accept that she’s not the ideal, ‘pure woman’ he once perceived. Gatrell highlights how, ‘Tess is an example of the destructive effect of society’s pressures and conventions on a nature naturally pure and unstained’. She becomes linked to that of a sexual temptress as Hardy describes ‘a steady, crimson glare from the now flameless embers’ which was reflected on Tess’ face, linking her to Satan. Similarly, the subversion of the Petrarchan structure in the Dark Lady sequence highlights how the speaker does not view her in the same adoring way as the Fair Youth, but as a promiscuous figure who he cannot help but succumb to. The female, who is potentially based on Mary Fitton, is presented as evil, and her sexuality is a threat to the spirit of …show more content…
They had a social and symbolic role, and Blanche tries to play at this traditional part yet fails disastrously. Her desperation to find someone like Allan leads to inappropriate relations, as she tells Mitch, ‘after the death of Allan - intimacies with strangers was all I had to fill my empty heart with’. She becomes the temptress and the fallen ideal as ‘she takes off her blouse and stands in her pink silk brassiere and white skirt in the light through the portieres’, craving affection and interest. This promiscuity would have been shocking during the time period, as women were not expected to be as sexually voracious as Blanche, and Bigsby describes how ‘she stands also as an image of Williams’s central theme; the destructive impact of society on the sensitive …show more content…
In Shakespeare’s sonnets the Fair Youth’s selfish nature becomes evident, as despite the speakers devotion, he disregards anyone’s feelings but his own. For example in Sonnet 34, the speaker asks, ‘Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day and make me travail forth without my cloak, to let base clouds o’ertake me in my way, hiding thy brav’ry in their rotten smoke?’. He is painfully disappointed by the Beloved, whose callousness has dashed any hopes of an equal relationship, and Auden describes him as, ‘essentially frivolous, cold-hearted, self-centred, and aware that he has some control over the speaker’. Shakespeare was receiving patronage for every sonnet, which suggests that perhaps the Fair Youth was just a construct so as to make money. In ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, Hardy describes how Angel ‘…loved her dearly, though perhaps rather ideally and fancifully than with the impassioned thoroughness of her feeling for him’. This showcases the depth of Tess’ love, highlighting how it is both greater and more sincere than Angel’s. Tess overly idealises Angel, in her mind he can do no wrong, she describes how, ‘he inspired her with no sort of personal fear: if he had entered with a pistol in his hand he would scarcely have disturbed her trust in his protectiveness’. In ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Blanche creates an illusion due to her longing for the ideal love, which leads her to
Blanche could not accept her past and overcome it. She was passionately in love with Alan; but after discovering that he was gay, she could not stomach the news. When she revealed how disgusted she was, it prompted Alan to commit suicide. She could never quite overcome the guilt and put it behind her. Blanche often encountered flashbacks about him. She could hear the gun shot and polka music in her head. After Alan’s death, she was plagued by the deaths of her relatives. Stella moved away and did not have to deal with the agony Blanche faced each day. Blanche was the one who stuck it out with her family at Belle Reve where she had to watch as each of her remaining family members passed away. “I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, Mother! Margaret, that dreadful way! You just came home in time for the funerals, Stella. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths—not always” (Scene 1, page 1546). Blanche lost Belle Reve because of all the funeral expenses. Belle Reve had been in her family for generations, and it slipped through her fingers while she watched helplessly. Blanche’s anguish caused her loneliness. The loneliness fueled her abundance of sexual encounters. Her rendezvous just added to her problems and dirtied her rep...
(May 1819). “The experience of this single event, participation in the titanically destructive power of cruelty, burrowed into Blanche's soul and irreversibly changed her from what she once was. Whether or not we think that she was cruel and that her words provoked her husband’s suicide, Blanche believes-as her words ‘It was because’ tell us-that his death was caused by something that she said. Thus, Blanche is looking for redemption, for forgiveness, in the arms of a young boy like her husband and in her confession to Mitch. She wants Mitch to absolve, forgive, and release her from the great cruelty of her past, because like her husband Allan Grey, Blanche wants to be loved for who she is” (Linda, Costanzo Cahir).
To conclude, the author portrays Blanche’s deteriorating mental state throughout the play and by the end it has disappeared, she is in such a mental state that doctors take her away. Even at this stage she is still completely un-aware of her surroundings and the state she is in herself.
An exemplary character of the era’s higher class, Alec manipulates Tess, eventually causing her distress and raping her. The original sacrifice of herself to support her family led to her falling victim to Alec d’Urberville and being impregnated. Though already disapproved of by the Church for conceiving this child out of wedlock, Tess is further shunned when she chooses to desert Alec, endure the pregnancy, and
...ell him about her dark past and he immediately is shocked and rejects her. He says, you were one person now you are another”. Tess pleads to Angel to love her as she is and not for what she did in the past but is not successful in getting him to leave the past in the past. Virginity for his wife is important and is not to be debated. Angel does not realize that Tess’s virtue should not be connected to her virginity.
...es and thinks that her hopes will not be destroyed. Thirdly, Blanche thinks that strangers are the ones who will rescue her; instead they want her for sex. Fourthly, Blanche believes that the ones who love her are trying to imprison her and make her work like a maid imprisoned by them. Fifthly, Blanche’s superiority in social status was an obscure in her way of having a good social life. Last but not least, Blanche symbolizes the road she chose in life- desire and fantasy- which led her to her final downfall.
