Tess of the D'Ubervilles Flashcards
Give three examples of contrast between wealth and poverty
Alec and Angel buy Tess new clothes in attempts to exert control over her.
• Alec’s wealth means that he does not have to work, while Tess’s (self-enforced) poverty mean that she takes on the hardest tasks of the rural labourer.
• Alec offers Tess’s homeless family the building that his mother used to keep her chickens.
Give three examples of contrast between the Durbeyfields and the Clares
• Tess’s family indulge themselves when they can (e.g. in alcohol); Angel’s family are abstemious.
• Tess’s family are not particularly interested in religion; their Christian faith determines everything that the Clare family do.
• Tess’s family life lurches from crisis to crisis; the Clare family seem to be in greater control of their finances and their destiny.
List three forms of technology that play a role in the story of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Include a brief description of the role played by each.
• The train connects rural Wessex to London and the outside world.
• The threshing machine causes a significant shift in the lives of rural labourers.
• The turnip-slicing machine standing opposite the ‘grave’ (p. 313) in which the roots had been preserved symbolises the cruelty and hardship of the work Tess does at Flintcomb-Ash.
Make a list of three reasons why setting is a vital factor in Hardy’s work.
• The rural life Hardy depicts was under threat and it was therefore important to try to capture it.
• Tess’s life is bordered by the county in which she was born. This contains the action of the story and makes Tess’s early naïvety believable.
• Varying the setting allows Hardy to use pathetic fallacy to reflect Tess’s changing states in the environment she inhabits.
Why were some critics initially shocked by Tess?
• Tess is insistently defined as a ‘pure’ woman, despite having had an illegitimate child.
• The subject matter, including rape and murder, was seen as inappropriate for a novel by some.
• Some critics did not like Hardy’s style and mocked it.
What is “realism”?
• An attempt to represent the world truthfully.
• An emphasis on accurate details in descriptions of setting, dress and dialogue.
• A willingness to represent sordid or unpleasant aspects of life.
List three events that might provide focal points for a feminist reading of the novel. Briefly describe the significance of each for such a reading.
• Tess reproaches herself for not helping her mother with the domestic chores (p. 20). This suggests that Tess has taken on the gendered expectation that her life will primarily take place in the domestic rather than the public or professional sphere.
• Alec’s rape of Tess and the lack of any legal action or punishment against him demonstrates the sexual double standard that Hardy critiques. It was more acceptable for men than for women to act on their sexual desires.
• Tess’s education is cut off before she can attain her ambition of becoming a teacher. A feminist reading would emphasise the inequality of access to education that women have experienced historically.
List three moments in the text that a cultural materialist critic might highlight, and explain why.
• The fact that Angel interacts so closely with the family and workers at Talbothays makes cross-class relationships seem integral to the text.
• It is significant that Alec D’Urberville inherits and does not have to work for his money. This makes him lazy and morally suspect in the eyes of Hardy’s narrator.
• The lack of possibilities for Tess as a worker and the fact that she ends up earning minimal wages at Flintcomb-Ash confirm the difficulties of rural life.
What kind of insights might be gained from an ecocritical reading of Tess of the D’Urbervilles?
• A close reading of the scene where Tess and Angel deliver the milk to the train station might focus on the changes to rural life brought by the railway.
• Stonehenge demonstrates how humankind have shaped and altered their natural environment since the earliest civilisations.
• The emphasis on farming, particularly at Talbothays, is suggestive of the possibilities of harmony between humans and their natural world.
List three ways in which we might define Tess as belonging to the tragedy genre.
• The story ends in death.
• Fate works against the protagonist.
• She is pursued and ultimately brought down by the actions of others, although she does have character traits (such as pride and a quick temper) that help to bring about her downfall.
Does the narrator in Tess of the D’Urbervilles have a patronising attitude towards the protagonist of the novel?
• Tess’s love for Angel seems naive and idealising to the narrator, who says, ‘in her reaction from indignation against the male sex she swerved to excess of honour for Clare’ (p. 193).
• The narrator often focuses on physical features, such as her mouth and lips, which make Tess seem like an object on display.
• But the narrator also gives the reader insights into Tess’s complex inner self.
• The narrator continues to reinforce Tess’s status as a ‘pure’ woman throughout the novel.
Make a list of three moments when the narrator deliberately obscures our perspective or withholds information from us. Briefly note why these shifts in perspective occur.
• We are not told that Tess has succumbed to Alec’s temptation at the end of the novel. We must follow her tracks as Angel does. This creates a connection between the reader and Angel, who had previously lost our sympathy through his ill-treatment of Tess.
• We do not hear Tess tell her story to Angel; this happens in the hiatus between Phases four and five. We already know that she was raped and had an illegitimate child, and at this point Hardy is more interested in the effect the narrative has on Angel.
• After the rape scene we are told that an ‘immeasurable chasm was to divide our heroine’s personality thereafter from that previous self of hers’ (p. 74). Hardy leaves a gap of four months after this point to emphasise this transition in Tess’s life.
Choose three moments when we see the symbolic significance of the colour red, and briefly explain it.
• In the first chapter Tess wears a red ribbon in her hair, which marks her out from her fellow dancers. We could interpret it as a marker of her ultimately tragic fate or as symbolic of her sexuality.
