Alec abandons preaching and pursues Tess again

Alec abandons preaching and pursues Tess again in a two-stage reversal: he first breaks an engagement to preach at Casterbridge Fair because he has gone to see her, then, after encountering her at work, gives up his evangelical identity and tries to reclaim her. His return converts a public religious commitment into a private pursuit, while his accusations and possessive threats make clear that he treats his own choices as consequences for which Tess should answer.

The Broken Preaching Engagement

Alec tells Tess that he believes he ought to preach, yet has suddenly stopped doing so and given way to his passion for her. The contradiction is immediate and practical. He had set out for Casterbridge Fair, where he was expected to preach from a wagon at half-past two; he shows Tess a printed announcement bearing the day, hour, and place. When she asks how he can reach the fair, he admits that he cannot: he has come to see her instead.

He describes this absence as the first time he has played such a practical joke on the people expecting him. A month earlier, he says, the possibility would have horrified him. His account makes the change more than a private fluctuation: an announced religious duty, an audience of waiting listeners, and his own stated conviction all yield to the decision to seek Tess. He says he will go away and try to keep away, but immediately asks for one embrace in the name of their former friendship. Even as he acknowledges the broken engagement, he turns back toward the intimacy he claims to be renouncing.

A Conversion Reversed

When Alec reappears at the farm, he is no longer dressed or behaving like the evangelist Tess knew from his recent religious phase. His former jaunty manner has returned. He tells her that she haunts him, and connects his renewed desire to the moment she told him about their child: the feelings he had channelled into puritanical religion, he claims, have abruptly flowed back toward her, leaving that religious channel dry.

Alec presents Tess as the cause of his apostasy, saying that she has knocked his faith out of him and made him a religious renegade. He also recasts his pursuit as sympathy: seeing her ill-used at the farm, he says, made him feel that he should protect her, while her husband seems to neglect her. He disparages that absent husband as almost a myth and claims that his own attempt to help Tess makes him nearer to her. The contrast between professed concern and renewed sexual pursuit is sharpened when he reaches toward her waist and tells her that she should share the consequences of his backsliding by leaving her husband.

Tess's Refusal and Alec's Claim

Tess rejects Alec's attempt to make his conduct her responsibility. When he says she tempted him, she recoils and answers that she could not help his seeing her again. She insists that he treat her husband honourably and leave before a scandal damages the husband's name. Later, when Alec again urges her to leave, she strikes his mouth with the heavy leather glove she had removed to eat. Blood appears on his lip, but she does not retreat into apology; instead, she tells him to punish or crush her if he wishes, invoking the belief that a person once victimized remains a victim.

Alec initially says he can make allowance for her blow, then turns the exchange into a claim of authority. He reminds her that he once asked her to marry him and that she refused; he declares that he was once her master and will be so again, asserting that if she is any man's wife she is his. The threshers begin to stir below, interrupting the private confrontation. Alec lets Tess go, says he will return for her answer that afternoon, and leaves the threat of renewed pressure hanging over the scene.

Religious Language as Excuse

Alec's language of conversion and relapse borrows the authority of Christian teaching while relocating responsibility onto Tess. He describes himself as having escaped the world and then become entangled in it again, but his account of the supposed cause is her presence rather than his own decision to abandon preaching and pursue a married woman. His claim that he has been on the way to social salvation, and his lament that Tess has caused his backsliding, make religious vocabulary serve as a self-exonerating explanation for conduct he chooses.

The episode also stages a sharp contrast between public duty and private appetite. Alec has a specific preaching appointment, a printed notice, and people waiting for him; nevertheless, he redirects his journey to Tess and later treats his return to desire as a consequence she owes him. His repeated movement from religious renunciation to possessive insistence gives the pursuit its defining pattern: he announces restraint, then presses for physical closeness or renewed control. Tess's resistance exposes the gap between his claims of concern and the coercion of his actions.