The injustice Within Tess of the D’Urbervilles and in Robert Frost's Poetry

1416 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Discuss Frost's love of nature in his poems

The injustice within Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1881) and Robert Frost’s poetry is unjustified and causes major suffering to those illustrated in both the novel and the poetry. Numerous variations of injustice are portrayed within these works such as; social injustice, religious injustice and moral injustice. These injustices often combine together to form an upsurge of ill-treatment within the characters’ lives. Furthermore, Frost’s poems often address heavy topic matters such as suicide, child morality and human morality. Harriet Monroe supports this argument by stating ‘Such art passes local boundaries as lightly as an aeroplane and swings out into wider circles of space and time.’(Monroe: 1924:149). Hardy’s ‘Tess’ addresses problems such as the unjust treatment of women in society by their own peers, which leads to the eventual downfall of Tess in a tragic tale of cruelty and its consequences. Moreover, Wuthering Heights (1847) displays a tragic, injustice and complex world for those who suffer the infortunes of being born into this isolated microcosm.
Throughout ‘Tess’, she believes that she is punished for her immoral action, however even to Tess a simple country girl, the injustice treatment for her mistakes does not seem justifiable, these punishments are due to Tess’s central injustice of being raped/seduced by Alec - ‘whatever her sins they were not sins of intention…why should she have been punished so persistently’ (pp.313). Furthering this argument, in Hardy’s ‘Tess’ the moral code of ‘no sex before marriage’ is broken by the protagonist herself and sets in motion her fate eventually leading Tess to becoming a fallen woman. In Victorian society, women were expected to practice sexual resistance if this was not conduct...

... middle of paper ...

...s that have a much defined rhyme scheme. Therefore, the poem becomes a more serious and personal epilogue to seal the past behind him, perhaps, having therapeutic aspects for Frost himself in retelling the grief they (Frost and his wife) went through. The title of the poem ‘Home Burial’ itself could be read as a double-entendre; these being the death and the burial of a child and the symbolic death of a marriage. An alternative narrative line has been concluded by Benjamin West saying ‘The true subject of the poem – from a biographical perspective – is the death of Frost’s nephew, child of his sister-in-law Leona White Harvey, in 1895. It was her relationship with her husband that inspired the poem.’ (West:2011). This alternative opinion conveys that ‘Home Burial’ is not about Frost’s own life although many other critics conceive it is about the death of his son.

Show More
Related

  • Robert Frost: Annotated Bibliography

    1062 Words  | 3 Pages

    Frost created many poems with a correlation to death. A poem that easily displays this theme is “A Soldier” because it deals with the falling of a soldier at war. As Karen Hardison explains that “"A Soldier" is composed around an extended metaphor that is introduced in the first line: "He is that fallen lance ...." The soldier is compared to a fallen lance, a weapon, that lies on the ground” (1). Most of this poem involves a metaphor and imagery, which help the reader understand the theme. The fallen soldier lies dead on the ground and as time passes he begging to deteriorate yet he remain in the same location, just like the lance. Frost also condemns war and all of the consequences that occur because of it. Furthermore, another of Frost poem that containing the theme of death is “Nothing Gold Can Stay’, the poem indirectly references the theme of death. The poem states that everything eventually comes to an end and that not even gold can remain unchanged. The poem explains this theme with many metaphors about everything’s coming to an end. Freeman explains that “Even the poem's rhymes contribute to this sense of inevitability: Nature's gold we (or She) cannot hold; the flower lasts only an hour; the post flower leaf is like Eden's grief; the coming of day means that dawn's gold cannot stay”(2). The poem explains that everything has a natural cycle and that nothing last forever. When the poem states “nothing can

    Read More

  • Tess Of The D Urbervilles And Heart Of Darkness Analysis

    1081 Words  | 3 Pages

    The community and her unsupportive parents’ cold treatment towards Tess following these events emphasize the hegemonic male perspective of society towards women. Furthermore, Hardy shows how women are seen by society through the male gaze as sexual objects, as Tess is blamed for Alec’s lack of self-control. He attempts to justify his cruel actions as he calls Tess a “temptress” and the “dear damned witch of Babylon” (Hardy 316), yet he later says that he has “come to tempt [her]” (340). Tess is also objectified by Alec when he says that if Tess is “any man’s wife [she] is [his]” (325). The narrator’s repeated sexualized descriptions of Tess, such as her “pouted-up deep red mouth” (39), further demonstrate how women are commonly seen through the male gaze in society.

