The setting at Talbothays is happy. Hardy uses words which are very descriptive to make his sentences but one of the best are “The Froom waters were as clear as the pure river of life.” To say that the Froom waters were clear as the pure river of life would mean that the waters were clear and pure so there fore a new beginning is promised. The words “the ripe hue of the red” also caught my eye because it’s as if Hardy is saying that it is twilight. It also gives you a picture in mind. When Tess arrives at the Talbothays she has in mind that she can start a new life.
When Tess arrives at the Talbothays she meets Angel she instantly falls in love with him but soon realises the girls are friendly and Mr Crick is a good employer but on top of that she can’t marry Angel. They first meet when Tess overhears Angel Playing the harp. She stops to listen and Angel talks to her. Soon their relationship is growing. Then Tess and Angel meet in the early hours of the morning in the “Twilight of the morning light”, The atmosphere is very intense in the spectral half compounded aqueous light”. They felt as if they were Adam and Eve. There beauty is stressed as are religious images of the “resurrection hour”. Angel also calls her “Artemis” and “Demeter” which are names of Greek goddesses. But then Tess says “call me Tess (Wants to be treated as a real person [Not idealised])
Soon Tess and Angel’s relationship grows as they start to grow fond of each other. Hardy uses the seasons cleverly as he used the summers heat and mornings to create a sense of romance. Tess then goes on to marry Angel but not long after that Angel confesses that he had a relationship with an older woman before this. So Tess thinks great he won’t mind about me, so Tess tells Angel her secret that she had been seduced by Alec. But unfortunately he can’t take the fact o they split up and Angel goes to brazil and Tess goes to Flintcomb Ash.
The setting at Flintcomb Ash is in the winter and far from the previous location. When Tess arrives at Flintcomb Ash she covers up her face with a handkerchief and “mercilessly nipped her eyebrows off” so not to attract male attention. We are told, there is “no sign of passion in her now” as she dresses as a field woman pure and simple in a winter guise. When she gets to Flintcomb Ash the weather is bad. This is to empathize the fact that the harshness is starting to build up. As the air was dry and cold there is less trees this shows the harshness. The harshness is even more emphasised by the description that young trees are being “mercilessly plashed down.” The soil is described as stubborn. As she arrives in the village it begins to rain and the words “solitude”, “Cold” and “Gloom” are used to describe the harshness on Tess. Marian describes it as a “Starve-acre place, the employment will be hard, back creaking work of Swede hacking”. Life at Flintcomb Ash is bad because the farmer there was once punched by Angel and he didn’t like Angel so he did all he could to make life hard for Tess.
Alec then turns up at Flintcomb Ash and offers to help but when she refuses and says “I’m married” he shouts at her and says that if she was to be married to any one it was to be him.”
So soon Tess is seduced again by Alec. Angel then comes back to England and asks Tess to get back with him Tess says no. But as soon as Angel leaves Tess realises that Angel is the only one that actually loves her so she picks up the knife and stabs Alec to death. She then gets onto the train and reunites with Angel and runs away with him.
During Tess’s life she goes through two different types of feeling one of them is bad and one the other one is good. But like everything in life bad nearly always comes first. First she goes to find the D’Urbervilles because her Mum and Dad orders her in order to get rich. So then she goes to Alec’s house to find them. But soon she gets seduced by him and raped. And that is the bad bit. But the good bit is that she meets Angel Claire and soon there relationship develops and they get married. But later Angel finds out that she was seduced by Alec and he leaves her. And that’s the other bad bit. Hardy often writes stories in which bad people succeed and good people having bad things happening to them. The story then ends with a tragic ending,
I think that Hardy has chosen a good array of words for his novel. But the only thins which is bad is that many of novels end with bad endings.
