A couple things: 1. I look like Popeye in the thumbnail. 2. I call Tess "Eliza". 3. I don't want to forget about Tess, I just want to forget about the trauma of reading this story .
I love this novel. It's one of the great prose tragedies in English. Also contrary to how it's often taken today, Tess was seduced not raped. That's how the original readers would have taken it. Hardy was highlighting Victorian sexual mores as hypocritical. If Tess was raped then that entire social aspect of the novel goes out the window. It becomes a melodrama about a helpless innocent who was victimized by a mustache twirling villain. If she was raped then the subtitle of the novel "a Pure Woman" becomes crushingly literal and loses any ironic force. If she was raped then Tess kills because of simple revenge and not because that person stood in the way of her honor and relationship with Angel Clare. - and btw if her purity can survive murder it can survive seduction.
A couple things: 1. I look like Popeye in the thumbnail. 2. I call Tess "Eliza". 3. I don't want to forget about Tess, I just want to forget about the trauma of reading this story .
I love this novel. It's one of the great prose tragedies in English. Also contrary to how it's often taken today, Tess was seduced not raped. That's how the original readers would have taken it. Hardy was highlighting Victorian sexual mores as hypocritical. If Tess was raped then that entire social aspect of the novel goes out the window. It becomes a melodrama about a helpless innocent who was victimized by a mustache twirling villain. If she was raped then the subtitle of the novel "a Pure Woman" becomes crushingly literal and loses any ironic force. If she was raped then Tess kills because of simple revenge and not because that person stood in the way of her honor and relationship with Angel Clare. - and btw if her purity can survive murder it can survive seduction.