“YANGI AVLOD ILMIY TADQIQOTLARI” respublika ilmiy-amaliy konferensiyasi
RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH HEROINES OF THE VICTORIAN AGE A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF FEMALE PSYCHOLOGY AND TRAGIC FATE IN THE DRAMA OF A. N. OSTROVSKY AND THE VICTORIAN NOVEL
PhD student at FerSU
This article undertakes a comparative-typological study of female characters in the dramatic work of Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky and in the English Victorian novel, focusing on the psychology of the heroine and the artistic mechanisms through which her tragic fate is constructed. Two of Ostrovsky’s central heroines - Katerina in The Storm (1859) and Larisa in The Dowryless Girl (1878) - are examined alongside English counterparts whose destinies share comparable contours: Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Tess in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), with reference to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). The study identifies a recurrent structural pattern across both traditions, whereby a sensitive and morally independent woman is constrained by a patriarchal and increasingly commercial social order, experiences an irreconcilable conflict between inner feeling and external norm, and is ultimately destroyed. At the same time, the analysis reveals significant divergences determined by genre, national-cultural context, and authorial worldview. The article argues that these heroines serve as focal points for each writer’s critique of the social commodification of women, while their differing modes of death - self-willed in the Russian texts, socially inflicted in the English ones - mark a meaningful distinction in the conception of female agency.