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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Junjie Qi is an assistant professor of English at Renmin University of China and a research fellow at its Center for Translation and Study of World Literature, specializing in Victorian literature. She is currently working on a research project titled “Ruins in the Victorian Literary Imagination.” Her work has appeared in several scholarly journals, including Philosophy and Literature, Papers on Language and Literature, The Thomas Hardy Journal, Neohelicon, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. Her monograph, The Ethics, Politics, and Aesthetics of Architecture in Thomas Hardy’s Novels (Cambridge Scholars, 2026), examines the ethical, political, and aesthetic implications of Hardy’s engagement with architecture, both within and beyond his literary works.

Abstract

This essay explores the restoration of the sexually ruined heroine in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles by situating the issue within the Gothic Revival and nineteenth-century architectural restoration debates, as well as Hardy’s anti-restoration polemics against the theological, ideological, and aesthetic stances upheld by Tractarianism and the Ecclesiological Society. Tess’s effort to restore herself follows the conventional pattern of the fallen woman’s redemption, crystallized in her attempt to rebuild her defiled temple-body, a Christian imperative traceable to St. Paul’s teachings. In so doing, Tess reenacts a ritualistic cleansing analogous to the restoration practices promoted by the Ecclesiological Society, both theologically underpinned by the Pauline doctrine of purity and aiming to bring restored subjects to an idealized origin stripped of historical accretions. Tess’s restoration as a living organism sustained by nature’s recuperative powers likewise fails. In Hardy’s Darwinian universe, nature’s capacity for renewal operates as a mechanical, inorganic process of substitution, replicating the logic of architectural restoration. The promise of renewal gives way to decay and decomposition, culminating in Tess’s ruination. Her ruined body, a synecdoche for the decayed d’Urberville lineage, exemplifies what Alois Riegl terms the “age value” of monuments, testifying to nature’s lawful disintegrating power and the inexorable passage of time. In reducing herself to ruins, Tess’s restorationist vision paradoxically endows her with a tragic agency normally denied to the fallen woman, who is defined solely by the materiality of her being.

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