[In the following essay, Fierz argues that Tess, Polanski's cinematic adaptation of the Thomas Hardy novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, is based on a misreading of Tess's character and a failure to understand the influences that shaped her character.]

William Costanzo commented in Literature/Film Quarterly in 1981 on Roman Polanski and his Tess film rendition of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles:

Tess has crossed the Atlantic as a kind of emissary from Polanski. The romantic story of a victim of society, it comes unchaperoned to a land where the director is himself a fugitive from justice. … After the brutal murder of Sharon Tate in 1969 … after his flight from the United States and a prison sentence for illegal sexual intercourse with a minor, he has chosen as his subject the seduction of a young girl by an older man.

A Plot of Tragedy should arise from the gradual closing in of a situation … by reason of the characters taking no trouble to ward off the disastrous events. …

(from Thomas Hardy's notebooks, quoted in Costanzo 72)

Was it something about women that he had known in his own life or was it Hardy's tragic Tess in Tess of the D'Urbervilles that Roman Polanski intended to film in Tess? According to Costanzo, Polanski wanted to return to “the universe of those authors who tell about certain things, the deepest of human sentiments … the ordinary tribulations in a rather cruel and rigid society” (74). If it was Hardy's text that Polanski sought to replicate, if he sought to give moviegoers a literary classic, the film Tess may be interpreted as a re-reading. The hypothesis of this paper is that Polanski misread Hardy's novel by underestimating Tess's strengths and by overlooking Hardy's thesis concerning the catalytic role of family alcoholism in undermining her character.

According to Barthes and Scholes, a re-reading might be expected to invoke codes, or criteria outside the text, by which the text is to be interpreted. For example, Hardy's text might be interpreted vis-à-vis the code of Victorian culture in two ways—either supportive or critical of that culture with respect to cultural repression of women. Polanski, it seems, took the critical approach, arguing that the victimized Tess would not have been repressed but for the male forces against her. Such an approach is supported neither by consideration of Hardy's ideas about women nor by sound critical consideration of the novel. It is the contention here that Tess was a doomed character in the novel because of her family background rather than solely because of her gender and that her character is best understood by the “code” of family dysfunction, which only Hardy's narrative specifically highlights.

Although Hardy apparently intended to idealize women generally,¹ his narrative comments show that he was more eager to explore the psychological origins of Tess, as he had done with such characterizations as those in Jude the Obscure and other works, while Polanski seems to have been content with romanticizing her victimization at the hands of men. While both “texts” of Tess reveal exploitative conduct by males in patriarchal Victorian culture, only Hardy's version offers any plausible theory for why Tess would resort to murder: Polanski's female is too vacuous to have the strength for such an act. While both Hardy and Polanski intended, as much as possible from their male narrator positions, to be “on Tess's side,” the film's casting of the frail Natasha Kinski emphasizes Polanski's extreme pity for Tess without recognizing the constituents of her personhood. To be sure, Hardy was also enamored of Tess, but he admired her and sought to describe the tragic deterministic circumstance of her plight rather than just her pitiable girlhood. But the real question is what “circumstance?” Only Hardy's biographer, Pinion, has noted the importance of family background to Tess's character: “Tess herself is a rather unusual character; her conscience makes her readily shoulder blame and guilt which more rightly belong to her feckless parents” (126).

Hardy's narrative development of character is exacting, forced, overly “diegetic” (Scholes 144) in light of modern styles of characterization where characterization is more often “absent” (Docherty xi). Hardy's narrative tends toward the older, the mimetically duplicative, the one-dimensional type of characterization. Thus, Tess is “vulnerable,” Alec is “predator,” and Angel is “indifferent,” whereas “real,” modern characters are multi-faceted.² Hardy's authorial craft develops the circumstances leading up to character traits that Polanski's film glosses over. Most Hardy critics focus on the impact of his narratives on character. Thus, J. Hillis Miller, called by Harold Bloom “our foremost Hardy scholar,” calls Hardy's style one of “distance and desire” (32). Miller says that Hardy's characters' minds are closed (deliberately), only dimly replicated, introspection disallowed, so that the observer can only infer longings and desires across the distance between characters (55). If Miller's reading is correct, the “gaze” scenes in the film, such as in the beginning, after Alec first meets Tess and their eyes meet when he walks off, ought to bring out viewers' feelings of desire. In fact, the film only portrays blank stares which allow the observer to infer nothing about desire. According to Miller, it is Hardy, the novelist, and not Polanski, the movie-maker, who saw life in the “manner of a movie camera, with spatial and temporal detachment, cool self-possession,” a “double vision” of author and character (50). Anderson (1990) and Kincaid (1991) likewise advert to the relative depth of Hardy's characterization that is lacking in Polanski's film. Hardy had a “feel” for the settings in Tess and for their place in history, their effect on character which Polanski did not. Although Polanski renders setting faithfully, indeed beautifully, he fails, without the help of Hardy's narrative or some cinematic innovation in lieu thereof, to tie setting to character.

