feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/gradesaver/Tess of the D'Urbervilles/section_1_part_3.txt
feat_book_id: Tess of the D'Urbervilles.chapter 14
feat_summary_id: chapter 14
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 14", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210410060617/https://www.gradesaver.com/tess-of-the-durbervilles/study-guide/summary-phase-2-chapters-12-15", "summary": "On a hot August afternoon, the sun beats down on Marlott while men and women work in the corn fields. Among the women is Tess, whom the other women watch carefully. At intervals she rests, for she has been somewhat changed. After a long seclusion she had decided to undertake outdoor work during the busiest season of the year. When she finishes her labor, during lunch her sister brings Tess's child to her so that she may breastfeed it. A nearby woman observes that Tess is fond of her child, although she might pretend to hate it. Tess had come to bear herself with dignity and to resolve not to wallow in her own self-pity. However, as her sorrows over bearing an illegitimate child fade away, a fresh sorrow arises. The baby takes ill. When Tess returns home after work, she finds that the baby had taken ill. Tess realizes that the baby has not been baptized. Tess begs her father to send for the parson, but he refuses out of pride. Tess goes to bed, but the infant's breathing grows more difficult and Tess prays for pity. Tess finally decides to baptize the infant herself: she gives it the name Sorrow. As she baptizes Sorrow, Tess appears to her siblings as a large, towering, divine personage. When Tess awakes the next morning, she finds that Sorrow has died. Tess wonders whether if it were doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child. She asks the new parson, and he agrees that Sorrow had been properly baptized, but he refuses to give a Christian burial out of community reasons. She tells him not to speak to her as saint to sinner, but as person to person. Finally he agrees that the burial will be the same.", "analysis": "Hardy once again shifts the narrative forward to bypass momentous events in Tess's life; skipping nearly a year in Tess's life, the story picks up after Tess has given birth to the illegitimate child borne of her one encounter with Alec d'Urberville. This child is the living representation of her sin: during the first part of the chapter it exists only as a symbol and not as an actual person, receiving a name only before its death. Even the name that Tess gives her infant child, Sorrow, represents the aftermath of her sin. Nevertheless, if Sorrow represents Tess's guilt over her weakness with Alec d'Urberville, Tess's reaction to her child is significant. At first Tess claims to detest the child, yet grows accustomed to it as a part of her, accepting this sin as inherent in her with a profound sense of self-loathing. However, once the child is near death Tess accepts it fully by insisting on its baptism. By confronting her sin and naming it, Tess essentially allows Sorrow to die peacefully. The baptism of Sorrow is a pivotal event for Tess in which she moves from a simplistic child to, as her siblings see her, a \"towering, divine personage. By baptizing her child, Tess also rejects the social structure around her that perceives the mother as an outcast, performing the ceremony that marks the acceptance of her child into society without the public declaration of the church. The baptism of Sorrow is thus a baptism for Tess as well, marking a new sense of self and self-worth that she has lacked. This can further be seen in the confrontation with the parson that follows: the once demure Tess demands that Sorrow be given a Christian burial, despite the objection of the parson"}
text: 
  
  It was a hazy sunrise in August.  The denser nocturnal vapours,
  attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated
  fleeces within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they
  should be dried away to nothing.
  
  The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal
  look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression.
  His present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the
  scene, explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment.  One could
  feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky.  The
  luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature,
  gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that
  was brimming with interest for him.
  
  His light, a little later, broke though chinks of cottage shutters,
  throwing stripes like red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of
  drawers, and other furniture within; and awakening harvesters who
  were not already astir.
  
  But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were two broad
  arms of painted wood, which rose from the margin of yellow cornfield
  hard by Marlott village.  They, with two others below, formed the
  revolving Maltese cross of the reaping-machine, which had been
  brought to the field on the previous evening to be ready for
  operations this day.  The paint with which they were smeared,
  intensified in hue by the sunlight, imparted to them a look of
  having been dipped in liquid fire.
  
  The field had already been "opened"; that is to say, a lane a few
  feet wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole
  circumference of the field for the first passage of the horses and
  machine.
  
  Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down
  the lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top
  struck the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were
  enjoying sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn.  They
  disappeared from the lane between the two stone posts which flanked
  the nearest field-gate.
  
