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234
Thomas Hardy
* * *
Tess, then, is ironically enough Nature’s ‘holy plan’, though strictly
speaking, if she could comment about novel-reading as cited, it is
unlikely she would have been familiar with Wordsworth. ‘She was
not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to
anybody but herself. She simply existed.’ It is a pity de Beauvoir did
not study Hardy; and he, in turn, might have subscribed to much of
what she wrote in The Second Sex, one passage of which could well be
superscribed over much of Tess:
‘Woman is the victim of no mysterious fatality; the
peculiarities that identify her as specifically a woman get their
importance from the significance placed upon them.’ 9
The existential sanguine is there again when Hardy—once more
somewhat spuriously—attaches a little Sully Prudhomme to his heroine’s
reflections, and remarks that she could ‘hear a penal sentence in
the fiat, “You shall be born”.’ Then after Tess has been betrayed—that
is, after she has ‘fallen’—we are asked:
‘In a desert island would she have been wretched at what had
happened to her? Not greatly. If she could have been but just
created, to discover herself as a spouseless mother, with no
experience of life except as the parent of a nameless child,
would the position have caused her to despair? No, she would
have taken it calmly, and found pleasures therein.’
It is something of a pity Hardy felt he had to make Tess an aristocrat
by birth, for the book is really unconcerned with class, except inasmuch
as that through Alec a rural West Country girl is betrayed by
common trade turned pseudo-squireen. 10 It is a pity if only since it led
D. H. Lawrence into some maddeningly self-indulgent passages on
the novel, in which, however, genuine insights lie buried.
Possibly not meant to be published, and only posthumously so
(in the Phoenix collection edited by Edward D. McDonald), these
pages are rendered almost unreadable by Lawrence’s assumption
that we will all share his love ethic, together with its attendant and
highly arbitrary terminology. Tess is an aristocrat and, for him, ‘has