Chapter Text
Issues of coercion and sexual consent are at the forefront of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, and the novel itself does not seem to present a solid conclusion on what exactly happened between Tess and Alec on the night that started her supposedly inevitable decline. Hardy tries to portray Tess as an innocent victim of both society’s conventions and traditional, tragic fate, and while he calls her a “pure woman” in the novel’s title, he still seems to attribute at least a portion of the blame to Tess, as if assuming that she was merely seduced, not raped. Approaching the text from the viewpoint of modern feminist criticism and ideas about rape culture allows insights into Tess’s story that might not have been available to Hardy or his readers. According to that viewpoint, Tess was indeed raped, regardless of the sequence of events Hardy leaves to the reader’s imagination; and the culture in which she lived—not fate—made this outcome and her treatment afterward a near inevitability.
Of particular note are the early interactions between Alec and Tess, with the strawberries he feeds to her over her objections and his description of the way he tamed his rebellious horse. From the beginning, Alec shows a willingness to override Tess’s choices and force from her a kind of consent or at least submission, encouraged by societal conventions that expect men to be sexual aggressors who assume women will flirt by playing at resistance. Tess, for her part, demonstrates an equally ingrained attitude of misplaced responsibility that keeps her in a situation she instinctively recognizes as dangerous, as well as a desire to be polite and ultimately submissive in response to Alec’s advances. At the same time, in following many of the era’s gender conventions in his pursuit of Tess, he also diminishes her personhood in that pursuit, essentially seeing her as something like his horse—an animal with enough spirit to require breaking, but one that it is his right to use and enjoy as he wishes. Alec does at least attempt to provide for Tess after taking advantage of her, which she refuses out of the sense of shame bred from her class and culture; Angel, presented as a good man, manages to objectify Tess even more completely in seeing her as damaged and used when she reveals her past to him, after which he seems to feel fully justified in abandoning her. His actions are possibly even less excusable than Alec’s, but they still fit within the modern feminist idea of rape culture.
Because these ideas surrounding sexual responsibility, coercion, consent, and seduction vs. rape form the basis of the entire plot for Tess of the D’Urbervilles, most academic treatments of Hardy’s book focus on these topics in one way or another. Some articles take different angles on Tess, arguing that Hardy’s view of her as only happy as a child of nature also diminishes her personhood by essentially making her part of the landscape, but the most common subjects for analysis involve gender and sexuality. Elsie Michie’s “Horses and Sexual/Social Dominance” uses the treatment of horses in three Victorian novels, including Tess, to demonstrate views toward both horses and women during that time period, specifically pointing out a scene in which Alec uses his horse’s speed and temper to frighten a kiss from Tess. Michie claims that these authors represent “social disruption through men who display a potential to dominate in their relation to sexually magnetic women and their ability to ride and control high-spirited horses” and links economic ideas to “the biological forces Darwin described, the aggression that leads to the survival of the fittest and the ineffable drives of sexual selection” (145). Reprehensible though Alec’s actions may be, he certainly demonstrates a sexual aggression that would—if only considered in terms of Darwinian biology and natural selection—be effective in propagating his particular version of the species. In this case, Alec’s ability to dominate a spirited (female) horse and willingness to harm the animal in order to make it useful to him can be easily compared with his treatment of Tess; he desired her physically and did not particularly care whether he harmed her, as long as he could eventually achieve dominance and gain what he wanted. In addition, Michie points out that Alec—like others in similar scenes of the other novels she studies—approaches the woman he desires when he is on horseback and she is on foot, again emphasizing his physical superiority to her. In fact, Alec deliberately uses his horse and gig to corner Tess at least once when he is trying to force her to cooperate with him, and again he is riding, she walking when they meet on the night of the rape.
