[HARDY-Ll] Tess and Sleeping Women

[Keith Wilson]

In light of JoAnna's posting about the representation of sleeping women in art, it's interesting to note how this motif is very deliberately repeated in Tess in the Stonehenge scene, a rendering in which Tess, sleeping on the "sacrificial" stone, is given sufficient presence / power / authority -- in association with the grandeur of the site -- that her sleeping form keeps the police at bay until the sun's own elemental strength awakens her.  This scene becomes a closing complement/contrast to the earlier night-time sleeping scene in the Chase -- the two states of vulnerability that bracket her tragedy, its inception point and its final fulfilment.  This capacity of her sleeping form to hold the police off and command their attention (they "stood watching her, as still as the pillars around") is, surely deliberately, made to be in striking contrast to her inability to keep Alec at bay in the earlier scene.
 
It's always seemed to me that the book could well end at that moment, and might even be better for doing so.  We know why Hardy wanted/needed the final brief Angel/Liza-Lu scene, culminating in the ponderous irony of the "President of the Immortals" ending his sport with Tess and the rather strained business of Angel going off hand-in-hand with Liza-Lu, perhaps to ruminate -- as scholarship has occasionally done -- on the potential impediments to future post-mourning felicity presented by the Deceased Wife's Sister Act.  And I guess the text had to have something to indicate that Tess is indeed executed for her crime.  But it is inevitably an anti-climactic subsidence after the remarkable moment of closure provided by the power of Tess's sleeping form to hold the world in attentive suspension, until she rises with the sun into the formalities of arrest that her quiet authority, rather than overt police action, is made to choreograph: "'I am ready,' she said quietly."
 
What a curtain line for the book that would have made, instead of having to have Angel and Liza-Lu pop up, a little like Albany taking over to mouth platitudes for a few lines after Lear's death, or Fortinbras after Hamlet's.
 
Best,
 
Keith Wilson
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