Raping Her Locks Beneath the Trees: A New Reading of Tess d’Urberville & Marty South
Raping Her Locks Beneath the Trees: A New Reading of Tess d’Urberville & Marty South

Author(s): Rebecca W. Boylan
Subject(s): Cultural history, 18th Century, 19th Century
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Thomas Hardy; Tess of the d’Urbervilles; Tess’s Lament; symbolism of women’s hair; The Pine-Planters; Marty South’s Reverie; The Woodlanders; selfeffacement
Summary/Abstract: In our recent global pandemic, many lost their hair to covid fevers. Others, cautious of the dangers of public indoor spaces, forsook barbershop and salon, effecting self-cuts or disappearing beneath overgrown hair. Undeniably, the pandemic violated choice when it came to hair. This chapter studies the loss of Victorian woman’s hair as deprivation of a natural beauty integral to her spirit. Thomas Hardy’s well-known Tess and perhaps lesser realized Marty South of 'The Woodlanders' are raped, the former literally, and both by societies so careless of purity, they force these women to cut their locks to preserve the self. Tess, violated by Privilege in the chase forest, becomes an itinerant dairy and field worker. Escaping a possible second assault she catapults herself into a shade of wounded birds, where in desolation, she bandages her head and half her face as wounded, finishing her self-defacement by cutting off her eyebrows. Marty endures the excruciatingly hard labor of scraping wood for thatching roofs, mostly performed at night in the woods to protect the pride of her incapacitated father. In a forest glen, before a pond’s mirror, she miserably cuts “mine own” luxurious tresses to sell, enabling a rich woman to disguise her balding skull in allures gone faithless more than once. Intriguingly Hardy gives resurrected voice to Tess (“lament)” and Marty (“reverie”) in post-novel elegies, further exposing his era’s abuse of woman’s worth – most especially a rural working-class woman whose largess of compassion emanates from a sculpted crown seized by greedy desires.

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