Nina Auerbach’s “The Rise of the Fallen Woman” examines Tess and similar novels within the context of this literary trope. “Conventionally, the fallen woman must die at the end of her story,” she says, “perhaps because death rather than marriage is the one implacable human change, the only honorable symbol of her fall’s transforming power” (35), and this is exactly the situation that occurs for Tess. She is supposedly still a pure woman throughout her entire ordeal, if Hardy’s subtitle is to be believed, but in her own viewpoint and that of Angel and society, she is tainted. She has fallen, and even though she earns a few days of happiness toward the end of her life, her death is still presented as almost inevitable, and rather than fighting it, she willingly submits so she will not live for Angel to change his mind about her yet again. Tess of the D’Urbervilles could be interpreted as a challenge to this Victorian story of the fallen woman, and Hardy seems to present it as such with his insistence that society, not nature, has made Tess’s life miserable. As Auerbach points out, though,
the structure of its narrative seems as subservient to the myth as Tess is here to Alec. Following the orthodox pattern, Tess begins in hopeful innocence, but goes from bad to worse after her fall divorces her from her girlhood self, her increasingly estranged condition aligning her with bare and open landscapes until her murder of Alec consummates her identity as outcast. (45)
Paris analyzes this strange conflict between Tess as a pure woman the way Hardy attempts to represent her, and the language Hardy actually uses in describing her. He calls the story “thematically unintelligible,” pointing out that while a good deal of the novel’s entire point is to establish Tess’s purity, it does not succeed in doing so in its own terms, let alone society’s (58). “Tess is seen here as a victim, not a villain... It is quite bewildering, therefore, to find Hardy arguing also that Tess is pure because there is nothing wrong with what she has done, because there is nothing evil about her sexual relations with Alec” (63). Either she is an innocent victim who has been horribly violated and who might—but should not—feel guilt because society would like her to believe she was responsible, or she participated willingly in a natural act for which society should not have condemned her. She cannot be both, despite Hardy’s seemingly confused attempts to present her this way.
Caminero-Santangelo attempts to deal with this issue as well in his article “A Moral Dilemma: Ethics in Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” focusing on the ways both author and narrator try to portray the events of Tess’s life in mutually exclusive ways: Hardy “criticizes unfair social conventions which he believes cause the unjust judgment and oppression of Tess, but he also subscribes to conventional attitudes towards ‘feminine nature’ and to the belief that social law should correspond with natural law” (47). In imagining her as a sapling, transplanted from poisonous soil to new land where she could thrive, he shows her as being “‘in accord’ with benevolent nature” but removes her autonomy at the same time, making her “only an empty form to be molded by her environment” (48). At the same time, although Hardy tries to say that only social convention is responsible for Tess’s misery while nature does not condemn her, he also follows Darwinian ideas of natural selection and evolution to show nature as cruel and arbitrary. Caminero-Santangelo concludes, “The sequence of Tess’s life has a certain horrible inevitability, and yet there is no determining explanation which could make sense of it. Social injustice, nature, economic upheaval all offer partial explanations, but none of these factors can account entirely for Tess’s horrible fate” (54).
One of the most pertinent studies for this particular aspect of Tess’s story is William A. Davis, Jr.’s “The Rape of Tess: Hardy, English Law, and the Case for Sexual Assault,” which uses sexual-assault laws from Victorian times and Hardy’s notes and drafts on the rape of Tess to argue that Hardy did indeed consider it a rape, not seduction, and readers would have done the same. Although it could be argued that Victorian audiences would have been even less likely to view the situation as rape given the sexual standards of the time, Davis points out a number of details that “suggest the violent nature of Alec’s assault,” but “To an alert Victorian reader, however, these details would have confirmed rather than introduced the idea of rape. The rape of Tess actually begins with the passage that describes Tess’s sleep and her lack of verbal response—the passage, in short, that establishes her lack of consent to Alec’s advances” (223). He refers to English law to show that the courts only demanded a lack of consent on the woman’s part to consider a sexual encounter as rape, not the actual use of force, and that a woman who was asleep or otherwise unconscious, as Tess is when Alec returns to her, was incapable of giving such consent. In all likelihood, then, the British judicial system at the time would have interpreted Tess’s case as one of rape and ruled in her favor, although Hardy may have wanted to prevent exactly this situation because he wanted to portray the plight of working-class women, who had so little access to or knowledge of the law that they were effectively outside its influence.
