Tess of the D’Urbervilles; Blame culture and the human factors lesson we still need to learn.

How a Victorian tragedy helps us think about women, psychological safety, just culture and the systems that shape human performance.

It took a good long while to emerge from the book hangover that followed 'Tess of the D’Urbervilles' by Thomas Hardy. There was even a good old cry about it in the immediate aftermath, but I am not ashamed to admit that books affect me deeply. This one left me with that particular hollowness that comes from loving a novel while wishing its heroine had been treated with far more humanity.

The tragedy of Tess’s life is shaped repeatedly by a lack of agency and power. She is constrained by poverty, gender, social expectation, hypocrisy and the decisions of people with more authority than she has. To be clear, I adored the book. But it is not simply the story of one tragic incident, one poor decision or one cruel individual. It is the story of a young woman who is failed repeatedly across the span of her life. Again and again, Tess is given responsibility without power, judged without context and expected to repair damage she did not create. That is one reason the story continues to strike such a chord with women. It shows how easily responsibility can be pushed downwards, towards the person with the least power to refuse it.

Reading it through a human factors lens, I kept returning to the incident that sets so much of the tragedy in motion: the death of Prince, the family horse.

The death of Prince, the family horse, sets the story in motion. It matters. But it is the first link in a much longer chain of blame, coercion, abandonment, hardship and hypocrisy.

The incident was not simply “Tess’s fault”

At the beginning of the novel, Tess is a still just a girl (child). Yet in spite of that, she is sent out before dawn with her younger brother to take the family’s beehives to market because her father is unable to carry out the task. Tess becomes drowsy while driving the cart. A collision follows, and Prince is mortally wounded.

It is easy to stop the analysis there: Tess fell asleep, therefore Tess caused the accident. That is the familiar logic of blame culture. It identifies the person closest to the outcome, treats their final action as the explanation, and closes the case.

Human factors asks better questions. Why was a young and inexperienced person given a safety-critical responsibility at that hour? What preparation did she have? What safeguards were available? How did fatigue, darkness, family poverty, dependence on a single working animal and the absence of capable adult support combine? What options did she realistically have to say no?

Tess was underprepared, under-resourced and under-supported. Fatigue was not a character flaw. It was a predictable human response to the conditions in which the work was being done. The collision may have been the immediate event, but the conditions that made it possible had been developing long before the cart set off.

The deeper failure comes next. Tess’s guilt is used to make her responsible for restoring the family’s fortunes. Her parents encourage her to approach the wealthy Stoke-d’Urbervilles, who have adopted the old family name but are not the relations the Durbeyfields imagine them to be. Because Tess is considered responsible for the loss, she becomes the proposed solution.

Blame is emotionally tidy, but operationally weak.

Blame can feel satisfying because it gives uncertainty a name and a face. It creates a simple story: someone failed, someone must pay, and the problem has therefore been dealt with. Yet a person-centred explanation often tells us very little about how to prevent recurrence. Removing, retraining or punishing one individual does not change the pressures, trade-offs, gaps in support or poorly designed conditions that shaped the event.

Steven Shorrock has written about the colloquial idea of “the human factor”, where human involvement is framed mainly as the source of unwanted outcomes. That interpretation encourages us to see people as both the cause of failure and the object of correction. A fuller human factors and ergonomics perspective looks instead at the interaction between people, tasks, tools, environments, organisational conditions and wider systems.

In Tess’s story, blame does more than misdiagnose the event. It transfers the family’s burden to her. Because she is seen as responsible for the loss of Prince, she is also expected to repair the consequences by seeking help from the supposed d’Urberville relations. The person blamed becomes the person who must pay. That combination of guilt, obligation and powerlessness propels her towards further harm.

Why this matters when we talk about women and human factors.

Work is not experienced in a gender-neutral vacuum. A peer-reviewed scoping review found differences in occupational hazard exposure between women and men, including within the same occupations. It also found that women were more likely to report exposure to bullying, discrimination and harassment in parts of the literature reviewed (Biswas et al., 2021). The point is not that all women share one experience, or that gender explains every event. It is that work systems, authority and exposure can be distributed differently, and our analysis must be capable of seeing that.

A women’s human factors perspective asks whose body, experience and voice were assumed when work was designed. It asks who has authority to stop, challenge or reshape a task; whose discomfort is normalised; whose account is believed; and who is expected to absorb the consequences when the system becomes stretched.

Tess has responsibility without meaningful authority. She is expected to keep the family functioning, but she does not control the conditions, resources or decisions that shape the task. That pattern remains recognisable in many workplaces: people can be held accountable for outcomes without being given the power, information, time or support needed to influence them.

