Index




EARTHLY SECRETS, PHANTOM WOUNDS: 
The Inheritance of Taboo & Trauma in Tess of the D’Urbervilles


Mae Liu
15 December 2023






    Taboo and literature are hardly strangers—more often than not, the two are intertwined, the latter long since having been a favoured medium for articulating the indescribable. Thomas Hardy’s preoccupation with the unspeakable in Tess of the d’Urbervilles is especially poignant when considered alongside the Victorian-era zeitgeist of dated decorum, straining against burgeoning social upheaval. From the nascent field of psychoanalysis burst a deep fascination with repressed dreams and secrets—and, deeper still, with their catharsis. What narrative functions, then, might sleep and dreams play in Tess? Moreover, what survives in the psychological unconscious—as a product of either sociopolitical structures of personal trauma—and how might it shape the motivations behind our actions? In Hardy’s storytelling, unconsciousness functions as a fatalistic medium, signalling the compromise of a character’s agency over their actions. Whether from physical vulnerability, the suppression of unresolved emotions in the psyche, or the inheritance and perpetuation of antiquated ideologies, this shifting concept of the unconscious casts a pervasive shadow of tragedy over Tess’s arduous narrative.

    In earlier chapters, unconsciousness assumes a more literal form in sleep: initially a state of innocence, however, sleeping soon becomes synonymous with vulnerability. Stripped of her physical agency, Tess’s sleeping state is what invites the inciting tragedies that shape the course of her life. Her “[losing] consciousness” on the back of their horse is what leads it down the “wrong side of the road” into its gory death: the morning mailcart, “with its two noiseless wheels, speeding along these lanes…like it always did…[driving] into her slow and unlighted equipage” (Hardy 557-558). A redistribution of agency occurs—from the sleeping Tess to the  impersonal mailcart—when 


 portrayed as the latter “[driving] into her,” “speeding as it always did.” This implies a sense of inevitable routine, evoking the hopelessness of a divinely orchestrated path; in comparison, Tess’s company is merely “slow and unlighted” (558). This vague word choice can likewise parallel a lack of clairvoyance and foresight in regards to mortality (to be “mentally slow,” or “unlighted” as unenlightened, in comparison with an omnipotent, otherworldly force like fate). Tess is forced to “[stand] helplessly looking on,” establishing the fatalistic tone of her plight (558). 

    The rape scene, during which Tess is “sleeping soundly,” echoes the same naïve unconsciousness that leaves her defenseless against horrific circumstances (591). Moreover, Hardy’s prose—suffused with naturalistic imagery—conjures to mind the colonial language perpetuated during Amerigo Vespucci’s “discovery” of America, where the continent was allegorised as a slumbering female figure, made desirable by abundant, untainted resources (Levine 52). This is affirmed by repeated characterisations of Tess that are rife with connotations of fertility—be it the “luxuriance of aspect” and “fulness of growth” Alec notes, or Angel’s awe of her “fresh and virginal” beauty (Hardy 565, 627). Thus, the unconsciousness of sleep is degraded from a state of innocence to one of weakness. This heralds the inevitability of tragedy in Hardy’s narrative, while also scrutinising the fate of lower-class women in Victorian society—susceptible to the predatory advances of men, as unsuspecting civilisations were to the pillaging of empires.

    The loss of innocence is also tied to knowledge and experience: unconscious states are akin to ignorance, such as Tess “[obeying]” Alec’s feeding her strawberries “like one in a dream” (565). The narrator notes that she




  “did not divine…behind the blue narcotic haze was potentially the ‘tragic mischief of her drama:” a disconcerting voice of omniscience which highlights Tess’s dreamlike (as though drug-impaired) lack of awareness (565). Later on, knowledge of her rape delineates the decline of her and Angel’s relationship from dream into crushing reality. While on the dairy farm, the lovers enter a dream-like state, reflected in their surroundings: awake long before the other workers, “they [seem] to themselves the first persons up of all the world,” and the “spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light…[impresses] them with a feeling of isolation, as if they [are] Adam and Eve” (634). The “aqueous light” recalls and transmutes the dreamlike implications of Alec’s “blue narcotic haze” into a more beatific context, as though momentarily absolving Tess of her harboured “sin” (i.e. made as stainless as Adam and Eve in Paradise). Consequently, this infamous allusion forebodes an eventual revelation and “Fall” from innocence, with Tess’s past effectively allegorised as the “forbidden knowledge” that ruins Adam and Eve’s perfect state. The natural imagery grows more perverse—July’s heat having “crept upon them unawares,” the air “[hanging] heavy as an opiate” (642). Tess’s withheld secret remains pervasive in her mind, externalised in the same “[creeping]” action as Alec’s former advances, and the recurring use of his narcotic motifs in her natural surroundings. This language of seduction parallels Eve’s temptation, as well as Tess’s initial assault. Hence, using the grave weight of the original Fall underscores the ephemerality of Tess’s dreamlike romance, predestining her for a scapegoated fate parallel to that which followed Eve’s transgression.

