Tess's View Of Religion In Tess By Arthur Miller

Even more than Tess, Angel Clare’s view of religion is heavily influenced by his upbringing and his attempt to break away from it. Angel’s father is a parson, and both of his brothers studied at Cambridge to become ordained. Just as Tess resents her family’s more ancient traditions, Angel tells his father he does not want to study to become ordained because the church, “refuses to liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive theolatry” (Hardy 91). Despite Angel’s desire to be different from his brothers, become a more modern man, and break away from religion, his strict religious childhood influenced his morals, making him unable to accept Tess once he finds out her secret: “Angel is obsessed with the idea of ‘feminine purity’ as any of …show more content…
This new farm is an opposite to the Paradise of Talbothays; it has no natural beauty and life, and is instead run by machines like the steam-thresher; Tess has no love here to make her days of hard labor bearable. Alec approaches Tess during one of her weakest moments, in a scene surrounded by hellish imagery of smoke and fire, and even jokes about himself being the devil, “A jester might say this is just like Paradise. You are Eve, and I am the old Other One come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior animal” (Hardy 281). Alec goes on to insist that he had no choice but to rape Tess, for she was so beautiful, and he could not resist her advances, despite the fact that it was rape and Tess had clearly shown she did not return his feelings. He tells her, “…surely there never was such a maddening mouth since Eve’s!” (Hardy 260). Hardy is commenting on the Victorian moral double standard, the belief that Tess can be raped, bear an illegitimate child, and suffer ostracism from her community and stigmatism from her husband, while her rapist can go free, believe he did nothing wrong, and blame the