[Hardy-l] tess and alec once more

[Arthur Efron]

In earlier messages, I brought out what I see as the  problematic 
features of  Hardy's novel when it deals with Tess killing Alec.

To get to the point I want to make, I will have to back up and say what 
the subject-matter of  TESS is. I work this out in my book, but here I 
will be as brief as I can. The term "subject matter" has particular 
meaning in the work of Dewey, in his book ART AS EXPERIENCE, but for 
this posting, I will assume that there is a common-sense understanding 
of the term.The basic  subject-matter of this novel is:  the sexual-love 
life of three people within an enveloping context of Nature. Critics 
tend to dodge or subordinate this.  I even found  five examples of 
highly competent critics who virtually  deny that sex is centrally 
important in the novel. I could add more.

When Tess kills Alec, her purpose must come out of her basic, gut-level  
identity as a woman.  It  has to be understood as intimately connected 
with her sexual self. However, it does not have to be anything she 
consciously formulates. As I have argued, her later statement that she 
must have been mad when she killed the man, and that such an act is 
contrary to her own nature in which she would not hurt any creature, 
shows that she is unaware of her motive.

There is such a thing as unconscious emotion.   That is a basic 
assumption of depth psychology, especially of psycho-analysis.  
Recently, I came across two fresh treatments of this problem, both of 
which argue for the possibility of unconscious emotions. For the record, 
they are  1) Jesse Prinz, GUT REACTIONS: A  PERCEPTUAL THEORY OF EMOTION 
(Oxford Univ.Press, 2004), and 2) Peter Goldie, THE EMOTIONS: A 
PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATION (also Oxford Univ.Press, 2006).

Angel's return, and the extremely painful scene in which Tess sends him 
away,  is  an  emotional event too overwhelming for her to just go back 
upstairs and pretend to Alec that nothing has happened. She has to give 
way to immeasurable grief. That is not a signal telling us that she soon 
will kill Alec. But then Alec asks her what is the matter. Right after 
that, a lot of  Tess's primary gut-level emotion surfaces. Besides the 
200 or so words of Tess's declarations that  Hardy lets us hear through 
the straining ears of the landlady, there is something much more basic 
going on. This something is not stated by Tess because she is not 
consciously thinking it.  It is a new emotion that she has not undergone 
before. It is an emotionally charged cluster of ideas that rises to the 
level of rage. The rage is aimed at Alec.

What is the idea?  If  Tess could think it consciously, it would be much 
like this:
You have been sexually degrading me for weeks (or months?) and I have 
been helping  you do it because of what you told me.

Those would not be her words, of course. But those words give an 
adequate sense of the idea. If  we could see into Tess's unconscious 
ideation, we would see something like that sentence, but it would be 
expressed much less politely. There would be some choice obscene terms. 
This is gut-level stuff. I don't know what the Dorset equivalents would 
have been, but I'm sure there were (and are) some. I recall Tess using 
the term ":whorage" earlier in the novel.

There is one important element of Tess's rage that is not unconscious. 
Indeed she states it: Alec  had been insulting her at times,  whenever 
he has made comments about Angel, and in the  present exchange of 
hurtful words, he makes the fatal mistake of saying something like that 
again. This she tells Angel a little while later: "he bitterly taunted 
me, and called you by a foul name. And then I did it: my heart could not 
bear it." Then she goes on "He had nagged me about you before."

Once before, she had smacked Alec, hard enough to draw blood, when he 
referred to Angel as that "mule of a husband." Isn't that the only 
violent act of Tess anywhere in the novel, prior to this scene? And now 
Alec blunders into insulting Angel again. This I take it is the final 
straw. It triggers the full release of her rage. Without the primary 
unconscious emotional rage, however, that would not have been enough to 
make her kill.

True, she tells Angel that she "feared long ago, when I struck him on 
the mouth with my glove, that I might do it some day for the trap he set 
for me in my simple youth, and  his wrong to you through me." This she 
says immediately after admitting that she does not "know how" she had 
done it; and later she says that she must have been mad. Once she has 
agreed to live with Alec again, as his sexual love partner, she is not 
likely to worry about the trap he had once set for her "in my simple 
youth."  But realizing now, at an unconscious level, that this guy has 
been in effect raping her for weeks, and doing it with her help, would 
be enough.

And I have said enough too. I would welcome comments and responses from 
anyone on the list.

I have two postscripts to add, and will put them on new and separate 
postings.

--Art Efron