Hardy and the Feminist Critique

I am writing my dissertation on Hardy's heroines in The Woodlanders, Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess. I'm arguing against feminist, or otherwise, suggestions that Hardy was a misogynist. I'm also assessing their claims and considering how much these critics have gleamed for themselves.

I'm interested to see what other people feel about Hardy and his heroines. Is he attacking women, their actions and the consequences? Or do you think he is attacking the social hierarchy and showing the limitations on women?

Hardy is indeed guilty of creating female characters with unredeemable qualities. The women never have a legitimate chance to succeed permanently on any level. Tess goes from one tragedy to another and if that were not enough she is forced into the loveless marriage by her mother who places the possibilities of a new found wealth over her maternal responsibilities. One can understand why Tess made the climatic decision she did, but this understanding must be realized while the reader is wearing his/her Hardy "reading glasses."

The same can be said about Sue from Jude the Obscure, whose pathos runs off her like rain. Jude is too love-struck to realize that life with Sue can only end in one way - the archetypal Hardy tragic ending. By the time that Sue leaves Jude he is but a shell of a man, who for lack of sobriety, marries yet another flawed female character in Arabella, Jude's first wife, who tricked him into marrying her not once, but twice.

I often like to place characters from one novel into a completely different novel to see how they would survive. While re-reading "Jude" I kept placing David Copperfield's Dora into the world of Jude or that of Tess. Quite simply she would have been eaten alive by page 2.

While I immensely enjoy Hardy; in truth he is one of my favorite authors, I am not quite sure that Hardy can be completely to blame for the decisions he made while writing during those Victorian times. I see parallels in the "lives" of his characters with the lives of those around him. Returning to "Jude" once more, there is a fairly obvious characteristic that Sue shares with his first wife, Emma Gifford, who like Sue became more religious as she grew older.

Thank you for posting your comments; I will now have to re-read The Woodlanders which I haven't done in quite awhile.

-M. Womack

Hi, I am sorry to see nobody replied to your post since June. It probably doesn't matter now, but I was just going to offer my view that what I get out of his writing is that Mr. Hardy was showing the factors of real-life society upon women. That is, to illustrate the confines and hypocrisies. I never felt that he was demeaning women in his own right.

take care,

Scott T. Shier

It's an interesting question and one that I can't answer at length having only read The Mayor of Casterbridge. In this book, however, I couldn't find anything strongly opposing women, especially in the character of Elizabeth-Jane. She is self-educated, more educated than her stepfather, Henchard, lives on her own at some point, and in the end even "had her own way in everything now. In going and coming, in buying and selling, her word was law." (Ch. XLII)

True, she follows the path of most women at the time in the end: she gets married and settled (though we don't find out whether she has children). Still, she is able to make these choices herself. In reading the book, I did not feel in any way that she was restricted like most women would have been in the nineteenth century. In fact, I felt that she was almost as free as a twenty-first century cosmopolitan woman would be, which is quite foreward thinking if you ask me.

Based on only Tess of the d'Urbervilles, I find the feminist critique utter nonsense to say the least. Whoever wants to claim that Hardy didn't write positively about women doesn't understand the genre he wrote in!

Naturalism is always negative. If it was about women they got raped, had illegitimate children, committed suicide, had affairs, etc. If it was about working class paople they drank, were lazy, homeless, etc.
It is not because he writes sad stories where, sometimes women, can't get out of misery that he is a massoginist! If anything he is indeed addressing the point of the woman in the male society. Alec is horny, rapes her, and for the rest of her life Tess is followed by this thing she didn't even cause, let alone want; to the point where she kills him after a lot misery on her own and then she gets hanged for killing the person who wrecked her life in the first place.

If anything Tess (and I am sure also the rest of Hardy's female characters) are women who desperately want to succeed in life and not fail. And they don't cease to tackle their misery, but society itself prevents such people to succeed. If you look at Tess, she does do whatever she can to get out of misery, despite her lazy father, her naive mother, her non-virginity, her dead baby, her husband who leaves her because she is not a virgin. She keeps believing in herself that the situation can get better, although she wants to die. So I don't see why Hardy would make such a story if he found that women weren't worth the words on the paper he wrote about them...

I think that Hardy was not himself misogynistic but portrayed his women as they were at the time-confined by society's limitations placed on them. The heroines of his fiction are more often than not the victims of what fate has in store for them...

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Originally Posted by MissBethany

I am writing my dissertation on Hardy's heroines in The Woodlanders, Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess. I'm arguing against feminist, or otherwise, suggestions that Hardy was a misogynist. I'm also assessing their claims and considering how much these critics have gleamed for themselves.

I'm interested to see what other people feel about Hardy and his heroines. Is he attacking women, their actions and the consequences? Or do you think he is attacking the social hierarchy and showing the limitations on women?

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Hi,

Just read a poem, by Hardy, today entitled "The Ruined Maid" which seems to me like a strong critique against society's treatment of women.

hope that helps,
David

I agree that Hardy is identifying the social systems that oppressed women in his time. He writes strong females who go through significant change through adversity and come out able to control at least some part of their lives.

I think that Hardy tries to be a feminist but his portrayal of Tess is a bit lecherous.

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Originally Posted by MissBethany

I am writing my dissertation on Hardy's heroines in The Woodlanders, Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess. I'm arguing against feminist, or otherwise, suggestions that Hardy was a misogynist. I'm also assessing their claims and considering how much these critics have gleamed for themselves.

I'm interested to see what other people feel about Hardy and his heroines. Is he attacking women, their actions and the consequences? Or do you think he is attacking the social hierarchy and showing the limitations on women?

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I wrote my MA dissertation on the The Woodlanders, Tess and Jude and focussed upon late-Victorian biological discourses of female sexuality. After intense study I came to the conclusion that however hard he tried to extricate himself from contemporary ideology regarding the female role, and sexuality in particular, Hardy was inevitably influenced by patriarchal society. Although he aimed to represent woman as a sexual being in her own right some of his female characters fail to convince. However, in my opinion he is far from a misogynist and he is rather more condemnatory of patriarchal society than "the fallen woman."

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

I think that Hardy tries to be a feminist but his portrayal of Tess is a bit lecherous.

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What exactly do you mean by that. Would you explain how is it lecherous?

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Originally Posted by MUMUKSHA

What exactly do you mean by that. Would you explain how is it lecherous?

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He goes on and on about how beautiful and irresistable she is.

I have to say, I get a bit fed up with the word misogyny being banded about. Whenever I look up the word misogyny I find it means a 'hatred of women'. However, most the time it seems to be used as a fancy word for 'sexist'. I dare say that even most male chauvinist pigs don't actually hate women. They maybe don't respect women as much as they should, but that's not the same as hate. In the case of Hardy, misogynist seems to mean 'not perfectly non-sexist' or 'indirectly sexist'.

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Originally Posted by kev67

I have to say, I get a bit fed up with the word misogyny being banded about. Whenever I look up the word misogyny I find it means a 'hatred of women'. However, most the time it seems to be used as a fancy word for 'sexist'. I dare say that even most male chauvinist pigs don't actually hate women. They maybe don't respect women as much as they should, but that's not the same as hate. In the case of Hardy, misogynist seems to mean 'not perfectly non-sexist' or 'indirectly sexist'.

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I agree with this. Hardy may seem a bit sexist at times but he seems far more enlightened than most Victorian men. He clearly enjoys women. And notably it's the female characters in Hardy that are most striking.