The disappointment... I understand the point of the story. The exploration of Victorian double standards etc. The descriptions of the countryside are nice, but nothing spectacular. The ambiguity of some scenes have almost a mystical quality, and I always appreciate subtlety.

However, the way Hardy deals with the character of Tess is uncomfortable. He has an obsession with Tess's beauty (describes her looks far too often; we get it, she has a lovely face) and makes the point of women being the fairer and more noble sex several times.

Hardy's way of examining the Victorian mores and fatalism through a female martyr is off-putting. He uses Tess as a mere tool, and doing so he fails to make her a convincing and compelling character. She carries her guilt through her entire life, but it's just all too much. Hardy hits you in the head over and over again with misery, so instead of feeling depressed or sorry for Tess I couldn't care less about anything that happened.

Wuthering Heights is full of darkness, but at least it's executed more smoothly and atmospherically. Tess is just kicked around and she ends up shedding all her character, becoming almost a caricature. She's the ultimate pure woman of the 19th century, but Hardy seems to enjoy a bit too much showing us the purity. Tess drags herself from one event to the other, but never did I feel the actual connection between her and what Hardy was trying to say.

Everything about this book is obvious, heavy-handed, and contrived. I never shy away from depressing stuff, but when a message is jammed down my throat (often at the expense of the characters) I become strongly averse to the whole story. The same happened with 1984. Nor am I the kind of person who rates a book low because I don't like the characters. Hardy tries to build a halo around Tess and treats the story as a fatalistic string of tragic events, so Tess is not really unlikeable but very hollow. I don't dislike her per se, but instead I dislike how she's fleshed out.

I can just imagine Hardy sitting at his table and thinking: "Alrighty then, let's make this as glum as possible, so even the dumbest ones will see the shitty situation of women in my time".

Fortunately, there's one thing that I can take from this: sexual encounters still mean different things with men and women. There are still far too many who uphold these double standards. There's for example a certain type of man who sleeps around until he can find the perfect woman to be his wife. At the same time he claims that the women he hooks up with in bars are just promiscuous dummies and good for nothing but one night stands (even though they have no idea how many partners the women have had), and his future wife should be pure and innocent without a huge sexual past (but it's ok for a man to have one). Ah, the good ol' madonna-whore dichotomy!

You have to be blind if you don't see the relevance of Tess with modern society.