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Tess of the D’Urbervilles 245
case of the Puritan. But Lawrence proceeds astutely to observe that
you can’t have the one without the other, the Puritan without the
Cavalier; and his interpretation of the other social pole repressing
sex by exploiting it, and also refusing full consciousness to woman, is
extremely interesting.
For him Alec d’Urberville is the opposite of Angel Clare, he has
‘killed the male in himself, as Clytemnestra symbolically for Orestes
killed Agamemnon’. So his is really another way of hating the flesh
(indeed Hardy writes, ‘d’Urberville gave her the kiss of mastery’). ‘It
is a male quality to resolve a purpose to its fulfilment’, Lawrence here
claims, ‘to receive some impulse into his semen, and to transmit it
into expression’. Woman, that is, needs the mediation of the male, the
reverse view, of course, of a feminist sexologist like Mrs Herschberger
(‘The male functions to produce sperm to give to the female’). Thus
Alec ‘seeks with all his power for the stimulus in woman. He takes the
deep impulse from the female’.
Though Schopenhauer, of all people, could hardly be called profeminist,
Hardy comes close to his thinking here, and indeed Helen
Garwood’s study of Hardy’s work as an exposition of Schopenhauer’s
was published as early as 1911. What Lawrence is saying is structured
to show the destruction of a woman’s psyche: this happens in two
ways—(a) Angel denies woman, (b) Alec identifies woman and destroys
her by betrayal. The result is death since in neither case is the woman
left whole. In short, ‘The female is the victim of the species.’ 27
* * *
Thomas Hardy was one of the last great heroic writers—‘Elizabethan’
for Cecil—lodged in a time that was running down. His God, or anti-
God, was Immanent Will, President of the Immortals, The Spinner
of the Years, a purblind Doomster (the diffidence of specification, in
Hardy’s semantic here, is itself an ‘ironic’ acknowledgement of taboo).
Once more, Lord David, in his admirable little book on Hardy The
Novelist, comes to our rescue and can be brought to the feminist bar
in evidence.
For, as he observes, when the black flag moves up the prison
pole as Tess drops to her death, we are given to read, ‘“Justice” was
done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had
ended his sport with Tess.’ The ‘Aeschylean phrase’ may be a literal