‘Yet there was nothing ethereal about it [Tess's face]: all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation’ (Tess of the d'Urbervilles 24: 152). ‘There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare’ (31: 193). In these two passages is compressed one of the central factors of the appeal of Tess of the d'Urbervilles: Hardy simultaneously – or rather, perhaps, alternately – suggests that life is characterised by ethereality or abstract values and emphasises the daunting rigour of maintaining life. He accompanies the view of an elevated mentalist, even idealist, existence with the contrasting force of substantiality, reality as it is commonly understood, without even hinting that these moods or perceptions might cancel out the other's absolutism. Similar oppositions – Angel vs Alec, conventional morality vs nature, love vs sexuality, grand past vs hardscrabble present, morality vs exploitation – organise the novel. Without directly evaluating these oppositions, Hardy firmly refuses to attempt to restrict the validity (or weakness) of one of the polar forces by the existence of the other. Moreover, in the course of the novel – even towards the end – Tess moves frequently from generalised tragic stature and insight into mundane, limited, local pragmatic reaction, underscoring the uncertainty that is at the centre of the novel's permanent appeal.

Embodying such contrasts, Tess superbly represents Hardy's incorporation of forces operative in himself and his society towards the end of the nineteenth century in Britain.