James Williams
By what means does Hardy seek to achieve sympathy for Tess
in this extract, and elsewhere in Phase the First
Throughout Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy seeks to create a lot of sympathy for Tess. Her life is seemingly full of fate and almost everything she does goes wrong. Hardy creates a lot of sympathy for her in particular during the latter part of chapter 4, Phase the First when the Durbeyfield horse, Prince, is killed.
The extract starts with Tess and her younger brother, Abraham, talking about the world in which they live being a “blighted star” rather than a “sound one”. Which is suggesting that the star, or world, Tess and her family live on is full of horror and things going wrong. Abraham asks Tess, “How would it have been if we had pitched on a sound one?” This suggests to the reader that Abraham knows no other life to the one he leads and would not recognise a “good life”. Sympathy is created from Tess’ response to Abraham where she basically lists all the things that are wrong with their life. She states that her father would have been able to do the journey they were currently on instead of them had he not “got too tipsy” and their mother “wouldn’t have always been washing.” Now that Abraham has his definition of a “sound one”, he mentions another fitting situation in their “blighted” world of Tess having to marry a gentleman to be made rich. This real life situation also creates sympathy for Tess because she says “Oh, Aby, don’t – don’t talk of that anymore!” This clearly shows how much she dislikes the situation but is being forced into it by her mother. The suggestion of them living in a blighted world full of wrong, does appear to be fatalistic itself when Tess falls asleep at the reins of their horse, and when she is awoken, they have been in a crash with the mail-cart and the horse has been killed. After the crash, Tess is beside herself and constantly blames herself, “’Tis all my doing – all mine…..no excuse for me – none” Her immediate thought is not about herself either as she exclaims, “what will father and mother live on now?”