Too little has changed since Thomas Hardy wrote about sexual assault

Double standards and victim blaming faced by fictional characters such as Tess of the D’Urbervilles should be a thing of the past. But as allegations about Brett Kavanaugh and Philip Green dominate headlines, the 19th century novel seems as relevant as ever, Erica Wickerson says

Tess’s story has been modernised, placing the victim on trial once again

When the news broke that Sir Philip Green was the businessman behind the court injunction preventing publication of his alleged sex offences and accusations of racism, the message that rich, powerful men are subject to a different standard from the rest of society was repeated once again. We heard this too when Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, one of the highest judiciary positions in America. Trump’s main focus was on the character assassination of several women who had accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault. Trump branded the claims a “hoax” and a “disgrace” that had been “brought about by people that are evil”. Following Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about what she said she suffered at the hands of Kavanaugh, she was unable to return home amid repeated death threats.

These stories of victim blaming and silencing by powerful men are all too common. The #MeToo campaign in the wake of revelations about Harvey Weinstein has put this discussion centre stage. Yet the cases of Kavanaugh and Green underline who still holds the power.

A recent article in The New York Times listed notable novels that deal with rape, most of them from the past few years, and popular culture has explored this more and more. For example, ITV’s Broadchurch began as a murder mystery series, then in the final season followed the investigation of a serial rapist. In the past couple of years, The Archers’ storyline about an abusive marriage was responsible for a significant increase in victims of domestic violence seeking help. Robert Galbraith’s (pseudonym of JK Rowling) detective series, the Strike mysteries, have as their heroine an empowered survivor of rape. Contemporary culture is reflecting a significant change in attitudes.

But literature has questioned assumptions of power and double standards for a long time, and has been a way of giving voice to those silenced by prejudice and fear. Two works in particular indicate the striking and worrying similarities in gendered power relations from the 19th century to the present day.

Thomas Hardy’s exploration of the devastation caused by sexual assault (because, let’s face it, that’s what it is) in his 1891 novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles is as relevant as ever. The double standards and victim blaming Tess faces should be a thing of the past. But Louise Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard (serialised for the BBC last year) effectively modernises Tess’ story, placing the rape victim on trial once again.

There are inevitably significant differences between Apple Tree Yard’s racy storyline and Hardy’s comment on the social mores of his time. The differences say a lot about literary construction through the ages. But both novels present us with a woman badly wronged, trapped and judged by her society. And these similarities also say a lot about the social function of literature.

There are battles at the heart of both novels: battles between men and women; battles between attempts to move forwards and traumatic shifts backwards; battles between different kinds of belief systems.

Apple Tree Yard is sold as a thriller, the story of a steamy love affair turned courtroom drama. Yvonne Carmichael, a successful, happily married, middle aged, middle class professor of genetics, becomes a co-defendant in a murder trial at the Old Bailey. Yvonne has been violently raped by a colleague; she confides only in her secret lover, who then beats the rapist to death. Yvonne, deeply traumatised but afraid of exposure, is put on trial for a crime she didn’t commit.

But the novel also offers a subtle social commentary that shows the continued relevance and urgency of Hardy’s message.

Hardy was inspired to write Tess of the D’Urbervilles when he witnessed the execution of Elizabeth Martha Brown in 1856. Brown had been convicted of murdering her abusive husband, a classic story of a woman condemned for defending herself against violence. Doughty’s novel offers an updated take on this. Her heroine is publicly exposed, tried and interrogated after the murder of her rapist and stalker.

Of course, society and the judicial system have changed since Hardy’s day. But the change is slow. And the way Doughty frames her novel around a major murder trial sheds a harsh light on the double standards that still exist in the judgement of male and female sexuality.

In both Hardy’s work and Apple Tree Yard, women are raped. In both novels too, their husbands have been (in some sense) unfaithful: Tess’ husband, Angel, had a fling with an older woman when he was younger; Yvonne’s husband, Gary, had a prolonged affair with a troubled PhD student – again, a man with authority exploiting an uneven power dynamic. Both Tess and Yvonne are quick to forgive their husbands. But the forgiveness is not easily reciprocated.

So what do the similarities tell us about how little social attitudes to abuse and power have changed? And what do the differences show us about the literary form then and now?

Both novels offer commentaries on religion. This commentary is far more threatening in Hardy’s novel because religion was so tightly interwoven into the social fabric of the time. Doughty, by contrast, alludes to it more lightly. But in both cases, it acts as a framework for the imbalanced attitudes to male and female sexuality.

Hardy’s heroine, Tess, is presented as a kind of mother nature figure; Doughty’s heroine, Yvonne, is a scientist. From the start of both novels, the protagonists are set up in opposition to religious dogma.

Tess is bound up with a pagan view of nature. We first meet her at the May Day dance, which celebrates the arrival of spring. We last see her at Stonehenge – “the heathen temple”, as she puts it – where she is arrested for Alec’s murder. Her life is ruled by the care of animals, the changing condition of the seasons, and the urges of men.

The geneticist, Yvonne, in Apple Tree Yard sees her secret love affair as a gendered role reversal. After meeting her lover for the first time, she begins to write him letters, which she has no plans to send. She doesn’t know his name, so refers to him simply as ‘X’, signing off with her own initial ‘Y’. This, she observes, reverses the male and female chromosomes, Y and X.

