Tess As A Tragic Victim Of Circumstance example essay topic

It is a part of being human that a person should err once in a while, but hopefully, and usually, they learn from their mistake and then recoup their losses, recover, and eventually reach a better place. However, this is not the case with the title character in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Many critics see Tess as a tragic victim of circumstance, who has little control over the events in her life, but Tess's attitude at different points in the book suggest otherwise. Tess is no stranger to being wronged by fate. She was born to a family with too many children, a drunken father, and a preoccupied mother. She is poor, but managed to go to school for a little while.

She is embarrassed by her father's drunken antics when he comes across her walking with her friends. She is forced to be the adult of the family and take care of the younger children when her parents stay down at the tavern. It is also up to her to deliver the beehives when her father isn't able to, and it is she who is sent to first beg money from and later work for the "rich relations". However, throughout the entire first phase of the book Tess accepts her responsibilities and faces them with determination.

Never once does she claim to be a victim. Tess's only mistake throughout the entire book is that she never stands up for herself. She accepts everything that befalls her and usually does what is asked of her. She is constantly thinking of others - her brothers and sisters, her child, her parents, or Angel - instead of listening to her intuition and thinking of herself.

She knows that Alec makes her uneasy - there is something she doesn't like about him - but when her mother tells her to go with him to work for his mother, she does it with little to no fight. She never even mentions that she has some doubts. When Angel blames Tess for her rape, she doesn't stand up to him. Instead, she agrees that it is her fault for attracting Alec.

Her only words after murdering Alec are a request to Angel to take care of Liza-Lu - no mention at all of how Alec raped her and pushed her to the very limit of her sanity. If Tess applied the same determination to these incidents that she applies to circumstances that are truly out of her control - like the actions of her parents and the life she was born into - she wouldn't be such a tragic figure. Granted, Tess is the victim of a rape, however, everything that happens to her after the rape is within her control. Each of the situations she faces presents her with a choice - fight it or accept it. Perhaps because of the time the book was written in, Tess chooses to accept her "fate" most often, women not being allowed to live independently during this period. One would think that each of her experiences somehow teaches Tess, that she gains some strength, or some piece of knowledge about herself from them.

Unfortunately, since her automatic reaction is to accept the bad things that happen to her without thought, she doesn't giver herself the chance to learn anything. In doing this, she makes herself the victim. The rape may not have been her fault, but her refusal to stand up and fight for herself is her choice, and is her fault. While it is true that Tess is placed in difficult positions throughout the course of her life, she brings many of them upon herself by refusing to fight.

It is not solely the world that victimizes Tess - she herself plays a part in it. The book could have ended with Tess telling her mother, "I won't go work for them because he makes me uncomfortable" and steadfastly refusing to go to the d'Urbervilles, but then, where would the story be in that? If anything, this book teaches the lesson that in ninety-nine percent of the experiences in our lives, we have a choice and it is the choice that we make that shapes the next chapter and paves the next road. Tess may have not liked the choices she had, but she still had options, and it is her refusal to make the more difficult choice - because it is very easy to sit back and be complacent throughout life - that makes her a victim. It is her fault a great deal of the time. Reading the story of Tess this way can make one think about how many of our tragic figures nowadays could have prevented their own tragedies?