Tonight, eventually I finished the book, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. She is a girl full of innocence. She just like a angle somehow wrongly run into the world of human.

  Everything begins with so called the ancient and noble family of the d’Urbervilles. Tess’s parents, a poor couple, was so proud of such title that the sent Tess to their unseen before but rich enough relative to ask for help. Who know this is the beginning of the tragedy? Why does she have to meet the wrong man, Alec d’Urbervilles, who was so strongly attracted to her? However, to the right man, she was only a half forgotten impression from an evening’s dancing in a country field. God always like to play a little trick. In life, the right man to love hardly ever comes at the right time for loving. Nature does not often answer the call for love, until the caller is tired of calling. In this case, as in millions, the two who should not have been a couple have met while the missing half wandered somewhere else, arriving much later.

  Alec d’Urbervilles, the so called gentleman, could not control his desire but to seduce Tess, a poor, pure woman, on a foggy night. When she came back her village, all the man scolded her, taking her for a shameful woman. After the death of her son, she finally decided to live her home village to begin a new life. She went far away to be a dairymaid. She ran along, her hope and sunshine warming her. It is exciting scene that when she ran laughing into the wind, she looked at her best. It seems that the desire for pleasure, which is in every living thing, has finally won over Tess. She was, after all, only a young woman of twenty, who has not finished growing up. No event, however unpleasant, could have marked her forever.

And here, she met her right man, Clare. He is an intelligence rather than a man in her heart. I still remember a conversation between them. One day, he asked her why she looked so sad. She said she want to know that why the sun shines on the good and the bad just the same. Her question gave me a shock. Though I understand her experience, I still hope that she only picked up this question from others. How I hope that she was the pure child of nature as she used to be.

Anyway, here, she temporary had a good time with him. That summer, Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other, balanced on the edge of a passion, yet just keeping out of it. But all the time, like two streams in a valley, they were bound to join. Then they married.

Unfortunately, her tragedy didn’t end with her marriage. One day, something unexpected forced Tess to bravely tell him the whole story with Alec d’Urbervilles and its results. It is too much for Clare to bear. One of his words shocked me a lot, that is, the woman I have been loving was not you, but another woman in your shape. How deeply this kind of words would hurt her, especially from the man her love most. Before him, she has become a guilty woman pretending to be an innocent one. She sat in the dark. The night has swallowed his happiness.

The man decided to leave, with the classical reason that he need some time to think. But what made me puzzle is what Tess said. “I agree to the conditions, Clare, because you know best. Only don’t make it too much for me to bear.” That should be all she said. We can well understand that if she had sobbed or fainted or begged him, he would probably have given way. But she made it easy for him. Maybe only those in love know the answer.

He went to Brazil and his attitude had changed during this time. He began to look again at what was right and wrong. He began to see that a person should be judged not only on what he has done but also on what he wanted to do. He began to think that he had perhaps been unfair to Tess, and he thought about her growing affection.

What made Tess most unexpected was she should come across Alec again. He cheated her that Clare would never come back and managed to force her to marry him. Before this, she has written several letters to Clare but without reply.

After he got the letter, he immediately went to see Tess, but only find that she had become other’s wife. The truth drove Tess, the weak woman to kill Clare. She was arrested at last. The gods has finished playing with Tess. Society had seen “justice” done. And I, the reader, may the angle never come to the world of human again.

The above is the whole plot of the Tess then let us go further about it. One of the themes often referred to in this novel is the way in which man dominate women. Sometimes the command is purposeful, in the man's full knowledge of what he did. For example, Alec acknowledges how bad he is after he seduce Tess for his own pleasure. Alec's act of abuse , the event greatly change the life of Tess, is the most serious instance of male domination over a female. But there are other examples. After Algel reveals that he prefers Tess, Tess' friend Retty attempts suicide and her friend Marian becomes alcoholics, which make s their earlier schoolgirl-type broke. These girls appear absolutely dominated by a desire for a man who does not realize that they are interested in him. This kind of unconscious male domination of women is perhaps even worse than Alec's self-conscious control.

Even Angel's love for Tess, as pure and gentle as it seems, dominates her in an unhealthy way. He has idealized her. When he calls her names like "Daughter of Nature" and "Artemis," I feel that he may be denying her true self in favour of a mental image that he prefers. At the end of the novel, Tess killed Alec, in which a man takes active steps against a man. Of course, this act only leads to even greater suppression of a woman by men, when the crow of male police officers arrest Tess. Her act seems heroic thought she just change the woman's lower status for a moment.

As far as the role of landscape in the novel. It always seems to inform us about the emotion and character of the event. When the novel opens at the village dance, the sun is out and the day is beautiful. This celebration is where Tess and Angel meet, even if only briefly. The weather turn as Tess returns home, where the scene is less elegant. Throughout the novel, many of the bad events occur in a dark and deep forest, and Alec and Tess met so many times in such a forest. The season bring changes to the story as well. At Talbothays dairy, the summer is full of budding love between Tess and Angel. When they profess their love for each other, they begins to rain, but neither of them cares: the weather cannot affect them. When they separate, Angel goes to Brazil an d finds the farming extremely difficult, while Tess goes to work at the farm at Flintcomb-Ash, where the work in rugged, depressing stubble fields in harsh and grueling.

Then I want to introduce something about the author and this novel. Thomas Hardy was born on june 2, 1840, in Higher Bockhampton in Dorset, a rural region of southwestern England that was to become the focus of his fiction. Although he built a reputation as a successful novelist, Hardy consider himself first and foremost a poet. To him, novels were primary a means of earning a living. Like many of his contemporaries, he first published his novels in periodic installments in magazines or serial journals, and his work reflects the conventions of serialization. To ensure that readers would buy a serialized novel, writers often structured each installment to be something of a cliffhanger, which explained the convoluted, often incredible plots of many such Victorian novels. But Hardy cannot solely be labeled a Victorian novelist.

Soon after Tess of the d'Urbervilles(1891) was published, its sales assured Hardy 's financial future. But the novel also aroused a substantial amount of controversy. In the Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy demonstrates his deep sense of moral sympathy for England 's lower classes , particularly for the rural women. This novel disclose the sexual hypocrisy of English society which caused broad public controversy.

Hardy lived and wrote in a time of difficult social change, when England was making its slow and painful transition from an old fashioned, agricultural nation to a modern, industrial one. Businessmen and entrepreneurs joined the ranks of the social elite, as some families of hen ancient aristocracy faded into obscurity. Tess' family in Tess of the d'Urbervilles  well illustrates this change, as Tess' parents, the Durbeyfields, lose themselves in the fantasy of belonging to an ancient and aristocratic family, the d'Urbervilles. His novel strongly suggested that such a family history is not only meaningless but also utterly undesirable. His views on this subject were unacceptable to conservative and status-conscious British readers, and Tess of  the d'Urbervilles  was met in England with widespread controversy. 

Hardy was frustrated by the controversy caused by his work, and he finally abandoned novel writing soon after he finished Jude the Obscure. He spent the rest of his career writing poetry. However, today he is remember somewhat more for his novels.