for shelby

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

for shelby

First off i would like to sincerely thank you for allowing me the opportunity to further repeat my pre-u1 studies here at millenia institute despite the insufficient grades and poor performance, i am most humiliated by my results and i feel that i have failed many people in my life, including my parents and especially my teachers but most of all i have failed myself.

This year has been a tough one for me, due to a series of unfortunate events happening in my personal life and going through stages of soul searching, i have allowed my emotions to affect my studies and was unable to give in my full effort into penning down the knowledge i have gained in the classroom into my exam papers. I have been dealt a harsh blow and a rude awakening upon receiving my grades, i did not expect to receive sub-standard grades.

However I must let you know that i do believe that given the chance I would like to prove to you that I am capable of redeeming myself next year and will not ever let an incident such as this ever repeat itself. I have been enlightened and have realised the folly of my foolishness. Gone are the days where I day-dream in class and spend hours drowning my self in self-pity. I shall buck up and am very determined to pursue my education here at MI and graduate with results sufficient enough to enter a local University course of my desire. I have a tough road ahead of me and it is going to be a extremely difficult race, as you have said countless of times.

I shall be more pro-active in class and responsive towards questions raised by the teachers. I will do my best to contribute and give critical and analytical comments when it is needed. Questions, i shall raise when I am in doubt. I will not let my low self esteem get the better of me and hinder me from learning. I will also be more attentive in class and not day dream during lessons, especially in classes where I am weak and require the most help. I will use the November and December holidays to go through my notes and do a further in-depth research on the topics and notes that my home tutors and subject teachers have given me. Practice is key and hence that shall be my motto for success. I shall not spend the valuable time i have during this 2 months in regret instead I shall pick myself up, dust my knees and continue to climb, I will not stop till i have reached the peak

With all due respect perhaps the actions i have claimed that i will do next year may sound cliche and familiar to you as you would probably receive all sorts of letters promising the same but I do believe that I may be an exception, I am a very determined person and am very hardworking, I will do whatever it is in my power to succeed and I do believe that I can be successful here in Millenia and do everyone and the school proud. I shall strive to perform and shine.

Angel Clare

Angel Clare -  An intelligent young man who has decided to become a farmer to preserve his intellectual freedom from the pressures of city life. Angel’s father and his two brothers are respected clergymen, but Angel’s religious doubts have kept him from joining the ministry. He meets Tess when she is a milkmaid at the Talbothays Dairy and quickly falls in love with her.

Angel Clare — The third son of a clergyman; Tess's husband and true love. He considers himself a freethinker, but his notions of morality turn out to be fairly conventional: he rejects Tess on their wedding night when she confesses that she isn't a virgin, even though he, too, has engaged in premarital sex. He works at the Talbothay's dairy to gain practical experience because he hopes to buy a farm of his own.

A freethinking son born into the family of a provincial parson and determined to set himself up as a farmer instead of going to Cambridge like his conformist brothers, Angel represents a rebellious striving toward a personal vision of goodness. He is a secularist who yearns to work for the “honor and glory of man,” as he tells his father in Chapter XVIII, rather than for the honor and glory of God in a more distant world. A typical young nineteenth-century progressive, Angel sees human society as a thing to be remolded and improved, and he fervently believes in the nobility of man. He rejects the values handed to him, and sets off in search of his own. His love for Tess, a mere milkmaid and his social inferior, is one expression of his disdain for tradition. This independent spirit contributes to his aura of charisma and general attractiveness that makes him the love object of all the milkmaids with whom he works at Talbothays.

His love for Tess may be abstract, as we guess when he calls her “Daughter of Nature” or “Demeter.” Tess may be more an archetype or ideal to him than a flesh and blood woman with a complicated life. Angel’s ideals of human purity are too elevated to be applied to actual people: Mrs. Durbeyfield’s easygoing moral beliefs are much more easily accommodated to real lives such as Tess’s. Angel awakens to the actual complexities of real-world morality after his failure in Brazil, and only then he realizes he has been unfair to Tess. His moral system is readjusted as he is brought down to Earth. Ironically, it is not the angel who guides the human in this novel, but the human who instructs the angel, although at the cost of her own life.

