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I am ALWAYS right.

I've not read the novel. The intro was off-putting for me. Now that I've seen the film I need never bother with the book.

I did enjoy the movie per say (in terms of an amusing castaway/jeopardy romp), but to enjoy it requires total suspension of disbelief. More so than fiction like Harry Potter. There are a lot of reality issues with the film but the Mars atmosphere one is the most blatant.  The atmosphere on Mars is only 1% as dense as that this planet. Storms of 100Mph would actually be like a light puff of air (i.e 99% less strength than the wind would be here on Earth). But they know this! When they instruct him to remove the nose assembly of the Ascent Craft and use polythene taupe/sheet in it place. The Mars atmosphere will allow the flimsy polythene sheet to withstand launch speeds of thousands of miles per hour. This could be true, but the wind storms on the surface of Mars are a nonsense. They treat Mar's atmosphere like the Earth's when it suits the story (because Mars is sterile and they need a suitably dramatic and dangerous protagonist and the 'storms' provide this). How much wind pressure in 1% density of atmosphere would it require to topple a spaceship or even bury a man in the sand when the air pressure of a thousand MPH airspeed velocity can be dispersed by plastic sheet? 

Interestingly, most people are skeptical of the replacing of the rocket's nose cone with a plastic sheet (which is possibly feasible) than they are of the Mars wind and storms (which are actually as ridiculous if it suddenly rained banana milkshake up there).

Why am I so picky? Well, the wind and sandstorms such the pivotal part of the premise; the reason that the original mission is aborted in an emergency evacuation, the reason Damon loses his crops etc. Ridley Scott must have been reigning himself in from the introduction of a few Zombies or ingested aliens hatching out of peoples chests (which is much feasible/possible than the storms).
 
No wonder the script has Matt Damon declaring,  'We are going to get the science the shit out of this movie'. He punctures his suit 'to fly like Iron-Man' and in truth, the sc-fi is on a par with Iron-Man.

   Did I put the kybosh on it for you yet?

The same sort of argument has been made in the past about Austen's work. I say she wrote in a confined way to mirror the life of a woman of her time. Women didn't have an epic, you see. Not like the heroes in literature did.

(I've read most of War & Peace and all of A Tale of Two Cities. I love them both as well. Still, I'd love to read a classic novel with a female Ahab off to conquer the stormy seas and catch her white whale. The best female Ahab I've met to date has been Scarlett. It might be more fair to compare Tess to Anna Karenina or Jane Eyre. Novels about women of a similar time period.) x

(Pardon me for still talking on this topic! I'm not actually sitting here for hours or anything. I've been doing homework. I answered you on the fly in the middle of that, then I back-burnered the topic and kept thinking of more things to say. And it's way more fun to write here than to study, which I'm off to do now!)

One of my favorite poems is "Ozymandias" by Percy Shelley. That's one where the artist says something powerful -- but doesn't say it. I think what makes art powerful is the "unsaid" factor.  A great writer should gesture at a truth without telling the reader whether it's good or bad, or even whether it's true. Just lay it out there, and let the reader decide.

If Hardy didn't do this, I can see how you'd be appalled and call it "patronizing." But remember you don't need to be convinced. It could be that what seems obvious to us in this era was not obvious at all to a Victorian person -- or more likely, was not obvious at all to the people for whom Hardy was writing. What I mean is, what we call "obvious" may have been subtle at the time. He published Tess only a few decades after Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin -- a book directed specifically to the women in the American South whose husbands dealt in slavery. Over-the-top sentimentality was the tool she had to speak to these women whom she'd likely never see in person, and speak in a wide, sweeping shout which begged them to consider the humanity behind an enslaved person's face, and say something to their husbands to free them. Appealing to the women was an enormous part of the abolitionist movement, and Uncle Tom's Cabin was an instrument within the movement -- one Lincoln said was the catalyst to war. The book caused outrage across the South because it suggested a viewpoint which threatened the whole Confederacy.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a contemporary of Hardy's. She wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" a year after Hardy published Tess. Her style is different from his (almost like the work most were writing AFTER World War One. It doesn't read as at all Victorian to me.) But we have to consider the audience. She was writing in a magazine that was likely read mostly by women. Her audience was likely fellow feminists/suffragists -- people who already agreed with her, though of course people beyond this audience read her work. Stowe's audience was Southern women.

Having not read Hardy, it's hard for me to guess his audience, but I assume it was middle-class and above in England, and as I said, the aim was to dent the conservative consciousness of the period which still clung to the idea that women were pure if and only if they were sexually untainted, and this was true whether they were raped or not, and if they were raped, they asked for it, and it was really quite easy to be a woman, actually -- just mind your place and don't look too tempting.

