Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy 3031401107, 9783031401107

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Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy

Roger Ebbatson

Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy

Roger Ebbatson

Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy

Roger Ebbatson English Department Lancaster University Malvern, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-40109-1    ISBN 978-3-031-40110-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

‘For Simon and Rebecca, with love.’

Prefatory Note

My aim in this short study of Hardy’s work in fiction and poetry is to shed some light on his aesthetic procedures whilst acknowledging and observing how, as Adorno phrases it, ‘art does justice to the contingent by probing the darkness of its own trajectory’, becoming in the process ‘less self-transparent’. In other words, Hardy’s oeuvre, in my reading, amply demonstrates and refracts what Adorno called ‘art’s enigmaticalness’: ‘That artworks say something and in the same breath conceal it expresses this enigmaticalness from the perspective of language.’ My focus in what follows is upon the ‘historical moment’ of each text, fully acknowledging the challenge which lies in the texts of the past which must remain to some degree ‘unintelligible’ in significant ways to the modern reader. As Adorno maintains more generally, ‘opposition is needed to the semblance of comprehensibility that has grown like a patina over each of these works and their performances’.1 My study is motivated therefore by a sense of the paradoxicality of Hardy’s texts, whether prose or verse, and to that end I have attempted to focus variously upon elements of folk representation, textual ambiguity and aesthetic impressionism in what follows. In placing a particular emphasis on variant readings of Tess of the d’Urbervilles I attempt to frame and problematise Hardy’s ambiguous textual practices in this exemplary work. Throughout the study I seek to explore and analyse Hardy’s texts in order to lay bare what I see as their indeterminacy; the poems and fiction under scrutiny paradoxically reveal themselves through their ‘veiled’ nature. The auratic work of art, as Adorno and Walter

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Benjamin often observe, reveals its essential nature only when veiled. The ‘aura’ which Hardy’s work registers with the reader serves to both evoke and prevent the work of interpretation. Indeed, for Hardy, and the reader, nature is crucially auratic, resulting in both the assertion and loss of selfhood in both fictional characters and also the authorial voice. It is on the seminal issue of representation that these texts are to be validated. In this respect it is worth observing the telling relevance of Benjamin’s historical thesis that storytelling originates in two contrasting groups, ‘one embodied in the settled tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading seaman’, but he also notes, appropriately in the case of Hardy, how ‘the resilient master craftsman and the itinerant journeyman worked together in the same rooms’.2 Thus, ‘the love of faraway places, such as a much-travelled man brings home, was combined with the love of the past, such as is manifested most clearly to the native inhabitants of a place’. What may be discerned in Hardy’s career as poet and novelist is what Benjamin would define as ‘the decline of storytelling’: ‘The art of storytelling is nearing its end because the epic side of truth – wisdom – is dying out’; and yet Benjamin’s argument that the novel ‘neither comes from oral tradition nor enters into it’ is clearly incommensurable with Hardy’s practice.3 Thus, in attempting to define Hardy’s vision, it is worth recalling Merleau-­Ponty’s argument that ‘nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see’, and his sense that there exists ‘a dialectic whereby perception hides itself from itself’.4 By focusing critical attention on Hardy’s acts of perception, as I attempt to do here, we are able to articulate the ways in which, in Merleau-­Ponty’s thesis, we commence with ‘the spectacle of the world, which is that of a nature open to a plurality of thinking subjects’. The visual experiences of Hardy’s characters ratify Merleau-Ponty’s notation of the way in which the ‘sensible world with its thickness and inexhaustible richness’ in ‘the moment of vision’ retains ‘a past in the depth of the present’. I attempt here to explore the ways in which the Hardy texts under analysis bear out Merleau-Ponty’s theorisation: When I see the horizon, it does not make me think of that other landscape which I should see if I were standing on it, nor does that other landscape make me think of a third one and so on; I do not visualise anything; all these landscapes are already there in the harmonious sequence and infinite unfolding of their perspectives. The Hardy reader is thus led to an appreciation of the way each horizon ‘refers to other perspectives, and so on indefinitely’. My intention is to

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open up the text in each case to this phenomenological insight, stressing, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, that Although the landscape before my eyes may well herald the features of the one which is hidden behind the hill, it does so only subject to a certain degree of indeterminacy: here there are meadows, over there perhaps woods, and , in any case, I know that, beyond the near horizon, there will be land or sea.5 The degree of my success in this interpretation must ultimately remain with the reader. Hardy’s writings, I suggest here, bear out the argument of a commentator on phenomenology that ‘our openness upon being is not … absolute proximity’ but rather ‘openness in being occurs in the form of a world, that is, a field, a topography’. Within this topography, as for Clym on Egdon or Tess at Talbothays, ‘the horizon includes the seer, and the world remains horizon’. For Merleau-Ponty, as for Hardy’s characters, the immediate lies at the horizon. In this scenario space extends ‘beyond the visible present’, and thus the act of walking, which so many Hardy characters undertake, appears in the form of ‘a rhythm of movement that propagates itself’.6 The way of human existence, for Hardy as for Merleau-Ponty, is primarily verbal, carried along on the waves of Being. The ensuing chapters broadly follow the established chronology of Hardy’s writing career.

Notes 1. T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. R. Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 150, 160, 241. 2. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Selected Writings, ed. H. Eiland and M.W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 144. 3. Ibid., 144. 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 67. 5. Ibid., 71, 279, 384, 385. 6. Alphonso Lingis, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in M.  Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. C. Lefort (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), xliii, xlviii.

Contents

1 ‘The Bride-Night Fire’: Hardy and the Voice of the Folk  1 2 A Pair of Blue Eyes: The Cliff-Scene and the Literary Sublime 15 3 Moments of (Technological) Vision 25 4 ‘The Withered Arm’ and History 45 5 (Un)Binding  the Sheaves: Selfhood and Labour in Tess of the d’Urbervilles 53 6 ‘The Open’: Hardy and Jefferies 63 7 The d’Urberville Family Portraits: Faciality and Identity 77 8 Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the Fin de Siècle 91 9 Wayfaring105 10 Hardy’s Lyric Voice: ‘Beeny Cliff’117

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11 ‘The  Face at the Casement’: Window Patterns in Hardy’s Poetry127 12 Conclusion141 Index149

CHAPTER 1

‘The Bride-Night Fire’: Hardy and the Voice of the Folk

The action of Hardy’s mildly scandalous early poem, ‘The Bride-Night Fire’ (1875), is easily summarised: Barbree, the heroine, is in love with a local youth, Tim Tankens, but is dependent on a cross-grained uncle who compels her to marry an older alcoholic neighbour, Tranter Sweatley.1 After the wedding-feast, whilst Barbree retires nervously to the bedroom, Sweatley accidentally sets fire to his house. Tim, alerted by the blaze, catches sight of a semi-naked Barbree cowering in the orchard, rescues her and takes her back to his own house, whilst the villagers can find no sign of the tranter, except for one bone. Barbree subsequently remains at Tim’s house but confines herself to his loft. Later, the possibility of scandal hinted at by a local skimmity-ride is countered by the couple’s marriage, on which occasion Barbree proudly declares herself to be still ‘a maiden’. As Norman Arkans observed in his analysis of Hardy and the ballad tradition, this material is characterised by ‘the presence of ancestral voices descended from more primitive, bardic voices spinning yarns, singing tales, weaving stories about plaintive lovers, mismatched couples, unfortunate wrongdoers’.2 This text, which Edmund Gosse claimed was based on a story told by Hardy’s paternal grandmother,3 is one of a handful of poems which exclusively concentrate upon the deployment of the Dorset dialect, a number of which echo the timbre and structure of the ballad form. The narrative conforms rather precisely to Vladimir Propp’s analysis

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Ebbatson, Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_1

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of the formulaic way in which the folk-tale ‘presents … a misfortune at first and then the receipt of a helper who liquidates it’.4 It has been suggested that traditional balladry thrives best in a homogeneous feudal and agricultural society, and preferably in a border region, and further, that orally based texts ‘contain the traditional phrases and patternings intrinsic to the oral method of composition’.5 In utilising the Dorset dialect, however, Hardy was highly conscious as a writer that, as he phrased it, ‘a tongue which, though a regular growth and not a provincial corruption, is indubitably fast perishing’.6 In the south-west of England, he maintained, an increasingly centralised education system had ‘gone on with its silent and inevitable effacements, reducing the speech of this country to uniformity, and obliterating every year many a fine old local word’.7 The use of dialect was thus, in his quasi-Darwinian terms, ‘worsted in the struggle for existence, when a uniform tongue became a necessity’.8 Sue Edney has appositely observed how, in the work of Hardy’s mentor, William Barnes, the sense ‘of what was familiar and stable in the life of a small farmhouse is always underpinned by anxiety over change’,9 and that sense of anxiety is registered here not only in the authorial act of recording the ‘fast-perishing’ dialect but also in the disastrous fire at Tranter Sweatley’s. In his survey of dialect usage in Hardy, Ralph Elliott notes how, whilst in the fiction it is intermittently smuggled in as ‘a literary compromise’, in a few of the poems it ‘is more obviously a part of the poet’s exploitation of every register of speech with which Hardy was familiar’.10 By affixing the subtitle ‘A Wessex Tradition’ to his tale, Hardy indicates to a putative metropolitan audience that, in the words of Ruth Finnegan, ‘“the ballad society” is typically a “folk” and isolated one, based on oral transmission’, in a process characterised by what she designates ‘a highly formulaic style’.11 In his study of oral tradition, Albert Lord distinguishes between the illiteracy of the folk-singer and the work of ‘the literary poet’, and remarks, If the way of life of a people furnishes subjects for story and affords occasions for the telling, this art will be fostered. On the other hand, when writing is introduced and begins to be used for the same purposes as the oral narrative song, when it is employed for telling stories … this audience seeks its entertainment and instruction in books rather than in the living songs of men, and the older art gradually disappears.12

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It has been postulated that standard English ‘has had no little effect on dialects’, an effect which by ‘gradually forcing dialectal forms into out-ofthe-way corners of the country’ compelled dialect speakers (like Tess Durbeyfield) to become ‘bilingual’.13 Richard Nemesvari has argued that Hardy’s ‘efforts to incorporate the Dorset vocabulary, inflections, and pronunciations of his family background into the fictional world of Wessex required a delicate balancing act’, since if he ‘attempted linguistic fidelity, he ran the risk of alienating an urban middle–class readership that would mostly be unable to follow what was being said’,14 and this is clearly borne out by the ambivalence displayed in Hardy’s editorial tinkering with the text, his first poem to be published, in its different manifestations.15 The dramatically fortuitous demise of the drunken tranter and the ensuing love-match mark the way in which the folk-tale, as has been argued, ‘indicates an organically vital way of life, a lost origin, a prelapsarian innocence’, which can paradoxically ‘only ever be represented as its own death’.16 The fading voice of the folk is to be heard, in this instance, with piercing clarity in Barbree’s heartfelt complaint: ‘I think I mid almost ha’ borne it,’ she said, ‘Had my griefs one by one come to hand; But O, to be slave to thik husbird, for bread, And then, upon top o’ that, driven to wed, And then, upon top o’ that, burnt out o’ bed, Is more than my nater can stand!’17

In his examination of orality, Walter Ong argues appositely that an oral culture ‘encourages fluency, fulsomeness, volubility’, as exemplified at this juncture by Barbree, and he further remarks how ‘enthusiastic description of physical violence often marks oral narrative’. In Ong’s account oral memory ‘works effectively with “heavy” characters, persons whose deeds are non-verbal, memorable and commonly public’.18 In Hardy’s text speech-patterns are echoed and reduplicated by the narrator, in a series of memorable scenarios such as Tim’s encounter with the heroine during the fire, an encounter rendered more erotically in the earlier version’s specific reference to the heroine’s ‘cwold little buzzums’:19 Her cwold little figure half-naked he views Played about by the frolicsome breeze, Her light-tripping totties, her ten little tooes,

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All bare and besprinkled wi’ Fall’s chilly dews, While her great gallied eyes through her hair hanging loose Shone as stars through a tardle o’ trees. (CP 72, st. 8).

Hardy’s practice in such a passage echoes that of William Barnes, whose verse, it has been said, ‘represented a new way of thinking about preserving and representing dialect in England—a kind of representation of the common speech of the common man’.20 The poetic text here conforms to the way in which, as Maureen McLane has argued, ‘the ballad could simultaneously uphold literary conceptions of authorship and romantic theories of collective folk utterance’.21 Hardy’s poem is structured by means of repetitive patterns of rhyme and alternating tetrameter/trimeter rhythm through which the action is relayed to a putatively more ‘educated’ audience, so that as Arkans remarks, ‘the ballad gives ground to more self-­ conscious concerns’:22 The lover Tim Tankens mourned heart-sick and leer To be thus of his darling deprived: He roamed in the dark ath’art field, mound, and mere, And a’most without knowing it, found himself near The house of the tranter, and now of his Dear, Where the lantern-light showed ‘em arrived. (CP 72,st. 4)

Hardy cunningly mingles ballad practice and style with more sophisticatedly self-conscious literary devices to create a drama with both personal and social resonance: The bride sought her chamber so calm and so pale That a Northern had thought her resigned; But to eyes that had seen her in tidetimes of weal, Like the white cloud o’smoke, the red battlefield’s vail, That look spak’ of havoc behind. (CP 72, st. 5)

The verse-patterning here conforms with Elizabeth Helsinger’s notation, in her analysis of nineteenth-century song-poetry, of ‘a returning rhythmic motif, epitomised in the half or tail-line that closes each stanza but whose effects can be felt throughout the poem’.23 Hardy’s procedures

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illustrate how the conventionally understood opposition between oral and literate forms put forward by some scholars cannot be maintained: as Louise Pound has argued, oral tradition ‘is necessarily regional or group lore’, so that there is ‘never any one folk from the point of view of folklore, but indeed many folk groups’.24 Structurally, ‘The Bride-Night Fire’ dramatically endorses Anthony Easthope’s Derridean critique of the feudal ballad, in which, as he claims: the syntagmatic chain does not aim for tight closure and rigid subordination of elements in a linear development; rather it works through juxtaposition, addition and parallel, typically … in binary and trinary patterns.25

The thematic and cultural implications of ‘The Bride-Night Fire’ are, furthermore, in no sense restricted to the complex issue of rural dialect: there is also a significant imaginative investment in, and reinscription of, mythical or ritualistic elements centring upon, first, the fire at the tranter’s dwelling, and secondly, the hero and heroine’s ‘rencounter’ in the ‘brimbles and underwood’ of the orchard. Andrew Radford has suggested that Hardy came to ‘regard folklore fragments such as ballads, folk medicines, love potions and fairy lore as precious though misconstrued “documents”’,26 and drew inspiration not only from the late-Victorian classics of anthropology such as Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) and Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890) but also from more local sources such as John Hutchins’s history of Dorset (1861). From this perspective Tranter Sweatley’s incendiary death, which echoes the fire at the Three Tranters Inn in Desperate Remedies, in which ‘two charred and blackened bones’ are misidentified as those of Manston’s wife,27 and anticipates William Dare’s arsonist destruction at Stancy Castle in A Laodicean, may be construed as an allusion to ancient fire-festivals. As Frazer observed in The Golden Bough, ‘All over Europe the peasants have been accustomed from time immemorial to kindle bonfires on certain days of the year’28—a pagan custom to which the opening of The Return of the Native eloquently bears witness, and one which was often related to the welfare of the crops. According to Frazer, the chief fire-festivals were those of Beltane (May Day) and Halloween (October). After the fire at the tranter’s, the heroine is discovered cowering in the orchard, and she and her beloved beat a hasty tactical retreat:

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Over piggeries, and mixens, and apples, and hay, They lumpered straight into the night; And finding ere long where a halter-path lay, Sighted Tim’s house by dawn, on’y seen on their way By a naibour or two who were up wi’ the day, But who gathered no clue to the sight. (CP 73, st. 13)

Hardy sets his tale in the time of ‘Fall’s chilly dews’, the action thus conforming to the widespread custom of what Frazer designates ‘the ancient fire-festival of the winter solstice’. Frazer further notes, significantly for this text, how ‘in the popular customs connected with the fire-­ festivals of Europe there are certain features which appear to point to a former practice of human sacrifice’.29 The sacrificial victim in this case is Tranter Sweatley, who is reduced to a single ‘bone’ in a scenario which curiously reinflects Freud’s thesis as to how, in Greek myth, fire was stolen from the gods ‘hidden in a hollow stick’, in an action which inclines him ‘to regard such an object as a penis symbol’.30 The sexual politics of the poem are ambiguous: whilst there may be a proto-feminist element to Barbree’s exploits, it can also be suggested that the heroine, in confining herself to her lover’s ‘tallet’ or loft, exchanges one form of male imprisonment for another. As regards the fatal conflagration, in her study of folklore in Hardy, Jacqueline Dillion records the medieval practice of warding off dragons and other evil creatures by lighting ‘bone-fires’ in ‘an act of resistance against nature’s winter curfew’. She cites a fourteenth-century monk who pithily remarked that ‘dragons hate nothynge more than the stench of brennyng bone’.31 In his analysis Freud also claims that the acquisition of fire was an act which ‘was accomplished by robbery or theft’,32 as in Hardy’s tale the tranter effectively ‘steals’ the heroine from her beloved. However, the hapless Sweatley then takes on the role defined by Northrop Frye as ‘the pharmakos, or sacrificial victim, who has to be killed to strengthen the others’.33 It is worth recalling in this connection Propp’s analysis of the way fairy-tales are to be read in terms of actors and functions, one of the actors taking on the role of the ‘helper’ who keeps the story moving. The resolution of such tales, according to Propp, is regularly accomplished by the punishment of the villain leading to a happy ending, often involving a wedding. Indeed, the demise of the inebriated tranter is marked by a repetitive verbal and rhythmic pattern which ends with a dramatic and abrupt moment of closure:

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‘Where’s the tranter’ said men and boys; ‘where can he be?’ ‘Where’s the tranter?’ said Barbree alone. ‘Whereon e’th is the tranter?’ said everybody-y: They sifted the dust of his perished roof-tree, And all they could find was a bone. (CP 74, st. 17)

By staging this climactic break Hardy conforms to the way in which, according to Rainer Nägele’s Benjaminian theorisation, a ‘caesura decomposes the body down to the bones and dismembers, in order to reassemble the disjecta membra in other figures’.34 The caesura, it has been suggested, ‘may lead into the other scene, the power of the other’, which ‘constitutes the text’.35 The narrator recounts how Tim Tankens comes to the orchet, when crooping from sight In the lewth of a codlin-tree, bivering wi’fright, Wi’ on’y her night-rail to cover her plight, His lonesome young Barbree appears. (CP 72, st. 7)

The discovery of the heroine here might be contextualised in relation to Frazer’s examination of tree-cults and the evidence that ‘heathen worship was performed for the most part in sacred groves’, culminating in the death of a sacrificial victim beneath ‘the sacred tree’.36 It is clear, furthermore, that Hardy’s text amalgamates two types of narrative: Lord’s study of oral custom annotates the prevalence of ‘a group of wedding songs which follow the same pattern as the group of rescue songs’. As he observes, ‘Bride stealing, especially when the bride is willing … but hindered by the enemy, is basically the same as rescue.’ Lord further notes that ‘even the rescue songs … also involve a wedding’.37 The upbeat conclusion to the poem is preceded more negatively by the ‘custom-kept rout, shout, and flare/Of a skimmity-ride through the naibourhood’, prior to the final proof of Sweatley’s demise, upon which the folk change their tune and agree that ‘Tim and his lodger should risk it, and pair’ (p. 74, st. 19). An earlier version of the text offered further detail here: There was skimmity-riding wi’ rout, shout, and flare, In Weatherbury, Drouse, and Egdon way, ere They had proof of old Sweatley’s decay.38

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The scandalous staging of the skimmity-ride is familiar to Hardy readers from later fictional episodes: first, Thomasin’s alarmed response to the singing of the heath-dwellers, following her aborted wedding ceremony: ‘What does it mean—it isn’t the skimmity-ride I hope?’,39 and then more ominously the exposure of Lucetta and Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where it is dubbed by the pub landlady ‘a foolish old thing they do in these parts, when a man’s wife is—well, not too particularly his own’.40 This retributive communal action is summed up by Jacqueline Dillion as ‘ritualistic punishment for actions that violated social decorum, according to the judgement of the “folk” community’. As she observes, by ‘renaming “The Fire at Tranter Sweatley’s” as “The Bride-Night Fire”, Hardy connects the house-fire of the first (unconsummated) wedding night, to the flare-filled skimmington that must precede the heroine’s realised “bride-night”’.41 With regard to the dialectal forms of the poem, E.P. Thompson, in his historical account of such ‘rough music’, relevantly stresses the idea that the skimmity ‘discourse’ ‘derives its resources from oral transmission within a society which regulates many of its occasions— of authority and moral conduct—through such theatrical forms as the solemn procession’.42 As narrator, Hardy in this poem exhibits a distinctly Bakhtinian ‘double-­ voicedness’, impersonating both the language of rural Dorset and of the educated middle class. Such double-voicedness, Bakhtin suggests, leads to a clash of discourses. As he phrases it, ‘the authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape, is dialogised heteroglossia’.43 In espousing the use of rural dialect Hardy’s text takes on the form of a ‘printed utterance’ which is multi-layered as the simultaneous embodiment of the voice of the folk and of the educated author, the ensuing tension creating a type of ‘heteroglossic’ stress-point between what Bakhtin defined as the centrifugal and centripetal forces inherent in language systems. Hardy’s ambiguous notation of the way in which dialect was being ‘worsted’ by linguistic conformity, and his dramatic rendition, in this text and elsewhere, of a resistant folk-culture, resonates with Bakhtin’s analysis: When poetry was accomplishing the task of cultural, national and political centralisation of the verbal-ideological world … on the lower levels, on the stages of local fairs and at buffoon spectacles, the heteroglossia of the clown sounded forth, ridiculing all languages and dialects … all ‘languages’ were masks and … no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face.44

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The admixture of two social languages upon which the poem is posited and its sexualised content demonstrate how, in Terry Eagleton’s terms, Bakhtin pits against ‘official’ language, ‘the explosive politics of the body, the erotic, the licentious and semiotic’.45 The individual poet, like Hardy in this instance, in some senses stands ambiguously situated in relation to what Maurice Blanchot terms ‘the speech of the people’. This ‘song of the heart’, Blanchot writes, is ‘united to the community’, but ‘as collectivity cannot sing’: ‘For song, in order to manifest what is common to all, needs the voice of solitude that alone can open up to the secret.’46 This ambivalently poised ‘voice of solitude’ was heard in the year of Hardy’s birth, when William Barnes characterised the Dorset dialect as ‘purer and more regular than that which has been adopted as the national speech’. The local dialect offered, Barnes maintained, ‘a broad, bold, rustic shape of English’ which was ‘rich in humour, strong in raillery, powerful in hyperbole, and altogether a fit vehicle of rustic feeling’.47 Hardy’s project here and at other places in his oeuvre is to recuperate the vigour of a vanishing language community whilst problematising or challenging the role of the reader. But it is clear that whilst, for example, John Clare or William Barnes, in Sue Edney’s terms, ‘demonstrate their complete commitment to describing and “bodying forth” their landscapes and communities’,48 for Hardy the imaginative posture is that of a harking-back to a vanishing era. Alan Chedzoy has aptly observed that Hardy gained access to ‘a rich source of material which had been largely unexploited by contemporary writers’, and this material provided, as Chedzoy remarks, ‘a source of narrative; comic relief; shrewd ironic commentary; and a resonant source of folk memory’, and yet was paradoxically ‘addressed to standard English speakers’.49 In the dramatic scenario of Barbree’s expulsion from the burning marital home and her subsequent reintegration into the community, Hardy re-enacts the processes of loss of homeland mirrored and enacted in the precarious state of dialect usage in his lifetime. In a discussion of the work of the Swabian dialect poet, Johann Peter Hebel, Martin Heidegger identifies the notion of ‘dwelling’ with the prevalence of dialect. Hebel is, he contends, in terms relevant to a reading of ‘The Bride-Night Fire’, what he terms a ‘friend of the house’. The poet, Heidegger maintains, ‘gathers the world into a saying whose word remains a softly restrained shining—the language of the dialect poet’. According to this thinking, which seems to chime with Hardy’s practice here, dialect ‘is the mysterious wellspring of every mature language’.50 At the same time it is necessary to bear in mind Lord’s scrupulous distinction between literate

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and oral ‘texts’. The techniques in each case are, he maintains, ‘contradictory and mutually exclusive’: ‘Once the oral technique is lost, it is never regained.’51 With Lord’s diagnosis in mind, ‘The Bride-Night Fire’ might justly be construed as an elegy for this loss. Indeed, Hardy’s text, in contrast to his more ‘formal’ poetry, tends to bear out Jan Mukarovsky’s contention that forms of folk poetry do not … have the unity of semantic intention which makes a work of artificial poetry an integral creation characterised by a particular set and sequence of parts.52

In some ways ‘The Bride-Night Fire’ accords with Thomas Pfau’s diagnosis of ‘catastrophic meanings typically lurking beneath the marked impersonality of balladic and pastoral writing’, and of the ballad form as ‘the repetition of a significant past that had never been experienced as a lived presence’.53 The poem’s readers may thus be ‘poised to repossess a past whose forgetting had lent such specious consistency to their conscious present’. The overall impact of such a text, in Pfau’s terms, is to indicate ways in which ancient memories miraculously preserved in, and suddenly again conjured up by, the poetic word which would also rekindle the conflict between the collective truth of the past, represented by the ‘people’ (Volk), and the dispersed knowledge of modern individuals, commonly known as the ‘public’.54

This quasi-comic text offers the reader what may be termed an archetype of speech forms, enabling the nineteenth-century reader to repossess a past which had been largely forgotten or obliterated by the processes of modernity. In sum, a reading of Hardy’s humorous dialect poem takes on unforeseen significance as sign and expression of a culture which is in retreat in the face of the universalising principle of exchange. The Dorset dialect which is recorded and celebrated in this text assumes the form of what Paul de Man terms ‘an errance, a kind of permanent exile’, or indeed, ‘not really an exile, for there is no homeland’, because, de Man concludes, in words which might have resonated at Max Gate, there is in the end ‘nothing from which one has been exiled’.55 In the following chapter it is argued that this sense of an extremity of ‘exile’, personal, amorous, and geological, informs the hero’s crisis on the cliffs of Cornwall.

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Notes 1. The term ‘tranter’, as in Under the Greenwood Tree and elsewhere, designates an ‘irregular carrier’. 2. Norman Arkans, ‘Hardy’s Narrative Muse and the Ballad Connection’, in The Thomas Hardy Annual, vol. 2, ed. N.  Page (London: Macmillan, 1984), 134. 3. Edmund Gosse, ‘Mr Hardy’s Lyrical Poems’, Edinburgh Review 227(1918), 290. 4. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, ed. C.A.  Wagner (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968), 107. 5. David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 53. 6. Hardy: Personal Writings, ed. H. Orel (London: Macmillan, 1967), 82. 7. Ibid., 76. 8. Ibid., 93. 9. Sue Edney, ‘“Times be Badish Vor the Poor”: William Barnes and his Dialect of Disturbance in the Dorset Eclogues’, English 58 (222) (2009), 212. 10. Ralph W. Elliott, Thomas Hardy’s English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 36. 11. Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 128. 12. Albert D. Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 20. 13. Martyn F. Wakelin, English Dialects (London: Athlone Press, 1977), 5. 14. Richard Nemesvari, ‘Discourse, Ideology, and Generic Hybridity in Hardy’s Fiction’, in A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. K. Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 110. 15. The poem first appeared in a bowdlerised form in the Gentleman’s Magazine, November 1875; it was reprinted in a more unbowdlerised version in Lionel Johnson’s Art of Thomas Hardy in 1894, which Hardy had read in proof. A more radical dialectal version then appeared in Wessex Poems of 1898, but the dialect content was then marginally reduced in the 1912 Wessex Edition. The title of the poem in Wessex Poems was ‘The Fire at Tranter’s Sweatley’s’; in the 1912 printing this became ‘The BrideNight Fire (Wessex Dialect)’, whilst in the Collected Poems it appeared as ‘The Bride-Night Fire/Or, The Fire at Tranter Sweatley’s (Wessex Dialect)’. For the Wessex edition and Collected Poems Hardy provided translations of d ­ ialect words. (See Simon Gatrell, ‘Dialect’, in Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy, ed. N.  Page [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 89.)

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16. Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter, Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song (London: British Academy, 2003), 17. 17. Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. J. Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 73, st. 11. Subsequently cited as CP. 18. Walter J.  Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Routledge, 2002), 40, 44, 69. 19. Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems: Variorum Edition, ed. J.  Gibson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1979), 72. 20. Meredith Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 74. 21. Maureen McLane, ‘Ballads and Bards’, in British Romanticism, ed. M. Carvel (London: Routledge, 2015), 594. 22. Arkans, ‘Hardy’s Narrative Muse’, 145. 23. Elizabeth K.  Helsinger, Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-­ Century Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), 167. 24. Louise Pound, ‘Folklore and Dialect’, California Folklore Quarterly 4 (1945), 151. 25. Anthony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (London: Routledge, 2003), 82. 26. Andrew Radford, ‘Folklore and Anthropology’, in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. P.  Mallett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 212. 27. Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies, ed. M.  Rimmer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 198. 28. J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, ed. R. Fraser (London: Oxford University Press, 1994), 709. 29. Ibid., 736, 744. 30. ‘The Acquisition and Control of Fire’, in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. J.  Strachey, vol. XXII (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 188. 31. Jacqueline Dillion, Thomas Hardy: Folklore and Resistance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 121. 32. Freud, ‘The Acquisition of Fire’, 188. 33. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 148. 34. Rainer Nägele, Theater, Theory, Speculation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 165. 35. Jeremy Tambling, Hölderlin and the Poetry of Tragedy (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2014), 26. 36. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 83, 84. 37. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 122. 38. Complete Poems: Variorum Edition, 74.

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39. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. S. Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 43. 40. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. D. Kramer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 260. 41. Dillion, Folklore and Resistance, 72, 83. Dillion offers an insightful account of the practice of the ‘skimmington ride’ and its deployment in Hardy’s writing. 42. E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991), 478. 43. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, tr. C.  Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 272. 44. Ibid., 273. 45. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin (London: New Left Books, 1981), 144. 46. Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, tr. C.  Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 130. 47. William Barnes, ‘The Saxon Dialects of Dorsetshire’, Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1840, 31. 48. Edney, ‘“Times be Badish”’, 228. 49. Alan Chedzoy, ‘“Those Terrible Marks of the Beast”: Barnes, Hardy and the Dorset Dialect’, Hardy Society Journal 4(3) (2008), 57. 50. Martin Heidegger, ‘Hebel – Friend of the House’ (1957), tr. B.V. Foltz and M. Heim, Contemporary German Philosophy 3 (1983), 96, 90. 51. Lord, The Singer of Tales, 129. 52. Jan Mukarovsky, The Word and Verbal Art, tr. J. Burbank and P. Steiner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 194. 53. Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 21, 211. 54. Ibid., 219, 231. 55. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 92.

