[Hardy-l] on the killing of Alec

[Arthur Efron]

On the problem of Tess's motivation in her killing of Alec, I remain 
unpersuaded by the interpretations I have seen of late.

Tess says that she came to the thought as she ran along, that  this 
killing would let Angel forgive her now.  Important wording in the text 
here is  "I thought as I ran along." Yes, she thought it as she ran 
along trying to catch up with Angel, but that doesn't mean that she 
thought this when she committed the act.

In my book, I treated this problem as an instance of right-brain 
left-brain interaction. I did not quite put it that way. It has to do, I 
say, with "the way the human mind works when it encounters seemingly 
impossible contradictions in its own acts"  In commisurotomy, it has 
been shown that people will give a completely  bogus (though sincerely 
meant) reason for something they have  done as a result of a probe into 
a half of their brain that is disconected from the other hemisphere. For 
example someone will move an arm because of a surgical brain probe and 
then when asked why they have done so, the person will give a reason 
that claims he or she did it for a certain purpose. This model of  brain 
function is well understood. The fact is, many normal people, whose 
brains are not cut in half, will do very similar  verbal reasoning in 
explaining, after the fact,  why they have done something  when the 
actual cause was blacked out, for one reason or another. In the case of 
Tess, she has done something totally outside of her own understanding of 
what her self ever could  be capable of.

Here  I can take up the notion that Tess was engaged in a courageous act 
when she killed Alec. This is quite incompatible with her own statement, 
some pages further on: "How wickedly mad I was! Yet formerly I could not 
bear to hurt a fly of a worm, and the sight of a bird in a cage used 
often to make me cry."  I take these words to show that she now realizes 
she did not know why she had killed Alec, and that the very idea of 
having done such a thing is outside of her sense of herself as a human 
being.

As for the courageous quality of the killing, I would say, forget it. In 
an extremely emotional altercation, one person picks up a a knife and 
sticks it into the heart of the other. The other was unarmed. Courage is 
beside the point.

If  what I have said about the split-brain quality of her action is a 
viable hypothesis, it then places  the problem of Tess's purpose in 
killing Alec back upon the experiencing reader. Can the reader 
understand why Tess did this? Well, this reader, Art Efron, tried to do 
it. I'll save this for a possible later posting.

There was a dissertation written years ago that dealt  with the 
responses of  readers to Hardy's novel when it first came out. One 
conclusion was that they were baffled as to why Tess killed Alec. 

Remember that Angel has said to her, on their momentous rencounter, 
"Ah-- it is my fault!"

--Art Efron
 


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