International Journal of English and Literature (IJEL) ISSN 2249-6912 Vol. 3, Issue 4, Oct 2013, 1-10 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd.

HOLDING MIRROR UP TO THE VICTORIAN SOCIETY: THE PREDICAMENT OF WOMEN IN THOMAS HARDY’S THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

AZADEH DAVOUDI FAR English Department, Kakatiya University, Warangal, Andhra Pradesh, India

ABSTRACT

In the Victorian cultural institutions were an important part of life. Socio-cultural institutions such as church and marriage were deeply rooted in patriarchy. The Victorian society, dominated as it was by patriarchal ideology, restricted women physically and mentally, and severely limited their economic opportunities. Throughout the nineteenth century women raised their voice against socio-cultural configuration that viewed women’s true destiny as fulfilling the role of wife and mother. They condemned society with its cultural ideology that rendered women passive and socially vulnerable.

In his attempt to expose the reality of his society, Thomas Hardy wrote novels which are heavily influenced by social factors. His novels frankly deal with various social institutions and honestly address social problems. As a regional novelist, he focused primarily on the social institutions and problems of his region. The customs and conventions of this region find prominent treatment in his novels. As a novelist Hardy had the ability to perspectivize on the issues of his age such as marriage, sex, and women’s rights. While doing so, he attaches much importance to the position of women in society and the trials and tribulations they underwent. In The Return of the Native he emphasises how marriage was considered an emotional and intellectual prison for women in the nineteenth century. He portrays two opposite women, Eustacia Vye and Thomasin Yeobright, in order to explore the reality of his society regarding marriage scripts.

KEYWORDS: Social Institutions, Victorian Woman, Patriarchal, Independent, Submissive Woman

INTRODUCTION

In almost all of his novels Hardy, as a realist novelist, emphasizes that individuals as well as society are in the process of change. His novels deal with the problems of the Victorians as they adjust themselves to the changes in society and their failure to change the social conventions in response to their needs. He explores the reality of his society and reflects them in his works taking into account new insights.

The Return of the Native is one of the most popular of Hardy’s novels. It was published in 1878 and it explores the realities of the time. The setting of the novel is created in accordance with the details of the heath which Hardy himself lived in. Hardy attempts to draw the picture of the heath and the influence of the place, together with its rigid laws, on the lives of the characters. Many critics believe that the setting, Egdon Heath, has a significant role to play in the novel. Egdon Heath is no less than a living character in the novel. Bonamy Dobree points out: “The plot ... of the Return of the Native would not be what it is but for the character called Egdon Heath, which streaks the whole tale” (28). It has a great background, vital and vivid, which is a symbol of the real circumstances in which man lives. The characters are treated in the context with its rigid milieu. Like in the other Hardy novels, at the centre of The Return of the Native lies a love story, courtship and marriage. The characters face marital choice. The novel presents various themes such as sexuality, politics, vital decisions on marriage, and nature versus society. Again like in the other Hardy novels, in this novel nature and society are portrayed in opposition. John Peck says, 2 Azadeh Davoudi Far

In a Hardy novel you should always be able to find evidence of a society versus nature tension at the heart of the material.... The first thing that might strike you is that Egdon Heath must in some way represent nature: even at the outset it seems reasonable to speculate that the order of society will be set against the untamed wildness of the heath. The characters who live here are likely to be caught between the pull of society and the pull of nature, including their own natures. (22)

Hardy who was aware of the rigid strictures on marriage uses the subject of marriage in almost all of his novels. He emphasises how marriage was considered an emotional and intellectual prison for women. He closely witnessed the complex and rigid traditions governing marriage and he attempts to explore the implication of his heroines’ physical and emotional susceptibility to social conventions and their consequences in the face of apparently overwhelming social pressure.

MAIN TEXT

In The Return of the Native Hardy unveils his criticism of the marriage codes and challenges the social and moral codes that shaped Victorian culture. He portrays two opposite women in order to explore the reality of his society regarding marriage scripts. Both Eustacia Vye and Thomasin Yeobright are limited by their surroundings and patriarchal ideology of their society, but their attitudes and responses to these limitations reveal their differences.

