Tess and Girly - Feminist to me, anti-feminist to others?
If there are two, there must surely be more.
In the past couple of days I've seen two things pop up critiquing two works I love and admire on the basis of how they treat rape (or don't).
A Fleen writer goes off against Girly, and a feminist blogger states that "Thomas Hardy’s book Tess of the d’Urbervilles has to be one of the worst pieces of anti-woman “literature” in the last 100 or so years".
Gah, seriously. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
Sometimes people seriously are looking for things. I don't care how valid their reading of it is, they aren't being particularily studious about it. Hand me anything and I can turn it into an anti-feminist diatribe if I feel like it. Doesn't mean it's actually there and usually means I'd have to be perversely unacademic about it, too.
Tess is raped in the book. This much is true. This was a pretty shocking detail to include in a book of the time, as Tess is the innocent and no judgement is immediately given to the guy who does it. This is realistic, though, since the wrath of God or author doesn't usually touch rich, titled guys taking advantage of poor country girls in the times Hardy was writing in. She goes back home and heroically has her baby in full view of the community, which is simply incredibly brave. She isn't punished by having the baby die. I can think of many reasons why this happens consistant with the themes and historic setting in the book: a) it's important for later plot b) Tess is young, poor, not terribly well fed, doing lots of manual labor and not going to have the healthiest birth, c) lots of babies die soon after childbirth, especially if they're sick at birth, d) Tess raising a child out of wedlock and hating the father would be another story and would prevent her becoming the migrant worker so central to the theme of the book. Having the baby die isn't punishing her, especially as you never get the sense in the story that she did anything wrong. Hardy doesn't judge her. Tess doesn't judge herself (otherwise she'd have the baby in secret, right?).
When she moves on afterwards and finds herself roaming from town to town doing whatever farm labor needs doing and meets Angel Claire, she still considers herself innocent in her own moral views. Tess increasingly breaks away from traditional church-based morality and comes into her own, more natural and nature based morality, complete with pagan undertones. After she marries Angel and they both confess their past wrongdoings, he judges her, which made me just cry when I first read Tess. I had never cried reading something before, but this hurt.
But throughout this and all the way into the conclusion, Tess sticks to her own morality and ways. It's only the world around her that wants to punish her, because this is the world she's living in. Hardy gives us a brave, moral, natural heroine and shows the tragedy of how her world tramples over her. Tess shows us the dying old ways of agriculture and the older, natural morality (as opposed to the more Christian victorian one surrounding her).
It's a tragedy. And it's probably one of the most human pro-woman pieces of literature I've ever read. Tess is no super woman, but she is extraordinary while being very real and natural. She has to make some tremendously tough decisions and is hampered by the society and times she lives in by what her choices are. If nothing else, Hardy's message is : Even if you are the purest, you will still get jerked around. Angel lauds her for her purity and can't reconcile that image of her with the idea of her being raped and doesn't see his own hypocrisy or get over it until it's too late. There is so much goodness in Angel but for that fatal flaw, which I also see as something of a critque on the church.
To say that she is in any way punished by the author for having been raped is to be so hung up on rape that you can't see what's in front of your face! The book is supposed to make you uncomfortable, because it deals with uncomfortable subjects you weren't supposed to treat so bluntly then. Besides that, can anyone think of a feel-good tragedy with uplfting morals?
Onto the second mention. I haven't read Fleen in a quite a while because I find most of the writers there crazily annoying. It's like reading a bunch of Rolling Stone magazine rejects, except now they have the power to hyperlink every damn word.
Girly is a fabulous webcomic. I can't compare it to Hardy, but I do love it. It's wacky, it's silly, and manages to still pull off amazing characters. One of these, El Chupacabre (aka Chuy) started off as a sort of menance to the city, because he is supposedly so irresistable that women can't help but want to screw him. He, innocently enough, thinks he's doing them a favor until it's pointed out to him that indiscriminate use of his power is hurting other people. Free loves doesn't work for everybody, right? His innocence gets crushed and he takes the reverse tactic of trying to become a monk. Doesn't work. He tries other things because now he sees this as a problem. He's like an alcoholic. Of love. Remember this is a wacky comic at the same time!
So if everyone in the comic sees this as a problem, how is this an endorsement? Even if you do take his innate ability to woo women as rape (which the women thus wooed don't), it still cannot be an endorsement by the author. If anything, the hippies should be coming out of the woodwork to critcize him for being anti-free love!
But what it comes down to is both bloggers are critiquing authors for including rape or something like rape. Should we never have these sort of things happen to characters? Should it only happen if the villian gets his compeuppance? Is rape the end-all of bad things that can happen to you, and if anything else happens to you, it's because you were raped? Tess's problem was that she pretty much got over it and no one else did. Tess still considered herself pure (outside of other influences), because of who she is, not what happened to her. In Girly, a guy does something he later reconsiders and tries to stop doing it. This is an endorsement?
You know, when I dislike something I don't feel like I have to make up feminist reasons why I don't. Both these bloggers would have been more honest by saying they just didn't like it.
