Tess of the D'Ubervilles

The ending that Thomas Hardy paints in Tess of the d'Urbervilles in very intriguing. Throughout the novel, Hardy repeatedly shows the dominance of males over females, with the prime example coming from when Alec rapes Tess. Hardy makes it his point to clearly show his audience the roles of men and women during the 19th century in Great Britain, with the former being much more controlling and predominant than the latter. At no point in time or instance does Hardy choose to let a female speak up for herself and take action against the will of another man other than near the end of the novel, when Tess surprisingly murders Alec. Ironically, this is the most heroic part of the novel, an event where Tess stands up against a man and breaks the expected pattern of a woman submitting to a man. Yet Hardy chooses, following his tragic genre, for Tess to get captured while running away and to subsequently be executed as a direct result of her heroic moment. Hardy vividly shows the injustice as to how woman are treated in Great Britain  through the tragic character that is Tess. One has to wonder how different Tess's life would be if she were born into a society that gave women just a little more power and voice in society. This harsh critism against the cultural and social values that England has against the roles of the sexes plays an important part in the novel, as Hardy is able to effectively criticize the traditions of his time in order to do his part to advance English society.

-Conrad

Last Week's Class Discussion

Living in Sin
        In class last week we were confronted with the poem, "Living in Sin"  by Adrienne Rich. Though the contemporary idea of living in sin is associated with "shacking up" or living with a person that is not your spouse the inner meaning of Rich's poem does not serve to discourage or ostracize those that live out of wedlock. Instead the words strive to expose a far larger problem that each of us have undoubtedly dealt with. The narrator in the poem describes a life of dichotomy, one in which she finds happiness in the nighttime but slowly sinks into depression as the day progresses. In this description, we found, with Mrs. Elliott's assistance of course, that the sin in which the narrator was living was not the fact that she was with a man that was not her husband but that she had yet to do anything to save herself from the emotional rollercoaster that she was experiencing. Personally, it reminded me of this quote;

            "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" - Albert Einstein

      Indeed this woman that Rich described was, in Einstein's definition, insane because she did nothing to change the situation she was in even though she knew that change was needed to alter her sad life. So let us all take a lesson from Adrienne Rich's literary figure and choose our own hapiness and our own sanity.

                                                          - Jake