CHAPTER 2

A Pair of Blue Eyes: The Cliff-Scene and the Literary Sublime

In the most dramatic scene of A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), whilst poised both comically and cosmically on the Cliff Without a Name, Henry Knight encounters the defunct gaze of the trilobite, and Hardy observes that ‘separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death’.1 The hero feels himself to be ‘in the presence of personalised loneliness’ (PBE, 212), but even when facing death, as an amateur geologist he proceeds to consider ‘the varied scenes that had had their day between this creature’s epoch and his own’ (PBE, 214). In a passage indebted to Gideon Mantell’s The Wonders of Geology (1838), a copy of which Hardy had received from Horace Moule in 1858, Knight somewhat bizarrely envisions the story of the cliff-face: Time closed up like a fan before him. He saw himself at one extremity of the years, face to face with the beginning and all the intermediate centuries simultaneously. Fierce men, clothed in the hides of beasts, and carrying, for defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock … Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the mylodon—all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Farther back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. Still more shadowy were the sinister crocodilian outlines—alligators and other horrible reptiles, culminating in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Ebbatson, Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_2

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the colossal lizard, the iguanodon. Folded behind were dragon forms and clouds of flying reptiles: still underneath were fishy beings of lower development; and so on, till the lifetime scenes of the fossil confronting him were a present and modern condition of things. (PBE, 214)

The rain sets in, taking the form of ‘a cosmic agency, active, lashing, eager for conquest’ (PBE, 215). Reflecting philosophically that his demise ‘would be a deliberate loss to earth of good material’, Knight takes succour from the reappearance of Elfride and prepares ‘to welcome life again’ (PBE, 217). Having removed her clothing, Elfride has replaced only her thin dress and constructed a rope from her underclothing, with which she pulls Knight to safety; yet at this revelatory moment the pair do not kiss because of the ‘peculiarity of nature’ of her repressed suitor, who cannot ‘take advantage of the unguarded and passionate avowal she had tacitly made’ (PBE, 220). This striking and quasi-somnambulistic scene, which mirrors and reinflects Elfride’s earlier tumble from the parapet of Endelstow church tower, offers an imaginative response to the burgeoning study of geology. Adelene Buckland remarks that Knight is here ‘confronted by the insignificance of humanity in geological time’ in an image she defines as ‘one of Romantic individualism’,2 and Benjamin Morgan notes how stone becomes a site of contact between two widely disseminated Victorian narrative scales: the unimaginably slow geological change over time as propounded by Lyell’s and Darwin’s uniformitarianism; and the implausibly rapid incidents and coincidences plotted by sensation novelists.3

In this respect, thus, Hardy ‘uses the material duration of stone to deform the eventful rhythm of popular fiction’.4 The establishment of this new science in the nineteenth century, Jacques Rancière has suggested, served to elicit ‘a new poetry’ through ‘the work of … archaeologists and geologists’, in a discourse which creates ‘cities from out of a few teeth, repopulates forests from out of ferns imprinted on fossilised stone’, and ‘reconstructs races of giant animals from out of a mammoth bone’. Rancière adds: The truth of literature is inscribed in the path opened up by these sciences which get lifeless debris to talk: fossils for the palaeontologist, stones or folds of terrain for the geologist, ruins for the archaeologist.5

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Andrew Radford pertinently notes, in this context, that this ‘engrossing incident’ offers ‘the most wide-ranging and comprehensive vision of former worlds in Hardy’s fiction’: By revealing Knight’s response to the suffocating silences of geological time-spans, Hardy captures the loss and reduction of man’s significance in his own sight.6

In addition, it may be argued that as Lucie Armitt suggests a propos the genre of fantasy literature, ‘the discourse of the geological fuels a topography that is textual’, in an imaginative structure whereby ‘the various strata set above-ground are placed in one-to-one correspondence with the layering of the protagonist’s psyche, so the novel appears self-reflexive’.7 It was, Gillian Beer argues, the work of Charles Lyell and his disciple Mantell which enabled mankind ‘to recuperate the staggeringly extended time-­ scale of the physical world’, and she adds appositely, in view of Knight’s response, that although man’s presence ‘is diminished in the raw time-­ scale, his is the only source of powerful interpretation’.8 Thus, it comes about, as Virginia Zimmerman has written, that In the insistence on the importance of the present as a measure of both past and future, individuals claim a position of spatial, temporal, and narrative significance.9

As occurs on the Cliff Without a Name, ‘from the vantage point of the present, we can observe all time’, and it is notable that Zimmerman singles out the trilobite as the fossil which, in the nineteenth century, most powerfully ‘collapsed the distance between past and present’, challenging the observer ‘to peer into the abyss of time stretching back beyond the scope of imagination’. Thus, it came about that ‘even as it exposed the terrible spectre of eventual annihilation, geology offered a theory that empowered the small, the individual’.10 However, Hardy’s dramatic scene reinflects not only the newly emergent discourse and imagery of geology but also the concept of the literary sublime as influentially promulgated by Kant in his Critique of Judgement, first published in 1790. In experiencing the sublime, Kant argues, ‘the mind is not simply attracted’ by the forms of nature but ‘also alternately repelled thereby’.11 In this philosophical argument it is ‘in its chaos, or in its wildest and most irregular disorder and desolation … that nature chiefly

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excites the ideas of the sublime’ (CJ, 77). In Hardy’s scene it is the registration of awe and fear in Knight’s consciousness that is the issue, in conformity with the Kantian view that ‘true sublimity must be sought only in the mind of the judging subject’ (CJ, 86), a response paradoxically linked with ‘a feeling of displeasure’ and ‘simultaneously awakened pleasure’— what Kant characterises as ‘a shaking’, or ‘rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction’, an ‘abyss’ in which the human imagination ‘fears to lose itself’ (CJ, 88). In his list of features of the sublime, which resonates with the Cliff Without a Name, Kant particularly specifies ‘bold, overhanging, and, as it were, threatening rocks’ and ‘the boundless ocean’ (CJ, 91). Yet, humanity, Kant observes, does not allow itself to be swamped or defeated: whilst there may be ‘recognition of our physical helplessness as beings of nature’, yet we preserve ‘a faculty of judging ourselves as independent of nature’ in a structure of feeling which suggests ‘the foundation of a self-­ preservation’ (CJ, 92). Knight may be said at this critical juncture to evince a Kantian consciousness of his ultimate superiority, as a rational human being, over the immense natural forces in evidence on the Cornish cliffs. Jean-François Lyotard suggests that the aesthetics of the sublime offer ‘a pleasure mixed with pain, a pleasure that comes from pain’, a pleasure indeed paradoxically marked by ‘the extreme tension … that characterises the pathos of the sublime’. In such a scenario, as Knight’s ordeal illustrates, ‘it is also necessary that the terror-causing threat be suspended, kept at bay, held back’, in experiencing a danger which ‘provokes a kind of pleasure’.12 The sublime, in this reading, ‘allows the unrepresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents’: ‘Violent, divided against itself, it simultaneously fascination, horror, and elevation.’13 Hardy would confirm his own intuitive sense of the haunting sublimity of the Cornish seascape in his 1912 preface to the novel, where he observed: The place is pre-eminently (for one person at least) the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly birds, the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the waters, the bloom of dark purple cast that seems to exhale from the shoreward precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the twilight of a night vision.14

Knight and Elfride here confront a version of the Kantian sublime, which, as Slavoj Zizek maintains, ‘excites and agitates’, sublimity being ‘attached to chaotic, terrifying, limitless phenomena’, nature ‘in its most

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chaotic, boundless dimension’.15 In his parlous situation Knight looks ‘straight downwards’ to the surface of the sea ‘more than two hundred yards below’: That narrow white border was foam, he knew well; but its boisterous tosses were so distant as to appear a pulsation only, and its plashing was barely audible. A white border to a black sea—his funeral pall and its edging. (PB, 216)

Jacques Derrida has remarked, a propos this complex formation of the Kantian sublime, that ‘the example of the ocean does not come fortuitously’; to the contrary, he argues, ‘the abyss threatening to swallow everything’ is irrevocably linked to the image ‘of the ocean of the poets, the spectacular ocean’.16 There is an ‘excess’ in the experience of the sublime, Derrida suggests, ‘which opens an abyss’: The imagination is afraid of losing itself in this abyss, and we step back. The abyss—the concept of which, like that of the bridge, organised the architectonic considerations—would be the privileged presentation of the sublime.17

There is a Derridean sense, registered by Knight, that the sublime ‘is not in nature but only in ourselves’, and it is suggestive that, in considering the perception of the sublime, Derrida should refer to the significance of ‘the telescope which makes this affirmation’18—an experience exemplified by Knight’s action in utilising his ‘old-fashioned but powerful telescope’ to view the steamboat carrying Stephen on the final stretch of his journey back to England (PBE, 204). In Hardy’s text the sublime refracts what has been designated ‘a heightened time during which the self is radically altered by something that presses on us from beyond our normal reality’.19 The discourse of the sublime, as here in Hardy’s novel which it textually destabilises and interrupts, ‘produces an overplus which it cannot command or control’, a ‘discursive excess’ that marks and disturbs the conventionalised narrative flow.20 Indeed in terms of Hardy’s oeuvre as a whole, Knight’s ordeal gestures towards the way in which, as Marx would suggest, industry and commerce ‘create [the] material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth’.21 Walter Benjamin extends this analysis in his arcades project, observing that

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Just as Miocene or Eocene rocks carry in places the impression of monsters from these earth periods, so the arcades lie today in major cities like caverns with the fossils of a subterranean monster: the consumers from the pre-­ imperialist era of capitalism, Europe’s last dinosaur.22

It is the mark of Kantian sublimity, what the philosopher designated a ‘point of excess’ or ‘an abyss’, that, in Benjaminian terms, ‘the moment of expression coincides with a veritable eruption of images’, giving rise to ‘a chaotic mass of metaphors’.23 In the critique of Kantian sublimity by Benjamin’s colleague, Adorno, it is suggested, appositely in view of Knight’s predicament, that ‘Kant’s doctrine of the feeling of the sublime … describes an art that shudders inwardly by suspending itself in the name of an illusionless truth content’.24 The hero’s sense of his own worth echoes Adorno’s thesis that ‘spirit, in its empirical powerlessness vis-a-vis nature, experiences its intelligible essence as one that is superior to nature’. That is to say, ‘man puffs himself up as if in spite of everything, as the bearer of spirit, he were absolute’ and ‘thus becomes comical’.25 Adorno further insists upon the political point that ‘by situating the sublime in overpowering grandeur and setting up the antithesis of power and powerlessness, Kant directly affirmed his unquestioning complicity with domination’26—a domination which in terms of Hardy’s novel is both gendered (the subordination of the ‘unguarded and passionate’ heroine [PBE, 220] to Knight’s masculinist impassivity) and class-bound (the snobbery of Parson Swancourt, the denigration and rejection of the low-born Stephen Smith, and Elfride’s ultimately fatal marriage to Lord Luxellian). A Lyotardian commentator has appositely pointed out how ‘with the emergence of exchange in the form of commodity-production, the sublime disappears’; its effect, that is to say, ‘becomes more powerful and chilling when, losing its transcendentality, it fades into capital’.27 The cliff-scene may be construed as an early staging of modern existential crisis in ways suggested by the German philosopher Otto Bollnow’s reflections on the human perception of space. When ‘solid ground is absent’, Bollnow remarks, ‘man must fall’, ‘as when an abyss opens close to him, at a steep cliff’. Man thus feels metaphorically and physically ‘that he is about to plunge into a bottomless pit; he is gripped by a nameless fear, and he will really fall if he does not promptly succeed in regaining his foothold’.28 Knight may be said here to experience what Kierkegaard nominated ‘the dizziness of freedom’. However, this freedom is undermined by the hero’s failure to ‘take advantage’ of Elfride’s disrobing:

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Hardy’s scene, in its culminating moment, thus illustrates what Thomas Weiskel terms ‘the role of repression in the sublime’, which is elicited because ‘the sublime splits consciousness into alienated halves’.29 In conclusion it may be postulated that the cliff-scene resonates with implications for Hardy’s oeuvre as a whole and particularly for the role he adopts in later novels and in his poetry as what Heidegger, in his essay ‘Why Poets’, identifies as ‘a poet in a desolate time’, one whose writing pursues ‘the track of the fugitive gods’.30 Knight’s predicament acts as a precursor to an intuitive sense elaborated in Hardy’s later writings of what Heidegger nominates an ‘age for which the ground fails’, which thereby ‘hangs in the abyss’ until a ‘turning point’ is attained by a ‘turning away from the abyss’.31 Knight is the conflicted forerunner of protagonists such as Clym, Henchard or Jude, types of the figure identified by Heidegger whose destiny, like that of Hardy in his later Cornish elegies for Emma, is ‘to reach into the abyss of the desolate’.32 It is also the case that Knight observes not only the features of the cliff-face but his own mental topography: as Lyotard remarks of the Burkean sublime, whilst the soul is ‘dumb, immobilised, as good as dead’, art ‘procures a pleasure of relief’ so that ‘the soul is returned to the agitated zone between life and death’.33 Bruce Johnson contends a propos the later Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The buried geological or archaeological, or even palaeontological, metaphors of[Hardy’s] work really imply an ideal model of consciousness, an awareness of the primeval energies that have shaped even the mind’s outward topography.

In this sense the strata which confront Henry Knight may be read as ‘not only telling an old story but also revealing a present process’,34 one which reverberates throughout the subsequent fatally inflected narrative, culminating as it does in the Luxellian family vault of Endelstow Church. The complexity and depth of Knight’s outer and inner crisis on the cliffs anticipates and exemplifies the wide range of visual (mis-)representations, natural and technical, examined in the next chapter.

Notes 1. Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. P.  Dalziel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1998), 213. This edition reproduces the text of the first edition of 1873. Subsequently cited as PBE.

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2. Adelene Buckland, ‘Physics, Geology, Astronomy’, in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. P. Mallett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 243. See also Buckland’s Novel Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), passim. 3. Benjamin Morgan, ‘Scale as Form: Thomas Hardy’s Rocks and Trees’, in Anthropocene Reading, ed. T.  Menely and J.O.  Taylor (Pennsylvania University Press, 2017). 4. Ibid. 5. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, tr. J. Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 19, 16. 6. Andrew Radford, Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 50, 51. 7. Lucie Armitt, Theorising the Fantastic (London: Arnold, 1996), 11. 8. Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 39. 9. Virginia Zimmerman, Excavating Victorians (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008), 3. 10. Ibid., 4, 15, 4. 11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, ed. N.  Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 76. Subsequently cited as CJ. 12. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, in The Continental Aesthetics Reader, ed. C.  Cazeaux (London: Routledge, 2000), 458. 13. The Lyotard Reader and Guide, ed. K. Crome and J. Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 131, 259. 14. Hardy: Personal Writings, ed. H. Orel (London: Macmillan, 1967), 7. 15. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 202, 203. 16. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, tr. G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 129. 17. Ibid., 129. 18. Ibid., 132, 138. 19. Simon Morley, The Sublime (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010), 18. 20. Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 300. 21. Karl Marx, ‘Marx on India’, New International VIII (1942), 192. 22. Cited in David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity (Cambridge, MS: MIT Press, 1988), 241. 23. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, tr. J.  Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 173. 24. T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. R. Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 256–7. 25. Ibid., 257, 259. 26. Ibid., 260.

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27. Wilhlem S. Wurzer, ‘Lyotard, Kant, and the Infinite’, in Lyotard: Philosophy, Politics, and the Sublime, ed. H.J. Silverman (London: Routledge, 2012), 207, 208. 28. O.F. Bollnow, Human Space, tr, C. Shuttleworth (London: Hyphen Press, 2011), 48. 29. Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 41, 48. 30. Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, tr. J.  Young and K.  Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 202. 31. Ibid., 220, 201. 32. Ibid., 222. 33. Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, 459. 34. Bruce Johnson, ‘The Perfection of Species and Hardy’s Tess’, in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U.C. Knoepflmacher and G.B. Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 262, 272.

CHAPTER 3

Moments of (Technological) Vision

In order to have a feel for landscape you have to lose your feeling of place. (Lyotard1)

The Victorian appreciation of landscape has been suggestively characterised as ‘the dreamwork of imperialism’.2 In The Hand of Ethelberta, it is on her way to the ‘celebrated ruin’ of Coomb Castle, significantly to witness a meeting of the Imperial Association, that Ethelberta Petherwin takes a moment to survey the land/seascape: The country on each side lay beneath her like a map, domains behind domains, parishes by the score, harbours, fir-woods, and little inland seas mixing curiously together … Standing on the top of a giant’s grave in this antique land, Ethelberta lifted her eyes to behold two sorts of weather pervading Nature at the same time. Far below on the right hand it was a fine day, and the silver sunbeams lighted up a many-armed inland sea which stretched round an island with fir-trees and gorse, and amid brilliant crimson heaths wherein white paths and roads occasionally met the eye in dashes and zigzags like flashes of lightning. Outside, where the broad Channel appeared, a berylline and opalised variegation of ripples, currents, deeps, and shallows, lay as fair under the sun as a New Jerusalem, the shores being of gleaming sand.3

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Such an epiphanic ‘moment of vision’ would characterise Hardy’s art in both fiction and poetry to the extent that, as Cézanne would phrase it, ‘landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness’.4 This accession of ‘literary language’ possesses in the Hardyesque oeuvre what the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty designates ‘a halo of signification’,5 and elsewhere he elaborates further: I understand the world because there is for me near and far, foreground and horizon, and hence a landscape in which things can appear and acquire significance.6

Hardy notably celebrated what he termed the ‘mad, late-Turner rendering’ of landscape, and Ethelberta’s visualisation here curiously endorses Merleau-Ponty’s contention that The painter’s world is a visible world, nothing but visible … Painting awakens and carries to its highest pitch a delirium which is vision itself, for to see is to have at distance.7

As Edward Casey appositely remarks, perceptions of landscape or seascape take the form of perspectives which tempt ‘the eye ever outward, farther and farther from the near-space in which it is currently located’.8 Hardy’s writing in this passage and elsewhere acknowledges the need for what D.M. Levin terms ‘the presence of the horizon’: When the horizon is forgotten, the space of enchantment, the clearing of light which allows vision to open and brings to presence things as they are gets diminished.9

Hardy sought, as he remarks in the preface to Far From the Madding Crowd, to portray ‘the horizons and landscapes of a partly real, partly dream-country’.10 The impressionist/modernist era is characterised by a sense of light, and Ethelberta’s experience endorses Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of the ‘doubling’ of the image of the sea: It is at once the profound depth of a possible shipwreck and the surface of the luminous sky. The image floats, in sum, at the whim of the swells, mirroring the sea, poised over the abyss, soaked by the sea, but also shimmering with the very thing that threatens it and bears it up at the same time.11

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Land- or seascape, in this reading, ‘opens onto the unknown’. For Hardy, a novel was to be conceived as ‘an impression, not an argument’,12 and in moving towards impressionism Hardy’s later fiction participates in an act of seeing which, as in the visionary process enacted by Ethelberta, possesses ‘a fundamental power of showing forth more than itself’.13 Hugh Epstein notes the countervailing movements in Hardy’s texts, either delving ‘inwards to render the external scene as a property of the mind alone, in a proto-modernist manner’ or gesturing ‘outwards to locate the sensing self, not as a cerebral receptacle but as an embodied agent within a scene in which it participates’.14 This is equally the case in the representation of a more populated landscape than that encountered by Ethelberta: It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being all health and colour. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice … Flossy catkins of the later kinds, sprouting fern-­ stems like bishops’ pastoral-staves, the square-headed moschattel, the odd cuckoo-pint … snow-white lady’s-smocks, the toothwort, approximating to human flesh, the enchanter’s nightshade, and the black-petaled doleful-bells were among the quainter objects of the vegetable world in and about Weatherbury at this teeming time, and, of the animal, the metamorphosed figures of Mr Jan Coggan, the master shearer, the second and third shearers who travelled in the exercise of their calling and do not require definition by name, Henery Fray the fourth shearer, Susan Tall’s husband the fifth, Joseph Poorgrass the sixth, young Cain Ball as assistant shearer, and Gabriel Oak as general supervisor.15

Here the narrator’s invocation of the act of looking is to be somewhat differentiated from Ethelberta’s act of vision, and this is even more the case in some of the most characteristic moments in Tess of the d’Urbervilles: The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps, each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the active binders in the rear laid their hands—mainly women, but some of them men in print shirts, and trousers supported round their waists by leather straps rendering useless the two buttons behind; which twinkled and bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each wearer, as if they were a pair of eyes in the small of his back. But those of the other sex were the most interesting of this company of binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object set

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down therein as at ordinary times. A field-man is a personality afield; a field-­ woman is a portion of the field; she has somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself with it.16

Such sequences may be elucidated by the argument put forward by Jean-Luc Nancy: The countryman, the peasant, is someone whose occupation is the country and the land … being a peasant means taking in hand the place and the time of the country. Its culture and cultivation, as one says,—that is, the fashioning of one by the other—the occupier and the occupied, the toiler and the toiled which are by turns the one called ‘the peasant’ and that which surrounds him, which is called ‘the land’, ‘the countryside’, in the sense of the field, which, for its part, is also a corner or piece of earth, but opened, extended, cleared by and for the occupation of growing and grazing.17

In the passage from Tess, it is notable that once again the emphasis is placed upon the ocularcentric process, Hardy describing how ‘the eye returns involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket’, ‘the most flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all’, a figure which ‘seduces casual attention’ whilst ‘the other women often gaze around them’. Indeed, the narrative insists upon the hyper-visualisation of the heroine, exploring the almost hypnotic effect of her ‘large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor grey nor violet … which could be seen if one looked into their irises— shade behind shade—tint beyond tint—around pupils that had no bottom’.18 John Hughes has persuasively annotated ‘how Hardy’s fiction … explores the nuances of looking and eye contact’, and demonstrates the ways in which ‘these modes of vision have been seen to offer a template for the type of creativity that animates his work’. Vision in this case, Hughes suggests, ‘is not a matter of seeing, as a static and objective recognition, but of looking, as a dynamic interaction’.19 In these sequences and elsewhere in his work Hardy moves towards a mode of ‘epiphanic modernism’ which suspends linear time in favour of a sense of intuitive transcendence, a moment of epiphany, as Ariane Mildenberg argues, ‘related to a perceiving subject who always already has an implicit bond with the world it seeks to know’.20 The vision granted to Ethelberta, or the later depictions of Egdon Heath or the Vale of the Great Dairies, serves to highlight what Mildenberg calls the ‘lived experience of the embodied subject’ in what becomes a ‘revaluation of but never

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a rejection of nineteenth-century realism’, disclosing the sensation of ‘infinite open horizons of the unknown but potentially knowable’.21 Deleuze and Guattari maintain that, as a literary form, the novel ‘has often risen to the percept—not perception of the moor in Hardy but the moor as percept; oceanic percepts in Melville; urban percepts, or those of the mirror, in Virginia Woolf’. In such cases, they argue, ‘The landscape sees’, to the extent that the percept ‘is the landscape before man, in the absence of man’.22 This illuminates a reading of Hardy’s haunting evocation of Egdon Heath, which ‘could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen’, its rounds and hollows seeming ‘to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy’, a stretch of land ‘singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony’. However, later in the text the wide views of the opening chapters give way, in the extreme case of Clym Yeobright’s blindness, to a vision of the heath ‘of a curious microscopic sort, his whole world being limited to a circuit of a few feet from his person’. With the restricted vision afforded by his ‘goggles’, Clym’s familiars become ‘creeping and winged things’ close at hand, his eyesight now limited to the ‘amber-coloured butterflies’, ‘emerald-green grasshoppers’, and the flies which ‘buzzed about him’.23 In such a scenario, as Patrick Armstrong perceptively remarks, Clym ‘is textually intertwined with the heath’s interconnected mesh of densely punctuated plant life’.24 This is one of a number of definitive episodes in Hardy which mark and record the impact of specular technologies on human perception and the aesthetic response to nature, in a body of writing which represents, as Armstrong discerns, ‘an attempt to move beyond the conventional romance plot and into a vanguard of optically experimental literature’.25 In reflecting upon Benjamin’s seminal essay on mechanical reproduction, Gianni Vattimo traces the way in which art, in modernity, becomes ‘connected to the advent of new technologies which in fact at once permit and determine a form of generalisation of aestheticity’: With the advent of the ability to reproduce art by mechanical means, the works of the past lose their aura, that is, the halo that surrounds them and isolates them (and together with them the realm of aesthetic experience as well) from the rest of existence.26

In Hardy’s work the impact of the new modes of technological vision is nowhere more dramatically explored than in Swithin St Cleeve’s deployment of the ‘equatorial’ telescope gifted to him by Viviette Constantine:

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The sky had a new and startling beauty that night. A broad, fluctuating semicircular arch of vivid white light spanned the northern quarter of the heavens, reaching from the horizon to the star Eta in the Greater Bear. It was the Aurora Borealis, just risen up for the winter season out of the freezing seas of the north, where every autumn vapour was now undergoing rapid congelation.27

Hardy himself would describe the text of Tess as ‘oftener charged with impressions than with convictions’,28 and this elusiveness becomes crucial in the period of the new technologies. Hardy, like other writers of the period, felt compelled to respond to the efflorescence of these new inventions. As Scott McQuire has noted, By the nineteenth century, the expansion of telegraph services and the successive invention of the camera (1839), the telephone (1876), the phonograph (1877), the wireless radio (1894), and the cinematograph(1895) completely redefined the practice of ‘communication’ and the notion of ‘proximity’.29

However, such communication would in some circumstances become miscommunication, leading to the suspicion that no matter how accurate a photograph might seem to be in representing a subject, that process of representation ‘had achieved notoriety and popularity through its potential to lie’.30 Merleau-Ponty pointedly reproduces Rodin’s apothegm, ‘It is the artist who is truthful, while the photograph is mendacious.’31 Thus, whilst Swithin’s telescope may enhance his vision, placing it, in Graham McPhee’s analysis, ‘at the centre of the visual field reaching into the cosmos’, it also ‘pulls away the very ground underlying the subject’s privileged point of view’.32 In such a scenario the telescope works to unsettle ‘the stable arrangement of space’ which ‘gives way under the accelerated time of technology’. The emergence of such technologies, that is to say, ‘undermines the sovereignty of the subject’,33 to the extent that mechanical image-production, as Nicholas Daly remarks, takes on a quality of ‘ghostliness’: mechanisation thus ‘introduces its own spectre-ghost in the machine’, eliciting ‘a parallel world of phantasmatic doubles’.34 The appearance of the ‘double’ was most pronounced and problematic in the development of photography, the camera, in Susan Sontag’s terms, entering nineteenth-century consciousness ‘not simply as a new mode of representation, but as a new language of truth’,35 a language which, by

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inextricably linking economies of money and photography, served to create a new social world. But this new world was shadowed and undermined by techniques which fractured and compromised the truth-claims of the photographic apparatus. As Sontag argues, the ‘consequences of lying have to be more central for photography than ever they can be for painting’: ‘A fake photograph (one which has been retouched or tampered with) … falsifies reality.’36 The vogue of the trick photograph flourished in the 1880s and 1890s and would become an issue for Hardy’s own work.37 In a finely articulated reading of Hardy’s use of photography, Mark Durden aptly observes that ‘his texts can be seen to be marked by a visual sensibility that is photographic’, in a body of writing ‘affected by the notion of the photograph as trace, an indexical imprint in light and shadow of its subject’.38 Durden catalogues a range of photographic references in Hardy, such as the poems ‘The Photograph’ and ‘The Son’s Portrait’, and notably the short story, ‘An Imaginative Woman’, in which Ella Marchmill falls under the amatory influence of a photographic portrait of the poet Robert Trewe, whose lodgings she rents. Although she never in fact meets the young writer, who subsequently commits suicide, after her own death in childbirth her husband detects ‘strong traces of resemblance’ to Trewe in his infant son, whom he summarily rejects. In A Laodicean photography, as Durden notes, ‘plays a central role’, with two portraits exercising a significant part in the plot, ‘the first because it fails to incriminate and the second because it incriminates falsely’.39 It was in the mid-1840s that a German photographer invented a new technique for retouching the negative, and as Sontag ironically notes, ‘The news that the camera did lie made getting photographed more popular.’40 The notion of the photograph as a perfect record of the perceptual world, Fox Talbot’s ‘pencil of nature’, became problematic with the possibility of what Martin Jay designates ‘deceptive doctoring’. Indeed, it soon became the case that, as Jay remarks, ‘even unretouched photos could be understood to provide something less than perfect verisimilitude’, these developments thus leading to an ‘ultimate disillusionment with the realist paradigm’.41 Later in the century, as Walter Benjamin observes, photographers begin to see their task as being ‘to simulate the aura’ of the traditional work of art, which they achieved by ‘using all the arts of retouching’.42 Through these duplicitous techniques the ‘other’ in the photograph, it has been argued, ‘paradoxically appears at the very moment of its absence’ in a scenario which ‘indicates the precarious and even ghostly status of presence in photographic representation’.43 Thus, it comes about, McPhee argues, that ‘the

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photographic image remains haunted by multiple and shifting structures of intentionality, “phantoms”’.44 Nancy attests that in photography ‘there is always something hallucinatory’, an image ‘metamorphosing everything into an alterity’ to the extent that the photograph ‘estranges, it estranges us’.45 The hallucinatory quality of the photograph and Hardy’s deployment of what Durden characterises as ‘a visual sensibility that is photographic’46 are evinced, for example, in the beginnings of Jude’s love for Sue through the sight of her photographic portrait, but it is the new practice of retouching which particularly bears out Freud’s contention that the mind resembles ‘a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus’.47As Roland Barthes presciently notes, trick effects ‘intervene without warning in the plane of denotation’, passing off as ‘denoted’ ‘a message which is in reality heavily connoted’.48 In A Laodicean it is Captain de Stancy’s illegitimate son, William Dare, who most dramatically embodies the prevailing vogue for photographic manipulation. Characterised as ‘a photographic amateur’ and peripatetic ‘young photographer’ variously identified as Canadian, East Indian or Italian, ‘a being of no age, no nationality, and no behaviour’, Dare is described by the architect Havill as a ‘complete negative’ and ‘maker of negatives’.49 Dare and Havill illicitly search Somerset’s studio in order to inspect his plans for the renovation of Stancy Castle, and the young architect has recourse to a photograph of William Dare in order to identify the culprit, a plan which is foiled when Captain de Stancy ‘carefully put the portrait into the fire’ (AL, 156). Later in the narrative Dare attempts to compromise Somerset in Paula’s eyes by manipulating his photo: It was a portrait of Somerset, but by a device known in photography the operator, though contriving to produce what seemed to be a perfect likeness, had given it the distorted features and wild attitude of a man advanced in intoxication. (AL, 319)

It is ironic, as Green-Lewis observes, that such trickery is practised by a man who, despite ‘his actor’s inconstancy’, is ‘literally branded with his identity’, the anti-hero’s name being tattooed on his breast.50 John Schad has proposed that in this puzzling text ‘photography betrays something of its kinship to writing—that other “black and white” art of duplication’, to the extent that ‘it is the sheer unreliability of writing that photography serves to foreground’. In such a case, Schad suggests, Dare’s photography represents ‘a shadow of not only architecture but writing, not only

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Somerset’s pursuits but Hardy’s’, A Laodicean in this sense being classified as ‘a shadow or negative of what … readers would recognise as a “Hardy” novel’.51 Durden justly remarks upon other key ‘acts of looking and being looked at’ in the novel,52 most sensationally the scene where Dare’s father, Captain de Stancy, is tricked by his son into spying on Paula’s gymnastic gyrations, her ‘supple form’ clad in a ‘pink flannel costume’ (AL, 173). Durden also comments upon the ‘vulnerability to manipulation’ of a second new mechanical process, the telegraph which Paula has installed at the castle. In this way the text hints at ‘a certain value of authenticity’ which is ‘lost with mechanical reproduction and communication’.53 Nineteenth-century realism is here cunningly undermined by such manifestations of technology to the extent that, in the seminal case of the photograph, the image becomes in Nancy’s terms ‘openly non-­ identical to itself’.54 Hardy’s response to ocular technology and the ‘gaze’ may be framed by what Levin describes, in a Heideggerian diagnosis, as ‘a world in ruins, a world in which only fragments and traces remain to tell the truth’. The overall effect of technology, in this theorisation, is to reduce the perceived world to disjointed constituent parts, ‘fragmented and disfigured by the enframing conditions operative in the epoch of das Gestell’.55 In Heideggerian terminology the natural world is now manipulated to the extent that ‘the Open becomes object, and is thus twisted around toward human beings’. In this construct, registered already in Hardy by Clym’s spectacles or Dare’s photography, as Levin suggests, ‘perception is never far from violence’ in a process marked by ‘disfigurement’.56 Nature in modernity is gradually deprived of its radiance or Heideggerian Schein. The landscape and horizon have become subject to ‘permanent disfiguration’ such as that encountered by Jude and Sue in their endless economically driven and uprooted peregrinations through a hollowed-out landscape. Here the numinous space of Wessex as ‘the Open’ is transformed irredeemably into a series of work-stations: Sometimes [Jude] might have been found shaping the mullions of a country mansion, sometimes setting the parapet of a town-hall, sometimes ashlaring an hotel at Sandbourne, sometimes a museum at Casterbridge, sometimes as far down as Exonbury, sometimes at Stoke-Barehills. Later still he was at Kennetbridge, a thriving town not more than a dozen miles south of Marygreen, this being his nearest approach to the village where he was known.57

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Under the impress of modernity landscape becomes an artistic or literary representation, as Nancy argues, of ‘a given absence of presence’: Instead of depicting a ‘land’ and a ‘location’, [art] depicts it as a ‘dis-­ location’: what presents itself there is the announcement … that there ‘is no presence’.58

Hardy’s writing project stands on the threshold of an aesthetic in which ‘the modern gaze is driven by the will to power’, but such a project, in both prose and poetry, may be characterised as a phenomenological attempt to draw the gaze away from the exertion of power, ‘situating it instead in the ecstatic intertwining of the visible and invisible’. Hardy seeks, in his haunting evocations of Wessex, what Heidegger would identify as ‘an open expanse of unconcealment’,59 which resists the commodification and reification of modernity. A poem such as ‘At the Royal Academy’, for instance, ponders the problematic and inherently ocularcentric issues involved in the ambiguities of the aesthetic representation of nature in the nineteenth century: These summer landscapes—clump, and copse, and croft Woodland and meadowland—here hung aloft, Gay with limp grass and leafery new and soft, Seem caught from the immediate season’s yield I saw last noonday shining over the field, By rapid snatch, while still are uncongealed The saps that in their live originals climb; Yester’s quick greenage here set forth in mime Just as it stands, now, at our breathing-time. But these young foils so fresh upon each tree, Soft verdures spread in sprouting novelty, Are not this summer’s though they feign to be. Last year their May to Michaelmas term was run, Last autumn browned and buried every one, And no more know they sight of any sun.60

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Hardy thus practises his art at a juncture when, in Levin’s terms, ‘an errant, fallen way of looking and seeing’ which ‘deepens the oblivion of being’ comes into play. The novels, stories and poems are ineluctably caught up in, but resistant to, a double-bind, refracting contemporary issues around ‘the reification, the commodification, the stereotyping of human beings and to the technological instrumentalisation of animals and nature’,61 at a moment when, in Heidegger’s reading, ‘we … are through radio and film under the rule of technology’.62 Whilst Will Dare’s antics serve to highlight the manipulative and deceptive qualities of ocular technology, elsewhere Hardy maintains a creative ambivalence in his representations: the rapturous quality of Swithin’s telescopic vision or the minute insights into Egdon’s natural world afforded by Clym’s goggles register a countervailing sense of revelation. As Armstrong argues, ‘microscopic and telescopic points of vantage often … create deeper and more nuanced ways of seeing’.63 This is a movement of thought specifically alluded to in Heidegger’s essay on technology, in which it is maintained that ‘techne’ ‘belongs to bringing-forth, to poeisis; it is something poetic’. According to this argument, Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens.64

