Looking Back at Hardy's Heroines

Nick Harris blog 1/28/2026

Looking back at the novels of Thomas Hardy from a post-post-modernist POV – or even something that has emerged after PPM with the AI revolution – readers can certainly ask what their purpose is in picking up the book in this day and age. Discounting a literature-for-literature’s sake reasoning, which is, in effect, just as good as any, we can, as I have championed in many blog posts, see a relevancy to the world in terms of its symbols of behavior. The wrestling of Roland Barthes becomes evident in the fights for understanding of the English countryside inherent in many of Hardy’s works. Specifically, I tend to focus on certain female characters in the novels. I keep going back to the image of the entrance of Eustacia Vye and how she gets tangled in the bushes on the heath creating a spinning sort of dance in her relationship with the earth as she struggles effortlessly to free herself. The constant struggle of Tess shows this dance as she claws her way to an imagined heaven which never comes. Sue Bridehead’s struggle toward emancipation fits in with this model, though she gives in to the struggle by going back to her husband after too many tragedies. Her position as the female pagan wrestler may have to go  instead to Arabella in Jude the Obscure, as Arabella is the true antagonist of the heath, a pagan trickster, in the story. Though she has none of the Pagan elegance of Eustacia Vye, she still shows seductive beauty. Arabella leads Jude into his first kiss, then fatherhood, then abandonment.

I tend to focus on these women, these muses, these fates, as they spin their way to a desperate end that defines the arc of their character. As Kathleen Blake points out about Tess, Hardy paints a central woman character as a symbol of purity. Indeed, the subtitle of Tess defines her as a Pure Woman. Hardy equates the beautiful with the ethical from the beginnings of Tess. Blake writes, “Hardy suggests connotations of the word ‘pure’ that critics had missed. (Blake, 205.) Here Blake quotes Hardy, “They ignore the meaning of the word in Nature, together with all aesthetic “ (claims upon it, not to mention the spiritual interpretation…. (Hardy, viii). The movement of the concept of purity toward a goal in line with the natural world makes Hardy see the role of the woman as a link to the beauty and the ethics of Nature. Blake writes, “Hardy moves the meaning toward a new realism, that of the archetypal, ideal, generic” (206). Blake moves Hardy’s women toward the Mythologies of Barthes, the archetypes of natural beauty and ethics.

Eustacia Vye was an early central hero of a Hardy story and laid the foundations for those to come. John Paterson writes that Hardy meant to be classical in his structure of The Return of the Native, but he became sidetracked by “infiltrations of romantic sympathy altogether foreign to the tragic vision of things” (134). The passion of eruptive feelings was symbolized in Eustacia Vye, it was her charm and her explosive undoing. The link she held to the Natural world of Hardy’s fictional natural paradise, Egdon Heath, is emphasized from her first appearance. She cannot shake the beauty and the arrogance of the Natural World.

 

But she tries. Eustacia wrestles to become an aristocrat, even thought hat would spell the undoing of her as a symbol of the Natural world. This irony is mirrored in the quality of purity in Tess, a purity that only achieves itself through her supposed sins with the young man Angel, her eventual flight from him to a devilish aristocracy, and her return to him in murder and a symbolic pagan sacrifice. Sue Bridehead and Abigail in Jude the Obscure both show a dichotomy within their personalities. They each have a search for freedom, a natural beauty all its own. But their search ends in tragedy involving responsibilities to children, children who act in ways that perplex them and take them down. In trying to proclaim their Natural state of being, Sue and Arabella realize their failure and run back to the restrictions of their youth, Sue to her husband, and Abigail to her world of trickery as she rejoins Jude just before he dies.

The purpose of reading these heroes of their various stories becomes a search for beauty and truth through gender and its relation to Nature. Hardy’s passion, it’s influence on later novels (such as those of D,H, Lawrence and the myriad of his disciples that still inhabit our literary world) becomes a focal point of purpose in picking up one of his novels. The Aristotlean equation of beauty and ethics shines through here and edifies the reader to her/his own reflections on these mindful topics, qualities that define a person’s inner personality.

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Blake, Kate. “Pure Tess:  Hardy on knowing a Woman,” in Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy: The Novels. Ed. Dale Kramer. G.K. Hall, 1990, 204-218.

Paterson, John. “The ‘Poetics’ of The Return of the Native,” in Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy: The Novels. Ed. Dale Kramer. G.K. Hall, 1990, 133-140.