苔丝的性格分析

Analysis of Characters of Tess

Abstract: Tess is shaped and praised by Hardy in his novel Tess of d’Urbervilles; she is a rebel image in English literary history. By the description of

her tragic, Hardy shows his resistance and struggle against feudalism and bourgeois morality, religion and social oppression. Hardy’s defiance against the status quo of Victorian England is both fierce and unrelenting and that is why both the last novels met with terrific accusations from the bourgeois authorities and their henchmen the critics.

Ⅰ.Introduction

Tess, the heroine of Hardy’s Tess of d’Urbervilles, is a peasant girl. And when Hardy gives the novel a subtitle, “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented”, we can see him defying the Victorian moral standard by calling Tess a pure woman. The character of Tess is extremely well drawn. A victim of the society, Tess is portrayed as a sweet-natured, kind-hearted, pure and rebel girl, and yet she is not free from the influence of social conventions and moral standards of the day. These characters make the image of Tess alive, moving and become an immortal artistic image. This paper attempts to detailed analysis and exposition of the characters of Tess.

Ⅱ. Characters of Tess

2.1 Sweet- natured character of Tess

“A fresh and virginal daughter of Nature” is what first Tess seems to Angel Clare. Tess always maintains the essence of herself as the daughter of a peasant; she loves life, loves nature and gives off the fragrance of the nature without decoration. Tess is the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly family of the d’Urbervilles. In the late 19th century Britain was completely ruled by capitalism, these aristocratic families of mighty powers have been gradually declined. D’Urbervilles family inherited to Tess' father only reduced to a village haggler; the only way to proof the association with his ancestors was “a wold sliver spoon and a wold graven seal”. Tess' father happened to know that he was the descendant of the d’Urbervilles from the pastor; he feels so rafted after his uplifting

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gr’t-family-vault-at-Kingsbere and knighted-forefathers-in-lead-coffins-there!” He is proud of his noble origin and stains with secular and vanity. Mrs. Durbeyfield− a hardworking and plain woman− fells complacent because of her husband’s noble origin. But Tess, who lives in the family with vulgar atmosphere, always maintains the virtues of working people; she has an aversion to the vulgarity of her parents and despises the noble origin. She always believes that she is a peasant’s daughter and lives on her own labor. “‘I have as much of mother as father in me! All my prettiness comes from her, and she was only a dairymaid’, she said.” Every word shows that Tess’ love and pride of the working class. Tess would rather adhere to the surname “Durbeyfield” than use the surname of aristocratic family “d’Urbervilles” in order to raise her status. Angel called Tess Artemis, Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because she did not understand them. “‘Call me Tess’, she said to Angel.” It forms a distinct compare with Alec, who picks the surname “d’Urbervilles”

from the British Museum, posing the character of aristocratic people. This show that Tess is a sweet- natured girl, who despises noble origin, hates vanity but takes pride of working class.

2.2 Kind-hearted character of Tess

Tess’ kind-hearted character shows the love of life, hard-working and brave enough to face all difficulties with a selfless self-sacrifice. Tess is the eldest child in her family. When she was sixteen years old, she shouldered her family burden without complaint. “There came to her a chill self-reproach that she had not returned sooner, to help her mother in these domesticities, instead of indulging herself out-of-doors.” She helps her father to sell hives, but on the way to market the horse called Prince was killed by shaft of the cart, which destroyed the major income of her family. “Tis all my doing-all mine!” So Tess is persuaded by her mother to visit the prosperous d’Urbervilles and to claim kin, though actually the latter is a family of capitalists who have recently acquired wealth and bought their way into the gentry. She works there and is seduced by the young master Alec d’Urbervilles, and has to return home in disgrace. She gives birth to a child who dies in fancy, and she is considered a sinful woman. How great sacrifice she did for her family! When Angel leaves her for Brazil and she goes home. Again the great poverty at her home forces her come out look for work. When she leaves home she took twenty-five of the fifty pounds Clare had given her, and handed the sum over to her mother, saying that it was a slight return for the trouble and humiliation she had brought upon them in years past. Tess’ work as wage-laborer at the Flintcomb-Ash farm shows farming was then run on the capitalist basis, with

the employment of badly exploited and oppressed wage-earners who had to work on the hardest working conditions. What Tess received at the hand of her master the farmer at the Flintcomb-Ash farm-both tyranny and insult- sufficiently indicates how much a poor peasant girl, of a small free-holder family, had to suffer not that of an individual or a family, but is symbolic of the destruction of the English peasantry toward the end of the 19th century. Then the news of her father’s death comes to her, and with it the expulsion of her family from their cottage, and because of her father being a life-holder, his death ends automatically their tenantry on the land. This finally drives Tess to go back and seek for assistant from Alec. This time was completely forced by social oppression and family poverty. She bears her sufferings in order to let her mother and siblings have settled place. This show Tess is a kind-hearted girl, who sacrifices all her happiness and all she has in order to rescue the family difficulties.

