[Hardy-l] history and readers

[Keith Wilson]

Not that it matters very much in relation to the primary point about the reductive extremes possible when students are encouraged by bad teaching to substitute themselves and their own worlds for any genuine imaginative engagement with the text or the text's socio-historical context, but I'm afraid the student's brisk career-advisory-service suggestion for Tess's future well predated the Chase scene and Tess even going off to claim kin with the d'Urbervilles.  This was her no-nonsense recommendation virtually from the outset -- forget Prince, leave the feckless family to sort out their own problems, and go and carve out a viable career for yourself in London, you silly girl. End of problem.  End of novel.
 
Keith  
 
 

Rosemarie wrote:

>Kevin - I think every student would benefit from reading your
>mini-treatise.  Keith isn't the only one to encounter students for whom
fictional characters *should* or *shouldn't* behave in a certain way.
Although the case of the Chase scene, in all its complexity, is less often
(in my experience) conjoined to personal bias or the "moral ought" partly
because complexity and ambiguity remain, to this day, attached to issues of
alleged rape. 

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