Thursday, February 21, 2008
Bothersome
I don't have much to say about this reading except for this: I feel that for some sense of equilibrium, good and bad things both need to happen. The problem with Tess of D'urbervilles is that her "bad things" may not out number the good, but they certainly over power the good. We know that there is no way that the marriage between Tess and Angel will lead to anything good. So despite the fact that she is happy at the dairy farm, she will leave and have some unhappy experience with Angel. I find it very bothersome that nothing truly good and every lasting seems to happen to her. Poor Tess.
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3 comments:
To me nothing "good" can happen TO Tess and that is what makes the book powerful. Instead of Tess acting as the passive woman where everything simply goes on around her she is constantly working, striving to proove herself. Her actions matter and they have consequences. If everything turned out amazingly well for Tess the reader would likely have trouble with the fairy tale ending. Such an ending would not justly show the permenent pain such an event might cause a person with Tess' character. Through the good and bad events in the book Hardy gives the reader a way to contras Angel's idea of beauty and truth to the darker truth behind both Alec and Tess's outward apperences.
What caught me about your post, Stephanie, was that you were looking for a sense of equilibrium. I think that, like a fairy tell ending as Sofia said, an equilibrium cannot exist in the world Hardy has created. It is there in that world that young women rarely get what they want, and their happiness is short-lived. It is here that I think the line is drawn: you have the world that Hardy can control, but to some extent he wants fate to play a part in this as well. Obviously Hardy controlled the entire novel, but in some ways it seems that he could not let the perfect ending happen for Tess. We've discussed how he is sympathetic to Tess' plight and wants the readers to be as well, but if that is so, why would he allow such tragedies to befall her?
I'm not quite sure if there really is an answer to this, but it is interesting to think about how much an author truly controls their piece versus how much some other element (fate, etc.) plays into the creation of the work.
I agree that Hardy does avoid a sense of equilibrium in his work. Clearly he seems an advocate of determinism, or fatalism. Also, I think that he realizes, like many other writers/artists, that life is very much of a suffering from beginning to end. In juxtaposition to the romantics before him (or the Beatles) , Hardy doesn't seem to hold that love can save one form their plight. Though Tess does find a worthy and loving man to be with, events around her, seemingly as determined as the turning of the Earth, dictate her fate. Her tragedies seem to be shared by many of the characters around her (such as John Dollop) . Yet because of the novel's focus on Tess, the reader sympathizes with her most.
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