Female Sexuality and Social Stigma: A Corpus-Driven Stylistic Analysis of Hardy’s Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Abstract

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hardy gives a piteous picture of the much talked about relationship between the creation of feminine sexual desire and the social sense of shame, through the character of Tess Durbeyfield. This study utilized AntConc software to extract the keywords’ collocations and clusters and then interpreted the results using the Mahlberg model (2013). It focused on analyzing the culture of Victorian England that punished women severely for violating the cultural sexual morality standards. Thus, the fate that befell Tess brought society’s misogynistic practices that subjugate and exclude women to an impeachment. Through the story told by the protagonist Tess, the author captures the existing societal injustice, where women’s virtue – their virginity is valued, while their sin – their sexuality, is punished. The findings of the study will benefit students of literature by looking at how authors encode meaning through simple linguistic features.