    Read More

  • Fallen Angel: Tess' Struggle in Victorian Society

    1383 Words  | 3 Pages

    The subtitle of the novel, however an after idea, focuses on the basic virtue of its champion. In spite of the fact that she is fallen, she is to be judged not by her ethical inconvenience but rather by her goal, her life and her temperament seen all in all. One side of Tess is the question of male strength, run of the mill of the Victorian time frame, the respectably traditional and preservationist age. At the time of Tess, even in late Victorian period, a lady ought to be rationally and physically devoted to men, called a "blessed messenger in the house." Else she was a "fallen heavenly attendant." Tessʼs dispositions as a Victorian lady are spoken to in her externalization by her honest to goodness spouse Holy messenger, and her physical

    Read More

  • Tess Essay

    801 Words  | 2 Pages

    Thomas Hardy challenges the sexual principles of the late nineteenth century in his novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Tess Durbeyfield, a young woman, looks for work at Trantridge, where she meets the charming Alec Stoke-d'Urberville. Alec becomes attracted to Tess and later rapes her in a forest. This drives Tess to look for work elsewhere, and she meets Angel Clare at Talbothays Dairy, where they fall in love with each other and marry. However, when Tess tells Angel what happened to her at Trantridge, he leaves her and goes to Brazil. Hardy presents two men who inflict different types of pain on Tess; while Alec harms Tess physically, Angel harms Tess psychologically. Hardy establishes that people are victims of fate and, although both men have many faults, Angel is the better man.

    Read More

  • The Deterioration Of Marriage In Robert Frost's Home Burial

    1141 Words  | 3 Pages

    Robert Frost’s dramatic poem Home Burial depicts two tragedies: the loss of an infant and the deterioration of a marriage that follows. The emotional dialogue characterizes husband and wife with their habits of speech, illustrating the ways that they deal with grief. Instead of comforting her in her distress, the husband attempts at every turn to force his wife to cease grieving. The unnamed farmer’s inability to console his wife, who seems to feel so much more deeply the loss of her child, combined with her inability to see any feeling at all in her husband’s actions, contribute to a conflict that seems unresolvable by the end of the poem. But Frost’s diction suggests that it is the husband’s style of communication, not his method of grieving, that is the true cause of the vast distance between the two.

    Read More

  • The Intricate Meanings of Robert Frost 's Poetry

    777 Words  | 2 Pages

    Frost’s sentence structure is long and complicated. Many meanings of his poems are not revealed to the reader through first glance, but only after close introspection of the poem. The true meanings contained in Frost’s poems, are usually lessons on life. Frost uses symbolism of nature and incorporates that symbolism into everyday life situations. The speaker in the poems vary, in the poem “The Pasture”, Frost seems to be directly involved in the poem, where as in the poem “While in the Rose Pogonias”, he is a detached observer, viewing and talking about the world’s beauty. Subsequently, the author transfers that beauty over to the beauty of experiences that are achieved through everyday life.

    Read More

  • Tess Of The D Urbervilles Symbolism Essay

    1779 Words  | 4 Pages

    The novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles written by Thomas Hardy was an interesting novel with lots of suspense. The main protagonist is Tess D’Urbervilles, a young, attractive, intelligent, and sensitive girl. In the first chapter, Tess’s father finds out he’s the last descent of one of the oldest families in England, the D’Urbervilles. Tess’s family lives in poverty and faces difficult to get through life. In the process of all this happening Tess experiences many bad things. The book introduces many symbols; one of the many was Red and White. These colors foreshadow future events in the novel such as pureness, beauty, carelessness, innocence, sin, evil and more.

