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

[Richardson, Angelique]

________________________________
From: Phillip Mallett [pvm at st-andrews.ac.uk]
Sent: 11 February 2009 09:53
To: Richardson, Angelique
Subject: Re: FW: FW: [hardy-l] More on the ending to Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Thanks, Rosemarie.

I suspect there are some matters on which readers of this (and any other novel) will never wholly agree, and on which any reader might take different views at different times of his or her life, so I won't keep urging my view. Part of the issue here clearly turns on definitions of trauma, but since the word isn't used by Hardy (as far as I recall), I'll let it go - we can all agree that what happens to Tess in the Chase stays with her as a deeply hurtful experience thereafter (at the end of Ch 12, for example, she is 'the agonised girl', in Ch 13 her depression is 'terrible'), just as we can (I think) all agree that whether we think Alec guilty of rape in a legal sense - either current or post-1885 senses - he is guilty as the immediate agent of her agony. I only want to add that the narrator, at the very end of the chapter, throws the emphasis on the 'social chasm' that has opened up - which is, I take it, a reference to Tess's new cultural status as a 'fallen woman'. (Incidentally, the sentence Rosemarie quotes at the end of her message moves on away from the specifics of this scene in the Chase, to suggest that 'so often' the 'coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man'. It's more a reflection on the 'universal harshness' than on Alec's sexual predatoriness - though it is that too, of course.)

As for my 'interpretive obliquity': well, I'm not sure Rosemarie can have the argument both ways, as it were - quoting the narrator as if he (I assume 'he') is authoritative about Tess's 'wincing', etc., but refusing to allow him the same authority when he speaks of her being 'stirred to confused surrender'.  But the other words I've quoted are Tess's own: 'if I had ever sincerely loved you, if I loved you still...'; and later 'I have never really and truly loved you, and I think I never can.' I can't make sense of these words, and fact that they =are virtually repeated, unless we allow that Tess at one time thought that in some way - which she now sees not to have been 'real' or 'true' or 'sincere' love - she felt she had loved Alec. I find myself aligning this not-real, not sincere love with 'stirred' , just as I align her rejection of those feelings now with 'confused' and 'surrender'. Her next comment, 'My eyes were dazed by you for a little, and that was all', seems to me precisely 'clear-headed', as is her recognition  that to stay on, and receive further  gifts from Alec ('anything more' - she has at least accepted the costly frock she wears in Ch 13), would make her his 'creature'. She knows what she felt, knows the status of what she felt,  knows that she doesn't feel it any longer, and knows too that to stay with Alec would be to diminish herself.

Hardy's/the narrator's compassion for Tess is evident, and moving, as generations of readers can testify. But at the same time there is a tough-minded side to this narrator, as there is to the field woman who says ''tis wonderful what a body can get used to o' that sort in time'. The narrator suggests that but for Sorrow's illness and death, Tess might have recovered in just the way this speaker expects, and indeed her companions assume when they teasingly sing ballads about maids in the green wood, etc. Tess grows more robust:  'their lively spirits were contagious, and she became almost gay.' The narrator is still more tough-minded in Ch 15, where alongside the reflections that (as in the Mayor) the wisdom to do better so often comes at the cost of making us lose the wish to do at all, he remarks that 'But for the world's opinion these experiences would have been simply a liberal education.' That's an extraordinary phrase, but Tess does become, as the Talbothays episode shows, a deeper and stronger woman than those around her: a 'complex woman', rather than a 'simple girl'. I don't think the narrator diminishes the sense that Tess was violated in recognizing her powers of recovery, nor in continuing to mount his main attack on 'the world's opinion'. My comments in this exchange have been intended to follow that emphasis, which is - in my view - a critique of society's (not, I remain convinced, Hardy's) 'fetishization of virginity'.

Phillip

--


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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