[Hardy-l] Tess/rape

[Phillip Mallett]

Dear Keith

Angelique has forwarded to me your contribution 
to the Tess/rape discussion. I wholly agree with 
your position here, that the text remains 
ambiguous about the legal status of what happens 
(its moral status - that Alec behaves wickedly  - 
is perfectly clear). Tess later remarks that she 
had never 'really' loved Alec. To say this is 
surely to imply that she felt she had loved him 
in some sense or to some degree - a sense she now 
regards as mistaken, or a degree she sees now to 
be insufficient to count as 'real'. Such a 
confession, made in court, would surely have made 
a rape conviction impossible.

In fact to look at the text is to see Hardy 
constantly revising the suggestions around the 
scene: from the fake marriage (which under the 
1885 Act would count as rape), to the druggist's 
bottle from which he pours a drink to keep her 
warm (which may suggest rape by date-rape drug) 
to the placing around her 'tenderly' of an 
overcoat - all this suggests steering away from 
rape. Tess's complaint when she discovers they 
are lost is made 'between archness and real 
dismay': archness = flirtatiousness, not to be 
wholly done away with by 'dismay', and the 
ambiguous position surely recalls her acceptance 
of the strawberries earlier, in a 'half-pleased, 
half-reluctant state'. Noticeably, the revisions 
emphasise that Alec is 'genuinely' lost, not just 
pretending to be (unnecessarily, since 
'genuinely' is merely a rhetorical intensifier of 
information already given).

My own teaching of the episode leads me to feel 
that most readers in fact shy away from the text; 
it is morally difficult to read, because here we 
are also reading ourselves. Take this sentence: 
'He knelt, and bent lower, till her breath warmed 
his face, and in a moment his cheek was in 
contact with hers.' What is the force of 'in a 
moment'? Is it that Alec acts here on impulse, 
much as Tess will do at times later? And where 
does the reader position him or herself here? 
With Alec, drawing nearer, or with the sleeping 
Tess? My students divide equally here, and do so 
whether of standard undergraduate age, or mature 
evening degree students, and with no pattern to 
distinguish male and female readers. And the same 
is true of the earlier version of the sentence, 
which continues '... his cheek was in contact 
with hers, and with her hair, and her eyes': 
which my students see in roughly equal numbers as 
a terrifying invasion of Tess's 'space' (their 
word), or as deeply tender and even loving -- and 
this irrespective of whether they go on to think 
that Alec is criminally culpable, or just a nasty 
piece of work. It's hard for even the most 
scrupulous reader to be sure what he or she feels 
reading this, I think. I'm simply not sure what 
my own feelings are; I don't know if I'd care to 
find out, if - as must at least partly be the 
case - my own imagination lingers on the scene as 
that sentence does.

One or two of my students have gone to add that 
whatever happens, and despite later references to 
a cry heard in the woods, the 'gentle roosting 
birds poised in their last nap', and 'the hopping 
rabbits and hares', seem undisturbed (they would 
surely have fled, for example, from the whirl of 
motion in Polanski's film). It's a small point, 
since the narrator has clearly withdrawn by now, 
but not wholly irrelevant.

What clearly is relevant is that the narrator 
goes on to comment not about the wickedness of 
men, or of one man, but about the harshness of 
life - how 'the wrong woman appropriates the 
man', as well as what we have seen here. But 
surely one reason to look back to the 1885 Act 
here has been missed, by Davis and others. The 
Act specifies that a woman who consents only 
because she is deceived by a mock marriage, or 
does not give her consent because she's drugged 
or asleep, can be held to have been raped, but 
reserves this protection for a woman 'not of 
known immoral character'. In effect, the 
protection applies to virgins only. Once Tess has 
left Trantridge, she no longer has the law's 
protection. This is one result of the 
valorisation of virginity - rather, fetishisation 
- and it is surely part of what the narrator has 
in mind when referring to the 'immeasurable 
social chasm' which has now opened up between 
Tess and other 'innocent' women. This to my mind 
is at least as wicked as whatever Alec has done. 
And for us as readers and scholars to place so 
much emphasis on this first act - given that we 
know Tess consents, with whatever unease - over 
the next few weeks, is to risk making the loss of 
her virginity define Tess's sexuality. When Stead 
launched his Pall Mall Gazette articles on 'The 
Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' he was 
concerned to protect virgins, just as surely as 
the predators he had in his sights were concerned 
to deflower them. Hence his need to have 'Lily', 
the girl he purchased for £5, examined by a 
midwife: as he put it at his trial, he didn't 
want to be 'palmed off with a little harlot'. 
Eliza Armstrong, to give her real name, was 13; 
if she was a virgin, she needed to be defended, 
if not - she was 'a little harlot', and beyond 
the law, and of no concern to the campaigning 
editor of a newspaper. We need to be careful not 
to fall into the same trap of making the first 
time count so much more than the others. Who and 
what Tess is, or Alec is, doesn't depend on the 
precise sequence of events on one night.

very best
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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