Tess as Posthuman: Overturning Conventional Ideas in Tess of the D'Urbervilles

『테스』를 통해 본 포스트휴먼 시대의 인간

This paper aims to show how Thomas Hardy overturns conventional ideas in opposition and eventually disrupts the hierarchical order of ideas in the Victorian society of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Divided into four sections, such as feeling/reason, purity/impurity, femininity/masculinity, and death/life, it examines how these binaries are deconstructed in the heroine's tragic life journey. The heroine Tess of the book, who boldly crosses the boundaries marked by traditional society, turns her image as a fallen woman into that of divinity, erasing the boundary between evil and good. In doing so, Hardy leads the reader to question the system of established values and reveals the illegitimacy of absolute values, thence stressing what all one can grasp in this world is nothing else than an absence of a central value. The relativity of truth and the power of overturning established value systems advertised in the book have significant implications for today's readers as well as for the Victorians.