Everyday life in Tess

Thomas Hardy is a famous English vernacular writer in the 19th century, he was born in Dorset, did not have a good education, spent the first half of his life in half-work and half-study, and when he reached middle age, he relied on writing to have a certain reputation, before giving up the original profession of repairing churches and serving the muse.

In Hardy's pen, the 19th-century British countryside style and customs are unobstructed, and his own literati identity gives these depictions a unique atmosphere: he is not a city man, a Londoner to examine the country terroir, nor is he born in the kind of obsession and nostalgia that grew up in Si, he quietly records the country stories full of sadness with a hint of alienation and three points of distance.

Hardy's masterpiece Tess writes about the tragic fate of a "pure woman" (as the subtitle suggests), and through her story, we also get a glimpse of the daily habits of the British countryside at that time.

The novel is interspersed with many descriptions of customs and habits, which also shows the importance of "tradition and continuity" in British culture. The novel opens with a "parade", an annual dance party that women are keen to attend, they wear long white dresses, representing the legacy of the old times, holding peeled willow sticks and white flowers in their hands, and people passing by can dance with them, and whoever receives the most invitations has the most face. Today, such a parade is gone.

The novel also records a custom called "idle travel", every Saturday night, everyone will gather in the town's tavern, drink a strange drink mixed with beer, and dance together, this dance not only has the nature of relaxation and entertainment, but even has the nature of a competition, Tess is precisely because she does not want to participate in the dance in the "leisure tour", and late at night into the deep forest, encountered misfortune.

In addition, through this novel, we can also see the admiration of supernatural phenomena and superstitions in the English countryside at that time. This also shows that in this country where the industrial revolution first occurred, in fact, traditional cognition and belief still have a lot of room for survival, and have not been swept away by the so-called "modernization".

There are a lot of coincidences and superstitions in the novel. For example, after Tess went to work at a relative's house, she was favored by the young master Of the relative's family, Yalei, who sent her a lot of roses, and when Tess looked down to admire these roses, she was suddenly stabbed, and she had an ominous premonition at that time, and afterwards she was seduced by Yare confirmed this premonition. This kind of "sign thinking" is often very popular in traditional agricultural societies, including China, which also says that it has seen "unclean things", and if we look at it from an anthropological point of view, we can probably call them a primitive witchcraft thinking.

When Tess endured hardships and finally harvested love again, she once again encountered the "omen culture" of the countryside. As she and the bride-to-be Angel were in a car preparing to leave the farm where she had worked, she suddenly heard the sound of roosters chirping, which was widely believed to be a bad omen in the afternoon, and Tess's heart was once again overshadowed. Later, her past events are learned by Angel, who can't stand it, leaves her fiancée, and tragedy happens again.

Tess writes about the unfortunate life of a woman who is wrapped in all sorts of ancient customs and even becomes a woman herself, becoming a curse and misfortune. Hardy has always doubted the legitimacy of these customs and ideas in the novel, and when he puts his doubts into the tragic life of a woman, we will find that Hardy is not only a recorder of Victorian rural life, but also a reflector.