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[emkachan]

In other news, I am reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Thomas Hardy is a condescending toolbox. It has very much the same flavor as Lady Chatterly's Lover or The World According to Garp: a "tolerant" depiction of current sexual mores from a completely male perspective with a condescension and inauthentic voice for the female character and he

Comments

[bertine]

_Tess of the D'Urbervilles_ made me want to rip my eyes out. I finished it because I was much more stubborn back then but I wouldn't now. _Lady Chatterly's Lover_ is much more readable.

[emkachan]

My mom said she liked Thomas Hardy when she was my age. I don't know if that was because her Catholic childhood was so repressive that she had to grasp at anything with a mention of sexuality and a female protagonist. I'll have to ask her. There's so much condescension. And his descriptions aren't even apt. It's like he went on one walk in the English countryside once and made some notes about to extrapolate from and then he asked a woman (probably his sister), "So, you have feelings, huh?" Ripping eyes out sounds like a good option.

Lady Chatterly's Lover made me want to get in my time machine to go back and tell D. H. Lawrence, "This is not shocking! Alluding to sex is not a literary revolution! Your writing is really dull!"