Tess of the D'Urbervilles & Her Downfall

The central character of the novel, of course, is Tess, and the story follows her from the age of sixteen until her death. Tess is a young woman of contradictions, and this has extended to the way she is viewed by various readers. Some see her as a victim of her society and of the changes coming over that society in her time, while others consider her to be responsible for her own fate, tragic though it may be. She is an innocent girl when first introduced, and she is raped by Alec d'Urberville. This leaves her pregnant, and while in our own time the victim of rape would not be considered responsible for being pregnant under those conditions, in Victorian England Tess would be seen as a fallen woman, as guilty even though she did nothing wrong. This fact thus defines her life in a way that is out of her control, making it difficult to see Tess as the mas

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. Her idolatry of this man was such that she herself almost feared it to be ill-omened (Hardy 273). The character of Tess is central to the novel, as noted, and that character should be seen both in the way Hardy presented her 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. . . 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 o 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 ch
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Angel Tess, Angel Tess--they, Angel Clare, Liza-Lu Tess, Hardy's Tess, England Tess, Alec Angel, Tess Angel, Hardy Tess, Pure Woman, thomas hardy, angel tess, thomas hardy york, hardy york, tess seen, angel family, fallen woman, own fate, alec angel, behavior novel, social disapproval,
Approximate Word count = 1970
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)