Tess of The d’Urbervilles Flashcards
Phase the First quotes
On an evening in the latter part of May…”
“d’Urbervilles … there’s hardly such another family in England”
“Untrodden as yet by tourist” … “fertile and sheltered tract of land”
“A country differing absolutely from that which he had passed through”
“May Day dance”
Color imagery of white and red
“I’m inclined to go have a fling with them / No, nonsense!”
“Nature’s holy plan”
“Everything looked like money”
“Well my beauty, what can I do for you?”
Imagery of strawberries - significantly before they’re ripe
“Tragic mischief in her drama … the blood red ray in the spectrum of her young life”
“Do you mind my smoking” + “He watched her pretty and unconscious”
“Thus, the things began”
“Roses at her breast, roses in her hat, roses and strawberries in her basket”
“I will go”
“Behind the valley of green birth… a gray country”
“Her large eyes staring at him like a wild animal”
“In spite of temptations as never before fell to mortal man”
“Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around” … “Everything else was blackness”
“This beautiful tissue, sensitive as gossamer”
“Immeasurable social chasm”
Phase the Second quotes
“That’s what every woman says… did it ever strike your mind that what every woman says
some women feel”
“She liked to hear the chanting and the old Psalms”
“A field-man is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field” + “reaping
machine”
“Particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of germination was almost audible in the
buds”
Phase the Third quotes
Reference to Van Alsloot or Sallaert
“Well then he called to mind how he’d seen the cattle kneel o’ Christmas Eves in the dead
o’ night”
“Clare continued to observe her”, “merest stary phenomenon”, “Artemis, Demeter”
“All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in
one vale”
“I’ll carry you through the pool”
“Three Leahs to get one Rachel”
“Thorny crown of this sad conception”
“Yet there was nothing ethereal about it, all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation”
“Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times he could reproduce them
mentally with ease”
“Yielded to his embrace with unreflecting inevitableness” -
Historical and Social context
- set during the Long Depression, so especially hard for the poor characters
- growth of industrialisation and mechanisation of architecture
- the idea that women had to be pure or otherwise were “Fallen women” (tainted)
- influence of Darwinism (pessimism and religious skepticism)
- emigration to Brazil
Literary context
- mainly reflects Victorian realism, but Proto-Modernist due to to uncertainty created my the two ellipses of Tess’ rape
- Jakobson’s metanymic pole + metaphorical pole, Hardy heading towards metaphorical pole (like poetry)
Phase the First summary
- first encounter with Alec + Angel
- significance of the d’Urberville name
- May Day dance
- Prince’s death
- Tess leaves home to be with Alex (for money) -> strawberry scene + rape
Phase the Second summary
- Tess leaves Alec
- Sorrow dies x> reference to a Christian burial (Christens him herself)
- reaping machine
Phase the Third summary
- journey to Talbothays + working there
- meeting with Angel
- harp scene
- Angel and Tess fall in love
Phase the Fourth summary
- Angel proposes to Tess -> they marry
- honeymoon scene in the d’Urberville home
- Angel confesses to Tess, so she confesses to him as well
Phase the Fifth summary
- Angel leaves Tess in Marlott (goodbye as a transaction)
- Angel asks Izz to go to Brazil, he goes to Brazil
- pheasants scene
- Tess goes to work at Flintcomb Ash
- goes to find the Clare’s but they’re in church
Phase the Sixth summary
- Alec asks Tess to marry him -> abandons his faith
- Adam & Eve scene
- John Durbeyfield dies
Phase the Seventh summary
- Angel comes back from Brazil, but he is too late Tess is with Alec
- Tess kills Alec
- Angel and Tess run away together
- Tess is arrested and executed
Phase the Fourth quotes
“Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as to their subjective experience”
“The walk had made them hungry … accustomed to the profuse drapes inemptae of the dairyman’s somewhat coarsely laden table”
“A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you”
“She lives what paper poets only write” –
“He saw the red interior of her mouth as if had been a snake’s”
“I am not good enough
Reference to Jack Dollop
“Her gloom lessened as she basked in it” (Tess about Angel)
“Her (Tess’) fine features were unquestionably traceable in these exaggerated forms”
“Last Day luridness”
Phase the fifth quotes
“You were one person; now you’re another” –
“Prestidigitation”
“He now handed her a packet containing a fairly good sum of money”
“Land was offered there (Brazil) on exceptionally advantageous terms”-> “lying ill of fever”
Tess’ links to the pheasants, makes a “nest”, understanding of their suffering
“Starve-acre place” + “colour of desolate drab”
Phase the Sixth quotes
“He who had wrought her undoing was now on the side of the Spirit, while she remained unregenerate”
“Implacable past” + “She was a bygone herself”
Turnip slicing machine – “bright blue hue”
“Joyless monotony of things”
“Ignorance of the gins and nets that the wicked may set for them…”
“Witch of Babylon”, “temptress”, as well as comparison to Eve
“Red tyrant”, “fire and smoke”, “He was in the agricultural world but not of it”
The British man in Brazil perhaps is a spokesperson for Hardy
“I am not a proper woman”
