Tess of the D'Urbervilles: the disillusionment of an innocent woman and a dirge for the ages

During her time at the dairy, Tess falls in love with the vicar's son, Angel Clay, and becomes engaged.

However, Tess was always worried that Clay would mind her past, and many times she wanted to tell him that she had been seduced by Alec, but she failed to do so for various reasons. Tess is pure at heart, but suffers from moral condemnation and torment.

Before the wedding, Tess had written a long letter, ready to confess to Clay, but accidentally tucked the letter under the carpet, Clay had no way of knowing.

Finally, on her wedding night, Tess can't help but tell Clay about it, expecting to be forgiven. Instead, Clay makes a particularly irresponsible decision to leave Tess behind and travel to Brazil alone.

Tess, newlywed, is back in the throes of a painful separation, and suffers a great deal of pain and self-doubt. After Clay left, Tess had to continue to work on some farms to make ends meet.

During this time, she re-encounters Alec, who assaulted her and who is obsessed with Tess and won't stop until he gets her.

And at this time, Tess's father passed away due to illness, her mother's health is weak, and the burden of the whole family's life falls on Tess. From the novel, we can see what a difficult situation Tess was in at the time: "Her younger siblings were out of school, the lease on the house was expiring, and the family had been thrown out of the village with nowhere to go."

In such a desperate situation, Tess, despite her attachment to Clay, could not resist the enormous pressure of the reality of the predicament. It is also in this desperate situation that Tess writes to Clay in an agitated and determined tone, even shaking her love for him.

In order to survive, Tess ends up accepting her mother's deal with Alec, at the cost of Tess becoming Alec's mistress and living with him.

On the other hand, Clay begins to reflect on his past behavior. He cannot let go of Tess in his heart and decides to go back to England to look for Tess again. This point in the novel exacerbates the conflict within Tess, who is overwhelmed with hatred for Alec because of her love for Clay.

Because, it is Alec let Tess lose her virginity twice, let her become a "unchaste" woman in the eyes of others, so that she has lost the dignity of a human being in the eyes of the world.

In the end, in all kinds of suffering and oppression, Tess can not hide the inner impulse, all the anger convergence in the sharp knife blade, a knife to end the life of Alec.

For Tess, it was like completing her own redemption, and completing her fidelity to Clay, and instead of panicking and panicking, she wore a "miserable smile of sympathy".

As written in the novel:

It is clear that Tess sees the killing of Alec as her duty, a task she must fulfill. Alec is a lingering shadow in Tess's life, and she feels relieved that Alec is gone.

After spending the last five days of her happy, contented life with Clay, Tess is arrested and eventually hanged.

03

There was a time when I was rather repulsed by Clay, thinking why he couldn't accept the brutal fact that Tess had been defiled by Alec and had fathered a child, and feeling very bitter about him leaving Tess behind on her wedding night.

Didn't he love Tess very much? Wasn't his love for Tess noble?

Perhaps Hardy has retained this trigger throughout, a satire on society as a whole: A man bent on purity meets a truly pure woman and is disappointed instead.

The reason why Tess is controversial is still inseparable from the ideas of the times, and we might as well look at the ideas of the Victorian era.

In the novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, when the rich boy, Alec, seduces J Tess, according to the concepts of the Victorian era, instead of blaming Alec, people will be harsh on Tess.

Even in today's highly civilized world, when women are subjected to such things, it is still customary for people to blame women, saying that they do not know shame and have no self-respect and self-love.

That's why Hardy had Alec reflect the social concepts of the time in one paragraph in the novel. After Alec violates Tess, he also unashamedly uses the story of Adam being seduced by Eve to blame Tess, falsely accusing her of seducing him, which led to this tragedy.

Seeing this is a real lung-breaker, but are there no such things in today's society? Yes, there have always been. At the time Tess was published, many cultural luminaries viewed Tess in the same way.

Even though Tess lives in a simple environment, where birds and flowers are everywhere, there is still the hissing sound of poisonous snakes.

Poor Tess, who had never even been in love before she met Clay, has been struggling to find moral purity because she was defiled by Alec, as well as seeking salvation in sin. Is society really fair to women? At least not in the society of the time.

Perhaps, for the innocent Tess, the night she was defiled by Alec was "a night of bitter, lifelong hate".

To this end, Tess suffered a great deal of inner torment, and she saw herself as the embodiment of sin, a woman whose innocence had been violated.

Precisely because of the concepts of the times that were unfair to women, Tess, after being violated, has always insisted on her inner purity, and has always fought against the inherent concepts.

