"The Strength of God" compels you to read this post

The Strength of God. What is that story really about anyway? It can not just be about how peeping on naked women is bad, because that would be too easy. After reading the story about five times I have accumulated a lot of thoughts and a lot of annotations, so I have some ideas about what its all meant to say. Firstly, Reverend Hartman's name has to have some sort of deeper meaning in it, whether Hartman means something of its just an allusion to something, I am not sure, so I looked it up. Hartman does not have a dictionary definition, however it does have origin definitions. In German, Hartman means a hard, brave, strong man, and in English it means strong and brave. This is interesting because Reverend Hartman does not appear to be very brave or strong. He gives in to temptation several times and then completely in the end on page 151. He also does not seem very brave because all of his sins are committed in the dark, solitary, secluded bell tower of his church. He does not do anything that is admirable, which is a denotations of brave, he simply watches a naked girl, punches a window, and rambles to George Willard. So Reverend Hartman's name is the opposite of him, interesting to know. Another part of this story worth analyzing is the fact that his wife's father was an underwear manufacturer. We did not get to discuss this in class and that made me pretty bitter. The denotation of underwear is clothing worn next to the skin under outer clothes. Next to the skin feels extremely intimate, something that Reverend Hartman and his wife are not. And also, since this book has an obvious theme of weird pedophilic type situations, I also see a uncomfortable inappropriate possible relationship between Hartman's wife and her father. She is described as being nervous, which could be attributed to her being abused as a child. Also she married a Reverend, someone safe, someone she knew would not hurt her. So this connection changes how I view the story a little bit, it becomes a little more ironic. The man that she thought would be good to her and just good in general, turns into a creepy peeping tom who ends up punching a window with his fist (pg 152). The fist is connotated as powerful, angry, violent, all words that would also describe an abuser. I think this story has an underlying story about Reverend Hartman's relationship with his wife, whether is was abusive or not, it was still most likely not right.