Thomas Hardy's Unmen and Othered Men

Abstract

A majority of critics and readers seem to base their readings of Thomas Hardy's characters, both male and female, on a hetero-normative construction of nineteenth-century masculinity. However I argue that Hardy's novels can profitably be read as delineating specific liminal masculinities that can be designated as 'other' using concepts of gender originating in nineteenth-century biological and psychological discourses. In this way Hardy's novels embody a form of resistance that transcends contemporaneous societal conventions. He employs certain characters as agencies of anxiety and discomfort in order to demonstrate to his readership that the 'other' may in fact perform the function of a unifying principle within the confines of the text. Rather than be banished to the margins for their perceived 'anomalies', figures such as the Unman and the Other are integral to their respective communities, not in spite of their liminality, but because of it.

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