Editing Tess of the d'Urbervilles (section)

=== Themes ===
[[File:Hambledon Hill towards Stourton Tower 20070730.jpg|thumb|right|The [[Vale of Blackmore]], the main setting for ''Tess''. [[Hambledon Hill]] towards [[King Alfred's Tower|Stourton Tower]]]]
Hardy's writing often explores what he called the "ache of modernism", a theme notable in ''Tess'', which as one critic noted, Hardy draws on imagery associated with hell to describe modern farm machinery and suggests the effete nature of city life as milk sent there must be watered down before townspeople can stomach it.<ref>[https://books.google.com/books?id=VSlD9b_o4JQC&pg=PA14&lpg=PP1&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=html Kramer, Dale (1991), ''Hardy: Tess of the D'Urbervilles'', Cambridge University Press]</ref>

On the other hand, the Marxist critic [[Raymond Williams]] in ''The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence'' questions the identification of Tess with a peasantry destroyed by [[Industrial Revolution|industrialization]]. Williams sees Tess not as a peasant, but as an educated member of the rural working class, who suffers a tragedy through being thwarted in her hopes to rise socially and desire for a good life (which includes love and sex), not by industrialism, but by the landed bourgeoisie (Alec), liberal idealism (Angel) and Christian moralism in her family's village (see Chapter LI). Earlier commentators were not always appreciative. [[Henry James]] and [[Robert Louis Stevenson]] in Bournemouth "loved to talk of books and bookmen. Stevenson, unlike James, was an admirer of Thomas Hardy, but wrote to James expressing his violent reaction to ''Tess of the D'Urbervilles;'' James wrote back agreeing the book was 'vile' (not a word used by Stevenson).