Gender and Genre:Women and the Family Script

Abstract

Hardy has always been held accountable for his depictions of femininity—whether by contemporary readers critical of the behavior of his female characters, or by feminist readers critical of Hardy’s narrative procedure towards them. His novels have been approached through the category of gender with notable frequency, even long before the rise of feminist criticism within the academy.¹ The title of Penny Boumelha’s feminist reading of Hardy’s fiction, Thomas Hardy and Women echoes a traditional association between these two subjects. Perhaps more than any other male English novelist, Hardy has been associated with his female creations. At times this critical association has been displaced onto the author, reconfigured as the author’s unhealthy identification with his characters; the familiar charge that Hardy was ‘in love’ with his character Tess is an instance of the drive to connect Hardy with his fictional women.