Conclusion
Both Shakespeare and Hardy signaled in their works the mind's loss of power to build the blessed unity with the natural world. Both of them showed that their male characters, Angel and Othello, came to hate the women they loved when they were no longer certain they knew them. Both of these great authors also concentrate on the loss of complete being, on the transformation of the male lover into the rejecting Puritan, and show that this negative metamorphosis brings chaos into their lives. Their bond with life becomes perverted; they become killers who destroy the living potential and bring degradation to this world.
The male characters in Tess and Othello , just like their wives, can be observed as victims to the false binary opposition embedded in the Western psyche. This false polarization implied in the Christian patriarchal world view brings utter degradation and destruction to the feminine: they observe their wives as either saints or immoral whores. Both Hardy and Shakespeare sensed the Western man's greatest mistake of polarization in human existence which negates the full complexity of being. Not only body and soul, but also life and death, man and woman, good and evil, nature and culture are the irreconcilable opposites that contribute to the inner split from which modern man still suffers.
What should have been the central goal of life, that is, wholeness, completeness and creativity, now becomes usurped and replaced by contrary attitudes. Shakespeare and Hardy noticed that the danger to life comes from the male representatives of the patriarchal world, whose ethical blindness and insensitivity to life need to be tamed into wisdom and ability to see things feelingly. Only through a reunion with the feminine can what is lost be found again: the link with the natural world and the totality of life and being.
Thus, the wreck Adrienne Rich is diving into is the wreck of obsolete myths, the old myths of patriarchy, the myths that split male and female irreconcilably into two opposing selves. Rich's idea is that we must write new myths, create new definitions of humanity which will not glorify this angry chasm but heal it: it is not only the artist who must make the emphatic leap beyond gender, but any of us who would try to save the world from destruction.
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