COMPARE AND CONTRAST Compare and Contrast

Compare and Contrast

Poverty as a social injustice

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, also known as Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, Tess of the d'Urbervilles or just Tess is a novel by Thomas Hardy, first published in 1891. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper, The Graphic. It is Hardy's penultimate novel, followed by Jude the Obscure. Though now considered a great classic of English literature, the book received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual mores of Hardy's day. The original manuscript is on display at the British Library, showing that it was originally titled "Daughter of the d'Urbervilles.

Major characters in Great Expectations: the first is Pip, who I mentioned before - the young Daniel Radcliffe character. Since the novel is a Bildungsroman, which is just following along a character's development as he gets older, Pip is the guy that the Bildungsroman is about, so he's kind of the main character. We learn early on that he's passionate and idealistic and he's really, really moral. He's always looking to improve himself in a social kind of way and also in a moral way.

Next, we've got the convict, who is also known as Magwitch, which is another one of those awesome Dickensian names. He's kind of an interesting figure. He's a convict, as you might have guessed from his title - he's on the run from the law - but he also does some really good things that we're going to talk about later, so he's a morally ambiguous kind of character.

There's Miss Havisham, who kind of seems like a crazy person when we meet her. She hangs out in her old wedding dress because she got abandoned at the altar. Her wedding didn't happen, so she basically hangs around in her old dress, which is kind of like an episode of 30 Rock - well, I guess that's when she buys her dress without having a wedding in mind, but it's the same kind of idea. There's rotting food and memories and she's just a weird character. She hangs out in a room where all the clocks are stopped at 20 to 9:00, which was the moment she found out that her fiancé left her; she only wears one shoe because she was only wearing one shoe at the time. She's kind of a crazy person.

But she's the guardian of Estella, who is someone with whom Pip is infatuated. He loves Estella. She lives this kind of upper-class life; she's beautiful, she's cold and manipulative, kind of like Gwyneth Paltrow if you want to typecast things. There're other characters that I'm going to talk about as we go along, but these are kind of the most important ones, the ones that are going to crop up again and again, and I don't want to have to keep reintroducing ...