XLI explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Suffering and Resilience

  Tess endures poverty, loneliness, and fear after Angel's departure, yet continues to work and travel, showing resilience despite her despair.

• Social Class and Inequality

  Tess's reduced circumstances force her into field work, and her appearance attracts unwanted attention; she is treated coarsely by a man who remembers her connection to Alec d'Urberville.

• Fate and Inevitability

  Tess feels trapped by her past and her circumstances, reflecting that her life is 'worse than vanity—injustice, punishment, exaction, death,' and she wishes for death.

Characters to notice

• Tess Durbeyfield

  Now a lonely, impoverished woman working as a supernumerary milkmaid; she has spent most of Angel's allowance and is too proud to ask his father for help; she travels to an upland farm recommended by Marian, is accosted on the road, and spends a fearful night in a plantation.

• Angel Clare

  Mentioned as Tess's absent husband; he is lying ill of fever in Brazil, having been deluded by promises of the Brazilian Government; Tess still hopes for his return and forgiveness.

• Joan Durbeyfield

  Tess's mother; she writes to Tess asking for money to repair the thatch and ceiling of their house, and Tess sends twenty pounds.

• Marian

  Former milkmaid at Talbothays; she has heard of Tess's separation from Angel and writes to Tess recommending work at an upland farm, where she herself is now employed.

• Alec d'Urberville

  Mentioned indirectly when Tess is accosted by a man who recognizes her as 'young Squire d'Urberville's friend' from Trantridge.

Key passages

• “Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her of Clare's allowance, after deducting the other half of the fifty as a contribution to her parents for the trouble and expense to which she had put them, she had as yet spent but little.”

  Tess had saved most of the twenty-five pounds left from Angel's allowance, having already given half of the original fifty to her parents.

  Shows Tess's careful management of money and her sense of duty to her family.

• “She could not bear to let them go. Angel had put them into her hand, had obtained them bright and new from his bank for her; his touch had consecrated them to souvenirs of himself... and to disperse them was like giving away relics.”

  Tess was reluctant to spend the sovereigns because Angel had given them to her, and they felt like sacred mementos of him.

  Highlights Tess's deep emotional attachment to Angel and the symbolic value of the coins.

• “The same delicacy, pride, false shame, whatever it may be called, on Clare's account, which had led her to hide from her own parents the prolongation of the estrangement, hindered her owning to his that she was in want after the fair allowance he had left her.”

  Tess's pride and sense of shame about her separation from Angel prevented her from asking his father for money, just as she had hidden the truth from her own parents.

  Illustrates Tess's internal conflict and her fear of being seen as a beggar or a failure.

• “She thought of her husband in some vague warm clime on the other side of the globe, while she was here in the cold. Was there another such a wretched being as she in the world?”

  Tess contrasts her own cold, miserable situation with Angel's distant, warm location, feeling utterly alone and wretched.

  Emphasizes Tess's isolation and despair.

• “All was, alas, worse than vanity—injustice, punishment, exaction, death.”

  Tess concludes that life is not merely meaningless but filled with unfairness, suffering, and death.

  Reflects Tess's deepening nihilism and sense of victimization.