Thomasin and Eustacia have entirely different views on marriage and they reflect their different expectations of life. Eustacia considers marriage a mean to fulfil her unconventional desires. She attempts to attain her satisfaction outside the traditional role of Victorian women, but Thomasin is represented as an ideal woman from the Victorians’ perspective. She is a realistic and level-headed girl who declines to take on any social roles other than that of the ‘angel of the house’. She gets married so that she can follow the traditional way laid down of society.

By contrasting his heroines with one another, Hardy shows the differences in women’s personality. Thomasin, like many Victorian women sees marriage as a means to solve her economic problems. Her need for a supporter runs counter to Eustacia who desires to be independent by perusing her dreams. Here Hardy shows the victimization of both Thomasin and Eustacia within the Victorian social spectrum. He emphasises that society, on the basis of social scripts, did not allow women to develop their personality apart from the angelic housewife role prescribed for them. He feels sympathy for Thomasin and her colourless traditional way of life and also for Eustacia the aspiring woman whose desires are shattered by social interference. He believes that it is the Victorian society which determines women’s destiny.

The story begins with the failure of the marriage ceremony of Damon Wildeve and Thomasin Yeobright. When she returns to her aunt unmarried, Thomasin feels ashamed in the presence of Mrs. Yeobright. She apologizes to her because of the unexpected outcome of her affairs which humiliates her aunt. Thomasin is aware of the power of the social laws and how she is perceived by the heath people. She does not like to be blamed and seen as a “lost woman” (123). She wants to be understood as she has been and considered a person with good intentions. She is deceived by Wildeve who tricks her and causes the failure of marriage ceremony with an irregularity in the marriage licence that he knows in advance. In this condition she pursues her idea of marriage with Wildeve just because she is apprehensive about the possible interpretations of the heath people about her failed marriage.

As a submissive woman Thomasin follows her society’s expectations of an ideal woman. She fears the gossip of people about her failure to bring about her marriage and the possibility of a humiliating skimming-ride to mock her relationship with Wildeve. She knows that the marriage script reflects not only upon her own life, but also upon the members of her family. Mrs. Yeobright also shows her concern when she sees Wildeve and blames him for not Holding Mirror up to the Victorian Society: The Predicament 3 of Women in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native acknowledging his mistake regarding his first proposal and for his hesitation to marry her. She says, “It is a great slight to me and my family; and when it gets known there will be very unpleasant time for us (46). So, Thomasin’s main purpose in wanting to marry Wildeve is not for love but for her family’s reputation. Although she believes that love should be the reason for getting married, she abandons her ideas to put an end to the rumours surrounding her. She says to her aunt, “I am a practical woman now. I don’t believe in heart at all. I would marry him under any circumstances” (175). Knowing well the traditional marriage script, Mrs. Yeobright understands that her insisting on getting married to Wildeve is the only course she should pursue at that time.

By portraying Thomasin this way Hardy wants to show women’s oppression and how lack of opportunities render women vulnerable and force them into marriage. The situation is not special only to Thomasin, but also for many Victorian women who accept their traditional ‘angel in the house’ role in life. A Victorian feminist, Josephine Butler, who is known as a firm supporter of widened opportunities for women, was angry about this cruelty inflicted on women. She objects to societal forces which would like –

Solemnly to inform the women who are striving for some work or calling which will save them from starvation, and who have no human being but themselves to depend on, that their proper sphere is home, – that their proper function is to be wives and mothers, and their happiness is to be dependent on men!” (xxviii-xxix).

Instead of developing her personality, Thomasin thinks that her submissive role will bring her peace and happiness. Hardy aims to show that many Victorian women accepted what society dictated to them, because the idea of the weaker sex was deeply embedded in their culture and they did not realize that there was an equality issue to begin with.

... the issue of marriage became a primary source of anxiety for Victorian women, trapped between pervasive ideology and counting fact. Taught that a husband was essential to their existence, and all their training directed to the art of catching one, they had the choice of being relegated to the ranks of abnormality if they did not marry, or being forced into what many regarded as degrading sexual competition, in which the losers faced economic hardship as well as social obliteration. (Foster 7)

Eustacia does not like the conventional life of the villagers. It is evident in her expectations and desires. Her desire to have a different life drives her to do whatever she thinks workable to reach her goals. She hates Egdon and has “dreams of cosmopolitan pleasures” (Harvey 67). Eustacia cannot tolerate the village culture and does not like to modify her behaviour on the basis of the prescriptive culture of Egdon. So she knows herself to be a victim like other women who are controlled by the unfriendly social codes. The heath with its rigid conventions spoils any chance of escape from her current life. Empathizing with her spontaneous urges, Hardy reveals the fact that her interests are in conflict with the use of society.

