外国语学院11级英美文学基础(1)考查A 苔丝读后感

Term Paper for English and American Literature (1) (A)

(December 2013)

I. Write a paper of about 500 words on any one of the following topics:

1. Shakespeare‟s major themes include love, death and immortality. Please discuss the relationships between these themes as viewed by Shakespeare based on your reading of Sonnet 18 and Romeo and Juliet.

2. At the end of Tess of the D’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy states, “…Justice‟ was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.” What do you think of this statement?

3. James Joyce uses epiphany as a literary device in most of his short stories as his protagonists come to sudden recognitions of themselves or their social condition. What exactly is the narrator‟s epiphany in the story “Araby”?

A “Pure ”woman? A “fallen ”woman?

----a book review of Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Name Number Mark Tess of the d’Urbervilles, published in 1891, was Thomas Hardy‟s last and most significant work. In this novel, Hardy reached the height of his achievement as a novelist. Readers are attached not only by the innate beauty, but also the tragic fate of Tess, the heroine.

In the novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, although her short life was full of tribulation and strike, she was courageous to face reality and to fight against the evil force. This kind of tenacious attitude towards life and fighting spirit was the most powerful and moving character of Tess. Yet her purity and self-sacrificing character did not bring her good luck but tragedy. She longed to escape from the shadow of the past and unfortunate life, but every tough choice she made only to make her situation go from bad to worse. Obviously, the tragedy of Tess is not only caused by fate, some other important reasons such as the poverty, worldly prejudice, Alec‟s wickedness, Angel‟s conventional ideas as well as Tess‟s character are all directly or indirectly, led to this tragedy. Tess's death was not a small joke played by fate accidentally but was under the interaction of internal and external causes, beautiful, pure, good girl Tess finally embarked on a road of no return.

With the intertwine of love and hatred, Tess had to end herself with a tragic results. God played with Tess so much. When her right m an appeared, God yet didn‟t give her happiness. Tess‟s parents loved her, but it was just an instinctive love; Alec said love to her, but it was an evil love; Angel said love to her as well, but it was an immature and selfish love. Tess didn‟t make any mis takes, but at last, she born all punishments and sufferings. At first, God had let the two persons miss each other. A tragedy was doomed. But perhaps no love, no hatred, no dignity, death was the best way for Tess to extricate herself.

Both Alec and Angel violated and made fun of Tess. Tess was injured physically by Alec and mentally was affected by Angel, Alec and Angel made Tess‟s tragedy from bad to worse by different ways. After Tess told him everything happened to her before, Angel still judged “purity” with conventional value and moral standard that were implanted in him when he was little, and so he was the slave to the custom and conventionality, considered Tess as a “fallen women”. He abandoned his wife for Brazil, which was a deathblow to innocent Tess.

Of course, naturalistic tendency is also strong in the novel. In a way, Tess seems to be led to her final destruction step by step by fate. Coincidence adds one "wrong" to another until she is caught up in a dead-end. Fate plays a predominate role in what happens to Tess, as Hardy says at the end of the novel: "Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess." Tess was powerless to change her fate, because she had been the plaything of a malevolent universe. We can find this fact at the end of the novel, when the narrator makes a statement after Tess is found and executed for the stabbing death of Alec. In this statement, the word "justice" has quotation marks because it means something different for Tess and something different for society. For society, "justice" has been served with the arraignment and execution of a woman who does commit a capital crime. Tess is like Prometheus in that she seems to have been a "toy" of the gods of morality and religion in Victorian England, and she had to be sacrificed for the good of mankind. All of Tess' life is the result of either an accident, fate, or the intervention of the gods. To fully understand the novel, one has to take into consideration both its critical realist and naturalistic significance.