EMMA TENNANT’S TESS: HARDY’S CANONICAL NOVEL FROM A FEMALE REVISIONIST PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Depending on the perspective, Emma Tennant’s Tess (1993) can be interpreted as a
neo-Victorian, postmodernist, and revisionist novel. This paper is aimed at analyzing Tess from
the aspect of revisionism. By offering a familiar story from a female perspective and combining
it with an imaginative biography of Hardy’s life and a polemic account of the history of women’s
oppression, the narrator intends to challenge the well-known past and rewrite it. The Victorian
era is represented as “the last great age of punishment for women”, but such representation is
extended to Thomas Hardy. By presenting unknown facts that portray the writer in a negative
context, the narrator intends to “shake” our understanding of the allegedly well-known past and
break into history. The novel implies that the Victorian age was even bleaker than it is usually
thought of, but this vision is extended to the present, which is arguably represented in an even
grimmer light. By pointing to the patterns visible both in the past and the present, the narrator’s
purpose is to highlight the timeless, universal topics that permeate all the literary and historical
periods, such as the oppression of women. As suggested by the novel, the only way to end the
tradition of women’s subordination and punishment is to allow women to tell their own stories.