[hardy-l] BBC film as cognitive comfort

[Arthur Efron]

To return again to the dimensions of the recent BBC film version of TESS:

Those of us who discern any ambiguity in Hardy's scene of Tess and Alec 
on a fateful night in the Chase, have nothing to worry about. The film 
makes it rape without a doubt. She screams twice. 

Imagine if it were kept in the unclear shape in which Hardy left it. The 
whole film would have been put at risk with an undecidable event near 
its opening.

Rape is horrible. But  presented this way it is cognitively comforting 
for those who require certainty, and for those who are already sure that 
the Man must always be violating the Woman. It may also set off some 
rape fantasies in the minds of  viewers.
Those would be quite a lot more difficult to generate from the scene as 
Hardy wrote it.

John Dewey wrote a book called THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY.  The book is 
complicated, but the  main idea is easy to summarize: there is no certainty.

But to qualify: Hardy did not exactly use ambiguity in that scene.  
"Ambiguity" is just a word we seem to have to use. Long ago I learned 
from a professor of rhetoric that there could be a better term, if we 
could learn to use it: "ambiloquence." I gladly credit Hardy with that.

--Art Efron