Translating the Treatment of Tess: Symposium Edition
Today I’d like to share with you my project entitled “Translating the Treatment of Tess: Determining Thomas Hardy’s Anti-Feminist Intentions for his Main Character in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.”
Within his novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy intended for his main character Tess to be the essence of a “pure woman,” as is depicted in an earlier subtitle of the novel itself. However, Hardy’s introduction of that phrase and description of Tess have caused a large amount of controversy, especially with feminist theory critics of literature, who believe that Hardy unfairly constrained Tess to Victorian gender ideals and entrapped her within a timeline of events that was extremely oppressive. Since Hardy published Tess, there have been numerous movie adaptations that have been produced that attempt to retell the story of Tess from another perspective, with cultural adaptations being especially popular in the Bollywood film industry of India, along with translations of the novel into languages such as Japanese. These film adaptations and translations of Hardy’s novel not only allow for a different interpretation of the story of Tess, but also give readers of the novel a chance to make comparisons and connections with some of Hardy’s conventions that he used within his novel. Many feminist theory critics have struggled to determine whether or not Hardy’s treatment of Tess is truly rooted in anti-feminist methods of thinking, but have never looked at a medium other than the English novel itself to see if such threads existed between the novel’s representation of Tess and a novel in another language or medium, such as film. The goal of my project and presentation today is to examine certain examples of anti-feminist treatment of Tess within Hardy’s novel, and then to extend those examples into the Bollywood movie adaptation Trishna and a Japanese translated version of the novel to show how the anti-feminist behavior carries over into more than just one medium. Although Hardy asserted that his treatment of Tess was solely based off Victorian gender ideals, today I will show that Hardy’s treatment of Tess was anti-feminist in its nature as a result of the same story being told across multiple mediums: Tess d’Urberville died because she was a girl.
In this next part of my presentation I’d like to focus on the fact that Thomas Hardy’s depiction of Tess is contradictory in that he expects her to follow Victorian gender ideals while simultaneously putting her in positions that force her to break out of them. The most notable example is Tess’s relationship with Alec d’Urberville, in which she is expected to live with him in order to provide for her family. In a pivotal and controversial scene in the novel, Alec ends up raping Tess in an event many scholars refer to as “The Chase”, and this ends up causing an “immeasurable social chasm” to appear within Tess, something she is never able to recover from (Hardy 95). This cataclysmic event is what initiates Tess’s downfall throughout the rest of the novel, causing her to continually fall deeper into a social turmoil that she cannot escape. To expose the anti-feminist design of this scene, I looked at Hardy’s language choices that he used when having Tess describe how she felt because of what happened between her and Alec. For example, when Tess’s mother is questioning Tess as to why she would not marry Alec d’Urberville, Tess reflects uses phrases such as “she had succumbed to adroit advantages” and “been stirred to confused surrender” implying that Tess actively chose to let Alec take advantage of her (Hardy 102). Here, Hardy is clearly being oppressive in his treatment of Tess due to the fact that he claims that Tess was raped because she allowed it to happen as a result of her giving in to Alec’s unwanted advantages, placing the fault of what a man did to her on her own shoulders. Of course the argument of whether the event that occurred that infamous night in the forest was rape or seduction has been a longstanding one, as noted in Ellen Rooney’s “Tess and the Subject of Sexual Violence: Reading, Rape, Seduction”. In her essay, Rooney attempts to define the difference between “the blurring boundary between seduction and rape” but comes to the conclusion that the effort is a “fruitless one” due to Hardy’s reluctance to explicitly express what happened after that chapter ended within the novel (Rooney 468, 469). Although Rooney makes some excellent points, I disagree with her claim that it is nearly impossible to define what happened to Tess, because Tess herself states multiple times that “she had dreaded [Alec]” which implies that what happened on the night of “The Chase” was not Tess’s intention or desire, but Alec’s forceful nature taking over (Hardy 102, 94). What happened to Tess was rape, and Hardy’s unwillingness to explain what happened that night only reinforces the reality that Hardy thought that Tess was to blame for her male counterpart’s destructive actions.
