The Father-Daughter Relationship inThomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders

Abstract

This study aims at the father-daughter relationship in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders drawn heavily on his family background. It reveals the effect which the parent’s social and economic ambition for a child have upon individual, family and social life. Throughout the novel, Melbury, a father, has to bear the suffering to see his loving daughter’s unhappiness in a disastrous marriage into which he urges her, and Grace in practice suffers from her unhappy marriage. This study focuses on how Melbury tries to materialize his strong ambition in his daughter and to settle her unhappy marriage, and on Grace’s course of life into a disaster caused by her father’s demand and her own submission and insufficient self-assertion, such as her education which makes her a conventional woman, her rejection of Giles, her attraction and marriage to Fitzpiers and her unhappiness. Eventually, this study tries to show that this novel is a tragedy resulting from the close father-daughter relationship by studying the aspects of this relationship.