Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Tess of the D’Urbervilles 235
the aristocratic quality of respect for the other being’. What does this
mean, if anything? We need a key. ‘She could attend to the wants of
the other person, but no other person, save another aristocrat—and
there is scarcely such a thing as another aristocrat—could attend to
her wants, her deepest wants.’ This is infuriatingly suggestive and,
indeed, Lawrence nearly always strikes through to the marrow of
some truth—Tess does respect the rights of others, only to have her
own infringed. The ‘embodiment of desire’ is destined to be betrayed
in this fashion. Meekness marries aggression. We shall return to
Lawrence’s critique below. It is a valuable one, well worth the tedium
of having to plough through Lawrentian rhetoric at its most intolerable,
e.g. ‘The murder is badly done, altogether the book is botched,
owing to the way of thinking in the author, owing to the weak yet
obstinate theory of being. Nevertheless, the murder is true, the whole
book is true, in its conception.’ Which is really to asseverate that
Lawrence’s sex ethic differed from Hardy’s.
For Lawrence’s interest was chiefly in what he was forever calling
the male principle. Hardy’s was not, as Virginia Woolf well saw:
‘For the women he shows a more tender solicitude than
for the men, and in them, perhaps, he takes a keener interest.
Vain might their beauty be and terrible their fate, but while the
glow of life is in them their step is free, their laughter sweet,
and theirs is the power to sink into the breast of Nature and
become part of her silence and solemnity, or to rise and put
on them the movement of the clouds and the wildness of the
flowering woodlands.’
One thinks of the charming frieze of the three milkmaids always
hovering behind Tess at the Talbothays farm in a real picture of feminist
solidarity: 11 never spiteful nor vicious toward Tess, as well they
might have been, only, as mortally dependent beings, gently envious of
her good luck (‘Such supplanting was to be’), and two of them serving
to warn Angel at the end. In the dairy dormitory they twist in their
beds at night ‘under the oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them
by cruel Nature’s law. . . . The differences which distinguished them as
individuals were abstracted by this passion, and each was but portion
of one organism called sex.’
[ . . . ]