Eustacia sees the heath as an obstacle to her freedom and to her chance to fulfil her dreams. Frustrated by her role and the place she lives in, she attempts to save herself from the traditional way of life in the heath. She does not desire to have any reconciliation with her surroundings. She cannot understand “why a woman of this sort could live on Egdon Heath?” (74). She does not feel a sense of belonging to this place. Her non-conformity and rebelliousness put her in a different situation in her society and consequently she is not known as an ideal woman. She says, “But I do desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life” (308). So People of Egdon never consider Eustacia one of their own. They think that she is an unconventional woman who lives in her own world without respecting the social conventions and cultural norms. 4 Azadeh Davoudi Far

Like many women of the Victorian Era, women of Egdon too are not allowed to have a career, purposeful activity or congenial relationship outside home. Eustacia is conscious of her unsatisfied desires and she assumes that women are born only to be housewives and to care for their husbands and children; they belong to the world of expectations. She believes that such prescriptions close the doors on the outside world for women.

In this respect, Hardy represents the problems of the Victorian women who did not have formal occupations and criticizes the patriarchal ideology which necessitated economic dependence of women on men. He points out that the cultural imperative of women’s independence strongly restricts the lives of women of all social classes. Eustacia who hails from a middle class family is also obliged to follow the dictates of her society that rejects employment for women outside home.

When Diggory tells Eustacia about the possibility of being employed by a widowed-lady who “wants a young company-keeper to read and sing for her” (104), she rejects it and thinks it is not suitable for her to work a domestic servant. She says, “It is to wear myself out to please her! And I won’t go. O, if I could live in a gay town as a lady should, and go my own ways, and do my own things, I’d give the wrinkled half of my life!” (104) Eustacia rebels against the rigid social laws of her society and wishes to be economically independent. What she exactly wants is to follow her own wishes not what the society expects her to do.

While in the Victorian society marriage was compulsory for women and there was no other chance for women to find a suitable career outside home, Hardy attempts to reconcile his perceptions of women’s desires with their actual position in society. In spite of self-sacrificed and long suffering that were the hallmarks of the Victorian women, Hardy’s heroines are strong willed and high spirited women who struggle against the social codes. In The Return of the Native Hardy creates the high spirited Eustacia who, by defying her prescribed role in society attempts to provide for herself a life of wider personal freedom than the one customarily granted to women. D.H. Lawrence believes that Hardy always tried to pit his characters against society. They attempt to show their dissatisfaction of the social laws.

Eustacia, Tess, or Sue ... were not at war with God, only with society. Yet, they were all cowed by the mere judgement of man upon them, and all the while by their own souls they were right….Which the weakness of modern tragedy, where transgression against the social code is made to bring destruction, as though the social code worked our irrevocable fate. (30)

In almost all of his novels, Hardy depicts several love-affairs and matrimonial troubles to reveal his recognition of the hardships the patriarchal structure of the Victorian society imposed upon women. He portrays unconventional women like Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd who refuses to become a man’s possession as a wife. In The Return of the Native he demonstrates the struggle of women as they establish their identities. Throughout the novel Eustacia rebels against the traditional view of women and attempts to satisfy her desires while searching her true identity outside the heath and its traditions governing marriage.

Hardy shows his awareness of the fundamental limitation of contemporary scripts and criticizes the social laws of his time with its unjust imposition on women. Eustacia is represented as one of the many Victorian women who do not find an opportunity to reconcile with the external world, physically and socially, because of her need for self-fulfilment and self-discovery. Hardy portrays her as a young girl who is trapped in a hostile atmosphere and she can neither accept it nor escape from it. The heath stands for the Victorian society as an entity that is unfriendly to women and prevents any possibility of self-assertion and freedom. Holding Mirror up to the Victorian Society: The Predicament 5 of Women in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native Like other Hardy’s heroines, Eustacia is also a beautiful woman. She has romantic aspirations. Her great desire is to be loved passionately. For her, love is the tonic that keeps loneliness away. She is in love with the idea of being in love in return. But she does not see people of the heath as worthy of her consideration. Eustacia knows that many women experience love by showing their faithfulness to their husbands. She believes being faithful for the sake of love smacks of lack of passion. Eustacia does not follow the norms of her society, because she likes to act according to her deepest needs, and she does not pay attention to others’ beliefs and expectations. Her strong desire to be loved madly and live in a passionate love causes her to do different things in the novel. Hardy portrays Eustacia as a sensual woman, but the sensual aspects of her life are not like those of Arabella in Jude the Obscure that have led to the tragic end of the story. Here he wants to attack the patriarchal sexual ideology that prevented women from enjoying the sexual aspects of life while considering sexual appetite in men to natural. Rosemarie Morgan says,

