The introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of Tess by Penny Boumelha starts by talking about the controversy caused by the novel's claim that "Tess has done nothing wrong" (xiii) and its connection to the polarizing nature of the text. Boumelha claims on the very first page of her Introduction that "from the outset [Tess] polarized its readers into supporters and detractors" (xiii).
What I find so interesting about that statement, is that the polarization of Tess's audience is just as alive today as it was when the book was published. When I mention this class, explain what we're doing, and a friend/parent/acquaintance asks the obvious follow up question: "Which book are you working on?" I seem to get one of two responses. Either they love Tess, Tess is the greatest of the choices I could've made (when I was home last Winter I was on a panel at my high school, and was talking about the 19th Century Novel, mentioned what we read for class, started talking about Middlemarch, and the english teacher I was talking to replies with, "Tess is so much better though.") Or, which so far has been more common, I get "Oooooooohhhh... why?" as if it is the most unsavoury reading experience they've ever had, and to which I then attempt to defend my choice.
Yes, there are things I don't like about Tess, there are aspects that bother me, but there are also elements I find incredibly intriguing, powerful, and quite beautiful.
One of the reasons I chose Tess was because of an offhand quote in one of our readings (Kristin Brady, Alec and Tess: Rape or Seduction?) from the 19th Century Novel last fall. It was a quote from a letter Thomas Hardy wrote to Thomas MacQuoid (and my next order of business is to find this letter) where Hardy worries about his characterization of Tess that "I have not been able to put on paper all that she is, or was, to me" (Brady 127). I find this element, of Tess as more than the text she inhabits, particularly in Hardy's experience of her, incredibly intriguing, especially in contrast to what seems to be Tess's ultimate fate of standing symbolically for women in general rather than herself in particular.
I think you're dead right about Tess still being a polarizing book. I know I have a tendency to take something of a hardline stance on it myself. Part of that, if I'm honest, is the book, and part is the critics. I've never been able to find the part the critics all think is there that says, "And then Tess was happily his mistress for months and months, until she was great with child." Yeah, no. And every critic (and many of the characters) seemed to imagine some level of consent that I just plain didn't see. But maybe that's just me.
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