خلاصه ماشینی:
"Here, we study Sue, the female protagonist of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, in the light of Foucault’s concept of individuality, and try to shed light on this character and put her in the context of a postmodern concept that emerged years after Hardy wrote the novel as an attempt to portray a slice of life as he perceived it in the closing years of the nineteenth century.
Since according to Foucault power is dynamic and productive, and resistance is inherent to it, the individual has the space for acting in the power relation in a way that s/he can be far from the docile body who simply acts as normalized society demands.
Relying on Foucault’s notion of individuality and trying to read Hardy’s novel in the light of his theories, we believe that Hardy knows an individual as one who can be both a slave of normalization and the free subject acting according to his/her own ethics while still living within the much normalized society.
Sue assumes that she is liberal both in thinking and action but deep inside she seems to be a well normalized woman who cannot actively and effectively resist norms of society; that is why against her heart, she marries Phillotson to act according to the norms of morality and middle class marriage.
She has never been able to effectively use the three elements necessary for "care of the self" which Foucault believes one needs to consider if he or she wants to create a new self capable of resisting the norms within the much normalized system."