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

[Keith Wilson]

The textual and (for what it's worth) the legal situations are much less
cut and dried than you are making them here, Rosemarie.

To begin with the legal situation -- and therefore to talk about these
characters as if they were "real" people, and to speculate about what
might have happened beyond the bounds of the text: yes, it is indeed the
case that to take sexual advantage of a sleeping woman, were it to be
successfully proved in court, would have been deemed to be rape.  This
fact is elaborately explored in William A Davis's very interesting
article, "The Rape of Tess: Hardy, English Law, and the Case for Sexual
Assault", "Nineteenth Century Literature" 52 (1997), 221-31, an article
that has, I suspect, done much to fuel the unequivocal rape line that
has increasingly come to dominate.  To his own satisfaction Davis
establishes that d'Urberville perpetrated a rape because in the relevant
scene when he initially arrives back Tess is asleep.  Davis uses this,
and citations of actual cases, to make the dangerously confident claim
that "Such laws and case rulings suggest that the courts would have
interpreted Tess's situation as a case of rape." But he immediately
undermines this claim about what real courts would have done --  if Tess
had been a real person -- by acknowledging that there is a second stage
to Alec's relationship with Tess in which she displays "complicity in a
sexual relationship of several weeks' duration" (Davis, 228).  If we
want to invoke the real law in a real situation to illuminate this
literary text, this subsequent stage in the relationship immediately
undermines Davis's antecedent claim about what the courts would have
found.  By the time the case had got to court, given the relative class
positions and Tess's subsequent "complicity" in continuing the
relationship, the chances of a court finding Alec guilty of rape would
have evaporated into negligibility.  Even Davis himself acknowledges
that taking the early stages of the relationship as a whole, "Hardy saw
seduction as a major part of the 'true reading' of 'Tess'" (228)   And
while we are in the realm of the "real world," I doubt very much your
own claim, Rosemarie, about what contemporary readers would have
"understood."  In the light of what happened subsequently in the ongoing
relationship, and in the absence of firm evidence of what actually
happened in the Chase, I doubt that many contemporary readers' knowledge
of law, or their predilections towards women who continue in
relationships with men who sexually assault them,  would have inclined
them to convict Alec of anything much beyond being a nasty piece of
work.

That gets us back to the text, and there is no evidence -- as I notice
Chuck has just indicated in his latest e-mail -- of what happens after
Alec finds her sleeping.  Davis and you, Rosemarie, assume that because
she is sleeping when he arrives back, she remained asleep.  But the text
doesn't say that.  Neither does it say she doesn't. That's why the
actual situation is finally unknowable, unless we want to get into the
unproductive business of speculating about what might have gone on
outside the pages of the text, and hence outside the existence of these
characters.  Interesting as Davis's article is, it hasn't earned its
eye-catchingly assertive title -- "The Rape of Tess" -- because it
hasn't, and can't, demonstrate what happens next.  The fact that had she
been asleep, Alec would have been guilty of rape is irrelevant to the
textual situation with which we are dealing.  All I am suggesting is
that to read it absolutely as a rape (as three people have now recently
done), and as Hardy refused to give us the textual grounds to do, we
make this a much less morally complex work than Hardy -- at many other
points in the book (back to our "pure" murderess and kept woman) --
seemed to be inclined to make it.

Incidentally I don't "want" it to be anything.  I'm perfectly happy to
rest in what Keats memorably called the state of negative capability,
"of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason."  That seems to me how literature works,
which is why making over-confident absolute claims about things on which
a text chooses to be silent is usually a reductive business.

Best,

Keith

Rosemarie wrote
>
>Whatever we might want it to be, Hardy's contemporary readers would
have understood the Chase event to be rape. Under the legislation of the
time, to take sexual advantage of a sleeping woman was deemed to be
rape. . . .. Did she consent? No.
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