By Jasmine Niblett
Author Biography:
Jasmine Niblett is a recent graduate of Edinburgh University in English Literature and History. Currently, she is studying for her Master’s degree in Modern History and is missing her studies in English Literature very much. Because of this, she’s been using literature for her historical research which has provided her with a very unique angle on many topics. A book that both inspired and challenged her in the last few months is Molly Roger’s semi-fictional book Delia’s Tears which reconstructs the life of enslaved people in South Carolina based on available photographs. As a combination of historical sources and literary imagination, it is a book she would recommend to everyone regardless of their subject field.
Read the full essay here:
This essay compares Charles Dickens's David Copperfield and Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd to explore how the authors employ their narrators to shape readers' perceptions of their female characters. Given the prevailing dominance of male authors in Victorian society, authentic representations of female subjectivity were still constrained, making it difficult to find authentic representations of female subjectivity. This essay inspects how and to what extent male authors managed to present women’s subjectivity authentically. The study delves into perspective, the use of moral guides, and irony in both novels, drawing productive comparisons with the works of female novelists such as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. This will demonstrate that the novelists share their use of irony as a narrative device, which allows them to tacitly comment on female characters and the world’s treatment of them. This creates the opportunity for alternative female subjectivities to manifest themselves within the main narrative of both novels. However, beyond this, this article will substantiate that Hardy, in contrast to Dickens, is more able to portray female subjectivity authentically through his narrator.
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