Positive Men, Negative Women?: Unfortunate Gender Connotations in "A Sunday Morning Tragedy," The Newcomer's Wife," and Other Poems Callum Madle 12th Grade

The poetry of the Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy contains some progressive ideals which challenge negative stereotypes associated with women in the Victorian era; notable here are poems such as ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’ and ‘The Newcomer’s Wife’. He challenged the Victorian sexual double standard, which ‘upheld different standards of chastity for men and women’ and marginalised unmarried women for sex outside of marriage. Nevertheless, Hardy also contradicts this progressive attitude in poems such as ‘At an Inn’ and ‘A Trampwoman’s Tragedy’, by conveying a greater sense of empathy toward male characters than female characters, thus attributing negative connotations to a female gendering.

To a certain extent, Hardy could be seen as challenging the importance of Victorian society’s rule and the extent to which they dictated the lives of Victorian women. In the poem ‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’, Hardy writes from the viewpoint of a mother, whose daughter is seemingly jilted by her lover, as she lived in ‘poverty’, despite being pregnant. The mother is portrayed as a socially conscious individual, who responds to her daughter’s apparent misfortune by acquiring a drug to ‘balk ill-motherings’, a phrase which leads to the mother...