I don't know. It's hard for me to assess the thing having never read it, but it seems to me Hardy was attempting to tackle a topic as obvious to our own era and as hazy in his own as slavery was to the slave-holding states (and frankly, most of the Northern states) in the 1850s when the very intelligent (and I don't believe actually prone to sentimental sighing) Harriet Beecher Stowe whipped out a giant can of sentimental novel to prick the consciousness of the female half of the American South. One can read Gilman's work and wonder why Hardy's remarks on the topic were necessary, but Hardy had the audience at the time which Gilman didn't have. (I assume.)

I've read The Picture of Dorian Grey, which was published close to the time Tess was published. QUITE different from Hardy's style. And I understand Wilde was mighty daring in some of his other works. Red Badge was also written in the 1890s. The style is way more like what would come after World War One, for me. Far more minimalist and interior. A quarter century later, Susan Glaspell would play the lead in Trifles. Her style is straightforward and minimalist -- like the works which came along after World War One. (I highly recommend this play.)

So maybe I'm way off in suggesting that Hardy wrote like a Victorian because he was one. OR -- maybe he wrote like a Victorian because the era he lived in was undergoing an enormous shift socially and industrially, and he, like his contemporaries, was standing with one foot in the Victorian era, and one foot in the twentieth century, and he was trying to reach the ones left behind. So he wrote the old way to pull them closer into the new century.

Anyway, I am not well-read enough to speak with authority on this. I guess I just want to suggest that you are not Hardy's intended audience. And you make me really want to read this novel! But if I'm being honest, the idea of opening up a novel you consider such a slog does not tempt me right now, in the midst of a great many assigned slog reads. (ACADEMIC ARTICLES OF BORING.) I crave light genre fiction to go along with my Renaissance syllabus, and stories like Jurassic Park, which I just finished after much gasping at scary velociraptors. (It was my brother's favorite book growing up. You know I like reading the favorite of folks!) I really, really want to read Tess though, and it shall happen after I have a little freedom from the professors!

I think Virginia Woolf would agree with your suggestion that literature should be art without an obvious moral. In A Room of One's Own, she urged women to write without poisoning the work with "messages." (She explains that far better than me. I'm just paraphrasing.) Her point was that women writers, when they did have the opportunity to write, kept revealing anger over their lack of power rather than talent. She considered Jane Austen an example of a female writer who stuck to the craft without trying to moralize, and Charlotte Bronte an example of a writer who might have been great but revealed too much anger in her work. (I disagree on both counts: Bronte was brilliant, and Austen was angry -- it's all over her work.)

These are the sorts of remarks I read about Tess today. They make me excited to try Hardy, honestly -- though I do feel like waiting until I don't also have a syllabus filled up with Shakespeare and John Donne. I've mentioned I have a good friend who loves Hardy's work. She's an inspiring reader & couldn't be more encouraging about him. Different strokes, I guess?

I think in the Victorian era, it was (often) the style to write novels that these days (post modernist era) would seem overwrought and sentimental. Pushing a moral was the style -- it was what people wanted. It was what critics actively hunted for while reading. If Hardy wrote today, with the benefit of all the changes that happened in literature after the First World War, he'd probably write differently.

I think it's easier to appreciate an historical work if you stay within its historical moment, but probably many would disagree with me. Art for art's sake, say some. I like to read old books for what they said or affected in the moment. That's probably why I continue to protest that the book was important. If someone wrote it today it would seem beside the point perhaps, but Hardy wrote in a different world, when people were still blinking in astonishment about the idea that women might want to vote. (However, a woman HAD run for President here in America already. Which I find piping excellent.) x

Wells would object to my abuse of his name, by the way.

"I read Tess the week it published, because it was so different from my own work. I read it because it was remarkably old-fashioned. It cast a female character into a role as old as the earth, and it seemed to speak from some pastoral place that wanted to wedge itself into the oncoming century. As I read it, I realized everything about it that annoyed -- the sense of suffocation, the forced archetypal roles, the melodrama which drenched every chapter with overwrought sighs was rather, as in the work of Austen, the point. Science fiction remarks on the present by considering the future. Tess contemplated the present by considering the past -- by scrutinizing the past and forcing it into the present. If the book were written now, it'd be less melodramatic, perhaps, but would it have been as courageous? My hat is off to the gentleman."
- H.G. Wells, 1938.

“The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.”
― Thomas Hardy

“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

Oh, yes! Emily and ee are inspiring! I love writers who make the medium work for them, rather than working for the medium.

I see your point about selling though. I probably should have selling on my mind as a writer. Maybe I'm too idealistic. I feel like art shouldn't be created by popular vote, but then, most writers probably think that. And probably have for centuries. Thanks, Bunny!

Me too.