Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Prince
When Tess dozes off in the wagon and loses control, the
resulting death of the Durbeyfield horse, Prince, spurs Tess to
seek aid from the d’Urbervilles, setting the events of the novel
in motion. The horse’s demise is thus a powerful plot motivator,
and its name a potent symbol of Tess’s own claims to aristocracy.
Like the horse, Tess herself bears a high-class name, but is doomed
to a lowly life of physical labor. Interestingly, Prince’s death
occurs right after Tess dreams of ancient knights, having just heard
the news that her family is aristocratic. Moreover, the horse is
pierced by the forward-jutting piece of metal on a mail coach, which
is reminiscent of a wound one might receive in a medieval joust.
In an odd way, Tess’s dream of medieval glory comes true, and her
horse dies a heroic death. Yet her dream of meeting a prince while
she kills her own Prince, and with him her family’s only means of
financial sustenance, is a tragic foreshadowing of her own story.
The death of the horse symbolizes the sacrifice of real-world goods,
such as a useful animal or even her own honor, through excessive
fantasizing about a better world.
The d’Urberville Family Vault
A double-edged symbol of both the majestic grandeur and
the lifeless hollowness of the aristocratic family name that the
Durbeyfields learn they possess, the d’Urberville family vault represents
both the glory of life and the end of life. Since Tess herself moves
from passivity to active murder by the end of the novel, attaining
a kind of personal grandeur even as she brings death to others and
to herself, the double symbolism of the vault makes it a powerful
site for the culminating meeting between Alec and Tess. Alec brings
Tess both his lofty name and, indirectly, her own death later; it
is natural that he meets her in the vault in d’Urberville Aisle,
where she reads her own name inscribed in stone and feels the presence
of death. Yet the vault that sounds so glamorous when rhapsodized
over by John Durbeyfield in Chapter I seems, by the end, strangely
hollow and meaningless. When Alec stomps on the floor of the vault,
it produces only a hollow echo, as if its basic emptiness is a complement
to its visual grandeur. When Tess is executed, her ancestors are
said to snooze on in their crypts, as if uncaring even about the
fate of a member of their own majestic family. Perhaps the secret
of the family crypt is that its grandiosity is ultimately meaningless.
Brazil
Rather surprising for a novel that seems set so solidly
in rural England, the narration shifts very briefly to Brazil when
Angel takes leave of Tess and heads off to establish a career in
farming. Even more exotic for a Victorian English reader than America
or Australia, Brazil is the country in which Robinson Crusoe made
his fortune and it seems to promise a better life far from the humdrum
familiar world. Brazil is thus more than a geographical entity on
the map in this novel: it symbolizes a fantasyland, a place where
dreams come true. As Angel’s name suggests, he is a lofty visionary
who lacks some experience with the real world, despite all his mechanical know-how
in farm management. He may be able to milk cows, but he does not
yet know how to tell the difference between an exotic dream and
an everyday reality, so inevitably his experience in the imagined
dream world of Brazil is a disaster that he barely survives. His
fiasco teaches him that ideals do not exist in life, and this lesson helps
him reevaluate his disappointment with Tess’s imperfections, her
failure to incarnate the ideal he expected her to be. For Angel, Brazil
symbolizes the impossibility of ideals, but also forgiveness and
acceptance of life in spite of those disappointed ideals.
