‘<i>The return of the native by Thomas Hardy</i>: Eustacia Vye or the bovarysme embodied in Wessex”

Authors

  • Thierry Goater Département d’Anglais de l’Université Rennes 2

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22409/cadletrasuff.2016n53a341

Keywords:

Bovarysme, Thomas Hardy, Flaubert.

Abstract

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is one of the great English novelists of the late Victorian era. Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are among his most famous novels. If he was not directly influenced by Gustave Flaubert’s aesthetics, Hardy was very much inspired by the heroine of Madame Bovary. Indeed, quite a few of Hardy’s female characters, whether in his novels or in his short stories, suffer with varying degrees from “bovarysme’, the disease of imagination and affectivity which is one of Emma Bovary’s central features. This paper aims to shed light on the posterity of Flaubert’s character through Eustacia Vye, the heroine of The Return of the Native, to show to what extent she represents not a pale imitation but an original variation on an essential model of Western literature. 

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Author Biography

Thierry Goater, Département d’Anglais de l’Université Rennes 2

Doutor pela Université Rennes 2 (França); é escritor, especialista em literatura vitoriana. Na Université de Rennes, atua como professor e pesquisador em Língua e Literatura Inglesa.

Published

2017-01-15

How to Cite

GOATER, T. ‘<i>The return of the native by Thomas Hardy</i>: Eustacia Vye or the bovarysme embodied in Wessex”. Caderno de Letras da UFF, v. 26, n. 53, 15 Jan. 2017.