Within the last ten chapters

[kelby_lake]

I love this novel. I subscribe to the whole d'Urberville blood being part of the reason for stabbing Alec- this is after all Tess of The D'Urbervilles.

A lot of fatal mistakes are made in Hardy's novels. I don't think Tess killed Alec in cold blood but as a desperate impulsive mistake. Perhaps there was an element of self-loathing as well- Alec represented that stain on her purity that prevented her being with Angel.

I don't find Alec unsympathetic. I think the key to this is his mother, who significantly is blind, preferring her birds over her son. As Alec has not grown up knowing love, he persues lust instead. He is incapable of love because he has never been shown any. The only point where he might have shown love towards Tess is after he has destroyed her.

[Maple]

You might be right about what crippled Alec's ability to love, but if we're going to address how the novel's character's had their personalities formed we would naturally want to wonder first about Tess. Here's a poor peasant girl living near subsistence reared by two irresponsible and dissolute parents. How did she come to have such a astoundingly admirable qualities and intentions? The practical explanation is that Hardy wasn't preoccupied with the psychology of personality formation. His interest was in telling a certain kind of story for which he needed characters to do certain things with certain motives.

It's natural for readers to love Tess as a kind of womanly ideal mortally wronged by her social and economic circumstances. It's stranger that Hardy, who created this character largely out of his own imagination, came to love the fictitious person he imagined. The longer I think about this book the most profound mystery of it all is Hardy himself.

[kelby_lake]

You might be right about what crippled Alec's ability to love, but if we're going to address how the novel's character's had their personalities formed we would naturally want to wonder first about Tess. Here's a poor peasant girl living near subsistence reared by two irresponsible and dissolute parents. How did she come to have such a astoundingly admirable qualities and intentions? The practical explanation is that Hardy wasn't preoccupied with the psychology of personality formation. His interest was in telling a certain kind of story for which he needed characters to do certain things with certain motives.

People didn't really think about psychology as such back then. This was before Freud. Besides, I can think of very few novels that are entirely practical.

Tess is shown to be a spiritual woman. She is ethereal, at one with nature. The psychology of personality doesn't matter. If you want to add it though, you could say that her personality is formed as the complete opposite of her parents, reactionary.