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248
Thomas Hardy
true lovers of this world. She speaks closely to women since she lives
‘under an arbitrary law of society which had no foundation in Nature’.
For although we may all be pawns in the hands of the purblind
Doomster, there is a sense of joy in the very copiousness of nature: as
we read in Tess:
‘The “appetite for joy” which pervades all creation, that
tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the
tide sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague
lucubrations over the social rubric.’
Nature itself is guiltless, and Tess a sample of its innocence. For, if
not the first, Hardy is certainly one of the best of our writers to use landscape
as psychic state, and sometimes one of the most daring (in Tess
there is a lengthy description of the Vale of the Var as a vaginal cleft). So
Hardy makes his ‘pun.’ woman cry out for all women when, exhausted
by field labour, she lashes at Alec with her glove, then sinks on the straw,
on which his blood is dropping, to cry out in agony, ‘Now, punish me. . . .
Whip me, crush me; you need not mind those people under the rick! I
shall not cry out. Once victim, always victim—that’s the law!’
NOTES
1. The text used here is the Wessex edition of 1912.
2. Susan Lydon, ‘Liberating Woman’s Orgasm’, The New Eroticism,
edited by Philip Nobile, New York: Random House, 1970, pp.
225–6 (reprinted from Ramparts magazine).
3. The composition of Tess and the concessions Hardy had to
make for an illustrated weekly newspaper have been thoroughly
covered by two works: Richard Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A
Bibliographical Study, Oxford University Press, 1954, and Ian
Gregor and Brian Nicholas, The Moral and the Story, London:
Faber and Faber, 1962. Tess appeared in the Graphic in twentyfour
illustrated weekly installments from 4 July to 26 December
1891. Both books show what happened to odds and ends of the
original conception.
4. Hardy complained at the omission, in the first American
edition, of ‘the second title, which is absolutely necessary to
show its meaning’.