Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

244
Thomas Hardy
the marriage consummation, to see fit to make his own admission of
sexual ‘backsliding’. Overjoyed, Tess then makes hers ‘because ‘tis just
the same’.
But of course it isn’t, given the society. Convention intervenes
and though ‘nothing had changed since the moments when he had
been kissing her’, ignorant of her lapse, ‘the essence of things had
changed’—the essence, not the existence. Tess slides to her knees and
begs for forgiveness, saying ‘I will obey you like your wretched slave’,
and asking, from the depths of her instincts, how he can suddenly stop
loving her on the mere receipt of information—‘It is in your own mind
what you are angry at, Angel.’ In truth, it is. Angel’s position is put in
the following exchange:
‘“In the name of our love, forgive me!” she whispered with a dry
mouth. “I have forgiven you for the same!”
And as he did not answer, she said again—
“Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you, Angel.”
“You—yes, you do.”
“But you do not forgive me?”
“O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were
one person; now you are another.”’
If we have been correct in tracing two themes working through
Tess so far, fecundating Earth Mother and social and political equal,
we can see that there is far more at stake here than a simple attack on
the double standard of male convention. As with Emma Bovary, the
characterization is saturated with civilization. And we can return to
Lawrence’s analysis.
For Tess is longing to be whole and neither man in her life will
let her be so. Lawrence sensed the psychodynamics of this, writing of
Angel Clare:
‘He had no idea that there was such a thing as positive
Woman, as the Female, another great living Principle
counterbalancing his own male principle. He conceived of the
world as consisting of the One, the Male Principle.’
Spattered as it is with capital letters, this statement is an unnecessarily
over-complicated way of saying that Angel was the classic