Tess (11 page)
Authors: Emma Tennant
Bad Women
Punishment. We're standing, Baby Tess, in the church of St Mary in Beaminster â or just outside, to be accurate, one foot in the porch and the other on the flagstones that cover the sinners of the past eight centuries â the men who sinned and the women who led them into temptation, that is. This is why I've brought you here â daughter and granddaughter and great-granddaughter of a Ruined Maid, to show you one of Dorset's finest shrines to Christendie â as your forebear Thomas Hardy fancifully called the punishment machine wherein we stand.
Your eyes, innocent of evil and good alike, strain in perplexity at the gargoyles, the monsters, the leering griffons that rise in a frozen elevator of stone on the exterior of the western tower. Where are they going, these vile-cheeked, puff-tongued beasts? Why have they got it in for you? Whatever, in the name of whichever god was the god of your distant homeland, have you done to deserve their rage and retribution? You have been born, and you haven't yet the power to choose between one course of action and another. You are as innocent as the day you were born. But you are not â as the presence of this fine perpendicular church, late twelfth-century, aisled and austere, will testify â you are not pure. You are the daughter of Eve â and she is the mother of us all, the reason for the need to punish Tess, and every Tess before her.
Until the concept of original sin is washed from the consciousness of man, woman will be eternally blamed for all the ills and malefactions of the world.
Before Eve was chosen from Adam's rib, his first wife Lilith exploded in a chaos of disobedience and the stars no longer knew how to follow the path of God.
Eve would submit â but she, too, went against the orders from
the Creator. She tempted Adam â she was cursed, along with him â and they fled from Eden to the barren rocks, the shingle beaches, the swampy marshland with which every country in the world is cursed (and we have our fair share of them here, too). She remains on earth to tempt men (remember Hardy's Tess, who is told strictly by the apparently reformed New Man and preacher Alec D'Urberville after her abandonment by Angel, the only man she could love, that she must on no account âtempt' him: this after his seduction and subsequent refusal to take responsibility for the baby that was the consequence of it!). For all Hardy's apparent compassion for Tess â and his description of her on the title page of the book that became him, overcame him and stayed more in the imagination of the world than anything else of him â as a âPure Woman', he was as guilty as the next man. His compassion was an exquisite cruelty. Hardy used the execution of Tess for the crime of murdering her first and hateful lover as a final, tender way of killing the woman he loves; he shaped her, through all the ages of history that woman has toiled, died in the agony of labour, stood at the stake, fallen gagging on black water in the duckponds of witch persecution â through all the centuries of slavery and non-belonging, without even a name or a woman priest to turn to in the hours of worst desolation, Hardy led Tess to the last; inevitable punishment, the price she must pay as daughter of Eve. For her prime disobedience to man, her ruler, her father, her seducer, Tess must swing.
As a child in Dorchester, Thomas Hardy attended public executions and was haunted ever after by those murderesses with their billowing skirts ⦠urine and faeces trickling down on yellow-stockinged legs swollen from labour and penury, faces grim and blackened, lips that could not even form letters when confronted with their own death warrant to read. Hardy's compassion stirred ⦠but Tess must end as they did. (It was a scandal, of course: Hardy never really recovered from the storm of protest and loathing his love affair with Tess provoked. He never fell out of love with Tess either, as we shall see.)
Woman is bad. You remember the way we came, Baby Tess, to this smug, pretty little market town, this minster that took its name from a Saxon saint, Bega?
Your eyes stared around you. You'd never been inland before. Washed up on Chesil Beach, all you'd heard was the (Saxon) murmur of the pebbles â for that's what the word for shingle was in the tongue of the next invaders and conquerors of Dorset â Chesil, Chesil ⦠the lull of the pebbly word had you sleeping as we left the Mill, and I looked once more round the garden to make sure I hadn't left the washing out to get soaked in the sudden downpours that fall through the tropical forest at Abbotsbury, as they do in Dominica or one of those high, green islands where your dad's ancestors toiled on the plantations, very probably.
