Janet Benton's Blog: One Writer's Path - Posts Tagged "secrets"

In situations of inequality and prejudice, telling the truth can ruin your life. A work of literature that explores this in a heartbreaking way is Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Young, innocent Tess is sent by her drunken lout of a father to live with a wealthy man in exchange for money. The wealthy man rapes her; she runs away, turns out to be pregnant, and tries to keep her infant alive while working as a farm laborer. Her tiny infant dies. At another farm, she meets the love of her life, a man named Angel. They agree to marry. On the eve of their marriage, she writes a letter confessing the tragedy of her past and slips it beneath the door of his room. Unbeknownst to her, the letter slides beneath a rug. They marry the next day; then she finds the letter, unopened. She gives it to him in the place they’ve gone to honeymoon. He can’t accept her past misfortune and leaves. The rapist comes for her again, hearing of her desperate status, and she becomes his chattel. Then Angel, having changed his mind long before and written letters that the rapist has hidden, comes to her door at last, asking why she never responded. She goes into a mad rage, kills the rapist, and then is hung. Having witnessed Tess’s hanging with her younger sister at his side, Angel walks off into the future with the virginal sister.

Secrets can be terrible. Telling the truth can be terrible. (Thanks to Caroline Leavitt for interviewing me for her blog! There are lots of interviews with me at https://janetbentonauthor.com/intervi...