The Fredösphere

We watched Tess of the D'Urbervilles over the weekend, this Tess produced by A&E.  We've never read the book, and we gave up on one previous film version when we saw the story was quickly going to turn grim.  We pressed on to the end of this version, and I must say I was impressed with the whole production.  All three principles are complex characters making sometimes surprising decisions, and the actors (Justine Waddell, Jason Flemyng, and Oliver Milburn) made it as believable as possible.

Now to the plot, provided by our novelist friend, Mr. Thomas Hardy.  Did I mention the story turns grim early on?  Well, from there it only gets worse.  This story is horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible. Hardy seems to have calibrated the events of Tess' life for the purpose of maximizing our pain.  Tess is an exquisite instrument of torture, nothing else.

As the story raced to a climactic scene featuring the wielding of an unlikely murder weapon, the wifeösphere reacted with a grunt as though it were her own gut getting the butter knife treatment.  It was then we knew Tess would give us no satisfaction; that the resolution would be infuriating, and Tess would find for herself a death that would leave us bitter and exhausted: 

‘Justice’ was done, and Tess, in the Aeschylean phrase, had ended her sport with us.