1. Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays
Tess
Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays

2. Setting and tone becomes ever gloomier - pervasive pessimistic sense of tragedy
Structurally – the second half of the novel (the first phase of this after the pivotal fourth)
The first half of the novel saw Tess fluctuate between hope/optimism/pro-activity and despair/passivity
Tess’s confession is her peripeteia - there is no going back once she has uttered the words: the tragic trajectory is set and can only lead to her death

3. Gothic conventions
The isolated site of the doomed honeymoon, the d’Urberville mansion, is grey and dark,
The presence of portraits (ugly) add to the feeling of Gothic disquiet.
Lots of shadow, with light used merely to contrast dark. Even the outside is shadowy and evil.
Events: the sleepwalking Angel carries the passive Tess to a graveyard, where he places her in a stone coffin. 

4. Hardy heightens his condemnation of society’s double standards
Mainly reflected in Angel’s actions and attitude
Actions: Angel has had a sexual relationship with a woman (lust/short term) just as Tess had sexual relationship with a man (undesired on Tess’s part)
Attitude: Angel expects Tess to understand and forgive (acceptable for men?) yet he cannot even begin to understand Tess, let alone forgive.

5. Tess becomes passive and submissive to her husband
offering to be his slave
kneeling in front of him
allowing him to carry her to a grave
and even offering to kill herself.

6. Angel’s sleepwalking should be viewed as a metaphor
he lives in a dream world:
invents his own idea of religion
idealises Tess dangerously so that in this phase it is not Tess who has changed but his perception of her (pathos for Tess)
Unaware of his own prejudices - condemning the aristocracy for their cruel treatment of women, yet he is cruel and cold to Tess and to Izz Huet.

7. Setting of Flintcomb-Ash
depicted as a frozen, harsh world
winter time
Contrasts with the idyllic world of Talbothays
The coldness and harshness reflects Angel’s treatment of Tess
Note the harsh sounds - “t” and the hyphen = disjointed , contrasts with the fluid and soft “Talbothays”

8. Sense of tragedy increases
Full of foreshadowing about death through symbols and motifs:
the pheasants
the portraits
the coffin
graveyards
winter setting

9. Hardy strengthens his message about fate
His deterministic thesis is established
no matter how they fight, people (Tess - can never regain her virginity) cannot escape what has been determined for them

10. Yet, Hardy also condemns society for Tess’s ills
church
aristocracy
a double-standard for men and women.
How can fate be at issue?
Hardy is writing in the tragic genre and using its conventions, yet he has a modernist perspective in challenging the accepted norms and values of late Victorian society.