George Eliot’s Language of the Sense

Abstract

I will begin, not with George Eliot herself, but with that more notoriously licentious writer, Hardy. When Angel Clare returns to Talbothays dairy, hot with his accomplished purpose of telling his father he intends to marry the milkmaid, he encounters Tess still warm and somnolent from her summer afternoon’s nap. The passage is heavily sensual:

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake’s. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over her pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a woman’s soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation (Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ch. 27).