7A Quotes to Learn

Woolf, Trespassing

‘Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground … Let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves’ (Virginia Woolf, ‘The Leaning Tower’, [1940])

Cixous, Women’s Writing

‘I shall speak about women’s writing, about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies…’ Hélène Cixous, ‘Laugh of the Medusa’ (‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, 1975; translation is from Signs 1 [1976])

Irigaray, Masculine Imaginary

‘I am trying to go back through the masculine imaginary, to interpret the way it has reduced us to silence, to muteness or mimicry, and I am attempting, from that starting point and at the same time, to (re)discover a possible space for the feminine imaginary’ (164) Luce Irigaray: ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’ (1977)

Dusinberre, Stage and Gender

 ‘Men and women perform on stage the gender roles which they are required to perform in society, thus highlighting the theatricality inherent in social behaviour’ (xxi [1996])

Sedgwick, Homosocial Exchange

‘in the total scheme of things, men’s bonds with women are meant to be in a subordinate, complementary, and instrumental relation to bonds with other men’

Gitanjali: Bharatwaj Iyer

Gitanjali’s God is a shifting God. It sometimes risks becoming nothing but the object of the poet, for no other sake than to fulfill poetry’s need for an object.

French Feminist Theory

‘ecriture feminine’ women’s writing, prelinguistic, grounded in the mother-child relationship, Helene Cixous. Cixous not writing just with blood, but milk: ‘she writes with white ink’.

‘parler femme’, woman’s writing, speaking, or to speak woman. Fluid, multiple, dispersed, grounded in the plurality of women’s erogeneity, Luce Irigaray.

‘interdit’ (forbidden) = ‘inter-dit’ (spoken inbetween), interest in gaps, the unspoken, as well as the unsayable.

French feminist theory might be seen more as a though experiment than a praxis, it’s not directly political, in the way that Rubin and Sedgwick are political. It’s a utopian theory and practice.

Woolf on Biography

Woolf ‘The New Biography’ (1927) theory of biography: ‘granite and rainbow’. ‘Truth’ she envisions ‘as something of granite-like solidity’, and ‘personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility’, and ‘the aim of biography’, she proposes, ‘is to weld these two into one seamless whole’ (E4 473).

EDWARD CARPENTER, 1889

‘The cure is not to cut off the passions, or to be weakly afraid of them, but to find a new, sound, healthy engine of general morality and common-sense within which they will work.’

‘the strange sense of mental unrest which marks our populations’ Civilisation

Section praising the recovery of other races over his own, particularly the Keffirs, giving accounts of men who have witnessed great recoveries which a European ‘civilised man could not have survived’. Still has an exoticising and animalising gaze: ‘superabundant health is [shown by] the amazing animal spirits of these native races’

Jane Eyre: Passion/Moderation

'I scorn your idea of love ... I scorn the counterfeit sentiment you offer.' JE to SJR

"Jane, you are docile, diligent, disinterested, faithful, constant and courageous; very gentle, and very heroic." - St John Rivers

Jane’s attraction to Rochester develops because he fosters her passions, suppressed since childhood—> sense of liberation.

Jane Eyre: Class

"I hope to save enough money out of my earnings to set up a school some day in a little house rented by myself.”

'I care for my self. The more solidarity, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.' - Jane Eyre

'poverty to me was synonymous with degradation.' -Jane Eyre

Inheriting money and claiming kin with SJs at the end allows her passions to become widely accepted, and for her to fix the issues she sees in the world.

Jane Eyre: Power

"Jane! will you hear reason? Because, if you don't, I'll try violence."' Edward Rochester, Chapter 27

“a sister might any day be taken from me. I want a wife: the sole helpmeet I can influence efficiently in life, and retain absolutely till death.” SJR

'I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine.' Jane Eyre

‘under her domination as his nurse and guide’ Miriam Bailin, The Art of Being Ill

Jane Eyre: Religion

“Where is God? What is God?” as Helen dies

“God invented you for a missionary’s wife.” St. John to Jane

“I prayed in my way—different to St John’s, but effective in its own fashion.” after hearing Mr. R’s voice

Jane Eyre: Biography/Style

“But this is not to be a regular autobiography.”