Why, then, does Hardy seem to spend the rest of the novel interpreting Tess’s past as one of seduction, not rape? Davis points out that at the beginning of the book’s second section, “Hardy replaces his earlier focus upon sexual assault with a new focus on seduction and on Tess’s complicity in a sexual relationship of several weeks’ duration,” and it is this seduction that forms the basis of the book’s plot from that point onward (228). Even in his personal comments on the novel, Hardy tended to emphasize the seduction aspect of the story rather than the rape, perhaps because he wanted readers to focus on moral rather than legal issues and to come to the conclusion that Tess could be considered pure even if she had somewhat willingly engaged in premarital sex. Considering Hardy’s deliberate framing of the rape scene as such rather than seduction, however, this still results in an odd dissonance between the first section of the book and the rest of the story. Davis concludes,
If the references to sleep and the administering of spirits are instances of Hardy’s use of his legal knowledge...then we must conclude that Hardy thought of the event in the Chase as a rape. Alec’s brutal mastery of Tess through rape makes possible his subsequent mastery of her through seduction. Hardy wants the equation to read a particular way: Tess is seduced because she was raped. (230, emphasis added)
Sarah Conly’s article “Seduction, Rape, and Coercion” takes a slightly different approach, using Tess’s situation as an example for examining various levels of coercion that might lie somewhere between seduction and rape. Ultimately, she agrees with Davis and most other critics that Tess was raped, but she comes to this conclusion from a somewhat different angle. Because Hardy does not tell readers exactly what happened in the Chase, it is impossible to know for certain whether Alec’s rape of Tess was physically violent, so Conly does not focus on this aspect. Instead she analyzes various forms of psychological and verbal coercion that could be present in cases of non-consensual sex, arguing that regardless of the precise circumstances, Alec’s actions still consisted of rape because he held a position of power over Tess. She considers intent, choice, harm, and legitimacy to be the primary criteria for determining whether a situation can be classified as coercion, saying that for an offer to be considered coercive, it must not only constrain the chooser’s options but must do so illegitimately, not allowing the other person to make a free choice. In Tess’s case, the use of psychological coercion and the financial power Alec held over her and her family seem to have proved sufficient, and Conly discusses the various kinds of coercion that eventually caused Tess to give way:
The aggressor may implore and wheedle until the other feels guilt; he may tease her with jealousy, berate her for her coldness and immaturity, chastise her for the harm she does him, refute her reasoning when she tries to articulate her position, and subject her to a barrage of angry words. Ultimately she may find herself in a state of psychological exhaustion, feeling unable to resist in the face of what seems an implacable will. In these cases, it is argued, the woman has been forced against her will as surely as if the aggressor had used physical violence. (104)
In a similar way, the threat of physical force is another form of coercion that does not allow a free choice but does not cause actual, physical harm; this situation would certainly be considered rape, and psychological coercion functions the same way. “For a choice to be coerced, however,” Conly says, “it is necessary that the person doing the choosing has no reasonable choice between doing what the coercer wants and the bad option which the coercer has introduced” (106). Although Conly does not describe this particular aspect in terms of Tess’s situation, the lack of choice is still relevant: Tess feels responsible for her family’s dire financial straits, so if the choice becomes one of utter poverty for her family or unwanted sex with Alec, she is likely to choose the second option and, in fact, does so at least once. Conly does come down on the side of rape with Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but she focuses primarily on this single incident, rather than questioning the difference between the event in the Chase as rape and what happened after as seduction, or even examining Tess’s situation after the rape at all.