Tess Flashcards
1
Q
Characterisation techniques used to depict Tess (5)
A
- Direct narration (focusing on her physical appearance/ external situation)
- authorial comment/ intrusive narrator
- Tess focalised through other characters e.g. Alec (lips/ sexuality), Angel ( idealistic), Dairymaids (her love for angel)
- inner thoughts, direct or indirect of Tess
- imagery and symbolism (Tess as an extension of Nature/ bird like)
2
Q
How does Hardy portray Tess as a vessel of emotions
A
- Her irrationality: very traditional view of a woman being emotional and intuitive rather than rational (reaction to princes death, her agnosticism is seen to be purely due to Angel not her own believes)
- Tess is seen as a ‘vessel of emotions’
3
Q
Tess as Hardy’s ideal woman
A
- Tess is his ‘absolute woman, totally femine’
- Tess is favourable contrasted to the other dairy women: ‘The deeper passioned Tess…finely formed, better educated… more woman than either’ pg 137
- Tess as an exoticised other
4
Q
How does Hardy present Tess’s aristocracy
A
- Tess’s physical appearance ‘more finely formed’
- Walking to Talbothays Hardy consciously contrast Tess with her surroundings- which is her ancestral land
- Burden: causes all her trouble- results in her encounter with Alec which leads to her downfall, leads Jack to act even more foolishly
5
Q
How does Hardy present Tess and Alec’s relationship (religion, consummation, tension)
A
- lexical fields strongly associated with worship and devotion
- biblical and classical allusion to deity/ divine figures (Artemis, Demeter)
- quasi-religious language foregrounds the ‘religion of love’
- tension through Tess internal conflict whether to confess or not
- When Tess and Angel finally can consummate their love in the New Forest the lovers re-enter paradise, cut off from the world- in this passage Hardy raises the novel to the level of romance, even myth as the lovers head towards stonehenge
6
Q
Tess as a male construct
A
- Tess is Hardy’s fictional construct- male sexualisation/ idealisation of women- what Woolf depicted as a masculine literary style
- male narrator, Tess is defined in terms of him
- Alec: sees Tess as a hyper sexual being, seductress/ temptress, a women upon which to exert power over
- angel lessens Tess identity as a complex women by dangerously idealising her- which ultimately leads him to think of her as being ‘another woman’. He also sees Tess as an educational project