Transcript Tess of the D`Urbervilles

Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Lecture 1
Opening up the Text in Context
A Very Brief Synopsis …
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Tess Durbeyfield, a poor country girl, is raped (?)
and made pregnant by Alec D’Urberville.
The baby (christened Sorrow) dies and Tess goes
to work on a dairy farm, where she meets and
falls in love with Angel Clare.
On their wedding night, when Tess confesses to
Angel about her past, he rejects her and goes off
to Brazil.
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Tess meets Alec again and for a variety of
reasons, including the fact that he has persuaded
her that Angel will never return, she agrees to live
with him.
However, Angel does return and Tess, furious that
Alec had lied to her, murders him.
Tess experiences a week of bliss with Angel, but
at the end of the novel, she is arrested at
Stonehenge and subsequently hanged.
Socio-historical Context –
The Woman Question in19th C. England
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Impact of Industrialization
Cultural re-visioning of the Victorian middleclass image of women
Denied of any real political & economic power
Widening gulf btwn the middle-class &
working-class women (exploited outside the
home in dehumanizing factories)
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Separation of spheres for women & men
Men identified with the external, public world
of work and women with the internal, private
world of feeling
An ideology that protects the idealization of
the middle-class notion of home and family
as a moral & spiritual refuge
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Women idealized as custodians of the moral
conscience, the repository of all virtue
Fear that the blurred distinction btwn the
public / private would coarsen women’s
superior moral nature
Controlled image of the woman as wife &
mother
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Policing female sexuality
Double standard in sexual morality – where men
could and did resort to prostitutes / mistresses,
middle-class women who were more liberal in their
sexual attitudes & behaviour were regarded as
‘fallen’
Women denied of any sexual feelings, and were
doubly victims of idealization and abuse
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Late 19th C. (1880s-90s) – beginnings of a
major revision in thinking about women &
their status
Perception that the ‘woman question’ had
arrived with the popular phrase ‘the new
woman’ coined in the 1890s to describe
women who had either won or were
fighting for equality & personal freedom
Literary Context - Publication
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TUB appeared in weekly instalments in the
Graphic from 4 July – 26 Dec 1891 (late
Victorian / early modern?)
In serializing the novel, Hardy had to rework
his original manuscript for the serial market,
due to Victorian moral sensitivity over the
treatment of female violation, illegitimate birth
& sexual hypocrisy
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First edited, serialized version was published
as a book in Dec 1891
Added the (defiant?) subtitle ‘A Pure Woman
Faithfully Presented by Thomas Hardy’
For all the controversy sparked by the novel,
the phenomenal sale of TUB actually gave
Hardy the financial security to concentrate on
poetry
Literature & social change
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The novel as a social critique on sexual
politics
How far does TUB complicate / interrogate /
disturb the Victorian ideals of womanhood
and sexuality?
BBC
Adaptation of
Tess (2008)
Eddie Redmayne
Gemma Arterton
(as Angle Clare)
(as Tess)
Hans Matheson
(as Alec d’Urberville)
Woman as Victim
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Tess as tragic heroine
Vital to engage with the complex construction of her
victimization in the novel
A fictional char. who defies strict categorization as
virgin or whore
“Nothing is more remarkable in the novel than the
extraordinary passion with which Tess is described
and justified.” (Biographer, Michael Millgate – 1971)
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Victim of her own physical charms? Her sexual
nature a tragic flaw?
Hardy emphasizes the beauty and sexual
attractiveness of Tess – “pouted-up deep red
mouth”, “flexuous and finely drawn figure”
It is her sexual attractiveness that invites the
predatory advances of Alec
But note ambiguity in the scene at The Chase in
Chap 11 - seduction or rape?
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A victim of her own high moral standards?
Consider Joan Durbeyfield’s outburst at Tess’s
trusting decision to tell Angel about her past with
Alec - “O you little fool – you little fool!”
Tess’s scrupulous conscience that unfortunately
deprives her of the instinct to survive, resulting in
the suffering of a genuinely moral woman
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A victim of injustice caused by the conflict
btwn spontaneous morality and a distorted
patriarchal value-system on sexual morality?
More sinned against than sinning – Tess acts
for the best but the worst befalls her due to
circumstances beyond her control?
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Angel’s crude application to Tess of the Victorian
double standard of sexual morality which excuses
his own past as ‘wild oats’ while condemning his wife
– “the woman I have been loving is not you” (Chap
35, p.229)
Exposes the inflexible demand for purity that
reduces Tess to terrible poverty, driving her back to
Alec and eventually to murder and hanging
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Yet, isn’t Tess also a victim of her own passivity
that perhaps results from an all-too effective
conditioning as a woman?
Tess’s acceptance of Angel’s judgment of her,
even though her instincts tell her he is unjust
and hypocritical
She seems to have embraced the ideology of
purity and is left defenceless because of it
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Complexity of Tess’s victimization – is the source
of the tragedy within and/or outside of her?
A victim only of her sexuality? How about class &
family?
More significantly, the force of the novel stems
from the ways Hardy conveys his intense
sympathy for her.
Significance of voice & perspective
Voice & Perspective
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Complex use of point of view
Third-person omniscient narrator that can
present events / situations through the eyes
of different characters (i.e. multiple
perspectives)
Hardy (as author) not necessarily the
narrator, though we can ‘hear’ his intrusive
voice
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“Darkness and silence ruled everywhere
around. Above them rose the primeval yews
and oaks of the Chase, in which were poised
gentle roosting birds in their last nap; and
around them the hopping rabbits and hares.
But where was Tess’s guardian angel? where
was Providence?” (Chap 11, p.74)
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How do we as readers respond to this strength
of feeling? – involved & moving or too heavily
insistent, even contrived?
Does this undercurrent of emotion conveyed by
a significantly male voice complicate or perhaps
even compromise Hardy’s social criticism of
women’s issues?
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Forcefulness of sympathy for Tess’s plight is
double-edged.
At one level, such forcefulness exposes the
hypocrisy of Victorian sexual norms and its cruel
injustice inflicted on women (in his time).
Yet, at another level, some feminist critics have
suggested that Hardy, in his fascination with Tess,
is creating an ideal subjected to the voyeuristic
male gaze.
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Contradictory positioning of Hardy as a writer
in presenting women and their experiences
Hardy still sees Tess’s self-effacing character
(her meekness as patience) as good and
admirable, which paradoxically endorses a
moral pattern of womanhood which the novel
demonstrates is damaging and repressive
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Hardy is sympathetic to women’s dilemmas
and demands, but this sympathy is still
embedded in a culture which was still
essentially patriarchal
Fictional stereotypes of women remodelled,
but not transformed
Is this contradiction also found in Lawrence’s
WL?