Fate and religion

[Mohammad Kamran]

Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a cathartic novel and whosoever goes through it never loses interest in it. The plot revolves around the role of fate and chance in human life and here lies the beauty of the written art. Hardy seems to have believed in the fact that Nature is responsible for all the human failures. It always cast adverse effect on human lives. The gods take humans as sporting thing. <br>As flies to wanton boys;<br>Are we to the gods.<br>Hardy is equally against the orthodox and conservatice concepts in religion. He has presented an ironical contrast of Providence and Religion by depicting Tess as pure and innocent woman being mistreated by the religious society. It was not Tess but the Fate that led her to seduction; And it was Irony of Fate that religious people aggravated the miseries of the forlorn lady and like gods and angels they too did not help her at all.

[abzu]

but fate is the consequense of choices, it was Tess's choices which drove hert fate. She made her life what it was by the choices she made, if she had made better choices she could have made a better life for herself, life is a consequense of choices and nothing else. Except for what wre signed up for before we incarnated, all else is fate. Fate is free will, destiny is what we preplanned for ourselves, now do you understasnd?

[Brandy Danu]

Fate by definition is the OPPOSITE of free will. Sorry abzu, there is a cultural gulf here and you are not on the same western/Christian page as people from this side of the world.

Perhaps destiny is pre-planned by our karma. However, Tess' life is certainly NOT purely a consequence of her own choice(s). The position/family/class she was born into and the (false) values of the times proceeded inexorably beyond her considerable effort and ability to transcend. This is the point Hardy was making. She was a pure spirit despite what society thought - and how it functioned in her case - from start to finish.

[Brandy Danu]

Check Hardy on Wikipedia for yourself but here is part of it:Once things have been put into motion, they will play out. Hardy’s characters are in the grips of too much overwhelming fate.

"He paints a vivid picture of rural life in the 19th century, with all its joys and suffering, a fatalistic world full of superstition and injustice. His heroes and heroines are often alienated from society and rarely become readmitted into it. He tends to emphacise the impersonal and, generally,

negative powers of fate

over the mainly working class people he represented in his novels. Hardy exhibits in his books elemental passion, deep instinct, the human will struggling against fatal and ill-comprehended laws, a victim also of unforeseeable change. Tess, for example, ends with..."