"Hardy's portrayal of women character" in his novels

Name: Joshi Toral

Paper: 5 Thomas Hardy as a novelist 

Topic:"Hardy's portrayal of women character" in his novels

SEM: 4,

M.A. part 2.

Year: 2012

Submitted to,

Dr.Dilip Barad,

M.K Bhavnagar University,

Bhavnagar

Introduction:

          Hardy is a remarkable twentieth-century poet as well as a nineteenth-century novelist. He was writer nature in his novel more. In his the Wessex novel are gallery of women portraits. The important women figure can be divided into groups.

          In this we took about his five novels is….

  

          1 Tess of the D’ Urbervilles.

          2 The Return of the Native.

          3 The Mayor of Caster Bride.

          4 Two on a Tower.

          5 The Well Beloved.

         

          In these novels Hardy has portrait women as an object. He is a ported women and the low in Victorian England.

          This “Victorian dichotomy” is a moral and intellectual construct or generalization that was created largely by males without much reference to human realities to say that any women who is not chaste must be depraved is to put half of the human creation into just two categories and this must be a gross over simplification.

          Probably Hardy’s must challenging rejection of his dichotomy was to give “Tess of the D’ Urbervilles the sub-title”, “A Pure Women”.

          Hear Hardy trying to make is that Tess is essentially pure and innocent, despite the fact that she has been exploded and abused by Alec. In this novel Angel seems to regard her in this way, and the irony of this situation is that he himself had a sexual relationship outside marriage. From his point of view there is one low for a woman, another for a man.

“The Return of the Native” Eustain Vye combines the strength of a man with the beauty of a woman. Like the health, Eustacia is untamable, dark and wild. The Victorian ideas displayed in Eustacia’s feminine desires conflicts with this masculinity.

“She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess that is those which make not quite a model woman” (Ch xi)”

The women characters in the novels of Thomas Hardy:-  

(1)        Tess of the D Urbervilles:-

Ø Tess

         Tess was the eldest of the Durbeyfield family, between her mother and Tess, with her nation school education, lay a gap of two hundred years, that between the Jacobean and the Victorian ages. Thu both have their thinking is also different to each other. Tess never ague with her mother diction.

“ {… } Quite a Malthusian towards her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many little sisters and brothers when it was such a trouble to nurse and provide for them.”

          Tess thinking about and help her family, she went to work, as soon as she left school on near by farms hay making, harvesting and preferably, milking and butter- making like at her home.

          Tess overcame her reluctance to go after forming an unfavorable impression of a

Alac D’Urbevilles.

          “She was a fine and handsome girl-not handsome than some other possibly-but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to color and shape.

She was a red ribbon in her hair…”

          “It would always be summer and autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as much of me as you have done through the past summer-time”

          Tess never listens her mother advice. And she despite her mother’s advice. Tess has to tell the truth. She wrote to Angel, but the letter she slipped under his door was thrust under the carpet, and he did not see it.

          Angels’s love was so ideal and that his Victorianism so engrained that he could not compromise when Tess urged him to forgive her.

          “Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you, Angel’

O Tess, forgiveness dose not apply to the case! You were one person, now you are another, My God- how cal forgiveness meet such a grotesque- prestidigitation as that {…} I repeat, the women I have been loving is not you. Another woman in your shape.”

His idealized Tess was ‘dead’ and separation followed almost inevitably.’ Where a woman of the world might have provided, Tess accepted his decision ‘as her deserts’ she ‘sought not her’ own, was not provoked. Though no evil of his treatment of her’

‘Once victim, always victim’

          

“Justice was done and the president of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase had ended his sport with Tess” 

Hardy’s giving sub-title “A Pure Woman”, to Tess aroused great controversy among Victorians. To Hardy, it had nothing to do with purity in the narrow moral sense. Purity is of the spirit, and with a spiritual reference. She is not almost but absolutely pure. Whether morality is of mind or of the hard or both there cannot be two reputable opinions about Tess’s morals.

“She has an attribute which caused D’Urberville’s eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was luxuriousness of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was.”

(2.) The Return of the Native:-

Ø Eustacia Vye:-

A girl of nineteen, she lived with her grandfather captain Vye at Mistover Knap.

She was the daughter of a cordite band master at Badmouth, and well educated. When her parents died she was live in Eldon, and dreaming of a glamorous life at Budmouth or else where.

         

“Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity}

She has the passions and instincts which make a model goddess that is those which make not quite make a model woman. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to from its shadow. She has pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries. Her moods recalled lotus-eaters her motions the ebb and flow of the sea her voice, the viola. To be loved to madness such was her great desire.”