    As a result, Angel’s reaction to Tess’s confession is akin to a rude awakening from a dream. The shedding of 

 their previous dream-like state results in a world-shattering paradigm for the couple: the “force of [Tess’s] disclosure [having] imparted itself,” Angel’s “face…[withers]” in response,” echoing the Miltonic imagery of Eden’s once-eternal roses fading upon Eve’s confession (“From [Adam’s] slack hand the Garland wreath’d for Eve down drop’d, and all the faded roses shed…”) (Hardy 706, Milton 9.892-893). The effects of Angel’s disillusionment, repressed (with palpable difficulty) in his conscious behaviour, manifest instead in his sleepwalking state. Triggered by any “strongly disturbing force,” Tess affirms that the “distress” caused by her revelation has doubtless induced his “somnambulistic state now” (Hardy 720). Here, Hardy reiterates a character’s loss of agency as the unconscious adopts a psychoanalytical role, as the repository for repressed emotions. “Sweet words withheld so severely in his waking hours” are “inexpressibly sweet to her” in his unconscious state, as Angel kisses “lips in the daytime scorned” —contradictions between conscious behaviours and unconscious desires as irreconcilable as night and day (721). Notably, Angel’s “burial” of Tess—wrapping her body in a sheath before placing her in a chapel coffin—symbolises his “mourning” of the pure, chaste image he had built of Tess, killed by her ill-disclosed trauma. As Abraham and Rand note, “what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others…the burial of an unspeakable fact within the loved one”—precisely, Angel is plagued by the chasm that Tess’s secret cleaves in his perception of her (288). His repeated “Dead! Dead! Dead!...my dearest darling Tess! So sweet, so good, so true!” along with the reenactment of carrying her across the Talbothays’ river reaffirms this source of loss (Hardy 720-721). The unconscious, therefore, also functions as the breeding 



    ground and motivator behind repressed desire, compromising characters’ agency as it forces them to carry out the wills of unburied phantoms. 

    In particular, there seems no greater wound to the unconscious than that inflicted by the dissonance between societal convention and unresolved traumas. Abraham and Rand coin these phantoms as “foreign bodies lodged within the subject”—hauntingly analogous to baby Sorrow, the physical remnants of the psychological wound Alec has literally “lodged” into Tess’s body (290). In Freud’s words, trauma is at once “the sense of something that has happened in the past,” but a past “that has not really ended”—enacted first by the physical burden of Tess carrying Sorrow in the aftermath of her rape, but reinforced in the lingering guilt (compounded by the child’s death and improper burial) haunting her unconscious (Bennett 133). “Like a ghost, the force of a traumatic experience…can always come back—” and Alec is the stark epitome of this repressed yet recurring Freudian past, revisiting Tess and wearing down her sense of psychological agency until she is susceptible to Alec’s coercions once more (133).

    In turn, the narrative’s most climactic events—Tess’s rape, Alec’s murder, and Tess’s hanging—all take place “off-stage,” deliberately exposing readers to the post-traumatic experience. The effect of removing immediate violence from the rape scene, especially, leaves us to mend an open wound, reckoning with the pain of an event we have not “personally” witnessed. Owing in part to staunch censorship of sexuality as per Victorian custom, it also serves a dual purpose—in amplifying the reader’s sense of loss, rendering us helpless to stop the tragedy but bound to live and repeat it. Exhausted endurance, as seen before, inevitably leads to cathartic release: the attempt to“relieve the


  unconscious by placing the effects of the phantom in the social realm” is “an attempt at [its] exorcism,” Abraham asserts (292). Alec is a prime example of ill-repressed fantasies, projected onto a blameless Tess: his near-immediate renunciation of religion at their reunion is in a “superimposed flush of excitement,” where he gleefully calls her “Eve,” “temptress,” and “damned witch of Babylon” (Hardy 776). His delusional judgement is suggested by the disjointed syntax, splintered with dashes to replicate a feverish breathlessness (777). Tess, too, eventually enacts her own catharsis by killing him after a similarly jumbled, anguished monologue (821). Regardless of her momentary relief, the act nonetheless reinforces her loss of agency to unconscious impulse, driven by a lifetime of unreconciled psychological torment.