Though the central action of Tomas Hardy's novel "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" centres on Tess, the other characters are not lacking in interest and individuality. Undoubtedly, Tess's life is marked by two contradictory temperaments, those of the sensual Alec d'Urberville and the intellectual Angel Clare. Both characters are described with artistic detail to show a blend of weakness and strength governed by fate. Both are flesh and symbol complementing the other in the fall and rise, rise and fall again of Tess herself, and both play crucial roles in shaping her destiny.
Claridge, Laura. "Tess: A Less Than Pure Woman Ambivalently Presented." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 28 (1986): 324-38.
Yet, Tess was able to overcome her affair with Alec because she possessed a keen sense of justice and morality. She realized that she had sinned, but also came to the conclusion that she should not be punished eternally for one mistake. This realization also reflects upon Tess's maturation mentally. Moreover, because her affair with Alec also resulted in a child, she was forced to mature much more quickly than she would have liked. Tess also had the habit of blaming herself for everything that would not go as planned. The whispering that Tess endures during her visit to Church after her affair with Alec only serves to strengthen her feelings that she was constantly at fault.
Now, the first major relationship Tess is in is with Alec d’Urberville in which she is subjugated to mistreatment. One of the most evident examples of the way Alec treats Tess in the garden, in which he feeds her strawberries while she was “in a slight distress” and even smokes in front of her, although she claims that she minds “not at all” (52). Now the clearer example, the strawberry abuse, alludes to the rape which comes later on in the novel. She is forced to consume the strawberry although she would rather “take it in [her] own hand” (52), obviously showing refusal at a blunt state, In addition to this Alec unabashedly smoked around her, which is not only disrespectful but hazardous to her health. The “narcotic haze” (52), which permeated the rooms Alec and Tess were in, acted like enigmatic amnesiac clouds of death. They not only limited visibility but choked Tess and damaged her eventually later on. This is also parallel to her rape in that the damage done by Alec was invisible for a long time in both cases. Later on in the novel, Alec is very shortly converted into a devout Christian but is “tempted” by Tess, whom he calls a “dear damned witch of Babylon” (377).
In this essay I will argue that the stereotypes placed upon women commonly associated with love sonnets are inherently misogynistic and will convey this through the comparison of William Shakespeare's sonnet 130 and Daniels 6 from Delia. Shakespeare's sonnet 130 highlights these stereotypes and uses a satirical approach in portraying the unachievable standards set for women in literature which contrasts to the Daniel's poem which is seen to objectify and to devalue women. This essay will also look at the argument of Simone Debeauvoir in the second sex which has aided in my analysis of the poems.
duction A Streetcar Named Desire, written by Tennesse Williams (1947), is often characterized as the most extraordinary play that portrays the authentic South American life in the late 40`s and reflects the psychological interactions between the realistic inhabitants of the crowded Elysian Street, a home for the working labor class. Also, the narrative discourse of the play, in a sensitive manner, reveals more profound psychological characterizations of the main protagonists and the background topics such as gender differences, sexual intercourses, the submissive women`s roles and the dominant and aggressive nature of the male in the heteronormative post-war society. Although it seems that the playwright is about the decadence of the working-class society, still, the internal background of the story shows sensitive topics such as fear od loneliness, the symbolism of madness and the consequences of the abusive and violent attitude towards women. The real significance of the notion "desire" is, in fact, related to the relationship between Stela, a young inferior wife, and her husband, the Polish officer Stanley
The d'Urberville estate is perfectly described by the cliché ?looks can be deceiving.? Although the mansion is beautiful, deception and trickery loom within. Alec d?Urberville deceives Tess and takes advantage of her naivety, proving the societal significance of ?Man over Woman.? His desire for Tess ultimately triumphs over her resistance to him, resulting in Tess?s tragic ruin. Moreover, it proves society?s double standard in viewing men and women. It is socially acceptable for d?Urberville to have affairs, but when Tess is seduced, she is considered unclean and an improper lady. In addition, it is at this estate that d?Urberville falsely discloses to Tess that she is not of d?Urberville blood because of her family?s poor industrial status and, therefore, not of a noble class.
Tess's natural side wins over, but she is then set up for a bitter end because she abdicates herself to Angel's moral indignation, blind to her own natural goodness. This is the tragedy of the text. Because the two sides of the "social chasm that [divide] our heroine's personality" cannot be brought into accord, Tess must lose everything. The Talbothay period shows what a happy community might look like - what her life 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 Tess's short life.
Throughout the novel Hardy personifies his criticism of sexual double standards in the form of the title character Tess. Tess undergoes a somewhat cliche ‘fallen woman’ tragedy, by amplifying the tragedy, Hardy is allowed to lend the reader an empathetic insight into the impartial condemnation of women. By the conclusion of Tess’ journey it is indisputable that the blame for her inevitable downfall does not belong to Alec but rather with the society that condemned her. The extent to which the socially constructed dogma reaches is manifested in Angel who reveals to Tess his own past sexual adventures but when informed of her own rape concludes that she is no longer the same person ‘No, not the same’, he views his wife as amoral rather than the victim she truly is. In Hardy’s society a female who lost her virginity before getting married, was shun - regardless of context. Hence virtue lay in virginity, diminishing the transcendent worth of a woman’s will. Misguided by their fallaciousness, the Victorian’s had confused virginity with virtue a physical and metaphysical conditi...