[Hardy-l] Apologies

[carolyn mcgrath]

Apologies to both Joan and Pauline for wrongly addressing my question for one to the other. I had read about six postings at once and thought I had remembered rightly, but then I'm the one who posted my contributions to POTM that evening so that shows how on the ball I can be. No offence intended.

Keith and Jane have both expressed very articulately the concern I tried to raise about the lost opportunity of challenging modern social mores by their decision to remove the ambiguity regarding rape vs seduction. The only further argument I would add to those already given is the significance of the joy Tess feels when, after she has forgiven Angel his past 'folly', he blandly asserts that her confession cannot be more serious than his. Her judgement at this point must surely be trusted by the reader, especially as evidence to the contrary is not available:

`It can hardly be more serious, dearest.'

`It cannot - O no, it cannot!' She jumped up joyfully at the hope. `No, it cannot be more serious, certainly,' she cried, `because 'tis just the same! I will tell you now.'

Hardy does not reiterate what the reader knows of the history of Tess and Alec, but the reader now has Angel's confession to reflect on from a few lines before:

"He then told her of that time of his life to which allusion has been made when, tossed about by doubts and difficulties in London, like a cork on the waves, he plunged into eight-and-forty hours' dissipation with a stranger.

`Happily I awoke almost immediately to a sense of my folly,' he continued. `I would have no more to say to her, and I came home. I have never repeated the offence. But I felt I should like to treat you with perfect frankness and honour, and I could not do so without telling this. Do you forgive me?'

Should we not accept that, on this issue, Tess' sense that Angel is her double holds true? It is why it is so difficult to 'let Angel off the hook' at the end of the book. The fact that he does recognise her superiority and acknowledges his own failures do go someway to redeeming him in my eyes; his inability to condemn her for murder, which is certainly more serious, shows that he knows she has been brought to this by his own, Alec's and society's cruel and hypocritical treatment of her.  

As Joan Rivers (or was it Pauline?) has it, with a modern, satirical twist - "A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp." 

all the best

Carolyn McGrath