Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
This is an excerpt from the paper...
In Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the central character of the novel, of course is Tess, and the story follows her from the age of sixteen until her death. Tess Durbeyfield has been told that her family is related to the wealthy D'Urbervilles. She goes to work for that wealthy and prominent family and learns that she is not related at all, but she also learns that the family is not as worthy as many believe when she is raped by the son, Alec. Pregnant, she returns home to work in the fields, and when her baby dies, she moves elsewhere and meets Angel Glare, whom she marries. She does not tell him about the rape and the death of her child until after they are married. Following the hypocrisy of the age, since he had an affair before the marriage, he gets angry and leaves for America. Alec finds her and pressures her to marry him, saying that Angel will never return. Angel does return, however, and Tess murders Alec to be with Angel. She is caught, tried, sentenced, and hanged, and Angel follows her wishes and marries her younger sister. The characters of Angel and Tess are tightly bound together, their fates intertwined. Their downfall can be traced to the fact first that Tess loves Angel with great intensity while Angel is a rigid and uncharitable man who abandons Tess when she needs him the most. This act leads to her downfall on the gallows. The true failure in the novel is the failure of Angel to remain with the woman he loves an
. . .
er and in the context of the time, a context Hardy was railing against: "For in Tess he stakes everything on his sensuous apprehension of a young woman's life, a girl who is at once a simple milkmaid and an archetype of feminine strength. Nothing finally matters in the novel nearly so much as Tess herself" (Howe 110). Howe goes on to note that in "her violation, neglect and endurance, Tess comes to seem Hardy's most radical claim for the redemptive power of suffering; she stands, both in the economy of the book and as a figure rising beyond its pages and into common memory, form the unconditional authority of feeling" (Howe 110). The subtitle of the book is "A Pure Woman," and this emphasis on purity at the beginning of the book was important to Hardy given that Tess would have been viewed as impure by the Victorian society of her time in spite of the fact that she has done nothing wrong and is victim rather than victimizer. We thus read the book with a different attitude than was held by the readers of Hardy's time: "Tess herself has not changed, the printed word remains as Hardy left it. But clearly there is a change somewhere, and clearly it must be either in us or in contemporary standards of morality" (Bates 236). It
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Angel Tess, Angel Tess--they, Alec Tess, INFLUENCES TESS, Hardy's Tess, Liza-Lu Tess, Alec D'Urberville, Alec Angel, Tess Howe, England Tess, thomas hardy, angel tess, alec angel, love tess, angel return, thomas hardy york, image woman, woman loves, tess love, angel rigid, tess loves,
Approximate Word count = 2494
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
