Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

236
Thomas Hardy
Tess Durbeyfield grows up to be a strong county girl, able to face a
walk of twenty-five miles with equanimity and to write a long impassioned
letter to her husband after stoically enduring a dawn-to-dusk
thumping on the platform of a steam-thresher at Flintcomb-Ash
(a Hardy name, if ever there was one). It is important to stress her
physique since it is made much of, and is clearly meant to fit her
character as a Gea-Tellus, Earth Mother. At the end she kills a strong
man with evident ease with a table knife (‘Fulfilment’ is the title of
this section, or Phase).
Now it is far from frivolous to suggest that a great deal of the
present ranting about feminine inferiority in a pretentiously egalitarian
world is a sort of tight-shoes syndrome . . . women are told, and
therefore feel, they have inferior physiques. A firm way of classifying
men, that is, appears to be by the fact that they are physically stronger.
Our laws embed this distinction within them at points.
But is this a biological parentage or a social construct? It seems
hard to discern. Professor Juliet Mitchell of the University of Reading
asks, ‘how can we tell whether there would be sexually determined
differences in a society not dedicated to their production?’ The arguments
here can become circular, if not frankly self-contradictory. One
school of anthropology would have it that the vulnerable female breasts
are ersatz buttocks, a rump-presentation duplicated in the breastless
chimpanzee and forced on the human primate when he stood erect:
‘The protuberant, hemispherical breasts of the female must surely be
copies of the fleshy buttocks, and the sharply defined red lips around
the mouth must be copies of the red labia.’ 13
Surely . . . must be? As a layman I remain relatively unconvinced
by the bizarre theory. Anyone who has studied chimps must concede
that they are far more upright than researchers report them to be, and
indeed do know frontal genital exposure (the cause of much of the
bother here). And the theory relies on, and strongly supports, the idea
that the female orgasm is originally ‘borrowed’ from the male, which
we are now industriously disproving.
Yet even within a short span of time woman seems able to alter her
physique to conform to social norms, unaided by corset, hobble-skirt
and bustle. It has been said, for instance, that the sloping shoulders of
the idealized Victorian heroine were more an attempt to copy patterns
of elegance to be found in fiction, written largely by males, than a
received reality. A section of my own study of popular iconography,