An artist who can't quite break free from convention : Hardy

By the end of part 1 of "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," Tess is a "fallen woman," seduced - raped, actually - by the insufferable Alec (?) D'Urbervilles, the spoiled son of the fake aristocrat. Thomas Hardy handles the scene of the rape with quaint 19th-century discretion, everything leading up to it - the ride on horseback into the forest, Tess falling asleep on the forest floor, D'Urberville leaving her and then coming back to find her a sleep with her lashes wet, and then he lies down beside her, and then - end of chapter, lights out! A young or inattentive reader might even miss it. Hardy is so sensual at times, his writing so full of passion simmering just below the boiling point - but he can't quite break free of the restrictions of his time and place, he was not born to be an avant-garde writer, just a "garde" writer. Perhaps that's why he gave up novels in mid-career and turned to poetry? Through the rest of the novel, we'll see what happens to the "fallen" Tess: is she a strong woman? Through the first section, she definitely is not - but she's a very sad woman, or really a sad young girl. Her parents are horrible, her society is provincial and closed-minded, and she has the misfortune of linking her fate to one of the nastiest, most selfish of cads in literture - can you blame her for her misfortune? Hardy's novel is more about fate than about character, although perhaps character will emerge and develop over the course of the story. It's a dark, gloomy world - the nighttime ride through the forest is an excellent emblem of Hardy's world - in which characters don't deserve their fate and have nowhere to turn, a post-deistic world.