There has been an interesting slippage in critical discussion of the climax of ‘Phase the First’ (‘The Maiden’) of Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman over the last century. Victorian critics, to a man and woman, assume that the luckless maiden is at least partly the author of her own misfortune. As Mowbray Morris put it in the Quarterly Review (April 1892):

For the first half of his story the reader may indeed conceive it to have been Mr Hardy’s design to show how a woman essentially honest and pure at heart will, through the adverse shocks of fate, eventually rise to higher things. But if this were his original purpose he must have forgotten it before his tale was told, or perhaps the ‘true sequence of things’ was too strong for him. For what are the higher things to which this poor creature eventually rises? She rises through seduction to adultery, murder and the gallows.1

Writing a month earlier in Blackwood’s Magazine, Mrs Oliphant is fierce against Tess for not having withstood temptation better:

Morris and Oliphant take it for granted that Tess was ‘seduced’ – that is, led astray, not violated or forced into sexual intercourse against her will. Compare this Victorian view with the downrightness of Tony Tanner, writing in 1968:

Hardy’s vision is tragic and penetrates far deeper than specific social anomalies. One is more inclined to think of Sophocles than, say, Zola, when reading Hardy … Tess is the living demonstration of these tragic ironies. That is why she who is raped lives to be hanged.3

She who was seduced in 1892 is she who is raped in the permissive 1960s. Even those modern commentators unwilling to go the whole way hedge their bets. Thus, the first edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (1932) declares ‘Tess is seduced’. Margaret Drabble’s fifth edition of OCEL (1984), while retaining the substance of the Tess entry, states ‘Tess is cunningly seduced’. The 1993 literary encyclopaedia The 1890s backs both horses by opening its Tess entry with the statement: ‘This simple story of seduction-cum-rape’, and goes on to describe what happens in the Chase as ‘virtual rape’.4 Ian Gregor, in his influential study of Hardy’s major novels, goes all the way by declaring that ‘it is both a seduction and a rape’.5 The Oxford World’s Classics editors, Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell, use the ambiguous term ‘betrayed’ (as does OUP’s blurb-writer) and the non-felonious ‘violated’. Writing in the 1990s, with the complexities of ‘date rape’ hovering in the air, James Gibson refers edgily to Tess’s ‘sexual molestation by Alec’ and his ‘sexual harassment of his victim’. In his outline of the crucial episode in the ‘Text Summary’ section of the Everyman edition, Gibson reverts to a more Tannerian reading of events:

Chapter 11

Alec rides with Tess into the Chase – works on her by appearing to be worried about her safety and emphasising the presents he has sent to her family – he deliberately loses the way – after pretending to go in search of the way he returns and rapes her.6

So what does happen in the Chase on that September night – seduction, cunning seduction, betrayal, sexual molestation, sexual harassment, violation, ‘virtual rape’, or rape? The first point to note is that Hardy himself was somewhat unsure about the ‘naughty chapters’ (as Mrs Oliphant called them). In the serialization of the story in the Graphic newspaper (July–December 1891) he was prevailed on by nervous editors to drop the Chaseborough dance and subsequent seduction/rape sequence altogether, putting in its place an entirely new subplot. In the Graphic version of Tess, the heroine is tricked into a fake marriage, and is thus deflowered with her full (if deluded) consent. This venerable device had been used earlier by Charles Reade in Put Yourself in his Place (1870), by Thackeray in Philip (1862), and, aboriginally, by Scott in St Ronan’s Well (1823). The attraction of the bogus-marriage gimmick was that it enabled the hoodwinked heroine to commit the act of fornication innocently, thus preserving her ‘purity’. In the three-volume edition, which came out in November 1891, Hardy repudiated artifice and insisted on reprinting the original rape/seduction text, with the prefatory proclamation: ‘If an offence come out of the truth, better is it that the offence come than that the truth be concealed.’

