Talk:Enoch Arden

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There is an incomplete sentence here. I don't know what is trying to be said about the masculinity of Enoch Arden? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 65.27.91.186 (talk • contribs) 01:41, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

I wondered about that too. It's current form as of 2019-01-16 is: "The hero of the poem, fisherman turned merchant sailor Enoch Arden, leaves his wife Annie and three children to go to sea with his old captain, who offers him work after he had lost his job due to an accident; in a manner that reflects the hero's masculine view of personal toil and hardship to support his family, Enoch Arden left his family to better serve them as a husband and father."

I'm not known to be averse to either commas or semicolons or insistent on the Hemingway style, but that is a hard compound sentence to digest.

I also wondered about the "masculine view". On one hand, I could see where Arden's position reflects some of the assumptions of a society in which the man is the expected primary breadwinner, and must fill the role regardless of personal cost. On the other hand, focusing discussion on it being the hero's "view" or anyone's "view" implies either purely personal attitudes on his part or fairly conscious and discrete social pressures. That belief itself would not have been "the hero's masculine view" or any man of the time's "masculine view". It would most likely have been the view of his wife and most women as well.

And a practical necessity- they were not running a welfare state and it was hard to live without doing a lot of work. And most of the work was hard and physical. And if your skills included those of a sailor, you'd likely have to use them. (Even today, leaving one's family to find work to support them is not that alien a concept.) Fishermen and sailors go to sea.

So there is a possible vector for including comment on gender roles in period society, although a brief one. I'm not even sure about that- it's far too basic an aspect of the time, or most times previous to our own, to be especially noteworthy or relevant in an article on the work. Random noter (talk) 22:43, 16 January 2019 (UTC)


 * I've done an extensive cleanup on this section. It was very poorly written and still stinks of OR despite two source cites tacked onto the end. Hopefully it reads better now. 2603:9001:4500:1C09:2420:AD81:1BD5:A876 (talk) 13:27, 8 July 2023 (UTC)