Who thinks Tess of the D'Urbervilles was raped?

[KindDogsTail]

Who thinks Tess of the D'Urbervilles was raped?( In the book by Thomas Hardy 1892)

I started a thread in Feminism about this but I wondered if perhaps some book lovers might not have looked in Feminism recently. This book is so loved and so important.

I also posted in Radio but no one has answered.

Academics discussing this book in the programme In Our Time last Thursday
said, 'We can't know.'

I feel that one can indeed know.... yes, she was.
So do most people as far as I can see.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player
about 32:00 minutes in.

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

Not taped, raped. Stupid phone!

We need an edit button!

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.

I heard the programme and ended up shouting at the radio, I was so angry. How the heck they could say "we cannot know" is beyond me.

I switched it off in the end.

I heard the radio programme and thought I should read the book.
What a shame they daren't say she was raped for some reason if everyone else thinks it was completely clear cut.

I have never before considered that it might not have been rape. I thought it was implicit in the text.

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.

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.

How exactly is something not of Tess's choosing not rape! What a terrible analysis.

Yes, it was.

When I studied the book it was also stressed that Alec had deliberately played on Tess' innocence and purity, manipulated her and used her. Today I suppose we could call it grooming, but there was no room for doubt that Tess was the vulnerable victim.

I also vividly remember how absolutely furious I was with Angel Clare and the way he treated her.

Having said all that it is still one of my favourite books, it made a lasting impression on me so much so that I can still remember how I felt when I first read it all those years ago.

I remember concluding that Angel was the true villain too. Don't think I'd see it that way now.

It's a bit different from a 'real life' situation though.

Tess can't tell us what happened. There aren't any police or CPS.

I don't imagine a modern Tess would go to the police. If she did it's unlikely that they'd take the case forward.

Where would a 21st century Tess end up? In HMP Styal? Maybe later in life - with a drug problem - she'd be ringing a support line to talk about what she'd experienced with Alec as a young and vulnerable woman.

Meanwhile her benefits would be cut/sanctioned she'd be using a food bank and if you were her next door neighbour you'd be complaining on Mumsnet about her volatile behaviour and dodgy 'friends.'

I agree that it was rape, but also that Hardy makes the issue even more challenging for the Victorian audience, by suggesting that Tess chose to stay with Alec afterwards for some weeks/months, and that he (Hardy) still regarded her as 'a pure woman'

On their wedding night when Tess talks to Angel she says "I was a child when it happened! I knew nothing of men." That's all the reader (and Angel) should need to hear.

I 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, but that is very much a construct of our current social mores. What did it mean back then? Hardy was exploring / decrying / revealing the social mores of his time.

It is a pity that the programme you listened to was not able to discuss it without being so bloody irritating. I think sometimes literary academics get too caught up in the minutiae and forget to link themselves, their thoughts and words, back to the pint in hand.

I was taught that it was rape... however, we were also taught to rethink it (and the sale in Mayor of Casterbridge) in the context in which they were written. What was it Hardy was asking his readers of that time to consider? How was that different to us in the 1970s. I suppose I would now add - and how has that changed again now, in 2016?

Was it rape? is not, in my opinion, the right question to ask of that text. It is too narrow and does not fully explore or acknowledge the social complexities that Tess lived within.

Was 'pint in hand' deliberate Our Blanche? Brilliant either way.
My 15 year old self was more outraged at Angel Clare marrying the sister even though Tess wants that. I must re-read the book as an adult.

I too was disturbed by Angel Clare marrying the sister. I have re-read the book since I studied it and I still cannot put Angel in a good light. I do remember our outraged class discussions about the way he behaved and the teacher trying to get us to see it through the prism of the time it was set in, we remained outraged!

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.

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.

Well, maybe all we can be sure of is that TV and radio don't 'do' literature very well. Radio can be better as there aren't so many distracting visuals. But too often Radio 4 is just the same old smug voices of people who think they're clever because - well because they keep getting asked back to do stuff on Radio 4.

I know that, you said so, very clearly. It is another of the things about it (from your posts) that was not well thought out about the programme.

In modern times if a person has sex with another when they are asleep, that is rape. Erm, yes, I didn't say otherwise... well, I didn't if you read my post as an entire thought/explanation, rather than chopping bits out of it!

OurBlanche
I understand you were looking for complexities.
You also said this:
The point is that Tess was suborned, taken advantage of... actions not of her choosing may not mean rape, it may mean grooming, but that is very much a construct of our current social mores. What did it mean back then? Hardy was exploring / decrying / revealing the social mores of his time.

He did did indeed describe a process of grooming.
(It is interesting that Hardy was able to describe this so ahead of his time)

But he also described an actual act of sex with someone who was asleep, and revealed through the text that he considered what the man had done to her was the same as what soldier ancestors of hers had inflicted on peasant girls, just less violently. Even in those days readers would have realised the being asleep combined with the soldier allusion meant rape not seduction..

He explored, revealed and decried social mores of the time by showing she was blamed for the act of rape someone else had inflicted on her.

In those days she would have been blamed for even being alone with him in the first place.

I still hate Angel Clare. Alec knows what he is, so is at least an 'honest' villain,but Angel still thinks of himself as a good man and considers it to be acceptable that he marries her sister. Alec meets the end he deserves, but Angel utterly betrays Tess and gets away scot free and ends up with the new improved version of Tess! I hated that book and still want to punch Angel in the face!