Is Tess Sympathetic

The further you get into the book, the more winey and self-pitying her voice becomes. In the beginning of chapter 16, I’m using the quote “Now began the worst period of my ordeal, I cried so much I thought I would turn into a river or a fountain, as in the old tales. No matter how much I prayed and offered up sacrifices and watched for omens, my husband still didn’t return. To add to my misery…” The first part of the

Her pain is very clearly seen when she say “you already left us once, you can’t again” to her husband’s ghost. Her plea evidently shows her pain and her longingness for support to bear the burden and loss. This burden, pain, misery and loss eventually leads her to insanity! These events in her life showed me the effect that war can have on people’s lives; the pain, loss and burden they have to bear. This made sympathise with the victims of war and helped understand their pain, which I feel is as equally as harsh as being up in the front as they have to live with the memories of the dead.

People who read this novel would easily be able to sympathize with what she is going through, especially when Catherine 's father passes. Unfortunately, people deal with deaths all the time and don 't always know how to move forward, much like Catherine. The struggles she faces are struggles most any reader could understand because people see that some illness is passed on to each generation.

She remains a strong young woman throughout her loss. After his death, she tells her parents, “‘I want you guys to have a life,’ I said. ‘I worry that you won’t have a life, that you’ll sit around here all day with no me to look after and stare at the walls and want to off yourselves.” (_). She is now more courageous and wants everyone to live a full life, not spend their lives grieving her.

She’s built up walls to protect herself from pain over the years and has learned to push aside emotion and play a poker face. She sometimes thinks rashly and does things better not done, but she always does them with cunning and craftiness that makes her a formidable enemy. I enjoyed her powerful nature and how she had such a fighting spirit. Not only did she have a relentless curiosity and amazing instincts, she stands up for those who need the help. By the end of the book she has developed and relinquished the walls, but she regained and grew in her stronger aspects. She becomes a force in the Washington politics and it was lots of fun watching her maneuver it. Barnes created such an amazing, rich world in D. C. It was easy falling into the politics and understanding what was going on once you were a few chapters in and had gotten the tons of names down. In my opinion, Tess is a fantastic protagonist, I really felt for her right from the first page. She’s grounded and practical and whilst she’s headstrong she isn’t an idiot – the perfect combination of a heroine who wants to get stuff done, but also realizes that other people may be better equipped to deal with some situations. Tess is not the only brilliant character in the wide spread cast created in The Fixer. Even the characters we spend little to no time with all felt like they had a special place in the story, they all felt like real people with their own problems that had nothing to do

Further on she says, “You might believe you have harmed yourself, the baby, your partner, your parents” (Torre-Bueno 1). This is an example as to why a woman may feel guilty about her decision. It helps to understand where the guilt comes from and why a person may feel that way. In the poem “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks she also shows how a mother acts who may be feeling guilty about her decision to abort her baby. For example, after talking about how you can never forget about having an abortion she states, “If I stole your births and your names, your straight baby tears and your games, your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches and your deaths” (Brooks 388). Here, she is demonstrating how the mother feels guilty because she feels like she was responsible for her baby not being able to experience different parts of life. She is feeling remorseful and responsible, which are the two main emotions of guilt.

There are many injustices in the world and life is not fair. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, is a story about a girl named Tess who is a victim of the cruel injustices of her world simply because of the circumstances of her birth. The story begins with Tess as an innocent country girl who goes on a journey of suffering as she is repeatedly wronged by the people in her life and even her community. Ultimately, Tess is unable to overcome her injustices and at the end of her journey, her life ends tragically. Hardy’s protagonist Tess suffers and endures one injustice after another because of her economic standing and gender, reflecting how Victorian English Society favors the wealthy over the poor and how women are treated unequally and held to a different standard than men. Because Tess is unable to find justice and fairness within her society, Hardy is trying to tell the readers to change the gender injustices and acknowledge the economic inequalities that society has created.

But you just keep living day after day, after terrible day.” This woman plays a key role in the theme of suffering. We see her in the past, being tortured by it. We see her actions causing it for multiple people. But sadly, in the all of what she has done, come back to bite her.

In his novel Tess of the d'Ubervilles, as well as much of his poetry, Thomas Hardy expresses his dissatisfaction, weariness, and an overwhelming sense of injustice at the cruelty of our universal fate - disappointment and disillusionment. Hardy argues that the hopes and desires of Men are cruelly thwarted by a potent combination of "all-powerful Nature, fate, unforeseen accidents and disasters, and tragic flaws" (Mickelson 32). Although Tess, the heroine of the novel, is fully realized with physical, emotional, and mental attributes, grasping desperately to be her own master, she is nevertheless overpowered, becoming a victim of circumstance, nature,

     Thomas Hardy often alludes to his heroine as the "soft and silent Tess."  "Soft" certainly insinuates her beauty, which Harrtainly insinuates her beauty, which Hardy stresses as her downfall.  However, it seems that Tess's silence is the all-pervading reason for her tragedies.  "The two men she encounters in her life steal her voice: one with violence, the other with his own language"(Jacobus 47).  Tess struggles with the damage that these men cause until redeeming herself through innocence.

One of her motivations for killing her children is also that their death is inevitable; she reveals this when she says “This shall never be, that I should suffer my children to be the prey of my enemies’ insolence.” (34) She also shows that she loves them when she says “Force every way will have it they must die, and since this must be so, then I their mother, shall kill them... This one short day be forgetful of your children, afterward weep; for even though you will kill them, they were very dear – Oh, I am an unhappy woman!” (40) This dialogue makes her seem more humane, and arouses pity in the audience as they see her dilemma, and struggle to follow through with her task.

At the end of the book, it is difficult when everything and everyone she relied on disappeared. This way of upbringing makes it tough when she does have to leave all that she knew and support

Although many would say that the author was trying to convey (emotion) to the reader, however, it seems to some that the author was more likely to pity her.

One does not decide what family one is born into. The innocent child, Tess, cannot be blamed for being born into a poor family. Tess is a victim of her upbringing, the situation of her father and mother as well as the knowledge of her ancestors, who were rich and prosperous. The fact that they had existed did not help Tess. However, it would have been a different story if she had been born into a wealthy family. Tess is the eldest of the family’s children and being a girl in that time was more complicated. As Joan Perkin in Victorian Women says:

Tess D’Urberville, the protagonist of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, must ask herself this very important question as she navigates the complexity of her life. Although she must provide for her family by running errands, taking care of her younger siblings, and managing her unruly parents Tess is a product of her culture. She is unintentionally passive in dire situations – such as when she drifted into a reverie and killed the family horse, or when fell asleep and was raped. Tess is also a symbol of purity, innocence and fertility like many other women of the time. Although social stigmas and her immoral social status are hindering, Tess’s burdensome past is the problem that truly prevents her from escaping her fate and developing a sense of