    Read More

  • Tess of the D'Urbervilles by THomas Hardy

    704 Words  | 2 Pages

    Tess is almost immediately seduced by one of her cousins. She became pregnant, but her child dies soon after it is born. She never tells the cousin that their child has died. But later, after she falls in love with the son of a local minister and marries him, she confesses her past. This is to much for her new husband to deal with. He "married down" because he was attracted to Tess's humble origins. Back then, men married down to lower classes if the women was beautiful because it would make the man look good. Obviously women were not well respected. But he is not prepared to accept the reality of her past. He leaves on a bizarre mission to South America.

    Read More

  • Essay on Contrasting Settings in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles

    564 Words  | 2 Pages

    The setting or settings in a novel are often an important element in the work.  Many novels use contrasting places such as cities or towns, to represent opposing forces or ideas that are central to the meaning of the work.  In Thomas Hardy's novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, the contrasting settings of Talbothays Dairy and Flintcomb-Ash represent the opposing forces of good and evil in Tess' life.

    Read More

  • Home Burial

    905 Words  | 2 Pages

    Frost uses a lot of imagery in “Home Burial” to give the reader a look at what is going on. The first line, “He saw her from the bottom of the stairs / Before she saw him,” lets the reader know Amy is at the top of the stairs, and her husband is at the bottom. He uses imagery to show many things such as facial expressions, movement from one place to another, and to describe a scene. He shows expressions in line eight “And her face changed from terrified to dull,” line forty-three “He sat and fixed his chin between his fists,” and line one-hundred and thirteen “…You’re crying.” By “seeing” these expressions, the reader can almost feel what is going on in Amy’s and her husband’s head. Line eight lets ...

    Read More

  • Nineteenth Century Literature Heroines and Conformity

    1654 Words  | 4 Pages

    Tess, the protagonist and heroine of Hardy's novel, becomes a victim of rape and in turn, her life grows to become degraded, humiliating and depressing; of which none of these things she deserves. Although initially striving to be heroic and providing for her family, (after she was responsible for the death of Prince) the position she takes on at the d'Urbervilles' ultimately leads to her death as she is raped and then pursued by her seducer Alec d'Urberville until she must murder him. This courageous yet dangerous decision to murder Alec epitomises her character as a heroine as she is brave enough to perform such a malicious act in order to kill her suffering at the root rather than being passive and perhaps choosing to take her own life instead.

    Read More

  • The Power of Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles

    3599 Words  | 8 Pages

    The Victorian times and attitudes victimize Tess, despite the fact that she possesses high morals and standards. The aim of this paper is to show how Hardy illustrates this in many ways. Her family, social, and economic background provide the reader with a perspective of living as a poor woman during the Victorian Era. Another avenue Hardy uses to show the unfairness of life for a poor woman during these times is two men who victimize Tess, Angel Clare and Alec d'Urberv...

    Read More

  • Robert Frost essay

    933 Words  | 2 Pages

    Through the use of numerous literary techniques in his poems, Robert Frost continues to engage audiences to the paradigms of everyday life. By writing about everyday life he was able to layer the key meaning of his poem with extended metaphors. Robert Frost’s poems are multi-faceted, which leads the reader with unending possibilities of analysis and ultimately possesses a greater connection to each poem. Most of his works are mostly autobiographical which includes two of his great poems Mending Wall and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening alongside The Road Not Taken.

    Read More

  • Tess of the D'Urbervilles

    1013 Words  | 3 Pages

    Fortunately, in our time, people of any stature can be punished for such a crime. In the Victorian era however, rape victims were silent and their suffering went unheard. Often, rape victims were blamed for their misfortune, and were said to bring it upon themselves. This was the case with Tess and Alec D’Urberville. When Tess told her mother of her rape, all her mother could say was that Tess should have “known the ways of men.”

    Read More

  • The Theme of Death in Poetry

    829 Words  | 2 Pages

    Both poets, in these works and many others, display a fascination with the death of themselves as well as the death of peers, and loved ones. Both Frost and Dickinson experienced a great deal of death throughout each of their lives. Frost’s greatest loss was the death of his son, which is greatly depicted in his poem “Home Burial.” Dickinson suffered the loss of many friends and family. She spent a lot of her time in her room looking out upon the headstones of these people.

    Read More

More about The injustice Within Tess of the D’Urbervilles and in Robert Frost's Poetry

Open Document