Marriage, vocation and the individual a feminist approach to thomas hardy’s the return of the native

الملخص EN

Many female characters in Thomas Hardy’s novels distinctly demonstrate the Victorian stereotypes of women: the conventional, obedient housewife or the defiant, liberated dreamer.

Hardy does not illustrate how women should be, but rather how society forces women to adapt to the accepted perception. The objective of this paper is to expose the themes of marriage and vocation in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native.

In fact, Hardy’s overall treatment of men-women relationship within a general feminist or rather thinker’s perspective is a topic demanding much closer attention than it has received.