However, Heidegger concedes, with peculiar relevance to Hardy, that whilst the Greek usage refers ‘to the techniques of the handicraftsman, … it simply does not fit modern machine-powered technology’, because that ‘is dependent upon technical apparatus’.65 Modern technology takes the form of what Heidegger terms a ‘setting-upon’ nature which entails the ruthless exploitation of natural resources. Man in the technological age is ‘challenged forth into revealing’, in a process of revelation which figures nature itself as ‘the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve’. Nonetheless, the act of ‘enframing’, signalled by Clym or Swithin, is, in the Heideggerian argument, ‘nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine’: ‘It is the way in which the actual reveals itself as standing-­ reserve.’66 This discourse may shed a riddling light on the way Hardy’s characters traverse a world which Heidegger characterises as ‘the free space of destining’. In manipulating technology the risk is that man ‘exalts himself and postures as lord of the earth’:

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What is dangerous is not technology. Technology is not demonic; but its essence is mysterious. The essence of technology as a destining of revealing, is the danger.67

It is the case, Heidegger argues, that ‘the essential unfolding of technology harbours in itself what we least suspect, the possible rise of the saving power’. It is in the realm of art, he concludes, that ‘essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen’.68 Heidegger’s ruminations, and their relevance to a reading of Hardy, may be modified and enhanced by a consideration of the Benjaminian aura, which is defined by a sense of ‘distance’. This historical aesthetic category, Benjamin held, would disappear in the era of technical reproductivity, having then lost its uniqueness. The images of nature promulgated by the Hardyesque text both embody this emblematic distance and its gradual fading in the period of modernity: They were opposite Laystead shore. The cliffs here were formed of strata completely contrasting with those of the farther side of the Bay, whilst in and beneath the water hard boulders had taken the place of sand and shingle, between which, however, the sea glided noiselessly, without breaking the crest of a single wave, so strikingly calm was the air. The breeze had entirely died away, leaving the water of that rare glassy smoothness which is unmarked even by the small dimples of the least aerial movement. Purples and blues of divers shades were reflected from this mirror accordingly as each undulation sloped east or west. They could see the rocky bottom some twenty feet beneath them, luxuriant with weeds of various growths, and dotted with pulpy creatures reflecting a silvery and spangled radiance upwards to their eyes.69

As Epstein observes of a number of episodes in the novel, ‘Cytherea’s very forgetting of herself is present as the life that thrills in lightwaves striking surfaces, her aroused participation in the event of the landscape’.70 Adorno proposes that such passages appear to ‘say something and in the same breath cancel it’.71 Yvonne Sherratt has noted that the perplexity surrounding the concept of the aura, ‘whereby it both evokes and refutes interpretation’, is the key to its nature as ‘a kind of distance’.72 In Adorno’s formulation, which resonates with this Hardy text, every part of nature ‘is able to become beautiful, luminous from within’.73 In this categorisation it is as if the object (nature) becomes the subject, thus signalling a kind of loss of selfhood: in Benjaminian terms nature ‘looks back’ at the observer

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in a dialectic Hardy was curiously attentive to. We are left, in Frankfurt School theory and in the Hardy text, with what Sherratt identifies as ‘a sense of the inherent difference of the external world from us, that is, of the Object from the Subject’74 or what Adorno defines as ‘the mysterious distinctness of the external world from ourselves’.75 In these and other key passages Hardy’s writing orchestrates what Rosalind Krauss nominates ‘the nature of vision’s spontaneous opening on to the external world as a kind of limitless beyond, an ever-retreating horizon’.76 Heidegger ruminates: Will we see the lightning-flash of Being, in the essence of technology? The flash that comes out of stillness, as stillness itself? Stillness stills. What does it still? It stills Being into the coming to presence of world.77

In his plangent poem, ‘On the Esplanade’, Hardy evocatively adumbrates and refracts these specular issues: The broad bald moon edged up where the sea was wide, Mild, mellow-faced; Beneath, a tumbling twinkle of shines, like dyed, A trackway traced To the shore, as of petals fallen from a rose to waste, In its overblow, And fluttering afloat on inward heaves of the tide: All this, so plain; yet the rest I did not know. The horizon gets lost in a mist new-wrought by the night: The lamps of the Bay That reach from behind me round to the left and right On the sea-wall way For a constant mile of curve, make a long display As a pearl-strung row, Under which in the waves they bore their gimlets of light: All this was plain; but there was a thing not so. (CP, 715)

The perceiving subject here is problematised in its response to the ‘twinkle of shines’ of the moonlit land/seascape, the horizon becoming ‘lost in a mist’ of unknowing emphasised by the man-made ‘gimlets of light’ created by the ‘lamps of the Bay’. The text might be framed in relation to the Benjaminian aura that ‘unique appearance of a distance

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however close it may be’ which is being lost in the era of technical reproducibility. Whilst, as Armstrong argues, Hardy is ‘an artist expressing a specialised knowledge of optical technology’, at the same juncture, ‘Blindness and visual impairment’ in his work function as ‘critical signifiers of entropy and degeneration in many of his novels’.78 Dirk Baecker has proposed that Benjamin’s thesis prompts ‘observations that provide a work of art with something it can only feature as lost’,79 and in the poem this loss centres upon the ‘lady unseen’ who ‘plays and sings’ behind a window ‘with undrawn blind’. ‘On the Esplanade’ and other passages of Hardy’s work suggest how, in Lyotard’s terms, all discourse has something opposite it, an object of which it speaks, which is over there, as what it designates in a horizon: a view bordering discourse.80

Hardy’s representations of landscape and light serve to reverse the hierarchies of representation of nineteenth-century realist fiction through what Jacques Rancière sees as ‘the adoption of a fragmented or proximate mode of focalisation, which imposes raw presence to the detriment of the rational sequences of the story’.81 Such a ‘mode of focalisation’, with its emphasis upon ‘the gaze’, characterises another poem, ‘The Riddle’: Stretching eyes west Over the sea, Wind foul or fair, Always stood she Prospect-impressed; Solely out there Did her gaze rest, Never elsewhere Seemed charm to be. Always eyes east Ponders she now As in devotion Hills of blank brow Where no waves plough. Never the least Room for emotion Drawn from the ocean Does she allow. (CP, 448)

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Merleau-Ponty, in his analysis of ‘the act of looking’, defines it as ‘indivisibly prospective, since it will present itself as preceding its own appearance’. In every such act the body, in a rather Hardyesque mode, unites present, past and future, it secretes time, or rather it becomes that location in nature where, for the first time, events, instead of pushing each other into the realm of being, project round the present a double horizon of past and future.82

There is thus, in phenomenological thought, what Jacques-Alain Miller has called ‘a supplementary gaze, which is always there’, ‘contained in visibility itself’, the gaze of ‘the hidden Other’: One may glimpse it when the light not only offers a field of visibility but also, simultaneously, focuses on a luminous spot which may figure the gaze, which incarnates for a moment the all-seeing gaze of the big Other.83

In a Lacanian reading of Hardy’s ‘Medusean eye’, Annie Ramel identifies in his texts ‘a split between the eye, which is on the side of the subject, and the gaze, on the side of the object, that is to say on the side of the Other’.84 Nothing was visible save the strikingly brilliant, still landscape. The wide concave which lay at the back of the cliff in this direction was blazing with the western light, adding an orange tint to the vivid purple of the heather, now at the very climax of bloom … The light so intensified the colours that they seemed to stand above the surface of the earth and float in mid-air like an exhalation of red.85

Lyotard has noted what he calls ‘landscape’s power to dissolve’ which ‘makes itself felt in the sense that it interrupts narratives’,86 as this passage in Desperate Remedies interrupts the narrator’s account of Cytherea’s ocular search for Owen Graye. Landscape, in Lyotard’s reading (and in Hardy’s imagining), possesses a ‘melancholia’ which permeates ‘an excess of presence’: ‘The mind draws itself up when it draws a landscape, but … the landscape has already drawn its forces up against the mind.’87 It has been suggested that ‘the space of a mapped dimensional modernity becomes the espace of painting in a specular mode, concentrating on the activity of vision per se, on the effects and construction of the visual

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field’.88 Such a construction pervades a remarkable moment of vision in Far From the Madding Crowd, in which ‘the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement’: The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past earthly objects, which is perceptible in a few minutes of stillness; or by the better outlook upon space that a hill affords, or by the wind; or by the solitude; but whatever be its origin the impression of riding along is vivid and abiding. The poetry of motion is a phrase much in use, and to enjoy the epic form of that gratification it is necessary to stand on a hill at a small hour of the night … and quietly watch your stately progress through the stars. After such a nocturnal reconnoitre it is hard to get back to earth, and to believe that the consciousness of such majestic speeding is derived from a tiny human frame.89

It may thus be premised, in conclusion, that Hardy’s work parallels that of Cézanne, in which ‘the gap between seeing and knowing, between sensation and the truth of nature’ is bridged through ‘formalised visual technique’.90 Epstein conjectures that the written scene ‘belongs neither entirely to a personal inner conception, nor entirely to a visible external or physical reality, but to the moment in which those two coalesce to realise themselves as an event’.91 In celebrating and portraying ‘the poetry of motion’ Hardy’s writing lays bare the ways in which, in Adorno’s thinking, ‘art is not the imitation of nature but the imitation of natural beauty’. In natural beauty, Adorno adds, ‘natural and historical elements intersect in a musical and kaleidoscopically changing fashion’. In the passage from Far From the Madding Crowd, and in other Hardyesque episodes, we may discern natural beauty as ‘suspended history, a moment of becoming at a standstill’. In Hardy’s texts, in Adorno’s definition, ‘the evanescent is objectified and summoned to duration’. The poems and novels may thus be construed as wishing ‘to attain what has become opaque to humans in the language of nature’.92 And yet behind the horizon smile serene The down, the cornland, and the stretching green – Space—the child’s heaven: scenes which at least ensure Some palliative for ill they cannot cure. (CP, 80)

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Such visionary moments, it may be argued, characterise the incendiary action of the folk-tale embedded in such an exemplary text as ‘The Withered Arm’.

Notes 1. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Scapeland’, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. A. Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 215–16. 2. W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994), 10. 3. The Hand of Ethelberta, ed. T.  Dolin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 236–7. 4. Cited in Taylor Carman, Merleau-Ponty (London: Routledge, 2008), 186. 5. Cited ibid., 198. 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’ (1961), in Phenomenology, Language and Sociology, ed. J. O’Neill (London: Heinemann, 1974), xviii. 7. Ibid., 287. 8. Edward S.  Casey, The World on Edge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 178 (and 171). 9. D.M. Levin, The Opening of Vision (London: Routledge, 1988), 76. 10. Hardy: Personal Writings, ed. H. Orel (London: Macmillan, 1967), 9. 11. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, tr. J. Fort (New York: Fordham Press, 2005), 13. 12. Hardy: Personal Writings, 27. 13. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, xviii, 287, 299. 14. Hugh Epstein, Hardy, Conrad and the Senses (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 37. 15. Far From the Madding Crowd, ed. S. Falck-Yi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 142. 16. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. J.  Grindle and S.  Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 93. 17. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 55. 18. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 93, 94, 95–6. 19. John Hughes, The Expression of Things (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2018), 122, 123. 20. Ariane Mildenberg, Modernism and Phenomenology (London: Palgrave: 2017), 13. 21. Ibid., 15, 18, 22. 22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘Percept, Affect, and Concept’, in The Continental Aesthetics Reader, ed. C.  Gazeaux (London: Routledge, 2000), 468.

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23. The Return of the Native, ed. S. Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 3, 5, 253, 254. 24. Patrick Armstrong, ‘Instrumental Optics: Microscopic and Telescopic Lenses in Two on a Tower’, Thomas Hardy Journal XXXIII (2017), 92. 25. Ibid., 86. 26. Gianni Vattimo, ‘The Death or Decline of Art’, in The Continental Aesthetics Reader, 189. 27. Two on a Tower, ed. S.  M. Ahmad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 135. 28. Hardy: Personal Writings, 27. 29. Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity (London: Sage, 1998), 185. 30. Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 2. 31. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, 306. 32. Graham McPhee, The Architecture of the Visible (London: Continuum, 2002), 11. 33. Ibid., 96, 199. 34. Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 58, 59. 35. Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 31. 36. ibid., 86. 37. See Arlene Jackson, ‘Photography and Style and Metaphor in the Art of Thomas Hardy’, Thomas Hardy Annual, (2), ed. N.  Page (London: Macmillan, 1984), 91–109. 38. Mark Durden, ‘Ritual and Deception: Photography and Thomas Hardy’, Journal of European Studies 30 (2000), 58. 39. Ibid., 62. 40. Sontag, On Photography, 86. 41. Martin Jay, ‘Photo-Unrealism’, in Vision and Textuality, ed. S.  Melville and B. Readings (London: Macmillan, 1995), 347. 42. Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, ed. M. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 517. 43. Kathryn Yacarine, Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of the Photograph (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 183. 44. McPhee, Architecture of the Visible, 123. 45. Nancy, Ground of the Image, 106. 46. Durden, ‘Ritual and Deception’, 58. 47. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, tr. J. Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 574. 48. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, tr. S.  Heath (London: Fontana, 1984), 21.

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49. A Laodicean, ed. J. Gatewood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 53, 55, 73. Subsequently cited as AL. 50. Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians, 85. 51. A Laodicean, ed. J. Schad (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), xxxiv. 52. Durden, ‘Ritual and Deception’, 63. 53. Ibid., 65. 54. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 105. 55. D.M.  Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 121. 56. Ibid., 124. 57. Jude the Obscure, ed. D. Taylor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 309. 58. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 59. 59. Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze, 126, 128, 132, 134, 60. ‘At the Royal Academy’, Thomas Hardy: Complete Poems, ed. J.  Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 627–8. Subsequently cited as CP. 61. Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze, 141, 166–7. 62. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Turning’, tr. W. Lovitt, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 48. 63. Armstrong, ‘Instrumental Optics’, 75. 64. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in Basic Writings, ed. D.F. Krell (London: Routledge, 1993), 318, 319. 65. Ibid., 319, 320. 66. Ibid., 326, 328–9. 67. Ibid., 330, 332, 333. 68. Ibid., 340. 69. Desperate Remedies, ed. M. Rimmer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 49. 70. Epstein, Hardy, Conrad, 47. 71. T.W.  Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. R.  Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 120. 72. Yvonne Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 162. 73. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 70. 74. Sherratt, Adorno’s Positive Dialectic, 207. 75. T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, tr. E.B. Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 33. 76. Rosalind Krauss, ‘In the Master’s Bedroom’, in Vision and Textuality, 333. 77. Heidegger, ‘The Turning’, 49. 78. Armstrong, ‘Instrumental Optics’, 86, 88. 79. Dirk Baecker, ‘The Unique Appearance of Distance’, in Mapping Benjamin, ed. H. Gumbrecht and M. Marrinan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 20.

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80. Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘Taking the Side of the Figural’, in The Lyotard Reader and Guide, ed. K. Crome and J. Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 80. 81. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, tr. G.  Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006), 24. 82. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. C.  Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 278. 83. Cited in Annie Ramel, ‘The Medusean Eye in Thomas Hardy’, The Hardy Review XIX (2) (2017), 85. 84. Ibid., 84. 85. Desperate Remedies, 29. 86. Lyotard, ‘Scapeland’, 216. 87. Ibid., 216. 88. Johanna Drucker, Theorizing Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 39. 89. Far From the Madding Crowd, 15. 90. Drucker, Theorizing Modernism, 43. 91. Epstein, Hardy, Conrad, 70. 92. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 92, 93, 94, 99.

CHAPTER 4

‘The Withered Arm’ and History

‘The Withered Arm’ (1888) has often been acknowledged as one of Hardy’s finest short stories, and as Kristin Brady points out, its form is close to the folk-tale: ‘There is an oral quality to its prose style, but it has no actual narrator with a personal motive for telling his story.’1 This is so even though the tale also refers to nineteenth-century developments such as photography and galvanism. Brady deals ably with the curious admixture here, noting Hardy’s reluctance to comply with Leslie Stephen’s request that the phenomenon of the withered arm itself be more fully explained to the reader. The story’s supernatural aspects are held firmly in place by the social realism of the presentation, as instanced in the opening description of the ‘eighty-cow dairy’,2 the size and capitalist structure of which Brady comments upon, adding that the simultaneous continuance of old-style practices makes the dairy ‘an emblem of its transitional time’.3 The story may possess a fairy-tale element, but as Gilmartin and Mengham remark, ‘it is in fact impossible to extricate it from its Victorian ideological setting’.4 It is possible, however, to suggest a more materialist context for ‘The Withered Arm’, focusing upon two specific episodes, the phenomenon of the withered arm and its treatment, and the hanging of the illegitimate son of Rhoda Brook and Farmer Lodge. The voice which transmits the narrative of ‘The Withered Arm’ is that of a sympathetic observer or kind

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Ebbatson, Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_4

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of literary folklorist. In Literacy and Popular Culture, David Vincent has noticed how the act of writing places the folklorist ‘on the other side of a divide’ from the ‘folk’, who still accept superstitious ideas.5 Certainly, such folklorists uncovered, as one of Hardy’s contemporaries put it, ‘a vast mass of superstition holding its ground most tenaciously’6 against the kind of literate corporate structures reaching even the most remote rural areas. In the pre-literate communal world which Rhoda inhabits, ‘the bizarre was commonplace and daily life suffused with the extraordinary’.7 As a Weberian commentator has suggested, Because the productive life of the peasants is so much at the mercy of the elements and the uncontrollable forces of nature, they are far more likely to subscribe to magical beliefs and superstitions than to a formal religion.8

Discussion in such communities often centred, as one writer noted of West Yorkshire, on ‘the powers possessed by some of the neighbours who had an “evil eye” and who could produce bad luck among others by simply wishing it to occur’.9 It is also the case, however, as Gilmartin and Mengham have argued, that the contemporary references to photography and galvanism serve to indicate ‘the somewhat indefinite lines of demarcation between science and superstition’ in Hardy’s text.10 The tale recounts how the beautiful Gertrude Lodge, having married Rhoda’s former lover, ‘visited the supplanted woman in [Rhoda’s] dreams’, mockingly thrusting her wedding-ring into the milkmaid’s face. ‘Maddened’ and ‘nearly suffocated’, Rhoda grasps the left arm of her rival and flings her to the floor in a dream action which leaves her still able to ‘feel her antagonist’s arm within her grasp’, ‘the very flesh and bone of it’ (WT, 63). When, next day, the unwitting Mrs. Lodge makes a charitable visit to the cottage, Rhoda is alarmed to perceive ‘faint marks of an unhealthy colour’ on the ‘pink round surface’ of the arm (WT, 65). As the summer progresses, the arm begins to shrivel, ‘as if some witch, or the devil himself, had taken hold of me there, and blasted the flesh’, as Gertrude plaintively observes (WT, 67). The belief system in which Rhoda is embedded demands an extreme sensitivity to all kinds of social conduct and to every manifestation of the natural world. The common denominators of her culture are orality and the natural rhythm of the seasons, and it is these factors which come into play in the recommendation to her lucklessly pretty rival, Gertrude Lodge, to seek the advice of the white wizard, Conjuror Trendle, in the recesses of Egdon Heath. Gertrude is rendered

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increasingly desperate by the withering of her arm and consequent loss of sexual allure. As Vincent observes, ‘the more a disease resisted a remedy, the more desperate became the search for alternatives’.11 Figures such as Conjuror Trendle, or Conjuror Fall who Michael Henchard consults about the harvest prospects, ‘could formulate the demand for their services into a decent livelihood’,12 though Hardy stresses Trendle’s feigned scepticism in his own powers and his alternative career as a dealer in furze. The word ‘trendle’ derives from the Anglo-Saxon term for a circle; progressively, in ‘The Withered Arm’ and more widely in Hardy’s Wessex, we see a repetitive, seasonal conception of time replaced by its linear opposite, in a process which Vincent characterises as ‘the invasion of the circular, immutable rhythms of nature by the progressive, man-made movement of an historically conscious society’.13 This is evident in the distinction drawn between Mrs. Durbeyfield, with her faith in the prophetic powers of The Compleat Fortune Teller, and Tess herself, with her schizophrenic ability to speak the ‘two languages’ of village community and metropolis. Enlightenment, so-called, resided in the established church, and the Anglican pastor often sought to challenge and undermine village credulity during the nineteenth century. The increase in literacy was crucial in this respect, but Vincent interestingly notes the caveat that a printed culture also preserved superstition, in the form of fortune-telling, dream books, and quack prescriptions of the type purveyed by Vilbert in Jude the Obscure. The ‘aged friend’ from whom the narrator heard of the curative incident appears to have been Hardy’s mother, Jemima. The Dorchester hangman, William Calcraft, was in the habit of selling the rope by the inch after a hanging to customers who believed in its medical efficacy, and was once rebuked by the authorities for allowing a man to come to the scaffold to have a wart touched by the dead man’s hand. The truth of such accounts remains in the balance, and Neelanjana Basu has aptly defined ‘The Withered Arm’ as one of those texts that ‘force the reader to reflect upon and examine a number of embedded readings or “discourses”’, each of which is then ‘revealed to be fallacious’.14 As Suzanne Johnson has noted, Hardy’s story ‘is a tale of metamorphosis, but the title alludes to only one—and not the most important—of the transformations recorded’.15 The climactic recognition scene, the execution of Rhoda and Lodge’s son for being present at a rick-fire, has sometimes been read as a melodramatic contrivance but may be contextualised within a specific historical conjuncture. The serial version of ‘The Withered Arm’, published in Macmillan’s Magazine in January 1888, placed the action in 1833, but

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later versions revised this date, pushing the action backwards to 1825. This ambiguity on Hardy’s part is of some significance in relation to the kinds of agricultural distress and upheaval which are registered in the execution of the anonymous boy, since the 1830s were notable in the countryside for the ‘Swing’ riots and subsequent violent outbreaks of social protest. The situation of the workfolk in the period following the Napoleonic Wars was extreme. Social control was exerted through poor relief, which proved totally inadequate, and the vestries which administered this relief were dominated by the squire, the parson and the farmer. As a result class antagonism increased and led to the formation of the so-­ called dark village, mutinous and discontented. Rocketing food prices and plummeting living standards provoked rural protest and crime in a wave of activity which Hobsbawm and Rudé, in their history of the period, designate a ‘defence against hunger’.16 Arson, or letters threatening arson, possessed a long history in the story of struggle and deprivation. As one commentator remarks, ‘arson gave the labouring community the opportunity to transform an individual act of covert protest into a collective and overt display of hatred against the farmers’:17 the boy thus attends a rick-­ fire which might have been aimed at his own father. The characteristic arsonist was the young labourer reacting to his appalling plight, and this response was at its height in the period from 1830 to 1850. Indeed, arson appears to have increased specifically because of the failure of the machine-­ breaking Swing Riots of 1830. Hardy himself would recall: My father saw four men hung for being with some others who had set fire to a rick. Among them was a stripling boy of eighteen … with youth’s excitement he had rushed to the scene to see the blaze … Nothing my father ever said to me drove the tragedy of life so deeply into my mind.18

Incendiarists believed that dread of fire would induce farmers to increase wages, and men would repeat the threatening motto, ‘Work, money, or fire’. Arson peaked in the years 1834–36, 1839–40 and 1843–50. The efflorescence of these activities prompted an act to amend the law on the burning of farm buildings in 1844 and a concurrent increase in insurance on farming stock. It is possible that, at the age of nineteen, Thomas Hardy attended the hanging in September 1830 in Somerset of the Kenn arsonists. This group of men were convicted on flimsy evidence of setting fire to a corn-rick. Whether or not this was the case, ‘The Withered Arm’

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certainly seems to reinflect the hanging of Sylvester Wilkins of Bridport, who was executed for arson at Dorchester Gaol on 30 March 1833. Wilkins was found guilty of setting fire to a combing shop in Bridport, the fire spreading rapidly to adjacent properties. The governor of the gaol provided two lead weights, which may still be viewed in the Dorset County Museum, each embossed with the word ‘mercy’, to ensure that the lightly built youth should be guaranteed a quick end. Hardy utilised this incident fairly directly in a later story, ‘The Winters and the Palmleys’, which appeared in Life’s Little Ironies. The ‘interpretive knot’ of the story relates it, as Basu argues, to ‘narrative techniques of classical detective fiction in presenting a fragmented story composed of half-suggestions’. The emphasis here is thus upon a problematised act of reading embodied in the ways in which Rhoda’s altering perspectives, as Basu suggests, ‘reflect her essentially subjectivised reading process’. The entire narrative is thus ‘fractured by deliberate omission of information at the most significant moments in the narrative’.19 If the action of ‘The Withered Arm’ is to be dated in 1833, it fits more securely within the major period of social unrest. It is worth recalling that it was the introduction of the lucifer match in 1830 which rendered the work of the incendiarist much easier. As a magistrate observed some years later, ‘we all know that lucifer matches have become very cheap … they are not only in the cottage, but in the pockets of every labourer’.20 Stealth and speed now enabled the firing of ricks and farm buildings on a scale hitherto unattempted, and the lucifer match meant that the majority of incendiarists were never caught. Hardy may subliminally have recalled this period when, in his 1895 preface to Far From the Madding Crowd, he referred to ‘a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post, mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches, labourers who could read and write, and National school children’.21 The appalling punishment meted out to the youth at the end of Hardy’s tale is somewhat displaced for the reader by the spectacular effects of Gertrude’s shock and subsequent death. But the lugubrious interview with the hangman, and the interview which ensures, endorse for the reader a central contention of Hobsbawm and Rudé’s study: Property was its legitimate object, life was not. The labourers’ scale of values was thus the diametrical opposite of their betters’, for whom property was more precious to the law than life.22

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It is not only authorial pathos that Farmer Lodge, after the death of his son, gives up his lands and farms, moves to Port Bredy and declines in ‘solitary lodgings’ (WT, 85): he carries with him the guilt of the propertied class. Indeed, in an earlier draft, as Johnson observes, ‘Lodge commits suicide after the funeral of his wife’, in an ending which, she contends, ‘would have been more true to the spirit of the narrative’.23 Nor was the boy’s punishment exaggerated for the sake of the tale, since every person forming part of the crowd at a rick-fire was liable to punishment—as Hobsbawm and Rudé pointedly remark, ‘the intention was to inspire terror and make an example’.24 Of the nineteen executions which followed the Swing Riots in the south of England, the majority were for the crime of arson: ‘From no other protest movement of the kind—from neither Luddites nor Chartists, nor trade unionists—was such a bitter price exacted.’25 The apparently ‘timeless’ ballad qualities of ‘The Withered Arm’ may thus be balanced by the historical specificity of the ‘bitter price’ which the tale so dramatically embodies in the lives of Rhoda Brook and her son, victims of a carefully rendered moment of class antagonism. This bitter price is exacted on a more epic scale in the issues dramatically and poetically explored in the experiences of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, to which we now turn.

Notes 1. Kristin Brady, The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1982), 21. 2. ‘The Withered Arm’, in Wessex Tales, ed. K.R.  King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 57. Subsequent reference is to this edition. 3. Brady, Short Stories, 24. 4. Sophie Gilmartin and Rod Mengham, Thomas Hardy’s Shorter Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 12. 5. David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 57. 6. William Henderson, writing in 1866; cited in Vincent, 160. 7. Vincent, Literacy, 159. 8. Frank Parkin, Max Weber (London: Routledge 2002), 52. 9. John Sykes, cited in Vincent, 160. 10. Gilmartin and Mengham, Hardy’s Shorter Fiction, 21. 11. Vincent, Literacy, 162–3. 12. Ibid., 172.

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13. Ibid., 158. 14. Neelanjana Basu, ‘To Correct the Misrelation: Reading Hardy’s Wessex Tales’, in Thomas Hardy’s Short Stories: New Perspectives, ed. J.B. Schaefer and S.C. Brownson (London: Routledge, 2017), 143. 15. Suzanne Johnson, ‘Metamorphosis, Desire, and the Fantastic in Hardy’s “The Withered Arm”’, Modern Language Studies 23 (1993), 135. 16. E.J.  Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), 54. 17. J.E. Archer, ‘A Personal Comment on Arson in Norfolk and Suffolk’, in Class, Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside 1700–1880, ed. M. Reed and R. Wells (London: Frank Cass, 1990), 85. 18. Cited in Brady, Short Stories, 28. Hardy also recalled: ‘My father knew a man who was hanged for saying to a farmer “it will be a light night”—his ricks being set fire before the morning.’ Cited in W. Rothenstein, Man and Memories (New York: Tudor Publishing, n.d.), 164. 19. Basu, ‘To Correct the Misrelation’, 145, 152, 153. 20. Cited in Reed and Wells, 171. 21. Hardy: Personal Writings, ed. H. Orel (London: Macmillan, 1966), 9. 22. Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, 247. 23. Johnson, ‘Metamorphosis, Desire’, 136. 24. Ibid., 221. 25. Ibid., 225.

CHAPTER 5

(Un)Binding the Sheaves: Selfhood and Labour in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Tess Durbeyfield has her origins within the enclosed landscape of the Vale of Blackmore, ‘an engirdled and secluded region’, as Hardy describes it, ‘bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge’, an area in which ‘the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale’.1 For the heroine, the vale ‘was to her the world’, and at the outset of the novel she has rarely ‘been far outside the valley’ (TD, 40). As the narrative begins, therefore, the stress is upon the protective boundaries of the vale, with a concomitant consciousness of that ‘livelier sense of Community’ to which Ferdinand Tönnies, in his classic definition of Gemeinschaft, propounded in 1887 just as Hardy began work on his novel, would refer.2 Indeed, Tönnies pertinently maintains in his study, Wherever human beings are bound together in an organic fashion by their civilisation and common consent, Community of one kind or another exists.3

The opening scenes of Hardy’s novel, focusing upon the May-Day dance in which Tess so fatefully participates, and also the revelation of the noble ancestry of ‘Sir’ John Durbeyfield, bear out Tönnies’s emphasis, in his account of rural life, upon ‘reciprocal binding sentiment as the peculiar will of a people’.4 This ‘binding sentiment’ is not broken even when Tess returns to Marlott as a ‘fallen woman’: to the contrary, in the harvesting scenes, the attendance of the mainly female group of ‘active binders in the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Ebbatson, Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_5

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rear’ of the mechanical reaper is distinguished by the presence of ‘the most flexuous and finely-drawn figure’ of the heroine, her bonnet pulled down so that ‘none of her face is disclosed while she binds’ (TD, 93). Although marked out by her experiences from her female fellow-workers, ‘the whole bevy of them’ are drawn together ‘like dancers in a quadrille at the completion of a sheaf’ (TD, 94). Tönnies speaks of the rootedness of village life, observing that ‘it is only the ploughed field, in which a man sows the seed and reaps the crop with his own labour, that binds his feet’: thus, it comes about that ‘man becomes doubly bound, both by the ploughed field and by the house in which he dwells’.5 It is the trajectory of the novel to ‘unbind’ this relation both in regard to the heroine’s chequered career, the uprooting of the Durbeyfield clan from their native village, ‘a family so heavily handicapped as the once powerful d’Urbervilles were now’ (TD, II0), and what more widely Hardy termed the ‘increasing nomadic habit of the labourer’ ultimately resulting in ‘a less intimate and kindly relation with the land he tills’.6 In Tonnies’s terms, community signifies ‘community of place’, but he also stresses ‘community of spirit’ as the ‘binding link on the level of conscious thought’.7 But while the village settlement remains ‘confined within narrow bounds’, it will, under the impress of that Gesellschaft which accompanies modernity, inexorably lead to ‘the simultaneous break-up of all those ties which bind the individual through natural will’.8 As David Frisby sums it up, the implication of Tönnies’s thesis is that ‘contractual relations within a dynamic capitalist society’ are perceived as ‘fleeting’: ‘Their basis is an egoistic calculation of individual gain that reduces human relations to functional ones.’9 In Gesellschaft, Tönnies maintains, people ‘remain separate in spite of everything that unites them’, with the result that ‘everyone is out for himself alone and living in a state of tension against everyone else’.10 This is already beginning at Marlott, where the incursion of mechanism has initiated a process identified in agrarian history as the elimination of ‘branches of harvest work that had been the chief work of women and children—the making and tying of the sheaves’11—and this tendency comes to a head with devastating effect at Flintcomb-Ash. The act of tying the sheaves at Marlott possesses both historical and philosophical resonance, enacting as it does what Jean-Luc Nancy has termed ‘the very gesture of the tying and enchainment of each to each’, and defining ‘an entire ontology of being as tying’.12 Nancy’s argument refracts and mirrors the folk culture depicted in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, notably in his suggestion that

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It is less the tie that binds than the tie that reties, less the tie that encloses than the tie that makes up a network.13

The communal experiences at Marlott and then subsequently at Talbothays Dairy, that is to say, represent what Nancy calls a ‘politics of knots’, a sense ‘of every one as the interlacing’, not as ‘a one’,14 as will occur in the desocialised structures of Gesellschaft into which Tess is increasingly cast as she wanders homeless through the countryside, an uprooting strikingly registered in her encounter with the itinerant sign-­ painter, who begins daubing large square letters of vilification on a stile, ‘as if to give pause while that word was driven well home to the reader’s heart’: THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT

The sign-painter’s ‘vermillion words’ ‘entered Tess with accusatory horror’ (TD, 85), their impact corroborating Nancy’s characterisation of ‘the sumptuous graphical singularities and fleeting semantics of graffiti as one mode of inscription of this “wandering” labour’.15 It is not the least of life’s little ironies that the man Tess saw ‘carrying the red paint-pot on a former memorable occasion’ should later reappear as a disciple of the newly ‘converted’ preacher, Alec d’Urberville (TD, 293). Earlier in the novel, by contrast, Tess’s recuperative descent into the Vale of the Great Dairies, Hardy observes, ‘sent up her spirits wonderfully’, receptive as she is to the ‘irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet pleasure somewhere’ (TD, 109). The pleasure principle, Freud argues, works by ‘seeking to restore an earlier state of things’, in a psychic process which tends ‘to bind the instinctual impulses’, an act of ‘binding’ that, he adds, ‘is a preparatory act which introduces and assures the dominance of the pleasure principle’—a principle supremely identified with ‘the sexual act’, embodying as it does ‘unbound or primary processes’ which ‘give rise to far more intense feelings than bound or secondary ones’. Nonetheless, it is the case, Freud concludes with ominous relevance to the case of Tess, that the pleasure principle ‘seems actually to serve the death instinct’.16 In his definition of the two basic human drives, eros and death, Freud held that the aim of the erotic drive was ‘to establish and maintain ever greater unities, that is “binding”’, whilst the aim of the negative counter-drive was ‘to dissolve connections, and thus to destroy’.17 When, ensuing upon Angel Clare’s post-nuptial rejection of Tess, the

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fecundity of Talbothays Dairy is replaced by the ‘starve-acre’ landscape of Flintcomb-Ash, it is the death instinct which comes to the fore, emblematised by the turnip-slicing machine fronted by ‘a long mound or “grave”, in which the roots had been preserved’ (TD, 305). It is into this boundless space of ‘blank agricultural brownness’ that Alec, now a quasi-religious ‘man in black’ (TD, 305), intervenes, his solemn visage tellingly revealing ‘corpses of those old fitful passions’ (TD, 313) which characterise his sensibility. He is doubled by a second dark male figure, that of the threshing-­ machine operator, these two implacable personifications of male dominance imposing both sexual and labouring servitude on the body of female field-­ labourers. Both men are interlopers in the Wessex rural socius, Alec as the son of Simon Stoke, ‘an honest merchant (some said money-lender) in the North’ (TD, 42), whilst the engine-man is characterised as speaking ‘in a strange northern accent’ (TD, 315). Their disruptive presence heralds the mounting pressure of modernity in the countryside. It is Tess’s duty, at the insistence of a third male predator, Farmer Groby, to mount to the top of the machine, ‘her business being to untie every sheaf of corn’ (TD, 316), in an act of repetitive mechanical labour which reduces the heroine to a shadow of her former self, ‘her knees trembling so wretchedly with the shaking of the machine that she could scarcely walk’ (TD, 317). With the pandemonium of the rat-catching, Tess ‘untied her last sheaf’ (TD, 324), in an action which mirrors both Tönnies’s conception of the break-up of all ties under Gesellschaft and Marx’s trenchant claim that By the nineteenth century, the very memory of the connection between the agricultural labourer and communal property had, of course, vanished.

