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Relevance to the Field--Part 8
Although there has been Hardy criticism written that is similar to my thesis, I want to take those ideas further. I hope to add to Hardy scholarship by looking at the male and female relationships as complex systems guided by certain social rules (mainly unspoken gender rules and class rules). Instead of focusing on who is weak and who is strong, or how helpless all of the characters are, I want to focus on what each character brings to the love triangle dynamic and how they attempt to cope with the rules that guide it. Because the characters are so deeply involved with each other, I believe the impact each has on the homosocial bonds of the others is worth exploring. When I read Kristen Brady’s Thomas Hardy and Matters of Gender, I came across two quotations that I felt were important. I believe that men have often been stereotyped in criticism, both for better and for worse. When Brady said, “only in recent years have critics begun to look at masculinity itself as contingent and changing rather than as normative and stable,” I immediately thought of the potential for my thesis to expand on this idea (104). Brady concluded her essay by calling for more research: “Hardy’s fiction offers great potential for an analysis of a gender framework in which women are the mediating link between men” (107). This is precisely what I want to explore in my paper. It may be the case that women in literature do fall into the role of the passive victim, but I believe that Sue, Bathsheba, and Elizabeth-Jane are the “mediating links” Brady is thinking of. While they may not always be able to get what they want from the love triangle, they do try to shape and mold it to the best of their abilities. Because the men are also not all-powerful, they try to do the same. I plan to show how they do this, and I also hope to discover why they fail. I believe this failure is due in part to class forces at work, self-destructive tendencies, and repressed desires (possibly homosexual in nature, but also possibly feminine emotions in general). I believe this is an area that has not been fully explored, and I hope my paper offers a fresh interpretation.