[Hardy-l] Tess

[Keith Wilson]

Indeed, clearly the book doesn't show them having sex since Hardy wanted to get it published.  I would suggest that for Hardy's original  audience, a couple sharing a bed for five days could have only one interpretation (after all, Giles Winterborne had to go and catch his death of cold in the woods rather than share a small cottage let alone a bed with Grace Melbury).  And also after all, Tess and Angel are married.
 
But as much to the point, isn't there a key imaginative rightness to the consummation's taking place after the death of Alec?  The text makes clear that after the disastrous honeymoon confession, the fact that Alec is still alive is the final piece of information that makes Angel despair.  He subsequently says to Tess 'How can we live together while that man lives?", and in the 1895 revision he adds "he being your husband in Nature, and not I" (thereby reintroducing a sentiment that in different words had existed in the Graphic serialised version and had been expunged from the first book edition: see Penguin Classics edition, ed. Tim Dolin, 237, 243, 443).  One of the first things Tess says to Angel when she catches up with him after killing Alec is "will you forgive me my sin against you, now I have killed him?"  (Penguin, 385), begging her "dear, dear husband" to say he loves her now that she has killed Alec.  Surely a key aspect of Tess's passionate naivety in her phrasing at this point is that now Angel can indeed become fully her husband given that Alec, her "husband in Nature" because of his prior possession of her, is dead.  The primacy of Alec's prior sexual possession/ownership of Tess is what makes Angel respond as he does, and it's the cancellation of that prior ownership that allows the consummation.
 
This has always seemed to me one of the most cruel aspects of the gender relations in the novel, and one of the most severe indictments of Angel, who becomes the very temporary protector/companion/husband to Tess only after she has fulfilled the logic of his position by killing Alec. In becoming her companion for those five days, he often seems to gain all sorts of credit in interpretations of the novel, with the implication he has reformed and seen the error of his unforgiving and self-righteous ways.  But it's always seemed to me that in the very fundamental sense outlined above, it's Angel who might be said to make Tess kill Alec as a result of her confused and naive acting out of the logic of his awful doctrine of primacy of sexual possession. So while it's gratifying to readerly desires for resolution that they finally get their honeymoon, his sharing in it doesn't let Angel off the moral hook by a millimetre in my view.
 
If those five days aren't intended as a sexual consummation, I think the whole very deliberate Hardyan irony outlined above is lost.  So if the television version did make the sex manifest, more power to it:  I'm sure that Hardy in the book version of these scenes was himself making it as manifest as period notions -- including his own -- of good taste would allow.
 
Best,
 
Keith
 

Pauline wrote: >They may sleep in the same bed, which certainly  suggests >intimacy, but intimacy isn't necessarily sex.   The point surely is that the >adaptation actually shows them having sex, rather than suggesting it.  Hence >Royd's argument (I think here Royd, please forgive me if I'm wrong) about >gratuitous sex.  As I say I've not seen the rest of the series, so I could be well off >track here.

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