The world of freedom and action Hardy’s greater heroines would shape for themselves disintegrates as rapidly as the man-made world superimposes upon them its own curbing shape. With the advent of adulthood and a fully awakened sexual consciousness, every explanatory move towards self-discovery, self-realisation and sexual understanding, meets with obstruction in a male-dominated world. (41)

Eustacia longs for a glorious union. She has high hopes about her future husband and expects him to fulfil her wishes in life. Eustacia has a strong will for autonomy and wishes to liberate herself from the conventions of the heath. When she learns about Mrs. Yeobright’s son, Clym Yeobrgiht, from the farmers, she is very impressed as she knows that he has been working as a diamond merchant in Paris and is soon coming back home. She is especially excited when the farmers think that Eustacia and Clym would make a good match as a couple. One of the two farmers, Humphrey, thinks that Eustacia and Clym are both educated and have a certain taste for things. He also thinks that they are suitable for each other, because their family’s rank.

The farmer’s conversation ignites the romantic fantasies in Eustacia’s mind and she gets interested in the subject of their discourse. She thinks that if she marries Clym, she can escape from the confines of her present life. When she becomes aware that he comes from Paris, it seems to her that “It was like a man coming from heaven” (121). Without seeing him, she falls in love with Clym “partly because he was exceptional in this scene, partly because she had determined to love him, chiefly because she was in desperate need of loving somebody after wearying of Wildeve” (158). Her colourless life gets filled with dreams about him as an ideal love. Clym’s arrival means everything to her. She breaks her relationship with Damon and sends him a note telling him that she will no longer see him.

Here, Hardy reveals one more objectionable habit of the Victorians, i.e. women’s viles to trap a man in order to fulfil their own wishes. Mrs. Yeobright, who has witnessed Thomasin’s pre-marital problems, is concerned about her son’s future and does not want him to live in the heath and ruin his future, especially when she guesses that Eustacia loves him. She believes that Eustacia, who does not obey the social proprieties, is not suitable for her son as a bride. She rejects any kind of affection between Eustacia and Clym, and refuses to believe that Eustacia has influenced him. She says, “Good girls don’t get treated as witches even on Egdon” (190). Hardy thus criticizes the narrow-mindedness of people who refuse to recognize her as an individual in her own right.

Mrs. Yeobright refuses to accept that her son has already made the decision to stay in the heath; Clym wants to pursue his idealistic dreams by building a school, and starts teaching. He wants to be “a schoolmaster to the poor and ignorant, to teach them what nobody else will” (193). In spite of her introducing Eustacia as a lazy and dissatisfied woman, Clym has practical reasons to want to marry her. He thinks, “If I take a school an educated woman would be invaluable as 6 Azadeh Davoudi Far a help to me” (213). In this respect, Clym’s primary purpose is not to get married but to find an intellectual companion who can be of assistance to him. Pierre d’Exideuil discourses the differences in the expectations of the couple.

The young woman comes unconsciously to love the being who is destined to occupy the void within her soul, while Clym goes forth to find the companion who should become the help-mate he seeks in his projects of study and instruction. The preparation is, therefore, ideal, solitary, and imaginative. (73)

In fact Clym and Eustacia both deceive themselves. Because of the wrong expectations from marriage, few days after their marriage they start suffering from the unhappiness resulting from marriage. They finally realize that both are pursuing selfish wishes and ignoring the other’s. Their marriage even in its early phase is boring and repetitive, especially for Eustacia who has seen Clym as a means to escape from the heath. So this monotony is more painful for her than it is for Clym.

What makes her more disappointed is when he tells her that he is going to do “furze-cutting” because of his poor eyesight. Eustacia now begins to think that her dreams would not be fulfilled in this marriage and sees her union with Clym as her “worse luck” (279). Hillel Matthew Daleski believes that the failure of their marriage is inevitable, because they see each other in terms each other’s ideal images in their minds, and not as they really are (88).