• The piece of blood-stained paper she sees blowing around in Chapter 44 is symbolic of Tess’s weariness and the futility of her journey to see Angel’s parents in the face of hostile fate.
• Alec is often associated with the red glow of fire (for example, when he seems to almost spring from the fire in Chapter 50). This exacerbates his devilish characteristics.
List five words that you find obscure or archaic. Give a dictionary definition for each.
• acclivity (p. 384) – an ascending slope
• effigy (p. 363) – a three-dimensional representation of someone; a statue.
• expostulate (p. 173) – to disagree
• polychrome (p. 122) – multi-coloured
• domiciliary (p. 121) – concerned with the home
Compare Angel’s speech with Tess’s speech when she first arrives at the dairy. Then choose a moment of dialogue between the two characters later on in the novel. What shifts in language use do you find?
• Even before she speaks to Angel, Tess expresses complex ideas, e.g. on p. 120.
• The early dialogues are often structured by Angel questioning Tess.
• After Tess’s admission, in Chapter 35, Angel seeks to shut down Tess’s attempts at dialogue.
• When they are reconciled in the final chapters of the book, their language is simple and similar.
Make a list of three non-visual symbols in the novel. Do they give different effects in contrast to Hardy’s visual imagery?
• Music symbolises the connection between Tess and Angel, from her early enchantment with his harp music to her later practising ballads for when he returns from Brazil.
• Tess’s voice is identified as ‘fluty’ and it is the first aspect that attracts Angel’s attention.
• The cockerel crow at the end of Chapter 33, just as Angel and Tess set out on their honeymoon, is symbolic of bad luck.
Identify three moments in which dialect is used by one of the minor characters. What does it reveal about the character or the context?
• In Chapter 1, Jack Durbeyfield’s dialect ‘’Twas said my gr’tgrandfer had secrets’ (p. 9) provides a stark contrast with Parson Tringham’s educated accent.
• In Chapter 4, an unidentified speaker at the village pub says, ‘But Joan Durbeyfield must mind that she don’t get green malt in flower’ The exact meaning of the local phrase is not revealed here, but it soon becomes clear that it predicts Tess’s pregnancy outside of wedlock.
• When Izz tells Angel that ‘nobody could love ’ee more than Tess did!’ (p. 270), the honesty of her speech is reinforced by her dialect.
Identify three significant words or images that recur in the novel, and briefly describe how their meaning alters according to the context.
• Red images recur throughout the text and are most frequently associated with Tess. She wears a red ribbon at the club-walking in Chapter 1. By the end of the novel her once ‘rosy’ but now whitened hands demonstrate the change she has gone through in becoming Alec’s mistress.
• Images of technology and modernity also recur. While the train is representative of the ‘ache of modernism’ (p. 124) in Tess and connects her to the outside world, the threshing machine emphasises her isolation.
• Images of blood are sometimes found at moments of heightened tension. For example, the narrator focuses on a ‘piece of blood-stained paper’ (p. 298) when Tess finds the Clares’ house empty in Chapter 44. The final culmination of this image is of course the ‘gigantic ace of hearts’ (p. 382) formed by Alec’s spreading blood.
How does Hardy use both time and space to structure his novel?
• Tess’s journeys through Wessex mark key moments in the plot and in her character development.
• Tess’s family home in Marlott is a key location and its loss brings about the final acceptance of Alec’s advances.
• The narrator gestures back to the medieval times of the D’Urberville family’s greatness to create a sense of hereditary decline and a linkage between generations.
• Time speeds up or slows down according to the needs of the plot. For example, we spend much time at Talbothays during Tess and Angel’s courtship but the period of her life as Alec’s mistress is collapsed into a few pages.
‘Like many Victorian novelists, Hardy is a realist even when he seems to question the possibilites of realism.’ Consider Tess of the D’Urbervilles in the light of this statement.
• Like George Eliot, Hardy is interested in subjectivity.
• He also sees an attempt at the truthful representation of the world as part of the novelist’s duty.
• He uses free indirect discourse to bring us into the individual’s mindset.
• He provides abundant details of setting and environment that enrich the realist narrative.
• Hardy does not glamourise rural life. He demonstrates its difficulties and indignities realistically.
Write a list of four or five ways in which minor characters impact upon the trajectories of the central plot.
• Cuthbert and Felix Clare are overheard lamenting Angel’s marriage in Chapter 44.
• Tess feels that the whole Clare family is set against her and doesn’t return to ask Angel’s parents for help.
• Farmer Groby turns out to have been the man who insulted Tess at the inn in Chapter 33. His words increase Tess’s feelings of guilt and anxiety as the wedding approaches.
• When Angel asks Izz Huett to go with him to Brazil in Chapter 40, her answer defending Tess’s love for him lays the foundations for his ultimate return.
Locate a passage of dialogue between Tess and Alec and one between Tess and Angel. Compare the ways in which Tess’s lovers speak to her and what their conversation reveals about their attitudes to their beloved.
• Alec and Tess’s dialogue on pp. 76–7 suggests his disrespectful attitude towards her and contains hints of her later violence.
• On pp. 123–4 Angel listens to Tess and respectfully asks for her opinions and thoughts. At this point in their relationship it is interesting to note that Tess still calls Angel ‘sir’.
