Tess on Stonehenge

 At some point during the summer after the Dobbs decision came down from the Supreme Court, I started to write a post on this blog about how criminalizing abortion would mean the return of sexual terrorism in this country of an almost Victorian intensity. I was reflecting on some of the reading I was doing at the time—nineteenth century novels that explored the fate of heroines who transgressed the sexual codes of their era. I was struck that more than one of these books analogized the fate of women accused of adultery, in nineteenth century bourgeois society, to that of a live victim on a sacrificial altar. 

The same symbolism appears in both Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The heroines of both novels pause to regard stone relics from pagan antiquity, and experience a shiver of foreboding when they consider that these plinths were once used for human sacrifice. Effi can almost see the blood of the ancient victims streaming down them. And Tess is famously apprehended after spending her final night laid out on Stonehenge itself. It was striking to me that these two male authors came independently to the same image, and realized the same ugly truth: modern society—for all its fancied moral progress over its primitive ancestors—still made sacrificial scapegoats of women. 

I never completed the post I started; the idea was there, but the emotion for some reason wasn't. It didn't feel genuine, so I stopped writing it. But this evening, it all came back to me. 

I was watching the 1979 Roman Polanski film adaptation of Hardy's novel, Tess. The movie is an almost scene-for-scene interpretation of the book, so faithful to Hardy's imagery and moral perspective that it makes the searing emotional impact of the novel fresh again. One almost feels one is rewatching scenes that had already played in one's head years earlier. Polanski is also wise enough to make a few of Hardy's most melodramatic grand guignol effects (think: carving knife and gallows) happen off-screen. The result is one of the most moving films I've seen in quite some time. 

There is something profoundly unsettling, to be sure, about the fact that Polanski was drawn to this theme and subject matter—Tess is a story of sexual violence, after all—no more than two years after his own arrest for the rape of a minor. Polanski's own crime even chillingly resembled that of the villain of Hardy's novel, Alec D'Urberville, who—in at least one of the versions the author penned—drugs Tess with a brew that renders her unconscious. 

Is there a strange sort of penance at work in Polanski's working through of this theme? Perhaps—but even if that's what is psychologically going on here, one could well feel that Polanski is the last person one would wish to hear from on this subject, no matter his intentions. But whatever we think of the director, I would challenge anyone to deny the impact of the film, or say that it does not succeed. And that success derives most of all from the fact that Hardy gave us such an impactful story to start with—a tragedy in the classical mold, arousing great pity and terror—and this is truly Hardy's novel committed to film. 

The film—faithful to Hardy, as I say, with almost every shot and line of dialogue—includes the novel's culminating and most richly-symbolic scene at Stonehenge. Seeing it brought back to me in a burst the draft of that post I had started and left unfinished almost two years ago. I decided it was time to revisit and complete it—especially as it has only become clearer to me, during those two years, that the warning implied in the idea for the original post was valid. Criminalizing abortion is in effect to make of one gender the scapegoat for all of society's sexual hypocrisies. It is to resurrect the sacrificial altar—the stone plinth and its human victims—for the twenty-first century. 

This is not to deny the essential tragedy of abortion. I cannot join those on the left who regard the procedure as morally costless. It is surely a loss to cut short a potential life, however defined. I would even say it is a wrong, if not always an avoidable one. We should therefore try to create a world where abortions do not occur. But it takes both genders to make an unwanted pregnancy. Yet, women are the ones who have to bear most of the consequences—the physical torture of carrying a pregnancy to term that one does not want, the terror of forced birth against one's will, or the moral hardship of having to choose whether or not to terminate the pregnancy.  

Men contribute their half to every unwanted pregnancy; yet they can walk away from it in a way that women cannot. And what's more—perhaps men contribute more than their half, if all were told. Men, today as in the nineteenth century, still have more power than women do to pressure or coerce their partners into unwanted sex—and not always by such dramatically violent methods as the ones that Alec D'Urberville or Roman Polanski employed. Sometimes, they rely on emotional manipulation or incessant pestering. Men perhaps contribute something more like 75% of the share to unwanted pregnancies, then, or more. Yet they bear roughly 0% of the physical and moral costs. 

This is the sense in which society continues to make a sacrificial scapegoat of women, so long as it criminalizes abortion and contraception. It's not that abortion is a morally untarnished procedure, or that it does not contain its element of moral cost and tragic loss. It does. But the moral cost—the guilt, if you prefer—belongs properly to both genders, and maybe more even to men than to women. Yet women are the ones who are made to bear this cost. The millstone is placed around their neck alone. And the costs they are made to bear become ever higher, the more society persists in trying to outlaw abortion and penalize those who seek it. 

And so, in a sense, Tess is still stretched out on her altar at Stonehenge. The grooves cut in the rock are still standing ready to collect the blood of the victims. And so they shall remain—with our modern society little better than the ancient practitioners of such bloody rites—for as long as states continue to punish abortion as a crime and force women to give birth against their will. 

Nor is there much sign that society is about to give up the path of scapegoating and public sacrifice. Trump recently was back in the headlines for reportedly floating a sixteen-week abortion ban as a goal for his hypothetical second term. Women across the country now have to fear being tried and convicted by their state government for actions that were constitutionally protected less than two years ago. A recent case in Ohio shocked the nation, when a women was arrested (eventually, thank goodness, she was released), for having an involuntary miscarriage in her home. The charge? Police accused her of improperly disposing of the fetus's remains. 

Plainly, the impulse to sacrifice remains strong. The altars in our society are still standing ready for their victims. Women remain the sexual scapegoats of our patriarchal society. I am reminded of a poem by Bertolt Brecht that I've quoted before (Bremer trans.): "You who bear your sons in laundered linen sheets/ And call your pregnancies a 'blessed' state/ Should never damn the outcast and the weak:/ Her sin was heavy but her suffering great." The poem could be written of the many women facing criminalization for terminating their pregnancies today, in the neo-Victorian society that Dobbs has created. And we should take to heart too the poem's reminder that unwanted pregnancy and the torture of coerced birth are far from a "blessed" condition. 

Turn back to Hardy's novel. At one point early on in the book, with his usual omniscient editorializing, Hardy challenges the Wordsworths of the world to look on Tess's childhood home, teeming with squalor, and still dare to maintain that here is evidence of "nature's holy plan." Likewise, we must say, forced birth—for all that anti-abortion campaigners insist otherwise—is part of no holy plan. It is no more "natural" than the alternative. To the contrary, it is the unholy plan of the repressive state, and of its rule by fear. 

It is a state that is of the same kind, if not the same degree, as every prior patriarchal order that has subjected women to violence in order to assuage the guilt of its own sexual hypocrisy—the same patriarchy that sacrificed its victims on stone plinths, millennia ago; the same patriarchy that pinned the scarlet letter, and cast out Effi Briest for having an affair, and apprehended Tess at Stonehenge.

Instead of going back down this ancient bloody path, let us take heed of a different message—one that is emblazoned on a fence post in Polanski's film. In one of the filmmaker's master strokes of irony, it is visible throughout the scene in which Angel Clare commits his most hypocritical Victorian sin against Tess—the moment when he casts her out of his life because he refuses to forgive her for the very same sexual transgression that he had just admitted to committing himself. The sign's message in the background of the scene displays a verse from scripture. It reads: "Blessed. Are. The. Merciful."