I love the humour of these posts. I hope that one day it’s up there with the 3 F’s an Portugal’s cv.

Leopold Kohr had a philosophy about smaller being better: The breakdown of Nations is one of his works.

Mahmood Mamdani also explores nationalism and colonialism in some of his works.

I can respect that you don’t appreciate the book but the use of red flags for describing the relationships and the attitudes towards Tess’ lack of development make me wonder if it is worth translating her into a modern setting.

The book and Hardy are criticising the hypocrisy of the British class system (which is a horrible system) and how women in particular got into a kind of double bind in circumstances where their vulnerabilities were exploited and with little way to defend themselves.

A modern day Tess may be more like an undocumented migrant woman whose family sends her out to supposed friends who are middle class and documented. Alec would then be someone who either uses his position and privilege to coerce her into sex or who rapes her (in one edition he gives her a tonic that is soperific).

Tess and her family would, in this scenario, also belong to a culture where virginity and sexual purity were valued and have her family honour tied to it. So her experience would be internalised as shameful.

This would destroy her chances and she would go and work in agriculture, away from her family, and try to start a fresh. Her past a secret. Angel would be a person who is documented, belonging to a similar culture, and who loves Tess but who also idealises her, in accordance with the ideas based on sexual purity.

Tess still carries that shame and blame for her situation. Angel on finding out can’t reconcile his ideals with Tess, the real woman. He is an idiot imo.

Tess has no way out of her situation. So she lives with Alec to stabilise her immigration situation and help her family. This is at a great cost as she cant love Alec but she can’t become a bigamist and marry another guy. She is doing this to survive, and transactionally.

When Angel comes back and apologises, she is confronted with a person who sees her goodness again this is painful. She kills Alec because he is a predator and he is the person who ruined her life. In the social circumstances of that time she had few options but to do this.

Angel runs away with her as his kind of penance and Tess must die. It is the punishment of women in stories who are not sexually ‘pure’. But Hardy is telling us that Tess is still pure (read the subtitle) and she was unlucky about the fate (one of the themes in the book) that she was condemned to, which wasn’t so much her fault but the sum of her actions in the shitty society she was living in.

I totally get that OP doesn’t connect to the levels of internalised shame that Tess felt and the pride she clung to in an attempt to keep her dignity. Or the horrible decisions she had to face. But back then things were brutal and many of those themes still relate to people today. If you are in the US there is still purity culture and programmes like Jane the Virgin. We are lucky that religion is no longer as much in politics and we are generally more forgiving. But we just need to go to the 50s to see dramatic tales of ‘fallen women’. It is not so far from where we are.