[Hardy-l] The Facts of LLife/Tess

[Richardson, Angelique]

The late nineteenth-century periodical press was awash with articles on the importance of educating (mainly) girls in the facts of life - see, for example 'The Tree of Knowledge,' New Review 10 (1894), 675–690, to which Hardy and most of the other male and female authors exercised by this issue contributed; girls, middle-class especially but not exclusively were seen as worryingly ignorant and thus woefully open to the machinations of the sexual double standard and, according to the growing number of social purists and eugenic feminists, to predatory degenerate men.  The moment where Tess suggests that the novel might be an agent of sex education is spot on re late Victorian thinking on the Woman Question and the Sex Problem.

(I chart these debates  in *Love and Eugenics: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman* (paperback 2008), and am looking at Hardy's engagement with these ideas in a book on Hardy and biology.  See e.g. Hardy in 'Candour in English Fiction', New Review, January 1890.)

Angelique






________________________________________
From: Charles.Anesi at wellsfargo.com [Charles.Anesi at wellsfargo.com]
Sent: 08 January 2009 06:09
To: hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu
Subject: RE: [Hardy-l] Re: Thoughts on 'Tess'

Rosemarie,
Trying to avoid indelicacies here, but I would think the gelding of farm
animals, the careful segregation of bulls, rams, boars and stallions,
and myriad other things (like the use of the reddleman's wares for
example) would provide even the most clueless country lass with
overwhelming evidence.  Arabella certainly seemed to get the idea.  But
I suppose Tess could have been carefully sheltered.  Anyway, this is a
matter that does not seem to bother most  readers and certainly does not
interfere with my enjoyment of the novel or its dramatizations.