Eustacia Vye: Muse-ings on the Unintended Feminist

Chelsea M. Slack

Abstract


Eustacia Vye as a feminist figure is not exactly a new idea – a quick Google search of the topic brings up dozens of articles, blog posts, and essays on the subject. Rather than simply document Eustacia’s feminist traits, this paper seeks to do two things. First, it examines Hardy’s positioning of Eustacia as the other and considers her ensuing treatment by the novel’s other characters through the lens of new wave feminism, specifically the work of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. The second, yet equally important, purpose of this essay is to contemplate how Eustacia, a product of Hardy’s phallocentric discourse, has become a feminist in the first place. Drawing on Heidegger’s being of entities and Irigaray’s teachings on visibility/invisibility of the female other, this article asserts Hardy’s inability to see or access Eustacia’s female being allowed him to unintentionally fashion a feminist character. Such rereading also opens up a vast number of male-created female characters to be analyzed as feminists.


Keywords


Cixous (Helene); Irigaray (Luce); New wave feminism; Intention; The other

Full Text:

PDF

References


Boumelha, P. (1982). Thomas Hardy and Women. Brighton: Harvester.

Cixous, H. (1976). The laugh of the medusa (K. Cohen & P. Cohen, Trans.). Signs, 1(2), 875-893.

Cixous, H., & Clément, C. (1986). The newly born woman (B. Wing, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

de Beauvoir, S. (1949). The second sex (C. Borde & S. Malovany-Chevallier, Trans.). New York: Knopf.

Derrida, J. (2010). The beast and the sovereign, Vol. II (G. Bennington, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Elvy, M. (2016). Sexing Hardy: Thomas Hardy and feminism. Kent, U.K.: Crescent Moon.

Gaudelius, Y. (1994). Valuing difference: Luce Irigaray and feminist pedagogy. Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, 14(1).

Hardy, T. (1922). The return of the native. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Heidegger, M. (1988). The basic problems of phenomenology (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Heidegger, M. (1992). History of the concept of time (T. J. Kisiel, Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Higonnet, M. R. (1993). The sense of sex: Feminist perspectives on Hardy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Howe, K. (2014). The Penguin book of witches. New York: Penguin.

Ingham, P. (1989). Thomas Hardy. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester.

Irigaray, L. (1974). Speculum of the other woman (G. C. Gill, Trans.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Irigaray, L. (1985). This sex which is not one (C. Porter & C. Burke, Trans.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Irigaray, L. (2002). Being two, how many eyes have we? Paragraph, 25(3), 143-151.

Levinas, E. (1987). Collected philosophical papers (A. Lingis, Trans.). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.

Mansplain. (2020). OED Online. Oxford University Press. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mansplain

Morgan, R. (1988). Women and sexuality in the novels of Thomas Hardy. London: Routledge.

Rogers, K. (1975). Women in Thomas Hardy. The Centennial Review, 19(4), 249-258.

Sollée, K. J. (2017). Witches, sluts, feminists. Berkeley: Three L Media.

Stubbs, P. (1981). Women and fiction: Feminism and the novel, 1880-1920. New York: Harvester.

Sumner, R. (1981). Thomas Hardy, psychological novelist. Hampshire: Macmillan.

Thurley, G. (1975). The psychology of Hardy’s novels. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

Wilhelm, H. (2017). Mansplaining and the gender wars: When argument becomes a weapon. Commentary, 144(5), 34.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/13445

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2024 Studies in Literature and Language

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share us to:   

 

Online Submission: http://cscanada.org/index.php/sll/submission/wizard


Reminder

How to do online submission to another Journal?

If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.


We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases: caooc@hotmail.com; sll@cscanada.net; sll@cscanada.org

 Articles published in Studies in Literature and Language are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

 STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net; Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mail: office@cscanada.net; office@cscanada.org; caooc@hotmail.com

Copyright © 2010 Canadian Academy of Oriental and Occidental Culture