Thomas Hardy and Animals 9781107179172, 9781316831861

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THOMAS HARDY AND ANIMALS

Thomas Hardy and Animals examines the human and nonhuman animals who walk and crawl and fly across and around the pages of Hardy’s novels. Animals abound in his writings, yet little scholarly attention has been paid to them so far. This book fills this gap in Hardy studies, bringing an important author within range of a new and developing area of critical inquiry. It considers the way Hardy’s representations of animals challenged ideas of human–​ animal boundaries debated by the Victorian scientific and philosophical communities. In moments of encounter between humans and animals, Hardy questions boundaries based on ideas of moral sense or moral agency, language and reason, the possession of a face, and the capacity to suffer and perceive pain. Through an emphasis on embodied encounters, his writings call for an extension of empathy to others, human or nonhuman. In this accessible book, Anna West offers a new approach to Hardy criticism. ANNA WEST is an early career researcher specializing in Victorian literature and animal studies. Since receiving her PhD from the University of St Andrews, where her research was funded by a Macpherson scholarship, she has published articles on Thomas Hardy, Victorian science and literature, and ecocriticism. She currently lives and teaches in Detroit, Michigan.

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THOMAS HARDY AND ANIMALS ANNA WEST University of St Andrews

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University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 4843/​24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi –​110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06-​04/​06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/​9781107179172 DOI: 10.1017/​9781316831861 © Anna West 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-​1-​107-​17917-​2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-​party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

Acknowledgments page vii List of Abbreviations ix Introduction: Hardy’s “Shifted . . . Centre of Altruism”: An Ethics of Encounter and Empathy

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What Does It Mean to Be a Creature?

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“The Only Things We Believe in Are the Sheep and the Dogs”

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“Artful” Creatures, Part I: Animal Language

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“Artful” Creatures, Part II: Can a Snake Have a Face?

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“Artful” Creatures, Part III: “Can They Suffer?”

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Useful Creatures: Rethinking Hardy’s Humanitarianism

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Appendix Bibliography Index

191 193 207

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Acknowledgments

Material from the second chapter of this book first appeared in article form: the first section was published as “The Woman and the Dog: Moral Sense and Moral Agency in Far from the Madding Crowd” in the Thomas Hardy Journal, and part of the second section originally appeared as “ ‘Rot the Genuine’:  Moral Responsibility and Far from the Madding Crowd’s Cancelled Fragment” in the Journal of Victorian Culture. I  am grateful to both journals for permission to include this work here (and to Phillip Mallett and Trev Broughton, respectively, for their attentive editorial guidance). Other ideas included in this book received first airing at a range of academic conferences; I am grateful to the Thomas Hardy Society, the French Association of Thomas Hardy Studies, the British Association of Victorian Studies, and the North American Victorian Studies Association for support to present at their respective conferences in the past few years, and to the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment for their sponsorship to present at the Reading Animals conference held at Sheffield University in 2014. For his generous support of the research that forms the backbone of this book, I thank James Macpherson. There are perhaps few academic communities as welcoming and congenial as the group of Hardy scholars, who welcomed me from my first attendance at the Hardy at Yale conference in 2011. I am grateful to this community and to the community at St Andrews for the lively conversations and thoughtful debates on Hardy’s work and for the support and encouragement provided by mentors, colleagues, and friends (especially Jane Thomas, Mary Rimmer, Jacqueline Dillion, Karin Koehler, Tsung-​ Han Tsai, and Lisa Griffin). Thank you, too, to Helen Gibson, the curator of the Hardy Collection at the Dorset County Museum, for allowing me to examine archival material (and for even dismantling a display case to let me look at the cancelled sheep-​rot chapter!). I am grateful to Ray Ryan for taking on this project, and to the team at Cambridge University Press for their work in seeing it through production. Thanks especially to Roger vii

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Acknowledgments

Ebbatson and Keith Wilson for their careful attention to and valuable feedback on the manuscript, and to Phillip Mallett, whose generous and gracious engagement with these pages helped me cultivate an idea into a book. Finally, my deepest thanks go to my parents and to Dan, Ben, and Ruth for their love and support, and for teaching me by example to value compassion and empathy.

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Abbreviations

AL A Laodicean BL The British Library BR Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited CD Charles Darwin CH Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage CL The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy CP The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy CSS Collected Short Stories D The Dynasts DCM The Hardy Collection, Dorset County Museum DR Desperate Remedies FEH Florence Emily Hardy FFMC Far from the Madding Crowd HE The Hand of Ethelberta Jude Jude the Obscure LEFH Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy LN The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy LW The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy MC The Mayor of Casterbridge OED Oxford English Dictionary PBE A Pair of Blue Eyes PN The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy RN The Return of the Native Tess Tess of the d’Urbervilles TH Thomas Hardy THPV Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice THR Thomas Hardy Remembered TT Two on a Tower UGT Under the Greenwood Tree W The Woodlanders References to Hardy’s novels are to the Oxford World’s Classics editions (when such an edition is available), except where otherwise indicated. ix

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Introduction

Hardy’s “Shifted . . . Centre of Altruism”: An Ethics of Encounter and Empathy

In April 1910, Thomas Hardy composed a letter to the Humanitarian League congratulating them on their twentieth anniversary  –​especially for their work in the defense of animals.1 In it he expanded upon an idea mentioned in a previous letter: the sense that “[t]‌he discovery of the law of evolution, which revealed that all organic creatures are of one family, shifted the centre of altruism from humanity to the whole conscious world collectively” (LW 373). He wrote: Few people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far-​reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical; that it logically involved a readjustment of altruistic morals, by enlarging, as a necessity of rightness, the application of what has been called “The Golden Rule” from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom. Possibly Darwin himself did not quite perceive it. While man was deemed to be a creation apart from all other creations, a secondary or tertiary morality was considered good enough to practise towards the “inferior” races; but no person who reasons nowadays can escape the trying conclusion that this is not maintainable. And though we may not at present see how the principle of equal justice all round is to be carried out in its entirety, I recognise that the League is grappling with the question. (THPV 311)

Hardy, too, had been wrestling with this question: what did it mean for “all organic creatures” to be “of one family”? What were the implied responsibilities of humans to these family members, to the “kindred ­animal” species (CP 557), as Hardy phrased it in his “Apology” to Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)? The draft composition of this letter shows Hardy’s efforts to grasp and articulate the subject:  the paper is worked with lines and arrows, 1 The Humanitarian League, founded by Henry Salt, focused much of their attention on animal welfare. Hardy supported their work to abolish the Royal Buckhounds in 1901.

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cancellations, word changes, and insertions.2 In place of “a necessity of rightness,” he writes “a matter of clear right,” and the sentence ending with “kingdom” moves directly to “No person who reasons can escape this trying conclusion.” This phrase  –​in the middle of the statement about extending moral consideration –​points toward a boundary, one between those who can and cannot reason, and who therefore can or cannot apply this widened sense of morality to “all organic creatures.” Hardy’s insertions to the letter –​pointing out Darwin’s possible failure to perceive this implication and explaining how the previous rationale of man as “a creation apart,” which justified “a secondary or tertiary morality,” was lost with the acceptance of evolutionary theory  –​indicate his scientific and philosophical involvement with the question. Hardy included the letter in his ghosted autobiography (published now as The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy), following it with a note that “no doubt the subject was much in his mind just now” (LW 377).3 Yet it is evident in his earlier writings that the subject had been on his mind for quite some time, although perhaps the force with which he felt it was only just coming to consciousness. For Hardy, even snakes were “blood-​brethren,” brothers and sisters in being.4 In Hardy’s writings –​especially his novels –​moments of encounter between human and nonhuman animals often are highlighted by the word “creature”: a term that can mean a “created thing,” “a human being,” or “an animal, often as distinct from a person.” In one sense, the word “creature” gestures toward likeness, similarity, and kinship; in another, it draws lines of distinction and alterity. Modifiers and context can change the connotation at times in an antonymic manner. Its application may express admiration or contempt, or it may operate paradoxically by drawing upon multiple implications at once. For Hardy, the word frequently serves as a species-​neutral appellation, raising and destabilizing boundaries traditionally asserted between humans and animals: boundaries based on moral sense and moral agency, language and reason, capacity to have a “face” in both a scientific and philosophical sense, and ability to suffer. Its appearance during encounters between human and nonhuman characters –​ between, for example, Fanny Robin and the dog on the Casterbridge 2 Draft to H. Salt, April 10, 1910 (DCM). The draft was composed on a single folded sheet of stationery from Hardy’s favored London club, The Athenæum. 3 The draft and LW version of the letter (which Hardy composed from his draft) have a few further variants from the published letter: “necessity of rightness” is italicized in LW; “from the area of mere mankind” reads “beyond the area of mere mankind”; “not quite perceive it” reads “not wholly perceive it, although he alluded to it”; and “though we may not at present” reads “though I myself do not at present” (LW 376–​377). 4 See “Drinking Song” (CP 905–​908).

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highway, or the adder and Mrs. Yeobright on Egdon Heath –​levels the ground between the two, gesturing toward an extension of empathy to both in moments of close physical proximity. Hardy strongly believed in the power of empathy –​or loving-​kindness, as he often called it –​to create a physical reaction in the reader that would give birth to a sense of moral consideration of (and obligation to) others: including, as can be seen in his letter to the Humanitarian League, nonhuman animals. Hardy’s use of “creature” to reconfigure the notion of a human–​animal boundary is illustrated perhaps most clearly by the concept of the Möbius strip. In What It Means to Be Human (2011), Joanna Bourke proposes the Möbius strip as a way to reimagine a boundary: a fluid, flexuous strip of paper twisted 180 degrees and taped into a figure-​eight, creating “a one-​ sided surface, with no inside or outside; no beginning or end; no single point of entry or exit; no hierarchical ladder to clamber up or slide down.”5 While the Möbius strip appears to have two sides, the nature of the figure makes it impossible to locate a single point at which one might distinguish one side from another. This method of modeling human–​ animal boundaries  –​which Bourke notes draws upon Jacques Derrida’s discussion of “how supposed dichotomies are actually dependent upon each other”  –​bids the reader to “move beyond comparisons based on similarities and dissimilarities and inject instability and indeterminacy” into one’s approach.6 In Hardy’s writings, the word “creature” does exactly that, functioning as a Möbius strip within the text and quietly subverting (or at least exposing to question) expectations of what it means to be a human or an animal. The work of this book will be to examine some of Hardy’s creatures: to look at his depictions of bees, sheep, toads, dogs, heathcroppers, mallards, adders, bulls, goldfinches, slugs, calves, horses, bullfinches, pheasants, cattle, rats, pigs, rabbits, flies, donkeys, chimpanzees, parrots, starlings, pigeons, rooks, cats, and humans. What does it mean to be a creature in his writings? How did his sense of compassion inform his representations of these animals, human and nonhuman? In what ways does the encounter function as a birthplace of empathy? While the focus of the following chapters will be on Hardy’s novels, especially his self-​categorized “Novels of Character and Environment,” excursions to his poetic work, including 5 Joanna Bourke, What It Means to Be Human: Reflections from 1791 to Present (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011), p.  9. One might picture M.  C. Escher’s “Möbius II” (1963) woodcut, which portrays ants crawling on a latticework version. 6 Ibid., pp. 10–​12.

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The Dynasts (1904–​1908), and to his personal writings will s­upplement the exploration, reconsidering Hardy’s image as a humanitarian in the context of his “grappling” with the question of “equal justice all round.” The method of approach follows the emphasis on encounter, prioritizing close readings of the texts. These readings will guide two further lines of inquiry: (i) the way Hardy’s work can be situated within, and seen to engage with, a variety of historical contexts (including the scientific and philosophical writings of his forerunners and contemporaries, the debates around the subject in the Victorian era, and the work of the humanitarian movement) and (ii) the extent to which it anticipates, and can be illuminated by, theoretical considerations of human–​animal relations raised in twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century thought (especially the writings of Jacques Derrida and the emerging concept of posthumanism). Reading Hardy’s creatures requires a willingness to shift one’s perspective and to attend more closely to embodiment, to bodily vulnerability, and to the multiplicity of worlds and ways of being. First and foremost, this book is about Hardy’s animals. Despite the abundance of animal life in Hardy’s writings, little scholarly attention has been paid to them so far. They have often been relegated to the background, regarded as part of the landscape or the larger natural world. There are a few notable exceptions. In his chapter “Hardy’s Insects,” Michael Irwin traces the swarms of insects that buzz and creep and crawl through the novels (“flies, crane-​flies, bees, wasps, moths, butterflies, ants, beetles, grasshoppers, gnats, woodlice, caterpillars, snails and slugs”) to argue that they demonstrate the same “process of change and evolution in which the human players are also trapped.”7 A  recent article by Ivan Kreilkamp provides a close reading of sheep in Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) to raise questions about animal agency, and another by Elisha Cohn compares Derridean and Deleuzean approaches to animals in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) in order to rethink theories of animality.8 (Both Kreilkamp and Cohn note the term “creature” as significant.) Individual animals –​especially the pig in Jude the Obscure (1895) –​become a focus of analysis within chapters and articles on broader topics such as Michael Irwin, Reading Hardy’s Landscapes (London:  Macmillan, 2000), pp.  25–​36 (pp.  25, 36). Irwin argues that the “thematic statement” often “grows out of some seemingly parenthetical passage of description,” making “the small things ‘become the big things,’ ” but he views the task of looking at all of Hardy’s animals as “simultaneously too easy and too large” (24–​25). 8 See Kreilkamp’s “Pitying the Sheep in Far from the Madding Crowd,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 42.3 (2009), 474–​481; and Cohn’s “ ‘No Insignificant Creature’:  Thomas Hardy’s Ethical Turn,” Nineteenth-​Century Literature, 64.4 (2010), 494–​520. 7

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generic hybridity or narrative empathy.9 Looking further back, Hardy’s humanitarianism and depictions of animal life have been put to use to argue against cruelty to animals after his lifetime: George Witter Sherman published an overview of “Thomas Hardy and the Lower Animals” in 1946 to protest the Bikini experiments, a series of nuclear weapons tests that included live animals as research subjects.10 Yet Hardy’s works provide fertile ground for further study of animals. His depictions of animals are exceptional for his era: except in cases of humorous commentary by the narrator, he avoids personification of his animal figures, depicting them instead in specific, psychological terms –​a demonstration of his involvement with the scientific developments of his day. Any study of Hardy’s animals is indebted to a foundation of work by Gillian Beer and George Levine (as well as Angelique Richardson, Phillip Mallett, and Roger Ebbatson, among others) on Hardy and Darwin and the overlap in their vision of the natural world.11 Hardy considered himself “among the earliest acclaimers of The Origin of Species” (LW 158). The two Victorian thinkers meet not in a pessimistic vision of the material world but rather in the close observation of the joy of being alive. As Levine explains, “ironically, even the darkest of Darwin’s ideas . . . are likely to fill the world with life, excitement, and strangeness, and fill art with new ways of seeing and shaping.” He then transfers the idea to Hardy: “when one hears the grinding of trees competing grimly against each other for space in the thick woods of Hardy’s Woodlanders, it is not the idea of the struggle but the startling implication that the trees have sensibilities and voices that is most surprising and most moving.”12 It is the beauty as well as the struggle and Hardy’s ability to recreate a sensory world with such 9 See, for example, Richard Nemesvari’s “ ‘Wherefore Is Light Given to Him That Is in Misery?’ Sensationalist Tragedy, Melodramatic Modernity, and the Moral Occult (II) in Jude the Obscure,” in Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 179–​209; and Suzanne Keen’s “Empathetic Hardy:  Bounded, Ambassadorial, and Broadcast Strategies of Narrative Empathy,” Poetics Today, 32.2 (Summer 2011), 349–​389. 10 George Witter Sherman, “Thomas Hardy and the Lower Animals,” Prairie Schooner, 20.4 (1946), 304–​309. 11 See Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-​Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983) and Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1988); Richardson’s collection After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind (Amsterdam:  Rodopi, 2013); Mallett’s essays “Hardy and Philosophy,” in A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. by Keith Wilson (West Sussex: Wiley, 2009), pp. 21–​35, and “Hardy, Darwin, and The Origin of Species,” in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. by Phillip Mallett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 316–​327; and Ebbatson’s The Evolutionary Self: Hardy, Forster, Lawrence (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982). 12 George Levine, Darwin: The Writer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 117.

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intensity that align him with Darwin. Beer deems this the “moment-​by-​ moment fullness of the text,” created in effect, as Levine explains, “by an astonishing and wonder-​ inducing attentiveness to the particularities of life, from ‘ephemera’ and barnacles and worms and ants and slugs to rabbits to horses to birds and grass and trees and people” which “is closely connected to an intensely ethical relation to the social and natural worlds . . . each driving in his own way into sympathetic engagement with the creatures they described.”13 Hardy looks at a world after Darwin with empathetic vision, but despite his feeling of continuity between the human and animal worlds, and even the animal and vegetable worlds, he is unable to find exactly how that sense of altruism should be enacted. Rather, his scenes that place humans and animals in close proximity seem to test proposed boundaries between the two: boundaries that had existed and been debated throughout history, but were brought to the forefront of Victorian consciousness by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s proposal of natural selection as a viable mechanism for evolution.14 In addition to Darwin’s influence, Hardy’s depictions of animals suggest his engagement with other Victorian scientists and thinkers of his era, including Thomas Huxley, George Romanes, Max Müller, and Leslie Stephen. Furthermore, this book engages with three other (overlapping) critical conversations: animal studies, posthumanism, and the discourse of “creaturely.” As a relatively new field, animal studies allows disciplines from both the sciences and the humanities to contribute (each from its own unique vantage point) to the larger question of the animal. Animals –​in one form or another –​surround every aspect of human life: while living animals are removed increasingly from human society (except as pet or spectacle), humans depend on animals for food and clothing, as medical research models, and in a multiplicity of other ways. Studying animals, then, requires one to think about and with animals, reconsidering assumptions of human superiority and right to dominion. Even using the abbreviated terms “human” and “animal” raises problems: while the more accurate “human animal” and “nonhuman animal” are more cumbersome, they at least point to the fact that both exist within the same animal 13 Darwin’s Plots, p. 241; Levine, “Hardy and Darwin: An Enchanting Hardy?,” in A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. by Keith Wilson, pp. 36–​53, (p. 41). 14 Rob Boddice argues that the “animal emergence of humans” was “common knowledge well before Darwin, but without doing any obvious good for other animals”: the “implied . . . ethic of humane treatment” did not automatically follow. See Boddice, A History of Attitudes and Behaviours toward Animals in Eighteenth-​and Nineteenth-​Century Britain: Anthropocentrism and the Emergence of Animals (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 2008), pp. 1, 317.

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kingdom.15 Yet to set up all other animals as nonhuman as opposed to the human is to lump into a single “catch-​all concept” an array of ­living creatures from toads to dogs to whales to lions to pigeons, as Derrida points out in “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).”16 It reveals the anthropocentrism built into human thought and human language. While anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism have become two watchwords for attitudes to avoid, it would be difficult for humans to view the world without human perspective (as even imagining another’s perspective requires the possibility of having a mode of vision oneself first), and describing animals without some of the same language used to describe humans would present similar impossibilities. As Beer points out, “intrinsic to all discourse” is the problem that “language is anthropocentric. It places man at the centre of signification.”17 Erica Fudge notes that an actual history of animals presents “impossible” difficulties, reminding readers that any “history of animals” is really a “history of human attitudes toward animals.”18 Rather, it is the realization that the concept of the human has been constructed –​and is not a “given” –​that in turn allows a reconsideration of the status of animals.19 At stake is the very question with which Hardy grappled. Instead of focusing on likeness or difference, rethinking human–​animal relations gestures toward the problem that animals have never been regarded as “the subject” or “the other” –​as figures to be treated with moral obligation –​within an ethical framework. What is human responsibility to animals? Emerging alongside animal studies is the concept of posthumanism: a theoretical framework that attempts to deal with the problems of thinking about animals through a humanist perspective. As Neil Badmington points out in his collection Posthumanism (2000), the term is used by different people to mean different things, but it traces its origins to Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things:  An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1966), which closes with the image of man as a face in the sand, 15 For more on the danger of the term “animal,” see Erica Fudge’s conclusion to Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), pp. 159–​165; for the problems it poses “for both academic disciplines and popular discourse,” see Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay’s introduction to Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Surrey: Ashgate, 2007), p. 2. 16 Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I  Am (More to Follow),” trans. by David Wills, Critical Inquiry, 28.2 (2002), 369–​418 (p. 402). 17 Darwin’s Plots, p. 53. 18 Erica Fudge, “A Left-​Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. by Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 3–​18 (p. 6). 19 Ibid., p. 11.

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erased by a lapping wave of the sea.20 Posthumanism does not disparage all tenets of humanism but rather rethinks the framework, looking toward philosophical and ethical implications of a mode of thought that places disembodied reason and autonomy above all else. (One might note, too, that the concept of the posthuman is very different from posthumanism; the posthuman sense of being after the body, of escaping the confines of flesh and blood, is ironically more humanist than posthumanist.) Posthumanism serves as a way of rethinking humanism, and it is in light of posthumanism that the term “humanist” will appear in the following pages. As Cary Wolfe explains, posthumanism is not just “a thematics of the decentering of the human in relation to either evolutionary, ecological, or technological coordinates” but rather a discussion of “how thinking confronts that thematics, what thought has to become in face of those challenges.”21 Posthumanism, he argues, forces one to “rethink our taken-​for-​granted modes of human experience . . . by recontextualizing them in terms of the entire sensorium of other living beings and their own autopoietic ways of ‘bringing forth a world.’ ” It requires one to “attend to the specificity of the human –​its ways of being in the world, its ways of knowing, observing, and describing  –​ by . . . acknowledging that [the human] is fundamentally a prosthetic creature” (by which he means an organism whose evolution is bound up with developments in technological, linguistic, and material tools –​ things not intrinsically “human” but that have “nevertheless made the human what it is”).22 To what extent might Hardy be considered “pre-​ posthumanist”? That is, to what extent do his depictions of humans and animals convey a sensibility that might be labeled as posthumanist in twenty-​first-​century terms? Wolfe  –​and others thinking about posthumanism  –​often turn to Derrida’s writings on animals, especially the essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”. Engaging with Descartes, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, Derrida addresses the question of the animal in philosophy by in turn deconstructing the human. As Lynn Turner explains in The Animal Question in Deconstruction (2013): Rather than rectify Descartes’ denial of the capacity to respond to those beings corralled under the singular misnomer “the animal” by more equally 20 Badmington’s “guiding principle” in editing the collection was “to preserve difference, to leave posthumanism open both to question and to what is to come”; see Neil Badmington, ed., Posthumanism (New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. 10. 21 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010), p. xvi. 22 Ibid., p. xxv.

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distributing this capacity among species like a new form of identity politics –​they can respond too –​Derrida continues the reversals and displacements of deconstruction. He both patiently questions whether humans can respond and alters what response might mean, such that it does not remain a capacity that belongs to an intending subject.23

In a debate focused on capacity and who forms the subject, Derrida inverses the schematics, placing the pressure on humans and ideas of capacity rather than on animals, and in the end linking humans and animals through incapacity, through lack of power, through the shared finitude of all living creatures:  mortality and the impossibility for even humans to face death as such. Instead of removing “a single indivisible” human–​animal boundary, his writings encourage “limitrophy”: the complication and multiplication of boundaries, making any one decisive division between human and animal an “asinanity.”24 Furthermore, Derrida offers the idea of the “unsubstitutable singularity” of the individual. He frames “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” with an encounter with his cat.25 Alone together in the bathroom, the cat is gazing at his naked body. In this moment, he recognizes the cat not as an “exemplar of a species called cat” but as “this irreplaceable being that one day enters my space, enters this place where it can encounter me.” For Derrida, it is important to recognize that this encounter is not with a fictional or hypothetical cat, but a “real cat” –​a specific animal with its own perspective, experience, and personality that cannot be replaced or replicated (not even through cloning, which would provide the copy creature with its own experience of being despite identical genetics). The cat, he argues, has “an existence that refuses to be conceptualized.”26 The encounter causes him to “think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor.”27 The absolute unknowability of the other, then, applies not only to the Other whose difference is defined clearly, but to one’s neighbor, the other whom one encounters and must choose whether or not to treat with moral consideration. In Derrida’s work –​and especially this concept of the “unsubstitutable singularity” of the individual –​ the theoretical inclinations of this book, which emerge in Chapters 4 and 5, find a home. 23 Lynn Turner, ed., The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), p. 2. 24 “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” pp. 397, 400. 25 Ibid., p. 378. 26   Ibid., pp. 378–​379. 27   Ibid., p. 380

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Finally, it is important to situate this book in relation to the d ­ iscourse of the “creaturely,” especially as articulated in the recent books On Creaturely Life (2006) by Eric Santer and Creaturely Poetics (2011) by Anat Pick. Santer defines “creaturely life” as “the peculiar proximity of the human to the animal at the very point of their radical difference.”28 Much of what he notes about an “archive of creaturely life” could be applied to Hardy (as Kreilkamp suggests), but importantly Santer sees creaturely life as a dimension of the human, created by an overlap between biological and political forces.29 He argues that the sense of the “creaturely” in a wide range of works by twentieth-​century German (and mostly Jewish) writers –​from Rainer Maria Rilke to Walter Benjamin to W. G. Sebald –​ “pertains not primarily to a sense of shared animality or shared animal suffering but to a biopolitical animation that distinguishes the human from the animal.”30 Similarly, Julia Reinhard Lupton looks back to the writings of Franz Rosenzweig and Walter Benjamin in order to examine Caliban as creature in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Rosenzweig identified the idea of creature as being continually under the state of transformation, as “everlastingly” created; Benjamin built upon Rosenzweig’s idea but within a political context, looking at the idea of not only the subjects of a sovereign power as creatures but also the sovereign power itself as creature, whose “self-​rule is tyrannous,” to quote Lupton.31 In her article on Tess, Cohn draws upon Lupton to suggest, “[t]‌he word ‘creature’ for Hardy refers to an ontological condition subject to transformation by an outside agency.”32 Important to the concept of creature for Cohn’s reading of Hardy are the “universality of pain” and the inclusion of animal abjectness, creating analogous relationships between human and animal suffering.33 In contrast to Santer and Lupton’s biopolitical readings of 28 Eric Santer, On Creaturely Life:  Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 12. 29 Ibid., p. xiii; “Pitying the Sheep,” p. 474. 30 On Creaturely Life, p. 39. Santer specifically considers the state of exception as a site conducive for investigations into “unconscious mental life”: life “mobilized around such enigmatic signifiers that can never be fully metabolized” that “persist as loci of signifying stress” (34). 31 See Lupton’s “Creature Caliban,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 51.1 (2000), 1–​23 (pp. 4, 6). See also Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, trans. by Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), pp. 129–​133, and Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, intro. by George Steiner, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), p. 85. 32 “No Insignificant Creature,” p. 509; Cohn suggests that Tess offers a “universalizing definition of the creature as bound to an unhappy fate,” drawing upon the passage in the novel that reads, “Nature does not often say ‘See!’ to her poor creature at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing” (Tess 48). 33 Santer sees humans and animals’ experience of suffering as separated by a human capacity for pleasure-​in-​pain, or Lacan’s idea of “jouissance”; see On Creaturely Life, p. 39.

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Introduction

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“creature,” Pick’s book turns to Simone Weil and her ideas of vulnerability and “[c]ompassion for every creature” to propose a creaturely poetics:  a “modality Weil names attention (and Walter Benjamin attentiveness) to the bodily and embodied,” given that a creature “is first and foremost a living body –​material, temporal, vulnerable” but also something sacred, something created.34 Creatureliness for Pick designates “bodily vulnerability,” a sense that living things are both precious and exposed to affliction. While Santer focuses on the German–​Jewish discourse, Pick engages with the field of animal studies and what she calls a shift toward “creaturely thinking” with the works of Derrida, Wolfe, Cora Diamond, and J. M. Coetzee (which, one might note, overlaps with what Wolfe designates as posthumanist thinking).35 In this book, the approach to the word “creature” encourages readers to consider the liminal ground between the human and the animal, the juxtaposition of kinship and alterity, and the compounding of (at times contradictory) connotations that together gesture toward the unknowability of the individual. While Cohn’s sense of a creature as being continually subject to transformation or enacted upon by outside forces does exist in Hardy’s work, Pick’s articulation of a creaturely poetics –​an attention to embodiment and vulnerability, to the finitude of mortality shared by all living creatures  –​is more closely aligned with the reading of Hardy’s animals (human and nonhuman) to follow. Creature becomes a lens through which representations of human and animal life can be read, bringing into focus Hardy’s “shifted . . . centre of altruism” on the surface of his pages. Yet at the same time creature is an impressionistic word, vague enough to allow multiple interpretations and implications simultaneously. In this way, creature aligns with Hardy’s attempt to portray his characters in a manner that maintains their complexities. Rather than forming a “scientific system of philosophy,” he argued “that the views in [his works of art] are seemings, provisional impressions only, used for 34 Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 4–​5. 35 Ibid., pp. 10, 7. See also Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), which contains essays by Wolfe, Cora Diamond, and Stanly Cavell in dialogue with two other philosophers, and J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Princeton University, October 15–​ 16, 1997), http://​tannerlectures.utah.edu/​lectures/​documents/​Coetzee99 .pdf (accessed February 1, 2013). Coetzee’s novella, originally given as part of a lecture series, is usually read as a presentation of ethical issues in relation to animals, but Diamond interprets it as the presentation of “a wounded woman” (Elizabeth Costello, the main character), who is struggling with the difficulty of thinking about the issues of animal treatment; see Philosophy and Animal Life, p. 49.

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Thomas Hardy and Animals

artistic purposes because they represent approximately the impressions of the age, and are plausible, till somebody produces better theories of the universe” (LW 406). In his emphasis on impressions, Hardy leaves a margin for the unknown and the unknowable, combining, one might argue, Santer’s view of “creaturely” as containing “a kind of life in excess of both our mere biological life and of our life in the space of meaning” and Pick’s movement toward beauty and the sacred in the vulnerability of the body.36 What emerges is something more, something not quite definable, something not quite able to be known. Chapter 1 opens with the question of what it means to be a creature in Hardy’s works, looking at the difficulty the term poses to attempts toward categorization. What does it mean to be a creature –​a “created thing” –​after Darwin? “Creature” appears in the “Novels of Character and Environment” approximately 143 times –​far less frequently than its appearance in works by his contemporaries. Hardy uses the word selectively, often during face-​to-​face encounters between humans and animals, but also between men and women –​and even sentient and insentient entities. In these moments, he interrogates the concept of a definitive boundary between the two realms in contact. Chapter 2 draws upon a statement made by Henry James in his review of Far from the Madding Crowd: “Everything human in the book strikes us as factitious and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.”37 The chapter takes James’s claim seriously, offering close readings of the novel’s canine and ovine narratives. The encounter between Fanny Robin and the dog on the Casterbridge highway launches a discussion of Hardy’s depictions of dogs in dialogue with Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) to explore the possibility of moral sense in animals. Next, the chapter provides the first sustained analysis of the omitted sheep-​rot chapter (a first-​draft scene that he chose to leave out, borrowing imagery from it for his full draft) and its resonances in the novel, which suggest a sense of moral responsibility to all creatures, human or animal. Following on from the discussion of moral agency and moral sense, Chapters 3, 4, and 5 will turn to three other human–​animal boundaries debated by Victorians: first, the question of animal language, and by extension the capacity for reason and thought; second, the concept of having a face, a portal of emotion through expression as well as a site 36 On Creaturely Life, p. 34. 37 Nation (December 24, 1874), in CH, pp. 27–​31 (p. 31).

