Within Ellen Rooney’s essay, she attempts to make sense of some of the contradictions of terms that Hardy presents within Tess. These terms include rape, seduction/seductive, pure/pure woman, meaning, and consent. In this post, I will focus on Rooney’s attempt to piece together Hardy’s attempt to separate seduction from rape, and how it affects Hardy’s intended perception of Tess as pure.
When talking about rape, Rooney tries to further define and make sense of the connection of rape and seduction within Hardy’s novel. She comments that “Hardy’s efforts to clarify the nature of Tess’s ‘violation’ are hindered by the rhetoric that links rape to seduction,” meaning that Hardy made it appear as though seduction led to the rape of Tess (468). Rooney struggles with the idea that the rape of Tess happened because of seduction, which leads her to claim that “rape is an extension of seduction,” and this is what makes it difficult for Hardy to rationalize what happened to Tess, who is also supposed to be a pure woman (468). This begs the question: can rape and seduction be wholly distinguished or are they always conjoined? Rooney is unable to find the answer because Hardy’s treatment of Tess contradicts itself throughout the book. When looking at the context of Tess’s purity when matched with her seductive ways, Rooney comes to the conclusion that “as a victim of her sexuality, which is her seductiveness, she can remain pure,” which is an interesting assertion because it blatantly calls Tess a “victim” of her own methods (478). How can Hardy justify calling Tess a victim at the same time that he presents her as a temptress? Rooney also asks this question, and remarks that “given his commitment to her purity, Hardy’s figuration of Tess as a seductive woman seems counterintuitive,” especially if he previously claimed that she was a “victim of her sexuality” (465, 468). Rooney brings her argument full circle when she states that “the meaning of [Tess’s] purity hinges on the relationship between seduction and rape” and that Hardy is unable to make a clear distinction of the two (465). Since Hardy is unable to truly resolve the issue of rape vs. seduction, it’s unclear whether he truly believed that Tess was pure, or whether she somehow seduced Alec, which ultimately places the blame on Tess and removes purity from her characteristics. Rooney’s attempt to decipher Hardy’s underlying implications was complicated by the constant contradictions that Tess provided when it came to Tess’s blurred image. Did Hardy want readers to view her as a “subject of desire,” or did he really want readers to believe she was pure (466)? Or is there a line that allows Tess to be both? These were just some of the many questions that Rooney attempted to answer with her feminist reading of Tess.
