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 für 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.