.
  
  On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece
  with the element she moved in.  Her flexuous and stealthy figure
  became an integral part of the scene.  At times her whimsical fancy
  would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part
  of her own story.  Rather they became a part of it; for the world is
  only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were.  The
  midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and
  bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach.  A wet
  day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the
  mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely
  as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.
  
  But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds
  of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her,
  was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy--a cloud of moral
  hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason.  It was they
  that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she.  Walking
  among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits
  on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, 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.  Feeling herself in antagonism, she was
  quite in accord.  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.
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter 13
target: Tess Durbeyfield's return to Marlott became the subject of gossip. In the course of several weeks Tess revived sufficiently to get to church. When she goes to church, she notices others around her staring at her and whispering; she knows what their whispers concern and feels that she cannot come to church anymore. The only exercise that Tess takes is after dark when she can be alone. She perceives herself as a figure of Guilt introducing into the haunts of Innocence.
feat_summary_analysis: Tess's return to Marlott becomes the subject of gossip in the town precisely because it is such a stunning reversal of fortune for the girl. Although she left to claim kinship with a noble family, she returns to Marlott in a lower social standing than before, unmarried yet pregnant with Alec d'Urberville's child. The weight of this disdain for Tess as well as her own personal guilt lead her to shrink from society, finding refuge only in the natural habitat around her. Hardy makes clear that Tess feels herself a sinner for what occurred to her and that her personal pain and regret outweigh any social opposition she may face