[Hardy-l] RE: Tess

[Keith Wilson]

I'm not sure critics do "speculate outside what is given in the text
itself," if by that one means speculate about events, relating to
characters, that don't occur, or aren't reported as having occurred, in
the text.  Thus, yes, we certainly speculate about "textual context" --
a text's relationship to its culture/period etc. But we don't -- not to
any useful analytical/critical end, anyway -- speculate about whether
Angel enters a monastery or runs off with Car Darch or re-emigrates to
Brazil after Tess's execution. He doesn't exist outside the pages of the
novel and he therefore can't be said to do anything after its end. We
don't even speculate profitably about events that might have happened
within the time-frame of the novel that we aren't specifically told of.
Thus if a student were to say in an essay that it is possible that
Prince is killed because the mail-man was incompetent and was himself
driving on the wrong side of the road, exculpating himself by accusing
Tess of having done so, we'd surely say that that is an irrelevant
speculation because the text does nothing to sanction or invite that
additional textual event that the student has posited.  The fact that in
"real life" a mail-man could or might make that claim doesn't change the
interpretative limits that the text itself sets.
  
One of the things that has gone horribly wrong with much teaching of
English these days, and is helping to destroy it as a serious discipline
in high schools (and is on its way to doing the same in universities,
certainly in North America, anyway), is the encouragement of students to
believe that merely because they posit a possibility in relation to
events that could or should have happened in a book (often without
having read the book with any real care, or sometimes even at all), they
are saying something of imaginative or intellectual interest on which
they should be congratulated.  I once had a student who somewhat
stridently told me that she found Tess an irritating character who was
entirely to blame for what happened to her: had she been a responsible
young woman (as I assume the speaker imagined that she herself would
have been in a comparable situation), she would have taken herself off
to London and got a job in an office.  When I pointed out that there
were problems with this proposition on a number of fronts -- one being
that since Hardy didn't choose to have her do so, the speculation was an
extra-textual irrelevancy, and another being that it showed a limited
understanding of the circumstances faced by Tess in the novel and by
19th-century women of comparable class positions in "real life" -- the
student countered that she had advanced this position in high school and
been congratulated by her English teacher on her provocative insights.
It was hardly surprising, then, that by her over-confident, no-nonsense
lights, this insight of hers came close to rendering all that happens to
Tess in the novel otiose, since she needn't/shouldn't have found herself
in the situations she was in anyway.  Oh well, on to the next book then:
anyone for "Bridget Jones's Diary"?

Thanks to Carolyn for reminding us of what is surely a fairly
substantial piece of evidence for the non-rape interpretation of the
transformative event whose nature the text doesn't/can't/chooses not to
specify: for the sexual happening (whatever it is) being confessed to by
Tess to be analogous, as Tess herself claims it is, to the event to
which Angel confesses, it would surely need to be something less
unequivocal than rape.

Best,

Keith    

-----Original Message-----
From: Rosemarie Morgan [mailto:Rosemarie.morgan at yale.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, October 16, 2008 3:42 PM
To: hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu
Subject: Re: [Hardy-l] RE: Tess


>I agree with Jane on Tess's sexuality and Hardy's sensitive treatment 
>of its complexity.
>And while it is well to "remember that, however moved by and drawn to 
>Tess we may feel, she is a fictional construct and not a real woman"
>Hardy's readers are not fictional. "To speculate outside what is given 
>in the text itself" is what readers and critics do -- text and textual 
>context cannot be separated as Hardy himself recognised-- idly or not.

Rosemarie



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