For my generation, sensitive to ways women had been objectified and eager to reclaim our power as subjects, The Portrait of a Lady could be readily claimed as a feminist text. Including the novel in my women studies course of the 1980s, I did not ask Isabel Archer to be a role model or even to be happy. Rather, I saw the heroine’s “progress” in the evolution of her understanding. That reading still seems to me an important one.
I did not teach Tess of the d’Urbervilles in “The Heroine’s Progress.” The Thomas Hardy novel that seemed best suited for the course was Jude the Obscure, since “modern,” educated, neurotic Sue Bridehead is such an intriguing example of the “new woman” of the 1890s. Tess is also a heroine of the 1890s—the novel was published in 1891, a decade after James’s The Portrait of a Lady—but despite the “ache of modernism” that Hardy attributes to her sixth-form education, Tess can hardly be called a new woman. In both her d’Urberville lineage and her Durbeyfield ties to the region, she is connected to the land and seems almost its emanation. She digs turnips up from its soil but can’t dig herself out of her life, bounded by class, sex, and poverty. Things happen to her; she is not seeking new vistas. She suffers and is sacrificed. It’s an old story, though told in the context of late nineteenth-century agrarian and religious upheaval.
Aligning Tess of the d’Urbervilles with The Portrait of a Lady, as I have done for my own purposes in this chapter, further reinforces the sense of Tess as a deeply traditional story. Its setting is rural, not cosmopolitan; scenes occur in English fields and woodlands, not the houses and gardens of urbane expatriates; the ending is classically resolved, not open; Tess, for all Hardy’s insistence on her purity, is objectified in traditional ways associated with women and sexuality. When she yawns, Angel Clare sees “the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake’s.” She is also a milkmaid who murders her seducer, a figure one can trace back to tragic maids in old English ballads.
Yet for all this, Tess also expresses a progressive, even radical vision. No author of his time more ardently than Hardy fathomed the repressiveness of Victorian morality, the strength of sexual drives in men and women, the unnatural constraints imposed by marriage, and the untruthfulness of novels that ends with “the regulation that ‘they married and were happy ever after.’” He wanted to substitute for “the catastrophes” of “this false coloring” the “catastrophes based upon sexual relationship as it is,” words from his 1891 essay “Candour in English Fiction.” And he anticipated how fiercely the reading public would resist his candor.
For the serial publication of Tess in The Graphic Hardy was forced to remove the seduction scene and the scene in which Tess baptizes her own baby, both sanitized and published separately as, respectively, “Saturday Night in Arcady” and “The Midnight Baptism: A Study in Christianity.” Among other concessions to the magazine’s readers, he even altered the scene in which Angel Clare carries the milkmaids across the puddle. “Let me run and get a wheelbarrow . . .” the version in the Graphic reads. Hardy was able to restore most of his original text for the book edition, but this greater freedom from censorship did not mean freedom from controversy. Tess as a fallen woman from a lower-class background has fictional predecessors: Little Em’ly in David Copperfield, Hetty Sorel in Adam Bede, even Hardy’s own Fanny Robin in Far from the Madding Crowd. All these, however, serve as foils to the pure heroine while Tess, in contrast, is that pure heroine, despite her experience and despite what might seem Hardy’s own ambivalence towards her (the snake’s mouth).
As a contemporary reader I easily assent to Tess’s purity, though I find myself eliding that term into others that for me have more meaning: courage, generosity of spirit, or, better still, integrity. Yet Hardy’s chosen word is important. Tess is a heroine of her times, but she is also a kind of archetype. She survives violation and neglect, and Hardy’s assertion of her purity is his vision of a purity of being that transcends all pressures and accommodations. She suffers “catastrophes based upon sexual relationship as it is” with both Alec and Angel, but she emerges from these uncompromised, even as a murderer, compelling us, as she does Angel at the end, to suspend moral judgment in our awe at her authenticity of feeling. Certainly Hardy idealizes her—James also idealizes Isabel Archer. But idealizing suggests distance. And yet, remarkably, Hardy realizes an exquisite closeness with Tess, a sympathy with her right to live in her sexualized female body. This body is natural and not corrupt. It is attached to a soul.
iii
I COME BACK TO the scene of my mother lying with me on the floor in her bedroom, talking about the naturalness of sex. My mother spoke sincerely, yet she also felt the need to guard her sexual secrets (there must have been others beyond the one about Freddie Ayer) then and for the rest of her life. I have wondered about my mother’s secrets, about their influence on our lives. In literature when a secret exists, especially a sexual one, it’s bound to be influential, both in its concealment and in its revelation. In Tess it’s the concealment of her past from Angel and her revelation of it on her wedding night that propel the story towards its tragic end. In Portrait the secret past liaison between Madame Merle and Osmond sets in motion the plot to have Osmond marry Isabel, and the revelation
