‘The Thing must be Male, we suppose’: Erotic Triangles and Masculine Identity in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Melville’s Billy Budd

Abstract

Towards the end of 1891 an author whose earlier works had already earned him both popularity and notoriety was finishing the revisions on a story of intense passion, betrayal, and murder. The main character of this story is so physically attractive that they are literally called ‘beauty’ by some they encounter, but finally it is their extraordinary innocence and purity which sets them apart. Tragically, however (and the text’s intrusive third-person narrator is insistent that this is a tragedy), it is just these qualities that draw the attentions of two men who, between them, manage to bring about the main character’s destruction. The first of these is driven by a dark, sensual desire to possess that innocence and purity, so that within the standard value-systems of a nineteenth-century novel he must be designated the ‘villain’. However, this particular text is ambivalent about assigning such designations. His rival, whose very name carries a celestial connotation, seems to hold a much more elevated desire, but in the end he is equally instrumental in causing the central character’s death. It therefore becomes difficult to think of him as a ‘hero’, even though the protagonist clearly does. Thus the story is brought to its tragic conclusion when the main character, believing that through the corrupting influence of the first man they have forever forfeited the regard and respect of the second, strikes and kills their dark tormentor.