Do I read clinically? Absolutely, especially when it comes to women's history. I've said somewhere else I read classics like primary documents, and I do. That's the way my brain works, and that's where my interest lies. When a good story can make me forget I'm reading, I know it will be a favorite. That hardly ever happens for me. It did with Gone with the Wind. It was only after several rereads that I was able to pull back and begin to analyze it in parts. My first couple reads were all story.
I'm not sure I expressed myself well above, if you think I question the integrity and validity of Gone with the Wind. I wasn't knocking it for a second. I think Mitchell knew exactly what she was doing. People still read Gone with the Wind and assume Mitchell was pining for the old days when she wrote it. In reality? She was a vibrant young woman (she wrote the novel in the 1920s) who had seen civilization as she knew it, with its Victorian morale and idealism, shattered by World War I and the Spanish influenza. She was raised by a grandmother and father who insisted she comport herself according to outdated standards of femininity grounded in the Victorian era. Meanwhile, she lived in a world where women chopped off their hair, cursed, got jobs interviewing prostitutes, and smoked cigarettes. Her mother was a suffragette who pressured her to be STRONG and REBELLIOUS while simultaneously insisting she fulfill her role as wife and mother. Her mother would have pointed out the incompatibility of the Southern legend of chivalry alongside the reality of "the rule of thumb" which went along with Southern marriages -- as long as your stick is no bigger than your thumb, it's perfectly legal to beat your wife. Southern chivalry suggested that women should be prized like angels and kept on a pedestal, where they were entirely useless. (Trapped, under the name of chivalry.) Mitchell is questioning the Old South illusion, and she does it BRILLIANTLY by borrowing the female is good / female is bad binary and turning it upside down.
When I say Scarlett wasn't a real woman of the Victorian era, I don't mean there weren't rebellious women who thought all sorts of brilliantly independent thoughts in the Victorian era. I mean that Scarlett was written by a woman who had seen the world transform after World War One. Scarlett is a brilliantly anachronistic character, I think. Sure, she starts out as indoctrinated into the social ideal as any other Victorian woman. (Surely many questioned it.) But a Victorian woman could never have written Scarlett as Mitchell wrote her.
I don't know if I'm making sense. What I mean is that you are comparing a diary written in the 1940s, and a novel published in 1936, to a novel written in 1891, and you seem to be suggesting that the prior two are more realistic, and therefore Hardy should have shut up and let a woman write Tess's story. I find that to be unrealistic thinking.
There's a scene in Jane Eyre where Jane has left Rochester & is knocking from door to door, pleading food. Bronte leaves the reactions of those who shut their doors to Jane unspoken, but the clear implication in the Victorian era would have been obvious: Jane is well-dressed and alone. This suggests that she has worked somewhere and has abandoned her post. ("Good") women didn't walk the streets alone, & it would have been foolish to abandon her post in such a society. Therefore, she must have been found in a precarious position with her "master" and been ejected from his employment. Such a woman was a "tainted" woman: alone, filth, fallen. Once she was found this way, she had nowhere to turn. She was destitute. She would never work again.
This was an actual fact of female life: a single woman was wholly reliant upon her employer to be the moral ideal Victorian society expounded. But the reality? (Which I've researched in primary source material.) Often the man in power sexually assaulted the woman in his employ, until she wound up pregnant, when he expelled her from his home immediately. A single pregnant woman in the 1600s in England? Would be physically whipped for entering a parish seeking help: even if she was in the middle of giving birth. The parish didn't want the responsibility of paying fees for her baby, so they would whip her and send her on to the next parish. During labor, an unmarried woman would be tortured to provide the father's name. (By the midwives.) It was a horrific society for women, if they didn't meet the mold.
THIS is what (I believe) Hardy is supposed to be challenging in Tess. I have heard that the plot is a bit over the top, as Victorian novels often were: lots of twists and coincidences. (I think it was serialized, which would explain that.) But he is trying to challenge the idea that a woman who met with the fate I lay out above was FALLEN. He was illustrating the abhorrent way society crushed a lone woman who was unlucky enough to deal with a man who didn't fit into the Victorian illusion of the way the world "should" operate. (I read a bit about the novel because I find it difficult to discuss knowing nothing at all on the topic.)