In the past couple of days I've seen two things pop up critiquing two works I love and admire on the basis of how they treat rape (or don't).
A Fleen writer goes off against Girly, and a feminist blogger states that "Thomas Hardy’s book Tess of the d’Urbervilles has to be one of the worst pieces of anti-woman “literature” in the last 100 or so years".
Gah, seriously. WHAT. THE. FUCK.
Sometimes people seriously are looking for things. I don't care how valid their reading of it is, they aren't being particularily studious about it. Hand me anything and I can turn it into an anti-feminist diatribe if I feel like it. Doesn't mean it's actually there and usually means I'd have to be perversely unacademic about it, too.
Tess is raped in the book. This much is true. This was a pretty shocking detail to include in a book of the time, as Tess is the innocent and no judgement is immediately given to the guy who does it. This is realistic, though, since the wrath of God or author doesn't usually touch rich, titled guys taking advantage of poor country girls in the times Hardy was writing in. She goes back home and heroically has her baby in full view of the community, which is simply incredibly brave. She isn't punished by having the baby die. I can think of many reasons why this happens consistant with the themes and historic setting in the book: a) it's important for later plot b) Tess is young, poor, not terribly well fed, doing lots of manual labor and not going to have the healthiest birth, c) lots of babies die soon after childbirth, especially if they're sick at birth, d) Tess raising a child out of wedlock and hating the father would be another story and would prevent her becoming the migrant worker so central to the theme of the book. Having the baby die isn't punishing her, especially as you never get the sense in the story that she did anything wrong. Hardy doesn't judge her. Tess doesn't judge herself (otherwise she'd have the baby in secret, right?).
When she moves on afterwards and finds herself roaming from town to town doing whatever farm labor needs doing and meets Angel Claire, she still considers herself innocent in her own moral views. Tess increasingly breaks away from traditional church-based morality and comes into her own, more natural and nature based morality, complete with pagan undertones. After she marries Angel and they both confess their past wrongdoings, he judges her, which made me just cry when I first read Tess. I had never cried reading something before, but this hurt.
But throughout this and all the way into the conclusion, Tess sticks to her own morality and ways. It's only the world around her that wants to punish her, because this is the world she's living in. Hardy gives us a brave, moral, natural heroine and shows the tragedy of how her world tramples over her. Tess shows us the dying old ways of agriculture and the older, natural morality (as opposed to the more Christian victorian one surrounding her).
It's a tragedy. And it's probably one of the most human pro-woman pieces of literature I've ever read. Tess is no super woman, but she is extraordinary while being very real and natural. She has to make some tremendously tough decisions and is hampered by the society and times she lives in by what her choices are. If nothing else, Hardy's message is : Even if you are the purest, you will still get jerked around. Angel lauds her for her purity and can't reconcile that image of her with the idea of her being raped and doesn't see his own hypocrisy or get over it until it's too late. There is so much goodness in Angel but for that fatal flaw, which I also see as something of a critque on the church.
To say that she is in any way punished by the author for having been raped is to be so hung up on rape that you can't see what's in front of your face! The book is supposed to make you uncomfortable, because it deals with uncomfortable subjects you weren't supposed to treat so bluntly then. Besides that, can anyone think of a feel-good tragedy with uplfting morals?
Onto the second mention. I haven't read Fleen in a quite a while because I find most of the writers there crazily annoying. It's like reading a bunch of Rolling Stone magazine rejects, except now they have the power to hyperlink every damn word.
Girly is a fabulous webcomic. I can't compare it to Hardy, but I do love it. It's wacky, it's silly, and manages to still pull off amazing characters. One of these, El Chupacabre (aka Chuy) started off as a sort of menance to the city, because he is supposedly so irresistable that women can't help but want to screw him. He, innocently enough, thinks he's doing them a favor until it's pointed out to him that indiscriminate use of his power is hurting other people. Free loves doesn't work for everybody, right? His innocence gets crushed and he takes the reverse tactic of trying to become a monk. Doesn't work. He tries other things because now he sees this as a problem. He's like an alcoholic. Of love. Remember this is a wacky comic at the same time!
So if everyone in the comic sees this as a problem, how is this an endorsement? Even if you do take his innate ability to woo women as rape (which the women thus wooed don't), it still cannot be an endorsement by the author. If anything, the hippies should be coming out of the woodwork to critcize him for being anti-free love!
But what it comes down to is both bloggers are critiquing authors for including rape or something like rape. Should we never have these sort of things happen to characters? Should it only happen if the villian gets his compeuppance? Is rape the end-all of bad things that can happen to you, and if anything else happens to you, it's because you were raped? Tess's problem was that she pretty much got over it and no one else did. Tess still considered herself pure (outside of other influences), because of who she is, not what happened to her. In Girly, a guy does something he later reconsiders and tries to stop doing it. This is an endorsement?
You know, when I dislike something I don't feel like I have to make up feminist reasons why I don't. Both these bloggers would have been more honest by saying they just didn't like it.