Tess and the Color Red

1688 Words4 Pages

Tess and the Color Red

For an artist as visually sensitive as Hardy, colour is of the first

importance and significance, and there is one colour which literary

catches the eye, and is meant to catch it, throughout the book. This

colour is red, the colour of blood, which is associated with Tess from

first to last. It dogs her, disturbs her, destroys her. She is full of

it, she spills it, she loses it. Watching Tess' life we begin to see

that her destiny is nothing more or less than the colour red You'll

want to make a list of all the times the colour red appears in the

novel, from the roses Alec gives Tess, to the monstrous red threshing

machine, to the shedding of blood. Divide these images into two

groups- the positive, life-affirming ones and the negative, violent

ones. Toward the conclusion of your paper, consider why Hardy uses the

same colour to represent concepts as opposite as life and death,

creation and destruction, love and hate.

Discuss the importance of landscapes and environments in Tess.

Hardy weaves imagery around the colours C. red and white

There are two ways to approach this question. You can either write

about Hardy's view of nature and man's place in it; or you can discuss

how nature in Tess reflects the characters' feelings.

For the first approach, gather evidence from the novel about how Hardy

sees nature. Remember to include his vision of nature as the core of

all life, and his view of man as a small part of the universe. Also

discuss how life goes on, following its natural rhythms, regardless of

what happens to individuals. Consider nature both as a friend to man,

as at Talbothays, and as a foe to m...

... middle of paper ...

...wessex

sometime in the 1880s.

although wessex is fictional it is clearly identifiable as dorset in

the south west of england (check a map or atlas).

by the late 1800s (eg 1880) in dorset the increasing industrialisation

of agriculture in the rural areas of britain were rapidly

destabilising and destroying the old established farming communities.

in tess' world human labour is giving way to mechanised labour,

farming for food is being rapidly replaced by farming for money, the

country produce is being exported to the cities for sale (rather than

consumed in the communities themselves), young men are being drawn

away from the countryside to the city in large numbers - leaving a

surplus of young women on the farms, people with 'new' money made in

the cities are buying up the old noble titles and so on and so on.

Open Document