Contrast the descriptions of Flint comb - Ash and Talbothays, showing How Hardy uses the atmosphere places to reflect different stages in Tess's life.

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Contrast the descriptions of Flint comb – Ash and Talbothays, showing How Hardy uses the atmosphere places to reflect different stages in Tess’s life.

In Thomas Hardy’s novel, “Tess of the D’urbervilles” the settings and surroundings of Talbothays Dairy and Flint Comb – Ash represent both the good and evil in Tess’s life. Throughout the novel Tess is faced with absolute happiness and also total misery. As she moves from location to location the setting of these different places reflect her different emotions. Hardy also uses nature to help the reader identify with Tess’s feelings. The natural surroundings and the different seasons are often in keeping with the events of the novel; literacy critics refer to this as the ‘Pathetic Fallacy’. Throughout the novel as the seasons change, so does the action, which describes the significant moments in Tess’s life. She falls in love in the month of “May”. When things are fertile and growing. Her Rape and the death of her body occur in “September” when nature is slowing, dying and decaying. Also Tess marries Angel in “winter”. The harshness of winter could represent the collapse and bareness of their marriage. As mentioned before, the locations of Tess’s travels are also important. Talbothays Dairy is situated in a “Lush, fertile land” that suggests the natural ripeness of Tess and Angel’s love. Flint Comb – Ash’s rugged Terrain finds in Tess lots of hardship of labour and the loss of her husband.

Our introduction to Tess Durbeyfield is Hardy’s description of the “May – day Dancers”, dressed in white, the “sun lit up their figures”, portrays the character’s radiance, children of nature, Hardy symbolises their differences by stating that “no two whites were alike among them”. Immediately we are able to see that Tess has something that none of the other girls have, “She wore a red ribbon in her hair” and her “large innocent eyes added eloquence to her colour and shape”. She is illustrated as “a fine picturesque country girl”. We are left with the impression of rustic beauty with a hidden, or perhaps not hidden, sense of passion.

Tess was born in the village of Marlott, located in the Vale of Blackmoor.

“This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields

are never brown and the springs never dry…. the hills are open,

the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give

an enclosed character to the landscape….”

Tess is born innocent into a land of possibilities. In this description of Blackmoor, Hardy gives the reader a sense of many possibilities through the imagery of “open hills” and “unenclosed fields”. Despite the fact that Tess is born into a limitless world. Her fate proves cruel and it destroys her innocence.

 

An event occurs one evening after her father had had too much alcohol, making it impossible for him to deliver the beehives to the market. So Tess sets out with her younger brother Abraham upon a route of “bad roads over a distance between twenty and thirty miles”. The journey is doomed because they will be having to cross “bad roads” that cover a huge distance.

They begin their travels on a “Starlit night”.

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“Abraham talked on… leant back against the hives, and with

Upturned face made observations on the stars, whose cold

Pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, in

Serene dissociation from these two wisps of humanity”

Hardy places Tess in a world of disharmony whilst on the trip, during the journey Tess falls asleep, causing the horse that is leading their cart to collide with a mail cart, fatally injuring her horse. By allowing this accident to take place while Tess is quite defenceless, Hardy portrays her as a victim of fate.

It is the death of ...

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