I was encouraged by a cousin of mine to include the following as my review of Tess of the D'urbervilles:
It...wasn't for me. They put the character through multiple hell's, gets the love of her life, they get married, he leaves her because of what Alec did to her, she marries Alec under protest for the money for her family, the husband comes back, she murders Alec, she and husband run off from the law, the law catches up with her, she tells husband to marry her little sister which he does even before her execution. Blech.
That short encapsulation of my entire experience for a friend on Facebook is pretty much the easiest way I could put it. On a scale of Pride and Prejudice to Wuthering Heights I'm giving this a "First Chapter of Wuthering Heights when I still had a shred of hope and some dignity as a reader.
I can hear some of the Thomas Hardy admirers already clamoring, "But this is an important novel! It ended how real life ended and that should be applauded!"
I will certainly not debate that first point. It is an important novel that challenges the social mores of the times that were at best hypocritical and at worst outright debasing of a whole section of the female gender that individually did no wrong. Hardy did his best to challenge the Victorian establishment and things actually changed. My issue isn't with the general drama of the novel. It's the ending because, let's face it dearios, it's a cheap ending.
One can very easily compare this novel to Jane Eyre if one does not consider the challenge to moral standards of the time. In each chapter, at every side, the heroine is beset by all manner of difficulties, all manner of ridiculous prejudices, holier-than-thou hypocrisy, and looming, larger than life jerks that stand between them and their shot at some form of happiness. Each heroine refuses to be defined by their circumstances...well...until Tess does. She gives in to marrying her rapist for financial security. Sure, it can be seen as a virtue that Tess did it for her family who was left fatherless and more penniless than before. However, she submits to her rapist for money and security. It can be argued that it was because she honestly believed that her husband was never coming home after all. When all was lost for Jane there was not a moment that she altered what she believed or who she was for security or because of a man. Tess changes everything that defines her for her rapist and for her struggling family.
The moment that the ending comes off as horribly cheap is not in the murder of Alec because, as she said, he lied about Angel never coming back. The cheapness didn't even come off in Angel and Tess running off having an idyllic time on the lam. No. It's in the moment when Tess actually tells her husband to go off and marry her little sister Liza. Why? Basically because she looks like a young Tess but without all the being raped thing.
What the hell?
No, seriously...what...the...hell?
When I read that part I literally looked at my wife and said, "He better not do it. Hell no."
Oh, he does it. Angel doesn't even wait for Tess' execution to be carried out. He's running through town with Liza hand in hand, happy as a lark, going to surely get some uncomplicated lovin' from Tess' little sister later that evening, and oh...well...they pause and see a black flag that's raised to signify that Tess had died.
It occurs to me as I write this that maybe this is another bit of social commentary, that maybe Angel is still one of the upper class jerks at heart. In which case, bully to Mr. Hardy. However...I doubt it.
One of the things that annoys me in all manner of fiction is when a character isn't called out on their BS. The most prevalent example that comes to mind is Magneto in the X-Men comics and movies. Here he is all pissed off about the holocaust, about this jerks who are some sort of master race condemning the "lesser races" to execution or servitude because the Aryans are obviously superior. And yet he's a jerk who is part of a master race condemning....because Mutants are obviously superior. No one EVER calls him out on that horrible glaring inconsistency.
In Tess that horrible inconsistency is the fact that Angel admits to Tess on their wedding night that she's not his first, that he spent thirty days in Egypt (?) in the sordid embrace of a woman he had no intention of marrying. He willingly went into bed not once but for thirty days with a strumpet...but heaven forfend that Tess be accepted by him. I mean she was raped...that's a sin...by nature she has a husband already. "And by that rationale you have a wife, you whore monger!" I accidentally said out loud in a Starbucks when I read it. He never faces up to that reality. He never admits that wrong. Oh, sure, he says, "I treated her too harshly," but that's not the same as actually seeing that the far far greater "sin" is his.
Back to the cheap ending...
It is my considered opinion that books with this sort of ending are simply not for me. I much prefer the endings of books like Jane Eyre and Little Women. Those books don't end in a perfect or idyllic way either, but they give us something we drastically need in this world...hope. Yes, your life won't turn out the way you wanted it to at the first blush of life or love. However, if you stick by your guns, cling to your faith and your principles, then in the end you will get something good, maybe even something better than you thought it could be. It may be like at the end of Jane Eyre where it has been years apart, each of them covered in emotional scars, they're older but wiser, and yet I guarantee what those two feel sitting near the fire together after all that is more solid, more valuable, and a more intense love than what they would have had if they said, "Screw the fact that I have a crazy wife in the attic, lets get hitched and get it on."
Give me an ending that reminds me that life is hard...but there's a light.
Pax,
W
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