The purpose of this paper is to examine Hardy`s Tess of the D` Urbervilles in relation to the Victorian economic situation and sexual ideology. In Victorian age, women were only servant and attendant and administering angel for the male. Hardy understood the difficulties of woman in patriarchal society and tried to describe whether a woman as an individual subject could be accepted like a man as a social being. So he chose as his heroine not Victorian female streotype but woman who have feministic aspirations although she is frustrated in social process. The social process is one of class and communal separation in the Wessex country as the capitalist farming. Tess suffer from the poverty of her family, but she shows much greatness through her life. She is always innocent in mind, sincere in attitude, patient in hard life and self sacrificing. She struggles against appalling circumstances. Hardy illuminates the faults of the sexual ideology, rigid religion and class by the relationships of Angel, Alec. Tess lose her virginity by debauched Alec. But she leave him and live firmly as an unwed mother. And she is deserted because of her past by Angel who is enslaved by the convention and cold society. Through suffering, Tess learn to live her own life by free will. Tess is different from the typical Victorian heroines who usually fit into the adaptive role of woman imposed on them by society. She overcome all difficulties and try to live her own life freely. She is vivid, vigorous, even dominating despite of many hardships. As the subtitle ` A Pure Woman` implies, Tess is pure in natural law nevertheless she committed murder. Hardy saw Tess not as fatally doomed characters or mere victims of Victorian sexual ideology. He saw Tess as complex human being whose aspirations are frustrated in the social process but who remain self-contained and even heroic. And he criticizes the absurd sexual ideology and hypocrisy of the Victorian age, revealing the image of active Tess, who would be a subjective human being of strong vitality and human will. In this sense, we would call him a humanistic meliorist or pre-feminist.