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Introduction

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demanding moral consideration; and third, the refocusing of the boundary not on rational, emotional, or moral capacity, but on the vulnerability of the body and the experience of suffering. Each chapter will suggest that Hardy reconfigures these traditional boundaries as Möbius strips, quietly undermining assumptions of “humanness” and pointing toward the unknowability of the individual through his use of irony, ambiguity, and humor. The chapters are framed by the idea of “artful creatures,” a quotation taken from the pig-​killing scene in Jude the Obscure: the term implies skill, deception, and intention, capacities typically denied to animals. Chapter 3 in particular examines the way Hardy probes the idea of language in animals, tracing the historical debates over language and its connection to abstract thought and the possession of an immortal soul. While Darwin and Romanes argued that animals possessed consciousness and reason that differed only in degree (rather than kind) from the same capacities in humans, the suggestion made by C. Lloyd Morgan that animal behavior should be described in terms of the lowest psychological faculty that could produce such action became the basis for twentieth-​century behaviorism –​which removed any suggestion of animal intentionality and any terminology that could also apply to humans from scientific discourse of animals. Rather than explicitly supporting or denying animal capacity for language, Hardy explores the relationship between human articulation and animal sound and the capacity for nonlinguistic codes to convey meaning in his fiction. In his poetry –​in the space provided by a form that captures an element of emotion just outside the limits of human language –​Hardy goes still further, directly imagining animals’ voices. Chapter 4 turns to The Return of the Native (1878) to reflect on the historical, scientific, and philosophical implications of what it means to have a face, focusing on the central question of whether a snake has a face. In the novel, Hardy engages with both the pseudoscience of physiognomy, as popularized by Johann Lavater, and the groundbreaking psychological study of “expressemotions” in Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Yet the importance of the face in the novel is perhaps best illuminated by the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, who viewed the face as a site of moral obligation in the moment of encounter. In an encounter between the dying Mrs. Yeobright and an adder, Hardy seems to be suggesting the possibility that a snake, too, can have a face. Chapter 5 reconfigures the human–​animal boundary through Jeremy Bentham’s question, “Can they suffer?” While Bentham argued that

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animals ought to be given some form of consideration because of their capacity to feel pain, his question raises further questions. What does it mean to feel pain? Even if animals can sense pain physically, can they perceive it mentally? This chapter examines three key scenes of animal suffering from novels across Hardy’s career –​the pig-​killing in Jude the Obscure (1895), the dying game birds in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and the honey-​harvesting in Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) –​setting them in context to contemporary debates and in relation to posthumanist thought. Hardy’s attention to creaturely embodiment places him as an early predecessor to posthumanist approaches. Chapter 6 will return to Hardy’s humanitarian sense of a “shifted . . . centre of altruism” as actuated in his daily life. Hardy traditionally has been depicted as an animal lover and humanitarian; in his biographies, he is shown answering the door in stockinged feet because young kittens were underfoot. Yet in a letter to his wife Emma during one of her trips to Calais, Hardy wrote of drowning a litter of kittens as a routine matter. Through a case study of horses in his writings, letters, and journal entries, the chapter takes a closer look at Hardy’s humanitarianism, revealing the dissonance between Hardy’s principles and his sense of pragmatics and his difficulty in reconciling the two. It also rethinks his historical image as an anti-​vivisectionist. Throughout his writings, Hardy’s compassion for animals is apparent. During an interview with literary critic William Archer in 1904, Hardy refuted the idea that his works were essentially pessimistic, saying, “What are my books but one plea against ‘man’s inhumanity to man’  –​and to woman  –​and to the lower animals?”38 Extending “ ‘The Golden Rule’ from the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom,” as Hardy’s letter at the start of this introduction proposes, bids one to lean closer:  to pay attention, to rethink assumptions, and to shift one’s perspective.

38 “Real Conversations,” in THR, pp. 28–​37 (p. 35).

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Ch apter  1

What Does It Mean to Be a Creature?

In Thomas Hardy’s novels, the word “creature” often appears during encounters between humans and nonhuman animals, quietly questioning the human–​animal boundary in moments of close proximity. The notion of a definite boundary separating humans from animals was already tenuous in Hardy’s time. Darwin, for example, problematized the categorization of humans as belonging to a separate kingdom –​as some naturalists were wont to do, dividing “the whole organic world into three kingdoms, the Human, the Animal, and the Vegetable” –​by arguing that the difference between humans and great apes was surely no greater than that between ants and coccus, two types of insects grouped in the same class.1 He sums up the “whole history” of the coccus in one sentence: it “attaches itself . . . to a plant; sucks the sap . . .; is fertilised and lays eggs”; in contrast, the history of ants could fill “a large volume.”2 Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-​Glass (1871) takes the Victorian parlor game “animal, vegetable, mineral?” to describe an encounter between Alice and a lion (with the characters exclaiming that she is “as large as life, and twice as natural” and “a fabulous monster!”), a scene Gillian Beer discusses as an example of the struggle around the naming of a thing –​of creating systems of classification, an issue especially complicated by Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859).3 Names assert boundaries, signal similarity, establish difference. This problem of naming –​and of the classification implicit in terminology –​forms an important consideration for anyone writing about the 1 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man: and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd edn (London: Murray, 1874; repr. 1901), p. 226. 2 Ibid., pp. 226–​227. 3 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (London:  Puffin, 1997), pp. 256–​257; Gillian Beer, “ ‘Are you animal –​or vegetable –​or mineral?’ Alice and Others,” at Victorian Classes and Classification, North American Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference, London, Ontario, November 13–​16, 2014, keynote lecture.

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Thomas Hardy and Animals

way humans think about and interact with nonhuman animals. Derrida, for example, proposes the homophonic portmanteau “animot” to draw attention to the paradox of signifying a group containing a diverse range of animals in a singular term.4 Harriet Ritvo notes that “explicit claims of unity (humans are animals) actually serve to reinforce the human-​animal boundary that they are intended to dissolve” by “incorporat[ing] a grudging acknowledgement that this boundary is widely recognized and powerfully influential” and “signal[ling] a context of semantic and cultural tensions.” She points out that even the definition of “animal” in the OED suggests an “uncomfortable conjunction of similarity and otherness,” with one entry including “all living things that are not plants” and the next narrowing its meaning to “one of the lower animals; a brute, or beast, as distinguished from man.”5 In Hardy’s works, “creature” becomes the word that indicates his feeling of a “shifted . . . centre of altruism,” as discussed in the introduction, and it often serves to reconfigure traditional human–​animal boundaries into Möbius strips, leaving the reader to conjecture which side is which. Like “animal,” definitions of “creature” juxtapose similarity and difference: they include both the specifically human and the distinctly nonhuman animal. Modifiers and context can change the connotation, at times in an antonymic manner. Throughout Hardy’s writings, the narrators and characters use the term to blur boundaries: not only between humans and animals but also between men and women and between ­animate beings and inanimate objects. Its appearance seems both to evoke a sense of the unknowable alterity of the other and to create continuity between two supposedly dichotomous beings, the latter usually serving as a direct appeal to the reader’s empathy. This chapter will examine Hardy’s approach to the human–​animal boundary through his use of the word “creature” in seven novels from the “Novels of Character and Environment”: Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. Hardy’s creatures complicate categorical hierarchies (including, for human creatures, those based on gender and class) and subvert Victorian attitudes toward both humans and animals, gesturing toward what Derrida calls the “unsubstitutable singularity” of the individual.6 4 “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” p. 415. 5 Harriet Ritvo, “Afterword: Animal Dreams and Animal Reflections,” in Victorian Animal Dreams, ed. by Morse and Danahay, pp. 271–​275 (p. 271). 6 “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” p. 378.

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What Does It Mean to Be a Creature?

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Constructing Creature The etymology of “creature” suggests something of the complexity of its usage. In classical Latin, the word was formed from the past participle stem of “creāre” (to create) and the suffix “-​ūra” (implying action, process, development).7 According to the OED, its emergence in English traces back to Middle English: originally “creatur” in Anglo-​Norman, “criature” in Anglo-​Norman and Old French, and “creature” in Anglo-​Norman and Old French, Middle French. Its definition evolved from a “human being, any created thing or being” in the eleventh century to “the created universe, creation” in the twelfth century to “someone who owes his position to the favour of someone else” in the fourteenth century. In Old English, the term to signify creature was “gesceaft” (related to the act of making or shaping) or more commonly “wiht” (related to a physical thing or being, at times with supernatural associations to figures such as elves or demons). The connotations derived from the history of the word recur in later constructions of its meaning:  the implication of the human, of divine creation; the sense of obligation to another; the active state of continuous creation, of potential transformation; and associations with the act of making and with otherworldly beings. What did “creature” mean in the Victorian era, and to Hardy? The 1860s –​the decade preceding the publication of Hardy’s first novel –​saw a new approach to philology emerge with Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language in 1861 and 1863 and the following movement to develop a new dictionary that would account for the historical development of language. James Murray began his work on A New English Dictionary in 1879. Murray wrote to scholars and scientists as he compiled his dictionary; Hardy, although not commissioned as one of Murray’s researchers, occasionally corresponded with him about Dorset dialect.8 Dennis Taylor argues that Hardy was one of the “Victorian authors most conspicuously influenced” by Murray’s project –​which later became the definitive Oxford English Dictionary.9 A New English Dictionary, then, serves as the closest source for a synchronic understanding of the word in See also Lupton’s analysis of the Latin creatura in “Creature Caliban,” pp. 1–​2. 8 Hardy’s close friend Horace Moule was a researcher for the volume H; see Dennis Taylor, “Hardy and the New Philology,” in Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 96–​172 (p. 108). 9 See Dennis Taylor, “The Victorian Philological Contexts of Hardy’s Poetry,” in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. by Mallett, pp. 231–​241 (p. 233). For a fascinating exploration tracing several authors’ influence on the OED, see “Hardy and the New Philology,” pp. 96–​172. 7

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Thomas Hardy and Animals

Hardy’s era. The volume containing “creature” was published in 1893 and lists five main definitions: (i) “[a]‌nything created; a created being, a­ nimate or inanimate; a product of creative action; a creation”; (ii) “[a] living ‘­creature’ or created being, an animate being; an animal; often as distinct from ‘man’ ”; (iii) “[a] human being; a person or individual”; (iv) “fig. [t]hat which is produced by, or owes its being solely to, another thing; a result, product, or offspring of anything”; and (v) “[o]ne who owes his fortune and position to a patron; one who is actuated by the will of another, or is ready to do his bidding; an instrument or puppet.”10 A supplementary sixth item covers hyphenations and phrases. The first definition evokes the Biblical connotations of the word. To be a creature is to be something that has been created, the product of a creator –​or Creator, to link the word to Genesis’s account of creation. But what did it mean to be a creature –​a “created being” –​after Darwin? While Hardy saw himself as one of the “earliest acclaimers of The Origin of Species,” his upbringing in Christianity had a strong influence upon his writings and views (LW 158).11 In childhood, he had planned to be a parson when he grew up, and as a young man he studied Latin and Greek “with a view to taking Orders” (LW 407). Responding to “slurs” that “invidious critics had cast . . . upon him” including “Nonconformist, Agnostic, Atheist, Infidel, Immoralist, Heretic, Pessimist or something equally opprobrious in their eyes,” Hardy noted “they had never thought of calling him what they might have called him much more plausibly –​ churchy; not in an intellectual sense, but in so far as instincts and emotions ruled” (407). Hardy’s language and phrasing often echo Biblical passages: as do, one might note, Darwin’s at the end of Origin. Darwin’s often-​quoted final sentence includes an allusion to Genesis’s breath of life: There is grandeur in this view of life . . . having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.12 10 James A. H. Murray, ed., A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by the Philological Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), ii, 1153. 11 As Mallett points out, Hardy’s vague wording of this statement does not indicate that he actually read Origin itself; see “Hardy, Darwin, and The Origin of Species,” p. 316. 12 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, intro. by Ernst Mayr, fasc. 1st edn (London: Murray, 1859; repr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 490.

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What Does It Mean to Be a Creature?

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In the second edition, he added “[by a Creator]” to make the allusion explicit. As Beer notes, “[i]‌n Darwin’s language at this stage of his career, the Creator works through laws, but is not usurped by them.”13 For Hardy and others, the discovery of natural selection did not remove the idea of a “Cause of Things” (or “invariable antecedent,” depending on his level of self-​editing in Life) (406).14 Hardy believed that reconciliation between religion and science was possible, urging in his “Apology” to Late Lyrics and Earlier that “religion . . . must like all other things keep moving, becoming” (CP 561). Perhaps, then, the term “creature” probes not only boundaries between humans and animals but also between religion and science, quietly suggesting that creation and evolution modulate into each other. As its Latin etymology reveals, the word combines the stem of the verb “to create” with a suffix that indicates continuing action and development: in this sense, the term proposes creation as an evolutionary process and evolution as an ongoing act of creation. Perhaps more importantly for Hardy, the word “creature” in his texts often calls upon a sense of Biblical loving-​kindness. While the next sections will examine the second and third definitions more closely, one might also bear in mind the resonances of the fourth and fifth definitions. In The Return of the Native, lines between the real and figurative world are blurred by the occurrences of creature that fall into the fourth (figurative) sense. Eustacia, for example, seems to “show a most reproachful look” to the outside world, but “it was directed less against human beings than against certain creatures of her mind, the chief of these being destiny” (69). Eustacia herself takes on a figurative quality by the end of the novel:  when she walks by Susan Nunsuch’s cottage, she appears to the woman within “as a figure in a phantasmagoria –​a creature of light surrounded by an area of darkness” (337). The image harkens back to Eustacia and Wildeve’s moth-​signal (in which the delicate body of the insect is consumed by the flame), but it also transforms Eustacia into an optical illusion, a figure of magical lighting. Susan’s superstitious decision to construct and melt a wax effigy of Eustacia, who dies on that very night, strengthens the suggestion of Eustacia’s figurative existence as somehow linked to her corporeality. The fifth (puppet-​like) sense of the term is wielded disparagingly 13 “Postscript,” in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, ed. by Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. xxvi–​xxxii (p. xxix). 14 See also Timothy Hands, Thomas Hardy:  Distracted Preacher? Hardy’s Religious Biography and Its Influence on His Novels (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), for an account of Hardy’s complicated relationship with “belief and unbelief ” (140).

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by both Grace and Tess: Grace asks, “How can any woman who is not a mere man’s creature live with him after what has taken place?” when Fitzpiers returns after Felice Charmond’s death (W 321), and Tess tells Alec, “I should be your creature to go on doing that; and I won’t!” when she leaves Trantridge a few weeks after the night in the Chase (Tess 89). Intriguingly, Christian Cantle uses this meaning to describe the dice in the game to win the gown-​piece at the Quiet Woman. “What curious creatures these dice be –​powerful rulers of us all, and yet at my command,” he says, mostly to himself (RN 218). The dice –​inanimate, manmade objects –​take on the role of a being whose will is “actuated by the will of another,” yet they make the humans who roll them creatures in this sense as well. They both bid and serve.15 Modifiers also play an important role in constructing the meaning of “creature.” Two subentries to the third definition –​pertaining to humans –​ illustrate the contradictions inherent in the term: (i) “[w]‌ith qualifications expressing (a) admiration, approbation, affection, or tenderness (sometimes playfully); (b) compassion or commiseration (sometimes with a shade of patronage)”; and (ii) as “[e]xpressing reprobation or contempt,” with the note that while this context was previously indicated by a modifier, it was “at length used alone” to designate a “creature of a kind which one forbears to specify.”16 Perhaps here the preternatural connotations of the word come into effect, shaping the reader’s picture of a character not only by moving the character slightly outside the realm of the human but also by insinuating what type of attitude to take toward that character. “Creature” might be applied to elevate the other as something more than human, reaching toward divine, as with the description of Liza-​Lu as “a tall budding creature, half girl, half woman –​a spiritualized image of Tess, slighter than she, but with the same beautiful eyes” (Tess 419) or Marty South’s view of Mrs. Charmond as an “Olympian creature” (W 41); to express compassion for beings that seem somewhere between human and animal, as in the description of the Durbeyfield children as “six helpless creatures” (Tess 30); to suggest reprobation (especially, with this example, in the theological sense) for one not included as fully human, as with “Sorrow the Undesired –​that intrusive creature” for whom “babyhood” forms “human existence” (108); or to assign an individual to the realm of 15 Compare with Benjamin’s analysis of the sovereign as creature; see The Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 85–​86. 16 When Hardy uses the meaning that aligns with the first subentry –​whether focused on admiration or compassion –​the subject is often a female character in the text, whereas the second subentry usually describes a male character.

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What Does It Mean to Be a Creature?

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the otherworldly, as with the engineman who looks like “a creature from Tophet” (345).17 Already the divisions and complications that arise from the word creature are evident. Creature indicates both alienation and affinity; it signals distance and close encounter; and it blurs clean lines between categories, doubling back on supposed boundaries. From these definitions, three important groups of creatures emerge in Hardy’s writings:  inanimate beings, animals, and humans. In order to better understand the individual creatures encountered in the following chapters, one might first ask the questions, what does it mean to be an inanimate creature? To be an animal creature? To be a human creature?

Inanimate Creatures Hardy rarely applies the word creature to an inanimate, nonsentient entity (only four times in the novels in this survey), but when he does, it is to an object that almost seems to be an automaton, taking on human characteristics and a life of its own. Two of these four inanimate creatures appear in Far from the Madding Crowd. The first is the puppet in the church clock when Fanny misses her wedding with Troy. The reader, along with the group of women waiting to watch the impending wedding, views the puppet strike half past eleven, quarter to noon, and noon. The narrator calls this puppet a “quarter-​jack,” an “automaton,” and a “mannikin” (115–​116). When the clock strikes noon, it seems to come to life:  “One could almost be positive that there was a malicious leer upon the hideous creature’s face, and a mischievous delight in its twitchings” (116). When Fanny finds Troy and explains her mistake, evidence that Troy, too, felt the puppet was mocking him is clear in his humiliated reaction; he exclaims, “You fool, for so fooling me!” to his mistaken betrothed (117). Later in the novel, another inanimate object takes on a malicious personification while undoing Troy’s seemingly romantic gesture of planting flowers on Fanny’s grave. The narrator describes the gargoyle as “too human to be called like a dragon, too impish to be like a man, too animal to be like a fiend, and not enough like a bird to be called a griffin” (306). It has ears, eyes, fingers, hands, a mouth, teeth, jaws, and toes (306–​307). Additionally, it seems to possess speech in the form of laughter:  as the narrator reports, this “creature had for 17 Tophet was known as a valley where children were sacrificed as burnt offerings; it is also synonymous with hell.

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four hundred years laughed at the surrounding landscape, voicelessly in dry weather, and in wet with a gurgling and snorting sound” (306–​307). Instead of simply draining water, this “horrible stone entity . . . vomited” and “spat” the fluid, and the stream from its mouth destroys Troy’s handiwork on Fanny’s grave (306–​307). The appearance of an inanimate entity as a personified creature at critical junctures in Troy and Fanny’s relationship seems a portrayal of fate laughing at human efforts; the puppet in the clock and the gargoyle are part of a grander scheme, one that makes the scale of a human life or love a short span of time against an eternal universe. The puppet strikes the hours, moved by the mechanism of the clock, and the gargoyle directs the water from the roof of the church, as it has done for centuries. Fanny and Troy’s mistakes –​confusing churches, abandoning lovers –​are human errors, tied to perception and misperception. The use of creature to describe inanimate objects that perform their duties automatically seems to play with the idea of what it means to be human, ironically suggesting that perhaps humans, too, are more automated than they would like to realize.18 The third example occurs in The Return of the Native in the form of the dice, as previously mentioned. Christian, in his awe of these “curious creatures . . . powerful rulers of us all” whom he believes hold his luck, states, “I am sure I never need be afeard of anything after this” while “handl[ing] the dice fondly one by one”: a sharp contrast to Wildeve, who gives them to Christian saying, “They were only cut out by some lad with his knife, and are worth nothing” (218). Wildeve renders the dice as creatures in the first sense of the word: objects created by a maker, in this case “some lad.” The reader later discovers the direct consequences the dice have on the fate of the characters in the novel: Christian loses the money Mrs. Yeobright entrusted him to take to Thomasin and Clym in a game with Wildeve; Wildeve in turn loses it to Diggory Venn who does not realize half the money is for Clym; Mrs. Yeobright accuses Eustacia of taking money from Wildeve after assuming he gave Clym’s half to her; Eustacia does not reconcile with Mrs. Yeobright; Mrs. Yeobright, upon knocking and not receiving immediate admission to Clym’s house, assumes that Eustacia has set Clym against her and ends up dying on her walk home; Clym blames Eustacia for his mother’s death, leading to their separation, Eustacia’s attempted flight, and her eventual death, along with 18 See Thomas Huxley’s “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata, and Its History,” in Collected Essays, 9 vols (London:  Macmillan, 1893), i, 199–​250, in which he argues that if animals are, as Descartes posited, automatons, then human animals are too  –​an idea analyzed in Chapter 3.

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Wildeve’s. Somewhere along the way, Christian’s faith in the power of the dice becomes relevant. Wildeve’s comment takes on a metaphysical sense: perhaps all creatures –​not just inanimate ones –​“were only cut out by some lad” and play a significant role in the chain of life despite seeming by some to be “worth nothing.” The last inanimate creature of this survey is met in Tess, the August after Sorrow has been born. The narrator describes the field before the farm workers enter, telling the reader that The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious, sentient, personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene, explained the old-​time heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a golden-​haired, beaming, mild-​eyed, godlike creature, gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him. (99)

Here, the application of creature gives the sun a body: a physical human body, and a specifically male body. At the same time, it elevates the sun to the status of a deity (another “creature” of human imagination), his “godlike” aspect lending support to religions that worshipped the sun.19 The contrast between a sentient, deified male sun gazing at the earth it controls and the “clock-​like monotony” of Tess’s movements as she, now a young mother, works in the field creates a sinister effect. What does it mean to be a human –​particularly an unmarried mother –​in the presence of such a creature, an entity that belongs to the natural world but figures as the gaze of patriarchal society?20 The appearance of inanimate creatures raises unsettling questions. Often when Hardy deems a nonsentient entity a creature, it shifts the scale of perspective, zooming out from the seemingly all-​important “little human morality play,” in the words of D. H. Lawrence, to view a grander universal scheme, in which all living creatures may be no more than automatons.21 Understanding what it means to be an inanimate creature, then, may shed light on what it means to be an animate creature. 19 Hardy was intrigued by solar mythology: see LN, i, 168 for his note from Max Müller on “solar myths”; see also J. B. Bullen’s “The Gods in Wessex Exile:  Thomas Hardy and Mythology,” in The Sun Is God:  Painting, Literature and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Bullen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 181–​198 (p. 188). 20 See J. Hillis Miller’s analysis of the novel’s “association of death and sexuality with a masculine sun” and the color red in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), pp. 122–​123. 21 D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. by Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 29.

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Throughout his writings Hardy is continually rescaling points of view: at times, magnifying insects to the size of elephants, and at others, making a continent into a garden-​mat.22 Yet notably for Hardy, the sense that humans and animals may be no more than “conscious automata,” in Huxley’s terms, does not diminish a feeling of wonder at the world or the need for compassion toward the creatures in it.23

Animal Creatures Encounters between human and nonhuman animals in Hardy’s novels often prompt questions about what it means to be a creature in a shared natural world. Approximately forty-​six of the one hundred and forty-​three times that Hardy uses the word in the seven novels under consideration, it signifies a specific animal or group of animals –​a high proportion of applications to the animal world in comparison to his contemporaries (see Appendix).24 In a letter to Frederic Harrison in 1906, Hardy wrote that the “view” of “the non-​human animal as a creature distinct from man” had been “exploded” by Darwin’s theory (CL, iii, 231). His choice to place the word “creature” at key points in his novels demonstrates this statement, gesturing toward kinship with and compassion to animals. The emphasis on animals as creatures often highlights affinity. In Under the Greenwood Tree, for example, the narrator describes a group of boys sitting wistfully outside the church watching “birds, cats and other creatures” until the vicar arrives, at which point they “suddenly subsided into sober church-​goers” (38). Here, the word seems to indicate a yearning on the part of the boys to join the animals they are watching, a feeling of proximity to the natural world that dissolves with the entry of societal expectation (in this case, the necessity of going to church). This proximity between humans and nature is intensified during the honey-​harvesting scene, in which the characters ponder how to obtain honey without “murdering” bees: the keeper Geoffrey Day is stung, and his assistant Enoch asks, “Have the craters stung ye?” (131). The dialect form of “creatures” combined with the actual physical contact between human and 22 See LW, p. 110: “28 Nov. I sit under a tree, and feel alone: I think of certain insects around me as magnified by the microscope: creatures like elephants, flying dragons, etc. And I feel I am by no means alone.” In contrast, a royal procession traveling across Europe in The Dynasts becomes “a file of ants crawling along a strip of garden-​matting” (278). 23 “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata,” i, 244. 24 Web-​based searches of the texts of these novels were crosschecked with my own reading. The numbers are based on the current Oxford World Classics editions (which do not include Diggory Venn as an “Ishmaelitish creature”; see RN, p. 426).

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animal –​Geoffrey sympathizes with the latter as “little mortals” and “poor things” (133) –​again indicates a familiarity with animals in a wider natural world, a familial community that includes the human. While applying the notion of “murder” to killing bees may seem hyperbolic, it implies an inclusion of animals in ethical obligation to others, a suggestion that takes on full force in Tess with the death of Prince. In Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy uses the word creature to appeal to sympathy for animals and to compare human and animal worlds. Of its nine applications to animals in the novel (all by the narrator), six signify sheep. The first five indicate pity, often for a lamb or for sheep in peril: “little creature” (18), “timid creatures” (41), “helpless creatures” (110), “dumb creatures” in anguish (139), and “poor creatures” (141). The sixth application occurs during the sheep-​shearing scene, and it shifts the animal progressively up the “Great Chain of Being.” Watching Gabriel shear a ewe, Bathsheba softly notes, “She blushes at the insult,” as a pink “flush which was enviable, for its delicacy, by many queens of coteries, and would have been creditable, for its promptness, to any woman in the world” spreads across the ewe’s “neck and shoulders” (145). After the shearing, the “clean sleek creature arose from its fleece –​how perfectly like Aphrodite rising from the foam should have been seen to be realized” (145). Here, the animal moves not only into the realm of the human (blushing being regarded as a solely human trait by Darwin and others) but to the realm of the divine and the mythological, with the narrator qualifying that the sight “should have been seen” in order for the comparison to be fully understood.25 Earlier in the novel, the description of workers queuing for their pay inverts this human/​ animal foreground/​background, with humans depicted in terms of the animal world: “The whole string of trailing individuals advanced in the completest balance of intention, like the remarkable creatures known as Chain Salpæ, which, distinctly organized in other respects, have one will common to a whole family” (77). For the human “family” in the passage, the “will” driving them to stand in line is the expectation of remuneration for their labor.26 25 For a discussion of blushing in animals in Darwin and Hardy, see Irwin’s Reading Hardy’s Landscapes, pp. 78–​80. See also J. Hillis Miller’s Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 57–​66, for an exploration of the shifting perspective between “close observation” and “godlike distance” in this scene (which arguably is paralleled by the Möbius-​strip movement between human and animal). 26 This brief image has resonance throughout Hardy’s work, especially in his vision of humanity as articulated in The Dynasts.

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The last two animal creatures in the novel are the toad Gabriel Oak finds underfoot before the storm and the dog who helps Fanny Robin to safety. In both encounters the human treats the animal with respect. After accidentally kicking the toad, “Oak took it up thinking it might be better to kill the creature to save it from pain; but finding it uninjured . . . placed it again among the grass” (239). Gabriel’s humanity extends to all bodies: he views the suffering of even an amphibian to be worth his consideration. In turn, the dog who approaches Fanny Robin –​who is herself called a creature multiple times in the text –​is a “huge heavy and quiet creature” (261). The dog is positioned on the same plane as Fanny both by category (“creature” rather than human or animal) and by physical stature (Fanny, on the ground, actually has to look up at him) –​a leveling examined further in the next chapter.27 In each of these cases, Hardy seems to highlight the continuity between the human and animal worlds: both belong to a broader natural world, one of struggle and suffering, of bodily vulnerability. In The Return of the Native, the word creature applies to the animal world in nine out of its twenty appearances: three times to heathcroppers, twice to insects, twice to birds, and twice to the adder who looks at Mrs. Yeobright. Its use is frequently in conjunction with reference to gaze, raising questions of the animal’s face: especially in regards to reptiles and insects, two classes of creatures whose ability to have a face has been doubted historically and philosophically. The importance of this gaze is established with the heathcroppers of Egdon Heath. They are depicted as the “group of dark creatures” who run away from Eustacia despite the fact she “did not turn her head to look at [them]” (57), as the “little creatures” who do not run away from Johnny Nunsuch because “each wore a clog to prevent his going astray” (57), and as the onlookers encircling Wildeve and Diggory Venn’s glowworm-​lit gambling scene (226, 228). “What a plague those creatures are –​staring so!” Wildeve says, throwing a stone at them to drive them away (228). Not only are the heathcroppers sensitive to the human gaze (Johnny, for example, is surprised that the heathcroppers do not flee until he sees that they have been “broken in”), but they have the power to gaze back. Their presence in the gambling scene, unusual given their timidity toward humans, disquiets Wildeve. Throughout the novel, insects too assert their presence as creatures. In the gambling scene “heath-​ flies, moths, and other winged creatures of the night, . . . beat about the 27 Phillip Mallett connects this scene to Darwin’s suggestion that dogs might have moral sense; see “Hardy and Philosophy,” p. 28.

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faces of the two players,” unnoticed by the humans until a death’s-​head moth extinguishes the candle and Wildeve gathers glowworms for light (225). In contrast, Mrs. Yeobright –​who comes face to face with an adder in an important moment of encounter highlighted by the term creature –​ is “not disinclined to philosophize” watching the “happiness” of “the maggoty shapes of innumerable obscene creatures . . . heaving and wallowing with enjoyment” over the mud (267). Can insects feel happiness? Can they wallow with enjoyment? By suggesting that these tiny insects –​too small to be seen distinctly by the human eye –​share the mantle of “creature,” Hardy seems to be proposing that such “philosophizing” may not be unreasonable. Certainly, face-​to-​face encounters between animals and humans in the novel highlighted by the term “creature” seem to imply that animals are capable of more than humans may think. When the reddleman comes across “a wild mallard –​just arrived from the home of the north wind,” the reader learns that this “creature brought within him an amplitude of northern knowledge. Glacial catastrophes, snowstorm episodes, glittering auroral effects, Polaris in the zenith, Franklin underfoot,  –​the category of his commonplaces was wonderful” (86). In her essay “Can the Native Return?,” Gillian Beer points out that Hardy’s brief allusion to “Franklin underfoot” brings up the sense that this bird has viewed atrocities, possibly including human cannibalism.28 The narrator explains that despite this knowledge, “the bird, like many other philosophers, seemed as he looked at the reddleman to think that a present moment of comfortable reality was worth a decade of memories” (86).29 While here the term links a bird to humans, later in the novel it is used to compare a human to birds in the characterization of Thomasin. The reader is told, “[i]‌n her movements, in her gaze, she reminded the beholder of the feathered creatures who lived around her home. All similes and allegories concerning her began and ended with birds” (207). Like the mallard, by the end of the novel Thomasin too is willing to find the “present moment of comfortable reality” with her new husband “worth a decade of memories” of the tragedy and difficulty of her life with Wildeve (86). The term creature occurs in The Mayor of Casterbridge only thirteen times, and only three times to describe an animal:  twice for the bull 28 Open Fields, pp. 31–​54 (p. 46). 29 This bird is not the only creature in Hardy to earn the distinction of “philosopher” –​the young George joins this ensemble (FFMC 42), and in A Laodicean (1881), Paula Power comments, “what strange and philosophical creatures storks are” (263).