  Presently there arose from within a ticking like the love-making of
  the grasshopper.  The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation
  of three horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible
  over the gate, a driver sitting  upon one of the hauling horses,
  and an attendant on the seat of the implement.  Along one side of
  the field the whole wain went, the arms of the mechanical reaper
  revolving slowly, till it passed down the hill quite out of sight.
  In a minute it came up on the other side of the field at the same
  equable pace; the glistening brass star in the forehead of the fore
  horse first catching the eye as it rose into view over the stubble,
  then the bright arms, and then the whole machine.
  
  The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with
  each circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to a smaller area as
  the morning wore on.  Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated
  inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their
  refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when,
  their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they
  were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of
  upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and
  they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones of the
  harvesters.
  
  The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps,
  each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the
  active binders in the rear laid their hands--mainly women, but some
  of them men in print shirts, and trousers supported round their
  waists by leather straps, rendering useless the two buttons behind,
  which twinkled and bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each
  wearer, as if they were a pair of eyes in the small of his back.
  
  But those of the other sex were the most interesting of this company
  of binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when
  she becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely
  an object set down therein as at ordinary times.  A field-man is a
  personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had
  somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding,
  and assimilated herself with it.
  
  The women--or rather girls, for they were mostly young--wore drawn
  cotton bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and
  gloves to prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble.  There
  was one wearing a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured
  tight-sleeved gown, another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the
  reaping-machine; and others, older, in the brown-rough "wropper"
  or over-all--the old-established and most appropriate dress of the
  field-woman, which the young ones were abandoning.  This morning the
  eye returns involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she
  being the most flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all.  But
  her bonnet is pulled so far over her brow that none of her face is
  disclosed while she binds, though her complexion may be guessed from
  a stray twine or two of dark brown hair which extends below the
  curtain of her bonnet.  Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual
  attention is that she never courts it, though the other women often
  gaze around them.
  
  Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony.  From the sheaf last
  finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her
  left palm to bring them even.  Then, stooping low, she moves forward,
  gathering the corn with both hands against her knees, and pushing
  her left gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other
  side, holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover.  She
  brings the ends of the bond together, and kneels on the sheaf while
  she ties it, beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the
  breeze.  A bit of her naked arm is visible between the buff leather
  of the gauntlet and the sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on
  its feminine smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds.
  
  At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged
  apron, or to pull her bonnet straight.  Then one can see the oval
  face of a handsome young woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy
  clinging tresses, which seem to clasp in a beseeching way anything
  they fall against.  The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular,
  the red lips thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.
  
  It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d'Urberville, somewhat changed--the
  same, but not the same; at the present stage of her existence living
  as a stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that
  she was in.  After a long seclusion she had come to a resolve to
  undertake outdoor work in her native village, the busiest season of
  the year in the agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that
  she could do within the house being so remunerative for the time as
  harvesting in the fields.
  
  The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess's,
  the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille
  at the completion of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on
  end against those of the rest, till a shock, or "stitch" as it was
  here called, of ten or a dozen was formed.
  
  They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work proceeded as
  before.  As the hour of eleven drew near a person watching her might
  have noticed that every now and then Tess's glance flitted wistfully
  to the brow of the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing.
  On the verge of the hour the heads of a group of children, of ages
  ranging from six to fourteen, rose over the stubbly convexity of the
  hill.
  
  The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not pause.
  
  The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its
  corner draggling on the stubble, carried in her arms what at first
  sight seemed to be a doll, but proved to be an infant in long
  clothes.  Another brought some lunch.  The harvesters ceased working,
  took their provisions, and sat down against one of the shocks.  Here
  they fell to, the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a
  cup.
  
  Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her labours.
  She sat down at the end of the shock, her face turned somewhat away
  from her companions.  When she had deposited herself a man in a
  rabbit-skin cap, and with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt,
  held the cup of ale over the top of the shock for her to drink.  But
  she did not accept his offer.  As soon as her lunch was spread she
  called up the big girl, her sister, and took the baby of her, who,
  glad to be relieved of the burden, went away to the next shock and
  joined the other children playing there.  Tess, with a curiously
  stealthy yet courageous movement, and with a still rising colour,
  unfastened her frock and began suckling the child.
  
  The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the
  other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with
  absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no
  longer yield a stream.  All the women but Tess fell into animated
  talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.
  
  When the infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat it upright
  in her lap, and looking into the far distance, dandled it with a
  gloomy indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she
  fell to violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could
  never leave off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which
  strangely combined passionateness with contempt.
  
  "She's fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en,
  and say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard,"
  observed the woman in the red petticoat.
  
