[Hardy-l] Tess

[Keith Wilson]

I agree that Tess is not thinking rationally, and I certainly wasn't intending to suggest that Angel literally makes her kill Alec -- i.e. that he compels and wants her to, which is the meaning JoAnna seemingly derived from my comment.  But Hardy's phrasing clearly suggests that Angel's emphasis on the living Alec's having some kind of sexual claim to Tess as her "husband in Nature" influences the distorted logic of her act.  Nor would I want to suggest that that lifts all responsibility off her shoulders -- she clearly commits murder, and duly pays the price for her crime.  But it does deliberately foreground, as part of the whole "pure woman" sub-motif, the cruel vulnerability of a lower-class woman to the class and gender power/ flawed authority of both these men, even when she tries to stand up to them physically (Alec) or argumentatively (Angel, as she does briefly on the wedding night, before deferring to his sense of her guilt).
 
As for her "choosing" to pick up the knife, it's interesting that this is precisely what Hardy elects not to show, substituting instead the somewhat grand guignol business of the dripping blood staining Mrs. Brooks' ceiling.  He could have shown her doing what Joanna's phrasing specifically has her doing --picking up the knife  -- as Joseph Conrad so memorably did a few years later with Winnie Verloc's stabbing of her husband in The Secret Agent.  But Hardy, unlike Conrad, decided not to show his murderer "choosing," with the intention, I suspect, of introducing a similar kind of motivational ambiguity/complexity to that created by the seduction/rape scene.  I don't particularly want to revisit at length that question again, about which there was a long discussion a few years back on the VICTORIA listserv.  But as I said then, it's always seemed to me that, in the absence of firm final evidence for one or the other, a "seduction" (though it's the wrong word) offers much more subtle and challenging textual possibilities.  Had it been presented as an unequivocal rape, even Hardy's more austere contemporaries would have had few difficulties in exonerating Tess from blame.  By making it unclear whether Tess -- lost, alone, vulnerable, mocked by her social peers, exhausted, cruelly manipulated by her employer's son and social superior -- at the last moment "consented" (a term that probably seems a meaningless quibble to us given such an imbalance in class/gender power, though also a term that in the absence of actual physical force would have rendered her culpable in the eyes of most of Hardy's original readers), Hardy deliberately challenges his readers to examine their preconceptions about moralized sexual categories.  Just as surely, his way of presenting Alec's murder deliberately challenges his readers to examine more thoughtfully -- in this particular instance, at least! -- the superficially straightforward categories of "murderer" and "victim."
 
Best,
 
Keith Wilson
                                                 
 
 
Joanna wrote
>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.
 

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 6591 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://coyote.csusm.edu/pipermail/hardy-l/attachments/20081013/d5cc30b8/attachment.bin