earticle

영어

In this paper, I examine the recurring themes of the five interconnected short stories from Thomas Hardy’s Life’s Little Ironies. The short stories revolve around the themes of discrimination against lower class women, premarital pregnancy, motherhood, marital incompatibility, and the longing to escape from the confines of the middle class homes. The heroines with lower social status who marry middle-class men suffer from class prejudices due to their illiteracy or lack of education and dream of escaping from homes. The middle class women who marry for financial security find themselves incompatible with their husbands and dream of escaping from their unhappy marriage to pursue self-fulfillment or liberate their repressed desires through sexual fantasies about intelligent and sensitive men. Leonora, the unmarried mother of “For Conscience’ Sake,” becomes financially independent through her own labor. Car’line Aspent, the heroine of “The Fiddler of the Reels,” chooses to liberate her sexual desires for a violinist instead of marrying an engineer who would guarantee her financial stability. These heroines gradually break away with Victorian marriage customs, gender roles, and class hierarchy, and transition to modern ideas which are embodied in the opening of the railways in southern England and the Great Exhibition of 1851.