Elaine Showalter presents an example from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy in order to analyze this text from a female point of view. She begins by criticizing Irving Howe for romanticizing and praising the opening scene of the novel The Mayor of Casterbridge. Thomas Hardy's famous work The Mayor of Casterbridge, which begins with the popular scene of a drunken Michael Henchard advertising and selling his wife and little daughter for five guineas at a country fair. In his study of Hardy, Irving Howe praised the brilliance, vivacity, intensity and power of this opening scene: Thomas Hardy begins by quoting “To detach himself from his wife; to get rid of this drooping rag of a woman, with her silent complaints and her exasperating passivity; to escape, not by furtive abandonment, but by the public sale of one's body to a stranger, as one sells horses at the fair; and thus snatch, through sheer amoral obstinacy, a second chance at life - it is with this blow, so insidiously attractive to the male fantasy, that the Mayor of Casterbridge begins. instruct and indoctrinate so that he identifies very deeply with masculine culture, will have a different experience of the scene from the mayor of Casterbrigde. It would be ideal to quote Howe first to highlight the extent to which the male critic's fantasies distort the text to the extent that Hardy informs readers very little of the relationship between Michael and Susan Henchard, and what we can generally seen in the first scenes suggests that she is not droopy, whiny or passive. His role, however, is passive; severely forced and inhibited by her femininity, and even more burdened by her child, there is no way she can...... middle of paper ...... the third phase which is called the phase feminine has been going on since 1920. Here we find women rejecting both imitation and protest. Elaine Showalter considers both imitation and protest to be signs of dependence. Women in this phase demonstrated more independent attitudes. They understand the place of the female experience in the process of art and literature. Women began to focus on the forms and techniques of art and literature. Representatives of this popular female phase were Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf who even began to think about male and female sentences. These two courageous figures wrote about men's journalism and women's fiction. They redefined and sexualized external and internal experience. Writers such as Rebecca West, Katherine Mansfield, and Dorothy Richardson from the period from 1920 to the present entered this phase..