Summary:
In Gillian Beer’s essay “Descent
and Sexual Selection: Women in Narrative, she calls forth a Darwinian idea that
has been overlooked by many critics focusing on Darwin and his influence on
Hardy, and that is the idea of ‘sexual selection’ and the role of women. She
discusses Darwin’s idea that, in contrast with most species, humanistic
tendency is for the man to hold the power of selection. In addition, she
discusses that men place great emphasis on beauty. She claims, “The emphasis on
beauty in the concept of sexual selection opened the debate into the domain of
aesthetics as well” (447). Further on in her article she sums up the effect of
all these ideas in terms of Hardy. She writes, “For George Eliot subtly, and
for Thomas Hardy more frankly, the contradictions, social and psychological,
and biological in the man/woman relationship and its identification with
genetic succession became crucial to their re-reading of traditional fictional
topics,” and she says, “Both George Eliot and Hardy emphasize the discordance
between woman’s individuality and her progenerative role” (449).
Analysis:
I think focusing on Darwin’s effect
on Hardy really helps give a better understanding of the novel. It helped me
see why Hardy places so much emphasis on Tess’s beauty. Beer says, “The social
emphasis on virginity, Hardy suggests, cannot be naturalized: ‘she had been
made to break an accepted social law, but no law known in the environment in
which she fancied herself such an anomaly” (449). I think Tess was a victim of
social convention and that although her fate may have led her down this path;
it did not have to end with death.
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