[Hardy-l] Re: Thoughts on 'Tess'

[Keith Wilson]

I thought the death of Prince was the weakest aspect of what was overall a good adaptation.  In the book, the stabbing of Prince by the shaft of the mail cart is made deliberately proleptic of the stabbing of Alec by Tess.  The chapter even ends with the observation that "she regarded herself in the light of a murderess," and in combination with the antecedent description of Prince's blood "spouting in a stream, and falling with a hiss into the road" the anticipation of Alec's eventual death is made sufficiently overt as to be unmissable by anyone reading the novel for a second time (and therefore possessed of information about what happens at the end).
 
All that's lost by having the mail-man -- with what seemed to me absurd speed, given that the gravity of Prince's injuries remained shrouded in darkness, at least for the television audience -- come bustling up with his shotgun.  And if the intent really is that we regard the gun as itself having some kind of proleptic phallic role, it seems astonishingly ham-fisted symbolically -- reductive to the point of bathos.  There has to be a logical consistency/parallel for a symbol to function meaningfully.  How can the killing of Prince by the mailman's gun be analogous to Tess's mercy killing of the birds while at the same time being suggestive of her own victimization by men?  One can't have it both ways.  Is the gun functioning symbolically as a means of merciful release or is it functioning as the phallic male weapon that will soon be used against Tess herself?  Surely the whole symbology becomes impossibly confused and crude if the symbol is required to have two mutually contradictory functions.  For the suggested symbolism to work, the phallus would have to be seen as putting Tess out of her misery by relieving her of her virginity.  I think not.  If the symbolic correspondences suggested were indeed intended by the adapters, they have turned the crystal clarity of Hardy's symbolism into confused absurdity.
 
Best,
 
Keith Wilson
 
 
Paul Niemeyer wrote:
 
>Again, I will defend the death of Prince as presented in the program because--while different from the scene as Hardy wrote it--it corresponds to Tess's "mercy killing" of the birds in the novel, and the smoking gun barrel is a phallic indication of the dual fates that await Tess: rape and execution.  


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