Hardys Tess of the dUrbervilles - Talbothay and Tesss Struggle Essa

Tess of the dUbervilles - Talbothay and Tesss Struggle In Tess of the dUbervilles, Tess is spiritually homeless. She wanders from place to place, doomed by her guilt to suffer personal ruin. Most of her temporary domiciles ar backdrops for unhappiness and uncertainty, provided her time at Talbothays Dairy is ostensibly a period of bliss. What purpose does this segment of the text - which on the surface seems so hopeful - serve? When she begins to use for the dairy and is wooed by Angel Clare, Tess is pulled asunder by two competing forces nature and society. The happiness and innocent sexual blush she discovers at the Edenic Talbothay solidifies Tesss shift toward inherent impulses. These impulses are strong enough to temporarily subdue Tesss crippling shame, and thus establish the texts central moral conflict. The Talbothay interlude allows Tess to put off making the final plump down into marriage for as long as possible. In a literary limbo, Tess can enjoy her ph ysical awakening without the stain of sin that her previous operation with Alec had imposed. Were it up to Tess, she would remain in this state of neo-virginity forever, for in it she is anonymous. She is not given the opportunity to live in this state for very long, of course. Angels ambitions - and these are grand in a conventional sense, despite his misleading antipathy toward social climbing - compel him to make Tess promise to marry him, preparing in her a channel for subjective will that allows her to set aside fear of Angels rejection should he find out about her past. While she at first resists his advances and resigns herself to living without him, she is ultimately vulnerable to desire. We agree nature subsume Tesss i... ...Tesss natural side wins over, but she is then set up for a bitter end because she abdicates herself to Angels moral indignation, blind to her own natural goodness. This is the tragedy of the text. Because the two sides of the social chas m that divide our heroines personality cannot be brought into accord, Tess must lose everything. The Talbothay period shows what a happy community might look like - what her lifetime might have been were it not for the albatross of shame. Talbothay is a shiny foil for the social brutality present in every other phase of Tesss petty life. Works Cited and Consulted Beer, Gillian. Finding a Scale for the Human. Tess of the dUrbervilles. Ed. Scott Elledge. New York W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1991. Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the dUrbervilles. Ed. Scott Elledge. New York W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1991.