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

[Rosemarie Morgan]

Thanks Phillip,

Trauma manifests itself in a variety of ways including chemical changes in 
the brain, eating disorders, suicidal feelings, repressed memory syndrome, 
confusion, self-loathing, even cancer

There is much more of course but self-detestation and confusion are clearly 
delineated by the narrator. And, incidentally, when it comes to narratorial 
voice  --as when the narrator speaks (in the passage cited by you, Phillip) 
of Tess's  "dread" of Alec, her "wincing" before him, that she had 
"succumbed to the adroit advantages he took of her helplessness," that "she 
had never wholly cared for him," --"temporarily blinded by his ardent 
manner, "stirred to confused surrender" (XII) and so on, which you quote, 
in part, below, it has to be said that these are *not* her expressions, her 
words or her voice, at all,  "Clear-headed"? No!. Tess is nowhere to be 
heard saying that  she now has a "purchase on what has happened." Every one 
of these phrases is expressed in the third-person and by the narrator.

Next, to take these words out of the mouth of the narrator and put them 
into Tess' mouth is one form of interpretive obliquity -- yet another is to 
ascribe these passages to her "purchase on what has happened" (by which you 
seem to imply--or implied earlier anyway - that the "Happening" refers to 
the Chase episode) whereas in this instance the narrator ascribes them 
specifically to the question of marriage to Alec.

Indeed, any one of these phrases could refer back not to what "happened" as 
much as to her entire Trantridge experience from, say, her 'Half pleased, 
half-reluctant state" in the scene of the "British Queen" strawberries, or 
"laughing distressfully..and then blushing with vexation that she had 
laughed," in the whistling scene or, when it comes to accepting Alec's 
offer of a ride (from the party revels), to  her fearful ambivalence, her 
feeling of being "bullied" and "almost ready to faint, so vivid was  the 
sense of the crisis. At almost any other moment in her life she would have 
refused...as she had refused...several times before." (X)

As to "fetishing" virginity. -- (commonly taken to refer to hymen-repair 
surgery) if Hardy's readers follow his lead in rendering the thing utterly 
precious one can hardly blame them :

  "Why was it that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as 
gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been 
traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive..." (IX)

Cheers
Rosemarie
________________________


'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.