I have listened to the programme again. This does not include a transcript of the whole programme which was 49 mins long, but just the parts talking about the rape scene which came mostly near the end of the discussion.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b078zcrr
We were told that the novel as Thomas Hardy first wrote it was rejected by two publishers, to whom he had submitted the first half of the novel, by one on the grounds that it was immoral and the other because it was too succulent. The third accepted it as a serialised graphic novel in a bowdlerized version and published it in 1891.
Hardy reissued it as the novel we have now in1892 (13:00 mins).
Melvyn Bragg was the host. There were three speakers:
Francis O'Gorman University of Leeds
Jane Thomas University of Hull
Dinah Birch University of Liverpool
In discussing why the novel was rejected by the first two publishers for immorality and succulence, we were told that Hardy had submitted the first half which contained the scene that,
Might have been a rape, or might have been a seduction but we can argue about that if we have time Melvyn Bragg 11:55mins
Melvyn Bragg went on to explain that the novel was intended to evoke our sympathy and compassion for a pure woman and her inexorable fate. He mentioned
'How her body speaks to others 15: 40 and was both an invitation and a threat.' MB
He began to talk about Alec Durberville:
32:53
^Alec's lust enabled him to act very badly. Did he or did he not rape her?..we've got to ask that
question, it's got to come up. Please, we have not got..^MB
34:17
Now then, what happened? MB
34:33
We can't know. The one thing we can be certain of is that whatever happened was not of Tess's choosing. That, ..uh, whether it was explicitly physical rape, or whether because her resistance was worn out because she was exhausted, we can't know. Because of course there's a sense in which nothing happened except in our imagination. (Jane Thomas or Dinah Birch)
But a baby comes out of it. That's quite something. M B
Yes, yes, but the baby....all of these things are fictional constructs....if you take my point.'JT or DB
35:00
But I'm reading the novel. I think novels are not just fictional constructs, they are the life of people we believe in...MB
True JT or DB
'Our imagination goes out to them and they become just as real as you three...Tess is as real as any of you here.' MB
35:20
We can never come up with an explicit answer as to what happened in The Chase.. JT
' just asked you why not MB
Because...because...because, as Francis has said, a lot of the crucial actions take place, as it were, off stage. It is one of the things he learnt from Greek Tragedy. You know..that you don't actually perform in front of the eyes of your audiences or reader. Because, in a sense, the consequences are so disastrous you could say that 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. JT or DB
Francis wants to say something MB
I think that it's worth saying that the first readers of the graphic version did experience a very different account of this. Because in that version we don't see anything of....seduction, rape...whatever it is. What we know is that Tess goes back home, that she says she had been tricked by Alec into a false marriage by a false registrar and she had lived with Alec for a week, But there was no baby Francis O'Gorman.
The woman speaker seems to evade a lot of the question by means of the academic trope that we can't know because Hardy uses the devise of Greek Tragedy to have events happen outside our view. In practice Hardy makes it clear enough what happened.
Francis O'Gorman's remark that in the original we don't see anything of seduction rape, whatever it is, it was only clear that Tess had been tricked into a false marriage - begs the mention that this would in modern times this would be rape too. Moreover, though F O'G was talking about the Graphic 1891 version, he failed to mention that in this Alec had also drugged Tess - another act of rape by modern standards.
In The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy
By Margaret R. Higonnet
we would have seen another expert who clearly recognises that Tess was raped.
books.google.co.uk/books?id=0AVXa3y4ghsC&pg=PA104&dq=thomas+hardy+tess+ingham&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwip4rmIiMjMAhXrCsAKHanj