Tess strikes Alec at the threshing machine and refuses to yield

At the threshing machine, Tess strikes Alec and refuses to yield when he again tries to make her submit to his wishes. The encounter lays bare the coercion beneath his claims of affection and help: even as she defends herself, he asserts that she belongs to him and threatens to return. Her resistance is decisive in the moment, but the threshing resumes around her, and she is left at her work under the pressure of his promised return.

Causes and Background

Alec comes to Tess while she is working at the threshing machine, presenting his visit as an effort to help her out of trouble. He points to her husband, whom he has never met and whose name she has not told him, to cast doubt on that marriage and to portray himself as the person nearer to her. He invokes the biblical prophet Hosea and suggests that Tess should return to her first husband, then addresses her as his beloved and urges her to leave the husband he dismisses as a mere husband in name.

The appeal shifts from persuasion to blame. Alec says Tess has caused his backsliding and should share in it by leaving her husband. His religious language and offer of assistance do not amount to respect for Tess’s stated marriage or her wishes; they serve his effort to draw her back into his control. The scene therefore begins with a conflict over who has the right to define her relationship and future, not with any agreement between them.

Tess’s Resistance

Tess does not answer Alec’s appeal in words at first. Instead, she swings the heavy leather glove she has removed to eat and strikes him across the face. The blow abruptly interrupts the intimate language with which he has been addressing her and makes her refusal physically unmistakable. Alec rises, but soon controls himself and attends to the injury; Tess, too, has sprung up, then sinks down again.

She challenges him to punish her and describes herself as trapped in the position of a victim. Her defiance is not a claim that she is safe or able to escape: it confronts the pattern of power that Alec invokes, even as she expects him to use it against her. The blow gives her a moment of direct resistance, while her words make clear how little she believes that resistance will protect her from further harm.

Alec’s Threat and the Immediate Outcome

Alec answers Tess’s resistance by recalling that he once asked her to marry him and insisting that she cannot now be his wife. He turns that failed proposal into a claim of entitlement. Taking her by the shoulders, he declares that he was her master once and will be her master again, and that if she is any man’s wife she is his. The contrast is stark: he has just criticized the husband for failing to help Tess, yet now treats marriage not as a bond she can choose but as a basis for asserting possession.

The workers below begin to stir, bringing the private confrontation into the hearing and presence of the working day. Alec lets Tess go and says he will leave, but that he will come again that afternoon for her answer. His departure therefore does not settle the conflict; his promise to return keeps his pressure on her in place. Tess remains stunned and does not speak again.

The Threshing Resumes

Alec retreats over the sheaves and descends the ladder. The workers rise and stretch after their rest, and the machine starts again. Tess returns to her position beside its drum and continues untying sheaves, one after another, in the renewed rustle of the straw. The ordinary labor surrounding the confrontation does not pause for her refusal or resolve the danger she faces.

That ending sharpens the scene’s central contrast. Tess has openly struck back and rejected Alec’s assumption of mastery, but she cannot simply leave the machine or make his threat disappear. Her work continues, while his stated intention to return hangs over what follows. The episode marks resistance as real and consequential in the encounter, but not as an immediate release from the pressures constraining her.