“And, reader, do you think I feared him in his blind ferocity?—if you do, you little know me.”

Jane Eyre: Illness

“When the typhus fever had fulfilled its mission of devastation at Lowood…”

Jane Eyre: Peak Combo Quote

“But as you are rich, Jane, you have now, no doubt, friends who will look after you, and not suffer you to devote yourself to a blind lameter like me?”

“I told you I am independent, sir, as well as rich: I am my own mistress.”

Bleak House: Class

Of Jo: ‘not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (...) but to feel it‘

Bleak House: Growing Up

‘Submission, self-denial, diligent work, are the preparations for a life begun with such a shadow on it.’ to Esther from her ‘Godmother’ when asking about her mother on her birthday

Bleak House: Passion/Moderation

‘'Mrs Rachael was too good to feel any emotion at parting, but I was not so good, and wept bitterly' Esther, Goodness equated with repression

Michael Slater: Esther was Dickens’ first attempt at a narrative from the perspective of a female character. He suggests that passionate women in D’s work face, “A frozen life, a premature death, [or] a life selflessly devoted to the service of others”; map onto Vic. Archetypes: the fallen woman, the new woman, and the angel in the house

Bleak House: Style

‘What the destitute subject of such an offer […] felt, and will feel to her dying hour, I could never relate.' Esther being offered an education after the death of her godmother (actually her aunt).

Bleak House: Growing Up/Children/Class Combo

‘It is said that the children of the very poor are not brought up, but dragged up’ said by Mr Jarndyce to to justify the ‘perfect child’, Harold Skimpole’s lack of attention to his children—a sort of ‘if they survive… then so will his’, but he says it ‘his countenance suddenly falling’. They then move on to talk about the house.

Bleak House: Gender/Identity/Class

she was called '[list of names…] mother Hubbard and Dame Durden, and so many name of the sort that my own name became quite lost among them' Esther’s Angel of the House identity, swallowed up by the duties around her, but valued in this role

Bleak House: Narrative Style/Honesty

‘I have suppressed none of my weaknesses on that subject, but have written them as faithfully as my memory has recalled them.’ Esther on the final events

Tess: Children/Class

“half-dozen little captives… such hard conditions… the shiftless house of Durbeyfield.”

Tess: Innocence/Knowledge

“And if he don’t marry her afore he will after.”

Tess: Religion, Passion/Moderation

“vermilion words shone forth” “I cannot split hairs on that burning query.” Started by Mr Clare. The Zealous Artist
“Her darling was about to die, and no salvation.” Sorrow the Undesired

Tess: Narrative/Style, Gender

“bouncing handsome womanliness”
“a luxuriance of aspect, a fulness of growth”
“Our heroine”
“a divine personage”

Tess: Innocence, Passion/Moderation, Knowledge

“a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience.”
“I was a child… why didn’t you tell me there was danger?”

Tess: Marlott

In the Vale of Blackmoor, a place that reflects the hidden stagnation of her upbringing—it is a place of acidic land, where “arable lands are few and limited”. Hardy retrospectively describes this location as where “[Tess] had rooted down to a poisonous stratum”,

Tess: Passion/Moderation, Knowledge

“a visionary essence of woman—a whole sex”
“an intelligence rather than a man”

Tess: Social Context

Rise of Industrialisation, time of rural decline, five consecutive years of poor harvests, time of the “Long Depression”.
Genesis, “The Fall of Man” (section heading, The Fall), frames his secular, didactic story about the decline of rural life in the bible to elevate it. Tess, like Eve, begins innocent, then eats of the tree of knowledge, and is cast to be damned forever. See all her assorted biblical allusions.
Subtitle “A Pure Woman”

Tess: Class Idealisation

“their position was perhaps the happiest of the social scale”, Talbothays

Tess: Place/Setting

‘damp and rank with juicy grass… staining her hands… upon her naked arms, blood-red stains‘
Flintcomb Ash, ‘starve-acre place’
The Slopes, strawberries already ripe
Gothic landscape at the Chase, “webs of vapour… formed veils between the trees”
Blending in as she approaches Talbothays, ‘of no more consequence to the surroundings than that fly‘

Nightwood: Identity/Knowledge

‘I, Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Connor, will tell you how the day and the night are related.’
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), whose epic poem The Divine Comedy describes a journey from damnation to salvation, and skepticism.