Hardy's “doubly-visioned” characterization simply does not surface in the film. For instance, when young Tess is with her girl friends and her father shows up drunk, Hardy tells the reader that she feels embarrassed, defensive, and that her pride is hurt, even as her dialogue, the other half of the “double vision,” says the opposite: “Look here, I won't walk another inch with you if you say any jokes about him” (9). She doesn't like her father's behavior but sticks up for him nevertheless, an attitude that is not conveyed in the film. She suffers the typical painful contradiction of feelings of all children of alcoholics, which such expert research on the alcoholic family as Alice Miller's For Your Own Good (1983) finds is so critical to the development of alcoholics' children, but the source of those feelings, her alcoholic family, is not apparent in the film. Her mother has lost all control over her as the result of the familial distortion produced by the father's drinking, but only Hardy offers the keen insight that mother, just like father, has a “problem”:

All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship—entirely dependent on the judgment of the two Durbeyfield adults for their pleasure, their necessities, their health, even their existence … six helpless creatures who had never been asked if they wished for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of Durbeyfield.

(17)

That most of the elements important to Tess's character are absent from the film is a condition that even popular reviewers have noted. Thus, Pauline Kael, in the New Yorker (Feb. 1, 1981), found such omissions as the “unbearable domestic tension,” the narrative's “perfect fusion of the intuitive and the planned,” and the “robust country girl” replaced by the blandness of Kinski. Writing in the New York Times (Aug. 5, 1981), Vincent Canby was more personal: “Though the film is beautiful to behold, it has no more life than an exceptionally expensive, carefully made production for television's masterpiece theater … Polanski cannot be excused because … he wanted a Tess for his murdered wife, Sharon Tate, to act the part of.”

Criticizing the film, Vedemaitis (1988) specifically attacks the lack of Hardy's character development as the film's most dissatisfying feature:

Whereas Hardy's Tess is proud, stubborn, intelligent, resilient, and enduring, a person who matures into complex womanhood, Polanski's Tess is submissive, enervated, withdrawn, and childlike to the end. Gone is the Tess who feels in her heart that, in succumbing to Alec, she has done no wrong for which she should be eternally condemned; … Gone from the film is the Tess who must be driven to the limits of emotional exhaustion before submission. Hardy's Tess, in her relationship with both Alec and Angel, capitulates only after an intense and desperate struggle that also creates a matching tension in the reader. … Gone are the ominous foreshadowing, the grim D'Urberville mansion with the foreboding ancestral portraits on the wall, Angel's hazardous somnambulatory walk in which he symbolically “buries” Tess, and Tess's suicidal despair. Instead, two people sit and talk. Polanski never raises the volume … No change of tempo. Whereas Phase Five of Hardy's Tess is almost unbearable for the reader, Polanski's rendition is languid, flat, even boring.

(55)

Although Vedemaitis sounds more like a “new” critic than a character scholar, and although she does not deal directly with Tess's unique problems as a woman or with the possibility that the origin of Tess's tragedy and of her psychology lies in her dysfunctional family, recent feminist scholarship has taken up the “woman problem” regarding Tess, adding important perspective to an understanding of Tess's weakness in the film. Polanski's idea of empathy with the female gender, however, fails to measure up to feminist critical standards any better than it does to the movie critics' standards. Mary Jacobus (1978) firmly emphasizes Tess's “right to be” in the face of oppression, avoiding both Hardy's “moral purity” and Polanski's “vacuous woman” conceptions, while Pamela Jekel (1986) argues that Hardy's Tess “evolves and gives us ample insight into the character of a heroine who emerges as an individual in her own right” (164), an argument that certainly could not be made on behalf of Polanski's Tess. Three 1990 articles, by Ingham, Blake, and Higonnet, adeptly utilize gender as a critical code, but all three conclude that Tess is a woman with uniquely womanly problems and they all echo Judith Spector's 1986 statement about male attempts to sympathize with female problems—the kind of attempt that perhaps motivates Polanski's Tess undertaking, to the effect that females do a better job on works by those of their own gender:

The study of gender-related aspects of literature by critics who are of the author's same gender can … involve an exhilarating feeling of empathy with the text and an eagerness to explain one's insights to others and “opposites.”

