The chapter I am presenting is Chapter 16, the first chapter of Phase the Third of Thomas Hardy's Tess of d'Urbervilles. This phase of the text or rather this phase of Tess's life, as Hardy would prefer to say, is unerringly named The Rally.

Acco. to the Oxford dictionary the word rally means..... The meaning speaks for itself. Tess is putting her past behind her to start a new independent life... in other, lighter, words, Tess is preparing for round 2.

But before we even get to the point of praising her bravery lets consider this fact... did women in the Victorian era who went through something as humiliating as rape even HAVE a round 2...did life await these women... the only choice of life they had was that of a prostitute or something lower than that. But Hardy seems to have turned this age-old conviction around. The story begins...