Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Semester of Degree Completion

2000

Thesis Director

Richard Sylvia

Abstract

In his novel-writing career, Thomas Hardy created a host of female characters struggling to survive in nineteenth-century England. Whether center stage or in the background, these women embody Hardy's insights into the conditions of the female sex--their frailties, strength, miseries, dreams, and finally, their destinies. Throughout his career as a novelist, Hardy's representation of women has not been consistent. His earlier heroines--heroines in the novels preceding The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)--are generally depicted as faulty characters eventually subdued or destroyed. In contrast, the later heroines are portrayed with increasing emphasis on their intellectual or mental traits and moral superiority. This inconsistency, seen in nineteenth-century cultural context, indicates that Hardy's representation of women moves from affirming contemporary ideologies about the nature and role of women toward challenging conventional views about women.

Elizabeth-Jane of The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of Tess of the d' Urbervilles (1891) represent Hardy's overt challenge to contemporary thought about women. Among all the female characters created by Hardy, Elizabeth-Jane and Tess are the strongest and most independent. Both women suffer horrible injustices and demonstrate rare nobility of spirit throughout their ordeals; yet, they meet with very different ends. While Tess is destroyed, Elizabeth-Jane survives, even thrives as the world destroys those around her. This thesis takes a close look at the characters of Elizabeth-Jane and Tess and answers the fundamental question of what brings the two to differing ends.

As one of Hardy's most conspicuous survivors, Elizabeth-Jane has traits important for survival and success. Observant and meditative, she consciously learns about people and events in order to gather wisdom about life. She carefully balances herself amidst the vicissitudes of life, neither consumed by miseries imposed upon her nor transported with unexpected good fortunes. Her equanimity is acquired through renunciation of desire based on sensible appraisal of life's limitations and possibilities. Elizabeth-Jane's triumph suggests that reason, restraint, and compliance with natural and social code are essential for survival and success.

Tess in many respects seems the opposite of Elizabeth-Jane. While Elizabeth-Jane's sexuality is muted, hardly noticed, Tess is described in an extravagantly sensual way. Her sexuality dooms her to be an irresistible object of male desire. Alec desires Tess only as a physical temptation, while Angel idealizes Tess as a spiritual abstraction. Both men fail to appreciate Tess's full identity and worth, and this splitting of Tess as an individual is responsible for Tess's miseries. Unfortunately she is both sexually desirable and poor, thereby more susceptible to being sexually victimized. Tess's situation is continuously aggravated by her class position. She is also the victim of the unjust sexual morality that has its foundation in and also perpetuates gender inequality.

Hardy's presentation of Elizabeth-Jane and Tess as moral authority is drastically different from his earlier depiction of women in which the heroines have to go through a period of "taming" for moral improvement. The change in Hardy's presentation of women at the final stage of his novel-writing career represents Hardy's reaction to the culture as well as personal pressures he experienced at this time. The increasing freedom and independence that women began to claim in the last twenty years of the nineteenth-century made it possible for changes to take place in fictional representation of women. For Hardy, the possibility of creating new images of women was enhanced by his ambition to surpass himself as an artist and by his augmented power to embody contemporary problems in his fiction and challenge his middle-class readers. As an artist bent on portraying the reality of human existence, Hardy expanded and complicated his world of women and vision of female experience by presenting Elizabeth-Jane as a survivor and Tess as "a pure woman".

The thesis includes five chapters. Chapter I examines how Hardy's earlier depiction of women encompasses contemporary sexual ideologies. Chapter 2 traces the cultural and biographical contexts within which Hardy underwent his last phase as a novelist. Chapter 3 and 4 discuss the characters of Elizabeth-Jane and Tess respectively. Chapter 5 examines the significance of these two characters with respect to the consistency/inconstancy of Hardy's vision of female experience.

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