When talking to Nora, declares that he has become ‘the greatest liar this side of the moon’ because he is always ‘telling my stories to people like you, to take the mortal agony out of their guts’

Nightwood: Passion/Moderation

‘[Jenny Petherbridge] appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora’s for Robin.’ Narrator
‘I have been loved,’ she said, ‘by something strange, and it has forgotten me.’ Nora on Robin

Nightwood: Biography

Djuna Barnes was well aware of these readings, and her own Paris community had its fair share of destroyed lives—think of Renée Vivien or Dolly Wilde. Djuna Barnes had spoofed the gay and not so gay times of her circle in Ladies Almanack.

Roman à Clef
Letter to friend before the publication: ‘Had a letter from Thelma, possibly the last in my life if the book does get printed. She will hate me so - it’s awful- God almighty what a price one pays for 200 pages.’

Nightwood: Passion/Moderation, Biography

‘Is there such extraordinary need of misery to make beauty?’, the doctor, quoted by Jeanette Winterson, who says the answer is already written as yes. Text written in the 1930s, a time of trauma for Barnes: separation from Thelma Wood, an affair with the young writer Charles Henri Ford, severe appendicitis, an abortion, and the physical toll of increasingly heavy drinking. Final section written when she was forced back to NY by a breakdown.

Nightwood: Animality

Then as one powerful lioness came to the turn of the bars, exactly opposite the girl, she turned her furious great head with its yellow eyes afire and went down, her paws thrust through the bars[…]

Then she began to bark also, crawling after him—barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching. […] until she gave up […] and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees

Nightwood: Children

Robin had given me a doll.
Then I looked up and there on the wall was the photograph of Robin when she was a baby
‘it is their child, sacred and profane; so when I saw that other doll—'
All Nora to the doctor
They’re different dolls

Nightwood: Gender/Identity/Power

‘a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own. If she is taken you cry that you have been robbed of yourself.’ Nora to the doctor
‘You make me feel dirty and tired and old!’ […] She was drunk. He had her by her wrist, one hand on her behind.

Nightwood: Style

112 word sentence, a whole paragraph about Nora finding her grandmother crossdressing which then flows into her new understanding of Robin given to her by an at last completed dream, ends with ‘Robin disfigured and eternalized by the hieroglyphics of sleep and pain.’, showing that the dream is a communication of meaning, using the mixed identity of her grandmother to reflect on Robin.
‘This is not the solid nineteenth-century world of narrative, it is the shifting, slipping, relative world of Einstein and the Modernists, the twin assault by science and art on what we thought we were sure of.’
‘a torrential and Byzantine language—a language of indirection—Barnes creates a lexicon of loss that acts as a strategy for recuperating what has been unspeakable’ Victoria Smith

Nightwood: Suffering

Matthew, drunk, final chapter: ‘If you don’t want to suffer, you should tear yourself apart.’ He then declares that he is completely sick and tired of telling stories, and that he has ‘lived my life for nothing, but I’ve told it for nothing’, and the original draft ended there, on the line ‘now nothing, but wrath and weeping!‘

Passage: Biography

The British Raj, a period of British colonial rule over India from 1858 to 1947, serves as the backdrop for A Passage to India.

Orlando: Thwarted Sexuality

[Seeing Sasha skate, thinking she is a man] Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question.

Orlando: Woolf lying about her expectations of biography

‘the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade…’

Orlando: Conversational, collaborative guiding of the reader

And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story.

Orlando: Love of literature as a disease

he was a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature.
infected by a germ
(Description of how it makes reality disappear into a ‘mist’, how all of his belongings are inconsequential to him, he becomes a ‘naked man’)
he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin

Orlando: Womanhood and Englishness

she had scarcely given her sex a thought [when with the Turkish travellers]
the coil of her skirts about her legs
she realised with a start the penalties and privileges of her position.

