Oindrila Ghosh
Associate Professor
Department of English
Diamond Harbour Women's University
AND
Belcher Visiting Fellowship in Victorian Studies, University of Oxford, UK (October, 2022-March, 2023)
Academic Fellow, University of Surrey (IAS), United Kingdom (April-May, 2023)
Charles Wallace India Trust UK, Awardee (2009, 2019)
UGC-IUC Post Doctoral Associate at Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (2016, 2018-19)
Member, Editorial Board, Victoriographies Journal (Edinburgh University Press)
Previously
1)Assistant Professor in English
School of Humanities
Netaji Subhas Open University
2)Assistant Professor in English
Head, Department of English
Naba Ballygunge Mahavidyalaya
My PhD. was on the study of motherhood and the victimization of women in the short stories of Thomas Hardy, from Jadavpur University. I am deeply interested in Hardy's philosophy and works and in the Victorian age in general and its postcolonial afterlives in particular. I have published widely on Thomas Hardy in International Journals, including the Hardy Society Journal and the Hardy Review and been invited to lecture on Hardy at Universities in India and Abroad.
I was Belcher Visiting Fellow in Victorian Studies at St Hugh's College, University of Oxford and Academic Fellow at University of Surrey in 2022-23. My Current research interests and interventions revolve around late-Victorian animal welfare movement (India-Britain) and its literary representations.
Department of English
Diamond Harbour Women's University
AND
Belcher Visiting Fellowship in Victorian Studies, University of Oxford, UK (October, 2022-March, 2023)
Academic Fellow, University of Surrey (IAS), United Kingdom (April-May, 2023)
Charles Wallace India Trust UK, Awardee (2009, 2019)
UGC-IUC Post Doctoral Associate at Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla (2016, 2018-19)
Member, Editorial Board, Victoriographies Journal (Edinburgh University Press)
Previously
1)Assistant Professor in English
School of Humanities
Netaji Subhas Open University
2)Assistant Professor in English
Head, Department of English
Naba Ballygunge Mahavidyalaya
My PhD. was on the study of motherhood and the victimization of women in the short stories of Thomas Hardy, from Jadavpur University. I am deeply interested in Hardy's philosophy and works and in the Victorian age in general and its postcolonial afterlives in particular. I have published widely on Thomas Hardy in International Journals, including the Hardy Society Journal and the Hardy Review and been invited to lecture on Hardy at Universities in India and Abroad.
I was Belcher Visiting Fellow in Victorian Studies at St Hugh's College, University of Oxford and Academic Fellow at University of Surrey in 2022-23. My Current research interests and interventions revolve around late-Victorian animal welfare movement (India-Britain) and its literary representations.
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Thomas Hardy was a Victorian by birth and chronology, but his understanding of women and creation of strong female characters made him the precursor of feminist thought. His short stories act as contrapuntal to his novels in their preoccupation with women and their tribulations as often as ‘unwed’ mothers but here motherhood, in all it’s shades, is brought out from the peripheries of the plot to the very centre, treating each episode as a unique case study and thereby studying women as individuals not typecast as Victorian society and literature was habituated to do. Social pressure, physical discomfort, emotional unfulfilment are the root cause of a woman’s victimization; and a victimized woman can rarely be expected to become a good, let alone perfect, mother. My paper would like to inspect how some of Hardy’s short stories raise doubts upon the concept of the ‘perfect’ woman and the ‘perfect’ mother, challenging the one-dimensional image of the all-sacrificing mother widely circulated in the literature and culture of Victorian England and revealing thereby how women remain ‘human’ with all the aberrations and cravings (thus, dubbed at times as ‘unnatural’) and are not subsumed into the single role of the all-sacrificing Madonna as expected of them. The paper will also try to place Hardy’s eclectic and lenient attitude towards so-called maternal aberrations as a contrast to Victorian inflexibility.