Female Roles In Thomas Hardy's The Mayor Of Casterbridge

Elaine Showalter presents an instance of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge in oder to analyse this text from a female perspective. She begins by Criticising Irving Howe’s as he romanticised and praised the Opening scene of the novel The Mayor of Casterbridge . Thomas Hardy’s, famous work The Mayor of Casterbridge, which begins with the popular scene of the drunken Michael Henchard advertising and selling his wife and infant daughter for five guineas at a country fair. In his study of Hardy, Irving Howe has praised the brilliance, vividness, intensity and power of this opening scene:

Thomas Hardy begins by quoting “To shake loose from one’s wife; to discard that drooping rag of a woman, with her mute complaints and maddening passivity; to escape not by a slinking abandonment but through the public sale of her body to a stranger, as horses are sold at a fair; and thus to wrest, through sheer amoral wilfulness, a second chance out of life - it is with this stroke, so insidiously attractive to male fantasy, that The Mayor of Casterbridge begins.”

It is noticeable and apparent that a woman unless she has been instruct and indoctrinate into being very deeply identified indeed with male culture, will have a dissimilar experience of the scene from the Mayor of Casterbrigde. It would be ideal to quote Howe first to point out how the fantasies of the male critic distort the text as Hardy notifies the readers very little concerning the relationship of Michael and Susan Henchard, and what we can generally see in the ear1y scenes suggests that she not is drooping, complaining, or passive. Her role, though, is a passive one; severely forced and inhibited by her womanhood, and further loaded by her child, there is no way that she c...

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...hird phase which is called the female phase is ongoing since 1920. Here we find women rejecting both imitation and protest. Elaine Showalter considers that both imitation and protest are the signs of dependency. Women in this phase were showing more independent attitudes. They comprehend the place of female experience in the process of art and literature. Women began to focus on the forms and techniques of art and literature. The representatives of this popular female phase were Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf who even began to think of male and female sentences. These two brave figures wrote about masculine journalism and feminine fiction. They redefined and sexualized external and internal experience. The writers such as Rebecca West, Katherine Mansfield, and Dorothy Richardson of the period between 1920 to the current day came under this phase.