  "She'll soon leave off saying that," replied the one in buff. "Lord,
  'tis wonderful what a body can get used to o' that sort in time!"
  
  "A little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming o't, I
  reckon.  There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in
  The Chase; and it mid ha' gone hard wi' a certain party if folks had
  come along."
  
  "Well, a little more, or a little less, 'twas a thousand pities that
  it should have happened to she, of all others.  But 'tis always the
  comeliest!  The plain ones be as safe as churches--hey, Jenny?"  The
  speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined
  as plain.
  
  It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy
  to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her
  flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor
  grey nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred
  others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises--shade
  behind shade--tint beyond tint--around pupils that had no bottom; an
  almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character
  inherited from her race.
  
  A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the
  fields this week for the first time during many months.  After
  wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret
  that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated
  her.  She felt that she would do well to be useful again--to taste
  anew sweet independence at any price.  The past was past; whatever
  it had been, it was no more at hand.  Whatever its consequences,
  time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if
  they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten.
  Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and
  the sun shone as clearly now as ever.  The familiar surroundings had
  not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.
  
  She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly--the
  thought of the world's 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, 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."  If she tried to be cheerful,
  to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers,
  the baby, she could only be this idea to them--"Ah, she bears it
  very well."  Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been
  wretched at what had happened to her?  Not greatly.  If she could
  have been but just created, to discover herself as a spouseless
  mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless
  child, would the position have caused her to despair?  No, she would
  have taken it calmly, and found pleasure therein. Most of the misery
  had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate
  sensations.
  
  Whatever Tess's reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress
  herself up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the
  fields, harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then.  This was
  why she had borne herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly
  in the face at times, even when holding the baby in her arms.
  
  The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and stretched their
  limbs, and extinguished their pipes.  The horses, which had been
  unharnessed and fed, were again attached to the scarlet machine.
  Tess, having quickly eaten her own meal, beckoned to her eldest
  sister to come and take away the baby, fastened her dress, put on
  the buff gloves again, and stooped anew to draw a bond from the last
  completed sheaf for the tying of the next.
  
  In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were
  continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters.
  Then they all rode home in one of the largest wagons, in the company
  of a broad tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the
  eastwards, its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some
  worm-eaten Tuscan saint.  Tess's female companions sang songs, and
  showed themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out
  of doors, though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing
  in a few verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry
  green wood and came back a changed state.  There are counterpoises
  and compensations in life; and the event which had made of her a
  social warning had also for the moment made her the most interesting
  personage in the village to many.  Their friendliness won her still
  farther away from herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and
  she became almost gay.
  
  But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on
  the natural side of her which knew no social law.  When she reached
  home it was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly
  taken ill since the afternoon.  Some such collapse had been probable,
  so tender and puny was its frame; but the event came as a shock
  nevertheless.
  
  The baby's offence against society in coming into the world was
  forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul's desire was to continue that
  offence by preserving the life of the child.  However, it soon grew
  clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the
  flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured.
  And when she had discovered this she was plunged into a misery which
  transcended that of the child's simple loss.  Her baby had not been
  baptized.
  
  Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the
  consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done,
  burn she must, and there was an end of it.  Like all village girls,
  she was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully
  studied the histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences
  to be drawn therefrom.  But when the same question arose with regard
  to the baby, it had a very different colour.  Her darling was about
  to die, and no salvation.
  
  It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she
  might send for the parson.  The moment happened to be one at which
  her father's sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest,
  and his sensitiveness to the smudge which Tess had set upon that
  nobility most pronounced, for he had just returned from his weekly
  booze at Rolliver's Inn.  No parson should come inside his door, he
  declared, prying into his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it
  had become more necessary than ever to hide them.  He locked the door
  and put the key in his pocket.
  
  The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond measure, Tess
  retired also.  She was continually waking as she lay, and in the
  middle of the night found that the baby was still worse.  It was
  obviously dying--quietly and painlessly, but none the less surely.
  
  In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed.  The clock struck the
  solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and
  malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts.  She thought of
  the child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double
  doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend
  tossing it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for
  heating the oven on baking days; to which picture she added many
  other quaint and curious details of torment sometimes taught the
  young in this Christian country.  The lurid presentment so powerfully
  affected her imagination in the silence of the sleeping house that
  her nightgown became damp with perspiration, and the bedstead shook
  with each throb of her heart.
  
  The infant's breathing grew more difficult, and the mother's mental
  tension increased.  It was useless to devour the little thing with
  kisses; she could stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about
  the room.
  
