(Un)Binding the Sheaves: Selfhood and Labour in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Tess Durbeyfield has her origins within the enclosed landscape of the Vale of Blackmore, ‘an engirdled and secluded region’, as Hardy describes it, ‘bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge’, an area in which ‘the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale’. For the heroine, the vale ‘was to her the world’, and at the outset of the novel she has rarely ‘been far outside the valley’ (TD, 40). As the narrative begins, therefore, the stress is upon the protective boundaries of the vale, with a concomitant consciousness of that ‘livelier sense of Community’ to which Ferdinand Tönnies, in his classic definition of Gemeinschaft, propounded in 1887 just as Hardy began work on his novel, would refer. Indeed, Tönnies pertinently maintains in his study,