tess of durbervilles
...g long hours for little money to pay for a large family when higher society were just getting richer and richer of the work done by people like her. In the opening chapters the rustic women including Tess are described as wearing a lot of white which symbolises their virginity. He uses words like 'secluded', 'engirdled', 'beautiful', and 'fertile' to describe Marlott which is where Tess lives, the is also how you can describe Tess and this makes her decline even more shocking. Tess is secluded and lonely because her parents send her off to her rich relatives hoping for something good and ignoring how Tess feels about it even though she cares about her family. She is fertile meaning that she is 'untouched' and pure also Hardy regulary describes her beauty,'she was a fine and picturesque country gurl,and no more'. There is another point in the book where Tess prays at what she thinks is some sort of holy relic but later finds out it was the grave of an evil man,'Tis a thing of ill-omen, Miss. It ws put up in wuld times by the relations of a malefactor who was tortured there by nailing his hands to a post and afterwards hung. the bones lie underneath. They say he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks at times', this foreshadows when she is hung at the end of the book. Another use of symobolism is used late in the book where Tess and Angel are at stonehenge, 'But Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon an oblong slab that lay close at hand, and was sheltered from the wind by a pillar', some people speculate that ritualized funerary processions where held at stonehenge which could foreshadow her coming death or this could be a reference to sacrifice,'and the stone of sacrifice midway'. Also when Tess spends a night in the woods she is described like she is hiding and there is also the...