Who thinks Tess of the D'Urbervilles was raped?

OurBlanche
Was it rape? is not, in my opinion, the right question to ask of that text

It was however the question being asked in this case and in the part of the radio programme being alluded to..

Of course the book raises vast and complex issues in which rape is one just apart. That is not in dispute.

Our Blanche
would agree with Muskey and Marianne. The point is that Tess was suborned, taken advantage of... actions not of her choosing may not mean rape, it may mean grooming,

In modern times if a person has sex with another when they are asleep, that is rape.

Tess!" said d'Urberville.
There was no answer. The obscurity was now so great that he could see absolutely nothing but a pale nebulousness at his feet, which represented the white muslin figure he had left upon the dead leaves. Everything else was blackness alike. D'Urberville stooped; and heard a gentle regular breathing. He knelt and bent lower, 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.
Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above them rose the primeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which there poised gentle roosting birds in their last nap; and about them stole the hopping rabbits and hares. But, might some say, where was Tess's guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked.

Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order. One may, indeed, admit the possibility of a retribution lurking in the present catastrophe. Doubtless some of Tess d'Urberville's mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray had dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly towards peasant girls of their time. But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter.

Yes, it was.

Yolandi I agree it is absolutely explicit in the text, but not in a prose police report way if the reader if the sort of person who requires that.

Meeep if you haven't read it before, it is a wonderful book though very upsetting.
I am going to read it again too.

I am so glad you thought that way too BakeOff and I am not mad.
I have written in to their contact email, and to Radio 4 feed back to complain. Not least because of similarly raped girls who may have been listening.

I've always thought it was obvious she was raped and I first read it over 30 years ago, I didn't realise this was contested until reading this thread.

It was the academics on the radio who were somehow not willing to call it rape.
Partly because Hardy does not give a blow by blow detail of the rape itself and partly because it seems they may have shared that Kenneth Clark sort of flawed idea that it wasn't 'rape rape' because it was not done by a stranger who had also violently attacked her.

34:33 mins into the programme Melvyn Bragg said
Now then what happened.

The answer was:
We can't know. The one thing we can be certain of is that whatever happened was not of Tess's choosing. That, ugh, whether it was it explicitly physical rape, or whether because she was exhausted because her resistance was worn out she kind of gave in. We can't know

I KDT say, if you read chapter 11 & 12 yes, you certainly can know.

She went on:

The question of whether it was an explicit rape, or whether it was some kind of forced seduction doesn't in the end matter to what happened to Tess

Then another man came on and referred to this seduction or rape or whatever it is

This sort of question 'was it rape rather than seduction' is shocking in our era
coming from these academics.

He did, however, used to spend a lot of time telling the mixed class about boys' urges that they had to fight, and girls' tempting ways

Yes, Shotgun that is exactly what I was trying to say: that if a man could be so tempted by a hanged woman who was doing nothing at all, surely the man himself is the protagonist of his own lust in the end, not the tempting girl - dead or alive.

Hardy must have realised this and used the novel to fight your jesuit's premise about girls' tempting ways.

In the radio programme last Thursday, In Our Time, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (still on Iplayer)
the listeners were told Thomas Hardy's background and the influences this may have had on his writing,

Apparently, when he was an old man of about 70, in some sort of recollection or memoir, he wrote that when he was sixteen he had witnessed the hanging of a beautiful young woman and then seen her hanging there. He had been sexually aroused by the sight. He would presumably have been very upset that he felt this.
He must have wondered too what had happened that this beautiful young girl had been hanged.

This was the inspiration for Tess, who was hanged for murder.

I think Melvyn Bragg said that the book was written as exculpation for his reaction to this poor hanged woman when he was sixteen.

My view, after hearing about this was that his feeling that way about a dead woman might have exemplified for him how men can be aroused by a woman who has not actually done anything intentional on her own part to cause that arousal - in this case she was even dead.

But more often men blame the woman for their own feelings of lust. Tess ended up being hanged because of two men's feelings for her. Yet she was the pure one. In those days she would have been blamed for what happened to her, Hardy was saying she was not the guilty one.

Hardy evidently was very honest with himself in admitting his reaction to the hanged woman. I don't think most people would be able to face that thought if they had it.