New Year's Eve

New Year’s Eve is both the fixed date of Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare’s wedding and a hinge between their hopeful intimacy and the unresolved consequences of Tess’s past. The day gathers private uncertainty, the dairy household’s affectionate farewell, and a reported omen of disaster: as the couple leave for their wedding journey, they learn that Retty Priddle has tried to drown herself.

The Wedding Date and Tess’s Unease

The date is set as the thirty-first of December, New Year’s Eve. Tess thinks ahead to becoming Angel’s wife and imagines a life in which their two selves will be joined and every incident shared. Yet the very form of her private reflection turns hope against itself: she wonders not only whether their life together can happen, but why it should. The approaching wedding is therefore no simple culmination. Its promise is already shadowed by her awareness that something may divide them.

That fear sharpens after Tess has revealed her past. Through the night she listens for Angel’s movement overhead; in the morning he comes down and kisses her as warmly as before, but says nothing about what she has told him. His silence leaves her unable to tell whether he has received her note or whether he has chosen to forgive her. She interprets his continued affection as grounds for trust, even while uncertainty persists. Each morning and night he appears unchanged, and New Year’s Eve arrives with the question still unanswered in her mind.

A Domestic Celebration and Farewell

The wedding day begins with a small transformation of the dairy kitchen. The couple have been treated as guests during their last week at the dairy, and the household has prepared the room in their honour: the chimney-corner is whitened, the brick hearth reddened, and a yellow damask blower replaces the old, grimy blue one. The dairyman explains that he wanted to do something for them, since they had declined the noisy celebration with fiddles and bass viols that would have been customary in earlier times. The modest decoration makes the kitchen itself a sign of communal affection.

In the afternoon, at two o’clock, Tess and Angel leave for a few days at lodgings in the old farmhouse near Wellbridge Mill, where Angel intends to investigate flour processes. The dairy servants gather in the red-brick entry, and the dairyman and his wife follow the couple to the door. Tess’s three former chamber-mates stand together against the wall: Retty looks fragile, Izz Huett sorrowful, and Marian blank. Tess recognizes their distress and briefly forgets her own fears in attending to theirs. She asks Angel to kiss them all once, as a final farewell. He complies, treating the kisses as a formal kindness; Tess, looking back, sees that they have instead stirred feelings the women were trying to suppress.

At the gate, Angel thanks the dairyman and his wife. A white cock with a rose comb settles on the palings and crows, its call dwindling away like an echo. The sound interrupts a moment of silence, and Mrs Crick remarks on the unusual afternoon crow. One of two men holding the yard gate open murmurs that it is a bad sign, unaware that the people by the wicket can hear him. The departing party thus leaves the dairy under a sign whose meaning is unsettled but immediately ominous.

The Omen and Its Consequence

Later, Jonathan Kail speaks to Angel in a subdued, concerned tone. He says that the people at the dairy have been alarmed by what might have become a terrible affliction since Angel and his new wife left that afternoon, and asks whether Angel remembers the cock’s crow. He then reports that Retty Priddle has tried to drown herself. The news gives the afternoon’s crow a specific human consequence: what seemed at first to be a rural superstition is bound to the crisis of one of the young women left behind.

The coincidence darkens the wedding day without changing its outward course. Tess and Angel depart amid the household’s goodwill, while the scene’s farewell exposes the emotional cost of their union for the dairy women who have loved Angel. New Year’s Eve holds these opposed meanings together: marriage and departure for the couple, painful separation for the women, and a sudden report of attempted suicide. The approaching new year promises a beginning, but the day’s close places that promise beside uncertainty and harm.