Tess Flashcards
the rape
‘why it was upon this beautiful feminine tissue… there should have been traces such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive’
tess lament
I cannot bear my fate as writ,/ I’d have my life unbe/ … make every relic of me rot / my doings be as they were not / and gone all trace of me!
chain metaphor of physical acts which change into signs or relics. the physical act makes a mark. her violation repeats the violence her ancestors did to peasant girls
tess doesn’t want to learn history
finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that i shall only act her part… the best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been like thousands’.’
innocent of rabbits
- ‘walking among the sleeping brids in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren… she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. Bit all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly’
Hardy in his diary on 4 March 1886 web
‘The human race to be shown as one great network or tissue which quivers in every part when one point is shaken, like a spider’s web if touched.’
her mouth
she had not heard him enter… she was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snakes… her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils. The brim-fullness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.’
her ‘exceptional physical nature’
dairy maids horny
the air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with the hopeless passion of the girls. They writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature’s Law… the differences which distinguished then as individuals were abstracted by this passion, and each was but portion of one organism called sex.
the end and gods
the President of the Immortals… has ended his sport with Tess’
the family crest
Tess says ‘we have an old seal, marked with a Ramping lion on a shield…’ Alec responds, correcting her, ‘a castle argent is certainly my crest… and my arms a lion rampant’
end and corpse
“thrown into a vague intoxicating atmosphere at the consciousness of being together at last, with no living soul between them; ignoring that there was a corpse”
