Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Socrates and Tess
I know that this is kind of pushing a connection but hear me out. Socrates holds the belief that it is better to be unjustly harmed than to commit injustice. I think that Hardy must have held a similar belief. As I said in a previous post, Tess' universe is completely unequal when one compares the good and bad events in her life. The bad events are ones that we as modern day people view as Tess being unjustly harmed (her rape, her marriage falling apart due to her rape). However, as Tess proves to us, she too feels again and again that she deserves this harm done onto her. Time and again Tess fails to stand up for herself against Angel and even the workman who recognized her from her work at the D'urbervilles, insisting that she is getting the punishment that she deserves. My theory is that Hardy, who admitted to being in love with his heroin, wanted Tess to be a morally upstanding individual. He may have done this unintentionally, but Tess definitely is unjustly harmed and never commits any REAL injustice. P.S. The greeks saw rape as a horrible offense against the soul of a woman and the man who commit it was therefore killed. How did it get so turned around as to blame the woman?
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In Socrates's situation, he was accused unjustly and tried to argue his case, but failing that, he submitted to the punishment anyway (poisoning) because he had no fear of death and felt it wrong to break a law he never endeavored to change. Tess has also been accused unjustly (Angel accuses her of sin by his absence), but I feel that she too believes she has sinned. She takes the punishment that comes because she too believes in some part of her that she deserves it. This is an unfortunate combination of the times she's living in and her own personality which is too quick to blame herself over others, even when others may be at fault (she doesn't blame Angel for going away, but her own past...she doesn't blame her parents for making her go to Trantridge, but herself for killing Prince). I think Socrates's story is not as tragic as Tess's, because he knew what he was doing and he knew that he was in the right. Poor Tess seems trapped in her own time and her own story and is too quick to blame herself.
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