Of A Working-Class Woman As A Sexuality-Trigger In The Fatalisst
Buffy Kao
Professor Chao-Fang Chen
19th-Century British Novels
16/Jan/2009
How Is She Doomed?
The Tragedy of a Working-Class Woman as a Sexuality-Trigger in the Fatalist Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Tess is absolutely one of Thomas Hardy’s most tragic characters. Her fate being a woman labourer and a sexuality-trigger leads to her tragedy. For all her life, she is manipulated by the society and she is hardly given the chance to decide what she wants to be and how she wants to end her story. As Hardy suggests, her fate is determined by the social construction. In Tess’s case, on the one hand, because of her status as a woman labourer, she is expected to get rid of her self-interest and to sacrifice herself. In …show more content…
What Victorians understand about female sexuality is literally constructed by the social system. Biologically speaking, sexuality is quite a norm in human nature. Desires and sexual instincts are both recognized as natural responses. Therefore, Hardy, when portraying a girl like Tess with affluent ‘vitality’, attacks the rigidity in the theory which confines female sexuality to be passive and passionless. Female sexuality is so abundant in Tess’s female body that neither Alect nor Angel has power to resist. Hardy demonstrates Tess’s female sexuality before her suffering is about to be unmasked, which signals that the primary cause for her painful experience is partly blamed to the discrepancy between human nature and constructed …show more content…
According to Humma, Tess is presented as a girl “who never sins against Nature, never loses her innocence” (66) and who “is again and again described through the imagery of plants and flowers appropriate to one who, in Farmer Crick’s words, ‘is a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature’ (155)” (qtd. in Humma 66). Hardy wants us to realize that sexuality is as primitive as Nature. Consequently, we need not repress the most original part of human nature. Hardy is also simultaneously showing the society’s restraint on female sexuality so that Tess, instead of boldly revealing her female sexuality, is obliged to suppress her sexuality by “[removing] the more prominent blooms” and “[covering] them with her handkerchief.” Beyond questions, Hardy employs the technique of “embedding sexual symbolism within his nature imagery” (Humma
Professor Chao-Fang Chen
19th-Century British Novels
16/Jan/2009
How Is She Doomed?
The Tragedy of a Working-Class Woman as a Sexuality-Trigger in the Fatalist Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Tess is absolutely one of Thomas Hardy’s most tragic characters. Her fate being a woman labourer and a sexuality-trigger leads to her tragedy. For all her life, she is manipulated by the society and she is hardly given the chance to decide what she wants to be and how she wants to end her story. As Hardy suggests, her fate is determined by the social construction. In Tess’s case, on the one hand, because of her status as a woman labourer, she is expected to get rid of her self-interest and to sacrifice herself. In …show more content…
What Victorians understand about female sexuality is literally constructed by the social system. Biologically speaking, sexuality is quite a norm in human nature. Desires and sexual instincts are both recognized as natural responses. Therefore, Hardy, when portraying a girl like Tess with affluent ‘vitality’, attacks the rigidity in the theory which confines female sexuality to be passive and passionless. Female sexuality is so abundant in Tess’s female body that neither Alect nor Angel has power to resist. Hardy demonstrates Tess’s female sexuality before her suffering is about to be unmasked, which signals that the primary cause for her painful experience is partly blamed to the discrepancy between human nature and constructed …show more content…
According to Humma, Tess is presented as a girl “who never sins against Nature, never loses her innocence” (66) and who “is again and again described through the imagery of plants and flowers appropriate to one who, in Farmer Crick’s words, ‘is a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature’ (155)” (qtd. in Humma 66). Hardy wants us to realize that sexuality is as primitive as Nature. Consequently, we need not repress the most original part of human nature. Hardy is also simultaneously showing the society’s restraint on female sexuality so that Tess, instead of boldly revealing her female sexuality, is obliged to suppress her sexuality by “[removing] the more prominent blooms” and “[covering] them with her handkerchief.” Beyond questions, Hardy employs the technique of “embedding sexual symbolism within his nature imagery” (Humma