The ‘unbinding’ to which Tess and her compeers are subject, furthermore, bears out Marx’s perception as to the ‘continuous conversion of the agricultural labourers into a surplus population’.18 The heroine’s chance encounters punctuate the narrative, from the initial appearance of Angel Clare at the May-Day dance, and his reappearance at Talbothays, or the scene with the sign-painter, to her ‘reencounter’, at the end of her ‘futile journey’ to Emminster Vicarage, with Alec in his new guise as what an elderly woman terms ‘an excellent fiery Christian man’ (TD, 292). Such moments serve to unsettle the linearity of the story to the extent that the narrative itself becomes ‘unbound’, as Leslie Hill suggests in his reading of Maurice Blanchot, which speaks of

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an avid commitment to desire that requires not the binding of narrative events, but rather their effacement, and an openness to capricious chance rather than stern necessity.19

If Hardy’s writing stresses ‘capricious chance’, it also sketches in a psychic pattern which may be further illuminated by Freudian theory. Freud argues that impulsive, instinctual behaviour patterns ‘do not belong to the type of bound nervous processes but of freely mobile processes which press towards discharge’.20 It is, in this account, ‘the task of the higher strata of the mental apparatus to bind the instinctual excitation’, any failure ‘to effect the binding’ leading, Freud argues, to ‘a disturbance analogous to a traumatic neurosis’: ‘Only after the binding has been accomplished would it be possible for the dominance of the pleasure principle … to proceed unhindered.’21 It is this Freudian ‘compulsion to repeat’ which so fatefully marks both Tess’s career and the narrative structure more generally. Whilst Hardy’s overriding investment in a linear Darwinian narrative model is self-evident, it is modified by elements which gesture towards Nietzschean ‘eternal recurrence’. Thus, in the scene of Tess’s rape/seduction Hardy annotates echoes of the behaviour of Tess’s ‘mailed ancestors rollicking home from a fray’ (TD, 77), a trope reinforced by the legend of the bloodstained d’Urberville coach and the gloomy female ancestral portraits at Wellbridge Manor.22 As Charles Bernheimer has proposed, in this text, Hardy creates ‘a plot whose insistent repetitions enact the male cruelty of nature’s law’, investing ‘authorial subjectivity in repetitive structures that signify death, and culminate at Stonehenge, a monument which represents the death drive as the principle of repetition operating from time immemorial’.23 Susan Friedman has persuasively argued that a full comprehension of narrative ‘is not possible in a bounded text because, like the dream in Freud’s psychoanalysis, the text’s dialogism is unbounded’. A receptive response to a variety of narrative axes, Friedman suggests, ‘discourages “definitive” and bounded interpretations’, encouraging instead ‘a notion of the text as a multiplicitous and dynamic site of repression and return’.24 Paradoxically, whilst Tess’s unbinding of the sheaves functions as a premonitory moment in the dissolution of the community of the workfolk, from an aesthetic perspective it may be construed as heralding an act of liberation for the reader. Adorno, in an essay on Hölderlin, advanced the theory that

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In cutting the ties that bind it to the subject, language speaks for the subject, which … can no longer speak for itself.25

Such authorial subjectivity leads to the disjunctive interplay, highly in evidence in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, between what Julia Kristeva designates a ‘bounded’ text and its dialogical ‘other’. The ‘structural finitude’ which Kristeva sees as marking the origins of the novel ‘is not sufficient for the bounding of the author’s discourse’, because nothing ‘can put an end to the infinite concatenation of loops’.26 Kristeva’s designation of the novel as ‘a presentation of texts, an intertextuality’, which highlights ‘the figure of dissimulation, of ambivalence, of the double’,27 is notably borne out in the garden scene, examined elsewhere. In this passage, it will be recalled, Tess was ‘conscious of neither time nor space’ as she ‘undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp’, while ‘the waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound’ (TD, 127, 128). Of this scene it may be posited that psychic space possesses the identical relation to real space as the dream. Tess’s experience here corresponds to Paul Schilder’s theorisation in his 1935 essay on the psychoanalysis of space, in which he argues that ‘space is not an independent reality … but is in close relation to instincts, drives, emotions and actions’. He goes on: There is at first an undifferentiated relation between an incompletely developed body-image and the outside space … There is a zone of indifference between body and outside world which makes distortions of body-space and outside-space by projection and appersonisation possible.28

The dreamlike quality of Hardy’s prose in this depiction of Tess’s garden experience moves towards a cinematic vision of the type identified by Alain Bergala in relation to Jean-Luc Godard, in which he identifies ‘an immense lassitude, an apparent inertia which is in fact a state of great porosity to the strangeness of the world, a mixture of torpor, of loss of reality and of a somewhat hallucinatory vivacity of sensations’.29 The focus in this crucial passage is not, however, solely upon the psyche of the heroine but also on the responsive consciousness of the reader. The ‘unbinding’ of the reader here, that is to say, occurs along the lines indicated by Soshana Felman: The unconscious … is not simply that which must be read but also, perhaps primarily, that which reads. The unconscious is a reader. What this implies

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most radically is that whoever reads, interprets out of his (sic) unconscious, is an analysand.30

Bearing in mind the trajectory of the entire novel and the fate of the heroine, it is possible to reconfigure the Barthesian formula and suggest that the birth of the reader is signalled by the death of the heroine and of the folk community to which she belongs. Hardy’s technique here and in other resonant passages of the novel shows affinities with his contemporaries in the impressionist movement, the reader or viewer being ‘unbound’ in the sense of being freed to configure the shifting tonalities of Tess’s experience. In Jacques Rancière’s terms, impressionism takes the form of a ‘poetics that reconstitutes the universe of representation with atoms of anti-representation’.31 As Shierry Nicolsen remarks à propos Adorno’s aesthetics, There is no fixed ground whatsoever, and the reader must continually maintain or establish a sense of relation to the unexpressed center of the book’s over-arching constellation. Put in other terms, the reader’s sense of experiential authority must become shifting, mobile, and decentered.32

Tess’s ‘exaltation’ in response to Angel’s harp-playing mirrors and enacts Maurice Blanchot’s definition of fascination as ‘vision that is no longer the possibility of seeing, but the impossibility of not seeing’.33 ‘That which fascinates’, Blanchot maintains, takes away our power to give meaning, abandons its ‘sensible’ nature, abandons the world, recedes before the world and draws us with it, no longer reveals itself to us and yet affirms itself in a presence foreign to the present of time and to presence in space.34

As J.M. Bernstein observes, Blanchot ‘assimilates fascination to the order of the image’, which embodies ‘the sublime work of art’. This assessment offers a resonant frame through which to view Tess’s seemingly ‘boundless’ experience in the garden: Fascination is a form of reflective judgement in which the dominating categories of determinative subscriptive judgement (space and time) are suspended.

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In this account, the fascinating ‘is the sublime’, which ‘dislocates constitutive subjectivity’ in its openness to ‘the experience of the aura, of what possesses strangeness and distance’.35 At this juncture, therefore, Tess is both bound and unbound in her complex response to the garden and the harp’s music, her situation aptly mirrored in Blanchot’s argument that to bind oneself to what has no name and no face and to give that endless, wandering resemblance the depth of a mortal instant, to lock oneself up with it and thrust it along with oneself to the place where all resemblance yields and is shattered—that is what passion wants.36

To sum up, the heroine here embodies what Blanchot defines as ‘being’s inertia’, her temporary unbound freedom from ‘time and space’, intensified by her human love, destined to be undermined and replaced by the unbinding of the wider folk community she so tragically and humanely embodies. This process of ‘unbinding’ will eventuate in Angel’s recognition that she is finally allowing her body ‘to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will’ (TD, 366), as the couple travel towards the denouement at Stonehenge. The penultimate scene of the novel takes on an allegorical resonance and implication which suggestively accords with Joel Fineman’s wider argument that allegory is a literary form which aims at recuperating loss: This journey back to a foreclosed origin writes itself out as a pilgrimage to the sacred founding shrine, made such by murder, that is the motive of its movement.37

Thus, it comes about that Angel Clare’s performance on his ‘second-­ hand harp’, whilst in Talbothays garden notating the beguilements of love, to which Tess would later ‘wish that she had taken more notice’ (TD, 331), also offers a deathly premonition of what the narrator terms ‘the note of some gigantic one-stringed harp’ created at the culminating scene of Tess’s arrest within that sacrificial ‘Temple of the Winds’, Stonehenge (TD, 379). These issues of Tess’s ‘unbinding’ may now be further contextualised through a comparative reading of Hardy and Richard Jefferies, with their differing responses to the decline of the rural community, the evolution of selfhood and the onset of the ‘administered society’.

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Notes 1. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. J.  Grindle and S.  Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 18. Subsequently cited in the text as TD. 2. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, tr. J.  Harris and M. Hollis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 19. 3. Ibid., 28. 4. Ibid., 32. 5. Ibid., 37. 6. Thomas Hardy, ‘The Dorsetshire Labourer’ (1883), in Hardy: Personal Writings, ed. H. Orel (London: Macmillan, 1967), 181. 7. Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, 37. 8. Ibid., 259, 260. 9. David Frisby, Simmel and Since (London: Routledge, 1992), 54. 10. Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, 52. 11. David O. Morgan, ‘The Place of Harvesters in Nineteenth-Century Village Life’, in Village Life and Labour, ed. R.  Samuel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 65-6. 12. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, tr. J.S.  Libett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 112. 13. Ibid., 114. 14. Ibid., 113. 15. Ibid., 116. 16. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. J.  Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 56, 57. 17. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, tr. H.  Ragg-Kirkby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 179. 18. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, tr. B.  Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 889, 848. 19. Leslie Hill, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary (London: Routledge, 1997), 192. 20. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 28. 21. Ibid., 28, 29. 22. On the role of eternal recurrence in Hardy more generally, see Roger Ebbatson, Landscapes of Eternal Return: Tennyson to Hardy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 23. Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 86, 89, 90. 24. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Spatialisation’, in Narrative Dynamics, ed. B. Richardson (Chicago: Chicago State University Press, 2002), 226.

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25. T.W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, tr. S.W. Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 137. 26. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language, tr. T. Gora, A. Jardine, and L.S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 56. 27. Ibid., 47. 28. Paul Schilder, ‘Psycho-Analysis of Space’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 16 (1935), 295. 29. Alain Bergala, ‘La Paresse’, Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris: 1990), 114. 30. Soshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 21-2. 31. Jacques Rancière, The Flesh of Words, tr. C.  Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 151. 32. Shierry Weber Nicolsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 131. 33. Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, tr. L. Davis (New York: Station Hill, 1981), 75. 34. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, tr. A.  Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 25. 35. J.M. Bernstein, ‘Fragment, Fascination, Damaged Life’, in The Actuality of Adorno, ed. M.  Pensky (New York: State University of New  York, 1997), 157. 36. Maurice Blanchot, When the Time Comes, tr. L. Davis (New York: Station Hill, 1977), 258. 37. Joel Fineman, ‘The Structure of Allegorical Desire’, October 12 (1980), 60.

CHAPTER 6

‘The Open’: Hardy and Jefferies

In his spiritual biography, The Story of My Heart (1883), Richard Jefferies seeks to defeat the time of writing, to transcend the spiritual instant, without abolishing what we might term the scriptural trace of the act of writing. His text illustrates a desire to cancel out the sense of the self as existing in time by means of a quasi-poetic ‘voice’ in which the secret of spiritual renewal is to be located. The literary project of autobiography has often been construed as a means of overcoming the banality of day-to-day memory in favour of an alternative ‘deep’ memory which offers a kind of redemption or cancellation of linear time. Memory, in this instance, is a bringing of the past into the present, restoring experience to life again in the actuality of the present moment, in a structure of feeling which sees the self redeemed from the deathly temporal flow, but is also in touch with a prehistoric past: I felt at that moment that I was like the spirit of the man whose body was interred in the tumulus: I could understand and feel his existence the same as my own. He was as real to me two thousand years after interment as those I had seen in the body. The abstract personality of the dead seemed as existent as thought. As my thought could slip back the twenty centuries in a moment to the forest-days … so his spirit could endure from then till now, and the time was nothing.1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Ebbatson, Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_6

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Jefferies appears here to adumbrate a movement of thought and emotion akin to Nietzsche’s concept of the Eternal Return, which stressed what the philosopher termed ‘the eternity of the moment here and now’.2 In such a formation, as Bergsonian philosophy would suggest, past and present fundamentally co-exist. The feeling of eternity is bound up in this visionary moment, the implication of Nietzsche’s idea being that no identity is self-sufficient, since the moment is able to perpetuate itself. Continuity is subverted through the phenomenon of return, belonging to a future which is in some sense unreadable in conjunction with an ancient past. Prior to this ‘encounter’ with pre-history, climbing the Wiltshire Downs, Jefferies avers: I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the earth’s firmness—I felt it bear me up; through the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me … I spoke to the sea: though so far, in my mind I saw it, green at the rim of the earth and blue in deeper ocean; I desired to have its strength, its mystery, and glory. (SH, 18–19)

Later on, in Sussex, Jefferies notes how ‘sea and hill gradually brought my mind into the condition of intense prayer’ to the extent that he is able to affirm, ‘Now is eternity; now is the immortal life’ (SH, 31, 39). Such ‘moments of vision’, though more muted and intermittent, are also to be found in Hardy’s writing, as exemplified in the experience of Tess Durbeyfield. An examination of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) reveals how Tess’s deep and intuitive sense of ‘the Beyond’ is inexorably undermined and expunged by the rigours and challenges of her life-pattern in ways already adumbrated towards the beginning of the novel, when she assures her brother Abraham that humanity lives on a ‘blighted’ star.3 Nonetheless, despite the damaging trauma of her rape/seduction by Alec d’Urberville, and subsequent pregnancy and the death of her illegitimate child, on her return to her native Marlott Tess is, like Jefferies, quite mystically responsive to a type of sun-worship which causes her to abandon Christianity in favour of what Hardy terms ‘the old-time heliolatries’. Indeed, the narrator postulates, ‘One could feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky’ (TD, 92), and such a vision enables and orchestrates Tess’s further recuperation at Talbothays Dairy and her

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ensuing courtship by Angel Clare. Approaching the Froom Valley, Tess’s ‘hopes mingled with the sunshine in an ideal photosphere’. In acceding to what the narrator calls the ‘irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find secret pleasure somewhere, which pervades all life’, the heroine gives voice to a pantheistic song of joy. As Hardy plangently remarks, Tess’s ‘half-unconscious rhapsody was a Fetishistic utterance in a Monotheistic setting’, originating, he argues, in the fact that ‘women whose chief companions are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature retain in their souls far more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematised religion taught their race at a later date’ (TD, 109). A little later, at Talbothays, Tess explains to the bemused Dairyman Crick, ‘I do know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive.’ By gazing fixedly at a star, as Jefferies would gaze at the sun, she avers, ‘You will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds o’miles away from your body, which you don’t seem to want at all’ (TD, 124). This intensely felt intuition of ‘the Beyond’ reaches its climax in the ensuing garden scene: The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch, and with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive smells –weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the appletree-trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him. Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star, came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden’s sensibility. (TD, 127)

Psychic space possesses an identical relation to real space as does the dream. Indeed, the dreamlike quality of Hardy’s prose imbues this passage with a cinematic quality identified, in discussion of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, as ‘an immense lassitude, an apparent inertia which is in fact a state of great porosity to the strangeness of the world, a mixture of

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torpor … and a somewhat hallucinatory vivacity of sensations’.4 The focus at this stage of the narrative is solely upon the psyche of the heroine, which is at the same time filtered through the consciousness of the putative reader. Bearing in mind the later trajectory of the novel and the ultimate fate of the heroine, it might be posited that the birth of readerly consciousness here is bought at the cost of the death of the heroine and of the folk community she embodies. Tess’s temporary unbound psychic freedom from the constraints of time and space is destined to be undermined and replaced by her marital rejection by Angel, and subsequent sharing in the demise of the workfolk, as emblematised in their communal sufferings at Flintcomb-Ash. In the later course of the narrative, what Hardy evocatively characterises as the ‘oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Var Vale’ (TD, 151) give way, following Angel’s rejection of Tess on their wedding night, to a landscape of exposure and suffering at the ‘starve-­ acre’ place of Flintcomb-Ash, where the rich, metaphysically nurturing potency of the Froom water-meadows is displaced by a terrain ‘almost sublime in its dreariness’ (TD, 275), dominated by the predatory male figures of Farmer Groby, the ‘dark motionless being’ of the northern engine-man (TD, 315), and the supposed religious convert, Alec d’Urberville, who now dismissively characterises Tess’s pantheistic creed as that of an ‘infidel’ (TD, 312). Here all sense of transcendence through nature is blotted out, the field-women transmuted almost to insect life, ‘crawling over the surface’ of the enormous swede-field ‘like flies’ (TD, 277). There is a fleeting memory of the visionary past, when Marian movingly points out to Tess ‘a gleam of a hill within a few miles o’ Froom Valley’ (TD, 278), but such moments are expunged by the ‘calvary of labour’ induced by the arrival of the steam threshing-machine, which enacts and stages the principle of mechanisation and the new relations of production that will transform the potentially visionary spaces of the landscape into an image of ‘the administered society’ in conformity with the laws of exchange and capital. It is then a relatively short step to the climactic scene at Stonehenge set in a country of ‘open loneliness and black solitude’ (TD, 378), where ‘the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation’ (TD, 381)—a setting which paradoxically at this prehistoric site signals the onset of modernity with the arrival of the agents of the law. Tess’s arrest takes place, ironically enough given her devotion to the ‘old-time heliolatries’, at this ‘heathen temple’, and as she remarks, Angel Clare was in the habit of designating her ‘a

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heathen’. The penultimate scene of the drama is thus significantly acted out at this ancient site, as the lovers’ conversation reveals: ‘Did they sacrifice to God here?’ asked she. ‘No,’ said he. ‘Who to?’ ‘I believe to the sun. That lofty stone set away by itself is in the direction of the sun, which will presently rise behind it.’ (TD, 380)

In the final chapter, as the black flag is raised over Wintoncester Gaol, the ‘two speechless gazers’, Angel and Liza-Lu, ‘bent themselves down to the earth’ (TD, 384) in a gesture which tragically reduplicates and cancels out Jefferies’s adoption of a similar but more life-affirming posture in his late essay, ‘On the Downs’: Stoop and touch the earth, and receive its influence; touch the flower, and feel its life; face the wind, and have its meaning; let the sunlight fall on the open hand as if you could hold it. Something may be grasped from them all, invisible yet strong. It is the sense of a wider existence—wider and higher.5

Hardy’s novel thus enacts a process through which the intuitive sense of ‘the Beyond’ movingly voiced by the heroine is progressively undermined by the processes of modernity in a textual movement which stands in opposition to Jefferies’s sustained beliefs. In The Story and the late essays, that is to say, Jefferies, despite his acknowledgement of the harsh nature of rural labour during the Great Depression, evinces a fundamental and defining spiritual investment in the efficacy of ‘the Open’ to illuminate and transfigure quotidian existence. Martin Heidegger would define the ‘Open’ as a space revealed to us in the moment when the world in which we live opens out to a sense of something larger. In his philosophy, the ‘Open’ distinguishes us from the animals and makes us human, to the extent that we stand in what he designates ‘the clearing’, ‘the open and free in the clearing of being’—a moment of visionary intensity mirrored and notably articulated in one of Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’: With all its eyes the natural world looks far into the Open. Only our eyes look back, set like traps about all living things, encircled round their free, outward path.6

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In a philosophical study of the concept of human space, Heidegger’s disciple Otto Bollnow maintained that ‘distance has a certain enticing quality, which attracts the passive individual and for which he yearns’. This perception of distance, he argues, ‘is by its own nature unattainable’, so that ‘there remains only an unfulfilled longing for the mysteriously enticing distance’, a longing Bollnow identifies as ‘a yearning for our lost origins’: It is only because mankind, according to its nature, is subject to homelessness that we can seek our lost home in the distance. Only for humans, therefore, can there be true distance.7

In turning to The Dewy Morn we may note the distinctions and differences between the two writers. Both offer their readers a ‘psychotopographic’ literary experience in which inner process is projected onto the exterior landscapes of south-west England, but ultimately for Hardy nature is perceived as what Marx termed ‘a source of all instruments and objects of labour’. In the bitter experience of the Flintcomb-Ash sequence it becomes clear that, in Marx’s terminology, nature is ‘rigidly separated from man, is nothing for man’.8 There is even, with reference to the historically based agrarian narrative of The Dewy Morn, a distinction to be drawn between Hardy’s and Jefferies’s conception of history: for Jefferies, nature ultimately offers a kind of ‘exit’ from historical process such that, in Adorno’s telling phrase, ‘natural beauty is suspended history, a moment of becoming at a standstill’.9 In the monotony of labour at Flintcomb-Ash, by contrast, man and woman form a link between the instrument of labour and its object, the sense of communality which pervades the Talbothays scenes evaporating under that impress of modernity already adumbrated in the scene of Tess and Angel delivering the milk to the rail terminus. For Hardy, that is to say, the function of writing is in the last analysis representational and historical, whilst for Jefferies, despite his expert acknowledgement and analysis of contemporary issues of land and labour, the act of writing is defamiliarising and transcendental. This transcendental quality is notably in evidence in the poetic opening sequence of The Dewy Morn which is, as W.J.  Keith remarks, ‘concentrated upon the spiritual element’.10 First of all the heroine, Felise, ascends the downs to observe the sunrise, experiencing a moment of spiritual afflatus which is at the same time uniquely bodily and fleshly:

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Felise was lying on the flowers and grass, extended under the sun, steeped in their sweetness. She visibly sat on the oak-trunk—invisibly her nature was reclining, as the swimmer on the sun-warmed sea. Her frame drooped as the soul, which bears it up, flowed outwards, feeling to grass, and flower, and leaf, as the swimmer spreads the arms abroad … She sighed with deep content, dissolving in the luxurious bath of beauty.11

Sometime later, having characteristically ‘idled and dallied’ and thus ‘lost the sunrise’, imbued with the pantheism which unites her sense of beauty with her love for Martial Barnard, she bathes in a nearby pool, feeling that there was ‘something almost sacred to her in the limpid water, in the sweet air, and the light of day’ (DM, 65). She is, unbeknown to herself, secretly observed by Martial Barnard, ‘crouched down behind the fringe of ferns’ (DM, 90), in a scene which combines an erotic charge with a certain voyeuristic tone: Before those beautiful knees he could have bowed his forehead in the grass, in the purest worship of beauty. They were sacred; a sense of reverence possessed him. (DM, 91–2)

But although ‘wondrous loveliness purified and freed his soul’ (DM, 92), Martial remains tentative and uninvolved with Felise despite her various ploys to encounter him in the surrounding area, instead becoming embroiled in a narrative plot which highlights social inequality in the late-­ nineteenth-­ century countryside. The heroine lives with her radically minded uncle, Mr. Goring, who owns one of the few plots of land not under the control of the local Squire Cornleigh and is in constant conflict with the hard-hearted land agent, Robert Godwin. Barnard is compelled through debt to sell his beloved horse, Ruy, to Godwin, but Felise purchases the animal and returns it anonymously to its owner, leaving Godwin, who secretly harbours longings for her himself, to jealously observe the development of their love. In a sub-plot which dramatises the plight of the labouring classes, Felise’s maid Mary Shaw loves the agricultural gardener, Abner Brown, whose parents are threatened with eviction from their tied cottage. Mary, who is pregnant, throws herself despairingly into the local mill-pond and Barnard, in a melodramatic scene, jumps in to save her, strengthened by his now dawning love for Felise. Mary subsequently dies, having given birth to an illegitimate child, and as the agricultural crisis deepens, Barnard decides to give up his farm and addresses a public

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meeting, bitterly denouncing Cornleigh, Godwin and the entire system, with its dominance by the landowning class. Towards the close, Godwin, driven to distraction by jealousy, attacks Felise in the fields, tying her to the ground and unsuccessfully urging Ruy to trample on her face. Barnard reluctantly shoots the horse, finally acknowledging his love for the heroine, and in the ensuing scene the land agent commits suicide, leaving Barnard finally to marry Felise. On one level it is undoubtedly valid to ascribe the distinction between the two texts to differences of authorial temperament: it is clear, that is to say, that the joyful pantheist reaching towards ‘the Beyond’ celebrated in The Dewy Morn stands in contradistinction to the more tragic historicist implications of Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Such a distinction, however, does not take us very far from a critical viewpoint and needs to be supplemented by a more philosophical textual reading. Where Hardy’s heroine is progressively subjected to a loss of spiritual vision, The Dewy Morn remains securely located in a landscape of desire, an imaginative but real historical place which defines Felise’s idealism within a rooted sense of ‘the earth’. Whilst both novels stage a drama centred upon the aesthetics and ethics of sexual desire, the inscription of that desire differs radically in the contrasting writing projects. Jefferies’s acknowledgement of pressing social issues is telling and freighted with implications, both artistic and political, which serve to challenge the notion of a settled and united agricultural scene in which labourer and farmer cohabit harmoniously under the benign gaze of the landowner. The society depicted in both texts is one impregnated by the effects of agrarian capital to the extent that the small-scale commodity production of an earlier quasi-feudal pattern, in which production is tied to use-value, is being replaced by a capitalist system tied to exchange-value. In that sense, as Diana Morrow has observed, The Dewy Morn ‘gives vent to a passionate and impetuous radicalism’ which, as she maintains, is characteristically linked to Jefferies’s adoption of ‘the mantle of transcendentalist nature priest’, offering the utopian possibility of a time when man, ‘inspired by the abundance and beauty of nature, would cast off the constrictions of the present and fulfil his potential’.12 A bald recital of Jefferies’s narrative does little justice to the depth and poetry of a text which reflects, as Jeremy Hooker remarks, ‘the passion of [Jefferies’] vision’, ‘the emotion of a man who sees the violation of the essence of nature, of his soul’s deep aspiring desire’.13 Whereas in Tess of the d’Urbervilles the social and personal pressure exerted on the heroine

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gradually leads to the extinction of her sense of ‘the Beyond’, Felise Goring is enabled, despite the vicissitudes of Jefferies’s plotting, to retain her semi-mystical mode of apprehension. Through her immersion in the natural world she achieves a state in which her perception of the world is enlarged, her sense of reality made more vivid, and in which her mind is still, at the ecstatic conclusion of the text, free to traverse space and time in a rapturous engagement which is both physical and spiritual. At dawn whilst her husband still sleeps, Felise becomes aware of a joyful afflatus latterly denied to Tess: The stars were gone, and the deep azure of the morning filled the sky. By the ridge of the hill the white light shone brightly; above it a purple mingled luminously with the blue; towards the zenith the loveliness of the colour is not to be written. The man slept, but the woman, wakeful in happiness, sat by the window. The dawn shone on her face, and upon the beautiful golden hair drooping to her knees. Her hands were folded, the same attitude in great happiness as in inconsolable sorrow; the dawn glistened upon the tears in her eyes. (DM, 394)

Jefferies here distinguishes between the male, whose existence is predicated upon ‘pursuit and conquest’, and the female, who feels that ‘pure rest had come to her life’ (DM, 395), and the novel closes on a note of overwhelming pantheistic communion: A golden breath came up among the bright whiteness of the light over the ridge of the hill; there were scarlet streaks, the lips of the morning. In the glorious beauty of the sunrise her heart brimmed to the full of love. (DM, 396)

Whilst, as Hooker notes, The Dewy Morn possesses an indisputable political dimension, the novel shares with The Story of My Heart, written a year earlier, an interest in signifying place through a cultural poetics of space. Although the ‘ecological sublime’ is scrupulously orchestrated in both The Dewy Morn and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, it is possible to argue, as Raymond Williams did, that Jefferies’s ambiguous social and critical status creates a fault-line in his writing which is not evident in the far more successful literary career of Thomas Hardy: There is the intensity, a lonely intensity, of his feelings for the physical world: the green language that connects him with Clare and with Lawrence. But

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the working rural world, where the physical experiences are most commonly found, is decisively altering. The labourers’ options are very firmly for change. A fault can then occur, in the whole ordering of a mind.14

The challenge which Jefferies strives to resolve in his fiction is to relate the question of being to issues of temporality, and he attempts this here through the heroine’s erotic pursuit of the somewhat impassive Martial Barnard, who has been compromised by his broken engagement to the wealthy tradesman’s daughter, Rosa Wood. As Felise becomes more aware of this imbroglio, she is compelled to confront the social and political issues relating to Barnard’s lack of funds and, more urgently, by the threatened expulsion of the Browns from their tied cottage. The self-inflicted death of Robert Godwin marks the end-point of the novel’s immersion in these questions of social history and the final chapter, as we have seen, returns to the ecstatic register of novel’s opening sequences. Whereas Hardy’s narrative tends towards tragic closure, with the raising of the black flag over Wintoncester Gaol, Jefferies’s sense of the ‘the Open’ here chimes with the tone and implication of his later essays. As Edward Thomas maintained, it was Jefferies’s ‘mystic consciousness’ ‘that gave a more solemn note to the joy which is the most striking thing in all his books’.15 Indeed, the aim and resonance of Jefferies’s late writings accords with Maurice Blanchot’s concept of an ‘attrait surplice’ (attraction in place), an experience which transforms a familiar place into another dimension and exposes us to ‘the approach of another space’.16 Both The Dewy Morn and Tess of the d’Urbervilles are notable for their deployment and reconciliation of seemingly antithetical imaginative principles, combining as they do the Naturalist and Symbolist techniques which came to predominate in late-nineteenth-century European aesthetic practice. Whilst the agrarian scenes in each text seek to render verisimilitude in relation to rural life at this juncture, such scenes are framed and enriched by Symbolist procedures which illuminate, for example, the garden scene, or Tess’s sleep and arrest at Stonehenge, and Felise’s intuitive response to the downs. Symbolist imagination thrives on the power of suggestion to dissolve clear outlines so that the distanciation of the object world frees representation from purely realist concerns. This Symbolist vision, tragically undermined and abandoned in the action of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, but passionately sustained in The Dewy Morn, works by overcoming death and finitude, conveying a sense of limitlessness via the use of spatial metaphors which lay bare the supra-historical inner dimensions of

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nature. To seek ‘the Beyond’ in these key texts is to lay bare the gap between socio-political exteriority and a potent Symbolist exploration of interiority which will take the text, and the reader, deeper within both mental and natural space. It may be predicated that for both Richard Jefferies and Thomas Hardy writing would take the form of a kind of social labour, converting literary work into cultural capital, but it is possible that Jefferies’s relative failure in the cultural market-place released him from the bonds of this commodification. This contrasting pattern of literary production represents differential responses to the loss of ‘dwelling’ at the onset of modernity, as both writers sought to comprehend ways in which man’s relation to nature may be understood through history. The sense of epistemological crisis generates in the one case a finely crafted narrative realism and in the other a stress upon the authenticity of a spiritual insight which destabilises such realism. For Tess, the unresolved tensions of her social and erotic life render a return to nature and an intuitive grasp of ‘the Beyond’ finally untenable, whilst in Jefferies such a return offers the possibility of ecstatic renewal through those ‘moments of vision’ which, for the writer and his heroine, transcend quotidian reality. To close on a theoretical note: in German philosophy a dialectical relation is posited between two types of experience, Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Erfahrung is tradition-bound experience unfolding over time, as Walter Benjamin remarks, ‘inseparable from the representation of a continuity, a sequence’.17 By comparison, Erlebnis to be understood as the immediate, isolated experience of the individual. Where Erfahrung elicits a narrativised and structured ordering, as in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Erlebnis interprets this order, as in The Dewy Morn or The Story of My Heart, creating an open structure susceptible to multiple interpretations. Benjamin’s colleague Adorno speaks of the way in which ‘the gesture of stepping out into the open is shared … with the artworks of the time’—the late-nineteenth century. ‘Delight in nature’, Adorno goes on, ‘was bound up with the conception of the subject as being-for-itself and infinite in itself’. As such, ‘the subject’s powerlessness in a society petrified into a second nature becomes the motor of flight into a purportedly first nature’. The image of nature, in this argument, thus survives in the nineteenth century because it registers ‘what exists beyond bourgeois society, its labour and its commodities’, to the extent that, as Adorno maintains, ‘natural beauty remains the allegory of the beyond’.18 Jefferies’s concept of ‘the Beyond’ thus accords with Benjamin’s notion of ‘profane illumination’, a concept which, as Richard Wolin explains,

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captures the powers of spiritual intoxication in order to produce a ‘revelation’, a vision or insight which transcends the prosaic state of empirical reality; yet it produces this vision in an immanent manner, while remaining within the bounds of possible experience, and without recourse to otherworldly dogmas.19

And let us end with the words of Jefferies himself, affirming his belief in the annihilation of temporal continuity, and his endless quest for ‘the Beyond’: I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years more it will still be only a moment. To the soul there is no past and no future; all is and will be ever, in now. (SH, 39)

Whilst Jefferies seeks a quasi-mystical escape from time, Tess’s experiences are rooted in the present but become haunted, as the following chapter suggests, by an enigmatically interpreted familial past.

