The Offering On The Altar Of Tradition

Being a transitional period from tradition to modern, the Victorian Age saw heterogeneous groups and schools focusing on sex and gender roles in more open, more informed and less complacent ways. More and more writers attacked double standards, occasional convenient marriages, and male superiority. At the same time, the Victorian Age was a considerably conservative period in which so-called femininity such as chastity, docility, beauty, self-sacrifice, and gentility, etc. was highly canonized.As a man brought up in the Victorian Age, Thomas Hardy, writing under and about his time, never survived the contemporary ideologies towards woman. His complex social background determined his paradoxical attitude towards woman, which led to his characterization of women in his novels. This thesis attempts to explore Tess in the social, historical and cultural contexts in which Tess is created. It holds that Tess's tragedy is due to her dependent economic condition and subordinate social condition.The thesis is structured in five parts: The Introduction, questioning all the opinions that impute Tess's death to the two men, focus on one aspect of her characteristics, and ignore the responsibilities of tradition, leads to the proposal that Tess is an offering on the altar of tradition, and defines the working definition of several terms concerned. Chapter One traces the dynamical process of Tess's self-consciousness surrendering to conventional ideology. Chapter Two analyzes the relationship of love and marriage, self-will and self-sacrifice, woman's chastity and man's licentiousness, self-dependence and man-dependence, woman's economic and social conditions to put forwards a new interpretation for Tess's surrender to tradition and her tragedy. Chapter Three exploresHardy's paradoxical sex ideologies. It maintains that Hardy never realized the essence of woman problem, not to speak of criticizing patriarchal ideology thoroughly. He functioned as an unconscious accomplice in Tess's case. The Conclusion summarizes elements that lead to Tess's tragedy, and concludes that without change of their economic and social conditions, women's struggle for self-fulfillment and self-independence is paradoxical, and finally turns out to be tragic.