Tess Dos D 39;urbervilles
Florentina Holcombe
you seem surprised by all the horrible that you go through with tess. i just finished reading the book right before watching the masterpiece classic and thought that it was very true to the story. and yes, it is gut-wrenchingly horrible, but i love how strong tess is through it all. although, the actor that portrayed angel seemed too young for me.
Thank you for the clarification. I read the book years ago and did not study it formally for class. In this post, the critique was aimed at the film, not at the book, which I loved for its richness of language and symbolism, which is woefully lacking in any cinematic adaptation.
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Hello, my name is Vic and I live in Maryland, USA. I have adored Jane Austen almost all of my life. I am a proud lifetime member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me and my team. We do not accept any form of cash advertising, sponsorship, or paid topic insertions. However, we do accept and keep books and CDs to review.
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Tess is a really good rose for Florida zone 9B. It started to bloom just a month or so after planting. Now in the subsequent year since initial planting, it is a regular bloomer. It seems well suited to this heat.
I planted Tess in a partial shade near my front porch and put in a large trellis for her to climb. I planted her in May, and she is blooming in June! the blooms are very fragrant. I hope she covers the trellis and makes my front porch smell like heaven!
my tess was a teeny tiny plant when i received her last summer, she has grown like a champ on an obelisk and her first flush this spring has probably 40 blooms! My plant doesn't have much of a fragrance yet, so I'm hoping that will develop with time, but it is a showstopper in the bloom department!
I purchased in 2022. Spring came and this Tess gave me runners with beautiful roses. As I am in Texas the heat was brutal in Summer 2022 and 2023.
I lost 2 other roses, but this Tess has stood the heat in both 2022 and 2023. When it blooms it is beautiful and smells wonderful !! I can't wait until it comes into it's beauty this next Spring and Summer and hopefully for years to come.
This novel is generally regarded as Hardy's finest. A brilliant tale of seduction, love, betrayal, and murder, Tess of the d'Ubervilles yields to narrative convention by punishing Tess's sin, but boldly exposes this standard denouement of unforgiving morality as cruelly unjust. Throughout, Hardy's most lyrical and atmospheric language frames his shattering narrative. The novel centers around a young woman who struggles to find her place in society. When it is discovered that the low-class Durbeyfield family is in reality the d'Urbervilles, the last of a famous bloodline that dates back hundreds of years, the mother sends her eldest daughter, Tess, to beg money from relations with the obvious desire that Tess wed the rich Mr. d'Urberville. Thus begins a tale of woe in which a wealthy man cruelly mistreats a poor girl. Tess is taken advantage of by Mr. d'Urberville and leaves his house, returning home to have their child, who subsequently dies. Throughout the rest of this fascinating novel, Tess is tormented by guilt at the thought of her impurity and vows to never marry. She is tested when she meets Angel, the clever son of a priest, and falls in love with him. After days of pleading, Tess gives in to Angel and consents to marry him. Angel deserts Tess when he finds the innocent country girl he fell in love with is not so pure. I am so happy that in my teenage years I found this marvellous book in a second hand book shop. Till then I was not aware of Sir Thomas Hardy. I started reading and found that it was hard to put down. Being a strong adorer of mother Nature, I was thrilled by the author's minute descriptions of nature in old England. I was dumbfounded by his observations and narration. Coming to the story, I became an immediate fan of the Tess, the heroine. In other words I can say that her character has changed me and my personality. Her simplicity, innocence, perseverance, dedication and most importantly her love made me to be always like her in my daily life. Instantly Hardy became my favourite author and I never stopped reading almost all of his novels. Every person who likes romantic novels must read this novel first. I will never forget Tess in my life.--Submitted by Velijala Phanindra Charya, India
This is an attempt to move away from the clichd/ somewhat hackneyed and simplistic interpretation of the charactersOverallOne thing that emerges from the novel is the romantic impulse to travel back in time to the time of knights and castles which would provide a counter-point to the somewhat mundane, dull existence of a post industrial revolution England when the full impact of modernity (with its ability to blend the modern advances in science and technology with the best in traditional culture) has not yet been felt.This should be familiar to us from the Cold War / millennial generation when we are just about getting the hang of having the cake and eating it too in the sense of harnessing science and technology to bring back/recreate the aura/atmosphere of bygone times while still retaining the benefits of modern life.At first glance, the whole pre-occupation with guilt at what would seem to us innocuous almost innocent transgressions strikes as somewhat silly and making a mountain of a molehill.But when looked at the perspective of transcendence, the