Finally, she establishes that—given the inherent contradictions existing in Victorian society between men and women, between the working and middle classes, between respectable and fallen women, and between the domestic wife and her female servants and the children’s governess—instability and fear were pervasive.
In a very fine reading of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hedgecock shows how Tess—simple, pure, and spiritual by nature but trapped in a beautiful, sensuous body—seeks to escape the reigning categories and iconographic images of women that imprison Victorian consciousness. Frankly, the chapter on Tess is worth the price of the entire book. However, true to her Marxist roots, Hedgecock shows how impossible this is. By showing what Tess is not—a mercenary schemer and predator—she segues into what the femme fatale is. In doing so, she illuminates for us the limited options open to working- and middle-class women, especially those who had “fallen,” and makes clear the various strategies women adopted to function within such a society, from using womanly wiles on their husbands to playing the docile domestic, from seeking standing by prostitution to scheming to marry well.
Every chapter, even chapters devoted in part to surveying feminist critics and their hostility to deterministic readings that seem to rob women of autonomy, is rich with information about the rigors Victorian women faced; each expresses a profound understanding of the real economic conditions that Victorian England and the women in it faced. Each conveys a sense of great complexity, of issues that escape oversimplification and facile condemnation. This sense of complexity is wed to a proper sense of dismay and to a sense of compassion for those trying to weave their way through a playing field patently stacked against them. Throughout the entire book, we see a keen literary sensibility at work. Whether dealing with minor literary figures who come to their inevitable unfortunate end, or the tragic resonances with which Hardy ends his great masterpiece Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hedgecock’s sincerity and empathy shine through.