 Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
REFERENCETHE CRITICSON TESS' CHARACTERShe (Tess) can flirt, she can listen, she can sympathize, she can work with her hands. Except when it is mocked or thwarted, she is superbly at ease with her sexuality. In no way an intellectual, she has a clear sense of how to reject whatever fanatic or pious nonsense comes her way.... Her womanly softness does not keep her from clear judgments, even toward her beloved Angel she can sometimes be blunt.... At least twice in the book Tess seems to Hardy and the surrounding characters larger than life, but in all such instances it is not to make her a goddess or a metaphor, it is to understand her embattled womanliness. Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy, 1967 ON TESS' RELATIONSHIP TO ALEC AND ANGELThe female in her was indomitable, unchangeable, she was utterly constant to herself. But she was, by long breeding, intact from mankind. Though Alec d'Urberville was of no kin to her, yet, in the book, he has always a quality of kinship. It was as if only a kinsman, an aristocrat, could approach her. And this to her undoing. Angel Clare would never have reached her... It needed a physical aristocrat.... Alec d'Urberville forced her to realize him, and to realize herself. D.H. Lawrence, "A Study of Thomas Hardy," 1936 ON ANGEL AND ALECAngel and Alec appear as figures of Victorian society hovering around Tess, but misunderstanding her, unworthy of her, unable to match her natural strength and spontaneity.... Both are statements about the principal character types of the Victorian middle class- the cruel bourgeois and the disinherited intellectual: both are without roots, both show a split between thought and feeling, both lack an adequate image of selfhood. Albert J. LaValley, Twentieth Century Interpretations of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 1969. NATURE IN TESSBy constructing the Tess-universe on the solid ground... of the earth as Final Cause, mysterious cause of causes, Hardy does not allow us to forget that what is most concrete in experience is also what is most inscrutable, that an overturned clod in a field or the posture of herons standing in a water mead or the shadow of cows thrown against a wall by evening sunlight are as essentially fathomless as the procreative yearning, and this in turn as fathomless as the sheerest accident in event. The accidentalism and coincidentalism in the narrative pattern of the book stand, thus, in perfectly orderly correlation with the grounding mystery of the physically concrete and the natural. Dorothy Van Ghent, "On Tess of the d'Urbervilles" in The English Novel: Form and Function, 1953. SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF TESSHardy sets the culminating family tragedy against the ominous background of the Lady Day migration of so many village folk. The erasure of long local life by these contemporary migrations, Hardy perceived, was a grave social and spiritual loss. It is no accident of art that the story of Tess should end amid scenes of uprooting.... Only a place in the family vault, a home there, remains to the derelict inheritors [the Durbeyfields]. It is this homeless despair of a family which has lost its rights and independence in the village community, that gives Tess finally into the invader's power. Douglas Brown: Social and Individual Fate in Tess from Thomas Hardy, 1961. TESS AND THE COLOR REDFor an artist as visually sensitive as Hardy, colour is of the first importance and significance, and there is one colour which literary catches the eye, and is meant to catch it, throughout the book. This colour is red, the colour of blood, which is associated with Tess from first to last. It dogs her, disturbs her, destroys her. She is full of it, she spills it, she loses it. Watching Tess' life we begin to see that her destiny is nothing more or less than the colour red. Tony Tanner, "Colour and Movement in Tess of the d'Urbervilles" in R. P. Draper's Hardy- The Tragic Novels, 1975. ON HARDY THE WRITERNot only the "modern" novelist is prey to tensions and ambivalences, and to radical divergences of feeling and belief, sympathy and judgment. The most important tension for Hardy- the very heart of his aesthetic in fact- was the simple desire to juxtapose plausible human beings and strange uncommon events, the real and the fantastic.... Hardy was a conscious anti-realist, opposed to the documentary and the drab, in spite of his minute fidelity to the physical world. He knew that all great art is a disproportioning.... Albert J. Guerard, Hardy: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1963.
[Tess of the D'Urbervilles Contents] ADVISORY BOARDWe wish to thank the following educators who helped us focus our Book Notes series to meet student needs and critiqued our manuscripts to provide quality materials. Murray Bromberg, Principal Sandra Dunn, English Teacher Lawrence J. Epstein, Associate Professor of English Leonard Gardner, Lecturer, English Department Beverly A. Haley, Member, Advisory Committee Elaine C. Johnson, English Teacher Marvin J. LaHood, Professor of English Robert Lecker, Associate Professor of English David E. Manly, Professor of Educational Studies Bruce Miller, Associate Professor of Education Frank O'Hare, Professor of English Faith Z. Schullstrom, Member of Executive Committee Mattie C. Williams, Director, Bureau of Language Arts
[Tess of the D'Urbervilles Contents] BIBLIOGRAPHYFURTHER READING
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