Tess is a young girl visiting her cousin Alec, who is of a higher class the Tess, Alec takes advantage of this and controls where they go and what they do. Hardy presents Alec as a scheming man and there seems something weird about him, Tess on the other hand is of completely different character to Alec, she seems like a vulnerable girl and has no control over what they do or where they go.
In the first extract Tess comes over as very uneasy around Alec, for example when Alec called her a ‘pretty girl’ she blushed, also Alec directs the conversation and answers in short sentences and in not much detail at all ‘yes when they come’ and ‘I suppose I have’ show this. I think that in this extract it shows that Tess has little or no power in the relationship, it shows this how Alec directs the conversation and how he gives Tess no chance to do what she wants to do as he shows Tess around the ground.
There is a lot of evidence in this extract that Alec treats Tess as inferior to himself, maybe because Tess isn’t from as higher class background as himself or just because he is sexist and thinks that women are inferior to men. There is evidence of this when Alec asks Tess ‘where do you live? What are you?’ This shows that the two characters are not at all close, you would think that if you had a cousin coming to stay you would find out who they were and know where they come from or even know them before.
There is a point in the first extract where you see that Alec has and influence over Tess and what she does. When Alec tries to feed Tess the strawberry Tess says ‘ no….no I’d rather take it in my own hand’ but it seemed like Tess had no choice whatever but to take the strawberry from Alec as he pushed it towards Tess’ mouth anyway.
Yet again in extract two there is another point at which Tess is made to sound inferior to Alec, Tess says ‘oh not at all sir’, This shows that Tess respects Alec for being of a higher class to her.
In this extract we learn a lot about the two characters. We learned that Tess is a lot younger than she looks Thomas Hardy showed this when he says that Tess had a ‘fullness of growth, which made her, appear more of a woman than she really was’. There is more evidence of Tess looking older than she is when Thomas Hardy says ‘the tragic mischief of her drama one who stood fair to be the blood-red ray in the spectrum of her young life’.
In this extract Tess and Alec are set in a smoke filled tent. I think that Thomas Hardy has done this to make Alec seem a little more threatening towards Tess.
There are a few points suggesting that Alec likes Tess as more than just a cousin, Hardy shows this by saying ‘causing Alec D’urbervilles eyes to rivet upon her’ as Alec looked at her. This is proof of my point as your eyes do not rivet upon someone who is a cousin of yours.
Again in this extract there is a clue that Alec is of a higher class than Tess. It says that Tess’ full name is ‘Tess Durbeyfield’ and Alec’s name is Alec D’urberville, this sounds like a posh and more of a higher-class version of the name Durbeyfield.
The third extract is different from the other extracts as the style of the writing changes, the words used are longer and generally more difficult to read than the other extracts. I found that this made the extract harder and more difficult to understand. The tone of the extract changes when Alec says that Tess ‘was doomed’, at this moment you feel that the rest of the story may take a different route to what you may have first imagined.
Extract four is only a short extract but yet it tells so much about Alec .You learn that Alec may have thought that he was leading Tess on but didn’t really care for her one bit.
In the last extract Alec breaks out into a loud laugh and says to himself ‘what a crummy girl’ this is another sign that Alec thinks upon Tess as inferior or of lower class to himself, that he was leading her on and didn’t care one bit for her.
