tess

ON TESS' CHARACTER She (Tess) can flirt, she can listen, she can sympathize, she can work with her hands. Except when it is mocked or thwarted, she is superbly at ease with her sexuality. In no way an intellectual, she has a clear sense of how to reject whatever fanatic or pious nonsense comes her way.... Her womanly softness does not keep her from clear judgments, even toward her beloved Angel she can sometimes be …

…Study of Thomas Hardy," 1936 ON ANGEL AND ALEC Angel and Alec appear as figures of Victorian society hovering around Tess, but misunderstanding her, unworthy of her, unable to match her natural strength and spontaneity.... Both are statements about the principal character types of the Victorian middle class- the cruel bourgeois and the disinherited intellectual: both are without roots, both show a split between thought and feeling, both lack an adequate image of selfhood. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**