[Hardy-l] RE: Tess

[Rosemarie Morgan]

Well now, Keith -- you know full well I didn't mean any of the above (re 
your email today ) .  But perhaps you were responding to another question 
altogether.

  By textual context I include such things as TH's 
(cultural-historical)  self-imposed obligation to tailor his texts to his 
audience, and his various revisions to the Chase scene are exemplary. As 
are also his numerous revisions to Tess's relationship with Alec. These 
changes were not made because he felt self- assured (as Jane is) that his 
creations were fictional. Far from it. He made the changes because he hoped 
to market his work for a culture for whom these issues were "real" -- not 
in the least bit fictional. They were live and topical and most certainly 
active within the cultural imagination. They sprang not out of TH's head 
entirely but from the world he lived in.

As you know, but some readers here may not, he was a magistrate for longer 
than he was a novelist and keenly interested in the machinations of law. 
Nor was he writing into a vacuum, much as we might wish art to be art 
bearing no vestiges of the prevailing culture or of historical context; I 
think that bubble was blown long ago, but into a milieu, into a society 
whose social mores he hoped, deeply, to influence (cf "We will educate them 
by degrees").

I have to confess I didn't read to the foot of your email, Keith,  re. the 
deplorable state of teaching -- but I will and if necessary amend the above 
accordingly.(if I have misrepresented your complaint) - but right now I'm 
in the hasties of departing for Manhattan.

I will return

Best
  Rosemarie


At 03:30 PM 10/16/2008, you wrote:
>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
>
>--