Seduction and Betrayal (26 page)

Dimmesdale's religion and Angel Clare's double standard are real enough, but it is not easy to give them an equal right to consideration. Religion was the whole of this life and after to Dimmesdale, and his last action is an “Election Day” sermon. For Angel, a skulking vanity and tribal narrowness caused him to abandon Tess. One feels at this point a certain attraction to the abstract in him; he would not have married Tess if he had not had a generalized, formal picture of her as a beautiful, virgin girl of the peasant classes he alone had discovered. The truth of his real love for her is that he suffers almost as much as she from his abandonment and yet he cannot reverse the course of his pedantic decision. The end of the plot is that Tess kills D'Urberville and is executed for it. That is the last act of the drama that began on the night of her seduction.

Hardy sees Tess as a beautiful, warm soul run down by the dogs of fate, in her case the bloodhounds of sex and love, Alec D'Urberville and Angel Clare. Her acceptance, her endurance of the griefs of experience, are of the heroic kind; she meets suffering without losing her capacity for feeling. She is not surprised by loss and rejection and therefore never degraded by it. In Tess's life every adversity has its double. Her misery over the flight of Angel Clare goes hand in hand with a deepening poverty and a deadening solitude. Toward the end of the book her family is actually starving and it is for that reason she takes up with D'Urberville once more. She is defined by her work. The arch of her existence curves as much with work as with love.

Tess's early days on the green dairy farm are idyllic, and the fields and cows coincide with youth and love. In the end she is living in the dismal town of Flintcomb-Ash, working at a threshing machine rented by the day. The farm has become a factory and some critics think
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
is about the death of the English peasantry. The destruction of Tess's love is like some eternal winter, and the scene of her final despair is a bleak and barren epic:

In the end Tess kills D'Urberville because he ruined her life, even if her real ruin came from Angel Clare. Hardy has great pity for Tess and yet he has not made of her a theme but a whole person, one of the most original women in fiction because of her naturalness, which never exceeds the possible. He takes a view of the social forces working upon her in his subtitle, “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented,” and in chapter headings such as “The Woman Pays.” She is nevertheless a paradox of the kind that seems to come unbidden into the minds of novelists when they face the plot of sex and its destructive force for women. She has, for all the truth that the Immortals are having their sport with her, for all the malign force of circumstance, suffered in a transcendent stoical way, accepting first her child and then the rejection by Angel Clare as a pattern of social destiny, deeply woven into the cloth of life.

The betrayed heroine, unlike the merely betrayed woman, is never under the illusion that love or sex confers rights upon human beings. She may, of course, begin with the hope, and romance would scarcely be possible otherwise; however, the truth hits her sharply, like vision or revelation when the time comes. Affections are not
things
and persons never can become possessions, matters of ownership. The desolate soul knows this immediately, and only the trivial pretend that it can be otherwise. When love goes wrong the survival of the spirit appears to stand upon endurance, independence, tolerance, solitary grief. These are tremendously moving qualities, and when they are called upon it is usual for the heroine to overshadow the man who is the origin of her torment. She is under the command of necessity, consequence, natural order, and a bending to these commands is the mark of a superior being. Or so it seems in the novel, a form not entirely commensurate with the heedlessness and rages of life.

The men do not really believe in consequence for themselves. Consequence proposes to them a wordly loss and diminishment they will not suffer. They will not marry the barmaid or the farm girl or the unvirginal. They will not confess to adultery when their success or their comfort hangs in the balance. They will not live with the mistakes of youth, or of any other period, if it is not practical to do so. Sex is a completed action, not a strange, fleeting coming together that mortgages the future. For this reason perhaps, the heroic woman had to be created in fiction. “Ah, she will not speak!” Dimmesdale cries out. When they take Tess away to be hanged and to bury her body under a black flag, she has nothing she can say except, “I am ready.” Maslova, at the end of her story, turns to Prince Nekhlyudov and says, “Forgive me.”

Sex is a universal temptation and activity and a great amnesty will naturally have to attend it throughout life. Scarcely anyone would wish it to define, enclose, imprison a man's being. Society has other things for him to do, being a soldier for instance — a group notoriously indifferent to sexual consequence. Obligation is so often improvident, against thrift. Still, the break with human love remains somewhere inside, and at times, under rain clouds, it aches like an amputation. But it is not
serious
. George Eliot said that she wrote novels out of a belief that a seed brings forth in time a crop of its own kind. How to the point is this metaphor for the plot of the illicit, the plot of love.

Now the old plot is dead, fallen into obsolescence. You cannot seduce anyone when innocence is not a value. Technology annihilates consequences. Heroism hurts and no one easily consents to be under its rule. The heroines in Henry James, rich and in every way luckily endowed by circumstance, are seduced and betrayed by surfaces, misled because life, under certain rules, is a language they haven't the key to. Feeling and desire hang on and thus misfortune (if not tragedy) in the emotional life is always ahead of us, waiting its turn. Stoicism, growing to meet the tyrannical demands of consequence, cannot be without its remaining uses in life and love; but if we read contemporary fiction we learn that improvisation is better, more economical, faster, more promising.

Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, often ironically. It is a bursting forth of only one of the cells in the body of the omnipotent “I,” the one who hopes by concentration of tone and voice to utter the sound of reality. Process is not implacable; mutation is the expedient of the future, and its exhilaration too.

At the end of
Nana
, the beautiful, harassed courtesan's death mingles with the agitated beginning of the Franco-Prussian War. “
à Berlin! à Berlin! à Berlin!
” we hear outside. In her coffin, fouled by small pox, passion and sensuality are reduced to a “bubbling purulence,” a “reddish crust.” It is more than that. It is the death of sex as a tragic, exalted theme. As Zola says, “Venus was rotting.”

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

Copyright © 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974 by Elizabeth Hardwick

Introduction copyright © 2001 by Joan Didion

All rights reserved.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., and Chatto & Windus Ltd.: For seven lines from “The Fish,” from
The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop
. Copyright 1940, © 1969 by Elizabeth Bishop.

Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., and Miss Olwyn Hughes: For specified excerpts from “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Lesbos,” “Edge,” “Cut,” “Contusion,” “Death & Co.,” from
Ariel
, by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1965 by Ted Hughes. Specified excerpt from “Last Words,” from
Crossing the Water
, by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1971 by Ted Hughes. Specified excerpts from “For a Fatherless Son” and “Apprehensions,” from
Winter Trees
, by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1972 by Ted Hughes.

Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., and Faber and Faber, Ltd.: For two lines from
Wodwo
, by Ted Hughes. Copyright © 1967 by Ted Hughes.

Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., and The Bodley Head: For specified excerpts from
Zelda
, by Nancy Milford. Copyright © 1970 by Nancy Winston Milford.

Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., and Faber and Faber, Ltd.: For nine lines from “Smooth Gnarled Crape Myrtle,” from
The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore
. Copyright 1941 and renewed 1969 by Marianne Moore.

Indiana University Press and Faber and Faber, Ltd.: For two lines by Anne Sexton from
The Art of Sylvia Plath
, edited by Charles Newman (1970).

Cover image: Edgar Degas,
Interior
(detail), c. 1868

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Hardwick, Elizabeth.

Seduction and betrayal : women and literature / Elizabeth Hardwick ; introduction by Joan Didion.

p. cm.

“A New York Review book.”

ISBN 0-940322-78-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Women authors. 2. Women in literature. 3. Women and literature.

I. Title.

PN471 .H3 2001

809'.89287 — dc21

2001002540

eISBN 978-1-59017-437-1
v1.0

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