Rousing Pity and Fear to Effect Purgation of Our Emotions

In Tess of the D'Urbervilles Hardy calls Tess who, in the opening chapters is a charming sixteen year old country girl, "a pure woman" in open repudiation of the scrupulous Victorian morals.
A complex character, Tess' perfectly pure mind is sharply opposed to her sensuous flesh.
The sensual Alec was attracted by the luxuriousness of her aspect, her fulness of growth - a feature she had inherited from her mother.
And her flesh was all vitality and warmth.
Further, Tess had a slight incautiousness in her character, again inherited from her race.
She was not wary enough to suppress the animalism in her flesh from responding to great external pressure.
Still further, we are told that it was only her sheer ignorance that made her break the moral law of virginal chastity.
Indeed, Tess reproaches her mother for not warning her that "there was danger in menfolk".
The "pure woman" issue hinges on the incident when Tess, traveling alone trustfully with Alec, lost their way at nightfall in a misty solitary wood where she fell asleep overcome with weariness.
The sad outcome of this incident was that she was a virgin no more.
But Hardy leaves it uncertain whether it was seduction or rape.
To this shame Tess seemed to acquiesce for a time.
Later she marries the high-principled Angel Clare, but on their wedding night Tess, driven by moral scruples, confesses to her husband her shameful past with Alec and of their unlawful child which died in infancy.
Horrified, Angel abandones her and leaves for Brazil.
In her distress, Tess unwillingly returns to her demon lover Alec.
Believing in his false assurance that her husband will never return, she goes on living with Alec as his wife.
But when, after some time, her husband returns repentant, she murders Alec for having deceived her, and has a happy reunion with her husband.
The couple flee into the New Forest but she is overtaken by the law and hanged for her crime of murder.
Tess is cast in the role of a fallen woman, and yet Hardy regards her as "pure".
He holds her only physically, but not morally, tarnished.
She kills Alec under the impulse to return to Angel, her husband and only lover.
For her physical defilement Tess herself is stricken with a sense of sin.
But Hardy disapproves of her "shreds of convention" as "moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason".
It was they that were out of harmony with the natural world, not she.
Tess' moral tendency overrides all her so-called lapses and sins and establishes her essential purity.
We too, in our practical lives, suffer the impressions of life's bitter blows.
Does that mean that the preponderance of unhappiness should turn us into pessimists? Pessimism is when people either endure misfortune with stoical resignation or surrender in a defeatist spitit.
Or,does fighting a losing battle with undaunted courage indicate the indomitability of the human spirit?