[hardy-l] More on the ending to Tess of the D'Urbervilles

[Marc Jolley]

I am a publisher and in our acquisitions of fiction (of which we do little) we refuse any piece that ends with all the "strings tied" into a nice package. We publish literary fiction, not popular fiction.  Nothing ends up that way in life; why pretend it does. 
The ending to Tess is as the story dictates it to be. Take for example John Grisham's A Time to Kill and The Firm. Neither book (nor film) had credible endings. But, he wanted readers to buy his next book so he played on emotion. Spare me. If Grisham had rewritten the ending of Tess, he would have had some good looking lawyer get her freed because he convinced the judge that society should forgive her of murder because she had had an unfortunate life. Give me Hardy!
Of course, this is the problem with Hollywood's influence on culture. the joke is if you want to be happy watch a hollywood flick (for the most part), but if you want a film that is "literary" art, watch an indie.

Marc Jolley
Director 
Mercer University Press
1400 Coleman Avenue
Macon, Georgia 31207


________________________________________
From: Pauline Guerin [pauline.guerin at ntlworld.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 4:28 AM
To: hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu
Subject: RE: [hardy-l] More on the ending to Tess of the D'Urbervilles

With very great respect, I always find it a little odd that anyone should feel the need to re-write someone else’s ending.  There are two things here that disturb me.

Firstly, Tess may have been largely passive in the book, but that does not mean that she would not feel great passion, frustration or even violence towards someone she may have felt had done her wrong, or was blocking her desired path.   As part of my Masters degree (in Victorian Literature and Culture) for my dissertation I wrote about ‘The Feminisation of the Madman,’ this took me on a fantastic visit to Bethlem Hospital where I was lucky enough to research both male and female ‘mad’ patients, incarcerated between around 1860 and the early 1900s.  Many of the women were segregated; isolated from the rest of the ‘community’ for their own safety.  Some even had to be restrained because of their violent tendencies.  Many of these patients, both male and female, were not ‘mad’ or insane, but had been institutionalised by their own families for varying reasons, (including those who were deemed to be a ‘nuisance ’ and those whose masturbatory habits were allegedly out of control).

I do not think, therefore, that Tess was insane, but she was ‘mad’ – furious, and why not? She’d not been dealt a particularly nice hand whichever way one looks at it.  Just because she is female, also does not mean that she does not have an urge to kill, far from it.  There is the old saying ‘always watch the quiet ones’!

Secondly, as a novelist myself, I am currently engaged on a project whereby the ending is, not only tragic, but also bloody and disgusting.  This is not necessarily how I would like the ending to be, it is merely how the ending is.  I, too, have feelings of despair, disgust and anger in my life, but the ending of my novel is absolutely nothing to do with how I feel, and I find it a little difficult to suggest that Hardy put his own feelings into his ending.  The upshot of it is that we cannot know, we can surmise, but to do so and believe it is dangerous.

On a lighter note, I’d be pretty upset if someone wants to change the end of my novel, because after all, it is my vision; my interpretation of the emotions of the characters.  To make it a happy ending would detract from the point of the novel in the first place.  As someone previously said, you either like it or you don’t, but please don’t fiddle with it.  ☺

Kind regards to all


Pauline




Pauline Guerin MA

I don't think that Tess had such a terribly strong, negative emotion in her to have murdered Alec. It was an unrealistic act on her part, given how passive she had always been.. Simply leaving with the returned Angel would have been more realistic for Tess's character. I think Hardy was writing out his feelings of anger, despair or disgust which were in his own life