    Finally, if the revelation of truths does damage enough, how might the unconsciousness be deluded by collective memory—specifically, by perpetuating harmful ideologies of a former time? The force of the narrative stems from the Durbeyfields’ desire to appropriate a long gone, illustrious title—a pursuit that deludes their conscious judgement and leads their offspring into ruinous circumstances. Tess falls asleep on horseback after worrying over the “vanity of her father’s pride,” the “grimacing personage” of her supposed suitor, and her “shrouded knightly ancestry,” larger-than-life concepts that “[grow] more and more extravagant” until she loses consciousness (558). “Prince,” the horse’s very name, is a projection of the Durbeyfields’ hubris—an air of majesty appropriated by an animal destined to labour until death. Its unreasonable death—the novel’s first blood—foreshadows the Durbeyfields’ loss of economic and psychological mobility as they continue to chase their rags-to-riches fantasy. This retribution is felt after



John Durberyfield’s death, where they are spurned from every lodging, and resort to resting alongside the bones of their ancestral tomb (806-807). After exhuming a buried name for its prestige, they find the fantasies and customs they tout are nothing but bare bones of an outworn past.

    The collective unconscious also becomes a channel with which reality is filtered and conceptualised through, obfuscating personal judgement with pre-conditioned conventions. Repeatedly, Angel reduces Tess to allegorical figures—Magdalene, Artemis, Demeter, and “other fanciful names,” until she is “no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman…condensed into one typical form” (635). These projections of anachronistic comparison sharpen the force behind Angel’s inability to reconcile his discordant perceptions of Tess—despite the “remote depths of his constitution” being “gentle and affectionate,” there lies “hidden a hard logical deposit…and with regard to the other sex, when he ceased to believe he ceased to follow” (717). His realisation that his love for her had been compromised by a socially induced sense of shame ultimately comes too late, making his desertion tragic in its pointlessness.

Above all, Tess’s life is primarily orchestrated by societal pressures—marital customs, sexual taboo, and economic class—the survival of doctrines from society’s collective unconscious that fail to serve any fruitful, present purpose. Religion is scrutinised with particular cynicism: when Alec rapes Tess, the narrative lens pans to the “primaeval yews and oaks of The Chase,” while mildly wondering, “where was Tess’s guardian angel? Where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps…he was sleeping and not to be awaked” (82). Here, unconsciousness manifests as wilful ignorance, reiterating the illusive power of religious belief

 in Tess’s life. The juxtaposition of the ancient trees with a troubling sense of divine indifference underscores this disproportion, religion ultimately appearing as imposing and useless as the trees that passively witness Tess’s assault. Later, the sign-painter, condemning premarital intimacy, epitomises Edward Tylor’s concept of anthropological survival: the symptoms of an “older condition of culture” from which “processes, customs, opinions…have been carried on by force of habit” (Tylor 16). His inability to actually answer Tess’s inquiry: (“I cannot split hairs on that burning query”) anticipates the Parson’s uselessness in baptising and burying baby Sorrow (Hardy 597). Throughout, religion’s futility in the face of real conflict denotes its survival in the collective unconscious. In a narrative where even Alec d’Urberville can play priest at his own discretion, people unconsciously become modern mouthpieces for antiquated ideologies. 

   Whether in the vulnerable state of sleep, the repression of psychological phantoms, or the inherited layers of generational wounds, Hardy explores states of unconsciousness as a versatile, fatalistic medium, ultimately used to compromise the agency behind character motivations. Beneath its throes of tragedy and amorphous definition of the unconscious, Tess calls into question the legacy of taboo texts, “trauma porn,” and what some may call the “voyeuristic sadism” gleaned from a narrative like Hardy’s. Yet to pierce beyond a social fabric requires first to examine what it deems taboo—and so, amidst the tight-laced conventions of Victorian England, a literary wound or rift in the consciousness may well be exactly what it needed. Herein lies the incentive behind externalising the literary unconsciousness, and beyond character motivations—probing into those lying dormant in our own consciences we have yet to exhume.




Works Cited

Abraham, Nicolas, and Nicholas Rand. “Notes on the Phantom: A Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 2, 1987, pp. 287–92. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343493. Accessed 23 Dec. 2023.

Bennett, Andrew & Royle, Nicholas. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory. Routledge, 2023, pp.129-127.

Hardy, Thomas. Far From the Madding Crowd. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp.539-834.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Sixteenth Century and The Early Seventeenth Century, edited by Julia Reidhead, Marian Johnson, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp.1495-1727.

Tylor, Edward Burnett. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Print. Cambridge Library Collection - Anthropology.



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