Key Quotations Flashcards
“There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train, their silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces, scourged by time and trouble, having almost a grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a jaunty situation. In a true view, perhaps, there was more to be gathered and told of each anxious and experienced one […] than of her juvenile comrades.” (2.9)
The club-walking group of women includes both young women, like Tess, and old women. Again, Hardy wants to collapse the distinction between past and present, old and young – all of those women are together in the same group, performing the same ancient ritual festival to springtime, so the distinctions of age hardly matter: they’re all women.
“Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order.” (11.63)
This description seems to be an effort by Hardy to pin the blame of her rape firmly on Alec, despite the complaints of contemporary critics that Tess could have done more to ward him off – Tess is asleep when he finds her, and Hardy’s choice of words makes Tess seem even more delicate and vulnerable than she was. It’s also interesting to note that while Hardy associates femininity elsewhere with “fullness of growth” (5.63), in this passage, it’s her delicacy and “sensitiv[ity]” that makes Tess seem more feminine.
“Women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature retain in their souls far more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized religion taught their race at later date.” (16.16)
Again, women are connected with old, primaeval, Pagan religion, and “outdoor Nature,” while men are (implicitly) connected with the “systematized,” man-made religion that came later.
“She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman – a whole sex condensed into one typical form.” (20.10)
In the early morning hours, Tess’s beauty seems other-worldly to Angel. They’re the only two people awake on the farm, and he can imagine that she’s the only woman in the world. And so he condenses every thought and fantasy of what all women are or ever could be, and projects that ideal onto Tess. In other words, he’s making her his ideal woman.
“Well, my big Beauty, what can I do for you?” said he, coming forward.” (5.30)
Point of interest here – this is the first thing Alec D’Urberville ever says to Tess. Why does he call her “my big Beauty”? Why not just, “my Beauty”? Aren’t Victorian heroines supposed to be all tiny and petite and corseted? Well, Tess is repeatedly described as a blooming, country girl – she’s also described as very “womanly” for her age, she got big boobs basically
