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Feminine Absorption In Tom Brown's Schooldays

Decent Essays

Feminine Absorption As the quintessential English public school identity formation experience novel, Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays highlights the masculine identity with the Rugby School experiences of bullying, sport, and compassion. As the roadmap for the English adolescent’s journey toward manhood, Hughes creates the formula to transcend from the adolescence into the true manliness form. Hughes’s character, Tom Brown, can only complete this ideal masculine model by absorbing the compassionate, motherly female qualities instead of rejecting them. Tom’s journey toward his manhood starts by his departure from not only his home to private boarding school, but also from the matriarch. Hughes describes their mother-son relationship saying, “Their love was as fair and whole as human love can be, perfect self-sacrifice on the side meeting a young and true heart on the other (57). His connection to his mother did not sever when he does go away to school. Even though it may seem that the relationship must sever, it truly cannot. It must however transfer from the mother to her son. Tom “manages to fill two sides of a sheet of letter-paper with assurances of his love for dear momma” (58). Tom’s motherly love must continue for this feminine quality of love to transfer. When his letter is duly delayed due to a letter sealing technicality, two boys tease him by calling him “Young mammy-sick!” (58). It is here that Tom experiences his first bout of bullying and the loss of

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