Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles was published in 1891. It’s really popular and world-renowned novel which has fascinated many generations. I chose the book because I have seen BBC’s TV-serie of it and it was very impressive.
The novel is located to Wessex, England which is a fictional town created by author. Tess lives there with her family and she is the oldest child. They are poor, uneducated but proper peasants. The father of the family, John, hears that he may have noble blood and after their only horse dies by accident they send Tess to visit their noble relations to get help. Tess does not succeed in meeting Mrs d’Urberville, but her son Alec takes a fancy to Tess and offers his help to her. Tess isn’t interested in Alec but receives his helping hand. Then some night Alec rapes Tess and she comes back home. At home Tess gives birth to a sickly boy who lives only a few weeks.
After more than two years twenty-year-old Tess has found employment outside the village, where her past is not known. There she befriends with three milkmaids and falls in love with Angel Clare. They get married and Tess has the courage to tell to Angel about Alec. Angel can’t tolerate Tess’ past and moves to Brazil and leaves her. After a while Tess’ father dies and Alec occurs to take care of her family if Tess comes to his mistress. Tess doesn’t have any choices and she accepts Alec’s offer. Then Angel comes back and Tess murders Alec. She gets caught and is escorted to prison. The story closes with Tess’ execution.
The protagonist of the book is Tess Durbeyfield. The novel tells about her tragic and really unfair life. She does nothing by egoism or greediness but still her misfortune makes her life terrible. The person who totally ruins her life is Alec so I could say that he is the antagonist.
I think that the central conflict of the plot is when Tess gets raped. After that situation everything changes: an innocent girl becomes a murderer. At that time getting raped was woman’s fault and she lost her reputation in the eyes of community. So only way to get justice was to murder a raper. Tess did so and suffered the consequences from it. She was executed but still the novel shows that she got her revenge. That’s why I think that an important theme of the novel is the sexual double standard.
I wouldn’t evaluate the story’s ending any way even if I like very much happy endings. In my opinion tragic ending just made the story more touching. It also shows how totally changed she was in comparison to the beginning.
The narrative point of view is third person limited and it’s same in the hole book. The language of the novel was old and abstruse. There were many old words which I had never heard before. Therefore I had to check out many words from the dictionary and reading was quite slow. But at least I learned much more English.