Eustacia finds herself tied not only to the role of a wife, but also to the role of a silent woman. She cannot tolerate this situation. Since she realizes that Clym cannot provide her the kind of life she has dreamed of, she attempts to escape from the consequences of her unsuccessful marital life by revisiting her feeling of loneliness prior to her marriage. She feels like a “painful object, isolated and out of place” (389). Meeting Wildeve in the village festival gives Eustacia a new energy. When they dance together, she feels that “she had entered the dance from the troubled hours of her late life as one might enter a brilliant chamber after a night walk in a wood” (288). This time Wildeve seems to her like the only means of escape from Egdon. When they walk together, she does not care what others might think about them. Her rebellious nature surfaces and she says, “I shall accept whose company I choose, for all that may be said by the miserable inhabitants of Egdon” (291).

Eustacia finally decides go away with Wildeve’s help. This decision shows that she has no more expectations from her marriage. She is sorry for her wasted life. Eustacia knows that Wildeve’s assistance is necessary in order to break free from the confines of Egdon. Thus, rather than trying to find a way to reconcile with her husband, she makes personal plans for the future. Joseph Warren Beach says, “The story as a whole is a continuous record of Eustacia’s vain attempt to escape the limitation of Egdon through the means of love” (95).

In the Victorian Era men were allowed to be independent at home and in the society, but women had no possibility of economic independence. On the basis of marital script, they were required to be dependent on their husbands. Eustacia feels like as a prisoner in the small world of Egdon. She likes to be independent and leave Egdon alone with Wildeve not accompanying her, but she has no money and therefore has to depend on him financially to reach Paris.

It is the last scene Eustacia appears in the novel she throws herself into a stream and dies. It is not clear though whether she has committed suicide. Hardy emphasizes what drives Eustacia to death is her sense of the impossibility of living a fulfilled life after many failed struggles to achieve it. She uses marriage as a means to reach her goals. Rather than seeing her dreams fulfilled, she confronts a grim situation in which she is required to be dependent economically and emotionally on her husband and play the role of silent housewife. Hardy points out through her that one of the reasons that had kept Victorian women silent was their economic insecurity. Holding Mirror up to the Victorian Society: The Predicament 7 of Women in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native Eustacia can accept neither her sick husband, Clym, nor a lover like Wildeve, because she knows that neither of them would help her realise her dreams. She does not allow herself to be dominated by these men. Perhaps, she sees death as her only means of deliverance from the misery of her life.

Chittaranjan Sengupta in her book, Thomas Hardy: The Novelist of Tragic Vision, interprets Eustacia’s ruin as a love’s tragedy. She believes that the main reasons for her downfall are her tragic flaws such as selfishness, self-deceiving nature and also the flaws in other character which accelerate her downfall. We can agree with Sengupta since Eustacia has many tragic flaws; but we should not at the same time ignore the role of the society in leading her to her tragic end. Apart from her personal faults, her society makes it impossible to fulfil her dreams. In society which does not care for women’s desires and needs and does not allow women to fulfil their dreams, death seems to be the only solution for them. This is the point Hardy drives home in The Return of the Native. Given all the constraints there seems to be just one solution to Eustacia’s problems – death, and death in what she embraces finally.

In almost all of his novels Hardy describes the nature of woman as “amoral” (Brady 96). Hardy creates characters who are “female” rather than “feminine,” because they are close to nature, and they suffer from the “absence of moral feeling” (96). To Hardy, they are not “fallen women” but “amoral” women. Despite her strong desire for autonomy so that she would satisfy her wishes and pave the way to a happy life, Eustacia finds herself caught in the game of her society. She tries to put her own ideas into action, but her society rejects them, because they run counter to the conventional structure of it. Eustacia thus fails to liberate herself from the conventions of her society, and pays a heavy price for it.

Hardy demonstrates that it is impossible to recognize any women’s problems with a mind free from bias in society. He complains against the social scripts imposed upon women rather than the process of self-definition that arises from definable characteristic of their biology or emotional composition. Thus, a woman was always a woman and the society with its prejudiced conventions did not allow her to succeed in changing her status in society, because changing laws, institutions, customs, and public opinions for men and women to become truly equal was a very difficult task. On a larger scale, women had the worst part to bear when they entered into marriage.

