Critics Flashcards
Kristen Brady
“By giving increased prominence to the villainy of both Alec d’Urberville and Angel Clare, Hardy was able to half suggest that Tess was more a passive victim of male aggression and idealisation than an active participant in her own disastrous fate”
James Heffernan
“To read Alec as a rapist is grossly to underestimate him. Like Satan, the role he jestingly but also revealingly plays, he seeks not to pinion the body of his victim but to master her mind, to exploit her weakness”
Jane Shilling
“Whatever happens to her, however cruel her destiny, she has a clear sense of herself, and the strength to remain true to it. Which is more than can be said for either of the men whose passion is the instrument of her tragedy”
Mark Asquith
“Angel abandons her, masking his prurient disgust at her sexual history with spurious Christian principles”
Kathleen Rogers
She is the least flawed of Hardy’s protagonists, but also the least human
Sarah Maier
Tess is a woman who embodies strong powers of will, reason, and moral integrity
Tony Tanner
It dogs her, disturbs her, destroys her. She is full of it, she spills it, she loses it. Watching Tess’s life we begin to see that her destiny is nothing more or less than the colour red
James A. W. Heffernan (4)
She kills Alec because in seducing her a second time, he threatens to make her his “creature”… to take possession of her soul
Sarah Maier
Through her self determination, Tess is able to overcome her past
John Bayley
Hardy was so jealously protective of his heroine that he edited out her deflowering and a good deal more besides
Sarah Maier
Angel does not wish to educate Tess in order to encourage her emancipation; the education that he has in mind would further domesticate her
R.M. Rehder on Hardy
pointed out that “His idea of tragedy represents a combination of Greek, Shakespearean and Biblical tragedy”
