One part of the reading that caught me was in the beginning of chapter fifteen, in Maiden No More. From page 98-99, it is the process of Tess maturing. Except I wouldn't quite call it a process, as the next page begins with "Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from a simple girl to a complex woman." It is the paragraph before that is an expansion on how she viewed the world as 'blighted'.
It is when she is looking over the important dates of her life year by year and she realizes, quite out of nowhere, "that there was yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her own death". She wonders when it is and how years go by but she does not know the day. It is an odd thought to have, but less odd now that she has gone through the horrors of rape, then losing a child that she had grown to love. While it seems that she may not be the best of mothers, there is respect due because of her maternal instinct. Although seemingly latent, it comes in full force when her child is dying. She feels that she must preserve its soul and that it must be buried with a proper Christian burial. What is sad is that neither of those really come through, she must perform the baptism herself, then the infant is buried with sinners in an almost hellish area of the graveyard.
It is after this that she begins to mature and shortly realizes that it is time for her to move on and away - "she could never be really comfortable again in a place which had seen the collapse of her family's attempt to 'claim kin'". She knows it is time to move on when she still "felt the pulse of life...warm within her". She wants "[t]o escape the past and all that appertained thereto was to annihilate it, and to do that she wold have to get away". She may force herself to believe this but it is obvious that after she falls in love with Angel, no such dream is possible. Her happiness seems doomed. But for right now, she is more mature than she was when the novel began.
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I circled the passage in my book only a few pages ahead of that passage Emily mentioned, its on page 102 and I felt it also showed Tess maturity and her pride and her relationship with the narrator.
The passage is: "She had no admiration for them now; she almost hated them for the dance thay had led her; not a thing of all that had been theirs did she retain but the old seal and spoon.'Pooh-I have as much of mother as father in me!' she said. 'All my prettiness comes from her, and she was only a dairymade'.
Obviously the narrator loves the character of Tess because he is letting the reader into her mind and into what she is thinking by saying she feels no admiration for her ansestors. I think this shows maturity because her parents and siblings get so excited at the prospect of their new name because they are all foolish, shallow and inmature; whereas Tess is mature and wise and although she can be naive, she is much more knowledgeable than she thinks. I also thought the passage showed her pride because she is saying that just because her fathers side of the family was once noble, her mothers side is just as apart of her as her fathers. In some ways, although she appears to lack some confidence there is some indication that she has pride as the word is mentioned with her several times in the first 3 chapters and also when she says phrases like the one in the passage.
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