Even in the frank versions of ‘The Maiden’, however, much is left inscrutable, if not entirely concealed. The rape/seduction episode begins with a description of the Trantridge peasantry’s loose morals and hard drinking, which are given free rein in their Saturday night festivities at the nearby ‘decayed markettown’, Chaseborough. Tess, we are told, likes to go to these Saturday night affairs, although she does not participate in the revelry. On the misty September Saturday night in question, Tess makes her way from Chaseborough to a barn in a nearby ‘townlet’ where her fellow Trantridge cottagers are at a ‘private jig’. She wants their company on the way home, since there has been both a fair and a market day at Chaseborough, and there may be drunken men in the country lanes. When she arrives at the dance, Tess discovers a surreal scene. The barn floor is deep in ‘scroff’ – ‘that is to say the powdery residuum from the storage of peat and other products, the stirring of which by [the dancers’] turbulent feet created [a] nebulosity that involved the scene … [a] floating, fusty débris of peat and hay’ (Chapter 10). The dusty haze thrown up by the dancers’ muffled stamping merges with the mist, and later the fog, which enshrouds the whole of the seduction/rape episode in a corresponding moral ‘nebulosity’.

The dustily indistinct picture of the dance has been connected with the pictorial influence of French Impressionism on Hardy and is one of his fine visual set-pieces. At a more physical level, the scene alludes to a common belief in country communities – that flying dust, as it gets trapped in their underwear, has a sexually exciting effect on women dancers. It is part of the folklore of barn-dances in America that unscrupulous young men – intending to induce wantonness in their partners – scatter pepper on the boards before the evening gets under-way. Certainly the ‘scroff’ seems to have had an aphrodisiac effect at Chaseborough. Hardy hints at sexual orgy by a string of meaningful classical references:

They coughed as they danced, and laughed as they coughed. Of the rushing couples there could barely be discerned more than the high lights – the indistinctness shaping them to satyrs clasping nymphs – a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity of Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing. (Ch. 10)

Each of these three allusions signals ‘rape’. Tess is invited to join in by a dusty, sweating swain. But she refuses. She becomes aware of the glowing tip of Alec’s cigar in the gloom behind her. He offers to take her home, but although she is very tired she declines, not quite trusting him – perhaps forewarned by the phallic heat of his Havana on her neck. But later, when Car Darch (one of Alec’s cast mistresses) threatens violence, Tess allows herself (a maiden in distress) to be rescued by Alec, now on horseback. This is the prelude to Chapter 11. Chaseborough is only three miles from Trantridge, and the journey on Alec’s stallion should take twenty minutes or so. But he deliberately loses his way turning his horse into the foggy wilderness of the Chase – ‘the oldest wood in England’. Tess, who has been up since five every day that week, is exhausted. As she falls asleep in the saddle, Alec puts his arm around her waist. ‘This immediately put her on the defensive,’ we are told, ‘and with one of those sudden impulses of reprisal to which she was liable she gave him a little push from her’ (Ch. 11). Alec almost tumbles off the horse. It is a significant detail. The push looks forward to Tess’s eventually stabbing Alec to death, which – we apprehend – is another reflexive ‘impulse of reprisal’. Here it stresses that even when her body is dormant, Tess’s purity is vigilant and well capable of defending itself. This is important, since she will be sleeping when the seduction/rape occurs.

The point is also stressed that Alec has not directed his horse’s head into the Chase with any overtly mischievous intention, but merely ‘to prolong companionship with her’. Tess repulses his love-making as they ride, without ever distinctly denying that she loves him. He is much encouraged by her lack of ‘frigidity’. He contrives further to weaken her resolve with the information that he has bought her father a new horse, to replace the luckless Prince, who died as a result of her falling asleep on the road. Once again, it seems that Tess is falling into dangerous slumber. Alec, who by now is completely lost in the fog and trees, wraps her in his coat, makes a ‘sort of couch or nest’ for her in the newly dropped leaves, and goes off on foot to look for some landmark. He eventually locates the road, and returns to find Tess fast asleep. He bends down to her, ‘till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears’ (Ch. 11).