Orlando: He/They/She

Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity […] dressed herself in those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either sex

Orlando: Ideas of masculinity, and insulting Both Genders whilst about to dock in England

I shall never be able to crack a man over the head […] or draw my sword and run him through the body, […] or sentence a man to death, or lead an army, or prance down Whitehall on a charger, or wear seventy-two different medals on my breast. [Masculinity linked with violence and success, femineity linked to subservience (pouring tea) when viewed from what is still at this point a male gaze.]

she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither

Orlando: division of the sexes, love of women

it was still a woman she loved; [the change has the effect to] quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man. For now a thousand hints and mysteries became plain to her that were then dark.

[The narrative describes how obscurity between sexes, ‘lets linger innumerable impurities in its gloom’, and so sets up queer love as more pure in a way? Contrast to NW]

Orlando: Start of the Nineteenth Century

In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one subterfuge was tried after another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart.

In Memoriam: The Act of Writing

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel:
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

Orlando: Act of Writing

a roll of paper, sea-stained, blood-stained, travel-stained [The Oak Tree manuscript, started 1586]
Nothing more repulsive could be imagined than to feel the ink flowing thus in cascades of involuntary inspiration.
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
[Thought whilst burying The Oak Tree, after Orlando has called out into nothingness for herself, see other flashcard]

Orlando: Wanting another version of oneself

So Orlando, at the turn by the barn, called 'Orlando?' with a note of interrogation in her voice and waited. Orlando did not come.

'All right then,' Orlando said, with the good humour people practise on these occasions; and tried another. For she had a great variety of selves to call upon.

[The biographer then admits that they have not charted all of Orlando’s selves, only the ones we have had time for, and that a person may have many more selves.]

In Memoriam: Robert Pattison

Robert Pattison identifies that Tennyson’s form ‘steers away from the stately aspect of the elegy’ and is merely ‘propped up by the elegiac stanza’.

Nightwood/Orlando: Women and Animality

‘Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human.’ NW
Barnes nearly naming her novel ‘Night Beast’
‘‘I consider woman as a beautiful, romantic animal.’ O

Nightwood: Childbirth

O’Connor tells Nora, ‘you who should have had a thousand children and Robin, who should have been all of them’

Orlando: Seleuchi Hound/Canute Elk Hound/Pippin Spaniel

Whilst Ambassador, Orlando has a Seleuchi hound, who stays with her through her transformation, despite being ‘half famished with hunger’, and one of her first actions upon waking is to care for it. The dog is starved, perhaps reflecting Orlando’s female identity having been in a prolonged state of self-denial until this point.

[Canute, the elk-hound, recognises Orlando upon her return to her estate, and it is a large part of the evidence used to dispel any doubts as to her identity.]

The spaniel licked Orlando with her tongue. Orlando stroked the spaniel with her hand.

In Memoriam: Form and Recovery

Isobel Armstrong credits Tennyson with ‘redefining [an elegy’s] form’, claiming that doing so is ‘inextricably bound up with the overcoming of grief’. Therefore redefining the form mirrors personal transformation, as pain matures to become literary creativity.

In Memoriam: T. S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot asserted that Tennyson was ‘desperately anxious to hold the faith of the believer, without being very clear about what he wanted to believe’; perhaps he wanted a holistic sense of security rather than a disputable doctrine.

In Memoriam: G. Eliot and Love

CXXVI states, ‘Love is and was my Lord and King’, whilst George Eliot remarked that ‘the deepest significance of the poem is the sanctification of human love as religion’.

In Memoriam: Be near me

Be near me when my light is low
[///]

[////]

Be near me when my faith is dry

[addressed to God or Hallam?]

In Memoriam: Formal departure from the elegiac tradition

Elegiac quatrain abab, Tennyson’s abba
Pentameter, but T used tetrameter
Michael D. Hurley claims this distances him from the ‘formal dignities of the elegy genre, aligning his poem instead with the oral outpourings of the ballad and song, or even the nursery rhyme’. He wasn’t actually first to it—Jonson and Sidney got there first—but he thought he was, showing he wanted to reimagine elegy’s orotundities (rich and sonorous vocal expression).

