Wandering Between Radicalism And Patriarchal Tradition

Thomas Hardy is a great English writer in the 19th century. Through his lifetime, he has composed fourteen novels, known as the Wessex Tales. Wessex is a place with Special geographic characteristics and customs, Hardy creat a series of special women in such a special place.Thomas Hardy's Wessex novels, also called "novels of temper and enviroment", consists of Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of D'Urbervilles, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Under the Greenwood Tree, Jude the Obscure, and two collections of short stories, i.e., A Changed Man and Other Stories and A Group of Noble Dames.The harvest of the proper research and enquiry about Hardy's novels: since W. W. II, the proper literary critics have been focused on aspects of Hardy's philosophical thoughts like natural determinism, views on willpower, pessimissim and fatalism in Hardy's novels. From 1980s on, Chinese scholars on English literature have succeeded in examining the tragic elements, modernist motifs, composition theory and arts, feminist and religious thoughts in Hardy's novels. Among them the outstanding is those research and enquiry in the light of feminist literary theory. However, most of these studies are devoted to some novel or several charaters in it, which results in their falling short of unity and wholeness, and turn out to be arbitary to some extent. So my thesis is aimed to examine and study all the female charaters in Hardy's Wessex novels so as to reveal the contradictions between feminist elements and Male Chauvinism in these novels, based on which the thesis further illustrates the value and humanist thoughtfulness within Wessex novels.My thesis consists of two parts. The first part focuses on analyzing the personality of the female charaters and Hardy's feminist concerns in Wessex novels. I hold that the tragedies of these female characters result from that their female pursuit goes against then traditional male chauvinist ideology, and that Hardy, sympathizing these women with lives and fates, exposes and denounces the oppression and devastation imposed by male chauvinist ideology. The second part probes into hidden patriarchal elements haunted in Wessex novels. In conclusion, I point out that the interwining and interacting between Hardy's concerns for women and male chauvinism imprisons Hardy and his characters between radicalism and tradition, and makes them haunted by them all through their life. male chauvinist ideology.