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Tess of the D’Urbervilles 229
had successfully suggested his transporting them by wheelbarrow . . .
and, above all, restoring the famous, eloquent subtitle ‘A Pure Woman’,
which estimate, as he himself put it in his Preface to the Fifth and
Later Editions, ‘was disputed more than anything in the book’. 4
So between Phase The First (‘The Maiden’) and Phase The Second
(‘Maiden No More,’ explicitly enough) there is an interval or lacuna
during which Tess must be conceived as having been carried away by
her sexual side, to which she obviously yielded with a degree of pleasure.
Alec’s initiation into sex—bully though he is—was not, in short,
wholly unpleasant. She was, in Hardy’s words, ‘stirred to confused
surrender awhile . . . ’, and, in her own to Alec, ‘My eyes were dazed
by you for a little, and that was all.’ He, meanwhile, was the kind of
man who makes James’s Doctor Sloper exclaim in exasperation, ‘You
women are all the same! But the type to which your brother belongs
was made to be the ruin of you, and you were made to be its handmaids
and victims.’
We must establish all this securely at the start since it influences
so much later on. The structural response comes in the pivotal confession
scene with Angel, whom Tess realizes she could at this point win
over by the wiles of sex yet refrains from so doing, sensing that (in a
shame-culture for women) seduction can be no solution—‘she might
have used it promisingly’, we read here, ‘it’ being ‘her exceptional
physical nature’. Hence Tess hates herself for her initial weakness,
really a little rape when we compare its similarity with that of the
dying pheasants later on when she again sleeps outside. So at the very
beginning of her destiny she turns with flashing eyes on Alec to cry,
‘My God! I could knock you out of the gig! Did it never strike your
mind that what every woman says some women may feel?’
We now know, or think we know, very much more about Thomas
Hardy’s private life and it may be that his liaison with Tryphena
Sparks, who probably bore him the only child he ever had, urged
further reticences on an already inordinately shy author. Sue Bridehead
of Jude the Obscure and Tryphena are indeed astonishingly alike,
and Hardy himself said that ‘some of the circumstances’ of this book
were suggested by the death of a lady in 1890, the year in which
Tryphena herself died. Jude was written not long after Tess. The model
for Tess herself was apparently a dairymaid called Marian, four years
older than himself and ‘one of the few portraits from life in his works’
(Florence Emily Hardy).