STRONG FEMALE CHARACTERS IN THOMAS HARDY'S NOVELS

The bachelor thesis focuses on the position of women in the Victorian Era, concretely found in the fiction of Thomas Hardy. The principle of this work is to analyse and characterise Hardy's heroines who, in defiance of the established Victorian social standards, stand out in a crowd. Thomas Hardy brought the female-related issues, at the time mostly overlooked, into focus. We reveal the dissimilarity of the heroines by comparing them to the traditional Victorian portrayal of women. The core of the thesis is the analysis of three feminine-centred novels with their protagonists - Bathsheba Everdene from Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Eustacia Vye from The Return of the Native (1878) and Tess Durbeyfield from Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). The first chapter centres on the description of the Victorian era and its society, especially women and their status in a patriarchal society. The following chapters will be devoted to the above-mentioned female characters and their modern mindsets and attempts to defy the Victorian ideal. These women face the traditional gender roles of Victorian society and struggle for emancipation