Category: Return of the Native

Thomas Hardy as a psychological realist, few critics have gone so far in the other direction as Gilles Deleuze, who states that Hardy’s characters ‘are not people or subjects, they are collections of intensive sensations’ (Deleuze and Parnet 39-40). This is to suggest not that Hardy is uninterested in people but that he is interested…

The authors emphasise society’s extreme expectations by presenting a female character who embodies the ideal by being domestic and submissive, contrasting against Becky and Eustacia’s defiant and rebellious behaviour. ‘The running parallel and contrast between Amelia and Becky provides the narrative backbone’, emphasising the structural unity encompassing the novel, created by the alignment of their…