novel captures the pathos of a family , rather a generations attempts to transcend its circumstances degenerate into the sordid.TessTesss complexity has not been fully appreciated by critics. Hardy seems to look to women such as Tess hailing from a rural background and accustomed to all forms of Hard / Physical work (Poverty without loss of self respect) and yet possessing a keen desire to improve herself intellectually , spiritually etc as the inspiration of the Modern Woman who would be a modern version of the Amazon.Tess s guilt is not that of a traditional, Victorian woman but that of a woman who attempts to live up to her ideal and live life on her own terms and not her despair on her failuresIn fact, Tess with her attempts at resisting Alec seems more true to the feminist credo because as she always maintains, he did take advantage of her initially and now, she loves Angel more than Alec if at all she possesses any love for Alec. Her rebuffs / resistance to Alecs overtures stem from the above and not from a conventional morality.At the same time, Tess is not fully modern in the sense that she continues to pine for AngelAlecThis is a character who is actually the most complex. His initial attempts to seduce Tess seem callow to our modern sensibilities.On deeper analysis, rather than a person who has come into the aristocracy ,he seems like a somewhat decadent aristocrat whose days of power are numbered and who is in the process of losing all that he had. He also seems to be somewhat effete. Actually, his wooing of Tess seems to be a classic case of attraction of opposites , the effete / soft Alec attracted to the strong / independent Tess, the case of a degenerate / jaded aristocrat wooing a member of the rural lower middle class , albeit of a distant aristocratic lineage. To modern sensibilities, his initial interactions with Tess seem somewhat insensitive and reminiscent of a bully, though this may be an attempt to mask his true feelings. Unfortunately, instead of just making Alec a somewhat self-indulgent playboy, Hardy resorts to the device of potraying him as an aggressor.In a different social milieu, possibly, he may have been the Knight,/possibly an Asiatic version to tess , the Amazon warrior. Hardy seems to hint at that when potraying Alec with a swarthy complexion The interactions between Alec and Tess seem more real rather than that between Tess and Angel which seem somewhat idealized. Tess fights with Alec and is on much more equal terms with him than with Angel.Were it not for the first seduction, Alec could have been a much more interesting character. In the final analysis, he seems to be a misfit in his time and actually, the real tragedy of the novel in human terms.Angel ClareAngel Clare is a hardworking, progressive member of the middleclass. He is modern in outlook, an atheist though his father is a member of the clergy. In spite of his atheism, he is idealistic. In fact, his views of love are almost ethereal. The real question is whether his love for Tess is actually worshipping an Idea of Tess as the epitome of Pure Rural Womanhood (links to Spartan Women ?) and when she reveals her story, the falling of the scales from his eyes is due to her falling into the role of the victim or her being involved in something so sordid as Sex/Rape .Possibly, Thomas Hardy bemoans the conventional rigid views of morality and even relationships love and evokes the following questions :- What would have happened if Alec had not seduced or bullied Tess ? Would she have been able to at least like him / be friends with him while still loving Angel ? Why should she not be able to love both ?
When people dear to us experience misfortune, we may offer them sympathy even as we might be thinking their misfortune was partly their own fault. The Tess novel is largely about a wonderful girl we may come to care a lot about who suffers great hardships. We're led to believe these misfortunes were all the fault of others. Hardy's brilliant writing contributes to the understanding that all of Tess' troubles are the result of bad luck, social injustice and a cruel fate. Tess' miseries and how she bears them seem to exalt her to sympathetic readers.But, what if Tess' choices made at least some of her hardships likely? Perhaps the most prominent of all Tess' qualities is her uncompromising virtue, a choice. All choices have consequences, including doing the honorable thing. Tess knew she risked everything in her wedding night confession, but she chose to do it because she preferred to risk her happiness and fulfillment rather than compromise her sense of honor. Her choice not only had devastating results for her, it also made Angel miserable. Most of us regardless of how honorable we imagine ourselves, temper our honesty an ethical behavior somewhat to assure our well-being. We all tell white lies, partial truths rather than the whole truth and justify it all thinking if there's no real harm done there's no foul. Tess won't compromise her virtuous conduct to her well-being, and the result is her misery. She bears it so stoically it seems she takes her hardships as if they're due. But these hardships don't result from any compromise she's made with virtue. Rather, her hardships result from not compromising her virtue.One moral of this novel might be that to survive satisfactorily in her world (and ours) requires some balance between virtue and personal well-being. Perhaps Tess would have done better to move a little towards Joan's example. Both she and Angel might've been happier for the difference.