Tess leaves Marlott for Talbothays

Tess leaves Marlott for Talbothays Dairy after a period of withdrawal and inward reconstruction, seeking work and distance from the memories attached to her family’s failed attempt to claim kinship with the wealthy d’Urbervilles. The move is a deliberate effort to begin again: she intends to live simply as a dairymaid, even as the journey takes her into the ancestral landscape she would rather leave behind.

Background and Decision

By the time Tess considers leaving, her trouble has become nearly forgotten in Marlott, where it was never generally known. Yet she cannot feel truly at ease in a place that recalls her family’s attempt to claim kinship—and, through her, a closer union—with the rich d’Urbervilles. She imagines that only long years might wear away her awareness of the failure. Departure offers a more immediate possibility: she hopes that somewhere without those memories she might be happy, and understands that escaping the past requires getting away from the place that continually recalls it.

Her private question is whether what has once been lost must remain lost. Tess wonders whether the idea of lost chastity as an irreparable condition might be proved false if she could conceal what had gone before. The possibility of renewal is associated with the recuperative force of organic nature, not with a claim that her experience has been erased. Her hope rests instead on whether life can grow again after a period of damage and social judgment.

The desire to leave becomes urgent in a particularly fine spring, when the stir of germination moves Tess and makes her eager to go. She has waited a long time for an opportunity. In early May, a letter arrives from a former friend of her mother’s, whom Tess had contacted long before but had never met. It reports that a dairy-house many miles to the south needs a skilled milkmaid for the summer and that the dairyman would be glad to employ her. The offer turns the wish for a new start into a concrete job and destination.

The Journey South

The dairy lies far enough away, Tess thinks, given how limited her accustomed sphere of movement and reputation has been. She sets out on a May morning two or three years after returning from Trantridge, carrying the history of those years as a silent interval of reconstruction. Her luggage is packed to be sent later; she travels first in a hired trap toward Stourcastle, a necessary stop on a route that runs in almost the opposite direction from her first adventure.

From the curve of a nearby hill, Tess looks back regretfully at Marlott and her father’s house, despite how strongly she has wanted to get away. She considers the younger children she is leaving: their daily life will likely continue with little lasting sense of the gap, and she has judged her absence best for them. If she stayed, she fears her precepts might do them less good than her example might do harm. Her departure is therefore not simply an escape from her own past; it also reflects her judgment about the influence her presence could have on the children.

Tess passes through Stourcastle without stopping and continues to a junction where she can wait for a carrier’s van heading southwest. The inland railways have not crossed this district. A farmer then offers her a seat in his spring cart, traveling approximately the way she wants to go. Although she knows nothing of him, she accepts; accompanying him to Weatherbury lets her walk the remaining distance rather than take the longer route by van through Casterbridge. The journey proceeds by available roads and local transport, with Tess adapting her route to reach the dairy.

At Weatherbury she stops only for a slight meal at a cottage recommended by the farmer. Then she sets out on foot with her basket, crossing the wide upland heath that divides the district from the low meadows of the next valley. Those meadows contain the dairy that is the aim of her day’s pilgrimage. The deliberate effort of this last stretch makes the new employment something Tess reaches by her own labor as well as by the letter that opened the way.

Ancestral Country and a Chosen Identity

Although Tess has never visited this part of the country, she feels akin to its landscape. To her left she can make out the dark trees around Kingsbere, where her ancestors’ bones lie in the parish church. The sight does not restore their prestige in her eyes. She has no admiration for the ancestors she regards as having led her family into trouble, and she almost hates them; all that remains to her from their possessions is an old seal and spoon. She insists that she has as much of her mother in her as of her father, and associates her prettiness with her mother, who was only a dairymaid.

Her new life is meant to exclude the family mythology that has made ancestry seem like a promise. Tess is resolved that there will be no more d’Urberville air-castles in her dreams or actions: she will be the dairymaid Tess and nothing more. Her mother understands this feeling without their having discussed it, and no longer brings up the family’s knightly ancestry. The silence between them is a form of recognition, allowing Tess’s chosen identity to stand without a renewed claim to inherited rank.

Yet her feelings about the ancestral landscape are not wholly consistent. Talbothays is near former d’Urberville estates and the great family vaults of her grandmothers and their powerful husbands. Tess expects that she will be able to look at them and think of the fall of the d’Urbervilles, as well as the quieter disappearance of an individual descendant’s innocence. At the same time, she wonders whether being in her ancestral country might bring some unexpected good. The old inheritance that she rejects as a guide to her life remains part of the setting through which she imagines what might come next.

A New Foundation at Talbothays

When Tess arrives at Talbothays Dairy, she drinks a little milk for refreshment. Dairyman Crick is surprised, and slightly contemptuous, that she treats it as a beverage; he says he has not touched milk for years and dismisses it as something that would lie in his insides like lead. He then directs her toward the nearest cow, remarking that some cows are hard to milk and others easy, and that she will soon find out the difference. His response introduces the dairy not as an abstract refuge but as a workplace with its own demands and practical knowledge.

After changing her bonnet for a hood, Tess sits on her stool beneath the cow and begins to milk, the milk squirting from her hands into the pail. In that ordinary working posture she feels she has laid a new foundation for her future. The conviction brings serenity: her pulse slows, and she is able to look around her. The change is modest and material, grounded in a task she can perform, but it marks a decisive turn from the attempt to escape memory toward the beginnings of a life organized by work.

The dairy is large, with nearly a hundred milking cows under Crick’s management. The milkers form a small working battalion of men and maids: the men handle the hard-teated animals and the maids the more accommodating cows. Crick himself milks six or eight of the hardest cows when he is at home, because he does not trust casually hired journey-milkmen or the maids to milk them fully. If the cows are not milked properly, they may go dry; the danger is not only an immediate loss, but a decline and eventual cessation of supply. Tess’s new foundation therefore belongs to a tightly practical world in which regular, competent bodily labor sustains the work and its future.

For a time there is no talk in the barton. The sound of milk streaming into the many pails is interrupted only by brief instructions to the cows, while the milkers’ hands move up and down and the animals’ tails swing. Around them stretches the broad, level meadow between the slopes of the valley, a landscape formed from older landscapes that have long since been forgotten. This quiet working scene gives form to the possibility Tess has sought: not a past wholly erased, but a present in which a new life may begin through the steady rhythm of work.