Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

232
Thomas Hardy
all, ‘quite a Malthusian towards her mother for thoughtlessly giving
her so many little sisters and brothers’ (a reflection from Hardy rather
than Tess) and by having her, in her teens, think of her siblings as ‘six
helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished for life on
any terms’. This unlikely consideration on the part of a teenage Wessex
girl is almost immediately succeeded by a slighting reference to Wordsworth
and his belief in ‘Nature’s holy plan’ (from ‘Lines Written in
Early Spring’). Almost the most violent authorial outbreak in the
whole of Tess replies to this in the penultimate Phase The Sixth (‘The
Convert’), where we read:
‘for to Tess, as to not a few millions of others, there was ghastly
satire in the poet’s lines—
Not in utter nakedness.
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.
To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading
personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the
result seemed to justify, and at best could only palliate.’
Hardy is here advancing another sexological insight, namely that
woman has laboured too long—in all senses—under the ban of the
concept that sexual pleasure is a concomitant of reproduction. As Ruth
Herschberger well puts it:
‘In a very basic sense, a child is the only admission of
marital eroticism that wins the approbation of society . . . It is
of the utmost importance to make clear that reproduction and
the sex act are far more closely allied in the man’s case than in
the woman’s for in the normal man the sex act is by Nature’s
design specifically a reproductive act as well.’ 8
Intercourse must always have reproductive significance for the
male. It does not do so for the female: A woman ovulates, sheds an
egg, usually but once a month, and during the long child-bearing
period of her life is generally infertile; furthermore, ovulation is not
with her a response to copulation (as with horses and sheep).
It is far from far-fetched to bring this into a discussion of Tess for
the imagery surrounding the heroine is so succulently suggestive of what
sexual union is for a woman—‘The coordinated system of the male is