Can be read as 1 poem or 133 poems. Continuity expected of the form is shattered.

In Memoriam: Prologue in Comparison to other sections

Composed afterwards, tone of firm resolve, end stopped, propositional. Seeks forgiveness for the haverings and heterodoxies that follow.

Strong Son of God, immortal Love, (Pr.1)
[…]
We have but faith: we cannot know;
For knowledge is of things we see;
And yet we trust it comes from thee,
A beam in darkness: let it grow. (Pro 21-4)

In Memoriam: Biography

First printed a small number of copies for private distribution to friends, no title, considered ‘The Way of the Soul’ (arguably reflects that this was both a journey for Hallam and himself).

T’s son was called Hallam Tennyson.

In Memoriam: Faith and Biography

T’s marriage to Emily Sellwood, to whom he had been engaged on and off for over a decade, went ahead after IM was published (and T was made poet laureate). The reasons Erik Gray proposed (T’s former lack of steady income and E’s concerns as to T’s possible lack of religious faith) work, but another part may have been that T needed to more fully process his grief through the work (though this is undermined by the fact most of IM was done by 1845).

In Memoriam: Social Context

Rituals of mourning heavily influential in Victorian culture: dress and stationary were determined by months and years since a person’s passing.

Also confusion as the science and reason which Victorian’s prided themselves on became increasingly at odds with their faith. T combined ideas of evolution with affirmation of faith.

Tess’s Lament in Poems Past and Present

‘And now he's gone; and now he's gone; . . .
And now he's gone!’

Tess’s despair continued into the poem

‘And it was I who did it all,
                Who did it all;‘

Tess’s guilt. Formally, the first line of each stanza repeats into the next (forgot me quite, I lived so long, and now he’s gone, who did it all, that day we wed, to think of it). Perhaps interesting that ‘who did it all‘ follows from ‘now he’s gone‘, the poem is structured in a way that gives the blame to Angel even as Tess claims it for herself.

Theories of the Novel, Hardy, Lukács

Hardy’s tragic trajectories communicate the “transcendental homelessness” that György Lukács considers the signature of the novel. (Theory of the Novel, 1916). Lukács, after his Marxist maturation, claimed that this applied only to modernist novels, which is another argument to bring Hardy to associate with the novelists.

Woolf: Function of the novel

[the novel exists] to express character—not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire

Tess: predestination written onto her body by Alec

…beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive…

Tess: Ruined Maid

Country dialect for the questioner, standard English for Amelia, ballad form. Returns to the dialect in the final line. The questioner wishes she had such fine garments and could ‘strut about Town‘, Amelia responds:

"My dear — a raw country girl, such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain't ruined," said she.

Orlando: Gender/Biography/Inheritance

In reality, because Sackville-West was a woman, she could not inherit Knole, the 500-year-old home that she adored. It passed to her Uncle Charlie, a loss that prompted Sackville-West, upon reading descriptions of it in Orlando, to write to Virginia, "you made me cry with your passages about Knole, you wretch".

Orlando: Woolf hurt by Vita

Vita had the first of many affairs in 1927, which hurt W greatly. W used the image of the wild goose to indicate the literary genius that always eludes Orlando (and so Vita)’s abilities. Ironically, Vita did not understand what it stood for, asking Harold for insight in a letter. The novel as a way of asserting control over Vita’s identity, and reshaping how she hurt her previous lovers (Violet/Sasha).

A Passage to India: Christian Faith

‘after years of intellectualism, [resumes] her morning kneel to Christianity’

the narrator comments, ‘There seemed no harm in it, it was the shortest and easiest cut to the unseen’

‘Her deity returned a consoling reply’ (but Jehovah’s words don’t seem to actually help her)

Ronny’s faith: ‘of the sterilized Public School brand, which never goes bad’

Tagore: Gitanjali, personal faith

‘My poet’, ‘my friend’, ‘my lord’ and ‘O my sun ever-glorious!’

Tagore: 41/43, forlorn/content faith

female speaker of Song 41, ‘And only I who would wait and weep and wear out my heart in vain longing?’
Only two poems later, ‘wait and watch at the wayside’, content that they ‘know… the happy moment will arrive’. Contrast to early poem by the alliterative ‘wait and w—’.

