Tess: More Sinned Than Sinning

In 1891, Tess of the d'Urbervilles first appeared with the subtitle A Pure Woman, Faithfully Presented. Twenty years later, in his Preface to the edition of 1912, Thomas Hardy wrote that he had added the subtitle "at the last moment, after reading the final proofs, as being the estimate left in a candid mind of the heroine's character — an estimate nobody would be likely to dispute. It was more disputed than anything else in the book."1 It has remained in dispute for more than a hundred years, and the dispute now turns on the question of whether Tess was raped or seduced. Ellen Rooney clearly explains why. While rape entails "the unambiguous violence that would guarantee Tess's purity," she writes, seduction defines the "less pure space of complicity, desire, and reading. . . . Ultimately, the meaning of purity hinges on the relation between seduction and rape." But Hardy, she says, cannot clarify this relation because he cannot represent Tess "as a desiring or speaking subject."2

Rooney's probing analysis of rape and seduction in Tess deserves close scrutiny by anyone who would write on this topic. But close scrutiny of the novel itself does not fully confirm her conclusions. On the contrary, it shows that Hardy can and does represent Tess as both a desiring and speaking subject, that he endows her with agency, that she explicitly considers Alec her seducer, and that as such he is far more dangerous to her than he would be as a rapist. Lurking plainly as well as mythically behind Alec is the figure of Milton's Satan. Alec tempts Tess as Satan tempts Eve, and in spite of the enormous differences between Tess and Paradise Lost, between a world supervised by Providence and a world abandoned by it, Hardy's repeated references to the Book of Genesis and to Milton's poem prompt us to consider carefully the relation between what Tess wants and what she is led to desire, what she is and what she does. For Tess, I contend, is an agent, a heroine endowed with the power...