There was this thing called the "cult of the domesticity" in the nineteenth century. That was the foundation of an acceptable woman's role: be desirable enough to get married, and then be the very best moral woman you can be, so that your husband has a gentle example to guide him, and you have an important position: mother to the future men of the world.
Before the Victorian era that cult didn't really exist yet. Lower and middle class women worked alongside their husbands in family businesses growing the food they would eat. When industrialization came along, women were winnowed out: men went on to work (rightly enough) and there was really nothing left for women to do, but watch over the children and be placed on moral pedestals.
In America, women entered the public sphere in waves for the first time in the nineteenth century, working in social roles to rid the world of prostitution, slavery (Northern women did this), and drink. This sort of public activity was generally approved because by this time in history, women were considered more moral than men: pure, devoted, etc. Any woman who didn't fall in line with ideal this was considered tainted. Not a real woman. That was the binary: the all or nothing philosophy that a woman was either THIS EXACT PICTURE OF FEMININITY or expendable, evil, a witch.
A woman was frowned upon for any other public work, however. Acting? On the same par as prostitution. Writing? Oh, my. Absolutely prideful. Sinful even. I mean, it could be done, but it was best to do it anonymously, and unless you said what the men wanted to hear, it was pretty unlikely your words would be preserved. (History belongs to the victors, after all.)
Woolf directly addresses this point when she is on the hunt for a record of female history in her essay. She can find a few queens, but really no one else. She isn't saying no one else existed: she is saying -- men (who were in charge of the annals of history) had not recorded the lives of real women. The only history that had been preserved was a few queens, and a giant collection of classic literature written mostly by men, which implied that in the whole of history, beginning with the witch-like Eve, there were only two versions of women: evil temptresses ("you don't want to be like that, ladies!"), or appropriate and acceptable females ("be like these gentle angels, and mind your place.") GIGANTIC AGENDA. There. And also likely ignorance.
I adore Anne Frank, Dill, but she wrote that diary a half-century after Hardy wrote his novel, in the privacy of her bedroom. It's not realistic to expect that a woman of Hardy's day could easily toss out a work in her own words. It definitely could happen, and probably did, but it wasn't easy. She had to find a way to get it through the publishing company, & guess who ran that? Which means she had to have it approved by a man, which means that she had to have it approved by someone courageous enough to go against the social standard, and risk his own reputation. Which means it was rare, and even then, it had to be read to matter.
You (seem) to fault Hardy for being a man & writing a silly melodrama about a woman when that story ought to have been told by a woman? Well, welcome to the feminist movement, my friend. That's the point: so many things ought to have been done by women, but unfortunately, they weren't. Luckily, those who did have a hold of the publishing machine sometimes tried to put in a word to spark some thinking. You have to remember that the audience Hardy was writing for at the time wasn't from the twenty-first century. It was accustomed to melodrama. Hemingway and World War One would shatter that. Melodrama was the language Hardy spoke, & he tried to use it for the right reason (I believe. Again, I'll have to read the novel to see for myself.)
You don't have to convince me of the integrity of Gone with the Wind. It's the most valid novel I've ever read. I think Mitchell knew exactly what she was doing with that illusive literary binary: Melanie Hamilton is the perfect, sweet, idealistic representation of the prized female enthroned within her domestic sphere. Literature by men in the Victorian era? Would have loved her! (Think Lucie Manette.) What happens to Melanie, & what happens to Scarlett? That's the point of Gone with the Wind, I think. When the pretty illusion is gone, when that pretend world of courtesy and chivalry falls away, what must a woman do to survive? Be the silly, simpering fool the men at the start of the novel want Scarlett to be? Or the shrewd woman who breaks the rules to survive? And does either Melanie or Scarlett live happily ever after? There is no place for either: they are pinched, suffocated, & destroyed whichever way they turn. Mitchell is brilliant because she snuffs out both of her females, but she complicates them, and implies that beyond their suffocation, they were real, they were courageous, & they lived.
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