Tragic Pattern of Hardy’s Female Characters: Externality of Ideology Contradiction
Tragic Pattern of Hardy’s Female Characters: Externality of Ideology Contradiction
Proposal
Thomas Hardy, known as one of the most important literary figures in Victorian Age, holds a significant position in English literary history. Dale Kramer once claimed that, “it is fair and accurate to say that, apart from Dickens, no novelist’s writing in English has appealed to so many different readers for so many differing reasons.”(Kramer, 1979: 2) Hardy is highly known for his adeptness in portrayal of characters, especially female characters. However, his own gender construct and stereotypes of his time makes his work, as well as his heroines, a rich source of controversies for literary critics. Clearly, his female characters, from the strong-minded Bathsheba to the more intellectual Sue, all have to depend on the men, renounce their own will and finally become subordinate to men. And it is noticeable that heroines in his main works all suffer the same fate: they try to break away from the conventional moral code, as a result of the awakening of selfhood, and pursue a relatively independent life, but all end in ruin, either physically or psychologically, which is doomed right from the start. We can read between the lines that Hardy had great sympathy for women in his time and was gratified to see their awakening, but in all his main works he arranged a similar tragic pattern for them. That explains why most controversial issues in recent Hardy criticism concern his attitudes toward women. No consensus has been reached yet in whether or not Hardy was in favor of feminism and why he created such tragic pattern for female characters in his novels. The present essay is to identify and critique significant pattern in Thomas Hardy’s portrayal of female characters in four of his major novels：Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, Tess of d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, and aims to explore the objective and subjective forces which can
Proposal
Thomas Hardy, known as one of the most important literary figures in Victorian Age, holds a significant position in English literary history. Dale Kramer once claimed that, “it is fair and accurate to say that, apart from Dickens, no novelist’s writing in English has appealed to so many different readers for so many differing reasons.”(Kramer, 1979: 2) Hardy is highly known for his adeptness in portrayal of characters, especially female characters. However, his own gender construct and stereotypes of his time makes his work, as well as his heroines, a rich source of controversies for literary critics. Clearly, his female characters, from the strong-minded Bathsheba to the more intellectual Sue, all have to depend on the men, renounce their own will and finally become subordinate to men. And it is noticeable that heroines in his main works all suffer the same fate: they try to break away from the conventional moral code, as a result of the awakening of selfhood, and pursue a relatively independent life, but all end in ruin, either physically or psychologically, which is doomed right from the start. We can read between the lines that Hardy had great sympathy for women in his time and was gratified to see their awakening, but in all his main works he arranged a similar tragic pattern for them. That explains why most controversial issues in recent Hardy criticism concern his attitudes toward women. No consensus has been reached yet in whether or not Hardy was in favor of feminism and why he created such tragic pattern for female characters in his novels. The present essay is to identify and critique significant pattern in Thomas Hardy’s portrayal of female characters in four of his major novels：Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, Tess of d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, and aims to explore the objective and subjective forces which can
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