  "O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!" she cried.
  "Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the
  child!"
  
  She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured incoherent
  supplications for a long while, till she suddenly started up.
  
  "Ah! perhaps baby can be saved!  Perhaps it will be just the same!"
  
  She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have
  shone in the gloom surrounding her.  She lit a candle, and went to
  a second and a third bed under the wall, where she awoke her young
  sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied the same room.  Pulling
  out the washing-stand so that she could get behind it, she poured
  some water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting their
  hands together with fingers exactly vertical.  While the children,
  scarcely awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger
  and larger, remained in this position, she took the baby from her
  bed--a child's child--so immature as scarce to seem a sufficient
  personality to endow its producer with the maternal title.  Tess then
  stood erect with the infant on her arm beside the basin; the next
  sister held the Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church
  held it before the parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her
  child.
  
  Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her
  long white nightgown, a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging
  straight down her back to her waist.  The kindly dimness of the weak
  candle abstracted from her form and features the little blemishes
  which sunlight might have revealed--the stubble scratches upon her
  wrists, and the weariness of her eyes--her high enthusiasm having
  a transfiguring effect upon the face which had been her undoing,
  showing it as a thing of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity
  which was almost regal.  The little ones kneeling round, their sleepy
  eyes blinking and red, awaited her preparations full of a suspended
  wonder which their physical heaviness at that hour would not allow to
  become active.
  
  The most impressed of them said:
  
  "Be you really going to christen him, Tess?"
  
  The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.
  
  "What's his name going to be?"
  
  She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a phrase in
  the book of Genesis came into her head as she proceeded with the
  baptismal service, and now she pronounced it:
  
  "SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son,
  and of the Holy Ghost."
  
  She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.
  
  "Say 'Amen,' children."
  
  The tiny voices piped in obedient response, "Amen!"
  
  Tess went on:
  
  "We receive this child"--and so forth--"and do sign him with the sign
  of the Cross."
  
  Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently drew an
  immense cross upon the baby with her forefinger, continuing with
  the customary sentences as to his manfully fighting against sin,
  the world, and the devil, and being a faithful soldier and servant
  unto his life's end.  She duly went on with the Lord's Prayer, the
  children lisping it after her in a thin gnat-like wail, till, at the
  conclusion, raising their voices to clerk's pitch, they again piped
  into silence, "Amen!"
  
  Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy
  of the sacrament, poured forth from the bottom of her heart the
  thanksgiving that follows, uttering it boldly and triumphantly in the
  stopt-diapason note which her voice acquired when her heart was in
  her speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her.
  The ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a
  glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each
  cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils
  shone like a diamond.  The children gazed up at her with more and
  more reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning.  She did
  not look like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering, and
  awful--a divine personage with whom they had nothing in common.
  
  Poor Sorrow's campaign against sin, the world, and the devil was
  doomed to be of limited brilliancy--luckily perhaps for himself,
  considering his beginnings.  In the blue of the morning that fragile
  soldier and servant breathed his last, and when the other children
  awoke they cried bitterly, and begged Sissy to have another pretty
  baby.
  
  The calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained
  with her in the infant's loss.  In the daylight, indeed, she felt her
  terrors about his soul to have been somewhat exaggerated; whether
  well founded or not, she had no uneasiness now, reasoning that
  if Providence would not ratify such an act of approximation
  she, for one, did not value the kind of heaven lost by the
  irregularity--either for herself or for her child.
  
  So passed away Sorrow the Undesired--that intrusive creature, that
  bastard gift of shameless Nature, who respects not the social law;
  a waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who
  knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom
  the cottage interior was the universe, the week's weather climate,
  new-born babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human
  knowledge.
  
  Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal, wondered if it were
  doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child.
  Nobody could tell this but the parson of the parish, and he was a
  new-comer, and did not know her.  She went to his house after dusk,
  and stood by the gate, but could not summon courage to go in.  The
  enterprise would have been abandoned if she had not by accident met
  him coming homeward as she turned away.  In the gloom she did not
  mind speaking freely.
  
  "I should like to ask you something, sir."
  
  He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the story of the
  baby's illness and the extemporized ordinance.  "And now, sir," she
  added earnestly, "can you tell me this--will it be just the same for
  him as if you had baptized him?"
  
  Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he
  should have been called in for had been unskilfully botched by his
  customers among themselves, he was disposed to say no.  Yet the
  dignity of the girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined
  to affect his nobler impulses--or rather those that he had left in
  him after ten years of endeavour to graft technical belief on actual
  scepticism.  The man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the
  victory fell to the man.
  