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that corners Lucetta and Elizabeth-​Jane, and once for the goldfinch that Henchard brings Elizabeth-​Jane. In all of these cases, “creature” seems an opaque appeal to the reader’s sympathy for animals under human ownership. The narrator calls the bull a “mistaken creature” as he charges Lucetta and Elizabeth-​Jane, and when Henchard subdues the bull, the narrator directly pits the “premeditated” cruelty of humans against the “impulsive” cruelty of animals: “The premeditated human contrivance of the nose-​ring was too cunning for impulsive brute force, and the creature flinched” (191). Its placement here hints toward sympathy for the bull; Elizabeth-​Jane pities him as “having perhaps rather intended a practical joke than a murder” (192). At the end of the novel, the creature that appears softens the image of a human. Henchard, looking for a wedding gift for Elizabeth-​Jane, selects a caged goldfinch, and the shopkeeper puts a “sheet of newspaper . . . round the little creature’s wire prison” (299). Here Hardy inverts the commonly repeated metaphor of woman-​as-​bird (seen with Thomasin, Tess, and Sue) to suggest that Henchard, too, is trapped by the rigid parameters (or “wire prison”) of patriarchal society and hegemonic masculinity. When Elizabeth-​Jane finds this bird dead of starvation a week later and discovers it was from Henchard, she buries the bird and “from that hour her heart softened towards the self-​alienated man” (305). While serving as a tender image (that Hardy did not include in the British first edition of the novel), it is also a quiet comment on the cruelty of caging birds –​an area of animal welfare that Hardy addressed publicly in his letter to The Times on “Performing Animals” and listed as a concern in his autobiographical Who’s Who 1928 entry.30 As Hardy evocatively noted in Life, “[a]‌ll are caged birds; the only difference lies in the size of the cage. This too is part of the tragedy” (178). In The Woodlanders, six of the twenty-​five occurrences of creature refer to animals. The first appearance is humorous and revealing: after Giles’s failed dinner party, he learns from Robert Creedle that a slug was found on Grace’s plate. Robert supposes that the slug –​“my gentleman,” as he calls him –​got onto the plate from the cabbage.31 He expounds, But Lord, there; I don’t mind ’em myself –​them green ones; for they were born on cabbage, and they’ve lived on cabbage; so they must be made of 30 See Carl J. Weber’s “The Restoration of Hardy’s Starved Goldfinch,” PMLA, 55.2 (1940), 617–​619. See also “Performing Animals. Mr. Hardy’s Protest,” The Times, December 19, 1913, p. 9 and THPV, p. 473. 31 A logical conclusion given the rushed nature of their preparations: when Robert insists, for example, that each “stick of celery” must be “scrubbed with a scrubbing brush,” Giles promises to do so but returns quickly from the garden, “tossing the stalks to Creedle” (73).

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cabbage. But she, the close-​mouthed little lady, she didn’t say a word about it; though ’twould have made good small conversation as to the nater of such creatures; especially as wit ran short among us sometimes. (80)

The slug, which was originally a snail (perhaps changed given the fact that Grace, who went to school in France, may have been exposed to the French dish of escargots and not minded the rural Wessex snail), shows the disparity between Giles’s and Grace’s social lives. Yet at the same time the dialogue between Giles and Robert provides a commentary on the nature of a being. Giles laments that “of all places, that was where [the slug] shouldn’t have been!,” but Robert points out that cabbage was “his native home . . .; and where else could we expect him to be?” (79). Like the slug, Grace seems out of place in her native home to those around her, but also like him, she was “born” in Little Hintock, and she has “lived on”  –​from the proceeds of its timber  –​Little Hintock, leading perhaps not to the question “can the native return?” but rather can the native leave?32 Robert’s comment on the “nater of such creatures” resonates again at the end of the novel, when the term recurs three times consecutively to indicate the wide variety of woodland animals who are Giles’s “neighbours” (301). As Grace sits alone in his hut looking out, the narrator relates, she could see various small members of the animal community that lived unmolested there –​creatures of hair, fluff, and scale; the toothed kind and the billed kind; underground creatures jointed and ringed –​circumambulating the hut under the impression that Giles having gone away, nobody was there; and eyeing it inquisitively with a view to winter quarters. Watching these neighbours who knew neither law nor sin distracted her a little from her trouble. (301)

Rather than listing specific animal species, Hardy chooses to name them by composing features: hair, fluff, scale, teeth, bills, joints, and rings. In this way, Grace seems to join the wider animal community as a creature made of skin and hair, living unmolested in Giles’s hut outside of societal limits. The sense of Giles and Grace’s participation in the animal community is extended by the conflation of the sounds they produce with animal noises. When Grace knocks at Giles’s hut, initially “he took no notice of her tiny signal” because he “seemed to be accustomed to the noises of woodpeckers, squirrels, and such small creatures” (296). Later, it is Grace 32 As Beer concludes, “return is not possible for the native without the idea of retrogression”; return occurs “at the price of returning to an earlier cultural stage in their development pattern”; see Open Fields, p. 53. This illuminates what is at stake in the early scenes of Grace’s return.

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who confuses Giles’s cough for an animal sound: she hears “a faint noise amid the trees resembling a cough; but as it never came any nearer she concluded that it was a squirrel or a bird” (302). Only when it is too late does she realize her mistake. Throughout The Woodlanders, Hardy seems to be exploring what the nature of a creature really is, focusing on the continuity between human and animal worlds. The ruins of Fitzpiers’s ancestors’ castle are now inhabited by calves, “young creatures” who are pictured “cooling their thirsty tongues by licking the quaint Norman carving” (160), and Darling, the “sleek creature” Giles buys for Grace, proves to have more intelligence than Fitzpiers when it comes to traversing the darkness (202). The implementation of man-​traps at the end of the novel brings the notion of kinship full circle: appropriately it is Grace, who feels the neighborliness of the woodland creatures around Giles’s hut, who is almost caught. Is trapping animals unlike trapping humans? Hardy returns to this theme in Jude with the rabbit caught in the gin. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, six of the ten applications of the word creature to animals are in relation to birds. Just as Thomasin is portrayed in comparison to birds, the presence of these creatures in Tess seems to highlight continuity and to interrogate traditional human–​animal boundaries. At Trantridge, Tess teaches the “dumb creatures” to sing, just as Alec teaches her to whistle, an irony which will serve as a launching point for Chapter 3 (65). At Talbothays Dairy, she ponders on the fleeting aspect of what it means to be an individual life in the span of time as the spring brings “[a]‌nother year’s instalment” of “ephemeral creatures” like nightingales, thrushes, and finches (144).33 On a day so hot that “the blackbirds and thrushes crept about under the currant-​bushes rather in the manner of quadrupeds than of winged creatures,” Angel breaks down and declares his love to her (164). On the night Tess encounters the dying game pheasants, she flees into the plantation because it seemed the “only . . . escape for her hunted soul” and sleeps in “a sort of nest” of leaves. The birds are heard first rather than seen, the sound of “wild creatures” whose bodies hit the ground, but when she wakes, Tess discovers the dying “harmless feathered creatures” and recognizes their suffering (296–​297). In this scene, Hardy emphasizes the cruelty of sport, stressing that the birds were 33 For a similar concept in Hardy’s poetry, see “Proud Songsters” (CP 835–​836). See also James Persoon’s reading of the poem’s ending, which shifts its tone from a possibly pessimistic “mechanistic view” of life’s ephemerality to one of wonder and enchantment with the mystery of life, connecting the birds to the enduring elements of “earth, and air, and rain” in Hardy’s Early Poetry: Romanticism through a ‘Dark Bilberry Eye’ (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), pp. 75–​76.

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“brought into being by artificial means solely to gratify these propensities” of the hunters (298).34 While Tess sees the birds’ dying agony as outweighing her human anguish, their plight parallels the situation in which Tess has been trapped by society, as will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 5. Her dire situation also is mirrored by the birds who arrive at Flintcomb-​ Ash, birds described in a manner not unlike the wild mallard whom Diggory Venn meets. While Hardy’s reference to “Franklin underfoot” was brief and passing in the earlier novel, here his narrator explains the sort of Arctic knowledge these “nameless” birds possess in detail: After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of dry frost, when strange birds from behind the north pole began to arrive silently on the upland of Flintcomb-​Ash; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes –​eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions, of a magnitude such as no human being had ever conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide of snow-​hills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous distortions; and retained the expression of feature that such scenes had engendered. (307)

The birds venture “quite near to Tess and Marian,” and like the mallard before them, they seem to have “dismissed experiences” past “for the immediate” –​the girls’ hacking that stirs up the soil, revealing food for them (307). This shift from the unspoken (and humanly unendurable) trauma that the birds have endured to the shared embodied present injects a sense of the unknowability of the individual, human or nonhuman. The narrator’s description of the birds’ physical experience of the Arctic gestures toward the psychological experience Tess undergoes after Angel leaves her: for both, the only way forward is to focus on the immediate moment, to provide for basic creaturely needs. The first animal creature encountered in Tess is Prince, the Durbeyfield horse, on the fateful night Tess and Abraham leave to take the hives to market. Prince is called a “poor creature” and described with language that situates him on a similar level as first the Durbeyfield children, then the Durbeyfield breadwinner.35 The continuity between him and Tess 34 The scene was influenced by Hardy’s walk with a local gamekeeper who recounted “a battue” in which 700 pheasants were shot in one day (BR 218–​219). See also Hardy’s poem “The Puzzled Game-​Birds” (CP 148). 35 Cohn also notes the use of “creature” to link Prince to the Durbeyfield children, who are called “helpless creatures” in the previous chapter; see “No Insignificant Creature,” p. 510.

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and Abraham is highlighted by the rendering of the two human characters as “figures” and their shared summons to labor at an unreasonable hour: Prince “look[s]‌wonderingly round at the night, at the lantern, at their two figures, as if he could not believe that at that hour, when every living thing was intended to be in shelter and at rest, he was called upon to go out and labour” (35–​36).36 The other animals named as creatures appear right before Tess is pursued by either Alec or Angel: Alec’s horse on the night in the Chase (“the panting creature” who needs to rest) (80), Dumpling and Old Pretty, the cows Angel lines up for Tess on the day he first embraces her (“the aforesaid creatures”) (165), and the rats at the bottom of the rick on the harvesting day when Alec looks on (simply “the creatures”) (355). This naming of the animal as creature prepares the way for the consideration of Tess as creature, invoking reader sympathy by recalling the fragility of all living beings. In Jude the Obscure, the protest against the cruelty of human treatment of animals is clear and direct. Of the thirty-​two uses of creature in the novel, seven refer to animals, and six of these apply to pigs. The first is the “long-​legged creature” that Jude and Arabella chase during their courtship (46); the next five all signify the pig they slaughter during the early days of their marriage. Jude calls the pig a creature three times during the pig-​killing scene, emphasizing pity for the animal and continuity between human and animal worlds. For Arabella, the moment of face-​to-​ face encounter comes just as the pig dies, “his glazing eyes riveting themselves on [her] with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends” (59) –​a reproach later repeated by Hardy in his poems “The Puzzled Game-​Birds” (CP 148) and “The Mongrel” (877). Arabella’s response shifts the sense of creature to indicate alterity:  “Artful creatures  –​they always keep back a drop like that as long as they can!” (Jude 59). Her description of the pig as “artful” is noteworthy:  the epithet implies trickery, deception, and skill, characteristics not usually believed to be within animals’ capacities, as will be examined in later chapters. The other animal deemed a creature in the novel is the “rabbit caught in a gin” that Jude and Sue hear cry in the night. The narrator explains, “[a]‌s was the little creature’s habit, it did not soon repeat its cry; and 36 Compare with the description of “aged night-​ horses, who seemed ever patiently wondering between their hollow coughs why they had always to work at that still hour when all other sentient creatures were privileged to rest” in “The Son’s Veto,” a short story Hardy wrote in 1891, the same year as Tess’s publication (CSS 409).

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probably would not do so more than once or twice; but would remain bearing its torture till the morrow, when the trapper would come and knock it on the head” (205). Jude and Sue project their own pain at being trapped by society into the cry of the rabbit. The narrator’s and Jude’s rendering of animals as creatures highlights continuity between worlds, but to read only likeness in the animal world would be to fail to recognize the absolute unknowability of the individual:  a problem that occurs in encounters both between humans and animals and between humans. The appearance of the term creature to describe animals does more than assert kinship and appeal to reader empathy. It complicates boundaries, interrogates constructions of “human” or “animal,” and gestures toward an ethics based on empathy.

Human Creatures In Hardy’s earlier novels, “creature” describes animals more frequently than humans, but as his career as a novelist progressed he increasingly shifted its application from animals to humans. In Far from the Madding Crowd, for example, nine of the seventeen mentions of creature correspond to animals while only six designate humans; by Jude the Obscure, half of its thirty-​two appearances refer directly to Sue. Sue is the human in Hardy’s novels who is figured as creature most often, an appropriate appellation given the difficulty her character has presented to critics.37 What does it mean to be a human creature? In Hardy’s texts, it frequently means being a woman:  the word only denotes specific male characters in the novels twice (Jude and the engineman in Tess) and children twice (the Durbeyfield children, Sorrow). Its human meaning is also used in the broader abstraction “fellow-​creatures,” but recurrently creature seems to identify a male gaze upon the female body and a patriarchal conjecture of what it is to be a woman. How, then, should the reader perceive this idea of woman-​as-​creature? Does the term suggest continuity and sympathy for another being in the wider collective world, as it did when applied to animals? Or does it imply that women are something less than human by 37 Critics have read Sue as repressed, asexual, feminist, enigmatic, and a unique being. See Rosemarie Morgan’s “Passion Denied: Jude the Obscure,” in Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 110–​154; Zane Linde’s “ ‘Intended by Nature to Be Left Intact’: An Asexual Reading of Jude the Obscure,” Thomas Hardy Journal, 27 (2012), 81–​88; Phillip Mallett’s “ ‘The Immortal Puzzle’: Hardy and Sexuality,” in Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies, ed. by Mallett (New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 181–​202; and D.  H. Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy, p. 122.

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associating them with animals?38 Can the concept of creature symbolize the distance between all living beings without the traces of a hierarchical viewpoint, without an upward gaze of idealistic admiration or a downward glance of patronage or supercilious contempt? In order to get a better understanding of Sue-​as-​creature, one must first consider how Hardy uses creature to portray women in his earlier novels. Under the Greenwood Tree shows its heroine, Fancy Day, as a creature twice. In its first instance, the word indicates the sense of Fancy’s alterity in the eyes of her community:  William Dewy questions, “By the way . . . that young creature the school mis’ess must be sung to to-​night wi’ the rest?” (24). She is both a member of the village (who will be sung to “wi’ the rest”) and an outsider (marked by her connection to the modern world with her education and the displacement of the choir with the organ). Its second appearance again serves to position her within and outside assumed categorizations:  Maybold realizes “that the young creature whose graces had intoxicated him into making the most imprudent resolution of his life was less an angel, than a woman” (157). His divine creature becomes woman –​and the “cold and sickly thrill” he feels that accompanies this transformation suggests the shift is not a positive one from his perspective. In Far from the Madding Crowd, the word creature applied to Fanny Robin often links her to the animal world, emphasizing the fragility of her person and drawing upon a sort of physical sympathy for her as a living being. Gabriel perceives her as “that slight and fragile creature,” likening her pulse to a dying lamb, and she is also called a “gentle creature” (55, 302). With Bathsheba, the designation of creature serves a very different function. While Boldwood idolizes Bathsheba as approaching the divine (“a mild sort of apotheosis took place in his fancy”), the narrator explains that she actually “lived and breathed within his own horizon a troubled creature like himself ” (125). Here, the term connects Bathsheba to Boldwood:  instead of women as divine (as Boldwood believes Bathsheba to be), the narrator implies that women live within the same horizon as men, facing the same demands of physical and emotional existence (Bathsheba is out supervising her farm, not sitting in her house where Boldwood had expected her to be when he goes to court her). Troy uses the word to trivialize her: when Bathsheba admonishes him for betting on another horse race, he calls her “a chicken-​hearted creature” and 38 See Bourke’s discussion of an 1872 letter to The Times titled “Are Women Animals?” in What It Means to Be Human, pp. 1–​2, 67–​70.

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indicates that he wishes he had never married her (255). Later, when Troy decides to reclaim Bathsheba as his wife, he reduces her to her physical appearance. He says to Pennyways, “She’s a handsome woman, . . . is she not? Own that you never saw a finer or more splendid creature in your life” (352). His focus on Bathsheba’s beauty –​which stirred him to want to reclaim her as his own –​reads as if he were describing a horse or a dog instead of a human. In The Return of the Native, while the term highlights the alterity between Eustacia and the heathfolk (who think of her as “that lonesome dark eyed creature up there, that some say is a witch” and as “so splendid a creature”), it also serves to counterbalance the view of Eustacia as something approaching the divine (52, 72). Just as Boldwood idolized Bathsheba, Charley had always regarded Eustacia . . . as a romantic and sweet vision, scarcely incarnate. He had been so shut off from her by the dignity of her look and the pride of her speech, except at that one blissful interval when he was allowed to hold her hand, that he had hardly deemed her a woman, wingless and earthly, subject to household conditions and domestic jars. The inner details of her life he had only conjectured. She had been a lovely wonder, predestined to an orbit in which the whole of his own was but a point. (320–​321)

When he later sees Eustacia leaning “like a helpless despairing creature against a wild wet bank,” he is “filled . . . with an amazed horror” to discover that his imagined divine woman is, like all humans, an animal.39 Angel Clare has a similar disruption of his idolized view of Tess at Stonehenge when she is about to be captured. As he holds her hand, he notices that “her breathing now was quick and small, like that of a lesser creature than a woman” (418). A  sense of fear is tangible in the male characters as they discover that the fragility of the women they erroneously apotheosized is not ethereal but corporeal.40 The replacement of woman-​as-​divine with woman-​as-​animal reveals the shared finitude of mortality. Women are, as the narrator of Far from the Madding Crowd explains, “troubled creatures” like the men who fail to perceive them as such, bound to the same perils of flesh-​and-​blood being as other embodied creatures. 39 One might also consider the similarities between Charley’s vision of Eustacia-​as-​angel and a child’s fascination with an insect caught in a “domestic jar” of the glass kind. 40 In contrast, Giles only views Grace as a “supernatural creature” in his feverish state upon his deathbed (W 309).

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Already the concept of woman-​as-​creature is complicated, often inextricably bound up with male perception and misperception, with ideas of hierarchy and (at times) latent misogyny. Perhaps appropriately for a novel that opens with a wife sale –​literally subjecting the role of the female to that of an animal  –​The Mayor of Casterbridge offers an overview on the sexually charged nature of what it means for a woman to be a creature. The furmity woman at the tent where Susan is sold is identified as a “haggish creature” whose “respectability” extends as far as her “white apron”: a removable symbol of domesticity, marking the woman from the animal as if personhood were dependent on clothing, something that can be put on and taken off (8).41 Creature becomes a sort of euphemism for Henchard’s view of women with whom he has had sexual relations:  Henchard tells Farfrae of his history with Lucetta while referring to her as “this young creature” (74), and as he approaches his remarriage to Susan, he is careful to hide the fact he feels “no amatory fire” toward “this pale creature” (78), who seems to the townspeople too fragile and ghostly to be an appropriate match for him. Susan’s lack of physical and sexual presence is so striking that the boys in town nickname her “The Ghost” (78). Elizabeth-​Jane’s depiction as “creature” also is constructed in relation to her femininity as defined by hegemonic masculinity –​or rather, her failure to fulfill domestic tasks in a manner befitting Henchard’s conception of “refined womanhood” (122). She occupies a strange liminal ground between uneducated animal (as indicated by her use of dialect  –​“those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel,” the narrator quips) and the masculine (as evidenced by her “elephantine” handwriting and her “unmaidenly” interest in Farfrae that she works on “quenching”) (121–​124).42 In this role, the narrator explains, “she lived on, a dumb, deep-​feeling, great-​eyed creature, construed by not a single contiguous being” (124). Yet Elizabeth-​Jane resists the way she has so far been created by the circumstances of her life, and throughout the novel she asserts a self-​creative force:  she studies Latin, for example, in an attempt to “humanize” herself (124).43 Lucetta, after marrying Farfrae, calls Elizabeth-​Jane a “lonely creature,” a comment that perhaps 41 See DR’s description of a woman’s clothes as part of her “creature,” rendered in insect-​like terms: “clothes are something exterior to every man; but to a woman her dress is part of her body . . . Crease but the very Ultima Thule of fringe or flounce, and it hurts her as much as pinching her. Delicate antennae, or feelers, bristle on every outlying frill. Go to the uppermost: she is there; tread on the lowest: the fair creature is there almost before you” (128). 42 The “mark of the beast” alludes to the status of an individual’s soul; see Revelations 14:9–​11. 43 One might argue that Elizabeth-​Jane succeeds in her self-​creative path: despite being the illegitimate child of a sailor, she secures marriage, financial stability, social status, and domestic happiness.

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juxtaposes the two women’s sexual “success” in securing (or failing to secure) a husband (198). In an earlier letter to Henchard, Lucetta refers to herself as a “creature too unconventionally devoted to you –​who feels it impossible that she can be the wife of any other man; and who is yet no more to you than the first woman you meet in the street” (227). The sexuality of a woman is construed in terms of creatureliness, of vulnerability, of bodily belonging or not belonging to a man. The novel signals the shift in emphasis from creature-​as-​animal to creature-​as-​ woman: while the previous novels under consideration apply the word more frequently to animals than to women, novels from Mayor onward increasingly apply it to women. Notably, Mayor also draws upon the sense of “creature” as compared to formulations of “body” –​such as nobody, anybody, and everybody –​ which the OED includes in the human definition of the term. When Henchard looks around while standing on the bridge before spotting his own effigy, the use of creature takes on this sense: “He looked backwards and forwards, and no creature appeared in view” (MC 276). The attention to bodies in the scene seems to refocus this meaning of the word on the possession of a physical corpus, human or animal, in contrast to the OED’s implication that to be “somebody” one must be human. In The Woodlanders, the tension created by the relationship between one’s physical body and internal essence complicates the idea of woman as man’s creature. Grace is sent to a finishing school “with a bevy of sylph-​ like creatures in muslin” to elevate her from her current social standing by improving her marriageability (77). When Fitzpiers first sees her, he has just observed both Suke and Marty get white paint on them from a freshly coated gate. He laughs at Suke and feels sorry for Marty, but he jumps up to help Grace, whom he perceives as a “different sort of personage”: “To let such a creature touch it even with a tip of her glove was to Fitzpiers almost like letting her proceed to tragical self-​destruction” (113). He views her as “a lovely creature!,” commenting that “the design is for once carried out. Nature has at last recovered her lost union with the Idea!” (130). Here, the connotations of admiration and of patronage become conflated. Rather than regarding Grace as a person, he abstracts her as an ideal of beauty, rendering her as an object to be studied and obtained –​an object he quickly will grow tired of possessing. When Grace is depicted as a “sylph-​like greenish-​white creature, as toned by the sunlight and leafage” by the narrator, Fitzpiers’s “remote gaze” as he approaches is only “one of mild interest rather than of rapture” until he gets close enough to see her beauty better (167–​168).

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Yet the narrator uses the word “creature” in relation to Grace to imply an essential personhood beyond physical form. When the reader first meets her in Sherton, the narrator describes her physical appearance and dress before continuing, What people therefore saw of her in a cursory view was very little; in truth, mainly something that was not she. The woman herself was a conjectural creature who had little to do with the outlines presented to Sherton eyes: a shape in the gloom, whose true quality could only be approximated by putting together a movement now and a glance then, in that patient attention which nothing but watchful loving-​kindness ever troubles itself to give. (39)

In short, who Grace is cannot be construed by her physical being –​the surface image she presents that inspires Fitzpiers’s love –​but rather by a movement and a glance here and there that reveal her interior self only to those who take the time to notice. Giles has this awareness of Grace’s person when he sits with her in the Abbey after Fitzpiers’s disappearance. He realizes, “it was a new woman in many ways whom he had come out to see; a creature of more ideas, more dignity, and, above all, more assurance, than the original Grace had been capable of ” (276–​ 277). When Grace asks him what he is thinking, he replies, “You are very good, dear Grace . . . You are better, much better, than you used to be.” When asked how she was better, Giles struggles to articulate what he notices: he “could not very well tell her how,” so he replies, “ ‘You are prettier,’ which was not what he really had meant” (277). A  comment on Grace’s beauty becomes the acceptable shorthand for his sense of her interior self, but Giles feels the gap between what he says and what he perceives, a conflict between his feeling of kinship with Grace and the sense of her as other, skirting the limits of the knowable. When Fitzpiers returns unexpectedly, the reader learns that Grace is an “impressionable creature, who combined modern nerves with primitive feelings, and was doomed by such co-​existence to be numbered among the distressed, and to take her scourgings to their exquisite extremity” from the sound of her breathing, soon displaced by the sound of her husband’s voice out the window, which sends Grace to Giles’s hut for refuge (293). Here, she becomes a part of the evolutionary chain, a transitional form between the modern and the becoming-​extinct rural past. Grace’s depiction as a conjectural creature, whose essence exceeds her physical body, prefigures Sue in Jude the Obscure. Grace herself considers what it means to be a creature in the passage when Suke Damson and Felice Charmond arrive at her home to hear

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news of Fitzpiers’s health on the night of his fall. As Grace looks at the two women, “[a]‌tenderness spread over Grace like a dew. It was well enough, conventionally, to address either one of them in the wife’s regulation terms of virtuous sarcasm, as woman, creature, or thing. But life, what was it, after all?” (257). The manuscript and three-​volume first edition read, “But life, what was it, and who was she?” In this passage, Grace contemplates the names she could use to demean these two women who have slept with her husband –​in descending rank, woman, creature, or thing  –​and instead feels sympathy for them. In the end she thinks of them as “Petticoat the First and Petticoat the Second of her Bien-​aimé” (258), the shorthand at the end setting up Fitzpiers as a model for Pierston in The Well-​Beloved (1897). The query of the earlier edition echoes Robert’s commentary on slugs and the “nater of such creatures” –​a question that would interest the “new woman” the married Grace has become. In Tess, Angel Clare’s construction of the heroine as a creature rather than a flesh-​and-​blood individual has fatal consequences. Angel tends to think of women as creatures: Retty, when he carries her across the flooded field, is a “disquieted creature” (159), and Miss Mercy Chant is a “blameless creature” (174). While his view of Retty and Mercy as creatures takes on a patronizing sense of the term, his construal of Tess as a creature demonstrates just how much he “creates” her in his imagination. In Tess, he sees his ideal woman embodied. Unlike Fitzpiers with Grace, Angel realizes that “Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life –​a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself ” (172). Yet as the novel progresses he is puzzled over her character: he upholds the virgin/​whore dichotomy, alternately calling her “almost like a coquette” and “the most honest, spotless creature that ever lived” (194).44 After they are engaged, he thinks to himself, “what a creature of moods she was, and how careful he would have to be of her when she depended for her happiness entirely on him” (214). With marriage, Tess will shift from an independent creature to his creature. As they have their first tea together as man and wife, he asks himself, “Do I  realize solemnly enough how utterly and irretrievably this little womanly thing is the creature of my good or bad faith and fortune? I  think not. I  think I  could not, unless I  were a woman myself ” (236). 44 For a discussion of Victorian sexual ideology (which tended to categorize women through the virgin/​whore dichotomy), see the first chapter of Penny Boumelha’s Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 11–​27.

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Here, Hardy seems to be commenting not on Angel’s perception of Tess but on the implicit misogyny in the traditional institution of marriage itself. Tess, who was “a woman living her precious life,” is now “this little womanly thing”; she is rendered an object by her liaison with Angel. Her social currency is her status as his wife, and as much as Angel can attempt to understand, he cannot fully realize what it is to be a woman in patriarchal society. He continues by thinking, “What I am in worldly estate, she is. What I become she must become. What I cannot be she cannot be. And shall I ever neglect her, or hurt her, or even forget to consider her? God forbid such a crime!” (236). This solemn oath is forgotten almost as soon as it is made. Despite his attempt to be aware of Tess as a person, Angel falls into the role of patriarchal male when he discovers “his” creature has been had by someone else. He leaves Tess to her fate. How, then, do these constructions of woman-​as-​creature help shape readings of Sue-​as-​creature in Jude? The novel sets up the idea of creature in the opening pages, explaining, “Nature’s logic was too horrid for [Jude] to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony” (12). This theme of the absence of justice in both society and nature runs throughout the novel:  Sue is neither a possession nor a nonhuman animal, but her “unsubstitutable singularity” is never adequately acknowledged in practice by any of the characters. The word creature in Jude seems to highlight this paradox: the problem of being an animal, a member of the collective conscious world, while respecting the absolute alterity of the other. When applied to Sue, “creature” often indicates this paradoxical sense of existence in a world of both “daily human experience” and “conjectural subjects” (147). When Sue runs away to Jude’s house, she asks him, “You called me a creature of civilization, or something, didn’t you?” before telling him of the books she has read (141). She tells him, “My life has been entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me. I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them –​one or two of them particularly –​almost as one of their own sex” (141). Upon hearing her account of living with a man “like two men almost,” Jude reacts in a way that shows her behavior is disorienting for him:  “Jude looked round upon the arm-​chair and its occupant, as if to read more carefully the creature he had given shelter to” (142). His first thought is of her sexual purity; he tells her with a trembling voice, “However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are as innocent as you are unconventional!” (142). Part of the problem that Jude presents is the role of sex in male/​female relationships:  societal perception of female sexuality has rendered the woman a

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thing (through the objectification of the gaze) or as a breeding animal (a means of reproducing and perpetuating the species –​and also a means for the transmission of property from one generation of men to the next). Wrapped in Jude’s large coat, her body and its traditional associations to sexuality seemingly tucked away, Sue is figured as a rational, intellectual being.45 She protests against the idea that she is “cold-​natured, –​sexless,” arguing, “Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-​contained in their daily lives” (143). Her abstinence in her relationships with men could arguably be seen as a feminist form of contraception, allowing her to choose if and when she would undergo a period of maternity.46 Free from the traditional gender roles of wife and mother, Sue protects her space as an individual and an equal. Jude thinks to himself, “[i]‌f he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience” (147). Yet Jude can never get over the sense of Sue’s sex, as opposite as it is in quality to Arabella’s “earthly” appeal. He views Sue as “so ethereal a creature that her spirit could be seen trembling through her limbs” (179); he addresses her as “you spirit, you disembodied creature, you dear, sweet, tantalizing phantom  –​hardly flesh at all; so that when I  put my arms round you I  almost expect them to pass through you as through air!” (236). He apologizes “for being gross, as you call it!” (236). Later he addresses her as “a phantasmal, bodiless creature, one who –​if you’ll allow me to say it –​has so little animal passion in you, that you can act upon reason in the matter, when we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance can’t” (250) and “a distinct type –​a refined creature, intended by Nature to be left intact” (332). The word becomes almost shorthand for Sue’s sexuality. Phillotson calls her “one of the oddest creatures I ever met” (221) and “an odd creature!” (241), and Arabella speaks of Sue as “not a particular warm-​hearted creature,” implying that Sue is not sexually passionate (282). Even Sue labels herself as a creature, although always in a 45 Mallett notes the text’s allusion to Ganymedes, suggesting her desire for something akin to “the Platonic doctrine of Eros propounded by male inverts [in Havelock Ellis’s terminology] like Wilde”; see “The Immortal Puzzle,” pp. 193–​195. See also Hardy’s preface to the 1912 edition, where he discusses a reviewer who described Sue as “the woman of the feminist movement . . . the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing” (Jude xlvi). 46 See also Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women, p. 145; she argues that “Sue is right to equate her refusal of a sexual relationship with her freedom, in that it avoids the surrender to involuntary physiological processes which her pregnancies entail,” identifying this as “the point where mind and body are in potential conflict.”

