Sin In Literature

¶ … women in literature suggest the truth of the statement made to Tess in Tess of the D'Urbervilles: "You were more sinned against then sinning." Sometimes this is a direct description of the way others are responsible, sometimes it refers to the way society views what is really only different behavior, and sometimes it is a matter of definition, with society seeing sin where there is only human nature.

In the Scarlet Letter, a seduction has taken place perhaps a year before the opening of the novel, but the fact of the seduction is incontrovertible because of the baby Hester Prynne has borne. She is being punished for this sin alone, though this is a sin that could not have been committed alone. She will not reveal the name of her partner in sin, and she bears what the public burdens her with stoicism and courage. Her sin is a sin of passion, but this passion is never evoked directly in the novel. This has all taken place off stage, and it is the aftermath of the seduction that interests Hawthorne.

For that matter, it is less the seduction itself than the response to it that is important in the novel. Dimmesdale suffers greatly because of this seduction, a sin he committed with greater knowledge than that of Hester and with greater culpability as a result. Not only is he a clergyman who should remain above such things in the eyes of society, but in addition he is living a lie by allowing Hester to be punished while he remains a secret sinner. The innocent question of Pearl highlights the depth of his sin: "But wilt thou promise... To take my hand, and mother's hand tomorrow noon-tide?" (Hawthorne 126). Of course, he will not do so because to do so would bring his sin into the open. His suffering is terrible, but it is entirely because his sin is the greater because it is unrevealed. Hester suffers more openly, but also less terribly.

In Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Tess is also more sinned against than sinning, and her lover, Angel, is a rigid man who abandons Tess when she needs him the most, an act that leads to her death on the gallows. The true sin in the novel is that of Angel, for he does not remain with the woman he loves and does not live up to his name, a name that also reminds the reader of the fact that at one time he was supposed to join the clergy. In many ways, Angel remains throughout the novel a fallen man.

The central character of the novel, of course, is Tess, and the story follows her from the age of sixteen until her death. Tess is a young woman of contradictions, and this has extended to the way she is viewed by various readers. Some see her as a victim of her society and of the changes coming over that society in her time, while others consider her to be responsible for her own fate, tragic though it may be. She is an innocent girl when first introduced, and she is raped by Alec d'Urberville. This leaves her pregnant, and while in our own time the victim of rape would not be considered responsible for being pregnant under those conditions, in Victorian England Tess would be seen as a fallen woman, as guilty even though she did nothing wrong. This fact thus defines her life in a way that is out of her control, making it difficult to see Tess as the master of her own fate. She does show some mastery in being able to rebound from this event, a testament to her will to live. She blames herself for what has happened, but still manages to live up to her many responsibilities to her family.

Angel Clare is a hypocritical man who may love Tess, but he abandons her only to return later when he is remorseful over what he has done. It is too late by then, and his return is what causes Tess to kill Alec d'Urberville. In the end, though he claims to love Tess, he and her sister watch the hanging and then go off together. This is what Tess wants, but it still is an example of the peculiar behavior demonstrated by Angel throughout the novel. He did not go into the clergy as his father did and as his father wanted him to do, and there is some sense that he did not do so because of doubts about aspects of the teachings of the church. His name, Angel, evokes a certain sense of goodness that is countered by his inability to make up his mind and to be faithful to the woman who loves him and who ultimately dies for him.

Tess's fate is not completely the fault of Angel, of course, and one of the elements brought forth by Hardy is the idea that Tess is a product of her upbringing and that much of what happens to her later in life can be traced to that fact. To a degree, this is also an issue of social class -- the Durbeyfields aspire to be part of the d'Urbervilles they believe are their relatives, and as poor people, the Durbeyfields are pressured by economic necessity that limits any chances Tess has for a future. In addition, Hardy criticizes the arbitrary laws of society that condemn Tess for something that is not her fault. Hardy sees these laws as an aspect of the general preference for the ideal over the real.