  "My dear girl," he said, "it will be just the same."
  
  "Then will you give him a Christian burial?" she asked quickly.
  
  The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby's illness, he
  had conscientiously gone to the house after nightfall to perform the
  rite, and, unaware that the refusal to admit him had come from Tess's
  father and not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity
  for its irregular administration.
  
  "Ah--that's another matter," he said.
  
  "Another matter--why?" asked Tess, rather warmly.
  
  "Well--I would willingly do so if only we two were concerned.  But I
  must not--for certain reasons."
  
  "Just for once, sir!"
  
  "Really I must not."
  
  "O sir!"  She seized his hand as she spoke.
  
  He withdrew it, shaking his head.
  
  "Then I don't like you!" she burst out, "and I'll never come to your
  church no more!"
  
  "Don't talk so rashly."
  
  "Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don't? ...  Will it
  be just the same?  Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but
  as you yourself to me myself--poor me!"
  
  How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he
  supposed himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman's
  power to tell, though not to excuse.  Somewhat moved, he said in
  this case also--
  
  "It will be just the same."
  
  So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's
  shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light,
  at the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that
  shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow,
  and where all unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides,
  and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.  In spite of the
  untoward surroundings, however, Tess bravely made a little cross of
  two laths and a piece of string, and having bound it with flowers,
  she stuck it up at the head of the grave one evening when she could
  enter the churchyard without being seen, putting at the foot also
  a bunch of the same flowers in a little jar of water to keep them
  alive.  What matter was it that on the outside of the jar the eye of
  mere observation noted the words "Keelwell's Marmalade"?  The eye of
  maternal affection did not see them in its vision of higher things.
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter 14
target: On a hot August afternoon, the sun beats down on Marlott while men and women work in the corn fields. Among the women is Tess, whom the other women watch carefully. At intervals she rests, for she has been somewhat changed. After a long seclusion she had decided to undertake outdoor work during the busiest season of the year. When she finishes her labor, during lunch her sister brings Tess's child to her so that she may breastfeed it. A nearby woman observes that Tess is fond of her child, although she might pretend to hate it. Tess had come to bear herself with dignity and to resolve not to wallow in her own self-pity. However, as her sorrows over bearing an illegitimate child fade away, a fresh sorrow arises. The baby takes ill. When Tess returns home after work, she finds that the baby had taken ill. Tess realizes that the baby has not been baptized. Tess begs her father to send for the parson, but he refuses out of pride. Tess goes to bed, but the infant's breathing grows more difficult and Tess prays for pity. Tess finally decides to baptize the infant herself: she gives it the name Sorrow. As she baptizes Sorrow, Tess appears to her siblings as a large, towering, divine personage. When Tess awakes the next morning, she finds that Sorrow has died. Tess wonders whether if it were doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child. She asks the new parson, and he agrees that Sorrow had been properly baptized, but he refuses to give a Christian burial out of community reasons. She tells him not to speak to her as saint to sinner, but as person to person. Finally he agrees that the burial will be the same.
feat_summary_analysis: Hardy once again shifts the narrative forward to bypass momentous events in Tess's life; skipping nearly a year in Tess's life, the story picks up after Tess has given birth to the illegitimate child borne of her one encounter with Alec d'Urberville. This child is the living representation of her sin: during the first part of the chapter it exists only as a symbol and not as an actual person, receiving a name only before its death. Even the name that Tess gives her infant child, Sorrow, represents the aftermath of her sin. Nevertheless, if Sorrow represents Tess's guilt over her weakness with Alec d'Urberville, Tess's reaction to her child is significant. At first Tess claims to detest the child, yet grows accustomed to it as a part of her, accepting this sin as inherent in her with a profound sense of self-loathing. However, once the child is near death Tess accepts it fully by insisting on its baptism. By confronting her sin and naming it, Tess essentially allows Sorrow to die peacefully. The baptism of Sorrow is a pivotal event for Tess in which she moves from a simplistic child to, as her siblings see her, a "towering, divine personage. By baptizing her child, Tess also rejects the social structure around her that perceives the mother as an outcast, performing the ceremony that marks the acceptance of her child into society without the public declaration of the church. The baptism of Sorrow is thus a baptism for Tess as well, marking a new sense of self and self-worth that she has lacked. This can further be seen in the confrontation with the parson that follows: the once demure Tess demands that Sorrow be given a Christian burial, despite the objection of the parson