(7)

If Higonnet, for example, finds Hardy's “repressive set of discourses … inimical to the development and expression of Tess's selfhood,” how much more inexcusable is it for Polanski to nearly erase Tess's character entirely (200)? Not only is Polanski's characterization of Tess too weak for an adequate representation of female personhood, but his inadequacy is exacerbated because he, unlike Hardy, is not a Victorian, but is a male living in the modern world and should know better. As Ingham points out, Hardy was somewhat progressive on the “woman issue” for his time, actually beginning to “reform” his conception of women by the time he wrote The Well-Beloved (20), while, on the other hand, as Veick's 1990 dissertation points out, “Polanski's reading of the novel is reductive, wanting in Tess's tragic qualities” (5).

Actually, Polanski's “vacuous victim” view of Tess seems to follow stale Freudian theory rather than either scholarly character or feminist theory. Inquiry into Tess's nature through a modern psychological analysis of her family background is what is needed to understand her character and to understand what is otherwise a rather surprising murder. Ironically and ingenuously, such psychological inquiry is explicitly provided in the text by Hardy's narrative, affording both reasons for the murder and for its thematic significance. Hardy's text carefully frames a hypothesis that it is not merely Alec's, or any other male's, oppression that is the proximate cause of Tess's criminality, but her “family system.” Jerome Bump (1991) has suggested that a modern “family systems” psychology approach may explain D. H. Lawrence's works, while Michael Steig (1968) has cast doubt on the modern utility of psychoanalytic theory, the theory which perhaps underlies Polanski's “oppressive other” film representation of Tess's oppression:

Inferences about the unconscious life of imaginary people involve a confusion of literature and life (261) … a fixation on the genital phase of infantile development, with its incestuous attachment [which] seems irrelevant to understanding [Sue Bridehead in Hardy's Jude the Obscure] for the simple reason that we cannot observe the origin of her character in childhood.

(265)

Family systems theory avoids the “unconscious life” by dealing directly, as Hardy's narrative does in his text, with overt factual manifestations of family dynamics. Polanski's film omits manifestations of family dynamics. Like Sue and Jude in Jude the Obscure, Tess is the child of an alcoholic family, an acute form of family dysfunction which Hardy, and not Polanski, highlights. Hardy, in effect, fits Bump's description of Lawrence—“a treater and diagnoser of the symptoms and causes of alcoholic dysfunction” (62), while Polanski leaves the observer to infer from a subconscious that is hidden beneath the surface of the film. Many of the adjustment problems supposedly found in adult children of alcoholics are made evident by Hardy's depiction of Tess. Hardy highlights virtually all of the behavioral attributes in Tess that are listed by such “family systems-alcohol” theorists as Bradshaw, for example:

delusion, denial, loneliness (Tess makes few friends), high level anxiety, shame (about her family), faulty communication style (she is evasive, hides true feelings, even has to write out her past), yearning for approval (as her mother taught her), compulsive/addictive (respecting Angel), narcissistically-driven, confused identity (caught between the old and new morality), inhibited trust, possible spiritual bankruptcy (Tess has not internalized her religion—only the resultant guilt).

(173)

Such attributes are normally associated with negative alcoholic family child rearing,³ the kind of child rearing that is symptomatic of the families in Hardy's novels.

Hardy's narrative distinctly shows how John Durbeyfield's alcoholism, lack of ambition, and faulty family leadership doom the family, and, in turn, his daughter Tess's prospects: “John Durbeyfield had more conceit than energy or health, and this supposition was pleasant to him” (39). Durbeyfield's domination of the mother drove her to vacuousness and set the stage for Tess's development. Hardy describes the mother as “light-minded … and [she] … had been discovering good matches for her daughter almost from the year of her birth (40). … The father was in a stupor induced this morning in honor of the occasion” (42). The father was a classic, blown-up drunk, full of hollow intentions, but amounting to nothing but a source of family instability, while the mother, according to Hardy, thought so little of the idea of female personhood that she called a woman's face her “trump card” (45). Hardy describes the workings of the failed “family system” in such detail as to leave no doubt that it is that system which determines Tess's character:

the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man … the possibility of retribution lurking in the present catastrophe. Doubtless some of Tess D'Urberville's mailed ancestors rollicking home had dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly. … But though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children is a mortality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature and it therefore does not mend the matter.