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negative manner, saying, “I know I am a poor miserable creature” (231); questioning, “I am not a cold-​natured, sexless creature, am I, for keeping you at such a distance?” (256); and deeming herself “a pitiable creature . . . good for neither earth nor heaven any more” (328) and “such a vile creature –​too worthless to mix with ordinary human beings” (338). The term seems to highlight both the other characters’ sense of Sue’s alterity and the flexuous boundary between Sue’s conjectural and physical selves. While Grace’s essence can be caught in glimpses and movements, Sue’s disconnect from her physical embodiment separates her from a wider world of living beings, perhaps not unlike the way Tess’s dissociation between her body and her “living will” after becoming Alec’s mistress removes her from the physical world and physical actions (Tess 401). The problem of creature is a problem of existence in a body: to be a woman in flesh and blood is to belie one’s interior self, to exist in a state vulnerable to objectification, to sexism, and to misogyny. The cognitive dissonance Sue feels between her attempt to exert her personhood by setting aside the body (and bodily desire) and her surrender to the body (and Jude’s desires) is never resolved, leading to tragic consequences. Only by returning to Phillotson and conceding to the conventions of society’s expectations does she believe she can atone for her attempts to “evade, or to exploit, the ways in which she is made to inhabit her gender.”47 Tied up with the formulation of female sexuality in the term creature is the notion of woman as domestic animal. Arabella points out that Jude’s sense of kindness to animals is the same as his idea of fairness to women; she brags to Sue over the ease of seducing Jude, saying, “Never such a tender fool as Jude is if a woman seems in trouble, and coaxes him a bit! Just as he used to be about birds and things” (259). When Arabella runs into Phillotson on the road, she admonishes him for divorcing Sue, telling him that his legal grounds for the transaction were void: Sue was innocent of adultery. Speaking of sex, she tells him She’d have come round in time. We all do! Custom does it! it’s all the same in the end! . . . You were too quick about her. I shouldn’t have let her go! I should have kept her chained on –​her spirit for kicking would have been broke soon enough! There’s nothing like bondage and a stone-​deaf task-​ master for taming us women. (306)

The exclamation, “We all do! Custom does it! it’s all the same in the end!” shifts the act of sex from a natural instinct to a sign of domestication, of 47 “The Immortal Puzzle,” p. 197.

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being “broken in.” Arabella, having been raised on a pig farm, sees no difference between the female and animal worlds in this regard:  just as man has subjugated the natural world, he has subjugated the woman. She quotes scripture to Phillotson, presenting the idea “then shall the man be guiltless; but the woman shall bear her iniquity,” to which he replies, “Cruelty is the law pervading all nature and society; and we can’t get out of it if we would!” (307). Within such a system, no space exists for the alterity of the other: male or female, human or nonhuman. There is no simple answer to what it means to be a creature in Hardy’s novels. On one side of the Möbius strip, the concept of creature serves as a link between all living beings; on the flipside, it is a sign of the unknowable individuality of the other. The word inherently draws upon the sympathy of like beings while concurrently setting in motion notions of hierarchy and a sense of distance. Hardy’s increasing use of the term and his shift of it from animals to women in his “Novels of Character and Environment” seem to correspond directly with amplified efforts “to strike a blow –​however indirectly, for humanity towards man, woman, or the lower animals,” as he wrote of Jude in a letter to William Archer (CL, ii, 96). Across his oeuvre, “creature” functions in a similar Möbius-​strip manner to the ways described in the sample discussed. Even in Desperate Remedies (1871) –​his earliest published novel and the one with the highest frequency of the word creature (seventeen occurrences) out of any of the works not covered in this ­chapter –​the appearance of creature probes assumed boundaries between human and nonhuman animals. Manston, reflecting on his rejected proposal to Cytherea, looks into a pool of water in a “rain-​water-​butt”: “Hundreds of thousands of minute living creatures sported and tumbled in its depths with every contortion that gaiety could suggest; perfectly happy, though consisting only of a head, or a tail, or at most a head and a tail, and all doomed to die within the twenty-​ four hours” (209). The image recalls the “pulpy creatures” Cytherea and Edward gaze upon just before their first kiss in the rowboat early in the novel (47), and Manston resolves that he, too, should have his day in the sun. In Hardy’s poetry, “creature” most often describes animals or the ­creations of an unfeeling Creator. The poems “The Lacking Sense” (CP 116–​118), “The Bedridden Peasant: To an Unknowing God” (124–​125), and “A Philosophical Fantasy” (893–​897) explore the “creaturely dependence” of conscious creation upon an unconscious creator, who “unwittingly sets wounds on what she loves” (117) and commits “crimes upon her creatures” (117), leaving them “In helpless bondage thus | To Time and Chance”

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(125). In these poems, “creature” emphasizes vulnerability –​“creatures” who are “Lame, starved, or maimed, or blind” (125) –​in a world dependent on a god who sees his creation as “malleable matter | For treatment scientific | More than sensitive and specific,” having “no sense” of “moral features,” “Or of ethical endeavour, | Or of justice to Earth’s creatures, | Or how Right from Wrong to sever” (896). In “Bags of Meat” (807–​ 808), “Compassion” (822–​823), and “The Calf ” (945), the word serves a humanitarian purpose, reconfiguring animals sold for human consumption as “mild” (822) and “bewildered” (945) creatures whose “deep dumb gaze” is “more eloquent | Than tongues of widest heed” (822). The appellation “creature” to discuss animals instead of less favorable terms –​like “brute” or “beast” –​seems intentional and fits with Hardy’s broader vision of a “shifted . . . centre of altruism”; a search of the Victorian hyper-​concordance lists “brute” only six times in the “Novels of Character and Environment,” and “beast” nine times.48 Placed in a wider Victorian context, Hardy’s choice to use the singular form of “creature” to signify individual animals is striking. In his contemporaries’ novels the word almost always functions to describe a female character or to disparage a male one. In George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), creature appears around eighty-​five times, yet every singular usage of “creature” denotes a human (especially Gwendolyn or Mirah or in the phrases “poor creature” or “human creature”), and the plural form only occasionally is employed to portray animals (for example, a pair of horses). Out of the approximately eighty-​eight occurrences of the term in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), only in one case does it apply to animals, and in the plural form (to a group of crabs, lobsters, and crawfish). William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) has around one hundred thirteen recurrences of the word, all of them human. In Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), the approximately seventeen instances of creature tend to disparage an individual’s humanity, and the single use of “creatures” refers to microscopic organisms killed each time one drinks a glass of water, which then becomes a metaphor for the risk of sending men to sea, reducing the value of human life to a market commodity in a capitalist system. To be a creature was to occupy a lower rung of the humanist hierarchical ladder, which elevated the “rational” upper-​class male above all. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-​Glass (1871) 48 Hardy’s narrator and characters tend to apply “beast” to four-​legged creatures (often in conjunction with Biblical allusions) and “brute” to men and male cruelty.

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creature does take on a Möbius-​strip quality questioning the boundaries of the human –​but in excursions toward the monstrous, toward the fabulous, toward the unnamable. Darwin himself tended to reserve “creature” as a catch-​all term for living beings rather than for individual animals. One must look transatlantically to find other novelists using the word in a similar manner to Hardy:  Mark Twain, for example, used creature to describe individual insects in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and Herman Melville to marvel at an array of land and sea mammals and fish, from polar bears to sharks to –​of course –​a variety of types of whales in Moby Dick (1851). Today’s OED maintains nearly identical definitions for creature as The New English Dictionary but rearranges the order: the second entry defines it as human, moving the animal to the third entry, and the fourth denotes “a person who owes his or her fortune or position, and remains subservient to, a patron . . .; a puppet,” placing the figurative sense as the fifth and final entry. While this development shifts the prerogative from the animal to the human, it suggests a subtle alteration in the perception of creature, tilting the emphasis away from its use as a derogatory term that implies a lower hierarchical status and toward a sympathetic attitude. Furthermore, it reminds the reader once again that language, like the constructed borders between humans/​animals and men/​women, is not stable. It is a changing, evolving, developing entity: not unlike a creature.

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Ch apter  2

“The Only Things We Believe in Are the Sheep and the Dogs”

In his Study of Thomas Hardy (1914), D.  H. Lawrence summarizes the human plot of Far from the Madding Crowd in a paragraph: The unruly Bathsheba, though almost pledged to Farmer Boldwood . . . lightly runs off and marries Sergeant Troy . . . She loves Troy, he does not love her. All the time she is loved faithfully and persistently by the good Gabriel, who is like a dog that watches the bone and bides the time. [Sergeant] Troy treats Bathsheba badly . . . Her pride helps her to recover. Troy is killed by Boldwood, exit the unscrupulous . . . young soldier and the mad, middle-​aged pursuer of the Fata Morgana, enter the good steady Gabriel, who marries Bathsheba because he will make her a good husband, and the flower of imaginative fine love is dead for her with Troy’s scorn of her.1

If Lawrence had been analyzing the novel’s ovine plot, his summary may have sounded something more like this: Lambing season begins. A ewe dies; a lamb is offered as a courting gift; a dead lamb is fed to the dogs [old and young] George. Young George drives a herd of pregnant ewes over a cliff; the sheep and their unborn lambs perish. A new herd comes under the care of the first shepherd, a man who carries lambs out of the cold and teaches them to drink from kettles. An orphaned lamb is dressed in the skin of a dead lamb and placed into a pen with the grieving mother ewe. The flock bathes. The sheep stray into a patch of clover and suffer from gastrointestinal pain: four die, three recover, and fifty have an operation, of which forty-​nine succeed. The sheep are sheared. One ewe blushes. Another is wounded. They huddle together through a storm. In the end, they are taken to the fair and sold for mutton.2

In his December 1874 review of the novel in the Nation, Henry James famously concluded, “[e]‌ verything human in the book strikes us as 1 Study of Thomas Hardy, p. 23. 2 My summary.

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factitious and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs” (CH 31). Certainly, as James suggests, the nonhuman animals in Far from the Madding Crowd are engaging and believable, often instrumental in propelling the plot forward and written about in a manner that demonstrates the author’s intimacy with the rural farming life. Yet his statement exposes a link between the two categories James meant to set up as dichotomous:  humans, sheep, and dogs are all classified as types of “things” (“everything” versus “only things”). Perhaps it was James’s intention to shift Hardy’s human characters into the category of things, a category reserved under Cartesian dualism for animals without souls: after all, he labeled Boldwood a “shadow” and Troy a “stage-​figure” (CH 31). Yet such a shift is not anomalous for Hardy, who was intrigued by the idea of human automatism as proposed by Thomas Huxley in a lecture that same year.3 The specific naming of species is also relevant. Like the human characters of the novel, the sheep and dogs exist within the shared environment of the farm. As domestic creatures they occupy a liminal ground somewhere between human and nonhuman animal, participating in acts that place them in unusual roles: they learn to use human tools, grieve, adopt orphans, and receive life-​saving operations; they alert others to danger, scheme for rewards, and perceive lingual cues. The narratives of the dogs and the sheep offer a deeper understanding of the novel, yet to reduce the novel to solely its human or animal plotlines would be to try to determine the front of the Möbius strip from the back. As Ivan Kreilkamp argues in his analysis of the sheep’s narrative in Far from the Madding Crowd, “it would seem more productive to understand Hardy’s ‘natural’ or nonhuman world as fully embedded into and inextricable from the human or social world.”4 The two are intertwined in an indeterminable loop. This chapter will take James’s claim seriously, following the most “believable” characters of Far from the Madding Crowd in order to see how Hardy levels the plane between humans and their animal kin through the word “creature” in encounters of close physical proximity. Furthermore, it will explore questions closely tied to the idea of a soul: boundaries set up and maintained by conceptions of morality. What does it mean to be a moral creature? The first section of this chapter will examine representations of 3 See Chapter 3’s discussion of Huxley’s lecture, “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata, and Its History.” 4 “Pitying the Sheep,” p. 474. Kreilkamp’s article also opens by engaging with James’s review seriously, revisiting the novel to explore the possibility of nonhuman characters as subjects and to consider the role of pastoral care.

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dogs in the novel, focusing on the encounter between Fanny Robin and the dog on the Casterbridge highway to ask, are nonhuman animals capable of being moral agents? do they possess something like moral sense? In the second section, the chapter will return to sheep, considering the case of the canceled sheep-​rot chapter to reflect on moral responsibility to animals –​human or nonhuman.

Dogs: Moral Agency and Moral Sense in Animals In her introduction to Far from the Madding Crowd, Linda Shires asserts that “the most powerful scene in the book” is “On Casterbridge highway,” in which Fanny Robin, ill, pregnant, and unable to move, is assisted to the poorhouse by an enigmatic dog. She tells us As a fallen woman, Fanny is the figure who presented the most trouble to Leslie Stephen and the conservative Cornhill. Fanny is also the problem of the book and Hardy certainly knows it. He will retell a story like hers in Tess of the d’Urbervilles where he takes the entire novel to do it justice. (xxix)

The scene is short, but Shires is right. In the six pages of the chapter, Hardy quietly manages to introduce many of the kinds of questions that he focused on throughout his works: questions of the fallen woman, the animal, and the “vast band of men shunned by the virtuous –​the men called seducers” (Jude 232).5 His approach to these questions, while emphatic in pleading on behalf of those society would ignore, shows a careful attention to the complexity of the issues at hand, down to the effect of word choice and phrasing in creating an emotional response in his readers. Rather than trying to philosophize easy answers, Hardy wrote “fiction subtly, against the grain . . . for questionings and not answers,” as Shires discusses elsewhere.6 Perhaps one of the more subtle and compelling questions raised is that of whether or not the dog who helps Fanny exhibits some type of moral agency or moral sense. Writing on this encounter in “Hardy and Philosophy,” Phillip Mallett points out That the dog is of no recognizable breed, while Fanny is left unnamed (she is simply “the woman”), allows the chapter to be read as a virtual test case for Darwin’s speculation that some of the higher animals, like dogs, might already exhibit “something very like a conscience.”7 5 Jude identifies himself as a “purblind, simple” member of this band. 6 Linda Shires, “ ‘And I Was Unaware’: The Unknowing Omniscience of Hardy’s Narrators,” in Thomas Hardy: Texts and Contexts, ed. by Phillip Mallett (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) pp. 31–​48 (pp. 35–​36). 7 “Hardy and Philosophy,” p. 28. See also Descent, p. 158.

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What exactly did it mean to have a conscience? To be a dog, in the literal or figurative sense? This section will seek to read the scene as “a virtual test case” for Darwin’s argument that the moral sense must originate in the social instincts common to both human and nonhuman animals. Rather than attempting to outline a “scientific system of philosophy” in Hardy’s work, attention will be paid to the way he conveys “seemings, provisional impressions” to “represent approximately the impressions of the age,” as he repeatedly argued his writings attempted to do (LW 406), tracing the way he portrays the three main characters of the scene (Fanny, the dog, and the absent yet implicated Troy) throughout the novel. First, it will address the presentation of Fanny leading up to the scene, paying special attention to the narrator’s word choice in describing her. Next, the section will focus on dogs who prime the scene for the mysterious dog on the highway. Finally, it will consider the seeming lack of moral aptitude in the male creature most often named a “dog” in the text: Troy. By reconfiguring the moral boundary between humans and animals through the word creature, Hardy interrogates notions of moral sense and moral agency, subverting not only Victorian conceptions of right and wrong, but also the idea of what it means to be a moral being in the natural world. When Fanny first appears in the text, she is described as simply “a figure” standing behind the oldest tree outside the wall of the churchyard. She evolves to “the motionless stranger,” “a slim girl,” “the girl,” and finally “the woman,” before moving back to being “the girl,” “the other,” “the stranger,” “the young woman,” “the young girl,” and finally, “that slight and fragile creature” (FFMC 52–​55). Besides proving that Hardy is far from redundant in writing an unnamed female figure, the narrator’s selection of apparent synonyms creates impressions of Fanny for the reader, carefully sketching the character who, despite her lack of page-​time, is central to the story of the novel. Hardy’s technique might be described in terms of the nineteenth-​century art movement Impressionism, which emphasized the way subjective perception shapes one’s view:  his word choice serves as his brush-​ strokes. As Jane Thomas notes, the term “impression” for Hardy “describes the impossibility of accurate and total representation of the material world” as well as “that which has a profound effect on an artist or writer:  what he chooses to represent on his canvas or in his pages.”8 Fanny starts out as a shape in the scene, vague 8 Jane Thomas, “Thomas Hardy and the Visual Arts,” in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. by Mallett, pp. 436–​445 (p. 442).

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enough to be an animal or human, then slowly moves along the spectrum from the “stranger,” to “the girl,” to “the woman,” then back to “the other,” and finally a “creature.” The fact that Fanny is standing outside the churchyard wall seems to imply that she is already a fallen woman, or sees herself as one: she is on the outskirts, hiding, wishing to remain unseen. She is outside the physical boundary of the place that represents moral good in society. Her location behind the oldest tree of the group perhaps anticipates Tess, and the image of the ancient woods of The Chase where Tess, too, meets a similar fate. Gabriel’s discovery of Fanny there and the impressions that gradually develop and sharpen into her character give her a sense of universality and timelessness:​Fanny could be anyone, anywhere. Her appearances as a figure and a creature invoke a sense of indeterminacy, blurring distinctions between the human and the animal world. In the brief moment of touch between Fanny and Gabriel, who upon accidentally encountering her is moved by her plight and hands her a shilling, Fanny’s pulse is likened to that of a lamb, further disturbing the human–​animal boundary. Gabriel feels that her wrist was beating with a throb of tragic intensity. He had frequently felt the same quick hard beat in the femoral artery of his lambs when overdriven. It suggested a consumption too great of a vitality, which, to judge from her figure and stature, was already too little. (54)

Gabriel empathizes with her because of his knowledge from the animal world, extending his “loving-​kindness,” as Hardy might say, from one to the other without hesitation. Walking away, Gabriel “fancied that he had felt himself in the penumbra of a very deep sadness when touching that slight and fragile creature. But wisdom lies in moderating mere impressions, and Gabriel endeavoured to think little of this” (55). Today, modern psychology terms this phenomenon “mirrored self-​recognition,” an emotional reciprocity that creates empathy as the observer recalls memories of personal experience with the emotion being viewed in the other person.9 Hardy titles the chapter “Recognition: A Timid Girl.” George Levine discusses the place of the observer in Darwin and the Novelists (1988), noting that in Hardy the levels of observation are layered. Characters observe other characters; the narrator observes the characters; and simultaneously the narrator is aware of being observed by the reader. Levine explains, “watching the living creature surreptitiously 9 For a discussion of mirrored self-​ recognition in animals, see György Gergely’s “From Self-​ recognition to Theory of Mind,” in Self-​awareness in Animals and Humans, ed. by Taylor Parker, Mitchell, and Boccia, pp. 51–​60.

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exposed confirms the possibility of the observer’s exposure, as well.”10 In discovering Fanny, Gabriel feels his exposure and “endeavours” to put the encounter out of his mind, and the narrator minimizes his own exposure by retracting the value of the impressionistic painting so far created of Fanny’s character, explaining that it is wiser to “moderat[e]‌mere impressions” (55). Despite this retraction, the scene primes the reader with empathy for Fanny that the later scene on the Casterbridge Highway calls for in full force. The image of the fallen woman was problematic for Hardy’s Victorian audience; as previously mentioned, Fanny made Leslie Stephen, the editor of the conservative Cornhill Magazine, deeply uneasy. In her study of the manuscript and serial versions of the novel, Cancelled Words (1992), Rosemarie Morgan explains that Stephen was looking for a quiet country tale for his readers, having read and been delighted by Under the Greenwood Tree; he ended up heavily editing Hardy’s manuscript of Far from the Madding Crowd to make it acceptable for his readership.11 An example of Stephen’s editorial sensibilities can be seen in his correspondence with Hardy during the serialization of the novel. In March 1874 Stephen wrote, I ventured to leave out a line or two in the last batch of proofs from an excessive prudery of wh. I am ashamed; but one is forced to be absurdly particular. May I  suggest that Troy’s seduction of the young woman will require to be treated in a gingerly fashion, when, as I suppose must be the case, he comes to be exposed to his wife? I mean that the thing must be stated but that the words must be careful –​excuse this wretched shred of concession to popular stupidity; but I am a slave.12

Despite the fact Hardy was forced to keep her quietly in the background of the novel, Fanny is the pulse of common lifeblood throughout it, and he builds the most sympathetic image of her character that he can. When Fanny goes to see Troy at the barracks (not the act of a conventionally respectable Victorian woman), Hardy continues his method of describing her in the most universal terms possible. Fanny appears as part of the snowfall: ephemeral and eternal, a part of the natural world rather than the cultural. Hardy’s narrator starts with a wide lens on the scene, describing the landscape and the falling snow, then zooms in on Fanny: Not long after [the snow began to fall] a form moved by the brink of the river. By its outline upon the colourless background a close observer might 10 Darwin and the Novelists, p. 227. 11 Rosemarie Morgan, Cancelled Words: Rediscovering Thomas Hardy (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 13–​19. 12 L. Stephen to TH, March 12, 1874. See Appendix II of Richard Little Purdy’s Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study, intro. by Charles P. C. Pettit (London: British Library, 2002), pp. 338–​339.

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Thomas Hardy and Animals have seen that it was small. This was all that was positively discoverable, though it seemed human. (FFMC 86)

She is as inoffensive an outline upon the earth as possible, unseen except by the close observer. Hardy requires the reader to lean closer to see her, to squint against the snow. Her only characteristic is that her outline is small, and whether or not she is human is undetermined. She continues on the scene as “the shape,” “the little shape,” and “the spot” before becoming “the figure” (86). The reader follows the agency of the snowballs she throws at the window to attract Troy’s attention rather than Fanny’s; she remains “a blurred spot in the snow” (87). When it is finally discovered that two human voices are corresponding, the narrator describes them by saying, “this person was so much like a mere shade upon the earth, and the other person so much a part of the building that one would have said the wall was holding a conversation with the snow” (87). To add insult to injury, Fanny is addressed by Troy with the question, “What girl are you?” to which she responds, as “the spot,” “Your wife, Fanny Robin” (87). She is simultaneously a tiny dot upon the scale of nature and a definite, named person. In her assertion “your wife,” Fanny claims her own innocence. From her perspective, Troy has acted as her husband by the laws of the natural world and has promised to become hers by the laws of society; therefore she is his “wife”  –​a claim that Troy later acknowledges over her coffin, despite his cruel question from the barracks that hints toward the fact that there are other women. After Fanny’s brave attempt to assert her own personhood, she is acknowledged by the narrator as “the girl,” then “the woman” before fading again into the natural as “the little spot.” Fanny is “the little spot” ignored and blotted out by society, the stain on Victorian morality that it attempts to rub out. The scene ends with “the soldiers’ peal of laughter,” which becomes “hardly distinguishable from the gurgle of the tiny whirlpools outside” from the river running nearby: Fanny feels her own vulnerability in perceiving the laughter, and the narrator hears it echoed in nature (89).13 Here is the cruel uncaring of the universe, a universe in which only those able to adapt survive, and while Fanny can blend into the environment around her, she is by no means adapting. She is again on the outskirts of society, outside in the cold snow, while the rest of humanity sits indoors and laughs. 13 This blending of societal rejection with the natural world –​perhaps a form of pathetic fallacy –​is reminiscent of scenes in Tess after Sorrow dies and Tess projects her emotion on nature.

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The next two appearances of Fanny in the novel, like all of her living scenes, are outdoors, en plein air: in the square after she confuses churches and misses her appointment to marry Troy, named only as “a little woman” (116), and on the Casterbridge Highway when she encounters Troy and Bathsheba, again identified as the “woman” (255–​257). In this latter scene, Hardy’s narrator uses no variety in his language describing Fanny: with the exception of a brief moment when Troy addresses her by name, she repeatedly is called the “woman,” even in the conversation between Troy and Bathsheba. The steadfast word choice seems to imply Fanny’s pregnancy; while the reader remains unaware of this fact until later in the novel, the impression the reader forms is adjusted by this shift in tone.14 There is no mistaking a pregnant woman as a little spot or an indistinct and only possibly human outline. In this state Fanny loses her individuality. She becomes the fallen woman embodied, nameless and repeated throughout time. The effect of her voice is all that remains –​Troy hears it and starts “visibly” before “recover[ing] the presence of mind sufficient to prevent himself from giving way to his impulse to suddenly turn and face her” (256).15 Here is that same recognition pushed away, that impression moderated. Troy refuses to acknowledge he knows her name when later questioned by Bathsheba upon driving away; as the narrator ironically notes, “[h]‌e suddenly seemed to think that frankness would benefit neither of the women” (257). Frank Troy is of no help to either woman: upon seeing his face, Fanny “uttered a hysterical cry, and fell down” (256). She becomes literally and figuratively a fallen woman because of Troy. In that moment Bathsheba pities her, exclaiming, “O poor thing!” (256) –​perhaps betraying her unwitting categorization of Fanny (see, for example, Grace Melbury’s thoughts about “the wife’s regulation terms of virtuous sarcasm” which would allow her to categorize Suke Damson and Felice Charmond as “woman, creature, or thing”) (W 257). She “instantly prepar[es] to alight” from the gig to help Fanny, but Troy urges the horse along before she can descend, keeping the vehicle in motion (FFMC 256). How would Bathsheba have reacted if she had discovered the truth at that moment, on the Casterbridge Highway? Morgan argues that with the 14 This omission demonstrates Stephen’s editorial hand: he requested Hardy to “omit all reference” to the pregnancy, saying “I am rather necessarily anxious to be on the safe side; and should somehow be glad to omit the baby”; see L. Stephen to TH, April 13, 1874, in Appendix II of Purdy’s Bibliographical Study, p. 339. 15 Fanny’s voice seems to have a stronger presence than her physical body throughout the novel; even Gabriel notes its particular and “unexpectedly attractive” quality (53).

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bowdlerization of the baby, Bathsheba’s feelings for Fanny as she discovers her and the baby in the coffin were changed from compassion in the manuscript to rivalry in the serial.16 Hardy’s heroines see “fallen women” not as a threat to their own security or morality but rather identify with them as fellow-​creatures, susceptible to the same passions and problems as themselves –​perhaps not an idea Stephen felt his readership was ready to consider. Bathsheba’s sympathy is thus twice thwarted by male perception of the need to avoid “frankness” in such circumstances: both in the text by Troy’s action of moving the gig along and in the real world by Stephen’s editing. Troy abandons Fanny to her fate, too concerned with his own immediate self to act in sympathy (his empathy, or recognition of her pain, failing to lead him to sympathy, or the choice to actually help), but the reader stays with her, observing the narrator observe her in the following chapter, “On Casterbridge highway.” She remains unnamed by the narrator, recognized instead mostly as “the woman,” but also as “the pedestrian,” “the wayfarer,” “the traveller” (258–​259); at her lowest point, as the “shapeless heap” (259); and at the end, as a “wearied soul” and “prostrate figure” (263). Time, that important and relative matter in Hardy’s works, seems to fade away in the darkness of the night: the “small, attenuated tone” of the “voice of the clock” from a distant manor-​house that strikes one at the start of the chapter “seems to lose in breadth as much as in length” (259) and is replaced later with the clock-​like “bark of a fox, its three hollow notes being rendered at intervals of a minute with the precision of a funeral bell” (260). By the time Fanny reaches the union, it is approaching six: the two-​mile walk takes her nearly five hours. In the darkness of the night, time slowed to a crawling pace, “the woman” repeatedly falls. The scene, as Shires says, “is overwritten for pathos” (xxix). Here is Hardy’s plea against man’s inhumanity to woman, his shifted center of altruism in a Victorian hierarchy that shuns the “fallen woman.” When Fanny encounters the dog on the Casterbridge Highway, Hardy’s plea takes on its full force. As Levine says, “[i]‌t is the moral sense growing from Hardy’s recognition of the implications of Darwin’s theory –​we are all, quite literally, brothers and sisters under the skin –​that gives to Hardy’s full look at the worst its profound force.”17 In this case, it is a dog who recognizes Fanny as a sister. The dog seems to choose to help Fanny 16 Cancelled Words, p. 147. 17 “Hardy and Darwin,” p. 50.

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(whether out of a conscious moral decision or out of a developed instinct), expressing a sympathy that Hardy uses to engage his reader’s empathy. When the mysterious dog appears out of the night, Fanny is not even capable of meeting him at eye level; instead, “she looked up to him just as in earlier times she had, when standing, looked up to a man” (FFMC 262). He becomes “her friend,” and she calls to him while actively avoiding all “human sounds” (262). The boundary between human and animal has become blurred: the animal is playing the role that should have been played by a human, Troy, and is treating Fanny with greater conscientiousness than the general society, both of the novel and of Hardy’s readership, may have done. Not only is Hardy implying that animals may possess capacities normally denied them, but also that society in general seems not to be endowed with the basic moral goodness that the scene demands, that is, the instinct to help another living being in pain  –​in this case, the fallen woman. Fanny trusts the dog and avoids any human contact in the scene: even the measurement of time shifts from societal methods to the natural world, from clocks to the bark of a fox. As Hardy’s narrator in Tess of the d’Urbervilles will later comment of its heroine’s plight, in the natural world Fanny’s story is nothing unnatural (Tess 97–​98). What does it mean to be both a human and an animal, Hardy seems to be asking; how does one reconcile the natural world with society’s conventions of morality? What does it mean to be a moral being: can moral action arise solely out of instinct, or does it require a mental process of reasoning? Have humans reasoned themselves out of doing the good that would have come instinctually? The dog disappears at the end, stoned away by the man at the Casterbridge Union.18 As a character, the dog does nothing to propel the narrative or change the course of the plot; Fanny still dies, despite his act of sympathy. Levine notes that at times when animals enter the scene in Hardy, The intrusion of their narratively irrelevant life on the stories of the protagonists is part of what those stories are about . . . All of these displacements [of perspective] imply a world in which proper perspective is almost impossible to achieve . . . What observation reveals is one’s own marginality and vulnerability.19 18 Roger Ebbatson connects this gesture with Wildeve’s reaction to the heathcroppers during the gambling scene (RN 228); see The Evolutionary Self, p. 16. 19 Darwin and the Novelists, p. 232.

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Hardy’s changes in perspective, between human and animal, innocence and impurity, and human instinct and animal morality, set the reader on edge. Angelique Richardson insightfully observes that “[a]‌t a time of shifting perspectives and clashing creeds, Hardy unsettles his reader, moving between, combining and inverting different ways of seeing.”20 He is subtly and perhaps deliberately making his readers uncomfortable, forcing them to adjust their notions of altruism and humanity through the recognition of their own “marginality and vulnerability.” Fanny is both the outcast and the universal figure, both the heartbeat of the novel and an obscured body. As Shires argues, she is “never dealt with adequately by any character, by the narrator, or by any ideology in the book” (xxix). Her character must be dealt with by the reader, if at all: Hardy leaves it as “the reader’s job to accept (or not) the juxtaposed points of view or to hold them in an unreconcilable balance,” as Shires points out elsewhere.21 Hardy entrusts the reader to perceive meaning as he or she so chooses, to grapple with or ignore the “mere impressions” of a woman who appears only for a moment yet whose presence ripples outward to permeate the novel. While Fanny tends to evolve in each appearance in the novel first from and then back to a neutral figure, the dogs in Far from the Madding Crowd stand out. While Henry James may have meant to belittle Hardy’s ability to write convincing human characters with his remark on the believability of the dogs, a closer look at the portrayal of canine characters reveals how carefully Hardy develops the impressions made by even the nonhuman animals in his texts. Before readers reach the noble, mysterious animal who helps Fanny through the night, Hardy has been shaping the perception of dogs throughout the novel, leading the reader to rethink canine capacity –​especially when it comes to the idea of moral agency. The first dog whom readers meet in the novel is George, who in the third chapter plays a significant role in saving Gabriel’s life  –​a heroic action for which he receives no credit. The reader experiences the scene from Gabriel’s perspective as he returns to consciousness after falling asleep in an unventilated shepherd’s hut: he hears “his dog howling” and feels Bathsheba’s hands on his head. When he thanks Bathsheba for saving his life, she tells Gabriel that the dog was the one who made her aware of the situation:  “I heard your dog howling and scratching at the door of the hut . . . The dog saw me, and jumped over to me, and laid hold of 20 Angelique Richardson, “Hardy and Science: A Chapter of Accidents,” in Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies, ed. by Mallett, pp. 156–​180 (p. 176). 21 “And I Was Unaware,” pp. 38–​39.

