Gender Representation In Tess Of The D Urbervilles
The discussion of gender and sexual representation in literature has ancestral references that go back to the classical period of Greece. There we can find works like The Bacchae tragedy of Euripides and Lysistrata comedy of Aristophanes. However, it was not until the XVIII century that a systematic insurgency of women's rights began, headed by Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1792, this British author publishes A vindication of the rights of woman, which discusses that women must have an education commensurate with their position in society. In the XIX century, Thomas Hardy brings the gender issue to Tess of the d'Urbervilles, showing that the condition of women in Victorian England brings unique implications to their trajectory as an individual. The women in Tess of the d'Urbervilles are, in general, submissive to the patriarchal order of society. The supremacy of man over woman in life dramatises the crisis of values in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, placing the heroine, Tess, at the mercy of the masculine judgment. Tess is a victim of male prepotency. She succumbs to the abuses of Alec d'Urberville and afterwards adopts a servile posture towards her husband, even after being godforsaken and banned from social life. The crisis of values is then dramatised by the hierarchical relationship established between the characters and their social position. As a result, this …show more content…
Throughout the plot Alec and Angel have the power of changing the way society assesses the central character moral standards. They are the symbols of the patriarchal power, imposing their will and judgments. However, the heroine at the end of the novel will categorically reject the Victorian rules and will act individually and not in an expected way as a Victorian female lead. At this stage, the storyteller chooses for the first time the distancing effect, i.e., he does not express what is going on in Tess's
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1162 Words | 5 PagesRosemarie Morgan thinks that continuous censure, criticism and frustration is precisely what increased his sympathy towards women who were coerced to conform to the men 's world (Morgan, 2006, p.15). This chapter of the paper makes an attempt to discuss the importance and the influence that the society with its prejudices had on the portrayal of women in the novel, with special focus on the protagonist Tess of the d 'Urbervilles. Social influences and prejudices include the oppression that Tess receives from her family, the church 's denial of a proper burial for her baby, and the society 's judgments on being a mother of an illegitimate child. The second one is gender restraints, illustrated through male
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