This is the last image Hardy leaves us with. It could be Prince Charming about to wake Sleeping Beauty, or it could be ravishing Tarquin. The narrative averts its gaze from whatever happens next and moralizes loftily for three paragraphs. The clearest clue as to what is meanwhile going on between Tess and Alec is given in the second of these paragraphs:

As Thackeray says in Vanity Fair, the novelist knows everything. Hardy must know what is going on here, even if he chooses not to tell us. Clearly intercourse is taking place while the narrator turns away and prates about olden times. But what kind of intercourse? All the narrative divulges to the reader is that Alec is not as ‘ruthless’ as those ancient ravishers, Tess’s ancestors, taking their seigneurial rights. It is clear that Alec has not set out with the explicit purpose of assaulting Tess; when he leaves her in her leafy couch, it is genuinely to find the road home, not to lull her into defencelessness. Not that she would normally be defenceless. The point is made earlier in the chapter that even when asleep, Tess is able to fend off unwanted sexual advances. Why does she not protect her imperilled virtue with one of those timely ‘impulses of reprisal’?

More significantly, when – a maiden no more – Tess upbraids Alec, she does not accuse him of rape, but of having duped her: ‘I didn’t understand your meaning till it was too late’, she says. Nor, when upbraiding her mother for not warning her against men, does Tess claim that she has been raped. As the narrative glosses her thoughts:

Alec, we understand, has been ‘adroit’ – some cunning caresses with his hands are implied. His ‘ardent manners’ (an odd conjunction – ardour is rarely well mannered) had ‘stirred’ Tess – erection is hinted at. The verb ‘stirred’ is significant, suggesting as it does physical reciprocation on Tess’s part. Did she consent? ‘Confused surrender’ suggests that she did, but that she was blinded at the time by his stimulating foreplay and the power of her own aroused feelings.

By Victorian legal lights it was clearly seduction; there was nothing forcible in Alec’s actions, although, as he himself avows (‘I did wrong – I admit it’), they were the actions of a cad. He ‘took advantage’ of her. This is immoral, but not criminal. Even by the strict current definition of rape on North American campuses, his behaviour would probably not be criminal. It is not recorded that Tess clearly told Alec to stop, once he had started to make love to her. ‘Stirred’ as she was, she may well have encouraged him to continue making love by body movements of her own. That is, neither seduction nor rape may be the proper term; Tess was a willing, if misguided, participant in her own undoing.

Why then do modern critics and readers assume that Alec is a rapist? For the same reason that they are unwilling to see Tess as a murderess. Here again, Hardy manipulates our response in his heroine’s favour less by what he describes than by what he omits to describe. To summarize: hearing unusual ‘sounds’, Mrs Brooks, the landlady at the Herons, the inn where Alec and Tess have taken an apartment, looks through the keyhole. She sees Tess in distress at the breakfast table, and hears a long complaint (‘a dirge rather than a soliloquy’) from her lips. Tess is berating herself for her weakness in surrendering again to Alec’s ‘cruel persuasions’. She sees herself as an irredeemably fallen adulteress. Mrs Brooks hears ‘more and sharper words from the man’, then ‘a sudden rustle’. Tess soon after hurries away from the inn, dressed in black. Alec’s body is discovered on the bed, stabbed through the heart.

Tess’s subsequent explanation to Angel is not entirely satisfactory.

‘But how do you mean – you have killed him?’

‘I mean that I have,’ she murmured in a reverie.

‘What, bodily? Is he dead?’

