2007: In many works of literature, past events and affect, positively or negatively, the present activities, attitudes, or values of a character. Choose a novel or play in which a character must contedn with some aspect of the pasem either personal or societal. Then write an essat in which you show how a character's relationship to the pase contributes to the meaning of the work as a whole.

Through out literature, authors often use events in the protagonists past to affect, positively or negatively, their decisions, actions or decisions and actions made about that person in their future. Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is an excellent novel that provides immaculate evidence on this point. The story is about the life of a young girl in the English country side in the 1890’s named Tess Durbeyfield. One unfortunate event when she was 16 leads to her death only five years later.

The story starts out at a May-Day dance, where Tess is first introduced to Angel. Tess later marries Angel, but he doesn’t realize it is the girl he met at the dance that he didn’t dance. Some could argue that this is the event that affects all others, but I believe that this event is not significant enough in the beginning to be the direct cause of the ending. If Tess and Angel were to have danced that day it was a possibility that they could have fallen in love then and there and married; but some of the adverse situations that Tess and Angel are subjected to in the next few years changes their personalities and perspective on life.

The major hindrance in Tess’s life was when she is raped. After her father finds out that he is a decendant of an ancient noble line called D’Urbervilles, Tess ends up killing the horse that the family needed for income. So she has to claim kin to a nearby D’Urberville family in order to hopefully gain a new horse or, her mothers wish, a husband. She meets Alec D’Urbervilles, who is really a Stoke whose family bought the D’Urberville name in order to hide in the country, who is really not related to her. He wants her, and after multiple refusals to his advances, he takes what he wants from Tess; leaving her pregnant and a life of hard ship. Multiple parties are to blame for this. Alec, obviously, because he raped her; but Tess’s mother and father are to blame as well. If her mother had educated Tess about the dangers of men and what the advances by Alec meant, Tess would have had a better chance of fending off Alec; and if her father hadn’t been a drunk and a horrible provider, Tess would have never had to go to the ‘D’Urbervilles” for aid in the first place. After this point in Tess’s life, it is always a continuous struggle.

Alec’s illegitimate child dies about a week after it is born, Angel leaves Tess after she confesses that she carried another mans child, and then she ends up back in the clutches of Alec. This is another moment when the past affects the future. If Angel hadn’t overacted to Tess forcible carrying another mans child and left, then Tess wouldn’t have ended up back with Alec so she can give her family some money after Tess’s father dies. Then she stabs Alec in the heart, for lying that Angel will never come back, so she can escape his clutches. Because of this the police chase after her and Angel. They are finally caught up to at Stonehenge and Tess is executed.

It seems that one event in Tess’s past just caused the next, only more extreme. This poor girl can never get a break; and nothing in her life is really truly her own fault. Not even her beauty that attracts men to her through out the novel. Any time the author would bring in a new man into Tess’s life, be it Alec, Angel , Farmer Groby or Tess’s father, something always goes terribly wrong.