Loneliness
This chapter talks about how people learn to feel alone and sustained, rather than alone and persecuted, lost, adrift, untethered. On loneliness and character in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the chapter describes the way people internalize novelistic structures and come to feel like literary characters. Like Tess, readers imagine that others are with them, narrating and experiencing their lives alongside them, even when they are alone. Alone with others, Tess introduces a notion of paradoxical solitude that D. W. Winnicott would explicitly theorize more than half a century later, as a fact of psychic life in his essay “The Capacity to Be Alone.” The chapter also shows how Thomas Hardy anticipates Winnicott's theory of relational solitude by making and unmaking his character Tess, who becomes an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations—an internalized presence—to her readers as much as to herself, and who seems to likewise sense the presence of the narrator and the reader in the world of the story.