The Bewilderment Of Eve's Sisters And Their Downfall

The Victorian Age was an age when deep-rooted conventions were challenged by modern consciousness. Thomas Hardy, a distinguished writer of the Age, captured the spirit of his time through his portrayal of female characters in a number of his novels. However, as is usually the case, women characters in male writers' texts do not necessarily speak for women themselves in the real world. They are male cultural constructs shaped by the dominant social discourse as well as projections of repressed male desire. These female characters are often caught between tradition and modern consciousness in their pursuit of self-identity and thus are doomed to be ruined one way or another and to fall victims to the dominant patriarchal society. The thesis focuses on four of the female characters portrayed by Hardy in his novels: Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd (FMC), Eustacia Vye in The Return of Native (RN), Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the d'Urbervilles (TD) and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure (JO). It aims to explore the objective and subjective forces which can explain the pattern whereby Hardy's heroines are bewildered in their quest for selfhood and eventually are ruined by the dominant social discourse. The thesis contends that the pattern emerges from an essential and inevitable dilemma these women face: if they conform to and identify with the dominant social structures and moral...