Notes 1. Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart (Dartington: Green Books, 2002), 36. Subsequently cited as SH. 2. Cited in Erich Heller, The Importance of Nietzsche (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), 114. 3. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. J.  Grindle and S.  Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 35. Subsequently cited as TD. 4. Alain Bergala, ‘La Paresse’, Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris: 1990), 114. 5. Richard Jefferies, The Hills and the Vale, ed. E. Thomas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 273. 6. Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Eighth Duino Elegy’, Selected Poems, tr. S.  Ranson and M. Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 165. 7. O.F. Bollnow, Human Space, tr. C. Shuttleworth (London: Hyphen Press, 2011), 91, 92. 8. Cited in Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: NLB, 1971), 15, 30.

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9. T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. R. Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 71. 10. W.J. Keith, Richard Jefferies: A Critical Study (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 131. 11. Richard Jefferies, The Dewy Morn (London: Richard Bentley, 1891), 4. Subsequently cited as DM. 12. Diana Morrow, ‘“Thoughts on the Labour Question”: An Alternative View’, Richard Jefferies Society Journal 8 (1999), 25. 13. Jeremy Hooker, Writers in a Landscape (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), 30. 14. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), 196. 15. Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies (London: Dent, 1938), 295. 16. Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à Venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 131. 17. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, tr. H. Eiland and K.  McLoughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 802. 18. T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. R. Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 83, 85, 90. 19. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 132.

CHAPTER 7

The d’Urberville Family Portraits: Faciality and Identity

There are few who have not felt at some period … a sort of terror from the manner in which the eye of an ancient portrait appears to fix that of the spectator from every point of view. (Walter Scott, ‘Memoir to Walpole’ (1811))

Hardy’s interest in his family tree developed to an almost obsessive degree in later life. As Clive Harfield has noted: Antique nobility decayed is the leitmotif with which Thomas Hardy opens Tess of the d’Urbervilles and was also a personal genealogical fascination for Hardy. Although immediately of artisan origins, his father being a small-­ holding builder and his mother a former maidservant, for much of his life Hardy believed himself to be descended from medieval Hardys who were once prominent landowners in Dorset.1

Hardy owned a number of books on genealogy, including a copy of John Hutchins’s History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset (1774), which is replete with annotations bearing witness to the notion that the Hardys were a family now in decline, marginalia which focus upon the prevalence of a number of Hardy families mentioned in Hutchins’s study. Hardy also consulted a local antiquary on these matters, the Revd. Charles Bingham, who would become Parson Tringham in the novel. Transmuting © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Ebbatson, Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_7

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‘d’Urberville’ to ‘Durbeyfield’ was intended to signal for the reader the fall of a once notable family, a descent underlined by Hardy’s evocation of the d’Urberville family vault at Kingsbere, based upon the Turberville chapel at Bere Regis. Other local families in Tess of the d’Urbervilles are also subject to this seemingly inevitable fall, as Dairyman Crick informs the milkmaids: “There’s the Billetts and the Drenkhards and the Greys and the St Quintins and the Hardys and the Goulds, who used to own the lands for miles down this valley; you could buy ‘em all up now for an old song a’most. Why our little Retty Priddle here, you know, is one of the Paridelles.”2

Kamilla Elliott, analysing the fluidity of class status and ideology which gets underway in the late-eighteenth century, cites a statement from a novel of 1793, in which the heroine reflects, ‘I have experienced the transmigration of souls and fled from the body of a fine lady to that of a country girl.’3 This ‘transmigration’, Elliott argues, links ‘the downward mobility of portraiture to the social realist novel’s representation of “humbler” realities’. The Victorian middle class would thus become haunted, like Hardy himself, by what Elliott terms ‘specters of further downward mobility to the lower classes’.4 Hardy’s imaginary investment in a romanticised version of his essentially ‘lowborn’ family culminated, in 1917, in the construction of the handwritten ‘Hardy Pedigree’, claiming tenuous links to a medieval Jersey family, the ‘Le Hardys’. Michael Millgate remarks on Hardy’s complaint, as an elderly man, that there were still people in Dorchester who thought themselves too grand to speak to him, leading the author to exclaim, ‘Ours was also a county family if only they knew!’5 It is worth noting that whilst, as J.T. Laird pointed out, ‘the theme of heredity is of little significance in the Ur-text’ of Tess of the d’Urbervilles,6 in the successive printed versions the heroine would become revealingly conscious of, and ambivalent towards, her suppositious inheritance. Thus, at the outset of the narrative, Tess regards the identity of her family with that of the knightly d’Urbervilles as ‘unpleasant’ in its issue vis-à-vis her initial encounter with Alec, ruminating how, rather than the ‘touches of barbarism’ and ‘bold rolling eye’ of her host, She had dreamed of an aged and dignified face, the sublimation of all the d’Urberville lineaments, furrowed with incarnate memories, representing in hieroglyphic the centuries of her family’s and England’s history. (TD, 43)

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However, on meeting Angel, who she views as ‘a gentleman and a student of history’, she hopes he will realise that ‘those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people in Kingsbere Church really represented her own lineal forefathers’, and that he would come to acknowledge that ‘she was no spurious d’Urberville compounded of money and ambition like those at Trantridge, but true d’Urberville to the bone’ (TD, 131). Towards the end of the novel, a repentant Angel Clare regrets his earlier failure to acknowledge that Tess’s ‘d’Urberville descent was a fact of great dimensions’: It was a fact that would soon be forgotten—that bit of distinction in poor Tess’s blood and name—and oblivion would fall upon her hereditary link with the marble monuments and leaded skeletons at Kingsbere. So does Time ruthlessly destroy his own romances. (TD, 330)

The ubiquity of portraits in Victorian literature has been widely noted, and as Lynette Felber observes, The literary portrait … provides a verbal representation of physical appearance that most conspicuously functions to establish character. Literary portraits work vicariously, asking readers to conceptualise imaginatively what the characters actually see, requiring that they visualise a painting—see it in their mind’s eye.7

In terms of Hardy’s oeuvre, Tess Durbeyfield’s experience is in effect anticipated when, in A Pair of Blue Eyes, Elfride and Stephen pay a visit to Lord Luxellian’s mansion, Endelstow House. On entering the ‘long sombre apartment’ which constitutes the gallery, the heroine, whose clerical father is a keen genealogist, begins ‘to feel somewhat depressed by the society of Luxellian shades of cadaverous complexion fixed by Holbein, Kneller, and Lely’ which seemed ‘to gaze at and through her in a moralising mood’. 8 Eight years later, in A Laodicean, Hardy would further elaborate these issues in Paula Power’s fixation with the de Stancy family portraits in the castle she has inherited. When George Somerset first views them, he is aware that ‘it required a profounder mind than his to disinter from the lumber of conventionality the lineaments that really sat in the painter’s presence’, some of the portraits ‘having a nobility stamped upon them’, whilst the actual de Stancys are to be identified by a ‘special indent’ on the nose. Later, when Paula herself inspects them in the company of

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Captain de Stancy, she feels as if ‘the De Stancys had stretched out a tentacle from their genealogical tree to seize her by the hand and draw her in to their mass’, and listens attentively to the captain’s tale of the suicide of one of his male ancestors motivated by unrequited love.9 The familial concerns of both Hardy, Elfride and Paula feed into and motivate the episode of Tess’s ominous and decisive encounter with the d’Urberville portraits at the start of her ill-fated honeymoon with Angel Clare, a scene which first featured in the Graphic serialisation of the text.10 The state of Wellbridge Manor anticipates this encounter, the building which ‘had been the mansion of a branch of the d’Urberville family’, but now reduced by what Clare terms its ‘mutilation’ to a simple farmhouse (TD, 203). Although Angel remarks satirically, ‘Welcome to one of your ancestral mansions!’, it is significant that ‘the mouldy old habitation somewhat depressed his bride’ (TD, 214), a depression which deepens dramatically when Tess reaches the upstairs landing: “What’s the matter?” said he. “Those horrid women!” she answered, with a smile. “How they frightened me.” He looked up, and perceived two life-size portraits on panels built into the masonry. As all visitors to the mansion are aware, these paintings represent women of middle age, of a date some two hundred years ago, whose lineaments once seen can never be forgotten. The long pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook nose, large teeth, and bold eye of the other, suggesting arrogance to the point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams. “Whose portraits are those?” asked Clare of the charwoman. “I have been told by old folk that they were ladies of the d’Urberville family, the ancient lords of this manor,” she said. (TD, 214)

Clare acknowledges to himself that Tess’s ‘fine features were unquestionably traceable in these exaggerated forms’ (TD, 215). As Jan Gordon observes: As if to accentuate the failure of the couple to begin anew by casting off history and family, Tess, against her mother’s advice, becomes a historian by insisting upon confessing her past beneath the imaginary portraits of her ancestors.11

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Despite the lovers’ subsequent erotic mingling of fingers in the water basin, Clare remarks: “Tess, you are not a bit cheerful this evening—not at all as you used to be. Those harridans on the panels upstairs have unsettled you. I am sorry I brought you here.” (TD, 216)

Then, on returning to the house late at night after a stroll in the grounds, Clare catches sight of one of the d’Urberville dames, whose portrait was immediately over the entrance to Tess’s bedchamber. In the candlelight the painting was more than unpleasant. Sinister design lurked in the woman’s features, a concentrated purpose of revenge on the other sex … The Caroline bodice of the portrait was low—precisely as Tess’s had been when he tucked it in to show the necklace; and again he experienced the distressing sensation of a resemblance between them. (TD, 231)

Elliott has argued that, in Gothic fiction, ‘the chief authority of picture identification lies … with dependent women and low-ranking viewers of portraits’.12 Tess’s consternation in front of the portraits, whereby she begins to become ‘other’ to herself, resonates with a later Hardy poem, ‘The Pedigree’, in which the speaker sits through the night ‘scanning my sire-­ sown tree’, whose branches, like the d’Urberville pictures, ‘seemed to twist into a seared and cynic face’. The speaker begins to comprehend how ‘every heave and coil and move I made’ has been preordained: Said I then, sunk in tone, ‘I am merest mimicker and counterfeit!— Though thinking, I am I, And what I do I do myself alone.’ The cynic twist of the page thereat unknit Back to its normal figure, having wrought its purport wry, The Mage’s mirror left the window-square, And the stained moon and drift retook their places there.13

And in ‘The Collector Cleans His Picture’, a rural parson enthusiastically seeks to clean a recently acquired portrait painting. Anticipating a vision of ‘love’s inhibited dreamings’, he is alarmed ‘when there leered up

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at me/A hag’ with ‘a bosom/Eaten away of a rot from the lusts of a lifetime’ (CP, 618). The episode at Wellbridge also anticipates the theme of another poem, ‘Heredity’: I am the family face; Flesh perishes, I live on, Projecting trait and trace Through time to times anon, And leaping from place to place Over oblivion. (CP, 434)

In a related text, ‘She, I, and They’, husband and wife sit with ‘the portraits of our fore-folk hung around’, and hearing a ghostly sigh they attribute it to the fact that the portraits ‘repine/That we should be the last/Of stocks once unsurpassed,/And unable to keep up their sturdy line’ (CP, 435). Thus, it is that Tess at Wellbridge Manor, despite earlier in her courtship voicing resistance to her as being defined as ‘one of a long row only’ (TD, 130), now begins to perceive herself as what another poem, ‘Sine Prole’, characterises as. the last one— Outcome of each spectral past one Of that file, so many-manned! (CP, 721)

Even more dramatically, in a late poem, ‘Family Portraits’, the narrator tells how, whilst contemplating ‘Three picture-drawn people’, they ‘stepped out of their frames’. This group, consisting of ‘a maiden of mild wistful tone’, ‘a dark woman’ and ‘a man of much gloom’, enacts a drama of ‘tragic amour’ and ‘dark doings’ which have led to his own birth (CP, 919–20). As a novel of the 1890s, Tess of the d’Urbervilles may be thematically contextualised in relation to the literature of the Decadent movement, and nowhere more so than in this crucial scene of the d’Urberville familial anguish and decline. In the most sensational fictionalisation of ancestral portraiture at this juncture, The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in the same year as Hardy’s text, this theme is focused not only on the spectacular ageing and gradual degradation of Dorian’s own portrait but also in a climactic scene where he inspects the ‘gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country house’ and speculates as to whether he has inherited ‘some strange

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poisonous germ’, which has ‘crept from body to body till it had reached his own’. Had one of his ancestors, he ponders, ‘bequeathed him some inheritance of sin and shame?’: ‘Were his own actions merely the dreams that the dead man had not dared to realise?’ Viewing the picture of another predecessor, Dorian reflects, ‘How evil he looked’, the face ‘saturnine and swarthy, and the sensual lips … twisted with disdain’. In the final scene of the novel, he returns once again to view Basil Hallward’s portrait of him: A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome—more loathsome, if possible, than before.14

Such scenes, which recur in Zola, Huysmans and others, would signal the way in which, in Lombroso’s influential theory of phrenology as a signifier of degeneration, ‘the face, body, gait, can be read off like a language, to reveal atavistic nature’.15 As in Hardy’s text, Dorian’s redemption is only achieved through the tragic death of the protagonist. Prior to this, it is also pertinent to note the ways in which during the course of Hardy’s narrative Tess is herself transformed into a painterly object through the dominant male gaze shared by Alec and Angel. As Kaja Silverman has pointed out, Tess most frequently ‘features as the surface upon which a pattern is imposed’, and is ‘likened early in the novel to a canvas upon which her mother paints an image of voluptuous womanhood with which to ensnare Alec’.16 Mrs. Durbeyfield’s plan leads inexorably to the rape/seduction scene which prompts the narrator to speculate Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive. (TD, 77)

The night in the Chase, coupled with Tess’s later disturbing encounter with the sign-painter’s ‘staring vermillion words’ of damnation (TD, 85), signals the heroine’s transition from unspoilt village maiden to what Silverman characterises as ‘a portrait on an easel, a patterned tissue, and a figure sharply-etched in the red letters of destruction’.17 Deleuze and Guattari, in a discussion of protagonists of the novel from Hardy to Lawrence, speculate:

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They know how difficult it is to get out of the black hole of subjectivity, of consciousness and memory, of the coupled conjugality. How tempting it is to let yourself get caught, to lull yourself into it, to latch back but a face.18

The novel form has, in this reading, ‘always been defined by the adventure of the lost characters who no longer know their name, what they are looking for, or what they are doing’. As Tess gazes in horrified bewilderment at the family portraits, her vision of them exemplifies Deleuze and Guattari’s contention that the face ‘is not animal, but neither is it human in general; there is even something inhuman about the face’. Indeed, in their argument, which resonates with Tess’s entire career, ‘if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face’.19 Tess’s exposure to the visages of her formidable female ancestors, with their ‘sinister design’, illustrates the way in which, as Emmanuel Levinas has argued, ‘The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed.’20 What Tess discovers at Wellbridge Manor may be seen as akin to Levinas’s theoretical postulate that The face resists progression, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable, turns into total resistance to the grasp.

In beholding the two women’s repugnant features, Tess is compelled to confront what Levinas defines as ‘the relation of the Other who puts into question the brutal spontaneity of one’s immanent destiny’,21 a destiny which in her case will reach its apogee at Stonehenge. Jan Gordon points out how, in their penultimate meeting at the Herons, ‘Tess will not allow [Angel] to come too close’, her looks having become similar to that of ‘her pictorialised ancestors, of an aestheticised object out-of-life’.22 This crucial ‘rencounter’ thus, in the later stages of the text, bears out Kamilla Elliott’s contention that ‘resemblance to family portraits attests to kinship and identifies apparent peasants … as heirs’. Tess’s experience here serves, in Elliott’s terms, to ‘establish young persons socialised in the lower ranks’ as ‘actual, lineal heirs to aristocratic positions’. She further pertinently suggests that ‘the portrait raises the soul of the deceased, a manifestation that guilty conscience exacerbates into haunting’.23 Whether or not this climactic scene triggers what Paul de Man terms ‘the ghostly memory of mourned absences’,24 it does enact what he describes as ‘an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity’ in the form of prosopopeia in which

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Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poein, to confer a mask or a face.

Tess’s experience at this juncture refracts what de Man characterises as ‘the giving and taking away of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration’.25 In terms of the cultural politics of this fateful encounter, it is clear that the cathartic scene with the portraits functions to undermine and destabilise the conventional image of the nineteenth-century rural female worker, who as Linda Nochlin writes insofar as she was poor, passive, natural and understood to be content with her God-given role as mother and nurturer, served as an ideal vehicle not only for ideological definitions of femininity but for those of the good worker as well.26

This paternalist ideal has already been dramatically reversed in the death of infant Sorrow, but by the same token the d’Urberville noble-women, in their apparent ‘treachery’ and ‘arrogance’, equally challenge and problematise accepted norms of female virtue, to the extent that the scene serves as an allegorical sign of the changing times. As Norman Bryson remarks of Dürer’s Melencholia, ‘once the allegory has been grasped and the content of signification has been released, the world is emptied, drained, sorrowful’.27 The melancholic gaze which the portraits cast towards Tess possesses a transfixing potency which preordains her doom-­ laden future. The d’Urbervilles are now in class terms in a state of houseless decline, and this scene serves to frame and embody the political and social valences of the novel as a whole, leading inexorably as it does to the final nomadic phase of Tess’s tragic career in which, as Angel Clare perceives, she allows her body ‘to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will’ (TD, 366). Gilles Deleuze maintains of Hardy that ‘his characters are not people or subjects, they are collections of intensive sensations’, with the result that ‘each is such a collection, a product, a bloc of variable sensations’.28 It is in the aftermath of her horrified response to the portraits and subsequent confession to Angel that Tess is subsequently reduced to such a ‘bloc’, in a movement towards what Deleuze defines as ‘the realm of the asignifying, asubjective, and faceless’.29 Early in the novel Hardy stresses how Tess at this juncture ‘was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience’ and notes how

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‘the dialect was on her tongue to some extent, despite the village school’, with the result that she ‘spoke two languages; the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad and to persons of quality’ (TD, 21, 26). Her uprooted condition subsequent to the events at Wellbridge Manor thus fulfils the implications of Deleuze’s query, ‘How to become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to one’s own language?’30 Indeed, Tess’s ever more uprooted condition mirrors Deleuze’s contention that ‘the face has a correlate of great importance: the landscape, which is not just a milieu but a deterritoralised world’.31 The portrait scene bears out what John Hughes observes more generally in his reading of Deleuze, that ‘such interruptive revisitings of the present by the past define a critical moment which carries with it a certain bitter knowledge’.32 Tess’s experience here reflects Adorno’s contention that ‘expression is the suffering countenance of artworks’, aesthetic objects which ‘turn this countenance only toward those who return its gaze’,33 as Tess does with the ancestral portraits. The perceptive observer of the artwork, Adorno suggests, is ‘convulsed’ by the experience to the extent that the picture’s ‘instrument is tears’. The unpleasant countenances of the d’Urberville women demonstrate the way in which, as Adorno contends, painting functions through ‘the absorption of the ugly’.34 Adorno’s analysis of the aesthetics of ugliness in art offers an insight into the implications of this pivotal scene. He questions the prevailing assumption that ‘a face deformed by a painting is just plain ugly’, arguing that ‘What appears ugly is in the first place what is historically older, what art rejected on its path toward autonomy’.35 The ‘grimness’ to which Tess is subjected by the d’Urberville portraits acts as what Adorno terms ‘the substantive imitation of fear’, an emotion which is here transferred to Hardy’s heroine. It is the role of the aesthetically ugly to present ‘old images of terror’ which destabilise ‘the affirmativeness of spiritualising art’.36 Thus, it is that Tess’s beauty, manifest in the ‘fine and handsome girl’ of the opening scenes at Marlott, with her ‘mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes’ (TD, 20), in this later scene is compromised by the way in which ‘the dialectic of the ugly has drawn the category of the beautiful into itself’. The beauty of art, in Adorno’s critique, is thus ‘sullied by the manipulative, composed violence of its exemplary works’. We may therefore come ‘to equate, justly, the ugly with the expression of suffering’, but in Hardy this suffering is dynamically and punitively transferred to the observer. In the art of modernity, Adorno posits, ‘cruelty raises its head undisguised’: ‘Cruelty steps forward unadorned from the artworks as

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soon as their own spell is broken.’37 With the heroine, the reader also vividly witnesses this cruelty in the ‘pointed features, narrow and smirk’ of the one d’Urberville woman and the ‘bill-hook nose’ and ‘bold eye’ of the other, suggestive of ‘arrogance to the point of ferocity’—features which, as we have seen, will ‘haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams’ (TD, 214). In the late poem ‘Family Portraits’, the narrator tells how three of his ancestors step out of the picture frame to ‘set about acting some drama’ centred upon ‘their own lifetime’s tragic amour,/Whose course begot me’. He cries out in fear, ‘Let old ghosts be laid!’, but regrets that he has failed to witness the ensuing action, since ‘therein lay my own’ (CP, 920, 921). As Tim Armstrong remarks, ‘the self may be sacrificed to the family, just as in Hardy’s genealogical poems the “line” may render the individual subject ghostly’.38 This would become Tess’s fate. It is striking how, following her horrified exposure to the faces of her putative female ancestors, in the ensuing downward narrative trajectory of the novel Tess’s personal identity is inexorably neutralised and she becomes almost literally ‘effaced’. Thus, it is that, on her forlorn journey to Flintcomb-Ash, in an attempt to disguise her features, she takes a handkerchief ‘from her bundle, and tied it round her face’, becoming ‘a figure which is part of the landscape’, and prompting Marian to ask, ‘Why is your cwomely face tied up in such a way?’ (TD, 272, 274). Edward Casey emphasises that ‘the edges of veils show just enough to inform … or to suggest what lies under the veil’. A veil allows us to see what is veiled through, indeed in, its edges: what is veiled is there, it itself, a captive of its own edges, even if all of it, or most of it, is concealed. Despite the veil, or in the veil, we are privy to the veiled thing itself.39

By contrast later, returning from her futile visit to Angel’s parents, Tess decides to ‘throw up her veil’, but reflects of her face: “It is nothing—it is nothing!” she said. “Nobody loves it; nobody sees it. Who cares about the looks of a castaway like me!” (TD, 292)

As the two young women labour at the ‘starve-acre place’ of Flintcomb-­ Ash Farm, the landscape itself begins to uncannily reflect this self-­ effacement, the swede-field taking on ‘a complexion without features, as if a face from chin to brow should be only an expanse of skin’, a

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phenomenon counterbalanced by the sky, which displays ‘the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone’: So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other, all day long the white face looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface of the former like flies. (TD, 277)

And Tess’s journey through life will culminate at Stonehenge, as she herself reflects, ‘with nothing but the sky above my face’ (TD, 380). The loss of a sense of personal identity and a pervasive tone of change and dissolution serve to mark Tess of the d’Urbervilles as a classic text of the 1890s, in ways to be considered in the following chapter.

Notes 1. Clive Harfield, ‘Dairyman Billett—The Other d’Urberville’, Hardy Society Journal 16(2) (2020), 49. 2. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. J.  Grindle and S.  Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 131. Subsequently cited as TD. 3. Kamilla Elliott, Portraiture and Gothic Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 4. 4. Ibid., 6, 17. 5. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4. 6. J.T.  Laird, The Shaping of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 108. 7. Lynette Felber, ‘The Literary Portrait as Centerfold: Fetishism in Lady Audley’s Secret’, Victorian Literature and Culture 35 (2007), 471. 8. A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. A.  Manford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 40, 41. 9. A Laodicean, ed. J. Gatewood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 26, 27, 187. 10. Laird, The Shaping, 116. 11. Jan B. Gordon, ‘Origins, History, and the Reconstitution of Family: Tess’s Journey’, ELH 43 (1976), 377. 12. Elliott, Portraiture, 173. 13. Thomas Hardy: Complete Poems, ed. J. Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 460, 461. 14. Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, ed. I. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 143, 144, 221.

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15. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 85. 16. Kaja Silverman, ‘History, Figuration and Female Subjectivity in Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, NOVEL 18 (1984). 17. Ibid., 12. 18. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, tr. B.  Massumi (London: Continuum, 1988), 187. 19. Ibid., 173, 170, 171. 20. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, tr. A.  Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 194. 21. Ibid., 197, 203. 22. Gordon, ‘Origins, History’, 388. 23. Elliott, Portraiture and Gothic Fiction, 66, 68, 242. 24. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 259. 25. Ibid., 76. 26. Linda Nochlin, Representing Women (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 84. 27. Norman Bryson, Word and Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 71. 28. Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues, tr. H.  Tomlinson & B.  Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 39. 29. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaux, tr. B. Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 187. 30. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka, tr. D.  Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota University Press, 1986), 19. 31. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 172. 32. John Hughes, Lines of Flight (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 100. 33. T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. R. Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 146. 34. Ibid., 349, 353. 35. Ibid., 61, 62. 36. Ibid., 62. 37. Ibid., 62, 63, 64, 65. 38. Tim Armstrong, Haunted Hardy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 71. 39. Edward S.  Casey, The World on Edge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 64, 65.

CHAPTER 8

Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the Fin de Siècle

Whilst there has been a proliferation of critical readings of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, relatively little attention has been paid to its role as a novel of the 1890s, a period self-identified by the term fin de siècle, which witnessed the emergence and efflorescence of the Decadent movement throughout western Europe. In his idiosyncratic journalistic best-seller Degeneration, which appeared in English translation in 1895, Max Nordau reflected upon the emergence in modern times of ‘vague qualms of a Dusk of the Nations, in which all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world’.1 This dramatic sense of decline resonates with the dialogue between Tess and her young brother Abraham, prior to their collision with the mail-coach: “Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?” “Yes.” “All like ours?” “I don’t know but I think I don’t know. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted.” “Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Ebbatson, Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_8

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“A blighted one.”2

Immediately following this ominous exchange the Durbeyfield horse is killed, ‘his life’s blood … spouting in a stream’, his body exuding a ‘huge pool of blood’, and Tess ‘splashed from face to skirt with the crimson drops’ (TD, 37), in an image-pattern, as has often been noted, which commences with Tess’s red ribbon at the May dance, to be further orchestrated by the religious text painter’s admonitory sign in ‘staring vermillion words’ TD (TD, 85), by the ‘piece of bloodstained paper’ near Emminster vicarage (TD, 289) and by the ‘scarlet oozing’ when Tess hits Alec with her glove (TD, 321), culminating in the ‘scarlet blot’ on the ceiling of the Sandbourne guest-house resembling ‘a gigantic ace of hearts’, the sign and emblem of Alec’s murder (TD, 369). Blood figures here, in common with other fiction of the fin de siècle, as what Jean-Jacques Lecercle identifies as ‘a life-force, but also … the medium of contamination’, a substance whose most striking characteristic is that ‘it circulates’. Lecercle’s remarks about Dracula may also apply to Hardy’s text: Blood is not only the life-force, it is, being the embodiment of the innocent semiotic opposition between life and death, the vital centre of the novel.3

The pervasive sense of imminent decay and dissolution announced by the mail-cart disaster marks Tess of the d’Urbervilles as a text which may productively be read in conjunction with, for instance, Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884),4 the early Sherlock Holmes stories, Jekyll and Hyde (1886), Dorian Gray (1890), Trilby (1894), The Time-Machine (1895), and Dracula (1897). One of the hallmarks of Decadent fiction, as Suzanne Nalbantian has suggested, is The power of the image to suspend action … (as prefigured by Huysmans); such images expand into scenes or static portraits which interrupt the flow of narrative by halting visions.5

This suspension of action, accompanied by a contradictory complex of emotions, is, as noted earlier, a marked feature of the garden scene in which Tess, ‘like a fascinated bird’, is entranced by Angel Clare’s performance on his second-hand harp. The outskirts of the garden, Hardy notes, are ‘damp and rank with juicy grass’ and ‘with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive smells’, their red, yellow or purple coloration forming a

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‘polychrome’ effect. Tess proceeds ‘stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights’ (TD, 127). Such a scene, set in what J.T. Laird designates ‘this blighted Eden’,6 constitutes a notable evocation of a type of Decadent literary art nouveau exemplified, for example, in Arthur Machen’s The Hill of Dreams, composed in the late-­1890s, which tellingly evokes ‘the poisonous growth of water-plants, the parasite twining of honeysuckle and briony’,7 in a scene with pre-­ echoes in Tess’s experience during her futile visit to Emminster Vicarage, where ‘the wind was so nipping that the ivy-leaves had become wizened and grey, each tapping incessantly upon its neighbour with a disquieting stir of her nerves’ (TD, 289). Charles Bernheimer, noting how this seminal passage elicits a sense of excess ‘that is at once life-giving and death-­ dealing’, aptly relates Hardy’s novel, in its admixture of naturalism and decadence, with the evocation of nature in Zola’s La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret (1875) and Huysmans’s En Rade (1886), with their ‘ominous undercurrent of morbidity running beneath the garden’s exuberant celebration of growth and fertility’.8 There is in this sense here and elsewhere in Hardy’s novel evidence of what Bernheimer calls ‘the destabilising effects of the intersection of symbolist and naturalist modes’ which work to produce a ‘peculiarly decadent irresolution’.9 It has been noted how the south-west of England, with its rural nature and ‘sense of its Celtic and non-metropolitan identity (especially in Cornwall and Dartmoor, but also Wessex)’ made it ‘a fertile area’ for the study of witchcraft and demonology.10 Tess of the d’Urbervilles most notably projects a significant and pervasive range of demonic/satanic features in the characterisation of Alec d’Urberville, in a representation which may also possess anti-Semitic overtones. The d’Urberville residence of ‘The Slopes’ is divorced from the rural economy, ‘not a manorial home in the ordinary sense’; to the contrary, ‘everything looked like money’, whilst the ‘Druidical mistletoe’ on the ancient neighbouring oaks signals a pre-­ Christian ambience (TD, 41). This is now the home of the Stoke d’Urbervilles, Mr. Simon Stoke tellingly and ambiguously represented as ‘honest merchant’ or, in a countervailing hint of putative Jewish ancestry, a ‘money-lender’ (TD, 42). The emergence of Alec, with his swarthy complexion, ‘full lips, badly moulded, though red and smooth’ and ‘well-­ groomed black moustache with curled points’, already suggests tell-tale ‘touches of barbarism’ (TD, 43). Alec is thus modelled along recognisably

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Decadent satanic or demonic lines, embodying what Gayla Steel has defined as a type of ‘demon figure’, ‘rising in [the heroine’s] path as phallic power, subjugating and confounding her ambitions’ and embodying a potency ‘she both yearns for and dreads’ in his role as a type of ‘demon lover’. Such a man is to be found ‘lurking in by-paths and walks ready to pounce on and possess unsuspecting maidens’11 and is associated with the Devil in the Wessex folklore with which Hardy was familiar. Indeed, the text hints at this, since the term ‘Stoker’ was one of the Devil’s appellations in the middle ages. Alec’s ‘bold rolling eye’ (TD, 43) suggests his possession of quasi-hypnotic or mesmeric powers linking him with such vampiric avatars of Decadent masculinity as Edward Hyde, Svengali and Count Dracula, and it is notable how, at his first encounter with Tess, his eyes already threateningly ‘rivet themselves upon her’ (TD, 45). When he offers her the ‘British Queen’ variety of strawberry, he compels the girl to eat the fruit from his hands, as ‘she parted her lips and took it in’ (TD, 44), in what may be construed as a diabolical erotic parody of the communion sacrament. Such overtones are further in evidence when Tess and her fellow-maid are required to present the chickens individually to Alec’s blind mother in a ceremony which ‘reminded Tess of a Confirmation, in which Mrs. d’Urberville was the bishop, the fowls the young people presented, and herself and the maidservant the parson and curate of the parish’ (TD, 61). The ensuing climactic scene of the Saturday-night dance at Chaseborough takes place in ‘a mist of yellow radiance’ which Tess first perceives as ‘illuminated smoke’, in the midst of which may be glimpsed elements of a pagan orgy: Through this floating fusty debris of peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers, and forming together a sort of vegeto-­ human pollen, the muted fiddles feebly pushed their notes … Of the rushing couples there could barely be discerned more than the high lights—the indistinctness shaping them to satyrs clasping nymphs—a multiplicity of Pans, whirling a multiplicity of Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing. (TD, 66–7)

