D’Urberville stopped the horse, withdrew his feet from the stirrups, turned sideways on the saddle, and enclosed her waist with his arm to support her.
This immediately put her on the defensive, and with one of those sudden impulses of reprisal to which she was liable she gave him a little push from her. In his ticklish position he nearly lost his balance and only just avoided rolling over into the road, the horse, though a powerful one, being fortunately the quietest he rode.
“That is devilish unkind!” he said. “I mean no harm–only to keep you from falling.”
She pondered suspiciously; till, thinking that this might after all be true, she relented, and said quite humbly, “I beg your pardon, sir.”
Chapter 11 of Hardy’s novel is pivotal to the tragedy of tess. In this chapter Alec D’urberville, a supposed distant relation of the beautiful country girl Tess, offers her assistance on her way home, only to take sexual advantage of her innocence and ‘sleep’ . Whilst Hardy’s langauge purposely obscures the extent of the sexual violation later in the chapter, the reader is convinced that his behaviour towards Tess constitutes rape and leds eventually to the execution of Tess for her revenge killing of Alec.
This earlier incident in the chapter reveals the intuitive aspect of Tess, particularly where Alec is concerned. Here her natural physical reaction is to repulse the philandering hands of her so-called helper/rescuer. Tess instinctively recognises his predatory intentions, yet is forced to deny her respsonses.
Alec’s affectation of hurt is Freudian in its attempt to mislead her. How appropriate is his self-summary of ‘devilish unkind’! This accentuates his villain status and makes his lust still more reprehensible.
The following sentence is psychologically revealing and makes consummate use of free indirect discourse. We hear and observe the process of Tess’s thoughts regarding Alec. ‘She pondered suspiciously;’ – how effective the deployment of the semi-colon which suggest both pause and doubt. Tess is trying to asssimilate the tension here between intuition/instinct and more ‘rational’ thinking which seems dangerously repectful of Alec’s material status. The precariousness of the verb ‘might’ highlights the destructive social conditioning which Tess and others have had to endure and accept. We feel it almost an imperative to warn her, to cry out ‘No! ‘ when we hear the verb ‘relented’..for this action betrays her own instinct which is ‘naturally’ alarmed by Alec’s duplicitous behaviour.
She yields to Alec’s chauvinistic actions ‘humbly’ and once again addresses him as ‘sir’ , an action which makes the reader shudder at her victimisation within a system that will eventaully kill her. The class system conspires against her twofold: as a woman and as a member of the working class. Thus, for all her beauty and the novel’s use of fre indirect discourse to privilege her point of view and inner life/world, Tess is irrevocably doomed. No one can or will save her from her determined ‘fate’.