Hardy’s Sue and her failure in the mirror of foucauldian concept of individuality
The paper is a study of Thomas Hardy’s female character, Sue, in Jude the Obscure. To discover the reasons for Sue’s failure in dealing with both society and her personal life, the character is analyzed from the framework of Foucauldian power relations and the concept of individuality. According to...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Pusat Pengajian Bahasa dan Linguistik, FSSK, UKM
2012
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/5371/1/18_2_5_Lalbakshi.pdf |
| _version_ | 1825725536462176256 |
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| author | Pedram Lalbakhsh, Nasser Maleki, Nahid Jamshidi Rad, |
| author_facet | Pedram Lalbakhsh, Nasser Maleki, Nahid Jamshidi Rad, |
| author_sort | Pedram Lalbakhsh, |
| collection | UKM |
| description | The paper is a study of Thomas Hardy’s female character, Sue, in Jude the Obscure. To discover the reasons for Sue’s failure in dealing with both society and her personal life, the character is analyzed from the framework of Foucauldian power relations and the concept of individuality. According to Foucault’s dynamic view of power relations, individuals or subjects in every society are free and dynamic and power produces individuals who act, and are not simply objects upon whom others act. Individuals change and take shape after they engage in power relations, and this is how our participation in power relations literally makes us who we are. In other words, an individual is not passive and a victim of power relations, but free to succumb to the demands of power relations or use the possibilities before him and practise his own ethics. To Foucault, subjects can practise their individual freedom through ‘care of the self’; that is, one can achieve a self other than what power relations impose. Considering Foucault’s ideas in this regard the authors of this paper argue that while the female protagonist of Hardy’s novel enjoys all three Foucauldian necessary elements for creating a new self other than the normalized self that power relation has created for her, what she creates as her new self is only a shadow, and a fading illusion. Her bitter defeat at the end is the proof of her illusive self and demonstrates that she has been unable to shake her normalized self off. When looked from a Foucauldian point of view she is a failure – still a normalized self masked under the figure of a new self. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-06T03:57:00Z |
| format | Article |
| id | ukm.eprints-5371 |
| institution | Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-06T03:57:00Z |
| publishDate | 2012 |
| publisher | Pusat Pengajian Bahasa dan Linguistik, FSSK, UKM |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | ukm.eprints-53712016-12-14T06:38:16Z http://journalarticle.ukm.my/5371/ Hardy’s Sue and her failure in the mirror of foucauldian concept of individuality Pedram Lalbakhsh, Nasser Maleki, Nahid Jamshidi Rad, The paper is a study of Thomas Hardy’s female character, Sue, in Jude the Obscure. To discover the reasons for Sue’s failure in dealing with both society and her personal life, the character is analyzed from the framework of Foucauldian power relations and the concept of individuality. According to Foucault’s dynamic view of power relations, individuals or subjects in every society are free and dynamic and power produces individuals who act, and are not simply objects upon whom others act. Individuals change and take shape after they engage in power relations, and this is how our participation in power relations literally makes us who we are. In other words, an individual is not passive and a victim of power relations, but free to succumb to the demands of power relations or use the possibilities before him and practise his own ethics. To Foucault, subjects can practise their individual freedom through ‘care of the self’; that is, one can achieve a self other than what power relations impose. Considering Foucault’s ideas in this regard the authors of this paper argue that while the female protagonist of Hardy’s novel enjoys all three Foucauldian necessary elements for creating a new self other than the normalized self that power relation has created for her, what she creates as her new self is only a shadow, and a fading illusion. Her bitter defeat at the end is the proof of her illusive self and demonstrates that she has been unable to shake her normalized self off. When looked from a Foucauldian point of view she is a failure – still a normalized self masked under the figure of a new self. Pusat Pengajian Bahasa dan Linguistik, FSSK, UKM 2012 Article PeerReviewed application/pdf en http://journalarticle.ukm.my/5371/1/18_2_5_Lalbakshi.pdf Pedram Lalbakhsh, and Nasser Maleki, and Nahid Jamshidi Rad, (2012) Hardy’s Sue and her failure in the mirror of foucauldian concept of individuality. 3L; Language,Linguistics and Literature,The Southeast Asian Journal of English Language Studies., 18 (2). pp. 49-56. ISSN 0128-5157 http://www.ukm.my/ppbl/3L/3LHome.html |
| spellingShingle | Pedram Lalbakhsh, Nasser Maleki, Nahid Jamshidi Rad, Hardy’s Sue and her failure in the mirror of foucauldian concept of individuality |
| title | Hardy’s Sue and her failure in the mirror of foucauldian concept of individuality |
| title_full | Hardy’s Sue and her failure in the mirror of foucauldian concept of individuality |
| title_fullStr | Hardy’s Sue and her failure in the mirror of foucauldian concept of individuality |
| title_full_unstemmed | Hardy’s Sue and her failure in the mirror of foucauldian concept of individuality |
| title_short | Hardy’s Sue and her failure in the mirror of foucauldian concept of individuality |
| title_sort | hardy s sue and her failure in the mirror of foucauldian concept of individuality |
| url | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/5371/1/18_2_5_Lalbakshi.pdf |
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