The typical Thomas Hardy plot places a female protagonist in a love triangle with two male protagonists who are portrayed as opposites. Hardy’s female characters are repeatedly depicted as the center of their novel’s fictional world (Daleski 19). Although the woman is always granted the freedom of choice of exactly which man she will end up with, she is generally viewed as a tragic character, that is, a victim. She consistently makes the wrong choice, which leads to a bad marriage and disastrous sexual relationships. It may seem that Hardy was a sexist and had little regard for the importance of women, while in actuality, just the opposite is true. When writing women, Hardy took a keener interest and created beloved, tender characters, such as Tess Durbeyfield and Eustacia Vye (Marquez 1560). If he didn’t hold women in such high regard

, Hardy may not have continually created such complex female characters.

Although he wrote women as tragic beings, he truly admired their individualism and beauty and spent more time perfecting each of their personalities than he did his male characters. In fact, many Hardy critics agree with Albert J. Guerard who believes while Hardy wrote a number of compelling leading ladies into his works, he only created two men of more than average interest, Jude the Obscure’s Jude Fawley and The Mayor of Casterbridge’s Michael Henchard (Marquez 1562). While Hardy did in fact base the personas of many of his female characters on those of the women he met during his life, he didn’t necessarily want to convey the thought that the women in his life were tragic, dull products of Victorian England society. Instead, he took all their positive traits and used them to create powerful and immortal figures like Tess, Eustacia, and Sue. The hopeless, lonely side to most of his female characters was written in to create an equilibrium in each woman. By balancing power with despair or a noble sense of dignity with a lowly background, for example, Hardy was able to create a line of female characters that could appeal to mostly anybody.

 Marquez, Garcia-Lawrence. World Literature Criticism: 1500 to the Present. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1992.

The Return of the Native’s Eustacia is special in that even though she is responsible for her own selfishness and even lost ambition, she is still admired for her strength and ability to deal with her unfulfilled dreams. Hardy wanted Eustacia to always seem strong and alive. Her drive for life has been compared to mighty Greek Goddesses, powe

Some topics in this essay:
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