[hardy-l] Tess's ending

[Niemeyer, Paul J.]

I know I won't say anything new or unique here, but we may be in danger of foundering on the shoal of "realism."  TESS's associations with realism--or naturalism--are somewhat tenuous.  At the time TESS was published, realism was associated with the journalistic, the clinical, and the scrupulously rational (think Zola).  Hardy was and is occasionally lumped together with realists, but I think contemporary critics are more correct when they associate Hardy's art with Modernism, as he tends to skew and distort reality.
 
In the case of TESS, what kind of novel is it?  A melodrama of a seduced-and-abandoned maiden (but is Tess seduced, and doesn't she do the abandoning?) that becomes a pastoral romance that becomes a George Moore-like story of a working-class survivor that ends up a Collinsesque crime drama.  It's a novel that plays with genres; likewise, its characters are skewed genre "types:" Alec has all the accoutrements of a stage villain, down to the curling mustache, yet there is a sense that he is consciously playing this role; the true-blue hero (named Angel, for Pete's sake, and given a harp!) turns out to have less feet of clay than feet of sand; and Tess herself is constantly being read--by the characters, by Hardy's narrator, and by the readers--as someone who must fit into a "type."  She's a country girl, a pagan earth goddess, a fallen woman, a sacrificial victim, almost anything we want her to be.  She never really conforms to any "type," and Hardy doesn't allow her to suffer the kinds of fate usually reserved for "fallen women" in the literature of the day: she doesn't become a prostitute, or die of remorse, or--like Little Em'ly--get shipped off to Australia to start life anew.  You could say that her killing of Alec is the most positive thing she does, a moment where she chooses to no longer allow herself to be defined by others and where she says, "THIS is what I choose to be."
 
I think it's a testament to Hardy's art that to this day people are still trying to make Tess (and TESS) into something they can understand and possess, to make her, as Hardy himself said, "my Tess."  Hardy fills us with the same desires and expectations we get from reading genre fiction, but he thwarts that desire, leaving us exhilarated and wondering, "What if?"
 
Anyway, those are my thoughts, unoriginal as they are.  At any rate, I can't accept the argument that it isn't "realistic" for Tess to have murdered Alec.  Murder happens all the time, and for reasons less explicable than Tess's.
 
Best,
 
Paul Niemeyer   

 
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