SOURCE: Mitchell, Judith. “Hardy's Female Reader.” In The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, edited by Margaret R. Higonnet, pp. 172-87. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Mitchell offers a poststructuralist approach to Hardy's fictional heroines, concluding that the feminist reader of Hardy will necessarily feel ambivalent about his representations of women.

What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.

—Budd Boetticher, Hollywood director of B Westerns

The heroines of Hardy's early novels are presented primarily as objects of erotic interest not only for the narrators and for the male characters … but also for the implied reader/voyeur. … What they...