There is something disturbing about the experience of watching the lavish new BBC1 dramatisation of Thomas Hardy's Tess Of The D'Urbervilles. However hazy one's notion of the plot, it is hard to shake off a sense of pity and foreboding.


Gemma Atherton as Tess of the D'Urbervilles

As viewers, we are in the same position as the omniscient author, of knowing more about his doomed heroine, Tess, than she does herself.

Behind the innocent gaiety of the opening scenes of white-clad maidens dancing on the green, we foresee, if only dimly, the tragedy to come.

There is a further oddity in the nature of that tragedy. Hardy gave his novel (published in 1891) the defiant subtitle of A Pure Woman and argued passionately that Tess should be judged on her nature and intentions, which were noble and virtuous, rather than condemned for the misfortunes inflicted on her by the desires and fantasies of the men she encountered.

A century later, it is fascinating to consider the extent to which his views - radical enough at the time to scandalise the critics - have become almost conventional.

Tess longed to become a schoolteacher. A modern Tess, seduced at 17, would find - if she had the spirit and determination of Hardy's original - that teenage pregnancy was no great impediment to her career ambitions.

Indeed, if her mother was involved in American politics, she might even have the startling experience of being hailed as a kind of role model.

The thing most likely to trouble a modern reader of Hardy's novel is Tess's passivity: her willingness to absorb without a struggle the dreadful consequences of the cruelty, selfishness and stupidity of the men who long to possess her. Her fatalism, her apparent acceptance, her dumb, almost animal, endurance make her seem like a victim. But though her fate is heartbreaking, in an important sense she is not a victim.

A great theme of Hardy's novel is the sense in which Tess is part of the landscape she inhabits: she feels herself to be at one with the woods, the streams, the passing seasons. Like them, she knows that what she feels and what she is will pass away, and instead of being terrified by that, she finds comfort and courage in it.

Whatever happens to her, however cruel her destiny, she has a clear sense of herself, and the strength to remain true to it. Which is more than can be said for either of the men whose passion is the instrument of her tragedy.


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