Alec d’Urberville

Alec d’Urberville  -  The handsome, amoral son of a wealthy merchant named Simon Stokes. Alec is not really a d’Urberville—his father simply took on the name of the ancient noble family after he built his mansion and retired. Alec is a manipulative, sinister young man who does everything he can to seduce the inexperienced Tess when she comes to work for his family. When he finally has his way with her, out in the woods, he subsequently tries to help her but is unable to make her love him.

Alec Stokes-d'Urberville — The libertine son of Simon Stokes and Mrs. d'Urberville. He either rapes or seduces Tess when she is no more than sixteen or seventeen years old, and later pursues her relentlessly. He persuades her to see the reality in her relationship with Angel and convinces her to become his mistress.

An insouciant twenty-four-year-old man, heir to a fortune, and bearer of a name that his father purchased, Alec is the nemesis and downfall of Tess’s life. His first name, Alexander, suggests the conqueror—as in Alexander the Great—who seizes what he wants regardless of moral propriety. Yet he is more slippery than a grand conqueror. His full last name, Stoke-d’Urberville, symbolizes the split character of his family, whose origins are simpler than their pretensions to grandeur. After all, Stokes is a blunt and inelegant name. Indeed, the divided and duplicitous character of Alec is evident to the very end of the novel, when he quickly abandons his newfound Christian faith upon remeeting Tess. It is hard to believe Alec holds his religion, or anything else, sincerely. His supposed conversion may only be a new role he is playing.

This duplicity of character is so intense in Alec, and its consequences for Tess so severe, that he becomes diabolical. The first part of his surname conjures associations with fiery energies, as in the stoking of a furnace or the flames of hell. His devilish associations are evident when he wields a pitchfork while addressing Tess early in the novel, and when he seduces her as the serpent in Genesis seduced Eve. Alec does not try to hide his bad qualities. In fact, like Satan, he revels in them. In Chapter XII, he bluntly tells Tess, “I suppose I am a bad fellow—a damn bad fellow. I was born bad, and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad, in all probability.” There is frank acceptance in this admission and no shame. I feel Alec is too wicked to be believable, but, like Tess herself, he represents a larger moral principle rather than a real individual man. Like Satan, Alec symbolizes the base forces of life that drive a person away from moral perfection and greatness

Jack Durbeyfield

Jack Durbeyfield (Sir John d'Urberville) — Tess's father, a carter in Marlott (based on the Dorset village of Marnhull) who is a lazy alcoholic. When he learns that his family is descended from nobility, he works less and less and starts pretending that he is an aristocrat. / Tess’s father, a lazy peddler in Marlott. John is naturally quick, but he hates work. When he learns that he descends from the noble line of the d’Urbervilles, he is quick to make an attempt to profit from the connection.


He takes great pride in his name, although it never brings him anything of value.
“well fred, I don’t mind telling you that the secret is that I’m one of a noble race- it had been just discovered by me this present afternoon.” 

Tess Durbyfield

Tess Durbeyfield — The protagonist, eldest daughter in a poor rural working family; a fresh, well-developed country girl who looks markedly more mature than she is.


Intelligent, strikingly attractive, and distinguished by her deep moral sensitivity and passionate intensity, Tess is indisputably the central character of the novel that bears her name. But she is also more than a distinctive individual

In part, Tess represents the changing role of the agricultural workers in England in the late nineteenth century. Possessing an education that her unschooled parents lack, since she has passed the Sixth Standard of the National Schools, Tess does not quite fit into the folk culture of her predecessors, but financial constraints keep her from rising to a higher station in life. She belongs in that higher world, however, as we discover on the first page of the novel with the news that the Durbeyfields are the surviving members of the noble and ancient family of the d’Urbervilles. There is aristocracy in Tess’s blood, visible in her graceful beauty—yet she is forced to work as a farmhand and milkmaid. When she tries to express her joy by singing lower-class folk ballads at the beginning of the third part of the novel, they do not satisfy her—she seems not quite comfortable with those popular songs. But, on the other hand, her diction, while more polished than her mother’s, is not quite up to the level of Alec’s or Angel’s. She is in between, both socially and culturally. Thus, Tess is a symbol of unclear and unstable notions of class in nineteenth-century Britain, where old family lines retained their earlier glamour, but where cold economic realities made sheer wealth more important than inner nobility.

Beyond her social symbolism, Tess represents fallen humanity in a religious sense, as the frequent biblical allusions in the novel remind us. Just as Tess’s clan was once glorious and powerful but is now sadly diminished.