(67)

Polanski fails to sufficiently provide the audience with “text,” by dialogue, action or otherwise, to allow any basis for the inference that Tess's criminality results from her up-bringing, despite the fact that Hardy repeats, over and over, the family factor in her character. It is simply not enough for Polanski to imply that Tess is weak because she is a girl when it is manifestly clear, from her own words, that her family made her that way:

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 menfolk? Ladies know what to fend hands against because they read novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance 'o living in that way, and you did not help me!

(75)

The reader, or the filmic re-reader in Polanski's case, must remember that the mother whom Tess addresses is the same mother who was too weak to decide whether Tess should leave home in the first place, who taught her how to be a female object, who delegated the mothering of the Durbeyfield children to Tess while she went to the tavern with her husband, and who taught Tess how to be a “poor me” (88-89) with so little direction and willpower that she spends her life bouncing from male to male, from job to job, from lie to lie as she descends toward the commission of her criminal act. Kinski does not “act” these phases of Tess's life in the film, because Polanski's mis-reading focuses instead on the male characters' acting upon her. Polanski misses the point that Tess is not determined by the males, but by a tragic family system that Hardy will not, despite her efforts, allow her to escape from:

She might prove it false if she could veil begones (91) … [but] only a young women of twenty, one who mentally and sentimentally had not finished growing, it was impossible that any event should have left upon her an impression that was not in time capable of transmutation.

(95)

Hardy ties Tess' character development directly to her father's character so as to make it clear to the reader, in a way that is not clear at all to the film viewer, as she stands, at 97, on the solid, rolling power, majestic English countryside “not sure of her direction … still upon the expanse of verdant flames, like a fly on a billiard table” (97), that she, like John Durbeyfield, has “no mind for laborious effect towards such a solid advancement as could alone be effected by a family so heavily handicapped as the once powerful D'Urbervilles were now” (96).

Tess knows, as the relationship with Angel deepens, that she will have to deal with her relationship to her past somehow, but Hardy inserts key passages to specifically indicate that she has irrevocably inherited her parents' indecisiveness:

Don't ask me … I told you why—partly. I am good not good enough-not worthy enough … Yes—something like that … She could only shake her head and look away from him … In reality, she was drifting into acquiescence. Every see-saw of her breath, every wave of her blood, every pulse on her ears, was a voice that joined with nature in revolt against her scrupulousness (164). I shall give way—I shall let myself marry him. I cannot help it.

(165)

“The Women Pays” is a chapter that, admittedly, shows how Hardy, like Polanski, felt sorry about Tess's unfortunate dealings with men. The chapter establishes Angel as every bit as cruel and oppressive as Alec, but it is also notable that, in both the novel and the film, in both the text and the acting, Angel is perhaps less aggressive than Alec, inviting thematic generalization about what he means to Tess in light of her background, what her relationship with him means in terms of the plot's progression (Phelan 105). Hardy emphasizes this family background theme through narrative between Tess and Angel, while Polanski leaves it out altogether:

TESS:
Oh, Angel—my mother says that it sometimes happens so!
ANGEL:
Different societies, different manners. You almost make me say you are an unapprehending peasant-women, who have never been initiated into the proportions of social things. … I cannot help associating your decline as a family with this other fact—of your want of firmness. Decrepit families imply decrepit will, decrepit conducts.

(215)

In the conclusion, when Angel goes abroad, Tess has a chance to become something on her own but, following her family's example, quickly takes the easy way out and goes back to Alec. While the film adequately portrays her limited resolve to make it in the real world, Hardy does more: Hardy specifically, once again, ties that lack of resolve to the background of her family system: “How she would be able to face her parents? … To put an end to myself” (239). Hardy makes Tess feel shame, a common alcoholic family trait according to therapists John Bradshaw and Alice Miller, in the eyes of her parents, but in the film, Kinski shows so little feeling that she is at most resigned. The shaming of Tess is crucial for Hardy, for it sets up her subsequent cave-in to Alec, which Hardy suggests is all that she can do because her family has given her no backbone, no capacity for judgment: she “yields to such vague impressions without” (283): “There was not much time for thought or elusion, and she yielded as calmly as she could to the necessity of letting him overtake her” (283). By the novel's end, Hardy has fashioned his notion of necessity—that Tess has no will to do other than what events dictate because of her weak family up-bringing, into the absolute extinguishment of her selfhood: “Adrift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will” (352). Hardy's narrative craftsmanship, absent in any manner or form from Polanski's film, has inexorably led the reader from Tess's past, to her crime, and, finally, to her demise.