With the context of the event of “The Chase” in mind, I then looked at how a Japanese language translation of Tess reinforced my claim that the story of Tess’s demise is inherently anti-feminist as a result of Tess’s downfall occurring because she is a girl (Hardy 94). In my preliminary research pertaining to translating novels, I found that when a story is translated into another language, sometimes the plotline is altered to stay within the boundaries that another culture has in place when it comes to social restrictions. However, I concluded that in the case of translating Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the story is so concrete in its intentions and meaning that the oppressive aspects of the novel remain the same even when switched to another language. In his essay entitled “Hardy in Japan” Sanae Uehara demonstrates that Hardy’s story is still essentially anti-feminist even when switched over to the Japanese language by claiming even though “Japanese censorship law[s] were complex,” translator Miyajima Shinzaburo’s translation of Tess “interpreted the ‘Chase’ episode as a case of rape” which was hugely significant for Japanese readers of Hardy’s novel (Uehara 174, 179). Miyajima then goes on to say that in this specific translation, Tess “‘tells her mother that she was raped by Alec’” something that does not exist in the original Hardy version of the novel since Hardy wanted Tess to be seen as an active participant in her demise, or as Hardy himself puts it, “[Tess] had been made to break an accepted social law” (qtd. in Uehara 179, Hardy 105). By looking at the Japanese translation of Tess, I found that even with all of the added social constructs and rules of another language and culture, Hardy’s treatment of Tess is still viewed as anti-feminist in the Japanese translation due to the fact that Tess is raped, yet still blamed for her supposed involvement in breaking the Victorian social constructs that punish her for being raped solely because she is a female.
Moving on from the Japanese translation of Hardy’s Tess, I next turned my attention to Hardy’s anti-feminist treatments towards Tess that are also prevalent in Bollywood movie adaptations of the novel, such as Trishna. In Sarah Maier’s essay entitled “From Wessex to India: Adapting Hardy’s Tess in Trishna,” Maier focuses on how Trishna is “bringing to life the complexities, frustrations and tragedy of Hardy’s 19th-century consideration of a woman caught in a life controlled by rigorous, inflexible social constructs” (Maier 186). Trishna, much like the Japanese translation of Tess, also highlights the anti-feminist moves that Hardy took when dealing with his main character, Tess. To connect back the example of “The Chase” which I mentioned earlier, Maier also discusses the implications of Hardy’s decision to not portray the rape scene by stating that “the pivotal sexual scene is eluded in both narratives,” which reflects on Hardy’s conscious decision to cover up the fact that Tess was, in fact, raped (Maier 190). Maier agrees with the idea that Tess was raped, and notes that director Michael Winterbottom, too, felt the same way by claiming that “the respective setting of each narrative in the West or the East makes clear that both women are acting under duress, making the question of rape obvious and the conscious use of empowerment by the men paramount” (Maier 190). Maier’s quote supports the claim that Tess’s story is anti-feminist in that it highlights the fact that Tess’s Bollywood counterpart, Trishna, was also raped in the Bollywood adaptation. Hardy’s attempt to not disclose the events that happened the night of “The Chase” show his reluctance to claim that Tess was not responsible for the rape because Hardy saw Tess as a “seductive woman” (Hardy 102, Rooney 466). Maier goes to prove that the story of Tess is oppressive towards women by saying that “both women [in the stories] are impregnated and will suffer the consequences while the men will be both oblivious and blameless according to society” which gives the men the ability to walk away unaffected, while the women are left to suffer because they are women (Maier 190). The rape of Tess and Trishna only solidifies Hardy’s anti-feminist intentions for his novel’s main character because even when the story was adapted into another medium, Trishna also went through the exact same situation and was responsible for the actions of her male counterpart, much in the same way that Tess was responsible for Alec’s actions and ultimately, her own demise.
In conclusion, looking at different versions and mediums of Tess such as Trishna, and the Japanese translation of Tess gave me more than enough evidence to support the claim that Hardy’s treatment of Tess within his novel was anti-feminist. Most importantly, Hardy’s attempt to blame Tess for her demise by portraying her as taking an active role in seducing Alec when he’s the one who raped her has carried across multiple mediums and translations, solidifying my claim that Hardy had one end goal in mind for Tess: death because of her gender.
