| dc.description.abstract | This thesis considers the roles, influence, and importance of landowning women, and women working with the land, in Hardy’s nineteenth-century Wessex, drawing on historical and literary sources. I shed light on the ways in which they were situated within their communities, with a focus on Hardy’s writing, from ‘How I Built Myself a House’, to Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Recounting different experiences of women’s connections to the land, considered collectively, the texts provide an interrogation of the legal and social oppression of women. While competing currencies, from beauty to social standing, allowed Hardy’s women moments of agency, their sex ultimately shapes and restricts their experiences. Through their connections to natural and built environments they experience fulfilment and find new responsibilities, but such autonomy is frequently temporary as they return to the positions society dictates they should inhabit.
My project shows that the complex and changing relationship between Hardy’s female characters and the spaces around them, natural and built, was crucial to their sense of self and of belonging within a wider societal framework. Ownership of property and land was one means through which some of these women could forge a role for themselves beyond marital and maternal expectations. The spaces inhabited by women are valued in Hardy’s work as vital sites for self-expression, but he also explores the obstacles faced by women who sought to use their relation to the land to exercise a greater degree of autonomy.
Although the possession of property might seem to offer a sense of security and stability, the threat of losing it remained, for many, ever-present. Property and its loss preoccupied Victorian critics, commentators, and writers alike. The theme of the creation, management, and dissolution of homes runs through Hardy’s work, calling into question the structures and ideologies which determined women’s social spaces and limited their freedoms. Ultimately, their experience of home was shaped by men.
Drawing on periodicals, newspapers, and census data, and exploring their reciprocal relationship with literary texts, I explore late nineteenth-century anxieties around class and gender, in particular the control of land by women, the inheritance of homes by women who would not traditionally have inhabited them (such as Paula Power in A Laodicean), and cross-class relationships, as charted in Two on a Tower and The Hand of Ethelberta; these themes threaten to disrupt boundaries of class and distract women from their domestic responsibilities.
The thesis is arranged thematically, beginning with the outdoor space of the farm, and moving to the adjacent, yet separate, space of the dairy. The third and final chapters consider ways in which Hardy interrogates the idea of home, challenging the notion that it was the natural domain of women and a sanctuary from the pressures of the outside world. My focus on the ways in which women in Wessex negotiated ideologies of gender, class, and public and private boundaries, sheds new light on the tension between expectation and desire. While new ways of living might seem to be within reach, the worlds of Hardy’s fiction cannot, or will not, accommodate women’s wishes or unconventional behaviours. | en_GB |
