(RE)PRESENTATIONS OF A PURE TESS

Abstract

This dissertation discusses how Tess is presented by Thomas Hardy in his novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and (re)presented in two other accounts: one through the medium of film, and the other, a feminist perspective. Comparison of these three different representations reveals their different interpretive stances. These stances are inevitably influenced by the personal views of the three 'narrators' and the prevailing social norms. Chapter One is entitled "Conventions and Contention". It examines Hardy's defence of Tess against the adverse criticism of his contemporary readers, who subscribed to existing social and cultural conventions. Hardy's defence of his view on Tess's purity, which can only be convincingly articulated with reference to her sexuality, poses problems. This illustrates how an author is inhibited from being explicit by the conventions of his society. Chapter Two, entitled "Emancipation and Appropriation", examines the Polish director Roman Polanski's adaptation of Hardy's novel for his film production. How a film director of the twentieth century reads Hardy's nineteenth-century novel, and renders his interpretation in a different medium, for a particular purpose and audience, will be discussed. Chapter Three, entitled "Feminist (Re)vision", examines how a feminist reader, Emma Tennant, responds to Tess's situation and reconstructs it for a late twentieth-century audience. Hardy's text deals with the issue of female sexuality, which, in the three narratives, inevitably becomes subjected to, and mediated by, a narrator located within a certain historical period. The dissertation works with the critical premise that author, text and reader are social constructs: historically and ideologically determined.