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my skirt” (FFMC 25–​26). While Bathsheba as a human has performed a moral act in saving Gabriel’s life (having made a conscious choice to investigate and help when she could have ignored the situation), the same action performed by an animal was not (and is not) typically regarded as “moral.” While Darwin concedes that “dogs possess something very like a conscience” in Descent, he goes on to say As we cannot distinguish between motives, we rank all actions of a certain class as moral, if performed by a moral being. A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them. We have no reason to suppose that any of the lower animals have this capacity; therefore when a Newfoundland dog drags a child out of the water . . . we do not call its conduct moral.22

Yet one must consider the context in which Darwin composed this statement: he is attempting to convince a Victorian audience who believe in the divine superiority of human morality that the foundations of a conscience have evolved through time and exist in the animal as well as the human world. Repeatedly in Descent he seeks to demonstrate that “the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.” After numerous anecdotes to argue that nonhuman animals display the capacity for “human” qualities –​including curiosity, wonder, imitation, attention, memory, imagination, and most importantly reason –​he concludes that while “moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals,” it is “the social instincts” that “lead to the golden rule, ‘As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them likewise’; and this lies at the foundation of morality.”23 His argument places the origins of moral sense in the instinct for maternal and familial affection. For Darwin, the most important point was that this distinction between humanity and the “lower” animals lay in degrees of separation on the evolutionary tree, not in a difference in the nature of the mind. What humans know of the mind of a dog is limited, both in Darwin’s time and in the present, but Hardy’s presentation of George’s behavior in perceiving Gabriel’s danger and the lack of ventilation in the hut followed by his action of alerting others to the situation reads like one of Darwin’s examples of animals showing reason. It also demonstrates what psychologists today term theory of mind: the ability to take the perspective of another. (Evolutionary psychologist Frans de Waal gives an example of an 22 Descent, pp. 158, 170–​171. 23 Ibid., pp. 193–​194.

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old bonobo at the San Diego Zoo who saved several young bonobos from being drowned by alerting the zookeepers to their presence in a drained moat that was about to be refilled; the old bonobo was able to predict what would happen “even though this would obviously not have affected him.”)24 While psychologists continue to research and debate the presence of Theory of Mind in nonhuman animals, dogs in particular seem to possess unique abilities usually only seen in humans, such as gaze following.25 Recent research shows “functional homology” between dogs and humans: positive associations activate the same region of canine brains as they do human brains, suggesting further evidence of what Darwin speculated in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals –​that dogs, too, can experience a range of emotions traditionally considered human, and possess a certain level of sentience.26 In a letter to Frances Power Cobbe on her article “The Consciousness of Dogs,” Darwin himself expressed that after writing Descent he had “got to believe rather more than [he] did in dog’s having what may be called a conscience.”27 Interestingly, Leslie Stephen had strong feelings about moral sense in animals, specifically dogs. In his chapter “Darwin and Divinity” in Freethinking and Plainspeaking (1873), published during the year preceding the serialization of Far from the Madding Crowd in the Cornhill, Stephen writes disparagingly that philosophers “[argue] at great length that instinct differs from reason not in degree but in kind, or that brutes do not possess even the rudiments of what we call a moral sense.” He says, Animals have always been regarded with a certain dislike by metaphysical arrogance. It has been held to be a conclusive objection to the validity of certain arguments for the immortality of the soul, that they would open the path to heaven to our dogs as well as to ourselves. It does not seem very easy to give any satisfactory reason for the extreme abhorrence with 24 Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, ed. by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 71–​72. For a detailed overview of Theory of Mind, see Martin Brüne and Ute Brüne-​Cohrs, “Theory of Mind: Evolution, Ontogeny, Brain Mechanisms and Psychopathology,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 30 (2006), 437–​455. 25 See Richard W. Byrne’s “Animal Communication:  What Makes a Dog Able to Understand its Master?,” Current Biology, 13.9 (2003), R347–​R348. 26 Gregory Berns, “Dogs Are People, Too,” New York Times, October 6, 2013, p. 5; see also Gregory S. Berns, Andrew M. Brooks, and Mark Spivak, “Scent of the Familiar: An fMRI Study of Canine Brain Responses to Familiar and Unfamiliar Human and Dog Odors,” Behavioural Processes, 110 (2015), 37–​46. 27 Charles Darwin, The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, ed. by Frederick Burkhardt and others, vol. 20 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 528. Cobbe suggested that dogs had “reflex morality”: they had learned some human “rules” of morality and possessed “the elements of the moral life” but lacked the moral freedom (or moral agency) to understand the “principles”; see Frances Power Cobbe, “The Consciousness of Dogs,” Quarterly Review, 133 (1872), 419–​451, (pp. 439–​440).

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which such a consummation is regarded, or to say why we should claim a monopoly in another world which we do not enjoy in this. Philosophers, indeed, have gone further, and denied to animals even the most moderate share of our own capacities, and have set them down as nothing better than machines. One is heartily glad to see the poor beasts getting their revenge in public opinion, and being recognised as our relations after having been almost repudiated as fellow-​creatures.28

Stephen is, of course, referring to Darwin’s work –​not only Origin, but also to Descent –​and he supports Darwin’s argument for a “difference . . . of degree and not of kind,” using the dog as an example. He argues that dogs clearly demonstrate the ability for reason: they are simply unable to verbalize that reasoning in human language. Yet this inability does not mean a dog lacks the capacity for verbal reasoning completely. Stephen explains that a dog “can understand a few simple words; and though he cannot articulate, he can make sounds indicative of his wants and emotions, which are to words what the embryo is to the perfect organism,” going on to say that the “capacity to understand is as good a proof of the presence of vocal intelligence, though in an inferior degree, as the capacity to speak. A dog frames a general concept of cats or sheep, and knows the corresponding words as well as a philosopher.”29 Darwin, in turn, uses this quotation from Stephen (albeit reversing the order of the sentences) in his second edition of Descent.30 The Georges in Far from the Madding Crowd seem written to Stephen’s description of a dog, and Hardy depicts them in a tone that comically prods the metaphysical argument of Cartesian dualism. Oak’s attraction to Bathsheba is likened to the dog’s attention to his meals:  as the narrator explains, “[h]‌is dog waited for his meals in a way so like that in which Oak waited for the girl’s presence that the farmer was quite struck with the resemblance, felt it lowering and would not look at the dog” (29). Here, Hardy satirizes what was a disconcerting issue for humans in Victorian (and even modern) society: the recognition of self in the animal world results in an averted gaze, but the reader cannot help but be amused by the comparison. George seems to understand not only language but also interpersonal relationships in the human and animal worlds; he shows “great concern” when Gabriel goes to propose to Bathsheba, and he ignores a cat encountered on the way because he considers “all superfluous 28 Leslie Stephen, Essays of Freethinking and Plainspeaking (London: Smith, Elder; Duckworth, 1907), pp. 82–​125 (pp. 90–​91). 29 Ibid., pp. 92–​93. 30 See Descent, p. 136.

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barking . . . a waste of breath” (30–​31). He avoids barking “except to order [sheep], when it was done with an absolutely neutral countenance, as a sort of commination-​ service which though offensive had to be gone through once now and then to frighten the flock for their own good” (31). According to the narrator, George not only chooses to moderate his language (in the form of barking), but also seems to expect his human owner to do the same. Later in the novel, George deems his owner’s feelings important enough to reassert them with his own vocal capacity: when Gabriel speaks threateningly to protect Bathsheba’s reputation, “[t]he dog George looked up . . . after the shepherd’s menace, and though he understood English but imperfectly, began to growl” (109). Shadowing Gabriel, he seems the four-​footed version of the shepherd.31 At times Hardy anthropomorphizes George (and especially his canine-​ son of the same name), but the effect quietly subverts the status of the dog in the Victorian hierarchy if one considers it in the context of Stephen’s writing:  Hardy, like Stephen, uses humor to discuss a dog’s supposed capacities. George’s “son” is a perfect example. While George senior is deemed “clever and trustworthy,” his son has “an insuperable difficulty in distinguishing between doing a thing well enough, and doing it too well” (39).32 When the young George drives a flock of pregnant ewes over a cliff to their demise, the episode is depicted with tragicomic military overtones. Gabriel discovers the dog standing above the cliff “against the sky –​dark and motionless as Napoleon at St Helena,” and the carnage of the sheep matches the aftermath of a battle: the illogical matter of overzealous ambition within war reflected in the animal world with the young dog as the wayward commander. On one side, the mock-​heroic irony is humorous, and on the other, immensely sad.33 The narrator explains that the dog’s faulty reasoning led to this error in calculation (like so many human generals who preceded him), and his fate is described in military terms: “George’s son had done his work so thoroughly that he was 31 See, for example, the description of Gabriel and George as “a figure” followed by “a small figure on all fours” (102). 32 Compare to the similar description of “Dog 1” and “Dog 2” in Frances Power Cobbe, “Dogs Whom I Have Met,” Cornhill, 26 (1872), 662–​678. 33 Adrian Poole notes another allusion in a mock-​heroic vein in the sheep-​blasting scene, when Laban Tall’s “face tragic as Morton’s after the Battle of Shrewsbury” calls to mind Morton bringing the news of Harry Percy’s demise in 2 Henry IV. Poole notes that the allusion both “falsely inflates the seriousness of the situation” and fits with the characters’ view of the situation: Gabriel’s work to “save forty-​nine of the precious creatures is no mean feat, the work of a local hero.” Poole wonders “on whom the mockery intended by this absurd Shakespearean reference falls.” See Adrian Poole, Shakespeare and the Victorians (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004), pp. 148–​149.

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considered too good a workman to live –​and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o’clock that same day” (41–​42). The phrasing of the sentence with the omission of an executor gives it the resonance of death by firing squad.34 The narrator concludes that this is simply “another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise” –​a comment that echoes Stephen’s comparison of dogs and philosophers (42). Here, Hardy’s handling of the human–​animal boundary is at its most brilliant:  while subverting his own anthropomorphic descriptions of animals through humor, he addresses the irony underlying the reader’s preconceptions of a dog’s capacities, pointing out that the world all living beings inhabit is one based on inconsistency.35 Even the best-​intentioned logic can be erroneous; philosophers’ conclusions may be no better in the practical world than a dog’s. The juxtaposition of the comic and the tragic in this scene reflects that the world in which Hardy’s characters –​human and animal –​live, and the world in which his readers live, is philosophically messy. Primed by these impressions of the two Georges, the reader encounters the dog who aids Fanny to the Casterbridge Union. He appears as a neutral figure (not unlike Fanny in earlier scenes), emerging as “a portion of shade” that detaches “from the stripe of shadow on the opposite side of the bridge” at the very moment when Fanny has given up all hope of continuing on (261), having been, as Mallett notes, “progressively stripped of her human autonomy.”36 Fanny, at this point in her state of desperation, has “even thought of rolling”  –​a rather animal method of movement (261). On this level playing field, the animal approaches the human, both literally as the “portion of shade” moves “into isolation upon the pale white of the road” (261), and figuratively across the supposed metaphysical gap between the human and the animal, dramatized by the tones of black against white. This visual introduction of the dog through the 34 Young George’s “execution” echoes Dickens’s dog Sultan’s death; see Ivan Kreilkamp’s “Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations,” in Victorian Animal Dreams, ed. by Morse and Danahay, pp. 81–​94 (p. 92n). 35 In Darwin’s Plots, Beer also notes Hardy’s use of comic anthropomorphism, this time in relation to insects in The Return of the Native when Clym is working as a furze-​cutter: “[t]‌he persistent anthropomorphism calls attention to the human and comically, throwaway, dislimns human boundaries; ‘unskilled acrobats,’ ‘silent ones of homely hue,’ ‘flies, ignorant of larders and wire-​netting.’ Man is here familiarised with all other creatures: the weight of the bees who ‘tugged at the heath and furze-​ flowers’ is enlarged as under a microscope to equality with the human inhabitant” (255). 36 “Hardy and Philosophy,” p. 28.

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narrator’s perspective in black and white seems to mirror the rigid conceptions of morality. At the same time, it sets up a visual parallel to the emotional dynamic at the end of the scene when the dog is stoned away; as Richardson observes, “the contrast between human inhumanity and a dog’s fellow-​feeling is stark.”37 Unlike the narrator, Fanny first perceives the dog through a much more intimate sense:  touch. In the narrator’s words, “[s]‌he became conscious of something touching her hand; it was softness, and it was warmth. She opened her eyes, and the substance touched her face. A dog was licking her cheek” (261). Hardy moves from the visual to the haptic and from the abstract to the specific. With the simple gesture of the lick, the dog becomes vividly real, and his empathy tangible.38 The dog is depicted as “a huge heavy and quiet creature” and stands “at least two feet higher than the present position of [the reclining Fanny’s] eyes,” locating him in the same categorical and physical plane as the woman (261–​262). His breed is indeterminate: Whether Newfoundland, mastiff, bloodhound, or what not, it was impossible to say. He seemed to be of too strange and mysterious a nature to belong to any variety among those of popular nomenclature. Being thus assignable to no breed he was the ideal embodiment of canine greatness –​a generalization from what was common to all. (261–​262)

Here is the universal dog, meeting the universal figure of the woman. He takes on an even more mythical persona in the continuing description:  “Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart from its stealthy and cruel side, was personified in this form. Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power” (262). Looking up at him, Fanny feels a dash of hope and thinks, “Perhaps I might make use of him” (262) –​a thought inspired by the dog’s approximation to a man in her current perspective, but one that also reiterates the status of animals among humans as creatures to be used. The dog quickly learns what Fanny is attempting to do and aids her along the road, demonstrating both empathy in his “frantic . . . distress” 37 Angelique Richardson, “Hardy and the Place of Culture,” in A Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. by Wilson, pp. 54–​70 (p. 64). 38 The focus on touch links the scene to a literary tradition of sexual connection between women and dogs. Laura Brown traces the trope of the “lady and her lapdog” through eighteenth-​century satiric verse –​a trope marked by the replacement of a male lover with a dog, the kiss, and the nonhuman gaze –​to its inversion in Victorian literature, where such encounters open “structures of discordance” and “hierarchy reversal”; see Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 85.

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when she falls and sympathy in letting her place her weight on him to take small steps slowly forward (262). He understands “thoroughly . . . her desire and her incapacity,” and the narrator titles him as Fanny’s friend immediately before telling the reader that “it was to be observed that the woman listened for human sounds only to avoid them . . . she had an object in keeping her presence on the road and her forlorn state unknown” (262). Fanny, a fallen woman, finds friendship in the animal world that will not be extended her by the human one, given her condition  –​not of being poor and ill, but of being an unmarried woman who is so obviously pregnant that Bathsheba has only to ascertain that the woman she encountered on the road was Fanny to know that Troy is the father of an illegitimate child. While some readers –​noting the tendency of Victorians to personify their animals –​might object to the behavior of the dog in the scene as anthropomorphized, Hardy focuses on the dog’s actions rather than giving him unfounded human attributes: his distress, for example, is shown by tugging on Fanny’s dress and running ahead, and his friendliness by licking her hand. The dog is stoned away after Fanny reaches the Casterbridge Union, an allusion to the Biblical woman condemned for adultery.39 Through the allusion the dog becomes a scapegoat for Fanny. Society’s treatment of the fallen woman then becomes a mirror for man’s inhumanity to the animal world –​except there is no Biblical figure to forbid the stoning for the animal. Hardy quietly raises the suggestion that, as Levine puts it, If Darwin was right, that we are all quite literally related, then the Christian ideal of loving one’s neighbor as one’s brother becomes unmetaphorical, becomes literal. Your neighbor is biologically your brother, and you owe to the trapped rabbit that Jude hears or the horse killed when Tess falls asleep at the reins a deep moral debt.40

The dog that you stoned and the woman you left on the road become your moral responsibility.41 The dog acting in compassion toward the woman follows the golden rule “at the foundation of morality,” to refer back to Darwin’s words, when (and perhaps even in spite of the fact) man did not. What, then, does this mean for the idea of a dog as a moral agent? Stephen found “the condemnation of the poor brutes as nonmoral (if we 39 See John 8:1–​11. 40 “Hardy and Darwin,” p. 48. 41 One might note that Cobbe concludes “Dogs Whom I  Have Met” with a story of a dog being stoned before urging readers to extend their circle of sympathy “to feel for all sentient fellow-​creatures” (677).

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may use such a word)” even “more monstrous” than the denial of language. The argument of degree versus kind resurfaces in his explanation: The metaphysical distinction between material and formal morality is as irrelevant as other such distinctions. Its meaning is simply that, though an animal may be capable of affection and self-​sacrifice, it cannot construct the general formula that we ought to love our children. Certainly no beast has framed an abstract conception of duty . . . The moral sense in its full development implies a faculty for observing consequences and stating general principles which the brute does not possess, but he has the rudiments both of the reason and the emotion, and what follows is a mere question of degree.42

Stories of heroic dogs saving their owners –​the way George saved Gabriel –​fit with the idea of a moral sense based on social instincts: the humans in these cases are an important part of the dogs’ social communities. What seems remarkable about this homeless dog on the Casterbridge Highway –​who “might so easily be aggressive,” as Shires points out –​is that he helps Fanny despite the fact she is a stranger to him (xxx). What, then, does this scene say about the instincts (let alone the m ­ orality) of the human character implicated in the situation, despite his physical absence? Ironically, while dogs throughout the novel are portrayed as mindful creatures, they also provide terms of comparison to describe Troy, perhaps the least thoughtful character in the text. Only six short chapters before the mysterious black dog materializes on the Casterbridge Highway to help Fanny, Boldwood denounces Troy as a “black hound!” for marrying Bathsheba in secret (231). Gabriel tells Bathsheba to think of Troy as “[t]‌hat man of a family that has come to the dogs”(189), and even Troy refers to himself in canine terms, commenting that he is “thankful for beauty even when ’tis thrown to me like a bone to a dog” (163).43 In addition, Troy is driven by instinct and impulse: two words used to replace ideas of morality and reason in the “metaphysical argument” against the animal world. While Darwin defined a “moral being” as “one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives,” Troy is introduced as a man to whom memories were an encumbrance and anticipations a superfluity . . . His outlook upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now 42 Plainspeaking and Freethinking, pp. 94–​95. 43 The name of a dog was used as an oath in ancient times, a fact Hardy noted during his readings of Plato (LN, i, 46). In the twentieth century, philosopher Emmanual Levinas ponders this oath –​ and the possibility of moral agency in dogs –​in his brief essay, “The Name of the Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Difficult Freedom:  Essays on Judaism, trans. by Seán Hand (London:  Atholone Press, 1990), pp. 151–​153.

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and then: that projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come . . . was foreign to Troy. With him the past was yesterday; the future, to-​ morrow; never, the day after. (166)44

Troy lives “only in the present” (166). Impulse, not reason, determines Troy’s fate:  he marries Bathsheba because of a momentary infatuation (293), takes a nearly fatal swim in Lulwind Cove after feeling his “nature freshen . . . within him” while viewing it (313), and joins first a ship’s crew and then a circus without second thought (316, 331). As soon as he sees Bathsheba upon returning to Casterbridge, he feels a “sudden wish to go in and claim her” (337). His relation to morality is described in evolutionary terms: as a “person with much animal spirit” and “primal strength,” the narrator explains that even his act of planting flowers on Fanny’s grave –​a seemingly romantic gesture –​is “but a species of elusion of the primary prick of conscience” (309).45 It is not until the gargoyle undoes his work that he seems to develop a conscience. The emphasis on instinct over reason links Troy to the animal world, but such a connection relies on the Victorian notion of progressivism and of man as a higher creature –​an issue that Darwin struggled with, frequently reminding himself that evolution was a branching process like the growth of a tree and not a hierarchical ladder. How are the seemingly incongruous depictions of the dog as noble friend and the man as a shameful dog compatible in Hardy’s writing? Hardy’s decision to use the name of a dog as an epithet for his villain, and to place a dog in Troy’s stead in the scene on the Casterbridge highway, seems to subvert conventional ideas of morality and instinct in his era. Through this flip, shifting instinct from animal to man and morality from man to animal, Hardy is blurring the delineations between man/​animal and instinct/​morality in a way that opens up areas of indeterminacy in the text. Are humans uniquely moral beings? Does an inclination to act upon instinct and impulse make a character less human and more animal? Or are instinct and morality linked in a vital, basic way, as Darwin emphasizes in Descent? As Mallett explains, Darwin argues that much that at first glance seems instinctual in animal behaviour in fact shows evidence of reason, while much that appears to 44 Descent, pp.  170–​171. Darwin later adds, “whatever renders the imagination more vivid and strengthens the habit of recalling and comparing past impressions, will make the conscience more sensitive, and may even somewhat compensate for weak social affections and sympathies” (935). 45 The OED defines “elusion” as an act of escaping or evading and cites this sentence from Hardy as an example. Troy’s efforts, then, are another way of “moderating . . . impressions” (FFMC 55).

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In the novel it seems that Troy, rather than the dog, is the one who must acquire a moral sense over time. The ironic link between the impressions of the dog and of Troy’s character raises another question: if readers are to feel sympathy for the dog who was stoned away, should they also feel sympathy for Troy? Many readers have found it easy to feel strongly for the dog who helped Fanny (see, for example, the anecdote of six American “humanitarians” who turned up on Hardy’s doorstep to protest its stoning), but to empathize with the “wicked soldier” of the story and to be saddened by his death at the end is another matter.47 In a sense, Hardy seems to point out the irony of feeling sympathy for one and not the other. In the moment where Troy’s hard work at planting the flowers on Fanny’s grave has been washed away by the gargoyle, the reader learns that he had not minded the peculiarities of his birth, the vicissitudes of his life, the meteor-​like uncertainty of all that related to him, because these appertained to the hero of his story, without whom there would have been no story at all for him; and it seemed . . . that matters would right themselves at some proper date and wind up well. This very morning the illusion completed its disappearance, and as it were all of a sudden, Troy hated himself. (309)

The narrator describes a brief moment in which Troy begins to feel his own falsity earlier in the novel, when his unctuous flattery of Bathsheba is interrupted by a genuine realization of her beauty: A factitious reply had again been on his lips, but it was again suspended . . . The truth was that as she now stood excited, wild, and honest as the day, her alluring beauty bore out so fully the epithets he had bestowed upon it that he was quite startled at his temerity in advancing them as false. (176)

Within his callous, impulsive, “animal” nature, there lies a conscience. In Cancelled Words, Morgan argues that “a close reading of [the] manuscript” reveals Hardy’s difficulty in “derogating a character who, in fact, makes 46 “Hardy and Philosophy,” p. 28. 47 In Carl Weber’s Hardy of Wessex:  His Life and Literary Career (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 93.

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constant appeals to his sympathy and imagination.”48 She compares the manuscript and serial versions of the novel to suggest that the “wicked soldier hero” engaged Hardy more than he had expected, necessitating revision to make the character less sympathetic.49 Troy, as it turns out, is “more complicated to define” than the reader would expect for one of the “vast band of men shunned by the virtuous –​the men called seducers,” as Jude (perhaps the most sympathetic and complicated of Hardy’s “seducers”) will later describe himself (Jude 332).50 The only time Troy mentions morality is after kissing Fanny’s corpse and claiming her as his wife. He responds to Bathsheba’s hysterical reaction by saying, “A ceremony before a priest doesn’t make a marriage. I am not morally yours” (FFMC 293). Later, upon viewing Bathsheba and remembering that she is legally his wife, Troy seems to have the opposite sense:  that Bathsheba is his, and he is hers  –​because of the law (337). What does it mean to belong “morally” to someone? Through Troy’s retraction and assertion of belonging to Bathsheba, Hardy complicates the traditional boundary between nature and culture, taking on a viewpoint similar to Darwin’s. Richardson summarizes Darwin’s approach in Descent as “refusing the boundary and the rigid hierarchies that lie between nature and culture . . . and calling into question the idea that the relation between the two is antithetical, positioning them as two coexisting, possibly equal, forces.”51 In his journal Hardy noted that “[i]‌f it be possible to compress into a sentence all that a man learns between 20 and 40, it is that all things merge into one another –​good into evil, generosity into justice, religion into politics, the year into the ages, the world into the universe” (LW 114). Boundaries and lines –​between man and animal, morality and instinct, nature and culture, and even the basics of good and evil –​are not clearly demarcated. By blurring the boundaries of what it means to be a moral being, Hardy makes a space for the possibility of nonhuman animals as moral agents. In 48 Cancelled Words, p. 33. 49 Morgan discusses revisions of Troy’s reaction to the ruined grave flowers as an example. She argues that the “terseness” in the manuscript “conveys Troy’s absolute despair,” and the word choice “vanish” to describe his departure creates “a far bleaker picture of desolation and annihilation.” In contrast, she suggests that the insertion of his swearing off gambling (rather than the gesture of throwing up his cards) in the serial causes the reader to “lose all sense of the depth and sincerity of Troy’s feelings” (38). 50 Ibid., p. 22. Writing on what it means to be a dog in Great Expectations, Kreilkamp suggests “that to be a dog is to occupy a shadowy realm of incomplete identity, identity that may not possess permanence or leave permanent traces,” an argument that could easily apply to Troy. See “Dying Like a Dog,” p. 89. 51 “Hardy and the Place of Culture,” p. 57.

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his portrayal of the dog on the Casterbridge Highway, Hardy follows the flip between the anthropomorphism popular in the Victorian era (and afterwards, as titles in bookshops continue to prove) and the anthropodenial in Western philosophical tradition stemming from Descartes.52 Couldn’t refusing animals the possibility of moral status, after all, be equally as absurd as assuming they can think about and discuss good and evil in human terms? Yet assertions that animals have internal processes, that they can make choices based on empathy and sympathy, that they can be moral creatures –​ to whatever degree –​are ideas that continue to be resisted because, as Paul Ekman explains, “if [animals] not only feel . . . but are aware of these feelings, it may become difficult to justify experiments on animals, caging them in zoos, using at least some of the present slaughter methods, and for some to decide whether or not animals should be eaten.”53 Darwin biographer David Quammen calls this the “horrible challenge implied by Darwin’s idea” that even “today we tend to overlook.”54 What does a “shifted . . . centre of altruism” mean in a world where the stakes of animal morality are dependent on the economics of research and consumption? What it means to be a moral being in an unstable world is complicated. While Hardy felt the need for a “re-​alignment of altruistic morals,” he was unable to answer what that meant in practice: a problem that continues to be relevant today (LW 376–​377). Shires observes that Hardy often “employs tragic irony, including not only the suffering of individuals in an uncaring universe but also the irony of a situation offering the chance for commentary, but without a speaker willing to deliver.”55 In the closing of “On Casterbridge highway,” as Shires notes, “Hardy’s irony is heavy. Animal kindness is thus repaid. But this scene carries an impact well beyond pity and irony. The scene evokes anger” (FFMC xxx). Yet there is no speaker willing to deliver; Hardy leaves his readers to perceive and respond to the feeling evoked on their own.

Sheep: Moral Responsibility to Animals Whether or not nonhuman animals are capable of being moral agents or possessing some sort of moral sense, Hardy’s depictions of them in Far from 52 See Primates and Philosophers, p. 65, where de Waal defines “anthropodenial” as “the a priori rejection of shared characteristics between humans and animals” and “the willful blindness to the human-​like characteristics of animals and the animal-​like characteristics of [humans].” 53 Introduction to Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. by Paul Ekman, 200th Anniversary Edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xxxi. 54 David Quammen, The Kiwi’s Egg: Charles Darwin and Natural Selection (London: Phoenix, 2007), p. 210. 55 “And I Was Unaware,” p. 37.

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the Madding Crowd demand consideration of moral responsibility to the other. Perhaps no animal is more appropriate for such a discussion than the sheep:  as Bathsheba exclaims during the sheep-​blasting scene, “Sheep are such unfortunate animals! –​There’s always something happening to them! I never knew a flock pass a year without getting into some scrape or other” (137). Yet the sheep in the novel are continually prompting questions along the human–​animal boundary, appearing as “creatures” and individuals as well as en masse. Hardy’s language and word choice often invert traditional human-​animal roles. During the lamb-​taking scene, for example, Bathsheba and Gabriel are described as “[m]‌istress and man” while convincing a ewe to adopt a lamb by enclosing them in close physical proximity “till the old sheep conceived an affection for the young one” –​a seemingly “human” practice, and a process arguably similar to the way Bathsheba develops her relationship with Gabriel (123). The sheep-​washing scene seems almost a reversal of the Biblical scene to which Bathsheba’s name alludes; rather than the male patriarch, King David, gazing at and demanding proprietorship of the bathing Bathsheba, it is Hardy’s Bathsheba who is gazing at her sheep and at her male employees (who are, like the sheep, “dripping wet to the very roots of their hair”) (126). In the scene where Gabriel carries four newborn lambs into a local drinking establishment to warm them by the fire, Kreilkamp notes that the lambs show the ability “to adapt to ‘unnatural,’ human culture”: as the narrator explains, Gabriel teaches “those of the helpless creatures which were not to be restored to their dams how to drink from the spout [of a small teapot] –​a trick they acquired with astonishing aptitude” (FFMC 110–​111).56 In all of these instances, Hardy’s resistance to delineating clear boundaries between human and animal points toward an attitude that pays attention not only to who or what the subject is but how the subject is constructed, the modes of thought and perception that frame such constructions. Perhaps the most cogent example to serve as a case study for the necessity of moral responsibility to the other in Far from the Madding Crowd is an episode not included in the earlier summary of the ovine narrative: the sheep-​ rot scene that Hardy later omitted from the text. Sheep-​rot  –​a dreaded nineteenth-​century sheep illness not to be confused with the similarly named foot-​rot –​occurred when flocks grazed in low-​lying, swampy fields. While the condition was fatal, in the early stages it caused its victims to fatten quickly without showing other symptoms. Troy’s efforts to capitalize on the 56 Kreilkamp also analyzes several neutral terms that Hardy uses to interrogate the human–​animal boundary in the passage:  an ambiguous application of “embarrassing” to either Gabriel or the lambs, the appearance of the terms “neighbor” and “somebody,” and the etymology of the word “shepherd”; see “Pitying the Sheep,” pp. 476–​477.

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economic advantage of this stage –​without regard to the animals’ suffering or to the dangers posed by human consumption of diseased meat  –​mirrors his treatment of Bathsheba and his attitude toward their relationship. While the chapter did not survive later drafts, Hardy used much of the imagery in a scene depicting Bathsheba sleeping in a swamp; in both instances, as Robert Schweik pointed out, the swamp is a literal (and not solely symbolic) unhealthful environment for its occupants.57 Furthermore, the fragment supports the argument previously made by scholars linking the swamp where Bathsheba sleeps with the fern hollow where she has her first romantic rendezvous with Troy. So far, little scholarly attention has been given to the omitted chapter, but this section will argue for its importance: the extent of Hardy’s description of sheep-​rot and the severity of the condition for the sheep (who are repeatedly configured as creatures) add further import to the swamp’s transcription to the scene with Bathsheba, gesturing toward moral obligation to nonhuman and human others.58 The fragment, while partially embedded into the text through Hardy’s revisions, exists as a separate, independent entity from the novel. Unlike the final-​draft manuscript’s cream pages and numerical pagination, the sheep-​rot chapter is composed on pale blue paper and sequenced by letter, 106a–​106k. Critics have therefore speculated that the scene may have been written as an insertion (as Hardy claimed to have written portions of the novel on leaves or whatever scraps of paper he might find during rambles outdoors), or have been part of a destroyed earlier first draft, or simply be an anomaly (FFMC 390–​391).59 Hardy’s title page before the fragment labels it as “Some pages of 1st draft (Details of sheep-​rot –​omitted from MS. when revised).”60 57 Schweik also called for scholarly attention to the fragment. See Robert Schweik, “A First Draft Chapter of Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd,” English Studies, 53.4 (August 1972), 344–​349. Schweik was in part rebutting Howard Babb’s claim that the swamp serves only as a symbol of Bathsheba’s despair; see Howard Babb, “Setting and Theme in Far from the Madding Crowd,” ELH, 30.2 (1963), 147–​161 (p. 159). 58 Most readings focus on Hardy’s borrowing from the chapter in relation to revisions to Troy’s character. See, for example, Clarice Short, “A Rejected Fragment of Far from the Madding Crowd,” Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 25.2 (1971), 62–​64. 59 See also LW, pp. 98–​99; Purdy’s Bibliographical Study, p. 16; and Far from the Madding Crowd, ed. by Rosemarie Morgan (London:  Penguin, 2000), p.  402 (hereafter FFMC Penguin). Hardy did not keep the final-​draft holograph manuscript, sending it off by instalment to the Cornhill, but it re-​emerged from the publisher’s archives in 1918 to be auctioned to raise funds for the Red Cross during World War I. This manuscript, which forms the basis of the Penguin edition of the novel, is held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. 60 The Hardy Collection, DCM. The fragment was bound with the sheep-​shearing supper chapter (which is composed on cream paper, like the holograph manuscript) as a gift for his second wife Florence.

