Tess.

Is it true that to love someone means to essentialize them? I’m writing about Tess and Thomas Hardy, and the fact that he was in love with his own character, and it seems to me to be so essentially true, this concept of blind judgment, of studied ignorance.

Thomas Hardy was so infatuated with Tess that it showed through his characterization of her, into the very way his narrator describes her character. It’s almost eerie to see how invasive, how graphic, how focused the narrator’s scrutiny of her is, almost as if he’s standing behind her in the bushes: stalker-writer.

Of course, this sort of controlled captivation is true of any author, any narrator, any story, but with Tess, it leaves a taste of perversion, perhaps because Hardy’s other characters also so easily mistreat her and essentialize her. Angel finds her to be the essence of womanhood, Alec treats her as a sex object. We really want to believe that someone understands her, even if it’s the omniscient narrator—but even he, it seems, suffers from a sort of need to make her what she’s not. I think this is the worst of everything for Tess, even worse than the cruelty of fate and the missteps and mistimed coincidences of her life. The fact that no one will ever understand her (not that even I do, of course . . .)—it leaves me so desperate for someone to rewrite her, to allow her an escape from her horrible destiny.

I do believe that Tess is real, but it’s not because of Hardy’s brilliant portrayal (as some scholars claim), not because she is so complex and brave and vulnerable at the same time. I believe she’s real in spite of the way Hardy treats her on the page. But poor Thomas Hardy, I think. Poor man, so infatuated with the ideal of a simple country girl with rustically good intentions and eternal purity. He couldn’t have her any other way, could he?

This is all predicated on the assumption that we can speak about characters as if they’re real, as if they have a core of identity. It’s still a question whether humans even achieve this: solipsism abounds. We cannot know the full extent of anyone’s existence. (Indeed, I just spent a few days questioning the reality of other people, so.) But if we can really come into a three-dimensional understanding of each other, and if we are allowed to treat the characters in books as flesh and blood, then—then I’m as sad for Tess as I am for her author.