Author(s)

Bingjie Xu ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Foreign Languages, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China

Corresponding Author

Bingjie Xu

ABSTRACT

Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Tess Durbeyfield in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles are two excellent feminist representatives in the treasure-house of British and American literature. Although the two female leading characters were in different times and countries, they share a lot in common in the causes of destiny tragedy. Both Hester and Tess were born in poor families and suffered the oppression of religion and male-oriented society. Both of them were victims of two men. However, they finally went to different endings of salvation and destruction for different resistance attitudes and personalities. Tess was hesitant in resisting tradition and adopted a radical way of confrontation while Hester insisted on countering the tradition and adopted a sustained way. Hester was tough, self-reliance and sustained while Tess was weak, dependence and radical. Through comparative studying the similarities and differences between Hester and Tess, we can reflect the same trouble of female survival under male power and gain some enlightenment on the current male-female relationships.

KEYWORDS

Hester, Tess, tragedy, similarities, differences

CITE THIS PAPER

Bingjie Xu, The Comparative Interpretation of Tess's and Hester's Tragedy. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2023) Vol. 6: 27-33. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2023.060805.

REFERENCES

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