[Hardy-l] Tess

[JoAnna Mink]

Although I haven't seen the recent BBC adaptation (I will when it makes it across the pond), it seems that the discussion has strayed far enough for me to add my two cents (worth even less these days) in reply to Keith Wilson's comment, "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."
 
First, I agree that Tess and Angel (finally) have sex in the novel.  Keith's note about TH's title "Fulfillment," in addition to TH's descriptive details, makes this clear--and, I believe, would have made it clear to his Victorian readers.  So Tess finally gets up to five nights (as John Pentney points out) of marital bliss.  Then, bang, comes reality, the real world of cleaners and constables.
 
I, however, disagree with Keith's positing that Angel made Tess kill Alec.  Yes, she kills Alec because of what Angel says (he's your husband in nature...) and because she believes this is the only way to get Angel to love and accept her.  Tess is wrong in several ways.  How could she rationally think that Angel would be pleased because she's killed a man?  In fact, Angel is horrified (Her story then was true!).  But Tess isn't thinking at all rationally.  
 
It's almost as though from the moment she stabs Alec until the moment she steps forward at Stonehenge (I am ready), Tess abdicates any sense of free will; she puts herself totally in Angel's hands and then the law's/society's.  But throughout the novel, she does assert herself and her free will, which is the main reason I disagree with Keith's idea that Angel made her do it.  She choose, however wrongly, to pick up the knife.  Angel is morally responsible (as Keith says in the last sentence quoted above) but not for Alec's murder.
 
Cheers,
JoAnna
JoAnna S. MinkProfessor Emerita of English
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