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.
This sounds like an interesting criticism that offered some really cool ideas! And focused on some things that we haven't really talked about in class, or at least not much. After skimming several of the criticisms for this blog it seems like there were a handful of them that focused their thoughts on the idea of sexuality and also the gender roles that Hardy is portraying; specifically through Tess, but also the male roles of Angel and Alec. We have talked a lot about the naturalism that Hardy utilizes, but through some of these criticisms I think it is really interesting to see what he may have been doing with genders throughout the novel. What could he have been saying about feminism of this time? Or what is he saying about societal expectancies of gender? We talk a lot about what Hardy was doing with Tess, but I wonder now too, what he was doing with Alec, Angel and the relationships that he creates among them.
ReplyDeleteKatie,
ReplyDeleteI agree that Tess was a victim of social convention, and even though I don't like her, I don't necessarily think that her fate needed to end in death either. However, as we discussed in class, I think Hardy probably did this because it was a common ending to a seduction novel; it was Tess' punishment for her sexual behavior, regardless of whether or not her sexual experience with Alec was rape or consensual. I also think it's important that you focused on Hardy's emphasis on Tess' beauty. Before the rape/seduction scene in the forest with Alec, Tess is always described with pure, youthful imagery, such as when Hardy says, "Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still [...] for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or in her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then."(Hardy 8) Her youth is really focused on in the first stage of our knowing Tess, and while her beauty is always present, as we progress in the novel, that "youthfulness" is no longer a predominant theme.
I like taking a Darwinian stance on this novel as well! It is a natural impulse for us to try and place all characters into the theories and beliefs we have now in our society when authors a lot of the time were operating underneath completely different ideologies or concepts. This idea that Tess's beauty caused much of her suffering is not such a far fetched idea. I think at the base, it gets to the idea that there are effects that the physical world has on our lives that we need not always ignore. Understanding a little more about the beliefs of Hardy is really helpful to the reading.
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