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

[Keith Wilson]

At the risk of going over ground recurrently tramped over in various Hardyan forums, I'd just like to raise the standard caveat about the seduction/rape question, which post-Polanski (and in my view primarily because of Polanski, rather than Hardy -- so it may offer an interesting codicil to our earlier discussion of film adaptation) is recurrently addressed as if what occurred is rendered by Hardy as unequivocally a rape.
 
In the absence of specific information one way or the other, to say that the text unequivocally indicates a rape is incorrect: the text deliberately leaves the situation ambiguous -- unless, and this is a very important caveat, one extends the definition of rape (as we might well feel inclined to do in a contemporary context)  to mean that when the woman is in a situation of vulnerability (isolated, exhausted, afraid, of a subordinate class --- all of which apply to Tess's situation in the Chase), the extraction from her of essentially supine resignation, or even half complicity, should be deemed an act of rape. But if we mean by rape what most Victorians would have meant by it -- i.e. violent physical compulsion -- there is no clear evidence that Tess was raped.  The famous comment sometimes adduced in supposed evidence -- "Doubtless some of Tess d'Urbervilles mailed ancestors . . . had dealt the same wrong even more ruthlessly upon peasant girls of their time" -- provides as much evidence for non-violence as it does for violence: in fact, I would have thought rather more, in that the mailed ancestors are said to have effected their sexual congress with peasant girls "even more ruthlessly," which presumably suggests that Alec didn't resort to overt violence, though he did clearly prey on Tess's vulnerability to a degree that to a modern consciousness might be seen as effectively rape.
 
But the distinction between what the text does say and what any given reader assumes it says (and a reader who says she was raped is indeed assuming that that's what the text says, because Tess doesn't exist outside the pages of the text, and nothing can be said to happen to her that doesn't happen in the text) is fundamental.  Saying that the text says it's rape is careless reading, careless reading that flattens the situation into simplistic moral terms that Hardy is deliberately trying to avoid.  What happens could have been anything between violence at one extreme and last-minute sexual complicity on Tess's part at the other, and what Hardy seems to want to suggest is that in relation to her "purity" it doesn't matter which, because Tess is equally victim (and once victim, always victim) whichever point on the spectrum between compulsion and befuddled complicity the act took place on.
 
As soon as we assume that, we make the book much more morally complex in the way that Hardy, surely, would have wanted it to be read -- a way that, courtesy of Polanski's directorial flattening, it has seemingly become more and more difficult to read it.  After all, what Hardy presumably wanted to indicate is that Tess -- a woman who (and these are unequivocal textual facts) has an illegitimate child by a man to whom she is not married, marries another man without revealing that fact, eventually goes back to live out of wedlock as mistress to the father of her child, kills that man, and duly -- in full accordance with legal procedure -- ends on the gallows for that crime, is indeed, customary moral categories notwithstanding, a "Pure Woman" and a victim.  If he had unequivocally made it clear that the act was a rape in the traditional sense of the word , i.e. an act of overt violence (which even in 1891 he could have done; he couldn't have portrayed the act itself in any detail, but he could have made it clear in the contextual narrative what the act had been), even an 1890s audience would have had relatively little difficulty with the notion that she was a victim.  By making it ambiguous, he is making a much greater moral demand on his audience, and inviting them to acknowledge that even if this woman has finally, in a vulnerable situation, "given in" to Alec, she is an innocent and tragically injured party.  That's a far from orthodox view in the 1890s; in fact it was a far from orthodox view right down to the 1960s, and perhaps beyond in some circles.
 
So why this recurrent modern need to insist that Tess has to have been raped to be a victim, which implicitly assumes -- oh irony of ironies -- that to suggest that there is no firm evidence that she was raped is to somehow qualify/undermine her status as sympathetic victim. Surely the insistence, even in the absence of textual evidence, that it is a forced rape is implicitly saying that because we like and sympathize with her as a character, are moved by her as a character, she has to be a woman who had no sexual response in the Chase to Alec. We want her as a victim on our morally undemanding terms, one who doesn't require complicated adjustments to facile moral categories, which, bafflingly, end up being as restrictive as those 19th century moral categories that Hardy was in part attempting to explode with this novel.  So strongly do we seem to feel this that we end up doing violence (our own metaphorical rape) to Hardy's text in our pursuit -- or Polanski's pursuit -- of simplistic, feel-good, Tess-has-to-be-sexually-stainless absolutes.  
 
Best,
 
Keith Wilson
      
 
Tony wrote
 > The main point, as Joanna says, is that Alec raped her and thus ruined her life. Did she consent? No.  
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 7181 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://coyote.csusm.edu/pipermail/hardy-l/attachments/20090109/a2d3a926/attachment.bin