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

[Phillip Mallett]

Pace Rosemarie's message, I did not say that Tess 
had not been traumatized, and I'm sorry if what I 
said could have been read to that effect. I said 
that 'Tess's own comments later don't sound to me 
like those of a bullied, traumatised woman' - 
'later' being that time when she begins to take a 
purchase on what has happened. By this stage, as 
she leaves Alec, her interpretation of the events 
of the past few weeks is that she had been 
'dazed' by Alec - in the narrator's words, had 
been 'confused' and 'stirred' by him, and 
'temporarily blinded by his ardent manner' - but 
that she had not 'really' or 'sincerely' loved 
him. She is strikingly clear-headed about this; 
she doesn't sound as if she is suffering from the 
kind of traumatic shock that makes 
clear-headedness impossible. Even so, I thought I 
had made clear in my message that what Tess 
suffers is a 'violation': manifestly, 
unequivocally, it is.

I remain concerned that this debate tends to echo 
the fetishization of virginity that (I think) 
Hardy was anxious to critique. As I said, I don't 
want to trivialize this either: of course the 
'first time' is physically and emotionally 
significant. But it is the social and cultural 
significance of losing virginity - its public 
rather than its personal meaning - that I wanted 
to draw attention to, both as registered in the 
1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, where 
non-virgins (i.e., people not known to be of good 
'moral character') lost the right to be protected 
against (for example) false marriages, or drugged 
sex, and as registered in the campaign to raise 
the age of consent which led to that Act, where 
Stead and his allies were concerned explicitly 
with the protection of virgins, who fetched 
better prices both in the sex market and in the 
sensational press, and not generally with the 
protection of the young. At the personal level, 
as one of the fieldwomen says, ''tis wonderful 
what a body can get used to ' that sort in time', 
and at the personal level Tess is remarkably 
resilient (as Rosemarie has argued elsewhere). 
But at the social and cultural level, an 
'immeasurable ... chasm' opens up for Tess after 
the night in the Chase. That she cannot 'get used 
to in time'.
Phillip Mallett
-- 
Was man nicht erfliegen kann, muss man erhinken ...
Die Scrift sagt, es ist keine Sünde zu hinken

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.


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