Introduction
“ I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.”
A. Rich , from Diving into the Wreck
Women's status in society can be traced and examined through literature. There are many writers who depict the lives of women who were destroyed either by men they loved, or the civilization they lived in. Thomas Hardy, the great English novelist and poet, is one of them. In his novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles , he writes about the decline of the pure and innocent country girl Tess into the physically and mentally tortured and ill-used woman, who eventually becomes the murderess of her seducer. Hardy “never hesitated to moralize about the perversity of the world in which Tess was trapped.”
William Shakespeare, one of the most influential writers in all of English literature, was concerned with the same matter: he put civilization on trial for the criminal suppression, degradation and destruction of all aspects traditionally associated with the feminine. In his drama Othello , he describes the sufferance and ill-treatment of Desdemona, whose life, just like Tess's, ends tragically.
These two great writers have one thing in common: they understood woman's soul and sufferings; they had an intuitive awareness of something criminal within Western civilization. They set out to understand what happened to once admired and worshipped woman in all her completeness and what happened to the total and unconditional love for her. And they were determined to reveal that in rejecting at least one aspect of her being, men destroyed themselves and brought down Heaven and Earth in ruins. This is the key to these writers' tragic heroes and heroines.
A. Alvarez, Introduction , in Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Penguin Books, 1984), p.21
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