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Why the scene was omitted from the manuscript in the revision process is also a matter of speculation, but Hardy’s reincorporation of elements of the sheep-​rot chapter into the holograph manuscript reveals, as Schweik and others note, something about Hardy’s composition process. Hardy often “self-​borrowed” from his earlier writings and notes, perhaps to make use of good material that did not fit in elsewhere or perhaps to meet the demanding schedule of writing a serialized novel. Several elements of the fragment appear in new form in the novel. The firing and rehiring of Gabriel at the end of the canceled scene frames the “sheep-​ blasting” scene, and an argument leading to emotional blackmail between Gabriel and Troy in the fragment becomes the basis for a similar interaction between Boldwood and Troy in the novel. As noted in the previous section, Hardy’s composition of the novel was influenced by Leslie Stephen’s editorial guidance.61 While much of Stephen’s advice was of the Grundian sort, some of it focused on pruning longer chapters to expedite the action. Perhaps the most logical assumption for the fragment’s omission is that in the creative process of writing and reimagining the novel, the scene was no longer needed in the narrative trajectory. Why, then, is this omitted material relevant? While the sheep-​blasting scene provides a dramatic and sensational incident, in keeping with the episodic nature of the serial, sheep-​rot has more subtle implications. Previously, critics have interpreted sheep-​rot as “foot-​rot,” a contagious bacterial disease isolated to the hooves that can cause lameness. Rosemarie Morgan notes that foot-​rot was “not . . . an authentic contaminant,” d ­ ismissing the suggestion that Hardy may have omitted the chapter because it was not “safe” to publish.62 Morgan is correct to note that foot-​rot did not affect meat quality, but a closer reading of the fragment reveals that Hardy’s description of the disease instead indicates a parasitic illness that develops in the liver, or what he calls “Rot the genuine.”63 The silent symptoms and sudden severity of this systemic disease –​a disease Troy deliberately engenders by manipulating the environment  –​offer 61 For a thorough examination of Stephen’s influence and the revisions the novel underwent, see Morgan’s Cancelled Words. See also Schweik’s “A First Draft Chapter,” pp. 345–​347, for an account of changes to Oak’s and Troy’s characters. 62 FFMC Penguin, pp. 402, 412n. 63 Notably, the phrase “the genuine” is not included in the Penguin edition’s transcription, although it is in the Oxford World’s Classics version. A look at the actual fragment reveals the reason for this minor discrepancy: the chapter is worked with revisions, and the phrase “the genuine” is part of a penciled and lightly erased insertion after “Rot” (DCM). “Rot the genuine” was (and is) an authentic contaminant, although Hardy’s choice to omit the chapter was not likely related to it being “unsafe” to publish such details.

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a parallel to Bathsheba’s experience with her dashing soldier husband. Reading the omitted fragment, then, allows for a recontextualization of Bathsheba’s night next to the swamp. Furthermore, it reveals something about Hardy’s approach to thinking about humans and animals:  while the ovine-​centric fragment was canceled, its omission in a way is offset by the use of borrowed material, conserving the emotional and ethical weight of the fragment in the novel. Ethical attitudes have material implications. Hardy’s depictions of the various aspects of sheep-​rot match historical accounts. Gabriel becomes suspicious of the sheep’s condition upon viewing them after a week away: He was amazed at the change in their appearance. Could his eyes deceive him –​he went round them pushed them felt them: no, there was no mistake –​they had increased beyond all anticipation . . . Next morning, he went straight to these promising creatures hooked one of them by the leg, held it between his legs and examined the gland in the corner of its eye. (392)

Gabriel discovers that the gland is yellow, and he exclaims, “Rot!” (392). His approach to diagnosing the sheep reads parallel to treatises on sheep-​ rot in the early nineteenth century:  John Fairbairn, a farmer writing in 1812, instructs the sheep-​owner to feel the sheep’s back to check if it is firm or if the skin makes a “crackling” sound, indicating the presence of rot, and to see if the corners of the eyes are yellow.64 Upon Gabriel’s diagnosis, the narrator explains that “to an honest shepherd or farmer,” the appearance of the “symptoms of Rot the genuine . . . is a ruinous catastrophe: the most fearful visitation of the sheep walk, & generally speaking incurable . . . The animal, after a certain stage, wastes to a skeleton, & at the end of two or three months it dies” (392).65 While sheep-​rot could mean the loss of livestock and therefore the farmer’s livelihood, Hardy’s narrator points out that “to sheep owners not over scrupulous the word has another meaning altogether. It is an opportunity. The 64 [Fairbairn, John], A Treatise on Breeding, Rearing, and Feeding Cheviot and Black-​Faced Sheep in High Districts:  With some Account of and a complete Cure for that fatal Malady the Rot. Together with Observations on Laying Out and Conducting a Store Farm. By a Lammermuir Farmer, 2nd edn (Alnwick: Davison, 1827), p. 149. 65 The seriousness of the disease is reiterated by the narrator’s assertion that “more than a million sheep & lambs die in Great Britain every year from this disease alone” (392). While the internal dating of the novel is debated (placing it somewhere in the 1860s or 1870s), Hardy likely had the 1860 sheep-​rot outbreak in mind; see James Beart Simonds, The Rot in Sheep: Its Nature, Cause, Treatment, and Prevention (London: Murray, 1862), pp. 1, 5.

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disease is a remedy: the blight of what is owned is the enrichment of the owner” (392). The narrator explains At the beginning of the attack the bile absorbed into the system operates apparently as a stimulant. It forces on the animal at a rate which is simply astounding. Its appetite is increased, all its nutritive organs seem strengthened, & fat & flesh accumulate with marvellous rapidity upon the most meagre frames. (392–​393)

After that stage, however, “comes the re-​action, & the poor creatures literally melt away” (393). The appearance of the phrase “poor creatures” hints at the distress caused to the sheep by the process, as well as their position of subjection to the unscrupulous human who may choose to take advantage of the disease as “a means to an end which can be reached so quickly by no other route”: “readiness of stock for market, & consequently early profit from sales” (392). The narrator adds, “[t]‌he trick is or was, to take the flock to market at the climax of that first stage of the disease, immediately before the skin becomes yellow, & when . . . none but an experienced eye can distinguish between its condition & that of the carefully fattened animal” (393). A fattened animal is a fattened animal, whether from disease or healthy development –​the animal’s well-​being and the quality of the meat being separate matters. According to nineteenth-​century writers on the topic, the process of intentionally rotting sheep was common practice among less ethically minded farmers. James Beart Simonds writes, “[m]‌uch has been said about sheep fattening somewhat quicker than is usual in the early stages of rot, and occasionally attention has been drawn to this circumstance as warranting a suspicion of the animal’s soundness,” quoting another writer’s account of a farmer who would flood pastures to fatten sheep for market faster than his neighbors.66 Edward Harrison, writing about connections between sheep-​rot and human illness, affirms that “[s]everal graziers and butchers, . . . omit not opportunity of producing [sheep-​rot] to increase their profits,” adding, “[w]hen livers are much diseased, the butchers carefully conceal them from the public eye.”67 Simonds gives accounts of butchers who were “taken seriously”  –​and at times fatally  –​“ill when 66 The Rot in Sheep, pp. 63–​64. Harriet Ritvo notes that the eighteenth-​century stock breeder Robert Bakewell had another motive for inducing sheep-​rot: he customarily infected his best animals with sheep-​rot before sending them to the butcher “to make sure that no one else used them as studs”; see Animal Estate, p. 68. 67 Edward Harrison, An Inquiry into the Rot in Sheep and Other Animals: in which a Connection is Pointed Out between it, and Some Obscure and important Disorders, in the Human Constitution (London: Bickerstaff, 1804), pp. 47, 50.

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engaged in opening many rotten sheep at a time.”68 He urges, “[w]e repeat but a truism when we say that the health of the animals of the farm . . . influences to a considerable extent the amount of wholesome food which is available for the people,” but his “truism” was one just emerging in the Victorian consciousness in the connection between animal health and meat quality.69 Sheep-​rot only occurred in a very specific environment: as G. G. S. Bowie explains, even before farmers understood the cause of the disease (which involves both a “freshwater snail” and “the complex life cycle of the fluke parasite”), they “had a fairly clear idea about the conditions most likely to produce rot in sheep.”70 Fairbairn traces the disease to consumption of “the after-​growth of grass in the months of September and October,” adding that it “may also be occasioned by the succulent herbage that grows upon flooded water sites . . . and recently improved wet-​bottomed moor.”71 Hardy locates his swamp in the appropriate temporal and spatial environment; Gabriel, while admiring an “autumn” sunset, notices the swamp at the bottom of the Great Ewelease: Oak’s thought was that this was a spot which would indeed rot a sheep, or a thousand sheep, in a very short time . . . The corner was a nuisance –​a nursery of pestilences small & great –​& it was to be drained. The attempt to convert it into a small water-meadow by introducing a running stream had been virtually a failure. (394)

As historians have noted, water-​meadows were an important part of the Dorset landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, allowing the dry chalklands to produce an “early growth of grass in the spring” for grazing flocks; it involved flooding low-​lying meadows with a shallow layer of moving water through various techniques of artificial irrigation. The movement of the water was vital, as “moving water dissolves oxygen but stagnant water creates anaerobic conditions, inimical to grass growth.”72 In 68 The Rot in Sheep, p. 77; see also A Treatise, p. 154. 69 Ibid. p. 1. 70 G. G. S. Bowie, “New Sheep for Old-​Changes in Sheep Farming in Hampshire, 1792–​1879,” Agricultural History Review, 35.1 (1987), 15–​24 (pp. 23–​24). 71 A Treatise, pp. 131, 133. 72 Hadrian Cook, Kathy Stearne, and Tom Williamson, “The Origins of Water Meadows in England,” Agricultural History Review, 51.2 (2003), 155–​162 (pp. 155–​156). Water-​meadows had been a feature on manors in Puddletown (Hardy’s Weatherbury) since the seventeenth century; see J. H. Bettey’s “The Development of Water Meadows in Dorset during the Seventeenth Century,” Agricultural History Review, 25.1 (1977), 37–​43 (p. 39). See also G. G. S. Bowie’s “Watermeadows in Wessex:  A  Re-​evaluation for the Period 1640–​1850,” Agricultural History Review, 35.2 (1987), 151–​158.

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the text, a hatch marks the boundary between the stream and the swamp, a sign of its attempted conversion. Upon investigation one night Gabriel discovers that Troy has been manipulating both the environment and the animals to cause rot: Troy floods the meadow by admitting water through the hatch, then lets the water drain partially into the ground before herding the sheep into the area to graze under the cover of night, “the simple creatures . . . momentarily & inevitably sucking in disease, death –​& an antecedent fatness” (396).73 Gabriel immediately leads the sheep out of the hurdles into safe pastures, running around them like a sheepdog to herd them out of the spot. When Troy steps forward to question him, Gabriel announces, “I came here to save the sheep” (396). Gabriel’s statement suggests concern not for the consumer or the farmer but for the sheep themselves, consistent with his attitude toward animals throughout the novel.74 In the fifth chapter when Oak discovers his flock over the edge of the cliff, mangled and dying, his “first feeling” is “one of pity” for the sheep; the realization of the material loss and what it means for his livelihood occurs only second (41). As the narrator explains: Oak was an intensely humane man:  indeed, his humanity often tore in pieces any politic intentions of his which bordered on strategy . . . A shadow in his life had always been that his flock ended in mutton –​that a day came and found every shepherd an arrant traitor to his defenceless sheep. (41)

Gabriel displays an interest in his sheep that extends beyond that of an ordinary shepherd (and perhaps comes closer to a “practical man” of veterinary medicine, given the presence of The Veterinary Surgeon and The Farrier’s Sure Guide among his books (72).75 For him, the sheep have intrinsic value as beings living out their own lives; he sees them as more than commercial goods. Troy’s response  –​“Every man can do what he likes with his own”  –​ epitomizes his attitude not only toward the sheep, but also to Bathsheba, 73 This image of the sheep “sucking in . . . fatness” is echoed in the description of the grass in the sheep-​washing scene: “[i]‌ts activity in sucking the moisture from the rich damp sod . . . almost a process observable by the eye” (125). 74 See Kreilkamp’s discussion of Foucault and pastoral care in “Pitying the Sheep,” pp. 475–​477. 75 Gabriel’s knowledge of veterinary medicine is not contained to books: he performs surgery on the ill sheep in the sheep-​blasting scene “with a dexterity that would have graced a hospital surgeon” (141). See Abigail Woods, “From Practical Men to Scientific Experts: British Veterinary Surgeons and the Development of Government Scientific Expertise, C. 1878–​1919,” History of Science (2013), 457–​480, for a description of the changing definition of veterinarian practice at the turn of the twentieth century.

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who as his wife is his legal property under Victorian law (396). The dialogue over the sheep’s welfare, then, reads as a conflict between the two men over Troy’s treatment of living creatures in general; his attitude toward animal husbandry is not far removed from that toward his role as a husband. Gabriel’s response –​“Not if he poisons other people by doing it”  –​resonates with the implications of Troy’s actions upon Bathsheba’s well-​being (think, for example, of the night when his drunkenness leaves only Gabriel to save the grain from the oncoming storm, or of his gambling habits) and more notably, Fanny Robin’s, who dies in a state of destitution giving birth to Troy’s child (396). The interaction leads into a discussion over the unknown consumer of the diseased meat. Troy considers the act of rotting sheep to be part of the business, telling Gabriel, “You know very well that these things must be done . . . you must learn to if you stay here” (396), a statement that echoes forward to Arabella’s “Poor folks must live” in response to Jude’s horror at slaughtering the pig (Jude 59). In one sense, the business of raising domestic animals is exactly that –​an economic endeavor to support the people doing the caretaking. Troy tries to convince Gabriel that “[t]‌here’s nothing new in my rotting sheep to force their fattening. Every body does it,” but Gabriel replies, “I don’t, & Farmer Boldwood don’t” (FFMC 396). His response suggests that intentionally rotting sheep was regarded as a dubious and divisive practice rather than a standard part of the mutton business. For Troy, whether or not the mutton is unhealthful is irrelevant; he will not be the one eating these animals. He tells Gabriel, “As to a rotted sheep being poison –​it’s all nonsense. Besides we send ’em to market, & the dealers send ’em to London –​& the people who eat them are nothing to us” (396). Troy is not worried about the moral implications of his actions, given that he does not know the recipients, a clear opposite to Gabriel’s belief “ ‘Tis as much harm to hurt people you don’t know as people you do” (396). Troy goes on to list products that consumers readily eat in defense of his argument, telling Gabriel, “Londoners have a taste for such things”:  “the diseased livers of poultry as delicacies,” “woodcocks’ entrails,” “newborn pigs . . . not healthy enough to rear,” “putrid deer, & hide bound oxen,” and “any far gone animal that’s killed to save its life” (397). Gabriel responds to Troy’s list by interjecting “Oh –​,” “Oh,” “Yes,” and “So I’ve heard,” but his lack of loquacity is made up for by his physical response: he bodily blocks Troy’s way, leading to a wrestling match in which he gains the upper hand (397). The subsequent firing of Gabriel by Troy and his reinstatement the next day through Bathsheba’s interference is transformed into Bathsheba’s dismissal and rehiring of Gabriel in the

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novel’s sheep-​blasting scene, as other critics have noted, but the discussion of diseased meat disappears. Troy’s attitude toward selling diseased livestock for human consumption was not uncommon in the era. Keir Waddington notes that after 1850 the meaning of “unwholesome” in application to meat shifted from indicating putrid food to “denot[ing] meat from diseased livestock,” as scientific investigation into the nature of disease began to explore diseases communicable across species boundaries through meat consumption.76 Prior to the 1850s, he explains, the meat trade was generally considered honest, but as retail prices climbed and incidents of contagious disease in cattle and sheep rose after 1850, the sale of diseased meat grew. Paradoxically, falling meat prices after 1870 encouraged butchers to be less scrupulous about the meat they sold.

The practice was widespread enough, he adds, that an 1875 article in the Sanitary Record titled “Is Selling Diseased Meat Immoral?” “bemoaned, ‘it was not looked upon as a crime.’ ”77 While Troy’s comment on killing an animal to save its life may sound ironic, Forrest Capie and Richard Perren note that “[d]‌isease restrictions on livestock could be avoided by switching to carcass meat.”78 While this change partially reduced disease spread while the livestock was in transit, it also allowed less ethically minded producers to send ill animals to market: an unwell animal that dies before slaughter usually cannot be eaten, but an ill animal that is slaughtered may still be processed for consumption, especially if the disease is not apparent in the carcass.79 Abigail Woods notes that even after effective diagnostic measures 76 Keir Waddington, “The Dangerous Sausage: Diet, Meat, and Disease in Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” Cultural and Social History, 8.1 (2011), 51–​71 (p. 61). Waddington provides a thorough analysis of Victorian debate over the effect of meat from diseased livestock on human health alongside the prevalence of such meat in nineteenth-​century urban diets. See also Kreilkamp’s note that the novel was written in “a moment marked by the emergence of modern veterinary science and by a new awareness of the crucial links between animal and human disease” in “Pitying the Sheep,” p. 478. For further reading on food quality and adulteration in the nineteenth century, see John Burnett’s landmark study Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day (London: Scolar Press, 1979), pp. 240–​267. 77 “The Dangerous Sausage,” p. 59. 78 Forrest Capie and Richard Perren, “The British Market for Meat 1850–​1914,” Agricultural History, 54.4 (1980), 502–​515 (p. 515). 79 Today’s UK slaughter regulations call for ante-​mortem and post-​mortem inspections, checking for “any disease or condition that may be transmitted to animals or humans through handling or eating of meat” or “any systemic disease or emaciation” but allowing some leeway for animals who had an accident necessitating emergency slaughter; see Chapter 2.2, Annex 1 of the Food Standards Agency’s Manual for Official Controls, available at www.food.gov.uk (accessed February 5, 2016). In the United States, ante-​mortem inspections are made at random, placing greater emphasis on post-​ mortem inspection of carcass meat; see the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “Slaughter Inspection 101” factsheet, available at www.fsis.usda.gov (accessed February 5, 2016).

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were discovered, “many [livestock owners] found it easier to send reacting cattle to market than to isolate them”; as Waddington puts it, these farmers “found it more profitable to sell diseased cattle for food than to seek veterinary attention for sick livestock.”80 Only in the late Victorian era were concerns about diseased meat and its impact on human health becoming prevalent, with a growing movement to abolish private slaughterhouses and replace them with regulated public abattoirs.81 From Troy’s perspective the economic capital gained by rotting the sheep supersedes any moral obligation to the animals or the consumers –​an attitude that arguably has continued with the modern movement away from the family farm to the factory farm. (One can easily imagine Troy, who carries out the act of rotting sheep under the cover of night, adapting to the typically removed-​ from-​view twenty-​first-​century factory farm.)82 The invested-​farmer Troy who appears in the fragment is one who sees the farm as a capitalist enterprise and the sheep as commodities.83 Troy does not feel moral responsibility for the sheep themselves as creatures –​a term that occurs in the fragment three times. The emphasis on sheep as “creatures” conveys a sense of their physical vulnerability –​a vulnerability linked to embodiment that Bathsheba shares in the “borrowed” re-​envisioning of the swamp scene. As Harrison noted in his treatise on the connection between sheep-​rot and human illness, exposure to environments that engendered rot could cause respiratory illness in humans.84 Bathsheba wakes up next to the swamp without a voice, her throat hoarse. In addition to the physical exposure that harms both the sheep and Bathsheba, Hardy’s choice to use so much of his discarded fragment in the scenes pivotal to the start and end of Bathsheba’s romantic feelings 80 Abigail Woods, “A Historical Synopsis of Farm Animal Disease and Public Policy in Twentieth Century Britain,” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 366.1573 (July 2011), 1943–​1954 (p. 1945); “The Dangerous Sausage,” p. 59. 81 Hilda Kean suggests that in the 1850s and 1860s, up to “a fifth of the meat eaten in the UK came from very diseased animals”; see Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 63. See also “The Dangerous Sausage,” p. 64 for Waddington’s discussion of the ways diseased meat was disguised by butchers. For more on the shift from private slaughterhouses to public –​a change that Hardy supported –​see chapters by Chris Otter and Ian MacLachlan in Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, ed. by Paula Young Lee (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008); Philip E. Jones’s The Butchers of London: A History of the Worshipful Company of Butchers of the City of London (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), p. 98; and TH to the Duchess of Hamilton, April 26, 1925 (CL, vi, 323). 82 Jonathan Safran Foer describes modern factory farming as “a mind-​set: reduce production costs to the absolute minimum and systematically ignore or ‘externalize’ such costs as environmental degradation, human disease, and animal suffering” in Eating Animals (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 34. 83 See “A First Draft Chapter,” p. 346. 84 An Inquiry into the Rot in Sheep and Other Animals, p. v.

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for Troy (the chapters titled “The hollow amid the ferns” and “Under a tree: reaction”) seems to imply that her love for the dashing soldier is akin to rot, an incurable disease if not treated early enough. Critics have suggested that the fern hollow where Bathsheba meets Troy and is awed by his swordplay is the same site as the swamp next to which she sleeps after Troy disavows her as his wife and leaves; the borrowings from the fragment in each of these scenes offer further support for that argument.85 First, one might consider the location of this site in the fragment and in its two incarnations in the novel. In the canceled chapter, the narrator describes the “Great Ewelease” as “a high dry & altogether desirable declivity for grazing” (394). At one end of the hill Gabriel spots “a fenny nook at the level of the springs”: the site that engenders rot (394). Similarly, the chapter “The hollow amid the ferns” depicts a “hill opposite Bathsheba’s dwelling” that “extend[s]‌, a mile off, into an uncultivated tract of heath-​land dotted at this season with tall thickets of brake fern . . . in hues of clear and untainted green” (181). Importantly, the season referred to in “The hollow amid the ferns” is midsummer: the warm, dry season that produces healthy and “untainted” growth. Approaching the spot, Gabriel notices “a red spot” which he realizes is Troy’s cigar (394); likewise, Bathsheba views Troy as “a dim spot of artificial red” when she goes to meet him at the fern hollow (181). The fern hollow itself is described as “a saucer-​shaped concave, naturally formed” with ferns growing around the perimeter “nearly to the bottom of the slope” before they “abruptly ceased” and the center “floored with a thick flossy carpet of moss and grass intermingled, so yielding that the foot was half buried within it” (181). The circular shape of the concave, the band of ferns, and the thick and springy bottom of the hollow all foreshadow the later swamp: a hollow with “beautiful yellowing ferns” growing on “the ground sloped downward” to the concave (296). Add to these descriptions Bathsheba’s thought upon approaching the spot in “Under a tree” that “she had seen it by daylight on some previous occasion, and that what appeared like an impassable thicket was in reality a brake of fern, now withering fast,” and it is easy to imagine the fern hollow of the summer becoming the stagnant and swampy “nursery of pestilences” of the autumn (295). In addition, the repeated borrowing of a distinctive image of the setting sun from the fragment ties not only “The hollow amid the ferns” to “Under a tree” but also the plight of the sheep in the fragment to that of 85 Linda Shires, for example, notes the parallels in the environment between the two scenes in her article, “Narrative, Gender, and Power in Far from the Madding Crowd,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 24.2 (1991), 162–​177 (p. 174).

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the women in the novel. The swamp in the sheep-​rot chapter is introduced as Gabriel pauses to take in “one of the most glowing of autumn sunsets,” featuring a “yellow sun, bristling with a thousand spines of light, which stuck into and tormented his eyes” (394).86 This image recurs three times in the actual novel with slightly different variations: first, the shears in the Great Barn of the sheep-​shearing scene are “bristl[ing] with a thousand rays, strong enough to blind a weak-​eyed man” (144); second, the sun in Bathsheba’s approach to the fern hollow is described as “the bristling ball of gold in the west” that “still swept the tips of the ferns with its long luxuriant rays” (181); and third, the vane of the church tower that Bathsheba views from her attic window after returning home from the swamp is “bristling with rays” from the setting sun (300). The linking of these three scenes further suggests the parallel between Bathsheba’s plight and the sheep’s. Like the “captive sheep . . . panting, quickening the rapidity of its pants as misgiving merged in terror” in the sheep-​shearing scene (144), Bathsheba is depicted as “trembling and panting” when she approaches the fern hollow (181). She, too, experiences a shearing; Troy cuts off one of her curls with his sword, an act that the reader later discovers he has also carried out with Fanny Robin when her golden lock of hair is revealed. In the fragment, Gabriel admires the rays –​just as Bathsheba (and likely Fanny before her) is seduced by the gleam of Troy’s swordsmanship creating a “firmament of light” around her by reflecting the “low sun’s rays” (183)  –​but he views the swamp as “a Valley of the Shadow of Death to any ovine entity under the sky” (394). The third mention of the sun’s rays bristling –​on the vane of the church tower which marks for Bathsheba Fanny’s grave –​signals the fatal potential of falling in love with Troy, a “Valley of the Shadow of Death” for any creature unaccompanied by a shepherd, to place the phrase in its Biblical context (300). The narrator describes the swamp in the omitted fragment as “indeed beautiful to look upon” with its “magnificent aureate mist or veil, fiery, yet semi-​opaque –​the hedge behind in some measure hidden by its golden brilliancy” and range of colorful fungi (394). Upon viewing this almost feverish beauty, “Oak’s thought was that this was a spot which would indeed rot a sheep . . . The corner was a nuisance –​a nursery of pestilences small & great” (394). Similarly, in the chapter “Under a tree,” Bathsheba wakes up to see “a species of swamp, dotted with fungi” (296). 86 See Hardy’s journal entry from 1873: “Nov. 3. A sunset. A brazen sun, bristling with a thousand spines, which stuck into & tormented my eyes” (PN 14).

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The narrator uses some of the same words and phrasings found in the fragment to relate her view in the novel: A morning mist hung over it now –​a noisome yet magnificent silvery veil, full of light from the sun, yet semi-​opaque –​the hedge behind it being in some measure hidden by its hazy luminousness. But the general aspect of the swamp was malignant . . . The hollow seemed a nursery of pestilences small and great. (296)

She feels a “tremor at the thought of having passed the night on the brink of so dismal a place”; like Gabriel’s awareness of the danger of the spot to the sheep, Bathsheba is aware both of her physical vulnerability in such a location as well as the metaphysical danger she experienced “having passed the night” in the metaphorical “Valley of the Shadow of Death”: her infatuation with the beautiful-​to-​look-​at Troy (296).87 Her retrospective shudder parallels her exclamation after Troy’s display of swordsmanship:  “I have been within an inch of my life, and didn’t know it!” (184). In the initial encounter, Bathsheba feels an “enlarged emotion to a compass which quite swamped thought” after Troy kisses her (185); waking up next to the swamp (significantly after the exposure of Fanny’s curl of hair and Troy’s kiss of her corpse), Bathsheba feels “a freshened existence and cooler brain” (295). Although Bathsheba wakes up mentally refreshed, she finds herself unable to use her voice:  the environment has a physical and not solely symbolic impact on her person. Liddy’s walk across the swamp in “Under a tree” signifies a restoration of health for Bathsheba. One might recall Bathsheba’s proposal to take Liddy with her to the fern hollow rendezvous, which Troy discourages; perhaps this is the reason “Bathsheba never forgot that transient little picture of Liddy crossing the swamp to her there in the morning light” (297). Her walk is described in very nearly the same terms as Gabriel’s walk across the sheep-​rot swamp in the omitted fragment: “Iridescent bubbles of dank subterranean breath rose from the sweating sod beside the waiting-​maid’s feet as she trod, hissing as they burst and expanded away to join the vapoury firmament above” (297). If Liddy had been present earlier, the unhealthful relationship with Troy possibly could have been prevented. Bathsheba alludes to the fern hollow 87 See also Roger Ebbatson’s “Far from the Madding Crowd:  Swampy Decomposition and Female Individualism,” in Literature and Landscape 1830–​1914:  Nature, Text, Aura (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 83–​91. Ebbatson contextualizes the scene as one in a “series of nineteenth-​ century representations of marsh and swamp [that] has its origins in Pilgrim’s Progress (1684),” and engages with Bachofen’s and Adorno’s use of the swamp to discuss Bathsheba’s “matriarchal renewal” and “female individualism” (86, 90).

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scene when Liddy reaches her, telling her, “Liddy if you ever marry –​God forbid that you ever should –​you’ll find yourself in a fearful situation; but mind this, don’t you flinch. Stand your ground and be cut to pieces. That’s what I’m going to do” (299). Like Gabriel’s act of giving salt to the sheep –​ “the best antidote then in his power” (393) –​Liddy brings Bathsheba food and tea to restore her physically from the effects of the swamp environment, and Bathsheba recovers her voice (298).88 The spatial and temporal resonance of the swamp suggests that Bathsheba’s love for and relationship with Troy are equivalent to sheep-​ rot; the effect on her person parallels the consequences of sheep-​rot upon the sheep. Love in such a system is like a disease. Troy’s lack of regard for Bathsheba –​his failure to fulfill his moral obligation to her as a person –​ is fatal: Boldwood shoots him in a jealous rage. Hardy’s depiction of the swamps and of the systems at work in both cases interrogates the boundaries between humans and animals, but he does not confuse Bathsheba with a sheep or the sheep with Bathsheba. Instead, the self-​borrowing from the fragment complicates straightforward narratives of romantic love and of farming animals and calls for a rethinking of moral responsibility to the other –​be it a human or nonhuman animal. Furthermore, Troy’s attitude toward farming in the fragment and representations of romantic love in the novel are linked by a subtle but underlying theme of love as a parallel system to capitalism. In the beginning of the novel, the narrator compares Gabriel’s emotional state after falling for Bathsheba with the stock market: Love, being an extremely exacting usurer (a sense of exorbitant profit spiritually, by an exchange of hearts, being at the bottom of pure passions, as that exorbitant profit bodily or materially is at the bottom of those of lower atmosphere) every morning Oak’s feelings were as sensitive as the Money Market in calculations upon his chances. (29)

The idea of a stock exchange based on hearts with spiritual profit or loss suggests love as a capitalist venture: not in the material sense of economic gain from marriage to a wealthier party, but in the risk and reward of relationships themselves. At the end of the novel, Bathsheba bemoans the fact that the material and spiritual realms are not fungible: talking to Gabriel about her history with Boldwood, she exclaims, “O if I  could only pay some heavy damages in money to him for the harm I  did, and so get 88 See also A Treatise, p. 173, which recommends salt (the only known “preventative and . . . cure” if given before the disease advanced) and hay, exactly what Gabriel gives to the sheep.