When she is engaged to Clay, she is even more tormented. She has to confess her past to Clay, but is still not accepted by the man she loves.

It would be wrong to blame Clay for not forgiving Tess, but the idea that women must be pure is y embedded.

Claire sees Tess as a symbol of purity, the ideal wife, and that's why he proposes to her. However, when Tess confesses her past on her wedding night, Clay's illusions are shattered.

That is to say, in Clay's inner reality, he has been at war with the concept of Z religion.

On the one hand, Clay can't get rid of the concepts instilled in him by the society and his family, so he can't accept a woman who has lost her Z-fucking; on the other hand, Clay has a true love for Tess and sympathizes with her, so he can't bear to leave her.

So the tragedy of Tess is also the tragedy of an era.

04

Finally, let's look at Tess herself, what a responsible and pure woman.

From the time Tess was born, her family was very poor, and because of this she learned to be independent early on.

Tess's father is the head of the family, but the man is lazy, not able to support the whole family, the burden is quite heavy. Tess's mother, a traditional housewife, like many housewives, she took care of the children and did all kinds of chores and dirty work.

In the whole family, Tess's parents do not earn much, just enough to make ends meet, but they have seven children, including Tess, so the pressure of survival is very great.

Tess, as the eldest daughter, had to help her family make ends meet, and every day she helped her parents share the household chores. Tess cared for her younger siblings while doing the chores, and as soon as she got home from school, she ran to the nearby farm to mow the grass, collect the crops, or help her mother milk the cows and churn the cream.

Despite her bad background, Tess never complained; instead, she took responsibility for her life and defended her family.

For example, at the beginning of the novel, when the girls in the village parade laughed at her father for talking big, Tess said:

Even when Tess was betrayed by her family at the end of the day, she didn't show any particular determination to resist, which shows that Tess loves her family very much, and she is also a particularly responsible girl.

Tess sacrificed herself for the benefit of her family, and she was willing to sacrifice herself for the stability of her family, which is a responsibility and a courage that not everyone can have.

Therefore, when Tess's father died, the family had no place to live and was starving, but Tess was forced to accept her mother's deal with Alec and willingly became Alec's mistress and lived with him.

For Tess's sense of responsibility, some people agree, but also some people despise, because for the family of origin is not good for the people, the sense of responsibility on the body, may also be the beginning of the tragedy that caused their own life.

Like Tess. Tess is beautiful, chaste and pure as a sheet of white paper, but she has a strong sense of responsibility. It is Tess's strong sense of responsibility that shaped her unique personality and pushed her into the abyss of tragedy.

Tess's sense of responsibility is evident throughout the novel, from the opening pages.

For example, Tess is reluctant to recognize her "family" in the D'Urbervilles, but she feels responsible for the accidental death of the old horse that sustained her when she and her brother were on their way to town to deliver honey.

Thanks to this, Tess feels very sorry for herself, and is determined to help her parents out of poverty and make amends at the same time.

This is what the novel says:

It is this unexpected change of heart that makes Tess change her mind and go to Mrs. D'Urberville's house, as her parents want her to do.

If you look at it from the surface, the tragedy behind Tess is caused by the vanity of her parents, but in the final analysis, it is from the sense of responsibility in Tess's character.

After Tess and Clay fell in love, Tess has been feeling very guilty, she feels obliged to tell Clay about her past, or else it is unfair to her beloved, which also stems from a strong sense of responsibility in her heart.

Only, I did not expect that Clay, the "upright" man, did not because Tess confessed, and accept Tess, but irresponsible in the wedding night left Tess, alone.

At the end of the novel, again out of a sense of duty, Tess ends Alec's life.

Because, in Tess's mind, it's the redemption she's trying to accomplish. Both for herself and for Clay. Likewise, Tess does it for the world, for the women who have suffered the same misfortune as she has!

In closing, I would recommend that everyone, especially women, give this novel a serious go.

Because, if not from a literary point of view, analyzing the novel from the point of view of the subject of the story alone, I think Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a must-read for every young woman, just like Vanity Fair.

After reading this book, you realize that society has evolved for more than two hundred years, while human nature has never changed. In the modern world, perhaps the tragedies of the Tesses have not become less, perhaps more.

In conclusion, I would like to ask: Is a woman guilty of leaving behind a dishonorable past for reasons not of her own?

I don't want to live to see you despise me! This is the tragedy of Tess's life! It is the tragedy of an age!

I will not live to see you despise me!