苔丝读后感-苔丝英语读后感
In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Hardy molded a pure, kindhearted image and rather an image brave enough to rebel, to shoulder the responsibility of her action. Her unfortuneness was the tragedy of the society, her character and fate. It vividly revealed the persecution towards people after Industrial revolution made by the conception of capitalism and traditional moral. Following are some of my opinions about the causes to her death.
Her character and parentage was part of the cause
In the author’s ideal world, Tess was the embodiment of beauty and the incarnation of love .She represents all the merits of the villagers in her hometown: beautiful, pure, kind, simple, charitable and tolerant. To love ,she had no egocentric thoughts and didn’t plan to meet her vain wish by marriage .She standed by he dignity and pursue freedom .Hardy made the poor, helpless ,humble country girl as the heroin.Despite she committed adultery and murder, Hardy still claim she was a “pure girl”. This fully showed the author’s sympathy towards Tess. Hardy elaborately modeled the image of Tess and indignantly describes the depression confronted with Tess through her short life.
Tess is a young woman who tends to find herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. She is a victim, but she is also, at times, irresponsible. She falls asleep while taking the beehives to market, which ends up killing the family horse, Prince She decides to visit the d’Urbervilles in Trantridge, giving rise to all her future woes, partly out of the guilt and responsibility she feels toward her family. She wants to make good, but in trying to help her family she loses sight of her own safety and her own wants and wishes. She becomes Alec’s victim in the forest. She probably should have known not to put herself in such a situation, but she has few other options. Here, it seems as though she is destined to rely on others, even when they are unreliable.
Tess is also a strong woman throughout the novel. She stands up for herself and refuses to crumble under pressure. She chastises herself for her weakness after her sexual escapade with Alec. If we agree with her claim that this indiscretion is a moment of weakness, we probably also feel that such weakness is not unlike that of most human beings. She is hard on herself for letting herself become a victim. At the burial of her child, Sorrow , she weeps but collects herself and moves on as a stronger woman. Overall, her determined attempts to escape her past primarily reflect her strength.
Her parentage to some extent leaded to her final tragedy. Born in a poor family, with an ignorant vain, drunkard father who did not care too much about the living of the family, and also with a vulgar, flimsy mother. The heavy burden of the family naturally fell on Tess’s shoulder .All these indicate her future fate. Then in order to make a living to support her family, she bear great grief to ask help from her noble relative and was seduced by Alec. The born of the child brought innocent Tess more heavy spirit pressure. All above was the beginning of the destruction to her happy life.
Tess was the sole supporter of the family .In the novel there was a series of accidents that naturally brought her to the end .The dramatic relationship with the boble family firstly bring her to the touch with evil. And when the only horse in the family dead, she was forced to ask help from Alec. When her father passed away, she tolerates the extreme pain and again yield to Alec’s demand. Fate once again made a fun of her While, she would never forgive Alec, and she was of full hatred towards him. She hated him, cursed him and thought that he was the destroyer of her life. At last, regardless of the law and moral of the capitalism, she killed Alec, bravely appealed and challenged to the hypocritical capitalism. Although her short life was full of tribulation and strike, she was courageous to face reality and to fight against the evil force. This kind of tenacious attitude towards life and fighting spirit was the most powerful and moving character of Tess. Yet her purity and self-sacrificing character did not bring her good luck but tragedy.
A victim of Alec and Angel
Is it Tess's misfortune to be pursued and loved by Alec and by Angel? Between them, do they unintentionally doom her? Is she their victim? The answers yes: Alec has a certain charm, in his amiable slothful way; Angel bears an aura of tensed moralism. What they share is incapacity to value the splendor of feeling which radiates from Tess. Each represents a deformation of masculinity, one high and the other low; they cannot appreciate, they cannot even see the richness of life that Tess embodies....He [Alec] may not be admirable, but he can be likeable, simply because commonplace vice is easier to bear than elevated righteousness.... Together the two men represent everything in Hardy's world, and not his alone, which betrays spontaneous feeling and the flow of instinctual life.
Both Angel and Alec are metaphors of extremes of human behavior, when the human has been cut off from community and has been individualized by intellectual education or by material wealth and traditionless independence.
If we say Alec’s flirtation with Tess represent the capitalism ascendence’s scourage towards Tess, the Angel’s abandonment represent the persecution to her by traditional idea .Though Angel hated civilization and rebelled the religion, and his also contempted social custom. He was closed to common people .But he at the most was a liberalist of capitalism. He didn’t really get rid of the bondage of old moral standard. He dreamed to own a farm and become a large farmer, but his love to Tess was not because his deep love to her but since he thought that Tess would be a perfect hostess .Despite he himself had profligate behavior ,when Tess sturdily told him her experience of insult and begged his forgiveness ,he couldn’t bear and even blame her with evil words . He mercilessly abandoned Tess, making this innocent girl once again suffered heavy strike on spirit. And ultimately pushed her to the abyss of tribulation. This strikingly revealed the hypocrisy and cruelty of the traditional moral concept. The poverty of the family brought her to Alec and end in his death and her execution. Her absolute obedience to Angel and willingness to sacrifice for him was her fatal weakness. On this term, Tess was forced to death by this kind of destructive social power, while Alec and Angel were the embodiment of this power. The two together caused Tess’s final destruction.
The social factors
The Victorian times and attitudes victimize Tess, despite the fact that she possesses high morals and standards. The hypocrisy of the capitalism morals was the fundamental cause to Tess’s tragedy. The dramatic tragedy of Tess is caused by the prejudice of that time .She was the victim of capitalism moral standard. The sarcrifice of Tess had high social reflection. When depicing the tragic life of Tess, Hardy connect her destruction to the social system of capitalism. At the end of the novel, 16 policemen came to arrest Tess, this typical representative of the function of the capitalism right. When concluding the history of Tess, Hardy wrote that: Justice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, in AEschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. Here Hardy used synecdoche and metaphor, the word justice in the original work actually means the unequality of capitalism law. “President of Immortals” was also the metaphor of the visualized image of capitalism, which represent the retroactive ruler of capitalism. This sentence vividly reveal the oppression of the rebelling society towards Tess, it directly scolded the system of capitalism
In that time, the hypocrisy traditional moral standard did not accept Tess; they thought that Tess had disobeyed their standard. In this novel, Hardy subtly and profoundly observed that upsetting time, and by describing the old economy and old social system, it reveals the crime of capitalism to destroy the peaseant. We can see clearly that the true cause of the death of Tess, in one word, was the capitalism’s moral standard, the hypocritical religion and the improper law system that really kill Tess.