I looked round the garden, with you in a sling tied under my breast, and I wondered what Hardy's Tess would think of my sister Tess, if she saw us here together. And I could hear the voice of our father as he came back into the Mill that time, when we were up in the room with the round eye ⦠and Tess was only fourteen and Alec knew he could go to gaol for it â¦
Yes, I stood there with you quite innocent, sleeping on my ribs and your breath coming in and out as quiet as the sea in the shell, when it pauses to listen to you â and I saw us all as we ran for it â Retty and Victor and me, that is â for how could Tess when she had Alec still inside her? Did it feel like the first stone, that was pushed in her and weighed her down, anchored her there, a helpless sea-urchin, with the spiky hair of the sixties and a half-burned fag in a saucer on the floor and the new pop music belting out as our dad mounted the stairs to find his under-age daughter fucking?
Did Tess feel the weight of the blame she, like all women, would always have to take, with Alec heavy as that great boulder of stone by the door of the Mill, lying on top of her?
No, of course she didn't. Not then; Nature looks after it that way, you see. Tess thought she was making a choice â if she thought anything at all. And she laughed right in our father's face. I can see it now â for all our running away we only got as far as the stairs out of the loft. And I was the first to catch it. Punishment.
Our father, you see, was born in the last great age of punishment for women â he was a Victorian, pulled from the flanks of his sickly mother just as the old Queen was dying â coming into a world
reeking of ether fumes and corrective braces and camphor oil. He saw his mother waste away from too much child-bearing; and he saw the men of his elder brother's generation slaughtered on the Somme while dreaming of their saintly mothers, their lily-white fiancées. He saw what happened to a woman if she stopped smelling of roses and lilies and sank into the mire: he saw the iron discipline needed, the pulling in of the stays that held the body and the will in check; he knew the Ruined Maid as well as our great poet, Hardy, who wrote of her and dreamed of her, incarnated as Tess. And to our father there was no change, since the days when ruin, the burden for the whole family, of the bastard â brought unending shame. He was going to stamp it all out, now â and no amount of little round pills and rock and roll were going to deflect him. (I don't think he ever really heard the guitars and drums that sounded from our room. Like the swans he tended at Abbotsbury, our father liked to think of women as silent, mute.)
The strap was kept in the dark, grey room on the ground floor of the Mill where my father's sister Tibby sometimes stayed on a rare visit from Scotland. In an oak cupboard with a bottle of brandy and an old pair of binoculars my father had inherited from
his
father â and which he'd confiscated when my mother took to gazing at the sky through them. (All day, at a milky-white sky where she saw stars, she said, speaking to her as they danced away with her happiness. But that was before our mother Mary fell into the millrace that day we went to the funfair, and was fished out and sent to the big house on the other side of Bridport, where they filled her with drugs and the stars couldn't get through to her any more.)
I wasn't surprised that I was the one to get the strap, not Tess. And, looking back on it, I'm glad it was that way round. Rather that than get locked, as Tess was, like a moping bird, bedraggled and unwashed, for three whole days down in the Mill storeroom, where iron bars on a tiny window looked out on dark water rushing, tirelessly, desperately, down into the pool and out through the sluice at last. My punishment, though it brought rage and an unbearable sense of humiliation at the time â well, at least it was over quickly and I could run to Retty for comfort and a dab of calamine lotion for the smarting weal. Mrs Priddle, Retty's mother,
was as shocked as any of the women in Abbotsbury when the news spread, told eagerly by Retty, of how my father had pulled down my knickers and beaten me with the strap over the sofa-bed that used to get folded out for Aunt Tibby â and with Victor watching as well, his eyes round as sixpences. He shouldn't do that now Liza-Lu is twelve, the women of Abbotsbury said as they went into the general store and stood for pension books or stamps or washing powder ⦠no, Mr Hewitt shouldn't, not now she's ⦠and, I can tell you now, Baby Tess, that the look on Mrs Priddle's face as she dabbed on the lotion â her pursed lips and her knowing look â well I knew then that I was no longer in the blessed state of belonging fully to neither sex â I was no longer a child, I was a woman. And it was for this that my father had punished me. Somehow I knew all this.
