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Tess of the D’Urbervilles 231
Finally, the ‘maternal’ Joan Durbeyfield is responsible for pressuring
Tess to marry Angel, and so sets in train the eventual tragedy.
In fact, Hardy’s ironies can become a shade heavy-handed in these
contexts, at least for modern taste, as when he has Alec d’Urberville,
who has watched Tess tortured by treadmill-like labour on the steam
thresher all day long, tell her—the woman he himself had seduced—
‘You have been the cause of my backsliding.’
But a novel, as Hardy wrote in a Preface to this one, is ‘an impression,
not an argument’. As a young critic has put it, ‘Nobody thinks
of T. S. Eliot or D. H. Lawrence as model democrats, or of The Waste
Land or Women in Love as being about good citizenship. But both are
about the impact of modern civilization on the finest, keenest, most
intelligent, most serious minds involved in it.’ 6
Hardy has here seen that a moment has come in our civilization
when meekness and humility are no longer values in the true sense
. . . and all the less so since we pay such loud lip-service to them in
church. We talk a lot about the virtues of humility but, in America
at any rate, encourage our sons to be aggressive, ‘tough’, to ‘flay’ and
‘whip’ their opposition in sports, to make a ‘killing’ on the market.
We give meekness few emotional rights any more. So the two strands
of our culture are being unravelled in different directions, as it were
(one of Tess’s sisters is called Modesty). Flaubert anticipated this
important feminist insight in his late story Un Coeur simple. Gogol
also comes to mind.
Male sexual aggression, incarnate here in Alec d’Urberville, is thus
virtually half of the Puritan conscience. James’s Dr Sloper had said as
much. ‘The man submits’, in the words of another writer, ‘to the force
of nature; the woman submits to the man. Sex is an act of aggression
with which she complies only because she is physically the weaker.’ 7
So Alec can cry out, ‘You have been the cause of my backsliding’.
Forever Eve! As a woman, it must seem, at times, that you cannot win.
For, as Hardy brilliantly if indirectly demonstrates, to put woman on
a pedestal is to take the defence of her honour out of her own control,
to tie her hands behind her back. Man is then encouraged to attack
purity per se . . . as does Alec d’Urberville (or Dostoevsky’s Svidrigailov).
I am suggesting that in another culture Tess could take care
of herself very well, thank you.
In so doing, however, one must also confess that Hardy considerably
loads the dice by making Tess, an unlettered country girl, after