Caught in the Crossfire:Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Cultural institutions were an important part of life in the nineteenth-century. Socio-cultural institutions such as church and marriage were deeply rooted in patriarchy. Patriarchy inferiorizes women by default and privileges men. It acknowledges that men have natural power over women. Double standards are an idea that had been rooted in England for many centuries. Before as well as after marriage men were permitted liberties of which no women could never avail themselves. Hardy argued in his fiction, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, that women might never be able to achieve equality with men because of the prejudiced and unalterable social laws which ran counter to women‟s will. For women thus, experiencing a life of fulfilment was virtually impossible in the Victorian society. Hardy‟s realistic understanding of the actual conditions of women‟s lives in the nineteenth-century went hand in hand with his highly moralistic interpretation of life in almost all his novels.

Keywords:

Patriarchal Society , Social Codes , Social Institutions , morality