Author(s)

Xuwei Li ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Foreign Languages, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China

Corresponding Author

Xuwei Li

ABSTRACT

In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Tess's sleep after Clare knew her past and her sleep after killing Alec was full of existential meaning, both as a sign of her fall and a loss of subjectivity. Tess thought she had two deaths, including after meeting Angel and her real death. Under the frame of existentialism theories, including Bad Faith, transcendence, and Temporality, the relationship between sleep and death emerged. The way she went from sleep to death is the way she went from falling to suicide. Tess's sleep is an escape from subjectivity and her death is a way to change her life into destiny by making her a part of being-in-itself. Her system was made past when her body and soul separate from each other and she submerged in this world. It is in her sleep and death that she can lose the possibility of transcendence and sleep finishes the philosophical suicide, so she was dead before being sentenced, and her death is a corporal complement of suicide.

KEYWORDS

Tess of the d'Urbervilles, sleep, death, existentialism

CITE THIS PAPER

Xuwei Li, Sleep and Death, Tess's Divorce of Body and Soul. Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2023) Vol. 6: 58-63. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2023.060110.
 

REFERENCES

[1] Rutland W.R. (1938) Thomas Hardy: A Study of His Writings and Their Background. Basil Blackwell.
[2] Singh D. K. (2022) Existence and Essence of Cosmic Absurdity in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented. Creative Saplings, 1, 41- 58.
[3] Hardy Thomas. (2018) Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Yunnan people's Publishing House.
[4] Sartre Jean-Paul. (1978) Being and Nothingness. Pocket Books.
[5] Nancy Jean-Luc. (2009) The Fall of Sleep. Fordham UP.
[6] Rose Jacqueline. (2021) On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World. Princeton UP.
[7] Lin Wei, (2018) Sleep in Literature: The Sleep Scenes in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Foreign Languages Research, 1, 88- 93.

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