ABSTRACT
Much is made by critics of the passive Tess who yields to circumstance and fate. They were and are voicing the nineteenth-century liberal point of view that exonerated the fallen woman on the grounds that she was one of nature’s unfortunates. Innately mute and trusting, passive and yielding, she suffered a weakness of will and reason and was not, therefore, responsible for her actions. These are the contours of the dominant cultural perspective and the language that shapes them: from Havelock Ellis to Roman Polanski it is the dumb, gentle, unthinking, passive Tess who too often survives in interpretation. This defeats Hardy’s purposes entirely. There is no denunciation, in his entire œuvre, as unequivocal as his denunciation of the sexual double-standard in Tess. And I include under this heading the sexual double-standard that would not deny to the sexually active male the power of will and reason, the self-responsibility and moral integrity that is so often denied to the sexually active female. Hardy’s Tess is a sexually vital consciousness and, without any shadow of doubt, to my mind, she owns each and every one of these qualities.
