Hardy - Tess of the d'Urbervilles

‘A PURE WOMAN’ (Well, that tell us what we’re in for here). 

•     ·       Phase the First – The Maiden
• ·       Phase the Second – Maiden No More
• ·       Phase the Third – The Rally
• ·       Phase the Fourth – the Consequence
• ·       Phase the Fifth – The Woman Pays
• ·       Phase the Sixth – The Convert
• ·       Phase the Seventh - Fulfillment

“The ideal and real clash slightly”

Ah, ‘purity’.   What a fraught political and social concept.  Actually it is not.  It’s quite simple.  Men figured out they had something to do with reproduction and at that point, women had to be kept solely for the procreative use of one man.  (Although that is antithetical to widespread and healthy gene mixing – right, down science!).  

The first man who figured out that the male of the species had something to do with procreation – (I wonder if he was gay … probably – gay men tend to be more prone to pithy observation) is a key figure lost to history.  There are 3 ages of human society:  Before men figured out they had something to do with procreation (matriarchy) and after (patriarchy) and after birth control (whatever it is you want to call what we have now – ‘modernity’?)  Our current tumultuous and hysterical (look up the root words for hysteria if you want a giggle) culture grow solely from the empowerment of women and the advent of control over childbearing.  Hardy and his wife failed to have children, and their marriage, through the lens of time, probably is best described as Unfortunate.  

Tess is a woman you want to emulate and spank with equal vigor.  Her purity is of emotional devotion; purity of love.  Once set, the bond cannot be undone, and life itself cannot prevail against it.   Would that we all find something (not a person, by preference) for which we are so wholly able to give ourselves.  ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished’, or admired, at least.  But to numbly, and dumbly, like a yoked beast, suffer tortures of the soul so profound that the eventual emotional eruption destroys another human being?  It speaks to reason long ago lost to the encroaching breadth and depth of emotional bondage.  It seems in the world of the great emotional novel, reason must early on slip away, unseen, unheard, unwanted.  On could posit that any passion, for a  person, a profession, a thing, murders reason. 

The Victorians seem to set emotion to the exclusion of reason on a pedestal, wherefrom all our eventually stricken with prejudice; some to redemption (Rochester) some to death (Tess).  Tess pays for her life for a wavering of the purity of her emotion.  For ceasing to believe in Angel, and unwilling to bear the torch alone any longer … for being human, and doubting her love; the wage of that sin is certainly death.  May God be more forgiving in the wavering of our love for Him. 

She is peculiarly stubborn for seemingly endless stretches and her capitulations (first for sex and then for safety), occur in a sudden moment, or off stage.  Is Hardy unable, or unwilling, to go into detail? Did Alec rape Tess? Or was she sexually seduced?  Not knowing lures us into Angel’s judgemental corner; that she somehow failed, whether she was raped or seduced.  So, we take Angel’s part, his churlish abandonment of Tess is justified and her privations a fair punishment, in a world where she might have more forcefully objected.  It is certainly a fortuitous easing of the way; the purity of the heroine tragically juxtaposed against the justifiably cruel actions the hero, for no critical price. 

No human being should be permitted the emotional cruelty so vicious it wounds, in this case wounds unto death.  How do we ensure the child grows with enough empathy not to be an emotional terrorist? For that surely is what Angel is.