Psychological safety is more than being invited to speak

Amy Edmondson (1999) defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In practical terms, it means people can ask for help, admit uncertainty, report an error, raise a concern or disclose difficult information without reasonably expecting humiliation, rejection or punishment for speaking.

Psychological safety does not remove standards or accountability. It allows difficult information to enter the system early enough for people to understand it and act. Edmondson’s research associated psychological safety with team learning behaviours, and later scholarship identified its relevance to voice, teamwork and organisational learning (Edmondson & Lei, 2014).

Tess does not lack honesty. She lacks confidence that honesty will be met with understanding. That fear is justified. When she finally tells her husband, Angel about her past traumas after their marriage, he responds through the moral and social assumptions of his time. Tess forgives his disclosed past; he cannot extend the same humanity to her. The standard is not merely harsh. It is unequal and filled with blind hypocrisy.

Just culture: understanding the story behind the act

Sidney Dekker describes a just culture as a culture of trust, learning and accountability (Dekker, 2016). It does not mean that anything goes, or that harmful actions have no consequences. It means that accountability should be fair, contextual and capable of generating learning rather than simply identifying somebody to punish.

Dekker and Nyce (2013) also caution that apparently objective approaches to just culture cannot remove questions of power and evidence. Justice depends on who defines the event, whose account is believed, what context is permitted and whether the process itself is fair.

Applied to Tess’s whole story, a just-culture approach would not look only at the final fatal act. It would reconstruct the long pathway: childhood responsibility, family pressure, Alec’s exploitation, bereavement, social stigma, Angel’s rejection, punishing labour, poverty, bereavement again, homelessness and the progressive collapse of alternatives. Understanding that context does not erase responsibility. It makes any account of responsibility more truthful.

Tess as the scapegoat for a failing system

Across the novel, Tess carries consequences that properly belong to a much wider network of people and conditions:

• Her parents transfer adult responsibility to her and treat her future as a route out of family poverty.

• Alec exploits unequal power and repeatedly refuses to respect the boundaries Tess tries to establish.

• The community turns hardship into shame and makes belonging conditional.

• Religious authority offers limited compassion at moments of grief and vulnerability.

• Angel values honesty in principle but punishes Tess when her truth disrupts his ideal of her.

• Employers and economic conditions leave Tess doing punishing work with little control and few alternatives.

• Housing and class structures make the family’s security fragile and place the burden of survival on Tess.

• The justice system responds to the final visible act without repairing or fully accounting for the long chain of preceding failures.

  
  

Tess is not passive in the sense of having no character, intelligence or will. She repeatedly works, resists, cares, tries to disclose, protects her family and attempts to begin again. Her powerlessness comes from the repeated mismatch between the responsibility placed upon her and the authority, resources and protection available to her.

What organisations can learn from the whole novel

• Do not analyse only the final event. Trace the pathway of decisions, pressures and missed opportunities that made the outcome increasingly likely.

• Treat power as a safety variable. Ask who could refuse, leave, challenge, disclose or seek help without losing.

• Listen to repeated weak signals. Boundaries ignored, concerns minimised, exhausted workers, unresolved grief and narrowing options are not separate issues. Together, they may describe a deteriorating system.

• Do not mistake endurance for resilience. A person continuing to function may be surviving because no safe alternative is available.

• Build psychological safety through your response. The real test is not whether leaders invite disclosure, but whether people are treated fairly after they disclose.

• Apply just culture across the whole timeline. Accountability should include those who design conditions, allocate resources, hold power and respond to earlier warnings, not only the person closest to the final outcome.

• Recognise gendered and social assumptions. Examine whose labour is expected, whose account is doubted, who performs care work and who is asked to absorb failure quietly.

• Support people after harm. Compassion, practical help and fair treatment are part of safety, not an alternative to it.

Blame gives us a culprit. Learning gives us the whole story.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles is not a safety case study, and I would not want to flatten such a rich and devastating novel into one. But literature allows us to see patterns that organisations still struggle with: responsibility without authority, unequal power, unsafe disclosure, moral double standards, economic constraint and a justice process that begins its analysis far too late.

The death of Prince matters because it begins the chain. But the central lesson lies in everything that follows. Tess is repeatedly offered the appearance of choice without the power, resources or safety that would make choice meaningful. She is treated as the cause of problems created by others, and as the person responsible for solving them. When she can no longer carry that accumulated burden, the final response is punishment.

If we want safer and more humane organisations, we have to notice people before they reach the final event. We have to ask what has been placed upon them, what options have been removed, whose interests the system protects and whether speaking up genuinely changes anything.

Blame gives us a culprit. Human factors gives us context. Psychological safety gives people a voice. Just culture gives us a fairer way to respond. And learning requires us to hold the whole story, not only its last page.