But against the natural world in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and the academic science in Apple Tree Yard is a rigid and unforgiving religion. In both, this suggests an essentialist way of viewing women, power and sin.

Tess condemns the church that won’t bury her illegitimate child; the man who raped her and sought salvation; the husband who chose to have a love affair but will not forgive her for her “sin”.

Yvonne’s name recalls Eve and the “original sin”. This links directly into the modern narrative of victim blaming: woman as temptress, man as helplessly beguiled. The site of Yvonne’s downfall – the location of the public sexual encounter with her lover that tarnishes her reputation in court – is Apple Tree Yard, a pretty strong allusion to the Garden of Eden.

So, in many ways, these novels written more than 100 years apart show us worryingly similar oppositions between male and female notions of “sin”, and the exclusive possibilities of redemption and condemnation.

And yet they read very differently. Is this because of social progress? Or literary development? The answer is a bit of both.

Hardy’s work presents an agonising social commentary, with doom and despair foreshadowed throughout. Doughty’s Apple Tree Yard is a racy page-turner and its television adaptation gripped viewers.

In part, the difference in audience experience relates to the ways in which the novels toy with time.

Yvonne tells the story in the first person, starting in the court room. We know she is on trial but we don’t know why, whether she’s guilty and what the judgement will be. Suspense is high from the word go. She then jumps about in the chronology, narrating the goings-on in the court and also shifting back to the events leading to the rape and the murder. We are given glimpses of the future, raising tension and making us want to know more. Arriving at work one day, Yvonne notices that her dull colleague, George, “had nicked himself shaving his neck that morning”. “In 18 months’ time,” she tells us, “I would discover that his blood group was O positive.” Why? How? What will have happened?

Hardy doesn’t chop up the chronology like Doughty, but instead repeatedly anticipates Tess’ downfall. This has a very different effect on the reader. The dissolute Alec D’Urberville makes Tess swear on a holy cross that she will not tempt him again (textbook victim blaming). Tess then discovers that the cross commemorates a man who sold his soul to the devil – in symbolic terms, a very bad sign.

Tess and her future husband, Angel, first meet at the May Day dance, where their eyes lock expectantly across the field. But Angel chooses another girl for the dance. Tess repeatedly laments this choice as a sign of their ill-fated relationship. Hardy also likens Angel and Tess to Adam and Eve: in the moment this seems romantic, representing innocence and love and purity, but it also suggests that this innocence will be shortlived, and the only way they can go is downwards.

The way Doughty chops up time and flitters backwards and forwards, giving us tantalising glimpses of the past and future, moulds Apple Tree Yard as a novel of suspense. Is Yvonne’s lover an MI5 spy? Will their affair come out? Will she be found guilty of murder? In contrast, Hardy’s subtle anticipation of Tess’ doomed existence creates pathos and profundity. The symbolic hints warn us that things will not end well, so Tess’ despair infiltrates the reader too. These very similar stories read in very different ways.

But the murders in these novels also affect our experience of the stories.

In both novels, the rapists become stalkers and hound their victims to the point of utter despair. In both novels, the rapists’ murder is the final catalyst in the protagonist’s downfall. Doughty opens with the murder trial, while Hardy ends with it. And this gives us a clue to a significant difference in social attitudes between then and now.

In Apple Tree Yard, the murder acts more as a plot device. We know from the start that Yvonne, the narrator and heroine, is on trial at the Old Bailey. We know from halfway through that George has been murdered and we know whodunit. Yvonne does not want to report her rape because she fears the exposure of her affair. This points to a judicial system that holds up women’s sex lives and histories for interrogation and judgement – did she lead George on? How much had she drunk? What was she wearing? Is she generally promiscuous? The victim is turned into the defendant, and this plays into the fears of many women and men who do not want to report experiences of harassment and assault for fear of the judgement they might encounter.

In Hardy’s novel, Tess murders her attacker, the cause of her ruin, right at the end. But there is no possibility of redemption within the confines of the novel or the 19th century legal system. She has no protection of class or wealth or gender. But Hardy’s subtitle, A Pure Woman, challenges the very notion of victim blaming. He offers his own judgement of the social and legal trials that condemn Tess.

The novels have very different endings, indicating a degree of progress in law and society. But the prejudice that silences Tess still echoes in Doughty’s novel. And this is why storylines like that seen in The Archers, Broadchurch and the Cormoran Strike mysteries matter: they show empowering and sensitive portrayals of victims of assault and abuse, and the possibility of justice. The similarities between Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Apple Tree Yard demonstrate the significance of why we tell stories, and the differences between them demonstrate the significance of how we tell stories.

Regardless of context and form, the cases of Brett Kavanaugh and Philip Green show that these are stories we still urgently need to tell and urgently need to hear. Hardy and Doughty both point to the dangerous culture of victim blaming. Kavanaugh and Green are part of a particularly terrifying trend, not just of victim blaming but also of silencing, removing the possibility of voice or justice. If victims don’t have the right to speak out and be taken seriously, then very little has changed since Hardy’s denunciation of 19th century hypocrisy – and justice is simply the stuff of fiction.