"The man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory fell to the man."
-Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Teaching Tess in the current world climate increasingly brings me back to this quote. We are still, as a world, torn between the rigidity of ecclesiastical thinking that Hardy despised and the human. In the face of desparate need for empathetic connection, fundamentalism of all types (not simply religious) continues to violate and block that need.
Hardy stopped writing novels because of their critical rejection. How can we preserve a victory for the human within us in the face of the ecclesiastic?
You make me want to teach this novel again! Your question has left me thinking...
ReplyDeleteSusan - Thanks. I wanted to draw a deeper connection to the kinds of celebrations we saw with the Bin Laden announcement - celebrations that evoked the kind of struggle the parson undergoes with Tess at this point in the novel...alas, I can't quite decide what I think that connection is!
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