          Hear Hardy portrayal beauty of woman and also her desire. The darkness in which she is introduced on rainbarrow is in harmony with her lot. The telescope and hour gloss which she often carried suggest ‘The desire of something a far’ Clym’s return from Paris was like a man caring from heaven.

“A young and claver man was coming into that lonely heath from, of all contrasting place in the world, Paris. It was like a man coming from heaven.”

          When he spoke to her, her perfervid imagination produced ‘a cycle of visions’. The captain suggested that reading had filled her head with much ‘romantic-non-sense’.

“If Miss Eustacia had less romantic nonsense in her head it would be better for her”

          She wanted “life music poetry, passions, war and all the beating of pulsing that is going on in the great arteries of the world.” In a moment of tragic decision, shortly before her death.

“Still in death the expression of her finely carved mouth was pleasant external rigidity had seized upon it in momentary transition between fervor and resignation”

          Eustacia fails to understand, dose not even try to understand that her own frantic quest for the homeland after heart’s desire live.

(3)The Mayer of Casterbridge:-

Ø Elizabeth- Jane

          Elizabeth Jane was the child of Michael Henchard and Susan, when Henchard sold his wife at Weydon- Priors. She took Elizabeth -Jane with her and emigrated to Canada with Newson. The child died three months after the sale. She is a part of the tragic irony of the story, and also he did not discover that she was Newson’s daughter until after Susan’s death.

“Appeared as a well-formed young woman of eighteen, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour”

          She was almost look-like of her mother, Susan. Hardy writes:

“A glance was sufficient to inform the eye that this was Susan Henchard’s

Grown-up daughter her former spring-like specialties were transferred so dexterously by time to the second figure, her child-

          She was devoted to mother and showed a strong respectable complex.

          This revolution of her mind on her first appearance in the novel, particularly the last sentence in the passage quire above, agrees well with her conclusive feeling much quoted to illustrate Hardy’s thought.

          “Happiness is an occasional episode in the general drama of pain”

And also Elizabeth Jane also says..

“She has a more important narrative function, dependent on her being placed naturally at the center of a web of characters, Susan, Henchard, Farfrae and Lucetta.”

          In this novel we can sys that woman not thickening beyond is limited but at that time mad do what ever they do in his life. And also man use woman as a object in his life.

(4)Two on a Tower;

Ø Lady Viviette Constantine:-

Viviette is a refined Eustacia with incoherent aspirations. She scarcely attracts us at first but succeeds eventually in winning our sympathy. She had unhappy married to Sir Blount Constantine.

          “There was an appearance visits her of confidence on lady Constantine’s face. She wore a heavy dress of velvet and lace, and being –the only person in the spacious apartment she looked small and isolated the soft dark eyes large, and melancholy by circumstances for more than by quality were the natural indices of a warm and affectionate, perhaps slightly voluptuous temperament languishinf for what of something to do, childish or suffer Clinical correlation & further evaluation.”

         

In this novel we see that Viviette is not happy with her married life. And also she was live alone in the society. Now women are suffer in the softy Hardy produce her with this character.

(5)The Well Beloved

Ø The Three Avice

(I)           Avice caro- the first grand mother.

(II)          Anne Avice – the second, mother.

(III)        Avice Pierston- The third.

The pursuit of the well Beloved and The Well Beloved, the central figure,

Jocelyn-Pierston is men obsessed both with the search for his ideal woman and with sculpting the perfect figure of a naked Aphrodite.

         

          The first of the three Avices with who Pierston through he was in love, was a girl of seventeen or eighteen with brown hair and bright hazed eyes.

          Avice the second was a washer woman a daughter of.

“I have loved fifteen a ready! She tells him laughing and when he asked with a sinking heart, Am I one of them? She ponders critically before she replies. “You was; for a week”.

          He is not discouraged, he takes her to London and for short time she was his servant in Landon, where he proposed to her only to discover that she was secretly married at home.

“My mother’s, and my grand mother’s” said she, looking at him no longer as a possible husband, but as strange possiblised relic in human from and were you my great grandmother’ s too?”

         

          In this novel Hardy portrayal how woman is a change ignition but the. His can’ thickening meet a weal beloved in his life. May be he fail to see a thing in his life that’s why three jometion he can’t surch his beloved.

         

Conclusion

          A possible conclusion to be drawn from the forgoing facts is that Hardy’s heroines are characterized by a yielding to circumstances that is limited by the play of incident. They are never quite bad. These qualities in them which saves them from ever being very bad. They have an instinctive self-respect, and instinctive purity.

                  

          Hardy as woman character sees a life of society and also such thing to in thus society. And also see an uncommon woman. Beautiful and nature see also seas woman in society and also camper to nature and woman also. How both effect each other.