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Thomas Hardy
‘Woman is truly less free today than ever she has been since
time began, in the womanly sense of freedom. Which means,
she has less peace, less of that lovely womanly peace that flows
like a river, less of the lovely, flower-like repose of a happy
woman, less of the nameless joy in life, purely unconscious,
which is the very breath of a woman’s being.’
D. H. Lawrence
Hardy asks—What is love? In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, his thirteenth
novel in order of composition and possibly his first in emotional
commitment, we have the heroine as victim, ‘a visionary essence
of woman—a whole sex condensed into one typical form’. 1 She is
perhaps the most firmly fleshed-out person in these pages, as also
the most fully sexed. What is more, Hardy takes pains to present her
as both a living, breathing, individual woman and one trying hard to
defer to the models in her culture. In short, she exemplifies what one
feminist has defined as modern woman’s true tragedy—’the sad thing
for women is that they have participated in the destruction of their
own eroticism’. 2
It is important to be clear about Hardy’s intentions here from
the start. For his own reticences, compounded with those of his time,
sometimes obscure—certainly for the contemporary student steeped
in libertine literature—what shimmers through the imagery, in a
manner in which of course it does in life. Tess liked sex.
In the serial publication in the Graphic, for instance, Tess’s account
to her mother of her own seduction by Alec d’Urberville is wholly
changed; in it Tess is deceived into a false marriage ceremony in a
‘private room’ with Alec. This sop to contemporary bias (the term
morality can barely be used), apparently echoing the similar deception
of Thomasina in The Return of the Native, was reinforced by
the expunging of all references to Tess’s child from the serial story,
including the whole of Chapter XIV. The first episode involving the
text-painter, whose fire-and-brimstone hortations Tess instinctively
felt to be ‘Crushing! killing!’, was also omitted. 3
While Hardy was no Flaubert in this respect—after all, he had had
Harper’s American offer for Tess in his pocket for over a year before
British serialization—he nevertheless went about faithful thematic
restoration for eventual book publication, letting Angel Clare carry the
dairymaids in his arms over the flooded lane where his magazine editor