2.3 Pure character of Tess

Tess’ purity shows her attitude towards love. Her love is sincere, persistence and faithful and all shows the virtue of a pure peasant girl. She deeply loves Angel, who is a diligence, politeness and unbounded by religious; she deeply hates Alec, who is a cunning, idle dandy and seduces her. Tess purses the purity of love; she loves the virtues instead of money. Although she deeply falls in love with Angel, she thinks she should not stain his pure soul because of her past. “The struggle was so fearful; her own heart was so strongly on the side of his-two ardent hearts against one poor little conscience- that she tried to fortify her resolution by every means in her powers.” Angel proposes to her and they arrange to married.

Previous to the wedding she writes of her past relations with Alec on piece of paper and thrusts it into his bedroom, but the paper gets mislaid under the carpet in the bedroom and so Angel does not get it. Then, on the wedding night, after Angel tells her of his past relations with a bad woman, Tess tells her whole story about Alec. But, while she forgives him readily, he is too much of a hypocrite and a snob and thinks too much of his reputation and his honor to forgive her and leaves her for Brazil. Tess silently endures Angel’s unfair treatment and doesn’t tell her family the truth. She never uses Mrs. Clare to call herself and obeys Angel condition- do not come to him and write to him if necessary. Angel doesn’t know, perhaps because he doesn’t understand the roughness of life in the English villages, which she has seduced and had an illegitimate baby at the age of sixteen. And Tess is unable to be really happy at Talbothays, as all her instincts tell her to be, because she can not forget that in the eye of the world she is a fallen woman. “It has been so much my religion ever since we were married to be faithful to you in every thought and look, that even when a man speaks a compliment to me before I am aware, it seems wronging you.” Even so when she meets with annoyance on account of the same she ties up her face in a bandage as long as people would believe in it. This show Tess is a pure girl, whose attitude towards love is purity and faithful.

2.4 Rebel character of Tess

Her rebellion shows her resistance and struggle against feudalism and bourgeois morality, religion and social oppression. Tess’ baby dies in fancy because the baby is offence against society in coming into the world. Tess’ father

refuses her request because he thinks it’s a shame for the noble family. She ignores the rules of religion and does baptism herself for her baby. When the pastor can not give the baby a Christian burial, “I do not like you, and I do not like your God. And I will never set foot in your church again,” Tess said firmly. It is not an easy thing to say such rebellious word in that time. When she meets Alec who has now become a preacher but whose religious calling does not prevent him from trying to renew his former relationship with Tess. Alec troubles Tess many times when she works as wage-laborer at the Flintcomb-Ash farm. She can not bear him so “she passionately swings the glove by the gauntlet directly in his face. It is heavy and thick as a warrior’s and it strikes him flat on the mouth. Fancy might regards the act as the recrudescence of a trick in which her armed progenitors are not unpracticed.” Angel has, however, somewhat repented of his harsh of his treatment of Tess and now returns from Brazil to be reconciled to her, but finds of her to be living again with Alec. Tess seeing that Alec’s relations with her prevent her from going back to live happily with Angel for the second time, hates him for ruining her life and kills him. “By degrees he was inclined to believe that she had faintly attempted, at least, what she said and she had done; and his horror at her impulse was mixed strangeness of its quality, which had apparently extinguished her moral sense altogether.” This show Tess is a rebel girl, who resists to bourgeois morality, religion and social oppression.

Ⅲ. Conclusion

This is one of the most tragic dilemmas in all Hardy’s novels. It is not an easy thing to be ahead of one’s time, at any rate not in Victorian England, the most

sincere convictions are liable to crack under a personal shock. Hardy describes Tess as a sweet-natured, kind-hearted, pure and rebel girl and these characters make the image of Tess alive, moving and become an immortal artistic image. The causes of her tragedy are not only the natural factors but also her characters. Although Tess hanged in the end of the novel, she had a sort of noble and pure strength; this is the charm and beauty of Tess of d’Urbervilles.