Clother and Proper Names:

The primary purpose of this essay is to survey the textual functions of clothes and proper names in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and to examine their relations to the Victorian identity politics. Critics have attempted to show that Hardy’s narrator tends to identify Tess with a text emphasizing that she is a textualized subject in the novel, open to male readers and their critical hermeneutics. Yet few critics have examined how her clothes and proper names are violently attributed to or inscribed on her body and psyche as a way of writing. In addition, this act of writing constructs her subjective identity via a “socio-linguistic classification.” Thus, Hardy uses Tess’s textual body together with her clothes and proper names to show how the process of female subjugation is constructed and how Victorian identity politics operates. Tess as a text, however, is resistant to interpretations by her male readers and writers, including the narrator, as the novel represents a constant interpretive instability and uncertainty lingering around her; she is, indeed, a text resistant to the masculine interpretative closure. Yet her strategy of subversion pushes those limits further. Tess is fully aware of the textual effects of the clothes and proper names she receives from men. This awareness, toward the end of the novel, compels her to de-face and re-clothe herself in her own fashion by becoming a textual scribe herself. The recurrent motif of this essay “Tess as a text” is not only a critical issue but also a pedagogical one in the classroom; this is because without textualizing Tess’s body (or her subjectivity) teachers find that it is impossible to grasp the Victorian values and politics through Hardy’s work.