Branshust Court

Question 1

What does the first night of Bramshurst court lack?

Answer 1

Any sense of urgency - Tess says to Angel ‘don’t think of what’s past!..I am not going to think outside now’

Question 2

Where does Tess live

Answer 2

Out of time
- aware that outside her and outside Bramshurst court, the inexorable, undeniable time patterns of society persist ‘all is trouble outside there; inside here content’

Question 3

What is Tess’s interpretation of tune forced into?

Answer 3

The spatial concept of life, Tess’s life becomes an attempt to recover her past
- after being raped her life becomes predetermined

Question 4

What is Tess’s enemy?

Answer 4

Time, forever moving her, as she sees it, further away from her ideal of innocence

Question 5

What is the great tension of the novel?

Answer 5

Defined by the pressure of idealism thrusting itself upon actuality

Question 6

Where does Tess’s hope rest?

Answer 6

Not on the recovery of innocence, but in the escape from the irrevocable and ever condemnatory sequence of days that provides the temporal metaphor for her hopeless position

Question 7

When do most of Tess’s great moments with Angel happen?

Answer 7

At a neutralised moment

Question 8

What does Tess learn ?

Answer 8

The apprehension of time as a moving thing that neither forgets nor forgives us a learned concept that Tess adopts as she moves abruptly from innocence to experience