테스,『 테스』, 텍스트

Abstract

This paper purports to be a critique of text readings based on the politics of identity, confining itself to recent rereadings of Tess of DUrbervilles. These rereadings of Tess have focused on the male gaze of the narrator on the assumption that he is catering to the middle-class consumption of working-class woman as spectacle. Accordingly, Tess becomes a text constructed by the Victorian discourse that naturalizes working-class woman as a part of the landscape. This spectator-spectacle structure is not without grounds in the novel, but it simplifies the complex characterization of Tess as well as the narrator. The narrator of Tess is indeed a middle class spectator; considering the evolution of various spectators during the eighteenth century, however, it is too simplistic to label him male gaze. He is a descendant of the spectators self-conscious of the futility of their good intentions to alleviate the suffering in view. The easy equation of Tess = text is another simplification; Tess is a spectacle, but at the same time, she has the potentials to be an autonomous individual, more so than any other character in the novel. In addition to these simplifications, recent readings of Tess have overlooked Hardys allusions to Pamela. Pamela has emerged as the text to validate the reading practices of the politics of identity by conflating writing, sexuality, and class struggle. Recent rereadings of Tess have applied this frame of reference, only to erase textual subversions made possible by the self-conscious narrator who historicizes the predicament of Tess as well as the spectatorship of middle-class readers.