Tess of the d'Urbervilles - my mad fiction love. Making kdramas look upbeat since 19th century

[dangermousie]

I plan to do a back-to-back watch of 1998 and 2008 adaptations of one of my favorite Victorian novels, Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, whose tragic heroine is destroyed both by the sheer brutality of physical survival and the rigid social mores of Victorian England. I am clearly a glutton for punishment but then I like Hardy, so that is not a

Comments

[meganbmoore]

I haven't read this in several years and am not sure how I'd react if I first read it now, but I remember that it's basically what saved me from shunning classics forever when I was about 15 and checking out what the school library had, and I read several that I hated in a row. I don't know that I liked Tess then, but I remember that, then, it was extremely significant to me that her reaction to people judging her for being raped and having sex was along the lines of "screw you." I don't think I ever noticed Angel a lot outside of "the guy she married," but I could (an d still can) understand why the author would have Tess with him than I could others.

[dangermousie]

To me, Tess is all about, well, Tess. I see the characters and the world of the book solely through her prism - I like Angel because he is what she wants, basically. If she wanted to move to Tibet and become a female monk, I would have been for it, too.

Hardy always wrote amazing protagonists.

[meganbmoore]

I actually haven't read any other Hardy, as most of my voluntarily reading classics stopped when they started being required reading, and mostly things I didn't care for. Much of my early exposure to classics was skewed by "superconservative catholic-school-masquerading-as-public-school" in high school and then my university's rather limited focus on more "name brand"-I MIGHT be less vehement about the ending of Jane Eyre if I hadn't had it through "only this interpretation allowed" I think 4 times through high school and college. But basically, that started shortly after Tess.

(In general, I think attitudes towards classics are created by how they're introduced. You have the more free-for-all approach, and then the "classic means literary genius no argument or alternate interpretations" one, it seems.)

[dangermousie]

I have that knee-jerk reaction to a number of Russian classics I had to read in Soviet school (but not all - some I love). I read classics way before they were supposed to be covered in school and discovered that this is the type of novel I prefer best - narrative structure, characters, language. The fact that school seemed to think it was valuable later on was a bonus but I never associated it with that.

[meganbmoore]

The only reason I wasn't completely turned off of them was because I started reading them on my own before that. I unintentionally spoiled Beowulf for my entire class once, and a few Shakespeares. But that was when I realized no one else was reading them on their own.