Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy - Elizabeth Langland (essay date 1993)

Elizabeth Langland (essay date 1993)

SOURCE: "Becoming a Ma n in Jude the Obscure," in The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet, University of Illinois Press, 1993, pp. 32-48.

[In the following essay, Langland evaluates Jude's dilemma of identity in terms of his struggles with the social ideologies of class and gender.]

Because Thomas Hardy's representations of women, by and large, exceed the simple stereotypes scholars initially identified as characteristic images of women, feminist critics early turned to his novels. While those first studies opened up possibilities of a rewarding feminist approach to Hardy, recent work looks more broadly at gender, exploring the problem of masculinity as well as femininity. Poised between centuries (nineteenth and twentieth), between cultures (rural and urban), and between classes (peasantry and middling), Hardy engaged profound social dislocations in...

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