One of Thomas Hardy’s most popular novels now comes with a trigger warning after students were told it contains ‘upsetting scenes’ about the ‘cruelty of nature’ and ‘rural life’.
‘Far from the Madding Crowd’, which depicts the brutal reality of Victorian rural life, has been slapped with a content warning by the University of Warwick.
Erm, I hate to break it to you, but pretty much Hardy’s entire opus was dedicated to exposing the above cruelty of nature and rural life. His main target, however, was the stifling effect of Victorian Britain’s rigid class structure on the human spirit, made all the worse by rural life — there was no escape for the “low-born”, and they were condemned to a hopeless and brutal existence (e.g. The Woodlanders).
And Madding and Woodlanders are far from the worst; wait till these snowflakes get to The Mayor of Casterbridge, where they’ll see the horrifying consequences of a single immoral action.
I think I’ll go and re-read the above three, just for fun.
we need to move beyond just trigger warnings and remove all safety features off of everything and let nature take its course for a while.
JQ
Kim,
a while back you posted your home schooling booklist and I have found it very helpful to broaden my horizons. My first college degree was in engineering so my college courses were heavily into math, science and engineering rather than literature and such. I’ve been chipping away at the list you posted and also a book list put out by John Lovell at Warrior Poet Society.
I’d love it if you could put out a list of recommended movies too.
JQ
Heaven forfend that they read Dickens!