Why was Tess’s girlish purity lost? Why did such a beautiful, noble and pure woman as Tess should suffer inevitable ruin? Why does the wrong man take the wrong woman? Why it is always the woman who pays? Why they are always hurt? Why is beauty damaged by ugliness? Why the tragedy is happened more than one hundred years ago repeated in modern times? Is everything too late?
Recently I’ve read the British famous writer Thomas Hardy’s masterpiece-Tess of the D’urbervilles. It describes the misfortune of a poor peasant girl Tess. In this novel, we can see Tess resist her unjust fate again and again, till to be ruined. With the development of the plot we find that her tragedy is inevitable. We can not but feel the intense emotions of pity and fear.
The cause of Tess’s tragedy has always been the concern of people, such a beautiful, noble and pure woman as Tess should suffer inevitable ruin. What leads to her tragic destiny? Who killed her? I can’t do very well in analysis the novel. I don’t know clearly how the time she lived in affect her life. I do have an understanding of the novel by myself. Alec and Angel who are the two people very closely related to Tess’s fate. I think fierce Alec played a very important role in killing Tess, but in fact, it was hypocritical Angel who killed Tess indirectly but more cruelly.
I wanted to cry, Tess, do not follow him when I read that plot. I hope she met her true love before she was seduced, but everything was too late. She was seduced by a so called gentleman-Alec, and from then on her life totally changed from this loss of innocence. People looked down on her and respect her no more. Actually she did nothing wrong because before she was seduced she knew nothing of man. Women were too weak. Tess was poor, weak and helpless and met the wrong person at the wrong time.
I strongly believed that it was Angel who killed Tess cruelly and without mercy. Angel was a liberal bourgeoisie. He made himself lived in the countryside rather than serving the god. Angel was a man who questioned the church’s teaching. He thought the church’s views were too strict and did not allow free thinking. Angel extricated him from religion and his family, but he couldn’t break with traditional moral principles. He wanted a wife who was the daughter of nature, honest, sensitive, intelligent, graceful, pure as snow and extremely beautiful. In the first part I thought Angel loved tess very much. In the following part I found that he loved an image he imagined. After their wedding Angel confessed the crime he committed to a woman long time ago and asked Tess’s forgiveness. Tess was not at all angry and forgave angel at once. She innocently thought that the thing she was going to confess would be forgiven. Poor Tess! She sat and told everything to angel, hoping he would forgive her as he was forgiven, but she was wrong. The woman pays.
Angel claimed that you were one person, now you are another when tess asked why. The woman Angel had loved was not tess, was another woman in tess’s shape. Angel loved the person he imagined. He considered tess the daughter of nature. Compared to tess’s words, “ I thought angel, that you loved me-me my very self! If you do love me, how can you treat me like this? It frightened me! Having begun to love you, I will love you forever, in all changes, in all troubles, because you are yourself. I ask no more.” we know how deep tess loved angel. She would have laid down life for angel. She not only loved the merits but also accept the demerits. We know from the book that when angel came back from Brazil, he could hardly be recognized by his mother because the cruel climate and hard work had aged him by twenty years, but tess accepted angel immediately, because he was the man she fell in love with.
I don’t know why angel couldn’t forgive tess since he himself had done the similar thing.