Women in Thomas Hardy's Tess and Henry James's The American

In the social context of nineteenth century, a woman was characterized as an entity that was in need of shielding embrace of either a husband or a father and a home. Hardy and James are often maligned by a feminist reader for portrayal of women who are either made to go behind the walls or punished for their refusal to submit to the patriarchal order of the society. The female protagonists, of the novels under discussion, Tess and Claire de Bellegarde confront with the issues of class consciousness, domesticity, marriage, as well as sexuality. These issues have been explored from the feminist perspective of Donovan, Marry Wollstonecraft, Showalter and Kauffman.