Thomasin also experiences an unhappy life with Demon Wildeve because of various reasons. Wildeve is an unreliable, flirtatious man. Their marriage which happens rather quickly, is not based on mutual love. Wildeve marries Thomasin to take revenge on Eustacia who deserted him for Clym. Wildeve supports Thomasin, neither emotionally nor economically. He does not give money to Thomasin even to meet her essential needs. With her passive nature Thomasin is the best example of Victorian women who face many economic problems because of their need to be dependent on men. Moved by her economic problems Mrs. Yeobright wants to give Thomasin her share of the inheritance, fifty guineas, through Christian Cantle.

When the meetings between Eustacia and Wildeve become more frequent, the lack of love and communication between Wildeve and Thomasin gets widened even as they have a baby. Thomasin eventually learns about the relationship between Eustacia and Wildeve and asks him for an explanation. But he does not respect her and regards her as little better than a “domestic animal” (385). By depicting her in these terms, Hardy wishes to emphasise how the lack of opportunity to be independent rendered Victorian women vulnerable. It is not a situation special to Thomasin but common to many women who accept the role of housewives. Thomasin plays the role of the submissive woman who abandons the chance of developing her own personality because her society hardly permits it.

Her silence and unquestioning attitude towards her husband speaks of the position of the Victorian women who were so utterly helpless. Thomasin knows her husband’s indifference to her, but she still believes that marriage is the 8 Azadeh Davoudi Far greatest fulfilment in her life. She therefore follows woman’s cultural script to be a wife and a mother and not to complain. Harriet Taylor in her book, The Enfranchisement of Women, argues that the trap in which Thomasin is scripted is not an uncommon one for woman of her culture.

It is neither necessary nor just to make imperative that they shall be either mothers or nothing.... There is no inherent reason or necessity that all women should voluntarily choose to devote their lives to one animal function and its consequences. Numbers of women are wives and mothers only because there is no other career open to them. (10)

Thomasin’s attitude also shows the difference between Eustacia and her. As opposed to Eustacia who attempts to find a way out of the heath since she finds it unbearable, Thomasin likes it. Symbolically, Thomasin’s acceptance of the heath shows her acceptance of the culture of the region, and Eustacia hatred for the place shows her dislike of its conventions and customs. Merryn Williams says,

Thomasin the “fair, sweet and honest” country girl is radically different from Hardy’s earlier heroines. She makes no extravagant demands on life, like Eustacia, but is content to fulfil herself naturally as a wife and mother (significantly hers is almost the only marriage in the novels that produces a child). (138)

Thomasin is a humble girl with realistic expectations from life. She does not have dreams that are impossible to realise given the culture of which she is a part. Although she knows the difficulties of marriage with Wildeve, her knowledge of her society convinces her to behave appropriately. She is also never impulsive towards Wildeve even when he ill treats her. When she comes to know that Wildeve has been meeting Eustacia, she does not react aggressively but sensibly. Thomasin realizes that Wildeve and Eustacia are about to elope together, but she hides the fact from Clym in order to keep him happy. Thomasin remains a loyal wife till the death of her husband. Although Wildeve has ill treated her since their premarital days till the time of his death, she accepts him as her husband with all his weaknesses.

CONCLUSIONS

Thus, in The Return of the Native Hardy mainly concentrates on the problems of women in the Victorian era. For this purpose he depicts two different Victorian women, Eustacia and Thomasin. He shows their different attitudes towards marriage, their expectations as well as their reaction to the results of their decisions and choices. Hardy demonstrates wrong assumptions regarding the role of husband and wife would not lead to happens.

By keeping observing his society, Hardy brings to fore various issues related to women’s subordination. He portrays a submissive female character like Thomasin who tries to be happy with what she has and the realistic woman Eustacia who rejects the limitations imposed upon her by the society. Both heroines fail in their marriages and suffer the consequences of their choices. Thomasin, like many Victorian women, thinks that she has to tolerate the social boundaries and impositions for a worthy cause, but she becomes the victim of these same unjust social laws. Andrew Entice believes that Thomasin is “always the innocent victim, she bends with each blow of fate, accepting and waiting” (Enstice 87). On the other hand, Social institutions of the Victorian era create many obstacles for Eustacia in her attempt to fulfil her dreams and she miserably fails to actualize her romantic illusions.

REFERENCES

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