Such a priapic scene orchestrates the way in which folk-memory elicited what have been termed ‘images of wild, orgiastic dance’, featuring ‘the erotic, almost insane nature of female fairy dancing’.12 Robert Ziegler’s

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characterisation of the witches’ sabbath chimes curiously with this episode in Hardy’s novel, speaking of ‘a rag-tag gang of gypsies, peasants, vagrants’, and significantly, ‘false clerics’.13 As the dancers collapse in a heap, Tess sees ‘the red coal of a cigar’ (TD, 68), an image, as Laird remarks, possessing ‘phallic implications’,14 and signifying the ominous arrival of Alec d’Urberville, a ‘false cleric’ himself in a later manifestation, in a sequence of events which will culminate in her seduction/rape. The satanic overtones here are unmistakeable, with the excesses of the rustics’ dance mimicking the medieval scenario of the ‘Sabbat’ or witches’ orgiastic dance in which, after banqueting in the Devil’s honour, the participants would copulate with their demon lovers. The ensuing rape scene in the Chase takes place at the setting of the moon, in ‘a faint luminous fog’, as Tess falls ‘into a reverie’, whilst Alec d’Urberville bends over her ‘till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers’ (TD, 73, 76, 77). The narrator goes on: Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above them rose the primeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which were poised gentle roosting birds in their last nap; and about them stole the hopping rabbits and hares. But, might some say, where was Tess’s guardian angel? where was the Providence of her simple faith? (TD, 77)

The scene accords with Kierkegaard’s notion that silence acts as ‘the demon’s trap, and the more this is silenced, the more terrible the demon’,15 and Hardy’s pointed reference to the absence of the ‘guardian angel’ gestures towards that doubling of the male protagonists which would prove ultimately fatal to the heroine. Indeed, the MS of the novel in its depiction of the Chase refers to the ‘Druidical mistletoe’ ‘still found on ancient oaks’,16 and this indicative sign is reduplicated on Tess’s wedding night, when she finds a ‘bough of mistletoe: Angel had put it there’ (TD, 231). As Laird observes, the ‘sinister connotation’ in the Chase ‘is here expanded by overtones of irony’17 which serve to link the two male protagonists. This irony which marks and furrows all the key texts of Decadence has been likened to a ‘vampire in hiding’, who, in a trope underlined by the fog which wraps the Chase ‘in thick darkness’ (TD, 76), ‘assumes the form of a creeping mist’.18 Both Alec and Angel evince a narcissism which, in Sarah Kofman’s terms, leads to ‘the production of doubles’ as ‘a substitute

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for procreation’. As Kofman further observes, the ‘diabolical double is always already a work of death, always already dead’: Each of the figures of the devil is itself double (at least), deceptive: this satanic power of division is also always a power of simulacrum.19

Indeed, Hardy’s text here conforms dramatically to some of the stereotypical features of vampiric seduction, as defined by James Twitchell: The actual attack is almost always the same: it is night-time, probably midnight, the bewitching hour. The moon should be full, for the vampire is not only revived by moonlight, he is energised by it. Assuming that the vampire is male, the female victim is preparing to sleep, in that dim world between sleeping and waking.20

The characterisation of Alec d’Urberville here possesses some of the ‘classic tropes of vampirism’ identified by Andrew Eastham in relation to The Picture of Dorian Gray: ‘mesmeric influence, a hieratic aristocracy, and sexual possession’.21 Tess’s resultant pregnancy and the birth of baby Sorrow reinflects the folk wisdom that the children of such illicit liaisons were always ailing and sickly, whilst the problems arising over the infant’s burial echo the widespread belief that, without authorised baptism, the dead child became the possession of the Devil. Thus, Tess thinks of her dying child ‘consigned to the nethermost corner of hell as its double doom for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy’ and pictures ‘the arch-fiend tossing it with his three-pronged fork’ (TD, 98), just as d’Urberville is observed later in the Marlott allotments wielding ‘the steel prongs of his fork’ (TD, 336). This hellish scenario was further elaborated in the earlier MS which depicts the infant’s ‘little limbs hissing and crackling in the heat or seized by junior devils’.22 Indeed, at the improvised domestic baptism ceremony, the ‘tender and puny’ baby is ironically depicted ‘manfully fighting against sin, the world, and the devil’ (TD, 97, 99). It is a defining characteristic of satan to be a shape-changer: the Christian devil, it has been argued, is ‘naturally a master of illusion’, to the extent that ‘virtually any form was available to him’.23 This is borne out in Tess’s belated ‘rencounter’ with Alec, now alarmingly transformed into ‘an excellent fiery Christian man’ (TD, 292), his ‘same handsome unpleasantness of mien’ modified by ‘lines of devotional passion’ which do little to mitigate his demonic presence, ‘paralyzing [Tess’s] movement so that she

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neither retreated nor advanced’ (TD, 297). The narrator observes laconically that Alec’s ‘animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism Paulinism’ (TD, 297). On leaving her seducer to resume his preaching, Tess comes upon the stone pillar known as ‘Cross-in-Hand’, her misperception of the monument as ‘a Holy Cross’ undermined by the shepherd’s ascription of it as ‘a thing of ill-omen’, marking the burial-place of a ‘malefactor’ who was said to have ‘sold his soul to the devil’ (TD, 303). When Alec reappears at Flintcomb-Ash, his relapse is once again signalled by satanic associations, as he ascribes his spiritual downfall to Tess’s ‘maddening mouth’ and categorises her as a ‘dear damned witch of Babylon’ (TD, 313), in a diatribe which will reverberate in the heroine’s later re-entry into Blackmore Vale, with its haunting conjuration of ‘witches that had been pricked and ducked’ there (TD, 333). These devilish overtones reach a climax in the nightmarish allotment scene at Marlott, when Tess becomes gradually aware of a male figure which the bonfire reveals to be Alec d’Urberville, who in this hellish environment ironically exclaims, ‘How much this seems like Paradise’, and identifies Tess as the temptress Eve, and, in a revealing lapse, himself as ‘the old other one, come to tempt you in the disguise of an inferior animal’. Although she replies, ‘I never said you were Satan’, the textual undertones contest that statement (TD, 336, 337) and will be tragically fulfilled in the final scene at the ‘heathen temple’ of Stonehenge. It is here that Tess, having murdered Alec, is accompanied by her absentee husband, Angel Clare, who stresses the pagan qualities of the site: “Did they sacrifice to God here?” asked she. “No,” said he. “Who to?” “I believe to the sun. That lofty stone set away by itself is in the direction of the sun, which will presently rise behind it.” (TD, 380)

Lying recumbent on the sacrificial stone, Tess in this ultimate scene conforms to the characteristic Decadent image of femininity already established in the sleepwalking episode, in which Clare ‘carefully laid’ his wife in ‘the empty stone coffin of an abbot’ (TD, 244). This characteristic Decadent scenario, parodied in Alec’s trick in posing as a ‘recumbent figure’ in the tomb at Kingsbere church (TD, 350), has been exhaustively explored by Bram Dijkstra, who points to the ‘piously prurient images of women which fulfilled the demands of self-sacrifice’ throughout the art of

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the fin de siècle, with its emphasis upon the archetypal figure of ‘the dying or physically spent woman as martyr’.24 Tess’s act in stabbing Alec to death brings her to the gallows and, Nina Auerbach has suggested, connects her with other Decadent female characters. As Auerbach appositely posits of Lucy Westenra in Dracula, ‘her fluctuations between virginal purity and bloody attacks link her to Hardy’s dual-natured Tess Durbeyfield as well as to Trilby’. Auerbach further notes how Victorian culture ‘abounds in icons of beautiful corpse-like women’, who become transfigured ‘in trance, sleep, lifelike death’.25 Even the seemingly benevolent figure of Angel Clare is curiously imbued with degenerative qualities, his Christian name ironically hinting at the abjection of his character. It has been suggested that ‘demons were essentially the same, fallen angels with angelic powers’,26 and the link between the two male protagonists is supported by Keith Ansell Pearson’s observation that ‘the desire to be a demon is a desire not to be One but more than one’.27 Indeed, it is a commonplace of Hardy critique to suggest that Angel Clare functions as the more spiritualised double of the fleshly Alec d’Urberville, both men conjoined by their destructive impact on Tess’s life. It is in Angel’s company, as has been seen, that Tess studies the portraits of her female ancestors, with the ‘long pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless treachery’, and the ‘bold eye of the other, suggesting arrogance to the point of ferocity’ (TD, 214). This is a scene, as already noted, which chimes with Dorian Gray’s inspection of his family portraits and prompts him to the question, ‘Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own?’28 It may be that in both scenes, as Andrew Eastham remarks, ‘uncanny repetition replaces development’.29 In a religious debate with the piously devoted Mercy Chant, it is notable how Angel is ‘thrown by sheer misery into one of the demoniacal moods in which a man does despite to his true principles’, and by his own admission begins to entertain ‘the most heterodox ideas’ (TD, 260). His self-righteous rejection of Tess on the wedding night, whilst overlooking his own metropolitan ‘dissipation with a stranger’ (TD, 221), stands in counterpoint to Alec’s openly avowed sensual passion, as when the seducer tellingly exclaims, ‘Angels of heaven … I cannot stand your looks! There never were such eyes, surely, before Christianity or since!’ (TD, 308). D’Urberville’s brief transmogrification to a ranting preacher is paralleled by a change in Angel, who on his return from Brazil ‘matched Crivelli’s dead Christus’: ‘His sunken eye-pits were of morbid hue, and the light in his eyes had waned’,

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to the extent that ‘you could see the skeleton behind the man’ (TD, 356). Such metamorphoses typify the male characters here, as Elaine Scarry has observed: One can, like Angel, simply decide to be a farmer in Brazil, or one can, having been like Alec a nouveau riche dandy in one terrain, choose to become a working-class minister in another.30

Furthermore, the novel, in its projection of a divided masculinity, would appear to endorse Georg Simmel’s contemporaneous definition of man as ‘half animal, half angel’, whilst woman, in his theory, ‘is situated in the human in the most unqualified sense’.31 What motivates the action of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is thus a contestation between daemonic and angelic elements, staged by Hardy in ways which confirm the postulate of Justin Clemens to the effect that Neither rulers nor slaves, angels and demons occupy intermediate realms; they are intermediate beings, ineradicably divided, divisive, in-between.

The tendency of the novel is to both endorse and problematise Clemens’s claim that ‘angels and daemons appear, again and again, in work dedicated to the possible revisionings of sexual difference’.32 In this sense the representation of Alec d’Urberville illustrates Walter Benjamin’s argument that ‘the possession of demonic sexuality is that of the egoist that, surrounded by sweet feminine mirages … enjoys itself’.33 This enjoyment, however, is founded upon class, sexual and financial exploitation: when Tess returns briefly to Marlott, her mother tells her how Alec d’Urberville sees her as ‘worth [her] weight in gold’, whilst he himself ‘wears a beautiful diamond ring’, which young Abraham notes, ‘did twinkle when he put his hand up to his mistarshers’ (TD, 49). Alec’s seductively hypnotic powers place him on a footing with a range of quasi-­ vampiric Decadent male protagonists in a way which is illuminated by Karl Marx’s delineation of a Gothic world of modernity haunted by spectral presences and ruled over by the mysterious movement of capital, here exemplified by the way Simon Stoke has moved from the north, ‘out of hail of his business district’ (TD, 42), in order to establish himself as a country landowner:

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Capital posits the permanence of value … by incarnating itself in fleeting commodities and taking on their form, but at the same time changing them just as constantly … But capital obtains this ability only by sucking in labour as its soul, vampire-like.34

The arrival of the Stokes in rural Wessex is illustrative of how, as Alexandra Warwick has pertinently observed, in the fin de siècle there emerges a discourse of ‘the urban preying like vampires on the rural, and in using blood as a figure of speech’, and she further emphasises the way Decadent vampire fiction insists upon ‘making the blood and body that of a woman’.35 Indeed, as Judith Wilt observes, ‘inter-gender relations can be the most vampiric of all, resulting almost always in the subjection and finally death of one partner’.36 At the same time, in interpreting Tess of the d’Urbervilles as a variant type of Decadent fiction, it is primarily the implied relationship between the male protagonists which is most revealing. Alec and Angel partake of some of the qualities of what William Greenslade has defined as ‘the figure of the “secret sharer” or “double” which inhabited, obsessed or preyed upon the human subject’. He goes on: The doubled or mirrored identity, where subject and ‘other’ are brought into troubling relationship, proliferated in the literature of the period: we need only think of Holmes and Moriarty, Van Helsing and Dracula, Marlow and Kurtz, Heyst and Jones. And the idea of two identities inhabiting a single subject, Jekyll and Hyde, stands as a commanding figure of the divided self.37

To Greenslade’s list we might add Stephen Smith and Henry Knight, Gabriel Oak and Sergeant Troy, Damon Wildeve and Clym Yeobright, Michael Henchard and Donald Farfrae, and most potently, Alec d’Urberville and Angel Clare. Angel’s kinship with Tess’s seducer is graphically indicated in the scene of Tess’s fateful wedding-night confession, the fire in the grate looking ‘impish, demoniacally funny, as if it did not care in the least about her strait’ (TD, 225, itals. added). Angel’s rejection of Tess because of her sexual ‘fall’, set against the memory of his own transgression, might be framed by Luce Irigaray’s proposition that angels ‘are not unrelated to sex’—to the contrary, she avers, the figure of the angel represents ‘a sexuality which has never been incarnated’.38 This association

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with Angel may be borne out when, arriving at his parents’ vicarage, Tess come across the ominous sight of the ‘piece of blood-stained paper, caught up from some meat-buyer’s dust-heap’, ‘too flimsy to rest, too heavy to fly away’ (TD, 289), in a scenario which curiously echoes Freud’s account, in an essay on demonic possession, of how the Devil throws his devotee a paper contract, ‘crumpled up and torn into four pieces’.39 In Rilke’s Duino Elegies the pervasive figure of the angel, in his own account, has achieved ‘the transformation of the visible into the invisible’ and is thus a ‘being who affirms the recognition of a higher rank of reality in the invisible’.40 By contrast with the Rilkean angel, with whom Angel Clare may share some qualities, ‘self-asserting man’, in Heidegger’s commentary, ‘lives by his will’s stakes’. In terms which reverberate with the characterisation of Alec d’Urberville, Heidegger describes such a man as being ‘essentially in the hazard of his essence within the vibration of money’, a ‘constant exchanger and middleman’. There can, however, in this Heideggerian reading, occur a transmutation between man as ‘the merchant’ and the angel, to the extent that ‘the scales of danger then pass from the realm of the calculating will over to the angel’.41 Rilke frames this poetically, speaking of the moment. When from the merchant’s hand the balance passes over to that angel who in the heavens calms and soothes it with the equilibrium of space …42

The issue is, according to Heidegger in terms relevant to the action of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ‘Who lets the balance pass from the merchant over to the angel?’43 This diagnosis gestures towards that doubling which so fatefully links the male protagonists, but as Andrew Webber has remarked, in terms of the Döppelganger, ‘the dyadic scheme is typically undone by a triangle of desire, the potential of which apparently lies in the rivalry of host and double over a female third party’. At the same time, as Webber suggests, by contrast instances of the female double ‘are typically in the service of male fantasies of the other, corresponding to the time-honoured polarisation of madonna and whore, the sexless and the over-sexed’.44 Hardy’s narrative schema to some extent bears this out by pitting the sensuously responsive Tess against the piously virginal Mercy Chant. Tess’s career throughout is marked by her virtually incessant wanderings across the changing landscapes of Wessex, and this pervasive

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Hardyesque theme of nomadism versus stability may now be more fully investigated.

Notes 1. Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 6. 2. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. J.  Grindle and S.  Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 35. Subsequently cited in the text as TD. 3. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, ‘Dracula and Witchcraft’, in The Gothic, ed. F. Botting (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001), 78. 4. Hardy evinced a particular interest in Huysmans, noting the value for ‘novels of the future’ of his concept of ‘spiritual naturalism’, and also referring to his later novel, La Cathédrale. The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, vol. 2, ed. L. Bjork (London: Macmillan, 1985), 48, 227. 5. Suzanne Nalbantian, Seeds of Decadence in the Late-Nineteenth Century Novel (London: Macmillan, 1983), 123. 6. J.T.  Laird, The Shaping of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 55. 7. Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams (London: Richards, 1954), 93. 8. Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 82, 66. 9. Ibid., 125. 10. Jonathan Barry, Witchcraft and Demonology in South-West England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 13. 11. Gayla R. Steel, Sexual Tyranny in Wessex (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 15. 12. Hans-Peter Broedel, The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 230. 13. Robert Ziegler, Satanism, Magic and Mysticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 21. 14. Laird, The Shaping, 62. 15. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, tr. H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 88. 16. Laird, The Shaping, 91. 17. Ibid., 91. 18. Andrew Eastham, ‘Aesthetic Vampirism’, in Art and Life in Aestheticism, ed. K. Comfort (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 85. 19. Sarah Kofman, Freud and Fiction, tr. S. Wykes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 143, 145, 158. 20. James B.  Twitchell, The Living Dead (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981), 10.

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21. Eastham, ‘Aesthetic Vampirism’, 89. 22. Laird, The Shaping, 63. 23. Broedel, Malleus Maleficarum, 49. 24. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 34. 25. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 22, 141. 26. Broedel, Malleus Maleficarum, 44. 27. Keith Ansell Pearson, ‘Spectropoesis and Rhizomatics’, in Evil Spirits, ed. G.  Banham and C.  Blake (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 136. 28. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. I. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 143. 29. Eastham, ‘Aesthetic Vampirism’, 90. 30. Elaine Scarry, Resisting Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 77. 31. Georg Simmel, On Women, Sexuality and Love, tr. G. Oakes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 114. 32. Justin Clemens, The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 106, 49. 33. Walter Benjamin, Reflections, tr. E. Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 255. 34. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, tr. M.  Nicolaus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 646. 35. Alexandra Warwick, ‘Vampires and Empire’, in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. S.  Ledger and S.  McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 211. 36. Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 269. 37. William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 72. 38. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, tr. M. Hoffmann (London: Faber, 1991), 15. 39. Sigmund Freud, Art and Literature, ed. A.  Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 410. 40. Cited in Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, tr. J.  Young and K. Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 234. 41. Ibid., 235. 42. Cited ibid., 236. 43. Ibid., 236. 44. Andrew J.  Webber, The Doppelganger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 18, 20.

CHAPTER 9

Wayfaring

Along the road walked an old man. He was white headed as a mountain, bowed in the shoulders, and faded in general aspect. He wore a glazed hat, an ancient boat-cloak, and shoes, his brass buttons bearing an anchor upon their face … Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty and white. It was quite open to the heath on each side, and bisected that vast dark surface like the parting-line on a head of raven hair, diminishing and bending away on the furthest horizon.1 I pace along, the rain-shafts riddling me, Mile after mile out by the moorland way, And up the hill, and through the ewe-leaze gray Into the lane, and round the corner tree; Where, as my clothing clams me, mire-bestarred, And the enfeebled light dies out of day, Leaving the liquid shades to reign, I say, ‘This is a hardship to be calendared!’2

Hardy’s oeuvre is pervaded by scenes of, and reflections upon, the act of walking. The fiction, and later the poetry, become instruments of a type of nomadism, populated as they are by the itinerants whose presence

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Ebbatson, Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_9

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appears to unsettle or undermine the stability of society. In this writing the ‘nomad’ possesses a clearly defined territory and follows paths established by rural custom, but which challenge and destabilise the village hierarchy. By the late-nineteenth century the state would seek to abolish vagabondage by means which elude some of Hardy’s characters: There is nobody on the road But I, And no beseeming abode I can try For shelter, so abroad I must lie. (CP, 599)

In the early twentieth century C.F.G. Masterman noted how tramp life, ‘the underside of the world, generally appears in writing in exaggerated sunshine or gloom’.3 The decades prior to that had been characterised by the appearance of a myriad of wayfarers and tramping artisans, some of whom would feature in Hardy’s representations of the rural scene. His wayfarers most typically transcend the more negative classification of this group, their ramblings possessing an overtone of freedom and liberty which resists the increasingly regimented sociality of the period, in an image of an instinctual life close to nature set against increasing urbanisation and regimentation. E.J.  Hobsbawm wrote that tramping ‘declined rapidly’ towards the end of the nineteenth century, but also reflected how, ‘in that period of rapid industrial growth’, some groups remained ‘semi-­ nomadic’.4 In this discourse the wayfarer functions as the ‘other’ of sociality, his/her representation refracted through a landscape imaged as a discursive terrain encoding a range of codes of signification. Such a complex of ideas is expressed, for instance, in the poem ‘Vagrant’s Song’: When autumn brings A whirr of wings Among the evergreens around, And sundry thrills About their quills Awe rooks, and misgivings abound, And the joyless pines In leaning lines Protect from gales the lower ground, O a hollow tree Is as good for me

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As a house of a thousand pound! Che-hane, mother; che-hane,mother, As a house of a thousand pound! (CP, 776)

These Hardy wayfaring texts betray the mid-Victorian influence of George Borrow’s gypsy narratives and Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Scholar Gypsy’, and during Hardy’s own career the romanticisation of wayfaring and vagabondage would be celebrated in E.V. Lucas’s 1899 anthology, The Open Road, and in the writings of W.H. Davies and Francis Thompson. It is the endlessness of tramping which in Hardy is set against the territorial stability of the state, a resistance dramatised, for example, by the experience of ‘The Weary Walker’: Ah! Past that ridge a third, Which still the road Has to climb furtherward – The thin white road! Sky seems to end its track; But no. The road Trails down the hill at the back. Ever the road! (CP, 742)

The ceaseless walking, here and elsewhere, illuminates how Hardy dramatises or stages what Georg Simmel, in his 1908 essay, ‘The Stranger’, would define as a state of ‘wandering’ which ‘is the conceptual opposite of attachment’. However, in this scenario the ‘wanderer’ or ‘stranger’ is, like the reddleman, ‘fixed within a certain spatial circle’. It thus appears that paradoxically for Simmel, ‘one who is remote is near’.5 In the culmination of The Return of the Native, the wandering reddleman, Diggory Venn, is problematically transformed into what Thomasin Yeobright terms a ‘respectable dairy-man … and a man of money’ (RN, 393). As Simmel argues, the ‘position of the stranger stands out more sharply if, instead of leaving the place of his activity, he settles down there’, as Diggory does on Egdon. Venn, like other Hardy itinerants, is both ‘near and far at the same time’.6 A more sombre version of wayfaring than that on Egdon is the motivation of the poem, ‘The Trampwoman’s Tragedy’, in which the couple.

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beat afoot the northward way We had travelled times before. The sun-blaze burning on our backs, Our shoulders sticking to our packs, By fosseway, fields, and turnpike tracks We skirted sad Sedge-Moor.

(CP, 195)

There is, though, a tragic pre-history, and as Simon Gatrell observes, ‘in the fifth verse the verb of motion changes tone as the narrator turns to her particular story … and the ballad-swift tale of jealousy and murder ensues’,7 leaving the bereaved woman, having borne a lifeless child, deserted: ‘Here alone I stray/Haunting the Western Moor’ (CP, 199). This ballad narrative, with its dramatic outcome in execution and child-­death, accords with Anne Wallace’s reflection that Hardy ‘deliberately contrasts the expectations his characters have of walking with its ineffectual and destructive results’. Indeed Wallace’s reading resonates both with the narrator here and the events in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, remarking as she does how ‘special difficulties faced women walkers, especially if they walked alone, because their peripatetic translated as sexual wandering’.8 Gatrell argues that ‘from the rounds of the Quire in Under the Greenwood Tree to Tess Durbeyfield’s wanderings … journeying is of singular importance in Hardy’s fiction’.9 This is a valid claim, but a clear distinction needs to be made between acts of communal walking and solitary wayfaring. Hardy envisages a beneficent but now outworn form of perambulation in which the Mellstock Quire make their Christmas rounds, where ‘the rustle of their feet and tones of their speech echoed with an alert rebound from every post, boundary-stone and ancient wall they passed’.10 However, communal goodwill transmutes into scandal and social retribution in the mass walk of the skimmity-ride, somewhat comically in ‘The Bride-Night Fire’ but disastrously in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where it evolves into ‘a scandal, which was spreading like a miasmatic fog through Mixen Lane, and thence up the back streets of Casterbridge’. This ‘great jocular plot’, with its effigies of the errant Henchard and Lucetta, triggers her ultimately fatal collapse, ‘convulsed on the carpet in the paroxysms of an epileptic seizure’.11 Such communal activities, both positive and negative, are in marked contrast to Hardy’s representations of the lone wanderer, notably epitomised by Diggory Venn. The ‘sad little boy’ who attends Eustacia Vye on Egdon, on catching sight of the reddleman’s van ‘assumed that this was

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the cart of a gypsy’ and he feels a mild ‘dread of those wanderers’, whilst also acknowledging that ‘uglier persons than gypsies were known to cross Egdon at times, and a reddleman was one of them’ (RN, 69, 70, 71). The role of Diggory Venn here is to function as ‘the stranger’, one who opts for a pattern of appearance and disappearance in a manifestation of transience. Diggory’s mysterious manoeuvres exemplify the way in which, as Lesley Harman writes, ‘the infrequency of confrontation with the stranger contributes to make it a source of suspicion or threat’: The spatial form puts the stranger close to those from whom he is socially distant, and far from those to whom he is socially close.12

The complex motivation of wayfaring is dramatised with subtle ambiguity in ‘The Weary Walker’: Ah! Past that ridge a third, Which still the road Has to climb furtherward – The thin white road! Sky seems to end its track; But no. The road Trails down the hill at the back. Ever the road! (CP, 742)

Here, as Gatrell notes, ‘the continual recurrence of “the road” leads to a fascination in the eye and ear of the reader with the shape and sound of the words’.13 The implication of the recurrent sound and rhythmic patterns of wayfaring here comes to register what Otto Bollnow designates an ‘altered relationship with time’: The wanderer is no longer separate from the countryside, it is no longer an image that passes away beside him, but he actually wanders through the countryside, becomes part of it, is completely taken up by it.14

In The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid the heroine, Margery Tucker, seeks to interrupt the postman’s extensive rounds so as to uncover the identity of the ‘foreign gentleman’ whom she had earlier encountered contemplating suicide:

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Reaching the opposite side of the park there appeared before her for the third time that little old man, the foot-post. As the turnpike-road ran, the postman’s beat was twelve miles a day … But what with zig-zags, devious ways, offsets to country seats, curves to farms, looped courses, and triangles to outlying hamlets, the ground actually covered by him was nearer one-­ and-­twenty miles.

When she finally comes abreast the postman and demands, ‘what is his name?’ she is told, ‘Tis a name no man’s tongue can tell’, and he spells out on the earth ‘BARON VON XANTEN’. 15 Such a Hardyesque encounter is consonant with the idea that, as Alexander Düttman claims, At the edge of the path, of the way, of language, we experience something very simple, maybe a name, maybe the other of the name, the name as other, that matches us in silence.16

Margery’s experience, and the more extensive wayfaring undertaken for instance by Tess, raises the issue of sexuality. Female walking may be said to play into a typical Hardy concern with pre-industrial modes of transport, a cultivation of rurality opposed to the forces of modernity, but it also prompts a discourse of anxiety and sexual vulnerability for the female walker as demonstrated by Tess’s fateful ‘rencounter’ with the now pseudo-religious Alec. There is a sense, highlighted by Tess’s case, that walking may become problematic and perilous in relation to female sexuality and identity. This is also a class issue: whereas Fancy Day is at liberty to wander freely, for the lower-class women at Talbothays and subsequently Flintcomb-Ash walking is a necessity of female labour fraught with challenges. It is often the predatory inclinations of men which render such mobility problematic for women, as when Tess escapes from the three-­ mile drunken walk undertaken by the Trantridge female group who ‘followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium’ under the guidance of the ‘leading pedestrian’, Car Darch, who walks with a stream of treacle pouring down her back ‘like a slimy snake’.17 Tess’s mobility in this crisis, and her decision to jump into Alec’s cart, serves to hint at her new identity as ‘fallen woman’ which will haunt her future. As Elaine Scarry notes, there is a notable difference ‘between Tess who walks through the world and Angel who “goes on” a walking tour,

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between Tess who works in the dairy and Angel who … plays at being a farmer’.18 This is a scenario which recurs in Hardy’s fiction. Thus, in the earlier Trumpet-Major, Anne Garland, alarmed at the thought that her would-be seducer, Festus Derriman, ‘would be sure to waylay her on her journey home’, proceeds by an exhausting roundabout route: It was necessary now to clamber over the down to the left of the camp, and make a complete circuit round the latter—infantry, cavalry, suttlers, and all—descending to her house on the other side. This tremendous walk she performed at a rapid rate, never once turning her head, and avoiding every beaten track to keep clear of the knots of soldiers taking a walk.19

Such passages epitomise the way in which the wayfaring woman may be tarnished with sexually transgressive behaviour embodied in the effortful exhaustion of Anne’s enforced rambling. Walking here represents an act of labour and disrupts the conventional association of the female body with the landscape. Mobility in the moral landscape for Anne, for Tess and other female characters makes a creative dichotomy between harmony and conflict, gendered patterns of exclusion being operative in the rural scene despite the familiar connotations of the woman with nature. The spaces of ambulation in these texts lay bare some of the contradictions of prevailing gender codes and undermine the notion of wayfaring as participating in a rural idyll. Hardy’s landscapes, that is to say, are often markedly encoded in reflecting dependency on outsider status in a male-oriented environment. The well-known episode of Tess when, in fleeing from Farmer Groby, waking up among the dying pheasants and mercifully wringing their necks, anticipates the end of her own wanderings in strangulation at the hands of the state. In this sequence the heroine’s identity dwindles as she effectively forms part of the ambience: Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the landscape; a fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter guise: a grey serge cape, a red woollen cravat, a stuff skirt covered by a whitey-brown rough wrapper, and buff leather gloves … Next day the weather was bad, but she trudged on, the honesty, directness, and impartiality of elemental enmity disconcerting her but little. (TD, 272–3)

Lacking proprietorship, the woman ‘walks on’, more observed than observer.

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Walking may also take on a more deathly resonance, as in ‘The Dead Man Walking’, in which the speaker asks, ‘don’t they know/That I have died of late years, /Untombed although?’ In years gone by, he recalls, A Troubador-youth I rambled With Life for lyre, The beats of being raging In me like fire.

The passion, though, has dwindled, and the speaker concludes, Yet is it that, though whiling The time somehow In walking, talking, smiling, I live not now. (CP, 217–19)

In a meditative essay on ‘The “Sense” of the “World”’, Jean-Luc Nancy postulates that ‘The “path to be followed” rests on presupposition’: One becomes uncertain about ‘the path to be followed’ and asks oneself if this ‘way’ is a function of the reason for, or the end toward, which one is walking.