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the sin off my soul that way!” (345). She feels a moral responsibility for her actions toward Boldwood, expressing the wish that such responsibility could be evaded through financial transactions –​an attitude not unfamiliar in today’s Western society. Through the canine and ovine narratives of Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy reconfigures constructions of morality, arguing both for the possibility of the moral sense in nonhuman animals and for the necessity of moral obligation to all creatures.89 Hardy, like Darwin and John Stuart Mill, refocused morality on the “Golden Rule,” which he termed “altruism.” He believed that Altruism, or The Golden Rule, or whatever “Love your Neighbour as Yourself ” may be called, will ultimately be brought about . . . by the pain we see in others reacting on ourselves, as if we and they were part of one body. Mankind, in fact, may be, and possibly will be, viewed as members of one corporeal frame. (LW 235)90

While here he writes “mankind,” his sense of a “shifted . . . centre of altruism” would extend this view to include “the whole conscious world collectively” (373). Victorian humanitarian Henry Salt argued that the lack of consideration for others was “due to a want of sensibility and sympathy –​ in other words, of imagination; the cruel man is cruel because he cannot put himself in the place of those who suffer, cannot feel with them and imagine the misfortunes from which he himself is exempt.”91 Hardy, as will be seen in the Chapter 5 discussion of suffering, felt he had a “strange power of putting himself in the place of those who endured sufferings from which he himself had been in the main free” (PN 292). Salt suggested that “[t]‌he cure for cruelty is therefore to induce men to cultivate a sympathetic imagination,” but he noted “the difficulty of effecting this” because of “the fact that the duty of humanity, as at present preached and understood, is so very vague, partial, and intermittent.”92 Are nonhuman animals included in this “duty of humanity”? For Hardy and Salt, the answer was yes, even if they felt uncertain what that would mean in practical terms. 89 Evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff and philosopher Jessica Pierce propose a definition of morality as a “system . . . of core behaviors” that are “common across a whole range of species, including humans”: “fairness behaviors, cooperative and altruistic behaviors, and empathetic behaviors”; see Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 151. 90 See also Hardy’s comment on “the gradual growth of the introspective faculty in mankind  –​of their power of putting themselves in another’s place, and taking a point of view that is not their own” (THR 35). 91 Henry Salt, Humanitarianism: Its General Principles and Progress (London: Reeves, 1891), p. 18. 92 Ibid., p. 18.

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It is this ability to take on new perspectives –​to shift readers closer to points of view not their own –​that gives Hardy’s writings their strength as a “plea against ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ –​and to woman –​and to the lower animals,” and it is his sense of curiosity as to what the world might be like from another’s standpoint that makes such writing engaging. His sheep and his dogs are believable, carefully attended to by an author willing to sympathetically imagine what it might be like to be Fanny Robin or a homeless dog or Bathsheba Everdene or a newborn lamb or Frank Troy. Hardy’s human and nonhuman characters are not, as James implied, “things.” Rather, they are living and feeling creatures who share, in the words of Michael Irwin, “the same physical, and perhaps even emotional, promptings: their blood . . . hurried by the same wants and fears,” while maintaining “unsubstitutable singularity” as individuals.93 Their narratives are bound up together –​inseparable and indeterminable sides of a single Möbius strip.

93 Reading Hardy’s Landscapes, pp. 79–​80; “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” p. 378.

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“Artful” Creatures, Part I: Animal Language

Hardy’s sheep and dogs were not fictional, abstract animals for him. As a youth growing up in rural Dorset, he frequently encountered these animals in his daily life. At the end of Life, Florence Hardy recounts the memories Hardy brought up in the weeks before his death. Among them is the story of the author pretending to be a sheep. As Florence relates it, “[h]e recalled how, crossing the ewe-​leaze when a child, he went on hands and knees and pretended to eat grass in order to see what the sheep would do. Presently he looked up and found them gathered around in a close ring, gazing at him with astonished faces” (LW 479). The anecdote provides an example of Hardy’s imagination and sense of humor: not only in his curiosity as a young child wondering what might happen if he pretended to be a sheep, but also in his fondness for the story in his later years, remembering the faces of the sheep. This willingness to get down on one’s hands and knees –​to encounter the animal in its own space, in its own way of life –​demonstrates an empathetic vision that can also be traced in Hardy’s depictions of animal life in his novels. While Hardy recognizes the alterity of animals, his awareness that he could not know what it is to be a sheep (to recast Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” in Wessex terms) did not prevent him from pondering other points of view, shifting perspectives and exploring the limits of overlapping worlds.1 Giorgio Agamben, in his account of the twentieth-​century zoologist Jakob von Uexküll, discusses the idea of the Umwelt:  an environment-​ world that exists only for the inhabitant, its meaning shaped by each being’s subjective viewpoint. There is, for example, “a forest-​for-​the-​park-​ ranger, a forest-​for-​the-​hunter, a forest-​for-​the-​botanist, a forest-​for-​the-​ wayfarer.” Within such environments, even small objects have different significance for the creatures interacting with them: for example, the difference in the importance of “the stem of a wildflower” to “a girl picking 1 See Thomas Nagel, Moral Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 165–​180.

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a bouquet” or to a “cow who simply chews and swallows it as food.”2 Importantly, the idea of the Umwelt implies that a unitary world does not exist, just as a space and a time that are equal for all living things do not exist. The fly, the dragonfly, and the bee we observe flying next to us on a sunny day do not move in the same world as the one in which we observe them, nor do they share with us –​or with each other –​ the same time and the same space.3

Even as a young man, Hardy was keenly aware of this sense, commenting at the end of 1865 on the individual relation of various Umwelts to time:  “To insects the twelvemonth has been an epoch, to leaves a life, to tweeting birds a generation, to man a year” (LW 56). Each creature has its own temporal and spatial experience of “world,” and within the material experience of that world, objects signify different meanings for each being.4 Uexküll, in his attempt to recreate the environments of the minute organisms he studied (the most notable of which was the tick), called his investigations “walk[s]‌into unknown worlds” and his writings a “travelogue,” inviting readers “to come along as we wander through these worlds.”5 He provides illustrations of what the world might look like from another creature’s point-​of-​view, which Agamben notes are useful for their “disorienting effect,” taking the human reader out of his or her normal perspective.6 Uexküll imagines the Umwelt of a tick, which he determines as having three distinguishing factors: the smell of sweat, the temperature of blood, and the skin of mammals. Yet, as Agamben questions, how does he account for a tick kept for eighteen years in a laboratory, deprived of these three things that constitute “world”? Hardy’s poem “An August Midnight” plays with the idea of overlapping worlds in its description of an encounter between the speaker and four insects: “a longlegs,” “a moth,” “a dumbledore,” and “a sleepy fly” (CP 146).7 While the first stanza describes the human’s environment –​marked by a lamp, a blind, and the sound of a clock –​and the entrance of the 2 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. by Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 41. 3 Ibid., p. 40. 4 See also Hardy’s note from Schopenhauer: “Before Kant we were in Time; now Time is in us” (LN, ii, 160); his mention of the “unreality of time” (LW 109); and his thoughts on relativity, “[t]‌hat things & events always were, are, & will be” (PN 71). 5 Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a Theory of Meaning, trans. by Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010), pp. 41, 43. 6 The Open, p. 45. 7 Before J. K. Rowling made the word famous as a character name in Harry Potter, a “dumbledore” was Dorset dialect for a bumblebee.

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insects upon the scene, the second stanza shifts into an exploration of what it means to encounter these tiny individuals, so seemingly insignificant yet ubiquitous in the human view of the world. “Thus meet we five, in this still place | At this point of time, at this point in space,” the speaker writes. The emphasis on time and space  –​the two factors Uexküll and Agamben stress are not uniting factors, but rather unique to each being’s viewpoint –​seems at first to unite the creatures, human and insect, in the single plural pronoun “we.” Yet the meeting only occurs for the speaker: as the next two lines show, the insects, who are referred to now as “guests,” behave in a manner indifferent to the human world. They “besmear” the speaker’s “new-​penned line”  –​an act both of creation, as the insects in their own way “write” on the page, but also one of destruction, as they interrupt the writer’s line by physically smearing the ink, making the words less legible  –​and “bang at the lamp” before falling dead, an act which illuminates the alterity of each Umwelt seemingly elided in the previous two lines. Each insect’s relation to the lamp is distinct from its significance to the speaker, who is using it to light his writing desk. The last two lines make this recognition of the insects’ alterities clear: Hardy plays with the idea of the Great Chain of Being as his speaker “muse[s]‌,” “God’s humblest, they!” before refuting it with “Yet why?” The poem concludes with Hardy’s version of Uexküll’s “unknowable worlds” of the insects: the speaker reflects, “They know Earth-​secrets that know not I.”8 The theme of this last line, of other creatures knowing “Earth-​secrets” that humans do not, recurs throughout Hardy’s work.9 Thinking with animals –​be it with sheep and dogs or with longlegs, moths, dumbledores, and flies –​allows Hardy and his readers to reconsider what it means to be part of “the whole conscious world collectively,” as he phrased it in his letter proposing a “shifted . . . centre of altruism” to extend the Golden Rule to the animal world (LW 373).10 Traditional boundaries between humans and animals become Möbius strips in encounters between Hardy’s creatures. The next three chapters will look at three of these boundaries to examine how Hardy configures them. This chapter will focus on language (and the related capacity for abstract conceptual 8 “An August Midnight” is a poem well beloved by the Hardy community; I  am indebted to the many scholars I have heard discuss it in person, especially Phillip Mallett. For another reading that has enriched my own, see Irwin’s Reading Hardy’s Landscapes, p. 26. 9 See, for example, F. B. Pinion’s commentary on “The Year’s Awakening” in A Commentary on the Poems of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 102. 10 For the aphorism animals are “good to think,” see Claude Lévi-​Strauss, Totemism, trans. by Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 89. See also Erica Fudge’s “Thinking with Pets,” in Pets (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), pp. 39–​72.

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thought), framing historical debates with the examples of Tess and the bullfinches at Trantridge and the birds in the poem “Winter in Durnover Field.” Chapter 4 will reflect upon the idea of the face, looking not to the OED but to the twentieth-​century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas for a definition and applying it to the gaze between Mrs. Yeobright and the adder in The Return of the Native. The third boundary to be examined will follow up on Jeremy Bentham’s question, “Can they suffer?,” giving special attention to the pig-​slaughter scene in Jude and to the dying game birds in Tess, but also extending the question to the bees in Under the Greenwood Tree.11 While both the insistence upon and resistance against boundaries can result in violence, two other important factors emerge in Hardy’s thinking with animals: a sense of humor and a sense of empathy.

Animal Language Critics have often commented on the attention to Tess’s lips, especially in the scene where Alec retrains her to whistle so she can fulfill an essential aspect of her role at Trantridge: teaching Mrs. d’Urberville’s bullfinches new airs.12 Red and full, her lips are usually read as a metonym for her sex –​overlooking the physiological function that they enact in this scene, which is namely to perform an act imitative of birdsong in order to teach her avian charges human melodies. The tension in the scene plays off the idea that the shape Tess must form with her lips is the same to whistle as it is to kiss, but if one sets aside the dynamics of gender and class in the scene, one might consider the artifice involved in the prolonged puckering of the lips into a round shape (in Alec’s words, “pouting up that pretty red mouth to whistling shape”) in order to produce a clear tone so natural to the songsters of the bird world (64). As Darwin points out in Descent, the human lips and tongue evolved with the emergence of human language, making it possible to articulate the specific vocalizations humans use to signify meaning.13 By shaping her lips and tongue to whistle, Tess is working instead to articulate a nonlinguistic sound, albeit one still based 11 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. by J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 283. (Hereafter referred to as IPML.) 12 For analyses of Tess’s mouth, see Rosemarie Morgan’s Women and Sexuality, pp. 50–​51, and Kaja Silverman’s “History, Figuration and Female Subjectivity in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 18.1 (1984), 5–​28 (pp. 6, 10–​11). 13 Darwin, The Descent of Man: and Selection in Relation to Sex, intro. by John Tyler Bonner and Robert M. May, 2 vols (London: Murray, 1871; repr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), i, 56–​59. References from this chapter onward will look to the first edition of Descent, unless otherwise noted.

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on a semiotic system, and one formatted by humans –​music written by a human composer. In a humorous exchange in The Dynasts, Hardy reverses this idea of the human taking on the sound of the animal. In Act V, Scene 5 of Part First, a character simply titled “Boy” complains, “I don’t like [Mr. Pitt]. He killed Uncle John’s parrot” (101). A  man with whom his father is conversing asks, “How may ye make that out, youngster?,” and the boy explains that “Mr. Pitt made war, and the war made us want sailors”: his uncle went for a walk “to talk to the pretty ladies one evening” and ended up being swept onto “a man-​of-​war to fight under Nelson; and nobody minded Uncle John’s parrot, and it talked itself to death. So Mr. Pitt killed Uncle John’s parrot; see it, sir?” (101). The man replies to the father, “You had better have a care of this boy, friend . . . he might as well have said Boney killed the parrot when he was about it” (101). Here, it is the parrot who performs the “human” act of talking –​and without a listener, it kills itself through the act. Parrots presented a puzzling figure: historically they held a reputation for being, to quote Aristotle, “human-​tongued.”14 Even Darwin, writing on language in Descent, comments, “for as every one knows, parrots can talk.”15 While the dialogue in The Dynasts provides comic relief, the larger violence framing this death  –​like the resonance of Alec’s physical apprehension of Tess on The Chase after the continual treatment of her as his “bird” –​suggests an underlying tragedy in the insistence upon boundaries: in the case of The Dynasts, national boundaries. This shifting between comedic and tragic tones creates a tension that subverts black-​and-​white definitions of perhaps the most closely guarded boundary dividing humans and animals: language. “Where, then, is the difference between brute and man?” the German philologist F.  Max Müller asked in the early 1860s. He continued, “I answer without hesitation: the one great barrier between the brute and man is Language.”16 With the widespread acceptance of the origins of humankind through natural selection from a common animal progenitor, those eager to reiterate the gulf between humans and the rest of the living world looked to language –​and the capacities for reason and abstract thought supposedly implicit in it  –​to mark what it meant to Aristotle, Historia Animalium, trans. by A. L. Peck, 3 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), ii, 83. Aristotle adds that the parrot “becomes even more outrageous after drinking wine.” 15 Descent, i, 54; in his revised edition of the text, Darwin clarifies that “some parrots . . . have been taught to speak” (2nd edn, p. 130). 16 F. Max Müller, The Science of Language, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1899), i, 489. The book is based on his 1861 and 1863 lectures at the Royal Institution. 14

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be human. But Darwin repeatedly asserted two considerations when approaching language. First, given the difference between humans and animals was one of degree and not of kind, mental faculties –​including and especially reason  –​were traceable in nonhuman animals. Second, he argued that languages were not “deliberately invented”; rather, “each has been slowly and unconsciously developed by many steps” “through a gradual process.”17 Darwin viewed the slow development of languages as analogous to the differentiation of species through natural selection. (In fact, evolutionary and language theory discourses became entwined by shared terminology and use of metaphor in the nineteenth century, as Gillian Beer notes).18 At the end of Descent, he summarized language as a “half-​art and half-​instinct” that “came into use” in a comparable manner to the early creation of tools, in turn shaping the development of the human intellect.19 Significantly, such a definition indicated that the emergence of language was not uniquely human; other species may have developed the same prelinguistic impulse into different forms of semiotic systems, dependent on coevolving biological structures shaped by environmental pressures. The image of the talking parrot  –​and the piping human  –​offers a point of slippage along humanist formulations of language as a definitive human–​animal boundary. Hardy’s depictions of nonhuman language reflect his involvement with the Victorian debates over animal capacity for language, subverting rigorously human definitions and revealing areas of uncertainty. In his writings there is a space for a definition of language that is not uniquely human –​rather, as systems that emerged in different ways among different species. For Hardy –​and for Darwin –​art offered a metaphor for considering language on both a broad and a narrow scale. Hardy copied down the quotation “[t]‌hose mighty works of art which we call languages” in his literary notebooks, a thought which gestures to the cumulative creative process of developing modern languages (LN, ii, 37).20 To regard language in this sense –​as “[t]he expression or 17 Descent, i, 55, 59. 18 Descent, i, 59–​60; see also Beer’s chapter “Darwin and the Growth of Evolutionary Theory” in Open Fields, pp. 95–​114. Languages were described in terms of living organisms: like distinct species, they can be linked to distinct geographical locations, undergo minute changes over time and movement of population across locales, combine and produce new formations (in this case, out of morphemes), and can become extinct. Beer notes that the nineteenth-​century discussion around the origins of humankind inspired a new focus on etymology, with language theory using evolutionary theory as a model and treating language as a living organism rather than a static system. 19 Descent, ii, 390. 20 Hardy notes from John Addington Symonds’s Essays Speculative and Suggestive (1890).

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application of creative skill and imagination . . . producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power,” to borrow a definition from the OED –​moves away from scientific definitions toward an aesthetic awareness, one that requires an emotional as well as a rational response, and one that recognizes the process as ongoing and collaborative. On a more local scale, Darwin, following in the footsteps of the philologist Horne Tooke, observed that “language is an art”:  an individual skill that must be learned, although unique from other arts due to “an instinctive tendency to speak.” Darwin extended this metaphor to compare the acquisition of human language in children with birdsong in baby birds, suggesting language is an art form that requires instruction and practice, much like playing a musical instrument, and a skill that may be performed with more or less proficiency according to the individual.21 Perhaps most salient for Hardy, if language is an art, then language requires more than a speaker: like the parrot, it needs an empathetic listener. Later in his notebooks he quotes J. Oliver Hobbes on literary art, copying down the thought that “[l]‌anguage, no less than music, is a way of hearing” (LN, ii, 117). Language is not only an expressive skill but also a receptive one. As Michel de Montaigne suggested in the fifteenth century, “[t]hat defect which hindreth communication betweene them and us, why may it not as well be in us, as in them? . . . For, we understand them no more than they us. By the same reason, may they as well esteeme us beasts, as we them.”22 Henry Salt recapitulated Montaigne’s argument in the Victorian era, writing, “[i]f we cannot understand their language, . . . that is our loss, perhaps, as much as theirs . . . It is not any structural imperfection on their part, but lack of sympathy on ours, that is the cause of the misunderstanding.”23 A character in Mark Twain’s What Is Man? (1906) reminds his listener that “so far as we can know, there is no such thing as a dumb beast,” proposing instead the phrase “Unrevealed Creatures” –​a usage fitting with Hardy’s sense of creature.24 In his depictions of animal language –​which often move between the comedic and the tragic –​Hardy calls for his readers to listen closely, to imagine voices and meaning outside their own Umwelts as unrevealed rather than non-​existent. 21 Descent, i, 55. 22 Michel de Montaigne, Essays and Belles-​Lettres, trans. by John Florio, vol. 2 (London: Dent & Sons, 1910), p. 143. 23 Henry Salt, The Humanities of Diet: Some Reasonings and Rhymings (Manchester: Vegetarian Society, 1914), p. 52. 24 Mark Twain, What Is Man? (New  York:  De Vinne Press, 1906; repr. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 107.

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From a historical and philosophical perspective, the definition of language is as elusive as Pierston’s Well-​Beloved. The rigor with which the scientific meaning of “language” is guarded emerged during the Victorian debates over speech and language and was intensified with the animal language experiments of the twentieth century, leading to the current definition of language in science as being “rule-​governed, simultaneously stable and dynamic, a symbolic system, and a performative idiom.”25 Yet a look at the etymology of the word reveals its historical conflation with ideas surrounding language: confusions with voice, speech, utterance, tongue, and communication.26 The primary definition of “language” in the OED is broad: while the first subentry describes it as the system of communication used by a particular country or people with a specific grammatical structure, the second subentry includes animal vocalizations; the third adds nonverbal communication, such as facial expressions and gestures; and the fourth gives the modern sense of computing, suggesting the technological aspect of language. Here, language is “[a]‌ny of numerous systems of precisely defined symbols and rules devised for writing programs or representing instructions and data that can be processed and executed by a computer.” One might argue that this fourth sense could also apply to music –​a system based on “precisely defined symbols and rules devised for [creating organized sound and] representing [in its notation] instructions and data that can be processed and executed by a [musician].” Throughout his writings, Hardy plays with the conflation of the first three senses of “language,” overlapping human speech with animal vocalization and reading the facial expressions of animal characters in the same manner as he approaches his human characters’ interiority –​as impressions, using the words “as if ” and “seems.” Casterbridge, only recently evolved from a cornfield, places the human and the animal in such close proximity that the courthouse is next to the sheep pasture: thus “the red-​ robed judge, when he condemned a sheep stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by” (MC 86). The dog George, as seen in the last chapter, adds his growl to his human’s “menace,” reinforcing Gabriel’s threat (FFMC 109). Christian Cantle interprets the adder’s gaze at Mrs. Yeobright as “overlooking,” considering that perhaps “something of the 25 Eileen Crist, “Can an Insect Speak? The Case of the Honeybee Dance Language,” Social Studies of Science, 34.1 (2004), 7–​43 (p. 12). 26 See the OED for the etymology of “language” and its “significant semantic overlap with the earlier speech and tongue” in its historical development.

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old serpent in God’s garden, that gied the apple to the young woman with no clothes, lives on in adders and snakes still” (RN 285). Ethelberta becomes embarrassed under the gaze of her rented donkey (who, like the adder, is referred to multiple times as a “creature”), whose look she interprets “as though he would say, ‘Why don’t you own me, after safely bringing you over those weary hills’ ” (HE 241). The last two ­examples –​ alluding to Biblical animals who did speak, namely the serpent in Genesis and Balaam’s ass –​acknowledge the ancient tradition that animals could speak but had lost the capacity to be understood by humans after the Biblical fall of mankind, and the first two gesture toward contemporary debates over the semiotic value of animal articulations and moral sense in animals. Furthermore, Hardy’s narrators and characters attend to meaning conveyed through nonlinguistic codes. Roger Ebbatson points to the sword-​ play scene in Far from the Madding Crowd, in which the erotic tension between Troy and Bathsheba is displayed not through dialogue or through conventional depictions of romantic encounters (although the scene does end with a kiss), but through Troy’s display, which Ebbatson reads as analogous to Darwin’s description of sexual selection in birds through the process of showing off plumage (his bright red coat) and performing antics. He writes, “Hardy expertly projects the non-linguistic codes which pertain in sexual matters in animal and human worlds so that the scene feels like a projection of the unconscious in which the figure of the male dissolves into a swaying tension. Discursive content is nil.”27 Similarly, when Bathsheba leaves a message “in chalk on the coach-​doors” and takes Dainty and the gig on a nighttime excursion to meet Troy in Bath, her employees fail to see her written account (given the darkness of the hour) and instead read nonlinguistic cues to locate the horse (212). They follow the sound of distant hoof steps, which they are able to recognize as Dainty’s, and when the sound dissipates, they trace her path by her tracks, which are rendered in the text not through description but in little drawings, showing the horse’s gait by the pattern of its hoof marks. As the narrator explains, the diagrams are used because “the footprints,” while “full of information,” were “difficult to describe in words” (208). This unusual insertion of a paratextual device into the text creates a sense of discovery for the reader, but it also replaces written human language with a physical code based on the equine hoof –​which is, by implication, more comprehensible and more expressive in this context. In Hardy’s texts, linguistic 27 The Evolutionary Self, p. 33.

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and nonlinguistic codes become malleable, with the latter sometimes serving as more meaningful and more accurate to the impression than the former.28 In The Language of Thomas Hardy (1990), Raymond Chapman comments on Hardy’s use of simile to compare animal sounds with those of humans, and vice versa –​specifically with noises produced by birds and by women. He points out the way herons in Tess “make ‘a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters’ ” and thrushes in Two on a Tower “crack snails on stones ‘with the noisiness of little smiths at work on little anvils.’ ” On the flip side of such comparisons, Chapman identifies two instances when female vociferations are described in terms of bird cries: Sue’s crying at the end of Jude echoes “through the house like a screech-​owl,” and Ethelberta emits a sound “like a note from a storm-​bird at night” upon hearing of a former flame.29 For Chapman, these instances gesture toward prelinguistic impulse, “tak[ing] us into a primitive world, older than Victorian Wessex, when links between the human and the animal were stronger and the sympathy deeper.”30 The descriptions of bird sounds as human suggest an imaginative curiosity about the worlds of herons and thrushes, hearing their sounds as meaningful. Moreover, the depictions of women crying like wild birds reconfigures the trope of woman-​as-​caged-​bird, a trope familiar to Victorian audiences and used –​as Bourke and Martin A. Danahay both observe –​by those on opposing sides of political viewpoints for very different functions: on one hand, “to dehumanize women” through misogynistic comparisons, and on the other, to “represent women as victims of male oppression.”31 From Mary Wollstonecraft to Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Henrik Ibsen, the image of the woman in a domestic setting as a songbird kept in a gilded cage was employed repeatedly in literature to protest the patriarchal treatment of women. By linking his heroines’ cries to those of wild birds, Hardy draws upon these associations while raising the stakes by breaking down a perceived nature–​culture divide. 28 Even when describing human characters, Hardy emphasizes nonlinguistic communication: see, for example, his description of the marketplace in The Mayor of Casterbridge: “The yeomen, farmers, dairymen, and townsfolk, who came to transact business in these ancient streets, spoke in other ways than by articulation. Not to hear the words of your interlocutor in metropolitan centres is to know nothing of his meaning. Here the face, the arms, the hat, the stick, the body throughout spoke equally with the tongue” (58). 29 Raymond Chapman, The Language of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 147. 30 Ibid., p. 147. 31 Martin A. Danahay, “Nature Red in Hoof and Paw: Domestic Animals and Violence in Victorian Art,” in Victorian Animal Dreams, ed. by Morse and Danahay, pp. 97–​119, (p. 117). See also What It Means to Be Human, p. 13.

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Tess’s training to imitate bird-​tone in order to instruct birds in human-​ song, then, is layered with tension. Bound up with the scene are worries about degeneration, both in the birds’ listening skills and Tess’s placement along the “Great Chain of Being” as signified by speech. Mrs. d’Urberville tells Tess that she must begin her lessons with the bullfinches right away, “or they will go back in their piping” (Tess 66). Tess, upon “seriously screw[ing] up her mouth for the long-​neglected practice” (whistling being an “accomplishment” common to “country girls” but not one “to profess in genteel company”) discovers “her former ability to have degenerated to the production of a hollow rush of wind through the lips, and no clear note at all” (66–​67). The school-​educated Tess wonders “how she could have grown out of the art which had come by nature” (67). To revert to this form of producing sound is to mimic a bird’s voice (effectively falling downward along the Great Chain of Being), yet the song produced through this form is an art, something typically reserved for the human realm.32 Alec points out the oddity of the situation, asking Tess, “do you think my mother a queer old soul?” and concluding, “she must be, to make you learn to whistle to her bullfinches” (68). Yet Tess becomes comfortable with her role, discovering that whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs d’Urberville’s room was no such onerous business when she had regained the art, for she had caught from her musical mother numerous airs that suited those songsters admirably . . . she threw up her mouth, put her lips near the bars, and piped away in easeful grace to the attentive listeners. (68)

Only when she sees Alec’s boots under the curtains, listening to her “giving her lesson” to the bullfinches, does she become uncomfortable with the act.33 Hardy’s word choice throughout the passage teases out the overlap between the human and the animal:  Tess “catches” the tunes from her dialect-​speaking mother, but “teaches” them to the bullfinches. In one world, the ability to produce a certain type of sound places one on a lower rung on the humanist hierarchical ladder; in the other, it is a means of “improvement.” Additionally, the birds’ dual capacity for aviary and human melodies seems akin to Tess’s “two languages.” Ebbatson notes that “[t]‌he steady sense of obliteration and replacement of old orders by new 32 For a similar image that conflates culture/​nature in Hardy’s writing, see Richardson’s discussion of the metaphor of the “dancing bear” in “Hardy and the Place of Culture,” pp. 54–​70. 33 See also A Commentary on the Poems of Thomas Hardy, p. 43: Pinion identifies this moment as when Tess realizes her danger. He suggests that Hardy’s poem “The Bullfinches” extends the plight facing Tess in the novel to the birds themselves, captive under the care of the blind Mrs. d’Urberville (CP 122–​123).

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is acutely registered in language,” especially “in the case of dialect, where the changes will be felt as a permanent loss” –​a loss poignantly paralleled by Tess’s extinction at the end of the novel.34 Hardy mourned the passing of dialect, reversing conventional attitudes toward dialect as a marker of status by preserving Dorset words in his writing. What does this mean for the bullfinches, who must replace their bird melodies with human airs? Birds in particular problematized definitions of language. In his Historia Animalium (c. 350 BC), Aristotle argues that while many animals have voices (needing only a pharynx and lungs to produce sound), only humans had the tongues and lips necessary for producing speech: excepting, that is, birds  –​who “second only to man” could “utter articulate sounds,” which might be considered “as a sort of ‘speech.’ ”35 He too notices that nightingales appeared to teach their offspring to sing, making it a learned rather than innate trait –​an idea that Darwin takes up in Descent.36 In a diary entry on 30 May 1877, Hardy records Walking to Marnhull. The prime of bird-​singing. The thrushes and blackbirds are the most prominent, –​pleading earnestly rather than singing, and with such modulation that you seem to see their little tongues curl inside their bills in their emphasis. A bullfinch sings from a tree with a metallic sweetness piercing as a fife. (LW 117)

Hardy’s simile –​comparing the bullfinch’s song to the sound of a fife –​ draws a curious retracing between birdsong and human music, between nature and artifice, and between animal and human production of sound. The vivid description of modulation and emphasis in the birds’ curling tongues demonstrates the power of birds to articulate patterns of sound, complicating notions of the uniqueness of human articulation. Even Darwin, when writing about language as unique to humankind, explains that by this he does not mean the “power of articulation” (which in the revised edition he changes to “the habitual use of articulation,” further giving space for articulate animals) but rather “the larger power of connecting definite sounds with definite ideas” (which again, he revises in the next edition, quoting from Leslie Stephen on the capacity of the dog to understand “a general concept of cats or sheep, and know the corresponding words as well as a philosopher,” as discussed in the previous chapter).37 For Müller (and many others, before and after him), it is “the 34 The Evolutionary Self, p. 21. 35 Historia Animalium. i, 115; ii, 83. 36 Descent. i, 55. 37 Descent, i, 54; 2nd edn, pp. 131, 136.

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naming of a thing” that separates humans and animals, and he proceeds to go through the names humans have given the animal.38 He traces the definition of “animal” to a lack of reason, explaining that “in Greek, language is logos, but logos means also reason, and alogon was chosen as the name, and the most proper name, for brute.”39 Frederic Bateman followed up Müller’s argument in Darwinism Tested by Language (1877), arguing that the difference between humans and other animals was not one of degree but of kind. Bateman outlines the difference this way: Bring a Fuegian to England, and give him time, and he will talk, for he possesses the healthy germs of speech, and has the capacity for evolving a language; put a monkey under training for any number of years, and he will never evince the slightest capacity for the acquisition of language.40

Bateman’s suggestion was taken seriously in the twentieth century, with the chimps Washoe, Gua, and Nim, the bonobo Kanzi, and the gorilla Koko among the primates trained by psychologists investigating language acquisition in nonhuman species.41 Such an approach has two obvious flaws: first, as Montaigne pointed out, it ignores the possibility of species-​ specific languages (or disparages the merit of studying such languages on their own terms); and second, as Beer explained, its anthropocentric structure casts nonhuman apes in anthropomorphic roles, “placing humankind at the unique center of significance” and viewing “other species as aspiring towards the human condition” (a view as erroneous as the Victorian progressionist belief that apes were aspiring toward becoming human).42 While Darwin suggested the likelihood of ape gesture-​language in his writings, commenting that “[a]‌ny one who has watched monkeys will not doubt that they perfectly understand each other’s gestures and

38 Science of Language, i, 521. For more on the ability to name as a boundary between humans and animals, see Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” pp. 383–​389. 39 Ibid., p. 527. 40 Frederic Bateman, Darwinism Tested by Language (London: Rivingtons, 1877), p. 156. 41 For the stories of Washoe, Gua, Nim, Kanzi, and Koko, see R. Allen Gardner and Beatrice T. Gardner, “Teaching Sign Language to a Chimpanzee,” Science, 165 (1969), 664–​ 672; W. N. Kellogg and L. A. Kellogg, The Ape and the Child: A Study of Environmental Influence upon Early Behavior (New  York:  Hafner, 1967); Herbert S. Terrace, Nim (New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1986); Sue Savage-​Rumbaugh, Stuart G. Shanker, and Talbot J. Taylor, Apes, Language, and the Human Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Self-​awareness in Animals and Humans: Developmental Perspectives, ed. by Sue Taylor Parker, Robert W. Mitchell, and Maria L. Boccia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For late Victorian chimp language experiments, see Richard Garner’s The Speech of Monkeys (London:  Heinemann, 1892). While the scientific merit of Garner’s studies was dubious, he recorded primate vocalizations and developed playback techniques that are still used by psychologists today. 42 Open Fields, p. 112.