Tagore: uncertainty as a struggle, but ultimately a strengthening force

The first-person speaker of Song 14 is both thankful for God’s refusal to meet their every prayer, as they know he is ‘saving [them] from perils of weak, uncertain desire’, and yet complains that ‘cruelly thou hidest thyself’

Orlando: Marriage vs Poetry

And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.

Orlando: Inexpressibility Topos

Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue. [trying to describe Sasha]

Tagore: poet as a reed flute to be played by God, poem 1

This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
[…]
Ages pass, and stilll thou pourest, and still there is room to fill

Tagore: Publication History

Bengali Gitanjali (1910) 157 songs (137 were new, composed in a 90 day period).
Translated Gitanjali (1912) 103 songs (53 from Bengali Gitanjali, 50 poems extracted from nine of Tagore's other poetry collections)

Tagore: Religious History

Upanishadic premise: reality is defined by Ananda (an all encompassing creative bliss) and a singular, divine consciousness immanently pervades all existence.

The Brahmo Samaj was a reformist movement that sought to recover the monistic basis of Hinduism as articulated in the ancient Upanishads. (Debendranath Tagore played a huge role in disseminating these teachings.)

Tagore: Working against his religious context

Tagore's poetry departs from orthodox Upanishadic monism, particularly the dominant medieval tradition of Advaita Vedanta (the material world is an illusion (maya) and that liberation (mukti) requires ascetic renunciation to enable the eventual dissolution of individual identity into Brahman).

Instead, he refutes any "world-negating asceticism" and views the senses as a way of connecting with God rather than a barrier.

Tagore: Quote about maya (72)

He it is who weaves the web of this maya in evanescent hues of gold and silver…

Tagore: No denial (73)

Deliverance is not for me in renunciation
[…]
No, I will never shut the doors of my senses.

Tagore: Reconceptualising the medieval Bengali Vaishnava poets

Tagore retains the emotional core of Vaishnava devotion—its intimacy, its domestic vocabulary, and its passionate longing—but removes the specific names of Krishna and Radha, presenting the divine instead as a formless, nameless beloved.

Tagore: Recurring flute image to emphasise simplicity (7)

Only let me make my life simple and straight, like a flute for thee to fill with music.

Stream of Thought Lecture

William James, mind as fluid, life experienced relative to rate of change.

The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period.”
Formalist potential, grammatical comparisons for thought processes

Trauma in the Victorian Novel

Violence is rarely described; you see an absence of something, or the psychological consequences (Tess).

Led to ghosts as expressions of repressed desires, fear, or pain. Gothic in Hardy.

Hardy: film style

J. Hillis Miller: Hardy saw life in the "manner of a movie camera, with spatial and temporal detachment, cool self-possession," a "double vision" of author and character, means that his relationships are ones of ‘distance and desire’, both between characters and from reader/author to characters.

Tess: Gender and literacy

Ladies know what to fend hands against because they read novels that tell them of these tricks!

Tess: Denial of the proposal

‘I am not good enough—not worthy enough.’
‘Why don’t somebody tell him all about me?’

Tess and Robin Linked

her arm, from her dabbling in the curds, was as cold and damp to his mouth as a new-gathered mushroom

Tess: Jealousy leading her to accept him

‘I can’t bear to let anybody have him but me!’ after one of the milkmaids sighs his name in her sleep
But then rejects him after hearing the Jack Dollop marrying a widow woman story

Tess: Lost future admitted to Angel when they’re driving back from the city

I was in the Sixth Standard when I left school, and they said I had great aptness, and should make a good teacher, so it was settled that I should be one.

Tess: Accepting Angel just after Alec has been mentioned, under the condition that he wants her ‘whatever my offences’

Yes, yes, yes! But O, I sometimes wish I had never been born!

Tess: Angel’s comments toward her about her childishness

Of course not, dear child. You are a child to me, Tess…

Tess: Interiority and Worship of Angel

her large, worshipful eyes, that had no bottom to them looking at him from their depths, as if she saw something immortal before her.