There is in this psychic state an ‘unassignable unity of sensate sense and directional sense’,20 which Hardy’s characters increasingly have lost. The affinity between walking and a death-like state haunts a number of poetic texts: in ‘A Wasted Illness’ the speaker approaches ‘The door to Death’ demanding ‘Where lies the end’: Through vaults of pain, Enribbed and wrought with groins of ghastliness, I passed, and garish spectres moved my brain To dire distress. And hammerings, And quakes, and shoots, and stifling hotness, blent With webby waxing things and waning things As on I went. (CP, 152)

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Such deathly intuitions are ironised and intensified in ‘The New Boots’, in which a woman is questioned by the narrator as to why her male neighbour’s brand-new boots ‘stay there hung on the wall’ despite his having declared, ‘I’ve got them at last—a pair/I can walk in anywhere/Through rain and slush and slop.’ In conclusion she tells her auditor. ‘They have hung ever since he died The day after gaily declaring: “Ha-ha! Now for wet wayfaring. They’re just the chaps for my wearing!”’ (CP, 902)

These moods elicit a state of blindness and indifference to nature in the wayfaring persona, as in ‘The Rambler’: I do not see the hills around, Nor mark the tints the copses wear; I do not note the grassy ground And constellated daisies there. (CP, 269)

In such texts, as another wandering speaker remarks, ‘Life’s bare pathway looms like a desert track to me’ (CP, 269). In these poems the act of wayfaring is often fraught with doubt and anxiety. Whilst the reddleman, Fancy Day or Michael Henchard may be defined as ontologically secure in their environment, in the poems wayfaring is sometimes construed as a contest between freedom and an increasingly overpowering convention. The ambiguities are paradoxically explored in ‘Christmastide’, in which an upright citizen’s negativity is contrasted with free-wheeling affirmation of the houseless: The rain-shafts splintered on me As despondently I strode; The twilight gloomed upon me And bleared the blank high-road. Each bush gave forth, when blown on By gusts in shower and shower, A sigh, as it were sown on In handfuls by a sower. A cheerful voice called, nigh me, ‘A merry Christmas, friend!’ –

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There rose a figure by me, Walking with townward trend, A sodden tramp’s, who, breaking Into thin song, bore straight Ahead, direction taking Toward the Casuals’ gate. (CP, 846)

The issue of class becomes increasingly evident: thus, the free-wheeling ability of Venn to transform from wayfarer to dairy-farmer becomes replaced by the inequity and exploitation experienced by Tess or Jude. The latter, employed as a youthful bird-scarer, pursues a path out of Marygreen, ‘till he came to a wide and lonely depression’ in the upland landscape. Having been punished by the farmer for his laxity, he later returns to the site ‘never swerving an inch from the path, and climbing up the long and tedious ascent’, eventually viewing the semi-mystical city of Christminster ‘veiled in mist’.21 The bleakness of the natural world here, and the illuminated vision of the city, speaks to the gradual elimination of wayfaring as an expression of freedom and signals increasing human subservience to, or enslavement by, a deceptive urban modernity. Jude sees Christminster as an emancipatory site of opportunity and social mobility, but his socialisation in the city draws him unconsciously into an arena of risk in which his self-identity, earlier marked by wayfaring, is replaced by issues of class and gender which will culminate in his lonely death. The fractured self of modernity, encased as it is here in a rigid class system, replaces the freedom espoused by the wayfarer. Hardy’s varied representations of wayfaring might productively be framed by a consideration of Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of nomadism. They argue that the nomad ‘has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another’. The life of a nomad takes the form of an ‘intermezzo’ in which he/she is ‘strictly subordinated to the paths’, and the elements of dwelling ‘are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilising them’. Further, ‘even though the nomad’s trajectory may follow trails or customary routes, it does not fulfil the function of the sedentary road’. Nomad space, in their theorisation, is to be envisaged as ‘smooth’: he/she ‘clings to the smooth space’ and possesses ‘infinite patience’. Summing up, Deleuze and Guattari categorise the nomad as ‘the Deterritorialised par excellence’ in a quest in which ‘the land ceases to be land, tending to become simply ground or support’.22

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She plunged into the chilly equinoctial darkness as the clock struck ten, for her fifteen miles’ walk under the steely stars. In lonely districts night is a protection rather than a danger to the noiseless pedestrian, and knowing this Tess pursued the nearest course along by-lanes that she would almost have feared in the daytime … Thus she proceeded mile after mile, ascending and descending till she came to Bulbarrow, and, about midnight, looked from that height into the abyss of chaotic shade which was all that revealed itself of the vale on whose further side she was born. (TD, 333)

Notes 1. The Return of the Native, ed. S. Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 7. Subsequently cited as RN. 2. ‘A Wet Night’, Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, ed. J. Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1981), 276. Subsequently cited as CP. 3. C.F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England, ed. J.T. Boulton (London: Methuen, 1960), 139. For a useful overview see M.A.  Crowther, ‘The Tramp’, in Myths of the English, ed. R.  Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). 4. E.J.  Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), 43, 44. 5. Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. D.N.  Levine (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971), 143. 6. Ibid., 144, 148. 7. Simon Gatrell, ‘Travelling Man’, in The Poetry of Thomas Hardy, ed. P. Clements and J. Grindle (London: Vision Press, 1980), 158. 8. Anne D.  Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 14, 29. 9. Gatrell, ‘Travelling Man’, 156. 10. Under the Greenwood Tree, ed. S. Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 27. 11. The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. D.  Kramer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 267, 268, 279. 12. Lesley D. Harman, The Modern Stranger (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1988), 15, 17. 13. Gatrell, ‘Travelling Man’, 168. 14. Otto Bollnow, Human Space, tr. C. Shuttleworth (London: Hyphen Press, 2011), 109. 15. Outside the Gates of the World, ed. J.  Jedrzejewski (London: Everyman, 1996), 153, 154.

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16. Alexander Garcia Duttmann, The Gift of Language, tr. A. Lyons (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 26. 17. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. J.  Grindle & S.  Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 69. Subsequently cited as TD. 18. Elaine Scarry, Revisiting Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 53), 53. 19. The Trumpet-Major, ed. R. Nemesvari (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 67, 68. 20. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, tr. J.S.  Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 77. 21. Jude the Obscure, ed. P. Ingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 8, 14, 17. 22. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, tr. B. Massumi (London: Continuum, 1988), 380, 381.

CHAPTER 10

Hardy’s Lyric Voice: ‘Beeny Cliff’

I O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea, And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free— The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me. II The pale mews plained below us, and the waves seemed far away In a nether sky, engrossed in saying their ceaseless babbling say, As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day. III A little cloud then cloaked us, and there flew an irised rain, And the Atlantic dyed its levels with a dull misfeatured stain, And then the sun burst out again, and purples prinked the main. IV —Still in all its chasmal beauty bulks old Beeny to the sky, And shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh, And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by? V What if still in chasmal beauty looms that wild weird western shore, The woman now is—elsewhere—whom the ambling pony bore, And nor knows nor cares for Beeny, and will laugh there nevermore.1 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Ebbatson, Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_10

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If the lyric form suggests, in J.S. Mill’s telling phrase, ‘an overheard utterance’, Hardy’s poem, subtitled ‘March 1870-March 1913’, inflects this definition to pose a number of issues pertaining to speech, writing and memory. The light-hearted joy of ‘that clear-sunned March day’ long ago diminishes to a piercing sense of loss which is framed by the persistence of the ‘chasmal beauty’ of ‘old Beeny’, balanced against the sense of the dead female beloved who ‘will laugh there nevermore’. As notably established and refined in the nineteenth century, in parallel with the growing interest in psychology, lyric takes a necessarily intersubjective form, since, as Scott Brewster says, ‘it is obliged to address itself to someone’.2 The lyric poem is paradoxically established during this period when poetry becomes a marginalised cultural form: Mark Jeffreys argues that lyric was ‘pushed into a Gothic ghetto because prose fiction became the presumptive vehicle for narrative literature’3—a literary form which Hardy himself exploited so successfully—and takes the shape of a performance of some kind, often, as Brewster remarks, eliciting an ‘uncertain or contradictory construction of the self’,4 contradictions mirrored in the differing manifestations of nature here, ranging from the dazzlingly brilliant ‘opal and sapphire of that wandering western sea’ to the ominous clouds which dye the ocean ‘with dull misfeatured stain’. This is to argue that the lyric text is ineluctably dialectical because, as Adorno proposed in his seminal essay, there is a contention in the form between subject and object, with the result that the lyric becomes ‘a philosophical sundial of history’. What Adorno terms ‘the loneliness of the lyric expression’, which he sees as ‘latent in our individualistic, and, ultimately, atomistic society’ is mirrored and imaged in the ‘chasmal beauty’ of this ‘wild weird western shore’. In his reading the lyric voices a protest ‘against a social condition which every individual experiences as hostile, distant, cold, and oppressive’,5 a liberatory gesture markedly registered here by the remembered figure of ‘the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free’. Adorno thus seeks to define the lyrical subject within its historical context à propos modernity and the reification of the world. Faced with the bleak nineteenth-century doctrine of progress, the lyric self turns inwards, locked, as Hardy is here, into a type of private mythology. For Hardy, the key emphasis is upon the voice itself, but this voice is to some degree alienated from its own identity. Adorno’s argument centres upon the problematic relation between aesthetics and his diagnosis of social decadence in the period of high capital and on the congruity he identifies between the alienated modern poetic text and an equally alienated sociality. In ‘Beeny Cliff’, as elsewhere in Hardy, the

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social becomes seemingly unrepresentable except immanently through the natural world, the lyric form in his hands registering a sense of loss imbricated in the sense of a failure of the lyric ideality. There is a hint of hollowness or emptiness in the anxiety of the poet’s question, ‘shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh,/And the sweet things said in that March say anew there by and by?’ which supports the contention that ‘the self is always for Hardy … the marker of an absence in life’.6 This absence is registered or emblematised by the natural land- and seascape, the poet and his beloved caught dialectically between the ‘pale mews’ below them and the ‘nether sky’ above, but the woman now located ‘elsewhere’. John Schad has argued that ‘Hardy’s absences and gaps belong as much to the world “out there” of sights and signs as to the self “in here” of mind and thought’, and yet at the same time his negations ‘are thoroughly marked by self-consciousness’.7 The essence of lyric in Hardy’s work overall conforms to Jonathan Culler’s definition of a verse-form which compels the reader ‘to construct a meditative persona’, one which ‘is presented as the discourse of a speaker who, at the moment of speaking, stands before a particular scene’. In such a format, Culler maintains, ‘the drama will be one of mind itself when faced with external stimuli’8—stimuli here embodied not only by the ‘opal and sapphire’ but also by the beloved’s ‘bright hair flapping free’—a brightness now eclipsed by that ‘chasmal beauty’ of the sea-cliffs, which, Tim Armstrong suggests, represents ‘a purple mixed with black, a passion remembered in the dark chasm of loss’. In this scenario, in Armstrong’s reading, ‘The dead woman’s voice is naturalised through the tropes of mourning, in being linked to the pulsating sound of the sea.’9 Armstrong also pertinently notes how ‘the triple rhyme and heavy beats—temporal markers of sameness, difference, repetition, and an infinite perspective—all combine to suggest that time is an oceanic series of waves, sounded out in the poem’.10 ‘Beeny Cliff’ is essentially an impressionist text which offers a pictorial evocation of shifts of light and colour mingled with subjective accounts of sensuous experience, enabling the poet to transmit to the reader a complex of immediate and transient feelings, the environment of the sea-cliff almost taking on the resonant mystery of an apparition. This aesthetic response was already made explicit on one of Hardy’s early visits to the cliff, where he noted The Cliff: green towards the land, blue-black towards the sea … Every ledge has a little starved green grass upon it; all vertical parts bare. Seaward, a dark

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grey ocean beneath a pale green sky, upon which lie branches of red cloud. A lather of foam round the base of each rock. The sea is full of motion internally, but still as a whole. Quiet & silent in the distance, noisy & restless close at hand.11

Impressionism offers an account of the present ‘moment of vision’ which is simultaneously the experience or repetition of one which lies distant in memory. Jesse Matz, in his exploration of literary impressionism, notes how ‘a former self receives an impression, and a later self receives its later counterpart and does the work of retrospective analysis’. In his account impressionism creates ‘atmosphere and mood’, ‘fixes moments, fragments form, and intensifies affective response’.12 Impressionism may thus be construed as a kind of creative irresolution which inhabits some of Hardy’s most characteristic writing. By siting the action of the poem on the cliffs of Cornwall Hardy signals his interest in the geological theories and explorations of the period, with the precipitous sea margin here hinting at the passing of the present order and the transience of the immediate state of affairs in a seemingly cyclic pattern of time. In contemplating Bergsonian theory, which was also deeply pondered by Hardy, Marcel Proust wrote: Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that followed them. But each past day has remained deposited in us … Our ego is composed of the superimposition of our successive states. But this superimposition is not unalterable like the stratification of a mountain. Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancient deposits.13

As Duane Williams remarks, ‘this is a geological time made up of sediments of the past that only involuntary memories can release’, and there is thus a distinction to be made ‘between chronological time that is abstract, horizontal, and linear, and geological time that is concrete, vertical, and intermittent’.14 In his poetry notebook Hardy juxtaposes the sensory experience of past and present: Today—has length, & breadth, & thickness, & colour, & voice, & smell. As soon as it becomes Yesterday it is a thin layer among many layers, without size or colour or smell or voice.15

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Trish Ferguson observes that this note ‘resonates with the idea of the idea of layered time recently discussed by Bergson’: The problem with such a conception of time as stratified … is that the past is emptied of sensory experience, but, by making a pilgrimage to Cornwall where he first met Emma, actively seeking to prompt the Proustian experience, Hardy is able to invert the hegemony of the present over the past.16

At the same time it may be noted that the geological framing device is tempered by what Veronica Alfano has designated lyric’s ‘effect of a temporal stasis that reflects the desire to conserve or recover transient impressions’. In this configuration, she maintains, the lyric is ‘characterised by a perverse strain of amnesia’.17 The lyric poet thus ‘attempts to freeze moments and sever their links to temporal continuity’, but ‘cannot exclude time and change’. The lyric, in this analysis, works ‘to defy time’s depredations and eternise fleeting impressions’—meaning in this sense becomes a kind of resurrection. Nonetheless, ‘Beeny Cliff’, in its brooding ambience, shows how, in Alfano’s terms, evolutionary theory ‘shines a light on the vastness of deep time, making it disturbingly alien or imponderable in the process’. In this theatre of loss, she argues, male sexual desire is masked or disguised by the way in which, as in Hardy’s poem, ‘forgetful remembrance displaces such desires to a dim long ago’.18 In many respects ‘Beeny Cliff’ conforms to M.H. Abrams’s annotation of lyric as featuring a speaker ‘in a particularised, and usually localised, outdoor setting’ who performs ‘a sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself (sic) or with the outer scene’, but also ‘with a silent human auditor, present or absent’. A poem of this type, Abrams suggests, ‘rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood’.19 The framing of this deathly silence raises in a rather acute form the way in which, as Heather Dubrow has argued, ‘love lyrics pivot on gender’ and reflect ‘the relations between speaker and object, the first generally male and the second female’. Memorialised lyric address to the female beloved thus ‘may silence her and its descriptions dismember and disempower her’.20 It is in this light that it has been claimed that lyric writing embodies ‘the essential unchangeableness of patriarchal poetry in its lyric desire to stop time’.21 Hardy’s poetry is frequently triggered by absence of the human, in a mode that bears witness to the way in which, as Linda Shires maintains, he ‘shows up the fragility and erasure of the human [but] reinforces the strength of nature’22: thus in ‘The Phantom Horsewoman’, another poem set in that ‘shaly

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Atlantic spot’, the young woman dwindles into ‘a phantom of his own figuring’.23 In this sense it is feasible to associate lyric form with otherness and absence, Hugh Grady claiming that ‘it is the otherness of the poem that bids for our comprehension’, the unreality of the lyric world in this argument being one ‘that we encounter with a shock of recognition because it is our own, though always absent’.24 ‘Beeny Cliff’ might feasibly be construed through the lens of the Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence. The poem is based upon a suppositious act of repetition, ‘shall she and I not go there once again now March is nigh’ in a temporal structure echoed and reduplicated, for example in ‘The Clock of the Years’, who avers, ‘I can make the clock of years go backward’ or Hardy’s own ruminations when in Rome ‘On the Palatine’, as to how ‘Time seemed fiction, Past and present One’. This scenario is then carried to extreme and slightly bizarre extremes as Hardy visualises the now dead Emma revivified and progressively becoming more youthful until she ‘waned child-fair,/And to babyhood’, after which she ‘smalled till she was nought at all’.25 Whilst such imaginings owe something to the elderly Hardy’s pondering over the implications of Einsteinian relativity, there are also discernible here traces of the concept of eternal recurrence as notably expounded by Nietzsche, a concept which stresses the importance of states of being over temporal flow.26 In his notebooks Hardy referred to the appearance of evolution as paradoxically ushering in ‘a timeless reality wh. includes & transcends change’.27 In The Gay Science Nietzsche expounded his counterintuitive doctrine: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.’28

The oceanic environment of Hardy’s poem, in which ‘the waves seemed far away’, chimes with Nietzsche’s notion that ‘everything that has been is eternal: the sea will cast it up again’, the world envisaged as ‘a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms’.29 For Nietzsche ‘the “I” of the lyric poet sounds forth from the abyss of being’, and the idea of subjectivity is ‘a delusion’. In the lyric poem, he maintains, the act of willing ‘and the pure contemplation of the … surroundings are blended together in a wonderful mixture’, the

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images of the lyric poet comprising ‘nothing more than himself (sic) … only different objectivations of himself’.30 We may in conclusion reflect upon the briefly glimpsed but visionary Hardyesque rainbow created by ‘the irised sun’. In his seminal essay on ‘Hardy’s Virgilian Purples’, Donald Davie enquired, ‘Could a slate-blue cliff under certain rainbow conditions cast a shadow so as to color the sea at its foot in various shades of purple?’31 He traces this phenomenon back to the evocative account of the cliff in A Pair of Blue Eyes and suggests that ‘the purple is not a visual effect at all … but is spiritual—a seeming, a floating off, an exhalation’; in this argument ‘the purples which prink the main as seen from Beeny Cliff are the spiritual light of sexual love’.32 Davie goes on to propose that the purples here are linked not only to the purple light of Hades in Virgil’s Aeneid but also to passages in Dante’s Purgatorio. Whatever its literary antecedents, ‘Beeny Cliff’ is a poem which retains an element of mystery which supports Adorno’s contention that ‘those who peruse art solely with comprehension make it into something straightforward, which is furthest from what it is’. He goes on: ‘If one seeks to get a closer look at a rainbow, it disappears,’33 just as Emma has discovered. Whilst what Adorno terms ‘the lyrical “I”’ produces ‘the semblance of the self-evidence of poetic subjectivity’, this subjectivity ‘is on no account identical with the I that speaks in the poem’.34 In a Benjaminian conversation-­piece one of the participants, Georg, remarks, on sighting a rainbow, ‘It’s just colour; nothing of it is form.’ He adds that in the rainbow ‘the unfolding of beauty is that of nature’. Art resides in ‘pure perception’, such that ‘in pure perception nature has conceived’. The rainbow, the speaker maintains, with a particular resonance for a reading of Hardy, is ‘the purest manifestation of this colour that spiritualises and animates nature throughout’, making of nature ‘the mute, apperceived primal image or art’.35 The hypnotic image of the ‘irised rain’ over the Cornish cliffs accords with Adorno’s contention that ‘artworks are images as apparition, as appearance’—the apparition, such as that of the recently dead Emma, ‘illuminates and touches’ in ‘the paradoxical effort to transfix this most evanescent instant’. It is as images that ‘artworks are the persistence of the transient’—in this instance a moment in time on the Cornish cliffs— ‘concentrated in appearance as something momentary’: ‘To experience art means to become conscious of its immanent process as an instant at a standstill.’36 In sum, ‘Beeny Cliff’ may be construed as a text which bears out Virginia Woolf’s vision of ‘truth as something of granite-like solidity, and personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility’.37

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Notes 1. Thomas Hardy, ‘Beeny Cliff’, Complete Poems, ed. J.  Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1978), 350–1. 2. Scott Brewster, Lyric (London: Routledge, 2009), 12. 3. Mark Jeffreys, ‘Ideologies of Lyric’, PMLA 110 (1995), 200. 4. Brewster, Lyric, 34. 5. T.W. Adorno, ‘Lyric Poetry and Society’, in The Adorno Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 221, 213, 214. 6. T.D.  Armstrong, ‘Poetry in the Afterlife of Thomas Hardy’, Victorian Poetry 26 (1988), 392. 7. John Schad, Hostage of the Word (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2013), 4, 7. 8. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 167. 9. Tim Armstrong, Haunted Hardy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 155, 164. 10. Tim Armstrong, ‘Sequence and Series in Hardy’s Poetry’, in A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. K. Wilson (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 391. 11. The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. R.H.  Taylor (London: Macmillan 1979), 10–11. 12. Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8–9, 14. 13. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol. 4, tr. C.K. Scott Moncfrieff and T. Kilmartin (London: Everyman’s Library, 2001), 119. 14. Duane Williams, ‘Eternity Glimpsed and Time Regained’, in Literature and Modern Time, ed. T. Ferguson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 121. 15. Thomas Hardy’s Poetical Matter Notebook, ed. P. Dalziel and M. Millgate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 21. 16. Trish Ferguson, ‘“Time’s Renewal”: Death and Immortality in Hardy’s Emma Poems’, Literature and Modern Time, 155. 17. Veronica Alfano, The Lyric in Modern Memory (Palgrave, 2017), 9. 18. Ibid., 14–15, 29, 37. 19. M.H. Abrams, ‘The Structure of the Greater Romantic Lyric’, cited in The Lyric Theory Reader, ed. V. Jackson and Y. Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 541. 20. Heather Dubrow, ‘Lyric Forms’, in The Lyric Theory Reader, 115. 21. Robert Grojohn, ‘Gertrude Stein and the Prose Long Poem’, Genre 24 (1991), 180. 22. Linda M. Shires, ‘Hardy’s Poems and the Reader’, Thomas Hardy Journal 34 (2018), 27. 23. Complete Poems, 354.

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24. Hugh Grady, ‘Notes on Marxism and the Lyric’, Contemporary Literature 22 (1981), 555. 25. Complete Poems, 528, 103, 529. 26. See Roger Ebbatson, ‘Nietzschean Evolution and Recurrence in Hardy’s Texts’, in Landscapes of Eternal Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 119–48. 27. The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, vol. 2, ed. L.  Bjork (London: Macmillan, 1985), 223. 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, tr. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 273. 29. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. W.  Kaufmann (New York, Vintage Books, 1968), 548, 550. 30. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. K.A. Pearson and D. Large (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 57, 56. 31. Donald Davie, ‘Hardy’s Virgilian Purples’, Arion 1(3) (1974), 506. 32. Ibid., 507, 508. 33. T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. R. Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), 162. 34. Ibid., 219. 35. Walter Benjamin, Early Writings, tr. H. Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2011), 219, 220. 36. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 110, 111. 37. Virginia Woolf, ‘The New Biography’.

CHAPTER 11

‘The Face at the Casement’: Window Patterns in Hardy’s Poetry

When looking from a window and saying I see men pass in the street, I really do not see them but infer that what I see are men.1

In a number of characteristic poems Hardy deploys the image of the window in a mode which serves to explore the notion of the threshold and ways in which the window-pane may be construed as suspending or pausing narrative, leading to immobility and entrapment, and thereby problematising issues of space and time, identity and alterity. In these texts the window separates inside/outside whilst simultaneously connecting them, converting presence into absence, distance into proximity, with the result that, as Maurice Blanchot suggests, Whoever has disappeared completely and is suddenly there before you, behind a pane of glass, becomes a sovereign figure.2

The key images of the threshold and the window-frame also work, Elaine Scarry notes, by permitting ‘the passage of one person into a space belonging to a person of another gender or of another class’.3 However, whilst, as has been observed, the ‘threshold of the door represents a point of entry that one may pass over’, the threshold of the window offers ‘visibility rather than a passage through’,4 and this sense of access and

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blockage is crucial to a reading of Hardy’s window poems. As Sheila Berger notes of Hardy’s oeuvre, ‘Settings, doorways, windows, stages, mirrors, pictures—all call attention unrelentingly to the framed nature of reality and of language’,5 and David Levin suggests that: To see others through a window-frame is to see others as beings in a picture, as in some sense man-made, the products of artifice.

In this argument the window functions as ‘a representation of a representation’.6 In his essay on Freud’s wolf-man, ‘The Truth through the Window’, Jacques Rancière maintains: A window is a determined structure, a four-fold relationship: an inside and an outside, a sequence and an interruption. This relationship is a two-way one: the outside can stand for reality, as opposed to the closing in on itself of the inside; but the inside can just as easily stand for the hic et nunc, the here and now, as opposed to the mirages of escape towards the outside.7

A reading of these Hardy poems might be further contextualised by reference to the concept of ‘human space’ propounded by the phenomenologist Otto Bollnow, who comments upon the ‘ability to see without being seen’, but also, in contradistinction, the feeling of exposure ‘in a brightly lit room at night’. He further notes a countervailing opening up of ‘the inner space to the world as a whole’: Through the window one looks out into the open air, one sees the sky and the horizon … So through the window the human inner space is observably and clearly positioned in the great order of horizontal and vertical.

When we look through the window, Bollnow suggests, as opposed to passing through the door, ‘the world recedes into the distance’, so that the window-frame ‘idealises the part of the world that is cut out and isolated in this way’.8 The Hardy poems under consideration here orchestrate and explore the types of literary window Rancière identifies with nineteenth-century French realism, ‘where the division between outside and inside, dream and reality, passage and blockage blurs’.9 Rancière’s notion that ‘by going through the window, meaning either circulates or freezes’10 is suggestive for a reading of Hardy’s ‘The Face at the Casement’, published in 1914,

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which takes the basic form of a monologue spoken by a male lover who, passing the home of a dying former suitor of his own now ‘plighted Love’, who accompanies him, glimpses a ‘white face, gazing at us/As we withdrew’,11 and thereupon ‘deigned a deed of hell’ by ostentatiously putting his arm round the young woman, though wholly ‘unfired by lover’s passion’. As a result the eclipsed suitor’s ‘pale face vanished quick,/As if blasted, from the casement’, upon which the successful lover’s ‘shame and self-abasement/Began their prick’. There is a significant and unnerving polarity here between emotional attachment and distanciation or separation, the rejected and now expiring former lover evincing a passion wholly absent in his lukewarm successor, his forlorn predicament as the ‘travelled sun dropped/To the north-west, low and lower’ embodying the argument propounded by Deleuze and Guattari that ‘the face has a correlate of great importance in the landscape, which is not simply a milieu but a deterritorialised world’.12 Hardy’s poem enacts that process of ‘deterritorialisation’ in its dramatic staging of the complex of love, possession and jealousy laid bare in a momentary but definitive gesture. The message which the young woman sends to her dying former admirer triggers an eloquent riposte: For her call no words could thank her; As his angel he must rank her Till life’s spark fled.

This heartfelt effusion is immediately cancelled and obliterated when his successful rival turns his head and determines on his fateful gesture. The trusting response of the girl, as she ‘smiled at [his] caress’, is cynically demolished by her current lover’s reflection: why came the soft embowment Of her shoulder at that moment She did not guess.

Whilst this is a poem apparently freighted with a biographical resonance,13 ‘The Face at the Casement’, in its textual complexity, also bears out John Hughes’s argument that in Hardy’s work in both fiction and verse ‘events of looking, and of eye contact, take on a real centrality and importance’—here with tragic implications since, as Hughes adds, ‘observation, and particularly the observation of another person, is a privileged

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form of self-revelation’.14 This is a text which, in the density of its (mis-) construction of human relations, resonates problematically with the Levinasian occultation of ‘the face’. Levinas would maintain that The ambiguity of distance, both removal and connection, is lifted by the window that makes possible a look that dominates, a look of him who escapes looks, the look that contemplates.15

Thus, it comes about, in this theorisation, that ‘meaning is the face of the Other’ to the extent that ‘to manifest oneself as a face is to impose oneself above and beyond the manifested and purely phenomenal form’.16 Indeed, Hardy’s apparently contrite speaker would seem to endorse Levinas’s argument: The fact that the face maintains a relation with me by discourse does not range him in the same; he remains absolute within the relation. The solipsistic dialectic of consciousness always suspicious of being in captivity in the same breaks off.

In this structure of thought the face ‘resists possession, resists my powers’: The face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment of knowledge.17

Levinas is sensitive to the issue of the gaze of the other as one which ‘supplicates and demands’, and can only supplicate because it demands: ‘The nakedness of the face is its destituteness.’18 The face of the other may thus come to haunt us, and in this case, as Levin suggests, ‘there is response to the suffering of the other’, marked by a sense of his/her ‘alterity’, which may be conceived as a ‘hauntology’.19 Thomas Keenan points out that the window ‘can breach, tear open, the protection that is the human subject, overcome it with a violence that proves remarkably resistant to knowledge’.20 A countervailing ‘moment of vision’, from exterior to interior, marks another poem in Satires of Circumstance, ‘Outside the Window’ (CP, 419). Here the visiting male suitor, having forgotten his walking-stick, turns back to his fiancée’s house to retrieve it, only to see and hear her ‘rating her mother’ with ‘a vixen voice’. Reflecting that at last he has

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witnessed ‘her soul undraped’, he congratulates himself, ‘tis but narrowly I have escaped’, and ‘steals off, leaving his stick unclaimed’. In this version of the window poem, it is telling that the harsh voice of the young woman ‘Comes out with the firelight through the pane’, the image the stunned lover sees being signalled by her ‘eyes aglare/For something said while he was there’. The man’s absent-mindedness over the stick leads, in this drama of sexual selection, to deselection in a text which hints at an antifeminist undertone, the implication being that the young woman deserves to be abandoned by her lover and as it were incarcerated in the familial domestic space whilst her admirer strides off towards unencumbered freedom. Sheila Berger has remarked how the ‘scene of the illuminated figure inside glimpsed by an unobserved watcher outside’ recurs in many of the novels, and she points out how, in this Hardyesque scenario, the window’s ‘limited view provides strangeness, mystery, and emotional intensity’.21 The gender politics of the poem, furthermore, might be read in light of Jane Thomas’s suggestion, in her examination of the contradictory ways in which, in Hardy’s work, ‘female desire is confined’, that such writing often centres upon Hardy’s ‘exploration of how domestic space is shaped by the regulatory practices of patriarchy’.22 It might be argued that the girl’s contentiousness, in this poem, plays to a number of issues in the debate over the New Woman to which Hardy had given careful but ambiguously framed attention, and it could be said that here the visual and auditory evidence is of the type-cast New Woman, controversially characterised by Eliza Lynn Linton as ‘hardened’, ‘unsexed’ and ‘mannish’.23 It is notable in this connection that the phallic stick, which is left ‘unclaimed’, itself paradoxically registers both male domination and a sense of being unmanned, in a staging of contemporary issues which, as Penny Boumelha observed, would lead to a complex of ‘tensions and ambivalences’ in Hardy’s writing project.24 The young woman’s self-revealing outburst here might be contextualised by Toril Moi’s distinction between the cultural construct of the ‘selfless’ and quasi-angelic nineteenth-century woman and what she terms the ‘monster’, ‘the woman who refuses to be selfless, acts on her own initiative’, and thereby ‘rejects the submissive role patriarchy has reserved for her’. The fiancée is thus aptly characterised as ‘duplicitous, precisely because she has something to tell’: The duplicitous woman is the one whose consciousness is opaque to man, whose mind will not let itself be penetrated by the phallic probings of masculine thought.25

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In this context the panicky abandonment of the walking-stick may be construed as sign and referent of the fear of phallic loss or castration which leads to the suitor’s alarmed retreat. In this sense, ‘Outside the Window’ may be read as a text which stages and performs an episode which, in the unconscious of the text, gestures towards a femininity that strives to escape from a phallocentrically controlling specularisation. There are two window poems by Hardy closely associated with the figure of Emma. The first, ‘We Sat at the Window’, has the subtitle ‘Bournemouth, 1875’ (CP, 428–9) and takes the form of a meditation upon a marriage which, after only one year, is already shadowed by failures of communication. The male narrator tells how the pair ‘sat at the window looking out/And the rain came down like silken strings’ on St Swithin’s day. For the two of them there was ‘Nothing to read, nothing to see’, to the extent that they become ‘irked by the scene’, each unable or unwilling to conceive ‘How much there was to read and guess’ in the other, to the extent that Wasted were two souls in their prime, And great was the waste, that July time When the rain came down.

