No One is Coming to Save You: Divinity and Its Absence in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Tess of the D’Urbervilles

The following thesis considers Victorian author Thomas Hardy’s engagement with the metaphysical as a technique for expressing a character’s conscience in relation to Eustacia in The Return of the Native and Tess in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. This was one of the increasingly sophisticated methods Hardy had to employ to avoid censorship during a time in which psychological understandings of women were particularly limited and problematic. Eustacia and Tess are realistic representations of Victorian womanhood as Hardy does not diminish their passions but instead grants them the full range and complexity of reason and emotion. An analysis of the role of divinity in these novels allows for a more complete understanding of Eustacia and Tess as women who are born with or experience trauma and express symptoms of mental illness.