The Portrayal of Women in the Victorian Age. Gender in Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge"

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 3.0, University of Marburg (Institut fr Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: 10 090 00016 HS: "The English Novel: From the Beginnings to the 21st Century", language: English, abstract: This term paper focuses on the topic of gender and the investigation of Hardy's portrayal of women as it emerges from the novel. In order to prove my thesis, I will reflect in how far Hardy follows major trends of Victorian fiction in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Next, I will depict the Victorian ideal of women with regard to fiction and society. Finally, I will prove my claim that Hardy's ambivalent view of women, which embraces both conventional and modern ideals, is valid for The Mayor of Casterbridge, because it portrays women both as inferior and superior. Accordingly, I will show that Hardy's heroines deviate from the prevalent Victorian ideal of women. Therefore, I will analyse crucial aspects like Hardy's authorial point of view as well as Henchard's relationship to Susan, Lucetta, and Elizabeth-Jane, in the novel.
My thesis matters because "[...] the appeal of Hardy as a novelist [...] has long been vital, increasingly so in recent years [...]". Besides, "[t]he tension [...] of Hardy's representation of women [...] makes his work one of the richest and most complex sources of feminist commentary in the realist novel". Recent criticism of Hardy focused on Marxist and feminist theories by reassessing Hardy's novels as revolutionary. This issue remains important because women have been oppressed for centuries, while Hardy's fiction contributed to the women's struggle for emancipation.