We walked away from the Mill and you seemed to look back â at the iron bars grown even more rusty since that punishment for the sin of carnal knowing, of temptation â and you seemed to look in astonishment, with those agate eyes of yours, in their cloudy saucers of pale blue â in amazement at the centuries of blame that came to rest on your grandmother, my sister Tess, all those years ago, at the very beginning of the so-called Sexual Revolution. You strained to see back in time to your grandmother's pale face at the low window by the racing water â and maybe you did, for you burst out crying suddenly, you cried so heart-rendingly that it was as if you'd seen her wraith appear there, begging you to set her free. But we walked on all the same, and we struck inland, and we hitched a ride all the way to Powerstock. Then we walked on, and we came to Batcombe Down. For I had to walk you down the most punishing walk the first Tess was ever to take â a walk where she lost hope and found the Devil â and I stood with you a while at Crossy Hand before we went down to the little town where our mother, born in the surrounding Marshpool Vale, was taken to be christened (as were her mother and her mother before her). I had to bring you here to make you understand the final, all-important component of Tess â of Tess before Hardy could breathe life into her, and of Tess my sister and all women too, brought up under the auspices
of the faith of the land â I had to show you here, in the portals of the magnificent (perpendicular) church of St Mary at Beaminster â how Christianity came to us, and how it changed our foremothers â and then how Christian perceptions of women, too, changed â so we would forever take the blame. (And I told you, as we stood by the squat stone pillar known as Crossy Hand, for it bears the small imprint of a palm, the stone shadow of a killer's hand nailed there, so the story goes â I told you that while Tess pined in the Mill dungeon, and I squirmed under my father's strap, Alec went off free as air, roaring up to Amesbury on the old Harley Davidson his pal Brian'd rehabbed a few weeks earlier â roared up to Amesbury to deal in motorcycle parts and swagger about at the bar of the George â while Tess and I both bled, she from losing her virginity, as our father would, and did, denounce it, and I from the leather thong, and then, later that day, as Mrs Priddle had foreseen, from my first period.)
And I'll tell you about Alec and Tess and how they met again. But first, as I began to say as we walked from the stone hand that Alec D'Urberville made Tess swear on that she wouldn't âtempt' him any more â there is the story of the Making of Tess, from the wild freedom of Celts and the constrictions of Roman life to the teachings of St Augustine.
The first four centuries of Christianity held that men and women were responsible for their actions: that they had the choice to sin or to gain salvation through obedience to the teachings of Christ. Our foremother Tess would have known nothing of this. For, as the Saxon conquerors came and were repelled and came again like the waves of the sea at Chesil Beach (and in Dorset, especially there, they were successfully kept at bay far longer than anywhere else in Britain), so also came the monotonous dirge of the monks as they made their way across Europe. Original sin was on its way; and for all the crystal ball on its long, fine pendant chain of silver could tell the first Tess of her continuing power, another, more powerful and more destructive prophecy was about to take over. The creed of
St Augustine was the real conqueror â of women. Here are his words:
The entire human race that was to pass through women into offspring was contained in the first man when that married couple received the divine sentence condemning them to punishment, and
humanity produced what humanity became, not what it was when created, but when, having sinned, it was punished
.
The punishment itself, Augustine adds, âeffected in their original nature a change for the worse'.
And Augustine, the fourth-century libertine-turned-saint, the man who fought against the âraging lust that exercised its supreme dominion over me' and, from his exorcism of the terrible bondage to the flesh, changed the Christian view of human nature, brought the blame fair and square down on the woman, gave as proof of this new definition of sin a highly idiosyncratic reading of Romans 5:12.
The Greek text reads: âThrough one man [or âbecause of one man'] sin entered the world, and through sin, death; and thus death came upon all men,
in that
all sinned.' John Chrysostom, as did most Christians, translated this as meaning that the sin of Adam introduced sin to the world and death came upon all because
all
sinned. But Augustine read the passage in Latin, and so either ignored or didn't realize the meaning of the Greek original â so he misread the last phrase as referring to Adam alone. Augustine proclaimed that it meant that âdeath came upon all men,
in whom
all sinned' â that the sin of one man, Adam, brought upon humanity not only universal death, but also universal, and inevitable, sin. Augustine uses the passage to deny that human beings have free moral choice, which Jews and Christians had traditionally regarded as the birthright of humanity made âin God's image'. Augustine declares, on the contrary, that the whole human race inherited from Adam a nature irreversibly damaged by sin. âFor we all were in that one man, since all of us were that
one man who fell into sin through the woman who was made from him
.'