[Hardy-l] Re: Thoughts on 'Tess'

[Niemeyer, Paul J.]

Not to be pedantic, but I'm not entirely sure that the cart Tess runs into in the serial IS a mail cart.  There are two men in the cart and there is nothing on them that indicates they're carrying mail, and I don't believe we see their freight (I'll have to study this whenever I get the DVD).  The impression I got is that the men are average joes on some job or other--must be important, given how fast they're going--and that the shotgun is carried as part of their usual equipage.  Again, we're dealing with the director's imagery and not Hardy's: that's what I'm trying to figure out.
 
Eyes open,
 
Paul Niemeyer

________________________________

From: Keith Wilson [mailto:kgwilson at uottawa.ca]

 
A further suspension-of-disbelief problem for me involved what the mailman was doing with a convenient Prince-dispatching gun so readily to hand. I haven't checked, so could certainly be wrong, but I'd be surprised if as late as the mid-nineteenth century, rural mail-cart postmen were routinely armed in England -- this is the Marlott-Casterbridge run, not Dodge City to Abilene.
 
Best,
 
Keith
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 5285 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://coyote.csusm.edu/pipermail/hardy-l/attachments/20090108/03682cfc/attachment.bin