The Rise of the Feminine Voice in Thomas Hardy’s “An Imaginative Woman”

Abstract

This present article deals with the idea of the feminine voice in Thomas Hardy’s short story “An Imaginative Woman”. As a naturalist writer, Hardy portrayed women’s faith as tragic and obscure; this how Ella Marchmill, Hardy’s heroine, encounters nothing but doom and disease when trying to free herself from her
ascribed duty as the “Angel of the house”. However, it is through her narration that she can challenge the social impositions that were place upon women; their public role and their intimacy. The concept of the
“New Woman” rises as a feminine figure that opposes these constraints: a woman who speaks her mind and explores her sexuality by means of her imagination, the only place that does not surrender to male domination