Sir Clifford Chatterley in Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence is a different sort of person, a member of the landed gentry in England with a considerable income from coal mines that his family has controlled for generations. His father reared him with the expectation that one of his sons would carry on the family tradition of service to England. Clifford's older brother Herbert is killed in the World War I, and Clifford then marries Constance Reid with his father's encouragement. However, the lower half of Clifford's body is paralyzed from a war injury. Like Jake, he is otherwise highly attractive, but both men are sexually impotent because of war. Clifford becomes a writer and makes some headway in that profession. The gulf between himself and his wife grows larger over time until she begins an affair with a playwright, Michaelis, and later with the gamekeeper on her husband's estate, Mellors, a miner's son about forty who has been educated so that he can speak in the upper class manner when he wants but who often uses the Derby dialect as a gesture of defiance or rebellion. Lawrence is most interested in the conflict of social class and the underlying reality of nature that binds all social classes together, whether members of those classes will admit it or not.

D.H. Lawrence's portrait of a woman in Lady Chatterley's Lover also sets the female against the social order, but more than this, he suggests that the female nature is being stifled by that order for purposes of its own. More than even this, Lawrence suggests that women represent and seek out in others a certain naturalness, a primal sexuality that contrasts with the abstract and cerebral. Lady Chatterley has bowed to the social pressures of her time and married Sir Clifford. He has retired to his estate after the end of the war, a shattered and impotent man. He is convinced only of his own superiority to the working-class people on his estate and elsewhere. Clifford has achieved a popular success with the stories he writes. Clifford in effect gives his wife permission to conceive a child by another man, since he is impotent and in any case has no desire for sex. However, he also assumes that his wife will select someone of the same social class.

At first, she does, having an affair with Michaelis, a man who arouses her sexuality but who has no real feelings fort her at all. She eventually turns to the gamekeeper, Mellors, someone of a very different social class and a man who is as vulnerable in his way as she is in hers. The novel contrasts the solidity and unbending nature of British society with the more primal and natural feelings brought out in Lady Chatterley and Mellors. Significantly, she meets Mellors when taking a walk through the remnant of Sherwood Forest on Clifford's estate. On the one hand, such a forest evokes a sense of British history and tradition, but the naturalness of the setting harks back even further to ancient times and more ancient feelings. The two have a hostile relationship at first, but Connie keeps coming back until the passion that has been ignited erupts. Their passion seems to follow the seasons, beginning in winter and becoming more powerful in the spring.

Their growing love is deliberately contrasted with Clifford's unhappiness in spring, a time of year he views as disrupting the industrial order that he values. Lawrence often compares the mechanistic world of industrialize Britain with the world of nature, and the fecundity and sexuality of the natural world is seen as distorted by the mechanistic world that has developed in this century. In such a comparison, Clifford is on the side of the industrial world, while Connie comes out on the side of the natural world. Yet, this is not what society wants women to be, and yet it is also the reason women were so restricted by society, because they were viewed as dangerous threats to the natural order because of their inherent sexuality.

In Lawrence's conception, living according to nature precludes the possibility of sin, though society may see the issue in a different light. While one could apply this idea to Hester and Tess as well, their authors clearly do not view the issue in that way, though they do find their women more sinned against than sinning.

More ancient writers tended to see sin as inevitable, and much of the behavior of their characters was ordained by the gods. To the modern sensibility, this suggest innocence, but to the ancient Greeks, a fatal flaw produced punishment in spite of the fact that the individual might be compelled to act as he or she does. The myth of Phaedra tells of how Phaedra, the wife of King Theseus, fell in love with Hippolytus, her stepson. She makes her passion known to the young man, and he rejects her. She then revenges herself on him by accusing him of dishonoring her, and this leads to the death of both the young man and Phaedra. Here as well there is a conflict between the laws of man and the laws of the gods, with Artemis exacting he revenge because she has been slighted by Hippolytus.