The hypothesis that Tess's psychological propensity to murder is the product of her family origins and, hence, is best viewed by a family systems or alcoholic family perspective, is amply supported by Hardy's narrative. Hardy's text reveals evidence that he sympathized with Tess as woman, to be sure, but a fair reading of Tess of the D'Urbervilles cannot rest with a sympathetic gender analysis alone. Therefore, to the extent that Polanski wished to faithfully adapt the novel, he failed by not replicating the evidence of family influence upon Tess's character. Polanski's vacuous Tess, as played by Kinski, is perhaps a relatively more sympathetic character who is clearly an object of the male character's (as well as Polanski's) “discursive control” (see Silverman, 31 ff), with virtually no subjectivity whatsoever, leaving the audience with only gender stereotyping or conjectural sub-surface analytic tools, such as psychoanalytic theory, to explain her. For Polanski, the audience must do the explaining because he has not employed film technique to harness Hardy's narrative, relying instead on audience sympathy to give rise to a general pro-Tess, pro-female, pro-feminist reception of the film. The feminist critics cited herein seem basically correct when they assert that reliance of this sort by a male to interpret femaleness is speculative. The truth about Hardy's Tess, and the only reason that she murders, need not be the subject of another male's speculation about her plight as a female or about the male characters' oppressive conduct; the truth is readily available in Hardy's descriptions of family dysfunction found within the literary text.

Notes

1. According to Pinion—Hardy's chief biographer, and perhaps the best source of “authorial intent”—in Thomas Hardy: Art & Thought, Hardy's artistic temperament was conditioned by an “imaginative susceptibility to beautiful women” (189). (In his eighties, while married, Hardy wrote to a Mrs. Henninger about an imaginary elopement, for example.) This “susceptibility” is reflected in his writing and reached its peak in Hardy's late novel, The Well-Beloved, concerning short-term, sequential affairs with various women. In 1987, The World evaluated Hardy's novels by calling him a “sex-maniac” (Ingham 97). Such characterization of Hardy's attitude toward women might describe Polanski's “women problem” as well, but such speculation does little to really explain, and in fact, may obscure, the different ways that Hardy and Polanski, both of whom sympathized with Tess, went about developing the causes of her character and of her capacity to commit murder. For Hardy, she was a “trapped bird” caught by family circumstances, while for Polanski, she was an oppressed female, trapped by males. Hardy's poem, “The Blinded Bird,” is illustrative of his perspective;

   Who hath charity? This bird.
   Who suffereth long and is kind …
   Who hopeth, endureth all things?
   Who thinketh no evil but sings? …

   (Pinion 135)

2. Though literary character theory has been generally out of academic fashion recently, there are exceptions. Texts that attempt “new” multi-faceted character theory as opposed to old character typologies include particularly John Knapp, Literary Character, including therein Bernard Hochman and Yuri Margolin on the “disassociated self” and Gerald Mead on how stylistics, as opposed to codes, determine, from time to time in a text, whether a character functions referentially as an agent for theme or textually for plot. Similarly, Richard Phelan. Reading People, Reading Plots, locates different facets, aspects or functions of character that occur within a text. Phelan's techniques seem useful to analysis of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

3. Bradshaw is the popular “tip of the iceberg” among many writers on alcohol theory. The “shame” element that underlies many attributes on his list is developed into a cultural theory by Miller, For Your Own Good. The “family system” approach to therapy, according to Murray Bowen, one of its original practitioners, began in the 1950s with the discovery that schizophrenia could best be treated by dealing with the patient's relations with others in the family. This idea, in turn caused the family to be “treated” as a single organism or system. It was further found that the parents of schizophrenic children tended to be “out of balance,” one dominating the other in an “overadequate-inadequate reciprocity pattern” (Bowen 27). The alcoholic family, so frequent in Hardy's novels, and so obvious in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, may be viewed as similarly out of balance.

Works Cited

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———. Thomas Hardy: Art & Thought. London: MacMillan, 1977.

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