“With my crust of bread and liberty”: Freedom and social conventions in homas Hardy’s Life’s Little Ironies

Abstract

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7992.2016v23n1p29

The aim of this paper is to analyze the association between freedom and social conventions in the book of short stories Life’s Little Ironies (1894), by Thomas Hardy. The stories represent the power of social conventions in terms of the way they impose limitations on the scope of freedom with which the characters deal with their choices and perceive their possibilities of action. In this questioning of the narrow scope of individual freedom in Victorian society, Hardy may be said to be drawing on the work of John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty (1859) develops many ideas which were in the center of the intellectual debate of the day. Behind Hardy’s rendering of the conflict between freedom and social conventions in Life’s Little Ironies, we can see “social tyranny”, as Mill puts it, acting upon the characters who cannot, in the end, overcome the social constraints, thus bringing upon them a tragic fate.