Tess

Question 1

Characterisation techniques to depict Tess

Answer 1

• 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)

Question 2

Tess as a vessel of emotions

Answer 2

• her irrationality: very traditional view of a women being emotional and intuitive rather than rational (reaction to Princes death, her agnosticism is seen to be purely due to angel not her own beliefs)
• Tess is seen as a ‘vessel of emotions’

Question 3

Tess as Hardy’s ideal woman

Answer 3

• Tess is his ‘absolute woman, total feminine’
• Tess is favourably contrasted to the other dairy woman: ‘the deeper passioned Tess…finely formed, better educated… more woman than neither’
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Question 4

Tess’s aristocracy

Answer 4

• Tess’s physical appearance ‘more finely formed’
• walking to Talobothay’s Hardy consciously contrast Tess with her surroundings- which is her ancestral land
• burden: causes her trouble - results in her encounter with Alec which leads to her downfall, leads Jack to act even more foolishly

Question 5

Tess and Alecs relationship

Answer 5

• 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 toward the Stonehenge

Question 6

Tess as a male construct

Answer 6

• Tess is Hardy’s fictional contrast - male sexualisation/ idealisation of woman - 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 woman upon which to exert power over
• Angel lessens Tess’s identity as a complex woman by dangerously idealising her- which ultimately leads him to think of her as being ‘another woman’. he also sees Tess as an educational project