Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Tess of the D’Urbervilles 241
Such writers have probably not read the pornography they are so
bitterly attacking and which, in fact, contains more than a modicum
of completely enfranchized and extremely dominant women, all
thoroughly enjoying the sexual experience. America has been the first
country to mass-produce pornography (in the last century it was, in
England, a prerogative of the elite); I am not suggesting that pornos
replace sex manuals, but they have certainly given lower-class people
in America lately a new rhetoric of sex and one that does not show it
as a response to a biological need alone. Clitoral orgasm is invariably
enjoyable, in such pages, and sometimes even linked with affection,
tenderness and awareness. Once more, Fem Lib contradicts itself. To
lock up pornography is to work for just those forces of repression that
have kept women down so long. Herbert Marcuse has a whole theory
of sexual liberation in which Eros and Agape are conjoined:
‘The regression involved in this spread of the libido would
first manifest itself in the reactivation of all erotogenic zones
and, consequently, in a resurgence of pregenital polymorphous
sexuality and in a decline of genital supremacy. The body in
its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be
enjoyed—an instrument of pleasure.’
Certainly it was so for Tess.
For women are in a majority, and they have several superior
faculties, including that of memory. 24 Monique Wittig, in her recent
novel Les Guérillères, played amusingly on a reversal of our assumptions
of male physical superiority. Undoubtedly these assumptions
were spurred on by Puritan capitalism. In Patriarchal Attitudes Eva
Figes makes this indictment: ‘The rise of capitalism is the root cause
of the modern social and economic discrimination against women,
which came to a peak in the last century.’ When Angel Clare, by this
time married to Tess, makes his proposal to Izz Huett to come to be
his mistress in Brazil, he footnotes the offer as follows: ‘But I ought
to remind you that it will be wrong-doing in the eyes of civilization—western
civilization, that is to say.’ The accent is on western, and
it is the man he meets in South America who shrugs his shoulders at
Angel’s erotic problem.
Under Roman law, at the end of the Antonine jurisconsults at any
rate, women were legally equal with men in most matters, a position of