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Themes for Tess and Dalloway - Coggle Diagram
Themes for Tess and Dalloway
Female Experience
Role in society
Expectations
Female voice
'You are an unapprehending peasant woman, [...] You don't know what you say.' pg. 232
Relationships
Relationships influenced by how others will perceive them- 'He loved her, ought he to marry her? Dared he to marry her? What would his mother and his brothers say? pg.156
Hopes/Ambitions
Female Appearance
Acquiring knowledge
Lack of Knowledge
Tess is unaware of the dangers men can pose and blames her mother for not telling her - 'Why didn't you tell me there was danger? Why didn't you warn me? Ladies know what to guard against, because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance of discovering in that way, and you did not help me!' pg. 82
Knowledge Inequalities
'How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge' pg.9, 'She knew nothing; no language; no history; she scarcely read a book now' pg. 9 - Clarissa is self-deprecating with her knowledge, also shows that upper class individuals do not need to rely on knowledge to survive.
'the Vicars view of that seat of learning as a stepping-stone to Orders alone was quite a family tradition' pg.116 - Education within the Clare family signifies status and allows them to follow a religious path. Allows Hardy to critique society's restrictions on knowledge.
Context: 1870 Education Act - set framework for the schooling of children aged 5-12
Power of Knowledge to improve social position
Journey's
Narrative
Woolf creates connections between all the characters - 'being attached to her by a thin thread which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one's friends were attached to one's body' pg. 123
Physical Journey
Tess walks around the Wessex countryside
Clarissa and the other characters are walking around London
Unavoidable character trajectories
Restrictions on journeys
Growing up/ageing
Time
Context: Henri Bergson Theory of Duration
Transcience
Sorrow does not experience time -'to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew not that such things as years and centuries ever were;' pg.96
Time as a narrative device
The striking of Big Ben is a motif used throughout the text allowing Woolf to structure the novel with time - 'The clock was striking - one, two, three: [...] the clock went on striking, four, five, six' pg.164
Class Inequality
Female Position
Tess viewed as a peasant due to her social status -'I am only a peasant by position, not by nature' pg. 232
Social class restricting characters
Interaction between social classes
Power
Female power/ lack of
Religion
Idea that is human's to blame however we use our religion to pass the blame - 'in that shabby corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all the unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides and others of the conjecturally damned are laid.' pg.97
Power through class position
Male Power
Angel refuses to forgive Tess for the misfortunes she experienced, however Tess forgives Angel - hypocrisy of social standards and behaviours - 'Forgiveness does not apply to the case.' pg.228
Relationship Dynamics
Power of societal expectations
Social conventions
Context: Virginia Woolf in her diary stated that in Dalloway she wanted 'to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.'
Hope
Lack of hope
Hope and religion
Social Status
Upper class
Lower class
Impact of having a strong reputation
Suffering
Mental illness
Society's failure to help those with mental illness. Sir William Bradshaw advises Septimus to rest - 'rest in solitude; silence and rest, rest without friends, without books, without messages; six months rest' pg. 108
Context: Woolf's sister Laura Stephens spent most of her life institutionalised as suffered from mental disabilities.
Context: Woolf suffered from depression for large periods of her life, with suicide attempts in 1913. Woolf died via suicide in 1941.
Septimus struggling with shell-shock, 'Now he had surrendered; now other people must help him. People must be sent for. He gave in.' pg. 99
Suffering at the hands of others
Tess's rape - 'upon this beautiful feminine tissue [...] there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive;' pg. 74
Rezia suffers due to the behaviour and actions of Septimus, she loves him but he does not love her. 'She was very lonely, she was very unhappy!' pg. 99 'he had married his wife without loving her; had lied to her; seduced her;' pg. 100
Idea that female temptation leads to male suffering - 'Clare was oppressed by the outward heats, so was he burdened inwardly by a waxing fervour of passion for the soft and silent Tess.' pg. 149
Female suffering
Unhappy with appearance - 'She could not help being ugly; she could not afford to buy pretty clothes.' pg. 141 Miss Kilman feels inadequate due to her appearance and highlights how women are judged on how they look.
Maidens' suffer as lose security Angel would have provided them - 'Marian: she's been found dead drunk' pg. 222 '[Izz] very low in mind about it' pg. 222, [Retty] 'In the water he found her.' pg. 222
Social view that women are responsible for their own suffering - 'women's faces have had too much power over me already for me not to fear them!' pg. 310. Alec suggesting that Tess's beauty is the reason why he raped her.
'Swear that you will never tempt me - by your charms or ways' pg.311
'grow momentarily fascinated by her freshness, and wonder if they would ever see her again: but to almost everybody she was a fine and picturesque country girl.' pg.16
Tess loses her child - 'passed away Sorrow the Undesired' pg.96
Miss Kilman's dissatisfaction with her own appearance - 'her forehead remained egg, bald, white. No clothes suited her. She might buy anything. And for a woman, of course, that meant never meeting the opposite sex.' pg.141
Society's expectations leading to suffering
Tess is faced with criticism and judgment due to her impurity
Clarissa struggles due to the expectation that a woman's role in society is merely to reproduce - 'She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children' pg. 11
Isolation
Isolation due to social judgment
Fate
Unavoidable trajectories
Role of Fate within the novels
Reputation
Nature
Nature reflecting narrative
'the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization' pg.149, 'part of Nature to match the state of hearts at Talbothays Dairy.' pg.149, 'the landscape seemed lying in swoon.' pg.149 - luxuriousness of nature, sexual imagery reflecting romance between Angel and Tess.