Abstract
She would have laid down her life for ’ee. I could do no more.1
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Notes
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Wommn Faithfully Presented, 2nd edn, Editor by Scott Elledge (New York: Norton, 1979) Chapter XI. This edition will be the source of further citations, noted in the text by chapter number.
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, Editor by Norman Page (New York: Norton, 1978) Part I, Chapter IV.
See an earlier discussion of mine, ‘Hardy’s Absences’, in Dale Kramer (ed.) Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1979) pp. 202–14. That discussion, concerned with Jude and A Pair of Blue Eyes, now seems to me, unhappily, divorced from concerns of sexuality and secretly married to some formalist assumptions. See also J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1970), a splendid book which, however, does not, despite its title, coincide with the model or argument here.
See Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (Oxford: The World’s Classics, 1980) Chapter XXX: ‘But then where would have been my novel?’
I realise that I am humanising and solidifying these characters, but that is for convenience only. What we call ‘Alec’, ‘Tess’, or ‘Angel’ should be regarded not as real people but as vehicles for setting up intricate and various structures of sexual expression and responsiveness. But it is certainly less clumsy to speak of ‘Alec’, ‘Tess’, and ‘Angel’ than of coded vehicles.
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. I, Part Two (New York: Random House, 1936) pp. 66–188. Further references to the same work are cited in the text.
Pain in conjunction with sexuality seems to him abnormal only if it substitutes for intercourse; it is common and normal if pain leads to intercourse.
Miller (Distance and Desire, p. 155) also suggests that this ending can be read as the beginning of a new cycle of the same thing.
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© 1990 Regina Barreca
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Kincaid, J. (1990). ‘You did not come’: Absence, Death and Eroticism in Tess. In: Barreca, R. (eds) Sex and Death in Victorian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10280-8_2
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