From the sympathetic inside view of the narrator, we feel the identity confusion of Tess as she questions her role as the legal wife of Angel after their marriage, mainly for her loss of physical virginity in The Chase. As the moral centre of the novel, Tess actively takes the penitential, self-effacing role in front of Angel, as shown in her kneeling down and praying, “not to god but to her husband’s supplication,” resulting in Tess’s passive self-doubts and self-debasement. Religion can be said to contribute to the inequivalent power between the couple, as it provides few paths to exaltation for women, in the 19th century. Victorian women who follow in the ideal of Mary— chaste, gentle and long suffering— are esteemed by their society. Though Tess cannot live up to the ideal of the Virgin Mary, she emulates Christ in her attempts to be self-sacrificing. 

However, Tess is not a firm believer of Christianity, but that of Angel Clare. He is deified in her eyes, so Tess would rather pray to him than to god, and have him the judge of her punishment as she confesses her guilt. She contains, as Robert Polhemus defines, an erotic faith to Angel, an emotional conviction, ultimately religious in nature, that meaning, value, hope, and even transcendence can be found through love. It is in Tess’s reasoning that Clare’s love can redeem personal life and offer a reason for one’s being. From psychologists’ points of view, self-sacrifice generally stems from the feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem, which is exactly the case for Tess, who refrains the egoistic impulse of happiness in reunion in order to adhere to the societal interpretation of goodness.

‘O my love, my love, why do I love you so!’ is Tess’s first instinctive projection of her fierce love to Angel alone. Angel has said, “there is something very said in the extinction of a family of renown, even if it was a fierce, domineering, feudal renown.” Tess’s possession of the attitude of a “friendly leopard” suggests a connection between these identifications that she contains unbridled lust. Her love and loyalty for Angel is fierce, even if forbearance is its outward mode, she couldn’t resist bursting “why do I love you so!”

Next comes Tess’s realization of Angel’s idealization of her. Their love blossomed initially, as Tess is “conscious of neither time nor space,” in a way too perfect for them to see through the surface of each other’s elegance. Thus, Tess is idealized as “virginal daughter of nature” and Angel is pictured as “a decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young man.” What’s different from their idealization, is that Tess can transform the crystallization of him to a real, imperfect person, while the shimmer of Tess’s image directly results in Angel deserting her. The major unbalance is that Tess is aware that Angel might be loving “what she might have been,” but she could not see past her own illusion. And since Tess believes her values lie in people apart from herself, she concentrates too much on her affiliation with others, including Angel. She is merely trying to live up to the gender ideals of her culture. Tess desperately tries to be a dutiful daughter, a virginal bride, an obedient wife, and a submissive and morally irreproachable female.

Due to her belief that her self-value lies outside of herself and conformity to societal expectation of her gender, when she sees “Retty looked so fragile, and Izz so tragically sorrowful, and Marian so blank,” her altruistic impulse inquires Angel to kiss them. The unbalance in love is, again, the awareness of the external environment. Tess’s delicate perception of the milkmaids’ affection, and an excess of sympathy, does not accord with Angel’s unconsciousness of his charm.