The imperviousness of each marital partner mirrors and parodies the dismal view from the window, with each psychically imprisoned in his/her own consciousness, as they are physically trapped by the inclement weather. The act of looking out of the window may become, in Charles Bernstein’s phrase, ‘a paradigm for both reading a text and reading the world’, and paradoxically reveals what Bernstein terms a ‘sense of sealed-offness from other minds’.26 The blockage of communication in this marital impasse refracts or stages Bernstein’s contention that ‘we all see words, but it is our usual practice to see through them’.27 Hardy’s poem focuses readerly attention not only on the theme of marital disillusionment—in Paul Zietlow’s interpretation, Hardy and Emma ‘fail to envision one another’28—but also on the text’s framing of a complex relation between past and present. The cheerless scene from the window, that is to say, illuminates Merleau-­ Ponty’s somewhat Proustian diagnosis of how, although ‘enclosed in [the] present’, the human subject constantly interacts with ‘imperceptible transitions, from the present to the past, from the recent to the remote’.29 The second window poem linked with Emma, first published in Hardy’s subsequent collection, Moments of Vision (1917), dramatically hints at the

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possibility that freedom from marital confinement is achievable only through death. ‘Something Tapped’ (CP, 464), dating from 1913, is directly related to the death of Emma and mobilises what may be defined as Lacanian concerns centred upon desire and the gaze. The poet, alerted by something which ‘tapped on the pane of my room/When there was never a trace/Of wind or rain’, catches a glimpse of ‘My weary Belovéd’s face’. The woman complains of waiting, ‘So cold it is in my lonely bed,/ And I thought you would join me soon!’ As the poet responds to the deathly invitation, and ‘rose and neared the window-glass’, he realises it was ‘Only a pallid moth, alas,/Tapped at the pane for me’. This is a scenario which offers a variant of the episode in The Return of the Native where Wildeve peers into Eustacia’s window, contemplated her for a minute, and then retreating into the heath beat the ferns lightly, whereupon moths flew out alarmed. Securing one he returned to the window, and holding the moth to the chink opened his hand. The moth made towards the candle upon Eustacia’s table, hovered round it two or three times, and flew into the flame.30

Ellen Lanzano notes that Hardy ‘uses the moth to represent the tragedy of the soul escaping into extasis and incinerated by its own passion’, thus becoming a symbol of ‘the actual soul escaping the body after death’.31 In stressing a putative encounter with the gaze of the (dead) Other, the poem negates the possibility of being seen by that Other. As Annie Ramel has maintained, in a Lacanian critique of Hardy, whilst windows ‘serve as frames enclosing the object of desire, and enhancing the part played by the gaze in the construction of desire’, at the same time ‘access to the Other is always missed, the wall of semblances divides the subject from the object of his desire’, with the result that, in these terms, ‘the Other’s gaze cannot reach me’.32 The Lacanian objet petit a is here definable, like the woman’s image, as ‘an object which is forever missing’, her female identity now unrepresentable. Jane Thomas remarks of the Emma sequence more generally how the pervasively present/absent ‘phantom female figure’ ‘is produced out of the inexpressible space of loss’, the ‘mourning subject’s longing for this spectral female’ symbolising a desire to return to a ‘pre-­ lingual realm, which is the space of dissolution, the realm of death’.33 The window-glass appears to offer access to Emma but resolves itself into the medium for a reversible relationship: Hardy’s predicament here echoes that of Orpheus, who, in Blanchot’s reading of the myth, ‘wants to meet

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[Eurydice] not when she is visible, but when she is invisible’.34 In the contradictory representation of the poet’s relation to Emma, ‘Something Tapped’, like the sequence of 1912–13 poems as a whole, undermines the traditional pattern whereby the elegiac form is deployed in a monumentalising mode, seeking, as Louisa Hall has noted, ‘to create a space (such as a tomb, a room, or a house) in which the spirit of the dead might reside, accessible to the living’.35 Hardy here subconsciously perhaps recalls and rejects his early architectural career, so fatefully undertaken at St Juliot church, insisting instead ‘that the ghost of Emma exist outdoors, under a wider sky’, and thus, as Hall suggests, ‘refusing to capture a phantom in new, obliterating materials’, and sorrowfully refraining from ‘the luxury of consolation by light-vision’.36 The figure of the dead woman, replaced by the moth, is thus, as in other poems of the sequence, ‘left in the wind … inexplicable and unenclosable’.37 The window-frame signals invisibility, an undecipherable ambiguity in the broken relation between husband and wife registered in the disjunction and division between the stanzas, so that the overriding impression is of spatial and temporal distance, a denial of touch and the blank space of irrevocable separation. Georg Simmel suggested that ‘the teleological emotion with respect to the window is directed almost exclusively from inside to outside: it is there for looking out, not for looking in’, creating the connection ‘between the inner and the outer chronically and continually’.38 In Hardy’s text, which refracts this connection, the beloved is now spectral, the self she once was transmuted into a fantasy impossible of materialisation, the stanzaic form itself insisting on this transference of the readable to the invisible, the gap between ‘distance and desire’ in the break between stanzas eliciting what may be termed the vision of a vision, in an endless postponement of desire mirrored and emblematised by the hapless fluttering of the ‘pallid moth’. A poem from Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), ‘Outside the Casement’ (CP, 664–5), sounds a tragically ironic note, depicting a female figure, the cynosure of all eyes, situated alone beyond the window whilst the admiring observers within, having ‘praised her whom/We saw in the portico-­ shade outside’, then respond with grief at the news of her ‘evil fortune’, which they have just received. The poem is subtitled ‘A Reminiscence of the War’, the unstated implication being that the woman isolated from the company has lost her lover on the Western Front—the poem’s original title having been ‘After the Battle’. The sympathetic observers cannot determine on a course of action, debating ‘Should we cloak the tidings, or call her and tell?’, but ‘spirit failed’, compelling them to ‘counterfeit/No

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knowledge of it,/And stay the stroke that would blanch and numb’. As a result the poem concludes with the ‘beguiled’ woman’s innocently unwitting response: ‘She now and again/Looked in, and smiled us another smile.’ Whilst the young woman is the subject of admiring glances, her situation, excluded from the sheltered domestic community, ominously refracts and mirrors that of the troops in the Great War, in ways which were tellingly adumbrated by Walter Benjamin: A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.39

There are unresolved tensions in the poem, centring upon the figure of the young woman who, though ostensibly admired, is the subject and focus of speculation by a group of non-combatants. In this sense the poem is a text which hints at the gender crisis motivated by the experience of mass warfare. The failure to communicate the tragic news by those safely ensconced behind the casement, whilst apparently benevolent, suggests a controlling and possibly misogynistic attitude. Gender was a significant issue during the Great War, and Trudi Tate has noted how ‘anxiety about the war’s violence is displaced on to women, and expressed as fear or hatred of women’s sexuality’, especially by those who linked the feminine ‘with the idea of someone whose body is not under threat’.40 Positioned as she is in ‘the patio-shade outside’, the young woman is mid-way between the comfortable protection afforded by the home front and the blasted, open terrain of the Western Front, the scene of that ‘evil fortune’ which remains undisclosed. The text is characterised by a curious blandness or complacency of tone on the part of the narrator, a speaking voice, as Berger argues in relation to some of Hardy’s poetry, ‘anonymous in its indifference to the reader’s emotional response’.41 This group of window poems offer a textual configuration which moves towards a type of proto-modernist consciousness, as indicated in Hilary Thompson’s Benjaminian reading of Virginia Woolf: In the window you see someone ‘opposite’ seeing you, and these opposite figures, whether they put out the light or witness your fall, conjure up the other side of life for you, so that it sees you. We have the sight of something held within a frame yet impinging from the other side; it remains other but

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affords us a vision of ourselves beheld from beyond. We have the messianic not simply as time but as sight, human sight.42

Hardy’s window poems serve to problematise and orchestrate the relation between perception and reality through the interposition, both emotional and linguistic, of a putative barrier which is erected between the agents and the poet. In this sense Hardy is writing in a proto-modernist style in which words associated with the liminal space of the window gesture towards a movement of desire across the emotional/perceptual barrier, a gesture which all too often ends in lack or incompletion. The window poems register absence or lack which is both internal and external. Hardy seeks to frame reality, but any totalising gesture is undermined by an alterity which is emblematised by the framing of experience which these texts attempt. The space offered by the apparent transparency of the glass works to obstruct stable identity, creating in its stead a zone of partial objectification and only semi-visible presence. In considering the epistemological dilemmas posed by the paradoxical aesthetics of the window, these texts often reverberate with the consciousness of what Derrida terms ‘a past that has never been present’.43 In Fredric Jameson’s version of this scenario, The look is what posits my immediate relationship to other people; but it does so by way of an unexpected reversal in which the experience of being looked at becomes primary and my own look a secondary reaction.

The look is, in this account, at the same time reversible: ‘by returning it, I can attempt to place the Other in a similar position.’44 Hardy’s pervasively contradictory registration of presence and loss in this set of poems creates a proto-modernist model which offers marked parallels with the scenario of a group of Rilke’s French poems entitled Les Fenêtres. Rilke, for instance, notes how a woman observed passing ‘in a window frame’ becomes ‘the one we lose/just by seeing her appear’. As the woman ‘lifts her arms/to tie her hair’, Rilke muses, ‘how much our loss gains/a sudden emphasis’. In the Rilkean (and we may suggest the Hardyesque) imaginary, the question is crucially posed, Aren’t you our geometry, window, very simple shape circumscribing our enormous life painlessly?

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A lover’s never so beautiful as when we see her appear framed by you; because, window, you make her almost immortal.

The two poets may be said to share what Rilke terms ‘a window mood’ in which ‘to live seems just to look’, or to do ‘no more than to stare’,45 in a structure of feeling characteristic of the modernist movement more generally. Hardy’s imagination here is attuned to the crucial imagistic and motivic significance of the window, and it may be suggested, in conclusion, that his window poems offer a poised reflexive balance between solipsism and relationship.

Notes 1. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, tr. E. Haldane and G. Ross (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 155. 2. Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence, tr. L.  Davis (New York: Station Hill Press, 1978), 43. 3. Elaine Scarry, Resisting Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 49. 4. Jane Rendell, ‘Thresholds, Passages and Surfaces’, in The Optic of Walter Benjamin, ed. A. Coles (London: Black Dog, 1999), 182. 5. Sheila Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 72. 6. David Michael Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1999), 43, 51. 7. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 151. 8. Otto Bollnow, Human Space, tr. C. Shuttleworth (London: Hyphen Press, 2011), 151, 152, 154. 9. Ranciere, ‘The Truth’, 151. 10. Ibid., 151. 11. Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, ed. J. Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 315–17. Subsequently cited as CP. 12. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, tr. B.  Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 172. 13. The poem appears to refer to an incident in Cornwall when during their courtship Hardy and Emma Gifford passed the home of her former suitor, William Sergeant, who was dying of TB.

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14. John Hughes, The Expression of Things (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2018), 101. 15. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, tr. A.  Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 156. 16. Ibid., 206, 200. 17. Ibid., 195, 198. 18. Ibid., 75. 19. The Philosopher’s Gaze, 280. 20. Thomas Keegan, ‘Windows: Of Vulnerability’, in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. B.  Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 127. 21. Sheila Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 66. 22. Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Desire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 41. 23. Cited in Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 76. 24. Ibid., 94. See also Carolyn Burdett, ‘The New Woman’, in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. P.  Mallett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 363–73. 25. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, 1985), 58. 26. Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 231. 27. Ibid., 270. 28. Paul Zietlow, Moments of Vision (Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 211. 29. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. C.  Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 386. 30. The Return of the Native, ed. S. Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 271. 31. Ellen Anne Lanzano, Hardy: The Temporal Poetics (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 113, 114. 32. Annie Ramel, ‘The Medusean Eye in Thomas Hardy’, The Thomas Hardy Review XIX, ii (2017), 79, 84. 33. Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Desire, 171, 172. 34. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, tr. A.  Smock (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 172. 35. Louisa Hall, ‘An Alternative to the Architectural Elegy’, Victorian Poetry 50(2), (2012), 208. 36. Ibid., 210, 213. 37. Ibid., 224. 38. Georg Simmel, ‘Bridge and Door’, in Simmel on Culture, ed. D.  Frisby and M. Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 173.

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39. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, tr. H. Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 84. 40. Trudi Tate, ed., Women, Men and the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 4,6. 41. Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures, 139. 42. Hilary Thompson, ‘Time and its Countermeasures’, in Modernism and Theory, ed. S. Ross (London: Routledge, 2009), 96. 43. Jacques Derrrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, tr. C.  Lindsay (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 58. 44. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (London: Verso, 1998), 104. 45. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Complete French Poems, tr. A.  Poulin (St Paul: Graywolf Press, 2002), 25, 35.

CHAPTER 12

Conclusion

The aims of this study have been to examine and attempt to illuminate Hardy’s representation of being in the world and his handling of issues pertaining to class and selfhood. Hardy modifies and dramatises the ways in which men and women mobilise or identify their experience of life. His fictional characters, and the subjects of his poetry, are to be seen as building meaning in a fluid and changing environment, both physical and mental. There is here a tension between the power of society and its individual members, which generates both the fiction and the poetry. From a Husserlian perspective we may see Hardy as being preoccupied by the dialectic between the perceptible world and the operation of human consciousness. Thus, this study seeks to illustrate ways in which Hardy’s writing orchestrates or expresses a social world which serves as a ‘horizon’ for the individual—Cytherea, Diggory Venn, Tess, Jude et  al.—which they are then called upon to (mis) interpret. In this body of work, it is suggested, we may discern not only reflexive individual behaviour but also the complexities of class consciousness in the changing rural society of late-­ nineteenth-­century England. In both fiction and poetry Hardy shows how humans in some sense create their own worlds. Alexander Düttmann argues that ‘modern life, dominated by the concept of “subjectivity”, is alienated from its historical origins in forms of rural life’.1 In philosophical terms Hardy’s characters in prose and poetry inhabit a ‘life-world’, but

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Ebbatson, Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_12

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one which is now impacted upon by Victorian proliferation or confusion of private and public spheres, as is somewhat comedically in the representation of Hocbridge in Desperate Remedies: The weather was sunny and dry, but the ancient borough was to be seen wearing one of its least attractive aspects. First on account of the time. It was that stagnant hour of the twenty-four when the practical garishness of Day, having escaped from the fresh long shadows and enlivening newness of the morning, has not yet made any perceptible advance towards acquiring those mellow and soothing tones which grace its decline … the town was intentionally bent upon being attractive by exhibiting to an influx of visitors the local talent for dramatic recitation, and provincial towns trying to be lively are the dullest of dull things.2

A little later, the narrator remarks, ‘It is the exchange of ideas about us that we dread most’ (DR, 19). It is here, as elsewhere in Hardy, that economic or technical organisation begin to invade individual structures of consciousness. That is to say, for example, that the individual projects of Owen or Cytherea Graye are bound to their social environment. But Hardy also shows the reader, in a phenomenological manner, how the individual’s relation to the body affects both the self and its others. Thus, Cytherea’s consciousness of her appearance and figure suddenly changes in the dramatic scene of her father’s fall to his death, when in the moments before ‘she unknowingly stood, as it were, upon the extreme posterior edge of a tract in her life, in which the real meaning of Taking Thought had never been known’ (DR, 13). What Hardy’s texts expose, even in an early text like Desperate Remedies, is a process of modernity as one of expanding homelessness in an exploration which will culminate in the wanderings of Tess or Jude. Hardy does not necessarily seek a return to roots or exhibit a nostalgic longing for earlier forms of life but works to create meaning out of an increasingly fragmented social existence. He also, in his memoried reconstructions of rural life, endeavours to counterbalance this sense of anomie with a close attention to country practices. His oeuvre demonstrates the tensions between the traditional, seemingly stable social structure of pastoral Wessex and a modernised social order in which the individual is compelled to play a number of different roles as exemplified, for instance by Diggory Venn or Sergeant Troy. Collective patterns of thinking which characterise Under the Greenwood Tree or Far From the Madding Crowd begin, in the course of his novel-writing career,

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to lose their hold on the individual, as, for example, with Angel Clare. The emergence from the ‘confines’ of tradition, Hardy shows, is ambiguous in its effects, offering individual freedom at the cost of mental confusion, personal insecurity and a deepening sense of homelessness which becomes the hallmark of the actions of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Woodlanders or Jude the Obscure. This is ambiguously explored, for instance, in a poem entitled ‘In the Small Hours’, in which the speaker lies in bed dreaming of how he ‘fiddled/With a dreamland viol and bow’ which he ‘had melodied years ago’: There danced the bride and bridegroom,    And couples in a train, Gay partners time and travail    Had longwhiles stilled amain! … It seemed a thing for weeping    To find at slumber’s wane And morning’s sly increeping,    That Now, not Then, held reign.3

This study seeks to explore also the idea of ‘the path’ in Hardy’s work, as a figure which leads towards an unknown future. The Heideggerian vision of Düttmann is of relevance here: The path doubles up, but there is no other path to follow, there is no path of the path, … no representation of the path … It is only a path if it strays from itself.4

The path followed by Diggory Venn, Tess or Jude, it may be argued, leads towards a new border of subjectivity, in a mode refracted by Düttmann’s argument: One does not follow a path, one finds oneself on it without knowing where one is going: the path is going, it has already left.5

The poetry composed later in Hardy’s career may thus be construed as forming a path which leads towards the Heideggerian ‘Open’: A vacant sameness grays the sky, A moisture gathers on each knop Of the bramble, rounding to a drop,

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That greets the goer-by    With the cold listless lustre of a dad man’s eye.    But to her sight    Drawing nigher and nigher Its deep delight, The fog is bright And the wind a lyre.          (‘On the Way’, CP 625)

In thinking of the related theme of ‘the folk’ and their language, the Dorset dialect, we need to comprehend the ways in which mankind gives names to things, and the manner of the changes registered in language in the later nineteenth century. Human language, as Hardy perceived, is always a kind of translation, a Benjaminian translation of ‘the other’, but that translation undergoes radical change in late-Victorian Wessex, ultimately obliterating the language of the folk in a process which also ‘steals’ their identity. Benjamin speaks of the ‘magical community’, but it is this which is steadily submerged under a newly formed network of uniform linguistic usage. The language of the folk becomes steadily more incommunicable in a world insistent upon universal communicability—hence the marginalisation of dialect between an early piece such as ‘The BrideNight Fire’ and Tess’s ambivalent ability to switch between her mother’s dialect and the new national language. Another strand of this study deals with the ways in which Hardy’s work is open to a type of impressionist vision which serves to undermine conventional Victorian plot structure, as in this moment from The Trumpet-Major: She passed along by the houses facing the sea, and scanned the shore, the footway, and the open road close to her, which, illuminated by the slanting moon to a great brightness, sparkled with minute facets of crystallised salts from the water sprinkled there during the day. The promenaders at the further edge appeared in dark profiles; and beyond them was the grey sea, parted into two masses by the tapering braid of moonlight across the waves.6

Matilda’s vision is crucially marked by the absence of the beloved in a mode which shares with modernist art a deliberate refusal to impose unity on what is perceived. The oceanic imagery acts to dissolve the rigidity or

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stability of selfhood crucially established by the Victorian novel. Hardy’s characters are exposed and vulnerable in what amounts to an art of dissonance or transgression. He is an author who, it may be said, dissolves the boundaries between art and life: The moving sun-shapes on the spray, The sparkles where the brook was flowing, Pink faces, plightings, moonlit May, These were the things we wished would stay;    But they were going. Seasons of blankness as of snow, The silent bleed of the world decaying, The moan of multitudes in woe, These were the things we wished would go;    But they were staying Then we looked closelier at Time, And saw his ghostly arms revolving To sweep off woeful things with prime, Things sinister with things sublime   Alike dissolving.          (‘Going and Staying’, CP 573–4)

It is clear throughout Hardy’s work that the question of perception is crucial to a reading of both fiction and poetry, and that the issues of sight, sound and language are at the heart of his work. Interpretations of Hardy may be valuably illuminated by reference to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Perception, in his account, possesses a language of its own and is a creative rather than a reactive process. In this structure of ideas embodiment takes the form of a series of syntheses, or indeed ‘entwinings’, and is seen here as illuminating for the reading of a range of Hardy texts. The body, as flesh, is not able to be reduced to a thought, but is rather both subject and object of perception, as at the opening of Tess of the d’Urbervilles: He could see the white figures of the girls in the green enclosure, whirling about as they had whirled when he was among them. They seemed to have quite forgotten him already. All of them, except, perhaps, one. This white shape stood apart by the hedge alone. From her position he knew it to be the pretty maiden with whom he had not danced … She was so modest, so

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expressive, she had looked so soft in her thin white gown that he felt he had acted stupidly.7

For Merleau-Ponty, as for Hardy, ‘The natural world is the horizon of all horizons’, a figure which embodies a ‘unity underlying all the disruptions of my personal and historical life’. The natural world resists a complete knowing synthesis because of its multiple perspectives ‘which have to be inter-related, since each one of them, by virtue of its horizons, refers to other perspectives, and so on indefinitely’: When I see the horizon, it does not make me think of that other landscape which I should see if I were standing on it, nor does that other landscape make me think of a third one and so on; I do not visualise anything; all these landscapes are already there in the harmonious sequence and infinite unfolding of their perspectives.8 (P&P, 385, 384)

Many of the characteristic Hardy ‘moments of vision’ might be interrogated through this framework, as in this passage from The Hand of Ethelberta: Christopher, about eight o’clock, was standing at the end of the pier with his back towards the open sea, from whence the waves were pushing to the shore in frills and coils that were just rendered visible in all their bleak instability by the row of lights along the sides of the jetty, the rapid motion landward of of the wave-tips producing upon his eye an apparent progress of the pier out to sea. Before him extended the lamplit watering- place itself, the specks of flame with which it was tricked out enlarging in long perspective from points far right and left to a throng in the centre of the picture, like two opposing rockets with their sparks transfixed.9 (HE, 39)

And in The Well-Beloved, Hardy’s conception of the darkening scene illustrates the way in which, in phenomenological thought, the sense of a self is dissipated and becomes somewhat amorphous. Whilst light serves to reveal a focusing of the self, night leads towards anonymity or dispossession, a supplanting of vision by the other senses. It is significant that it is at this juncture in the plot that Jocelyn first encounters a young woman of whom he could only ‘get glimpses of her profile against the roadstead lights’ and ‘could just discern’ her ‘commanding imperious face’.10 Levinas has proposed that the face is in fact ‘the way in which the other presents itself, exceeding the idea of the other in me’.11 This Hardyesque insight is

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echoed in Bataille’s suggestion that ‘in the “impression” bringing it back to memory, as in the poetic image, there remains an ambiguity arising from the possibility of grasping what, in essence, is elusive’.12,13

Notes 1. Alexander Garcia Düttmann, The Gift of Language, tr. A. Lyons (London: Athlone Press), 31. 2. Desperate Remedies, ed. M.  Rimmer (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1998), 11. Subsequently cited as DR. 3. ‘In the Small Hours’, The Complete Poems, ed. J.  Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), Subsequently cited as CP. 4. Düttmann, The Gift, 31. 5. Ibid. 6. The Trumpet-Major, ed. R. Nemesvari (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 256. 7. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ed. J.  Grindle and S.  Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 23. 8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. C.  Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 385, 384. 9. The Hand of Ethelberta, ed. T. Dolin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997), 39. 10. The Well-Beloved, ed. P.  Ingham (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1997), 22. 11. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, tr. A.  Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979), 50. 12. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, tr. A. Bolt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 142. 13. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, tr. S. Heath (London: Fontana, 1984), 157, 159.

Index1

A Administered society, 60, 66 Adorno, Theodor, vii, 20, 36–37, 40, 57–59, 68, 73 enigmaticalness, vii lyric, 118, 123 ugliness in art, 86 Agricultural society, 2 Allegory, 60, 73, 85 Alterity, 127, 130, 136 Ambiguity, vii, 6, 8–9, 34, 48, 93, 109, 113, 130, 134 Ancestry, 1, 53, 57, 80, 82–87, 93 See also Genealogy; Heredity Angels, 95, 98–101, 129 Anti-Semitism, 93 Arkans, Norman, 1, 4 Arnold, Matthew, 107 Arson, 5, 48–50 At the Royal Academy, 34 Autobiography, 63

B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 8–9 double-voicedness, 8 Ballad, 1, 2, 4–5, 10, 50, 108 Barnes, William, 2, 4, 9 Barthes, Roland, 32 Beeny Cliff, 117–123 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 29, 73, 99, 123, 135 arcades project, 19, 20 aura, viii, 31, 36–38 profane illumination, 73 storytelling, viii Berger, Sheila, 128, 131, 135 Bergsonian theory, 64, 120, 121 ‘Beyond’, the, 64, 65, 67, 70, 72–74 Binding, 53–60 Blanchot, Maurice, 9, 56, 59, 60, 72, 127, 133 Blindness, 29, 38, 113 Blood, 57, 79, 92, 100

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 R. Ebbatson, Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7

149

150 

INDEX

Bollnow, Otto, 20, 109 human space, 68, 128–129 Borrow, George, 107 Bride-Night Fire, The, 1–10, 108 structure, 4–5 C Caesura, the, 7 Capitalism, 19–20, 45, 54, 66, 70, 99 Cézanne, Paul, 26, 40 Chance, 56, 57 See also Destiny Christmastide, 113–114 Clare, Angel, 55–56, 79, 81, 85, 92–101, 110, 111 garden scene, 59–60, 65, 92 portrait scene, 80, 86, 98 Stonehenge, 60, 66–67, 97 wedding night, 66, 98–100 Clare, John, 9, 71 Class, 20, 48, 50, 78, 99, 110, 114, 127 Clock of years, the, 122 Collector Cleans his Picture, The, 81 Communication (technological), 30, 33 Community, 9, 53, 54, 60, 66 See also Gesellschaft Cornwall, 18, 93, 120–123 Critique of Judgement (Kant), 17–18 D Darwin, Charles, 16 Davie, Donald, 123 Davies, W.H., 107 Dead Man Walking, The, 112–113 Decadent movement, 82, 91–97, 99, 100 Degeneration, 38, 83, 98

Degeneration (Nordau), 91 Deleuze, Gilles, 29, 83–87, 114, 129 Demons, 92–101 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 19, 136 Descartes, René, 137n1 Desire (sexual), 70, 121, 130–133 Desperate Remedies, 5, 39 Destiny, 21, 84 See also Chance Detective fiction, techniques of, 49 Devil, the, 46, 92–97, 100 Dewy Morn, The (Jefferies), 68–73 Dialect, 1–4, 8–10, 85–86 See also Dorset dialect Dillion, Jacqueline, 6 Domination, 20, 131 Dorset dialect, 1–3, 8–10 Doubling, 26, 95, 101 Dracula (Stoker), 92, 94, 98, 100 Dreams, 18, 46, 57, 58, 65 d’Urberville, Alec, 54–57, 64–66, 78, 79, 82, 91–101 Durbeyfield, Tess bilinguality, 3, 47 nomadism, 85–86, 105–107, 114 seduction/rape, 57, 64, 83, 94–95 sense of ‘The Beyond,’ 64, 67, 70, 71, 73 sun worship, 64–67 Durden, Mark, 31–33 E Egdon Heath, ix, 28, 29, 35, 46, 107–108 Elliott, Kamilla, 78, 81, 84 En Rade (Huysmans), 93 Epstein, Hugh, 27, 36, 40 Erfahrung, 73 Erlebnis, 73 Eternity, 64, 74, 122

 INDEX 

Evolution, 121–122 Eye contact, 28, 129 See also Looking F Face, the, 83–88, 128–130 Face at the Casement, The, 127–129 Fairy-tales, 6, 45 Family Portraits, 82, 87 Far from the Madding Crowd, 26, 40, 49 Faute de l’Abbé Mouret, La (Zola), 93 Femininity, 85, 97, 132 Fin de siècle, 91, 92, 97, 100 Fire, 1–8, 47–50 fire-festivals, 6 See also Arson Flintcomb-Ash, 87 Folklorism, 46 Folk poetry/tales, vii, 1–10, 46 Frankfurt School, 37 Frazer, James, 5–7 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 32, 55–57, 100, 128 G Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 122 Gaze, the, 33, 34, 38–39, 83, 84, 130, 133 See also Looking Gender, 20, 100, 111, 114, 121, 127, 131, 135 Genealogy, 77–80 Geology, 15–17, 19–21, 120–121 Gesellschaft, 54–56 See also Community Godard, Jean-Luc, 58, 65 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 5 Guattari, Felix, 29, 83, 84, 114, 129

151

H Hand of Ethelberta, The, 25–29 Hanging, 45–49, 111 Hardy, Emma (née Gifford), 21, 114, 121–123, 131–134 Hardy, Thomas and the abyss, 18–21 ancestry, 78–80 authorial temperament, viii, 5, 6, 8, 26, 29, 69–70 Hebel, Johann Peter, 9 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 21, 101 Open, the, 33, 67 technology, 35–36 Heredity, 78, 81–82 Hill of Dreams, The (Machen), 93 History, viii, 40, 53–54, 68, 73, 80, 118 History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset (Hutchins), 5, 77 Hobsbawm, E.J., 48–50, 106 Horizon(s), viii, ix, 26, 29, 33, 37, 38 Hughes, John, 86, 129 Hutchins, John, 5, 77 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 83, 92–93 I Identity, 32, 77–88, 109, 110, 114, 118, 127, 136 Imaginative Woman, An, 31 Impressionism, vii, 27, 30, 59, 120 Indeterminacy, vii–ix Individualism, 16, 118 Inequality (social), 69 J Jefferies, Richard, 63–74 Jude the Obscure, 21, 32–34, 47, 114

152 

INDEX

K Kant, Immanuel, 17–20 Kierkegaard, Søren, 20, 95 Kristeva, Julia, 58 L Labourers, 48–50, 53–56, 70–72 Lacanian theory, 39, 133 Landowners, 70, 77, 99 Landscape, viii, ix, 25–27, 29, 33, 34, 38–39, 66, 87, 111 Laodicean, A, 5, 31–33, 79–80 Levin, D.M., 26, 33–35, 128, 130 Levinas, Emmanuel, 84, 130 Literacy, 46, 47 Looking, 27, 28, 39, 129, 132, 134 See also Eye contact; Gaze, the Lord, Albert, 2, 7–10 Lucas, E.V., 107 Lyell, Charles, 16, 17 Lyotard, Jean-François, 18, 20–21, 25, 38–39 Lyric, 117–123 M Machen, Arthur, 93 Mantell, Gideon, 15–17 Marx, Karl, 19, 56, 68, 99 Materialism, 45 Mayor of Casterbridge, The, 8, 19, 108 McPhee, Graham, 30–32 Mechanisation, 30, 54, 66 Memory, 63, 84, 118, 120 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, viii, ix, 26, 30, 39, 132 halo of signification, 26 Mill, J.S., 117 Modernism, 26, 28, 135–137 Modernity, 10, 29, 33, 34, 54, 56, 66–67, 73, 99, 110, 114 Myth, 6, 133

N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 26–28, 31–34 politics of knots, 55 The “Sense” of the “World,” 112 Napoleonic Wars, 48 Narcissism, 95 Naturalism, 72, 93 Nature, 17–20, 33–36, 40, 65, 68, 69, 73 New Boots, The, 113 New Woman debate, 131 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 57, 64, 122 Nobility, the, 77, 79 Nomadism, 54, 101, 105, 114, 115 See also Wandering; Wayfaring Nordau, Max, 91 O On the Downs (Jefferies), 67 On the Esplanade, 37–38 On the Palatine, 122 Open Road, The (Lucas), 107 Open, the, 33, 67–74 Oral tradition, viii, 1–5, 7–10, 45–47 Other, the, 39, 83–84, 122, 130–133, 136 Outside the Casement, 134 Outside the Window, 130–132 P Painting(s), 26, 79–81, 86 See also Portraits Pair of Blue Eyes, A, 15–21, 79, 123 cliff scene, 15–18, 20, 21 Paradoxicality, vii, 3, 18, 31, 57, 66, 107, 113, 122, 136 Past, the, vii, viii, 10, 17, 63, 64, 120–122 Pedigree, The, 81 Percept, the, 29

 INDEX 

Perception, viii, 19–20, 26, 29, 33, 68, 71, 123, 136 Pfau, Thomas, 10 Phantom Horsewoman, The, 121 Phenomenology, ix, 39, 128 Photograph, The, 31 Photography, 30–33, 45, 46 Phrenology, 83 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 82–83, 96 Pleasure principle, 55–57, 65 Portraits, 31–33, 57, 77–88, 98 Prehistory, 64, 66 Primitive Culture (Tylor), 5 Propp, Vladimir, 1, 6 Prosopopeia, 84 Protest, 48–50, 118 Proust, Marcel, 120–121, 132 R Rainbows, 123 Rambler, The, 113 Rancière, Jacques, 16, 38, 59 ‘The Truth through the Window,’ 128–129 Reader, the, 3, 9–10, 59, 73 consciousness of, 58, 66 Realism, 29, 33, 38, 45, 73, 78, 128 Representation, vii, viii, 3, 30–35, 38, 59, 68, 72, 73, 128 Rescue songs, 7 Return of the Native, The, 5, 107–108, 133 Clym Yeobright, ix, 21, 29, 33–35 Rhyme, 4, 119 Rhythm, 4, 6, 109, 119 Riddle, The, 38–39 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 137 Duino Elegies, 67, 101 Les Fenêtres, 136 Ritual, 5, 8

153

Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid, The, 109 Rootedness, 54, 70, 86 See also Community Rudé, George, 48–50 S Sacrifice (human), 6 Satan, see Devil, the Scarry, Elaine, 98, 110, 127 Scholar Gypsy, The (Arnold), 107 Scott, Walter, 77 Seascape, 18–19, 25–27, 37, 64, 117–120, 122, 123 See also Landscape Self, the, viii, 36, 53–60, 118–119 in time, 63 Sexuality, 99–100, 110, 135 She, I, and They, 82 Simmel, Georg, 99, 107, 134 ‘The Stranger,’ 107 Sine Prole, 82 Skimmity-rides, 1, 7, 8, 108 Something Tapped, 133–134 Son’s Portrait, The, 31 Sontag, Susan, 30–31 Space, 58–60, 65–68, 71–73, 127–128 Speech-patterns, 2, 10 Stephen, Leslie, 45 Story of My Heart, The (Jefferies), 63, 67, 71–73 Storytelling, viii, 1–3 Sublime, the, 17–21, 59, 60, 71 Superstition, 45–47 Swing Riots, 48–50 Symbolism, 72, 73, 93 T Technologies, 29–40 ocular/specular, 29, 33–35

154 

INDEX

Telescope, the, 19, 29–30, 35 Tess of the d’Urbervilles Alec d’Urberville, 57–58, 64–66, 78, 82, 91–101 ancestry, 78–81 Angel Clare, 55–56, 79, 80, 85, 96–101, 111; garden scene, 59–60, 65, 92; portrait scene, 80–81, 85, 98; Stonehenge, 60, 66, 97; wedding night, 66, 98–100 binding, 54–57, 60 and fin de siècle, 91, 97, 100 Flintcomb-Ash, 54–56, 66, 68, 97, 110 garden scene, 58–60, 65, 72, 92 May-Day dance, 53, 56 moments of vision, 64 portrait scene (Wellbridge Manor), 57, 79–82 rape scene (Chaseborough), 57, 64, 83, 95–96 sign-painter, 55–56, 83, 92 Sorrow, infant, 85, 96 Stonehenge scene, 57, 60, 66, 72, 88, 97 structure, 57 Talbothays, ix, 55–56, 60, 64, 65, 110 Vale of Blackmore, 53, 97 Vale of the Great Dairies, 28, 55 Thomas, Jane, 131, 133 Thompson, Francis, 107 Thresholds, 127 Time, 15, 16, 63, 109, 110, 119–122 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 53, 54, 56 Tramping, see Vagabondage Trampwoman’s Tragedy, The, 107 Tree-cults, 7 Trumpet-Major, The, 111 Two on a Tower, 42n24, 42n27 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 5

U Under the Greenwood Tree, 108–109 Unrest, social, 49 V Vagabondage, 105–106 Vagrant’s Song, 106 Vampirism, 95–96, 100 Veiling, vii, viii, 87 Vincent, David, 45–47 Vision, 26–30, 37, 39–41, 59 moments of, viii, 25–29, 39, 40, 64–66, 73, 120, 130 Visualisation, vii–ix, 26, 28, 79 W Walking, ix, 105, 107–112 Wandering, 55, 101, 107–108, 110–112 See also Nomadism; Wayfaring Wasted Illness, A, 112 Wayfarers, 106–107, 114 Wayfaring, 105–114 See also Nomadism; Wandering We Sat at the Window, 132 Weary Walker, The, 107–110 Wedding songs, 7–8 Wessex, 2, 3, 33, 47–49, 56, 93, 94, 100, 101 Wet Night, A, 115n2 Windows, 127–137 Winters and the Palmleys, The, 49 Witchcraft, 93–94, 97 Withered Arm, The, 45–50 dating of action in, 47–49 Wonders of Geology, The (Mantell), 15 Woolf, Virginia, 29, 123, 135 Z Zola, Émile, 83, 93