H04014 "NEW ENDING FOR TESS" 2/15/04 HARDY FORUM ARCHIVES
From: mstanford@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: A new Ending for Tess
Date: February 15, 2004 12:29:14 PM PST
Someone posed the following question to me and I thought you all might like a shot at it:
Assume in TESS that instead of Tess killing Alec, she simply leaves, tracks down Angel, they forgive one another and then move on with their lives. Would this make the novel "less great"?
S. Pastore
From: hardycor@owl.csusm.edu
Subject: Re: A new Ending for Tess
Date: February 15, 2004 12:47:44 PM PST
Whether or not this would make the novel "less great" it would certainly
make it less Hardydesque.
Betty Cortus
From: Rabikom@edgehill.ac.uk
Subject: Re: A new Ending for Tess
Date: February 15, 2004 12:51:00 PM PST
Thank you Michael.
Yes, it would be much less great, I presume, and much less real. It is
not like Hardy to tell us stories which are ornamented with illusions
for the reader's complacency. And that's why his prose still appeals to
people in all sorts of trouble, which means, more or less, all people.
Marta Rabikowska
From: wesspix1@btinternet.com
Subject: Re: A new Ending for Tess
Date: February 15, 2004 2:52:45 PM PST
Only if she subsequently realises what a hypocrite Angel is and kills him instead. With his brand-new exciting theology and his outdated morality and his sexist, class-ist view of the rural working classes...
Gary Alderson
From: mulcahey@pacbell.net
Subject: RE: A new Ending for Tess
Date: February 15, 2004 3:04:26 PM PST
It would not only make the novel less great, it would make the novel appalling,
and appallingly trite, a story not worth telling.
It would be psychologically a betrayal. Tess's sense of irredeemable
unworthiness would never allow her to "track Angel down." (To forgive each
other? Angel has nothing to forgive -- the crime, the abandonment, was his.
That Tess sees the wrong as all on her side is central to her innocence and
her character.) If Tess thought she was worth fighting for, if she thought she
had a future, she wouldn't be with Alec. She is already a suicide. She has
run afoul of orthodoxy, at every turn, but is too orthodox herself to resist
its judgment.
It would be unsatisfying in the extreme. The killing of Alec is the central
act of justice in the story. (Tess's execution is inevitable, but not just.)
Too, the reader knows Angel is not worthy of Tess. If Angel and Tess walked
off into the sunset on the last page, I'd throw the book across the room.
It would rob TESS of one of the most thrilling and original conclusions in
literature, the part that gives us goosebumps, the thing we still read it for,
the cornice the whole edifice supports: those final fugitive days when Angel
and Tess wander like gnats across the monumental face of Britain's dream of
itself, ending at Stonehenge.
Take that away and the whole novel unravels. Tess might as well be Tess
Johnson as a Durbeyfield from the D'Urbervilles.
Patrick Mulcahey
From: sflynn@gettysburg.edu
Subject: RE: A new Ending for Tess
Date: February 15, 2004 3:23:47 PM PST
Bravo, Patrick. I could not have said it better. To be honest, I can't wait to pose the question to my students when I teach my Hardy seminar next fall. If nothing else, an interesting discussion should ensue.
The original question brought to my mind the bowdlerized versions of Shakespeare of which the Victorians were so fond. Cordelia and Lear walk off into the sunset together. Would anyone ask if that tragedy would be "less great" when thus altered?
Suzanne Flynn
From: harrybatt@mn.rr.com
Subject: Re: A new Ending for Tess
Date: February 15, 2004 4:35:19 PM PST
A new TESS ending? Well, I'm all for revenge. Women heroines seem
to have a knack for it. "When they raise their rifles higher, I'll say
'Ready! Aim! Fiyah!' " I would accept S. Pastore's finish with a slight
TESS modification; viz., Tess has left Alec to waste away with his vernereal
disease and she finds Angel to fogive and reward him with dose of gonorrhea.
York was a victim of Hardy's revenge in FFTMC. Why not Tess's worthless
lovers? John Bridell, Minneapolis, MN as harrybatt@mn.rr.com
From: patmann@ouvip.com
Subject: Re: A new Ending for Tess
Date: February 16, 2004 12:11:03 AM PST
If anyone would like to know my version of what happened to Angel, it's all in 'The d'Urberville Inheritance'. The book is in Dorchester County Library - borrowing and reference sections.
Patricia Mann
From: cartb4horse@gmx.net
Subject: Re: A new Ending for Tess
Date: February 17, 2004 5:13:39 AM PST
The novel would be less great.
The assumption takes for granted the craftsmanship of the work. The first example that comes to mind is the scene with the pheasants dying in the snow. It would, of course, need to be rewritten as well - the mercy Tess shows the wounded birds by wringing their necks foreshadows her own end. Allowing Tess to survive in the end would be like allowing the wounded birds to prolong their deaths on their own - merciless and cruel. Survival doesn't always mean a happy end and certainly not a return to innocence.
Chris Cathcart
From: Charles.Anesi@wellsfargo.com
Subject: RE: A new Ending for Tess
Date: February 17, 2004 5:39:23 AM PST
It would require a complete re-write.
This reminds me of Illia's version of "Medea" in "Never on Sunday" --- Medea doesn't kill her children, patches things up with Jason, and they all go to the seashore for a holiday.
Chuck Anesi
Charles.Anesi@wellsfargo.com
office 612-667-9518
cell 612-940-3345
From: harrys@cnetco.com
Subject: Re: A new Ending for Tess
Date: February 17, 2004 8:00:41 AM PST
Shall we attempt as well to rewrite our social history? As with Jude, the wish to not have to see such depth of pain and disjoint is itself instinctively deep. Yet there, close to instinct, the words quietly describe truths about us. Joan Sheski