‘Yes. He heard me crying about you, and he bitterly taunted me; and called you by a foul name; and then I did it; my heart could not bear it. He had nagged me about you before. And then I dressed myself, and came away to find you.’ (Ch. 56)

Hardy does not give us any details of the subsequent trial, leaping straight from Tess, arrested on the sacrificial slab at Stonehenge, to her execution at Wintoncester Gaol. But it would be interesting to know what came out in court. By Mrs Brooks’s testimony (as we have it), it would seem that Alec – justifiably vexed by Tess’s long diatribe against himself – said something ‘sharp’ (‘bitterly taunted’ seems an overstatement). It is hard to think up a ‘foul name’ applicable to a man (‘no-balls eunuch’?) which would justify what followed. Tess then picked up the carving knife from the breakfast table, walked all the way across the length of the living room to the bed on which Alec was still lying, and stabbed him through the heart. One precisely aimed stroke has killed him. It is hard to imagine how this could be done – given Alec’s superior strength and agility – unless Tess waited until he relapsed into sleep, as people do before breakfast. An awake Alec would hardly watch Tess stalking towards him with an upraised knife without raising a hand to defend himself or shifting his torso away from the path of the murder weapon.

It is conceivable that a legal defence could be made for Tess along the lines that lawyers successfully defended Lorena Bobbit – the aggrieved Virginian who cut off her husband’s penis with a carving knife while he slept. Possibly a modern jury might acquit Tess, on the grounds that she, like Lorena, had suffered years of abuse from her partner (although Alec is not recorded as ever striking or beating Tess). But the jury would not, one imagine, acquit her as readily and absolutely as do the literary critics. This, for instance, is how James Gibson summarizes the climactic chapter:

‘Alec is murdered’ would seem to be truer to the facts. Hardy’s rhetoric allows the critic to overlook the simple wrongness of Tess’s act, and mask it in a neutral phraseology more appropriate to suicide or death by natural causes than homicide. The holes in Hardy’s account allow us to jump to conclusions (‘Alec is a rapist who gets what is coming to him’) and sanction such exonerating imagery as Tony Tanner’s: ‘Tess is gradually crucified on the oppugnant ironies of circumstance and existence itself’. On objective legal grounds, one might retort, Tess deserves crucifixion rather more than do the two thieves and their famous companion. It would be much harder to sustain the ‘Tess as Christ figure’ line if readers had before them a clear image of her plunging the carving knife into Alec’s sleeping body, choosing her spot carefully so as to kill him with one blow – all because he had applied some unspecified ‘foul name’ to her husband. Nor would it be easy, I imagine, to sustain the ‘Tess is a victim of rape’ line (which leads directly into the ‘justifiable homicide’ line) if one had a clear image of her making reciprocal love to Alec in the Chase. Hardy’s novel is like a court case in which all the material evidence is left out, and the jury (readers) rushed to judgement on the basis of the defendant’s beauty and pathetic suffering alone.

All this is not to suggest that Tess is a murderous slut who gets what is coming to her. But one should perhaps give more credence to Mrs Oliphant’s Victorian commonsensical view. Alec is not a rapist and, although her innocence makes her vulnerable, Tess must take some small responsibility for what happens in the Chase. Tess does have a saleable skill, and she did not have to surrender a second time to Alec purely for economic reasons. Nor, having surrendered, did she have to compound adultery with wilful murder. Had Hardy, in the manner of some Victorian John Grisham, supplied us with two closely described trials in the body of the novel (the first of Alec for rape, the second of Tess for murder), our verdict would surely be harder on Tess, and lighter on Alec.

Notes

1. See Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, ed. R.G. Cox (London, 1970), 217–18.

2. Ibid. 212.

3. Tony Tanner, ‘Colour and Movement in Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, Critical Quarterly, 10 (Autumn 1968); repr. in R.P. Draper (ed.), Hardy: The Tragic Novels (London, 1975), 182–208. The passage quoted comes on 205.

4. The 1890s, ed. G.A. Cevasco (New York, 1993).

5. Ian Gregor, The Great Web (London, 1974), 182.

6. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. James Gibson (London, 1994), 411.

7. Ibid. 417.