“Moral Imbecility” – Lena Belfort, 6/25/1903

A man once wrote a “faithful presentation” of a “Pure Woman,” and he called her Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It
was no sentimental feminine romancer, but a man and a realist, who put forth this remarkable story. It was
that clear-eyed and clear-minded Hardy who has given us the powerful arraignment of conventional virtue of
Two on a Tower, whose “Jude” has startled us out of our moral self-complacency—that Hardy who with fine
artistic skill has revealed to us life, and the stress and the limitations of it, and the damning burden of the
moral code. Another man has come forward—see Lucifer, 970—with the assertion that “Woman has only
rudimentary moral sense and knows little about principles. To her justice is nothing. Of shame she only learns
from some man she has grown to love.” In support of this he instances “that scene in Hardy’s novel where
Tess, beautiful animal, after having heard the ‘moral man,’ Angel Clare, tell of his one fault, makes, in the
simplest and most unconscious way, her confession of moral imbecility as quite a matter of course, until she
discovers that Angel has become horrified by the recital. After she has shown us the state of her moral vacuity
we are not surprised at the ease with which she goes back to her ‘betrayer,’ or the equal ease with which she
murders him and goes back to Angel Clare.” Reading with a broader mind than this detractor has shown, let
us consult Hardy closely and see if Tess illustrated George Brown’s claims as to the natural depravity of women.
As to her sense of shame: Alec d’Urberville had gratified his lustful passion by taking advantage of her ignorance,
her helplessness, her sense of the gratitude she owed him, and she had succumbed to fate and the sense of
powerlessness which benumbs a young and innocent girl when she finds herself in the grasp of a passionate
and masterful man. Three weeks after that night in the chaise, when she is returning to Marlott, she speaks to
him thus: “If I had gone for love of you, if I had ever sincerely loved ‘ee, if I loved you still, I should not so loathe
and hate myself for my weakness as I do now. I did not understand your meaning till it was too late. I cannot
take anything from you. I should be your creature to go on doing that, and I won’t!”

See her flushing and tingling in every nerve of her beautiful body as the theological sign-painter disfigures the
country landscape with his monstrous texts of damnation. Hear her heartbroken cry—”Oh mother, my mother!
How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn’t you tell me
there was danger in men-folks? Why didn’t you warn me?” See her gliding by night among lonely hills and dales.
“The midnight airs and gusts, moaning among the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of winter twigs, were formulæ
of bitter reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague
ethical Being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as
any other. Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren,
or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts
of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in
antagonism, she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known
to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.” Sense of shame she certainly had, a needless
and exaggerated sense indeed, for “but for the world’s opinion those experiences would have been simply a
liberal education.” “To the woman justice is nothing,” says the critic. Follow Tess through her tragic life; her
pilgrimage to Trantridge, undertaken against her own judgment and instinct because she felt she must repay her
parents for the loss of Prince; her attempts to stifle her own alarmed instincts of self-protection on that moonlight
ride, that she might be just to the man whose benefactions were merely strings in the snare he was drawing
about her; at the dairy her pitiful attempts to put the other dairy-maids forward, and to refuse herself to Angel;
her honest struggles as to the telling of her story; and all through the agony of Angel’s repudiation and desertion
note how she keeps his point of view ever before her mind, note her refusal to sell the jewels, his heirloom—
is this a woman “to whom justice is nothing”?

At the last, surprised at Sandbourne by Angel, in her desperate sense of the wrong done them both, she
transcends laws and customs, is borne out of herself and her generation, and becomes retribution incarnate,
the very spirit of poetic justice, crude, barbaric, but sublime. “It came to me as a shining light that I should
get you back that way.” And at this crisis Angel Clare rises to meet her, at last is worthy of her, redeems his
soul and cleanses it forever from its stain of hypocrisy, of traditional injustice. This is not the Angel Clare who
spurned the girl whose only sin had been ignorance and defenselessness. She comes to him now, direct
from Alec d’Urberville’s bed, where he lies dead by her hand, and Angel takes her to his heart almost without
question. And he is right in so doing. In that blow with the carving knife, that inspired blow, Tess severed
herself utterly from the past, and she came to Angel free and pure and utterly his, all his, body and soul.
Talk of “moral vacuity,” whose is it? What was the difference between the two confessions—his made
almost lightly, fully confident of her love and forgiveness; hers seriously and sadly given, but trusting to
his great love and his understanding;—what, I ask, was the difference between her “sin” and his? Just
this, that she had been ignorant of evil, and a woman, wherefore Nature had burdened her young body
with the consequences of another’s cruel lust. His “fall” had been a fleeting indulgence of the senses; his
soul had not been touched. Her “fall” had been a physical misfortune whence her soul emerged, unstained,
and with an added poise and womanliness. When he took her in his arms at Talbothays she was as esse
-ntially a virgin soul as when she danced on the green at Marlott and he passed her by.Whose was the
“moral vacuity,” hers or Angel Clare’s—Angel, who three weeks after repudiating her asked Izz Huett to
go with him to Brazil? Whose is the “imbecility,” hers or George Brown’s, who speaks of the “ease with
which she returns to her ‘betrayer?'” Ease?

Watch her through months and months of waiting, silent waiting, deserted, ignored by Angel; watch her through
months of poverty and toil, hopeless but loving; see her on the road to Flintcomb-Ash, snipping her eyebrows
and bandaging her face to escape the gallantries of men; watch her through the fearful drudgery of that winter,
her ineffable humility and patience, her bitter loneliness; then the meeting with Alec and the beginning of his
persecution. Ease, do you say, George Brown? Have you read the book? Had you ever a mother? Have you
any human sympathy? Ease! Days, weeks, months of drudgery, and ever beside her promises of comfort and
affluence; her impassioned appeal to Angel unnoticed, and Alec ever insinuating the thought that she was
throwing away her devotion; her very sense of justice at last compelled to revolt even against her husband;
her mother and the children, those children she so loved, helpless on her hands, and Alec ready to provide
for them; her heart breaking in despair of Angel’s ever returning, her life having no meaning to her save for the
children;—ease! A heart of gold, the courage of a pure love, but yet a woman, young, passionate, yearning for
sympathy, for affection—and “continual dropping will wear away a stone—ah, more—a diamond.” That flippant
paragraph of George Brown’s made my blood boil, and it is boiling now as I lay down the book of Tess, after
my third reading of it. But it is not now George Brown who is the object of my indignation; it is hot against the
time-honored outrage we have set up as a standard of virtue, against our very civilization and our immoral
morality. Hot were the tears I shed over the wrongs and the sufferings of Tess, but hotter yet and bitter indeed
are the tears in my soul as I remember there are those who can read her story and not see, can speak of it
lightly, carelessly, and not see and feel and cry out and revolt against this fearful Moloch to which we sacrifice
our purity and the best of our young womanhood—this monstrous chastity.