How Tess of the D’Urbervilles drew on Paradise Lost
A documented line of influence: Thomas Hardy demonstrably engaged John Milton’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
Paradise Lost
John Milton · 1667
RenaissanceThe influenced
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 1891
The Age of the NovelRelevance
7/10
On Tess of the D’Urbervilles’s page
- Tess of the D'Urbervilles casts its seduction as Eve's fall, with Alec as Milton's Satan
- Hardy makes the debt unmissable — Alec names himself 'the other old one, come to tempt you,' and the text quotes Satan's seduction of Eve from Paradise Lost (9.626-31)
- Read Milton first and Tess's ruin reads as a fall from Eden into a world with no redemption waiting — the Eden gone, only the Satan left
On Paradise Lost’s page
- Milton supplied Hardy the frame for a fall out of Eden
- In Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Alec tells Tess outright, 'You are Eve, and I am the other old one, come to tempt you' — and Hardy quotes Satan's seduction of Eve straight from Paradise Lost (9.626-31)
- The temptation Milton dramatized as the loss of paradise becomes, in Hardy's hands, a country girl's ruin — same archetype, no Heaven to fall from