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expression, and to a large extent . . . those of man,” such studies were not undertaken until much more recent times, with Catherine Hobaiter and Richard Byrne being among the first psychologists to publish on the use and meaning of gestures among wild chimpanzees.43 Yet while even Descartes admitted the capacity for communication in animals, the question remained, does a word have to exist in order to enable a specific thought? Müller argued yes, writing that “[t]‌here is no thought without words, as little as there are words without thought” –​to which Darwin responded, “[w]hat a strange definition must here be given to the word thought!”44 For Darwin, even ants had some power of mentation. His children may have teased him over his sense of complete awe and wonder at ants and earthworms, but his enthusiasm was contagious. Reveling in the “wonderfully diversified instincts, mental powers, and affections of ants” when “their cerebral ganglia are not so large as the quarter of a small pin’s head,” he concluded, “the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more marvellous than the brain of a man.”45 The simple sense of wonder –​along with his list of actions that describe the ant world as a type of civilization and his mention of Jean Pierre Huber’s chapter on “their language” –​influenced not only his mentee George Romanes, who corroborated the statement by writing, “[a]s Mr. Darwin has observed, the brain of such an insect deserves to be regarded as perhaps the most wonderful piece of matter in the world,” but also Müller.46 Beginning to concede ground, Müller 43 Expression, p. 63; Catherine Hobaiter and Richard Byrne, “The Gestural Repertoire of the Wild Chimpanzee,” Animal Cognition, 14 (2011), 745–​767. See also Hobaiter and Byrne’s “The Meanings of Chimpanzee Gestures,” Current Biology, 24.14 (2014), 1596–​1600. Hardy too may have considered the possibility for chimp language: in a children’s poem attributed to Hardy titled “The Chimpanzee,” the title speaker notes, “every one among us chatters | Until we sound as mad as hatters” –​the latter phrase shifting from comic to tragic when echoed in “Channel Firing” three years later, in which God deems the nations “[m]‌ad as hatters” during his speech to the dead. See Fifty-​Seven Poems (Gillingham: Meldon House, 2002), p. 7; CP 305. 44 Descent, 2nd edn, p. 135. Müller sent Darwin a copy of his 1870 lectures “On Darwin’s Philosophy of Language” in 1873, and the naturalist responded to them in his 1874 revisions to Descent. On a separate note, insistence upon the impossibility of a thought without the matching word would mean, for example, that some cultures would lack certain concepts depending on their language’s vocabulary; the presence or absence of particular terms in a given language does not determine the existence of corresponding concepts for an individual. 45 Descent, i, 145. See The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. by Francis Darwin, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London: Murray, 1887), i, 155, where the editor recalls his father’s “description of a larval cirripede, ‘with six pairs of beautifully constructed natatory legs, a pair of magnificent compound eyes, and extremely complex antennae’ ” which his children teasingly “used to laugh at him for” and “compared to an advertisement.” 46 Descent, i, 58; George Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals (London: Kegan Paul, 1883), p. 45. Huber was a Swiss entomologist who worked on the order Hymenoptera.

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included the following statement on communication in ants in his 1888 Gifford lectures: You have only to disturb an ant-​hill, and see what happens. A number of ants will run away on their beaten tracks, they will stop every ant they meet, and every ant, after having been touched and communicated with, will run to the ant-​hill to render help with the same alacrity with which a member of the fire-​brigade runs towards the place of conflagration after hearing the bugle in the street. We cannot understand how it is done, but that little head of an ant, not larger than the head of a pin, must have been able to express terror and implore help.47

Hardy, too, was struck by the fact that ants make slaves of other ants and keep aphides as “milch-​cows” (LN, i, 32, 35). Even the definition of humans as tool-​makers, political creatures, and playful beings seemed undermined by this small insect.48 In his diagram at the opening of Mental Evolution in Animals (1883), Romanes placed the emergence of communication with Hymenoptera, the order that includes both bees and ants (and spent 54 and 111 pages on each respectively in his book Animal Intelligence published the preceding year).49 In modern times the bee has perhaps usurped the ant in terms of human awe at insects’ capacities, given the discovery of their waggle-​dance language for which Karl von Frisch won the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Why was it so crucial to deny nonhuman animals the capacity for thought in humanist tradition? As Descartes explained in his Discourse on Method (1637), where he established his system of dualism dividing rational humans from automated animals, reason was indicative of the immortal soul. If, Descartes posited, we “imagine that the soul of animals is of the same nature as our own,” then “consequently, we have nothing to fear or to hope for after this life, any more than have flies or ants.”50 E. M. Forster illuminated the underlying tension in an evocative passage in A Passage to India (1924) in which two missionaries consider the limits of “divine hospitality”: In our Father’s house are many mansions, they taught, and there alone will the incompatible multitudes of mankind be welcomed and soothed. 47 F. Max Müller, Natural Religion: The Gifford Lectures, Delivered before the University of Glasgow in 1888 (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 357. 48 See David G. Ritchie, Natural Rights: A Criticism of Some Political and Ethical Conceptions, 3rd edn (London: Allen & Unwin, 1916), pp. 54–​55. Darwin notes Huber’s observation of ants playing “like so many puppies”; see Descent, i, 39. 49 See “Chapter III: Ants” and “Chapter IV: Bees and Wasps,” in George Romanes, Animal Intelligence (London: Kegan Paul, 1882), pp. 31–​142, 143–​197. 50 René Descartes, Discourse on Method and The Meditations, trans. by F. E. Sutcliffe (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 76.

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As the acceptance of evolution upset biology-​based conceptions of human uniqueness, assertions of immaterial difference became more important for Victorians attempting to maintain Cartesian dualism. Hardy, however, was interested in the work being done in physiology that connected the immaterial to the material world. He copied down, for example, the following statement from George Henry Lewes on the absence of the soul: Physiology began to disclose that all the mental processes were (mathematically speaking) functions of physical processes, i.e. –​varying with the variations of bodily states; & this was declared enough to banish for ever the conception of a Soul, except as a term simply expressing certain functions. (LN, i, 92)

Lewes’s statement summarizes the stance proposed by Thomas Huxley’s 1874 lecture “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata, and Its History,” which reconfigured Cartesian discourse in an unexpected manner. Huxley argued that Descartes was correct in thinking animals are automatons, but he expanded the argument in a pivotal way: if animals were automatons, then human animals must be too. The pivotal difference between Descartes’s and his own view of animal automaticity was consciousness: humans were “conscious automata,” whose “mental conditions are simply the symbols in consciousness of the changes which take place automatically in the organism,” and whose “sum of existence” consists of a “great series of causes and effects.”52 Hardy, who admired Huxley’s writings, experimented with the idea of human beings as automatons throughout his works: consider, for example, his depictions of Jonny Nunsuch (as “a mere automaton, galvanized into moving and speaking by the wayward Eustacia’s will” like “the brass statue which Albertus Magnus 51 E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 30. 52 “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata,” p. 244.

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is said to have animated just so far as to make it chatter, and move, and be his servant” –​a description paraphrased from the literary notebooks) or of Napoleon (who has moments of awareness that “his” choices were the product of an Immanent Will, and admits “ ’tis true, I have ever known | That such a Will I passively obeyed!”) (RN 60, D 519).53 For Huxley, nonhuman animals were included in the realm of conscious automata; he argued that “all states of consciousness in [humans], as in [animals], are immediately caused by molecular changes of the brain-​substance.” The difference lay in “intensity of consciousness”: from “the absence of language,” he believed that animals could have “not trains of thought, but only trains of feelings,” yet they still had “a consciousness which, more or less distinctly, foreshadows our own.”54 The presence or absence of a soul was left open, having no bearing on his hypothesis. In his 1888 lectures on natural theology, Müller conceded further territory to animal capacity, redefining the line between humans and animals at abstract conceptual thinking: he wrote, “[n]‌early all philosophers drew the line of demarcation between man and beast at concepts. Up to concepts the two seemed alike.”55 Yet he was careful to maintain that concepts cannot exist without words; he added, “in strict logic, the sign, being the condition of a concept, may really be said to come first.”56 The debate over animal cognition and abstract thought was especially heated between Romanes and his fellow psychologist, C. Lloyd Morgan. In a June 1879 Nature article, Romanes argued that abstract thinking –​or thinking “of qualities as apart from particular objects” –​was possible for nonhuman animals: Give a cat or a dog some kind of meat or cake which the animal has never before met with, and the careful examination which the morsel undergoes before it is consigned to the mouth proves that the animal has properly abstract ideas of sweet, bitter, hot, nauseous, or, in general, good for eating and bad for eating.57

Romanes traced the emergence of abstraction along a phylogenic tree to birds. Morgan disagreed. In an article responding to Romanes’s Animal Intelligence (1882), he argued that while a general conception of a thing is 53 See LN, i, 63. 54 “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata,” pp. 244, 237. 55 Natural Religion, p. 372. 56 Ibid., p. 369. 57 George Romanes, “Intellect in Brutes,” Nature, 20 (1879), 122–​125 (p. 123).

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possible “for our four-​footed friends,” “abstract ideas” were linked intrinsically to “the use of language”: We see a plum, and we find that it is round, and blue, and resisting. From these words we abstract nouns, roundness, blueness, resistance. We then proceed to manufacture a something to which each of these words may answer, and we call that something a quality. Having thus made the quality, the next thing we do is try and endow it with a separate existence, and to the results of our endeavour we give the name abstract idea . . . Without a considerably developed use of symbols such a process is impossible.58

Animals could have “a language of their own, a means of communication with their own fellows,” but only within a present state of being and without being able to project what the other might be thinking (a process known today as Theory of Mind, as discussed in the previous chapter). He reconstituted the boundary of language between humans and animals in terms of this lack of ability to reflect on the past or to anticipate the perspective of another being, stating that while the human “through language spoken or written, profits by the experience of his fellows,” the animal “has to be contented with the experience he inherits or individually acquires”; therefore, it was only through the tool of language that “higher abstract thought” became “possible.”59 Morgan limited animal intelligence to “feeling or sensing relations” between moments of sensory consciousness, questioning whether they could “perceive or cognize relations and whether [they could] either know or explain.”60 His “canon” became the basis of twentieth-​century behaviorism: “in no case is an animal activity to be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be fairly interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.”61 Yet Morgan’s statement came with a caveat: he admonished, we must remember how exceedingly difficult it is to obtain evidence of the beginnings of reflection and introspection in the infant or child, and must be prepared to admit that such beginnings may be taking origin in the mind of the dog without our being able to obtain definite . . . evidence.62 58 C. Lloyd Morgan, “Animal Intelligence,” Nature, 26 (1882), 523–​524, (p. 524). 59 Ibid., p. 524. 60 C. Lloyd Morgan, “The Limits of Animal Intelligence,” in International Congress of Experimental Psychology: Second Session, London 1892 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1892), pp. 44–​48 (p. 47). Romanes was supposed to attend the conference but was absent due to illness. 61 Ibid., p. 44. 62 Ibid., p. 47.

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This approach has informed the field of comparative psychology, which applies the same experiments to primates as to children in order to explore the similarities and differences in the formation of theory of mind. It is notable, then, that the sheep in Mayor pronounce their judgment through “the tune of Baa” (italics mine). Music for Hardy provided a metaphor for accessing not just animal language, but the range of emotive experience not captured by the current state of human language.63 Jane Thomas notes that the visual arts “offered him a language other than the purely verbal to structure his imagination”; music, too, offered Hardy another structure.64 His own personal history as a musician and extraordinary sensitivity to music as a child suggest an ear keenly attuned to the emotive capacity of song upon an empathetic listener.65 In his literary notebooks, Hardy copied down a quotation from Novalis: “Thought . . . is only a pale, desiccated emotion” (LN, ii, 34). A passage copied from J. B. Mozley’s sermon “Nature” extends this sense to language: Language is everywhere half sign; its hieroglyphics, the dumb modes of expression, surpass the speech. All action, indeed, is besides being action, language; if you do a thing for another, that is language; if you do not do it, that is language … Fragments at the very pick of expression –​that reality which just comes to the surface for a moment … The proverb is true which says, that half is more than the whole; fragments mean most. (69, italics mine)

The metaphor of language as music shifts the focus from thought and speech to emotion and expression (mirroring, one might note, Darwin’s movement to the study of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals), providing a space for the unexpressed, for the not quite expressible. The emphasis on “half” –​on the part being more than the whole –​fits with Hardy’s approach to writing fiction. In his essay on “The Science of Fiction,” Hardy argues for the limits of realism as a literary movement, pointing out the impossibility of capturing “in its entirety the phantasmagoria of experience with infinite and atomic truth, without shadow, relevancy, or subordination” (THPV 108). He concludes that “[t]‌o see in half and quarter views the whole picture, to catch from a few bars the whole tune, is the 63 Darwin (and others before him) explored the idea of music as a possible origin of language: Beer observes his excitement in his notebooks upon wondering, “Were signs originally musical!!!??”; see Open Fields, pp. 99–​100. 64 “Hardy and the Visual Arts,” p. 444. 65 In Life, Hardy records dancing “a pas seul in the middle of the room . . . to conceal his weeping” caused by certain airs when he was three or four years old (19), an experience that surely inspired Car’line’s uncontrollable emotional response to the fiddle in his short story, “The Fiddler of the Reels” (CSS 496).

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intuitive power that supplies the would-​be story-​writer with the scientific bases for his pursuit” (110). For Hardy, the part tells more than a supposedly full description because it gestures toward the unknowable and the unexpressed in reality:  not just what Virginia Woolf described as “the margin of the unexpressed” in his writings that leaves it to “readers to make out his full meaning and to supplement it from their own experience,” but also the inexplicable in real life, the experiences that resist (for whatever reason) being neatly pinned down by human cognition through thought alone.66 A further entry in the literary notebooks explores the limits of language to capture the range of sensations, perceptions, and experiences related to human life.67 Noting again from Symonds’s Essays Speculative and Suggestive (1890), Hardy wrote, The range of human thoughts & emotions greatly transcends the range of such symbols as man has invented to express them; & it becomes therefore the business of Art to use these symbols in a double way. They must be used for the direct represn. of thought & feeling; but they must also be combined by so subtle an imagination as to suggest much which there is no means of directly expressing … In poetry of the first order, almost every word (to use a matheml. metaphor) is raised to a higher power. It continues to be an articulate sound & a logical step in the argument; but it also becomes a musical sound & a centre of emotional force. (LN, ii, 43, italics mine)

This quotation illuminates the fourth subentry sense of the definition of language: while computing may be a recent invention, it points to other types of nonlinguistic languages that take something other than phonemes as their building blocks, such as mathematics and music. Poetry ties language to another system of meaning, an emotional semiotics based on sound and rhythm as much as on linguistic content. These structures offer a parallel for approaching formal structures in animal language: bird song, bee dance, chimpanzee gestures. From this perspective, poetry provides a space for the animal voice in a way that is structured by more than just imaginative empathy. Poetry’s ability to manipulate time through meter, changing emphasis for emotional resonance or destabilizing an assumed reading of a line, pushes against language-​based meaning. Hardy, who wrote of the “unreality of time,” would have possibly considered an 66 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: Second Series (London: Hogarth Press, 1935), p. 248. Twenty-​ first century philosopher Cora Diamond calls the sense of the inexplicability of certain experiences the “difficulty of reality,” a concept which will be discussed in Chapter 5. See Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, pp. 43–​89. 67 Hardy also considered the relation between language and gender:  see Bathsheba’s comment in FFMC on the difficulty “for a woman to define her feelings in language, which is chiefly made by men to express theirs” (342).

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analogous “unreality of language” in capturing inarticulate emotion and half-​formed thought (LW 109). As Jane Thomas argues, “Hardy’s poems exemplify the artist/​poet’s aesthetic desire to push beyond the recognisable limits of language.”68 While Thomas looks at this desire in relation to loss and elegy, it also forges a pathway for thinking about and with animals. Only in his poetry does Hardy directly imagine the voices of animals –​ and usually the voices of birds. If philosophers like to think with dogs, then poets like to think with birds, and Hardy is no exception. “Winter in Durnover Field” offers an example not only of his use of form to signify an additional layer of meaning in the poem but also of his modernist sensibilities: the poem combines the ancient French triolet with the structure of a short, one-​act play. The triolet is a short form written in iambic tetrameter that relies on repetition, giving it a bird-​like quality for the human listener; the first line is repeated in the fourth and seventh lines, and the second line is echoed in the sixth line and repeated as the close of the poem in the eighth line. Only two rhymes are used. The two poems in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901) that precede “Winter in Durnover Field” are also triolets from the perspective of birds, but this third poem in the sequence stands out for its odd format. Beneath the title, he sets the “SCENE.  –​A wide stretch of fallow ground recently sown with wheat, and frozen to iron hardness. Three large birds walking about thereon, and wistfully eyeing the surface. Wind keen from the north-​east: sky a dull grey” (CP 148). He then gives the poetic lines of the triolet as lines of a play, with the characters indicated as a rook, a starling, and a pigeon: Rook. –​Throughout the field I find no grain; The cruel frost encrusts the cornland! Starling. –​Aye: patient pecking now is vain Throughout the field, I find … Rook. –​No grain! Pigeon. –​Nor will be, comrade, till it rain, Or genial thawings loose the lorn land Throughout the field. Rook. –​I find no grain: The cruel frost encrusts the cornland! (148–​149) 68 Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 166. Thomas, who also examines the Symonds quotations, applies a reading of Lacan to Hardy’s “Poems of 1912–​1913,” arguing, “[t]‌he poetic symbol occupies a place on the borderline between language and what cannot be signified . . . A poetic symbol reaches beyond itself toward something that cannot be stated or expressed precisely, bringing it into the realm of knowledge but retaining that sense of what is beyond articulation” (169).

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The musical sounds created by the alliteration and the scansion of the poem echo the cries of birds. The rook’s line repeats the hard guttural “k” sound; the starling’s pecking is captured through the onomatopoeia of the “p” alliteration; and the pigeon coos with the lull of “l” sounds.69 The long “a” repeated as the A rhyme in grain/​vain/​rain lands on the stressed last syllable, much like the sound of a caw, and the trailing off sound of the “n” phoneme that appears not only in the A lines but also in the repetition of “land” in the B lines suggests the effect of the wind on the bird cry. The extra syllable in the B lines could be scanned as stressed or unstressed, creating either a masculine rhyme with a sense of urgency, or a feminine rhyme with a sense of echoing. The refrain “No grain!” seems a descendant of the repeated “Nevermore” in Edgar Allan Poe’s much more famous bird poem, “The Raven” (1845).70 “Winter in Durnover Field” repeats the theme introduced in Jude the Obscure on another cornfield: the one where the young Jude must work as a human scarecrow to keep the rooks off the field. Jude shakes a clacking instrument to scare the rooks away until at length his heart grew sympathetic with the birds’ thwarted desires. They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them. Why should he frighten them away? They took upon them more and more the aspect of gentle friends and pensioners  –​the only friends he could claim as being in the least degree interested in him, for his aunt had often told him that she was not. (9)

Jude’s world is that of the rooks’ in “Winter in Durnover Field” –​that of repeated denial, of a “cruel frost” encrusting all of his hopes and ambitions. In this scene, Jude proclaims that the birds “shall have some dinner you shall! There is enough for us all” (9). As he watches the birds eat, he feels “[a]‌magic thread of fellow-​feeling united his own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled his own” (9). If one considers the history of the rook in England, the resemblance grows. J.  Stevens Cox records that “[a]‌s early as 1533 an English Act of Parliament ordained that a clap-​net or drag-​net be kept in use in every parish for catching rooks, crows and jackdaws in order to check their 69 While here the onomatopoeic effect is created through alliteration, Agamben discusses the way animal onomatopoeia –​which makes “inarticulate” animals voices “writable” or “engrammatos” –​serves to “capture the voice of nature at the point at which it emerges from the infinite sea of mere sound without yet having become signifying discourse”; see Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. by Daniel Heller-​Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 69. 70 Sue is described reciting “The Raven” as a precocious child with a look “as if some real creature stood there” in Jude (105).

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excessive numbers”; failure to control rook population through this method was penalized with fines.71 This Malthusian worry about overpopulation returns at the end of Jude, with the comic pathos in the depiction of the first Jude proclaiming “There is enough for us all” shifting to tragedy with the second Jude’s note: “Done because we are too meny” (325). In the scene with the rooks, Jude’s misplaced identification leads to his own punishment-​by-​clacker:  when Farmer Troutham discovers Jude letting the birds eat, he beats him with the rattle so harshly that the sound echoes toward the church to which “the farmer had largely subscribed, to testify his love for God and man” (a love that clearly does not extend to child and bird) (10). The experience –​placing the child in the position of the rooks –​shifts Jude’s perspective, and he decides, “Nature’s logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony” (12). He feels “seized with a sort of shuddering”: “[a]ll around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it” (12). For Jude, as for the birds of Durnover Field, the suffering of life is inevitable. Hardy’s description of rooks in a winter field in “Winter in Durnover Field” and Jude have a curious –​and more lighthearted –​resonance with Herbert Maxwell’s 1892 article “Speech.” In the article, Maxwell argues that animals have languages of their own whether or not humans can understand them. He notes, “[o]‌ne has only to go afield some mild December noon, and watch the proceedings of a flight of rooks, to be led to the firm conclusion that the sounds he hears are part of a conversation.”72 He humorously imagines a “sedate individual (as like a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries as a biped in black feathers can be to a biped in broadcloth) busy turning over the stones with his strong beak … Finding nothing, ‘Caw!’ he says, and flies off to another part of the field.” This “caw” is not meaningless: Almost certainly it expresses something, either in the way of information to his companions or of expletive to relieve his own feelings, just as a disappointed man (not, bien entendu, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, but an ordinary mortal) is prone, under similar circumstances, to pronounce a profane monosyllable.

Maxwell extends his comparison between the aviary and human worlds, moving around the field to notice a flirtation between two birds and a J. Stevens Cox, The Bird-​Trappers of Wessex (Mount Durand: Toucan Press, 1984), p. 96. 72 Herbert Maxwell, “Speech,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 151.920 (1892), 828–​842 (p. 828). 71

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motionless rook whose “speech seems to our gross faculties only monotonous repetition of the same sound, but is probably well understood by his hearers as exhortation, advice, narrative, or speculation.”73 While Maxwell’s article is written in a tongue-​in-​cheek tone, his argument draws upon Montaigne’s proposition that perhaps the “defect” is in the human listener. In his imaginative empathy, Hardy moves beyond Aristotle in the attribution of voice, with the wind taking the place of lungs and any natural form capable of moving in the wind  –​from the branches and leaves of trees to the dried bells of the heather –​serving as a larynx.74 Hardy even notes the tongues of nonhuman entities: not only of the birds in his diary entry but also of the fire in The Dynasts, playing upon the idea of flames’ tongues. In the scene, the armies are asleep, and “all is quiet but for the sputtering of the green wood fires, which, now that the human tongues are still, seem to hold a conversation of their own” (343).75 The crackling of the new wood, still moist, speaks of an environmental violence typically elided in historical accounts of war. Trees in Hardy are continually given voices, from the opening description of the woods in Under the Greenwood Tree to the poem “The Wind Blew Words” (CP 446–​447).76 Müller, in his essays on mythology and folklore, discusses the history of attributing voices –​and even souls –​to trees and other members of inanimate nature: such description was “inevitable in the historical growth of language” given that objects in ancient tongues “could only be called or conceived by means of one of the predicative roots” (roots which “were all or nearly all expressive of actions”) and “could only be a masculine or feminine, for neuters were a much later invention.”77 Take the word “river” for example: in Sanskrit, Müller writes, “a river could only be called and conceived as a runner, or a roarer, or a defender, and in all these capacities always as something active and animated, nay, as something masculine or feminine.”78 Hardy’s fascination with the idea of voices in nature –​and with the view of “all things in inanimate Nature as pensive mutes” (LW 117) –​suggests, 73 Ibid., pp. 828–​829. A group of rooks is known as a “parliament”; one might note the pun inherent in Maxwell’s article, which goes on to describe the British Parliament as a “House of Speech . . . filled with speakers who . . . have never learnt their trade” (835). 74 See, for example, the descriptions of the heath-​bells’ voices (RN 55, 84). 75 See also the poem “Surview,” in which the speaker’s own voice talks to him “from the green-​grained sticks of the fire” (CP 698). 76 See also Irwin’s “Noises in Hardy’s Novels,” in Reading Hardy’s Landscapes, pp. 37–​61. 77 F. Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop: Essays on Mythology and Folk-​lore, vol. 4 (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. xi. 78 Ibid., p. xi.

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as Michael Irwin words it, that “perhaps . . . our speech, like our music, can be seen as a dialect ultimately derived from the sounds of nature. We strive to distinguish familiar tones and cadences as we listen to the essentially unintelligible mother tongue.”79 His literary notebooks offer examples of his interest in this sense of listening; one entry copies from a review of The Letters of Thomas Edward Brown (1900) that commented, “[h]‌e read a certain humanity into natural things, feeling for them as though actually living and sentient,” and another from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) that read, “[h]e could understand the tunes & voices of [beasts, plants, fishes & birds]” (ii, 96, 103, latter brackets Hardy’s). While there is an imaginative element to Hardy’s listening –​a certain lending of the human to the animal –​there is at the same time an intensity of feeling for the nonhuman. As Virginia Woolf questioned, “what scholar solicitous for the changing shapes of language, ever heard the cry of a small bird killed in the next wood by an owl with such intensity?”80 For Hardy, listening into the unknowable spaces created by voices of the natural world allowed meaningful encounters between creatures by calling upon one’s own empathy –​which in his eyes, was another way of phrasing a growing “sense of humour,” a willingness both not to take oneself so seriously nor to deny the possibility of capacity to the other (THR 36).

79 Reading Hardy’s Landscapes, p. 55. 80 Common Reader, p. 247.

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“Artful” Creatures, Part II: Can a Snake Have a Face?

The previous chapter glossed over a fundamental subset of communication: the language of the face through expressions and the gaze. Despite its reputation as the site of the most rudimentary form of communication, the question of who can possess a face has long been debated in history and philosophy, with the capacity for a face asserted at times as a boundary between humans and animals. It may be easy to imagine the facial features, for example, of a dog or a chimp, but what about a snake? If thinking with birds complicates considerations of language, then thinking with snakes –​specifically the adder that Mrs. Yeobright encounters on her deathbed in The Return of the Native –​will serve as a guide for examining the idea of the face, from Johann Lavater’s pseudoscientific treatise on physiognomy to Darwin’s groundbreaking work on expressions to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s study of it as a site of responsibility to the other, whomever that other may be. What does it mean to have –​or to encounter –​a face? What happens when it is obscured or misread? Rather than arguing that faces serve a particular function in Hardy’s writings, this chapter will ask the reader to reflect upon the countenances depicted in The Return of the Native, considering the possibility of faces as sites of encounter, deflection, and exposure.1 Hardy’s faces are memorable:  while he typically introduces characters from a distant vantage point as figures in the landscape, early in the novel he gives a close-​up of his central characters’ faces. For Hardy, any element in the landscape can be described in terms of the face: the sun, moon, and all variety of matter underneath them are given faces, features upon a figure, capable of stillness and expression.2 The first face encountered in The 1 For a Deleuzean analysis of “the multiple functions of the face, as a screen onto which thoughts and feelings are projected and as a physiological receptacle for sensory encounters with the world,” see William A. Cohen’s “Faciality and Sensation in Hardy’s The Return of the Native,” PMLA, 121.2 (March 2006), 437–​452 (p. 438). 2 See Hardy’s diary entry from February 10, 1897: “In spite of myself I cannot help noticing countenances & tempers in objects of scenery: e.g., trees, hills, houses” (LW 302).

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Return of the Native is that of Egdon Heath. In the famous opening chapter of the novel, the reader learns that the heath must be experienced at dusk or dawn under the changing light in order to be fully understood: as the narrator explains, “[t]‌he face of the heath . . . could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen. Its complete effect and explanation lay in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn: then and only then did it tell its true tale” (9). Hardy extends this statement to the human in the third chapter, using the shadows from a bonfire to obscure the faces of the heathfolk. This obfuscation of faces upon introduction makes close examination of features difficult, undermining the Victorian practice of physiognomy: the analysis of a person’s moral character according to his or her face. As articulated by the eighteenth-​century Swiss Protestant writer Johann Lavater in his Essays on Physiognomy (1775–​1778), the theory proposed that faces were permanently inscribed by the most common emotions felt by the subject, with positive emotions equated to moral goodness. By assessing a person’s facial features, one could determine his or her moral (or immoral) propensities. The face’s “signs” formed a “common language” of both humans and “brute creation,” and his theory depended upon universal applicability: Lavater provided instructions for reading the physiognomy of a wide range of animals, from dogs to serpents. In short, his theory proposed that “[i]‌n proportion as [man] is morally good, he is handsome; and ugly, in proportions as he is morally bad.”3 When the narrator describes the faces of the inhabitants of Egdon Heath standing around the bonfire, the “brilliant lights” and “sooty shades” cast by the fire make the permanent moral expression of each face . . . impossible to discover, for as the nimble flames towered, nodded, and swooped through the surrounding air the blots of shades and flakes of light upon the countenances of the group changed shape and position endlessly. All was unstable; quivering as leaves, evanescent as lightning. (21)

As the description continues, Hardy shifts between the natural world and material objects, blurring the boundaries between supposedly separate realms and describing the extreme effect lighting has upon visual perception: Shadowy eye-​sockets deep as those of a death’s head suddenly turned into pits of lustre: . . . wrinkles were emphasized to ravines, or obliterated 3 Johann Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, trans. by Henry Hunter, 5 vols (London: Murray, 1789), i, 51, 135. Spellings using the long s have been standardized.

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Thomas Hardy and Animals entirely by a changed ray. Nostrils were dark wells; sinews in old necks were gilt mouldings; things with no particular polish on them were glazed; bright objects, such as the tip of a furze-​hook one of the men carried, were as glass; eyeballs glowed like little lanterns. (21)4

By highlighting the instability of appearances, Hardy quietly undermines the tenets of physiognomy still popular in the Victorian era.5 In its place, he seems to suggest a porous boundary between the animate and inanimate worlds, recalibrating depictions of the human to focus on embodiment and materiality.6 His position here is close to that of Huxley and Lewes, as described in the previous chapter. Hardy treats the belief in physiognomy playfully throughout the novel, at times presenting a picture familiar to the Victorian reader of Lavater: in the face lies the character of the soul. However, with the introduction of Eustacia, the narrator concentrates on facial expressions rather than features. Eustacia, first seen as a figure, is shown with a handkerchief over her face, a detail that tantalizingly hints back to Christian’s comment on the red-​stained Diggory Venn: “If he had a handkerchief over his head he’d look for all the world like the Devil in the picture of the Temptation” (34). The reader is given glimpses of her profile –​a brief allusion to phrenology, a similar practice that made use of the shape of the head to read morality –​but as the narrator explains, this glimpse is worth little; the profile is “mere superficiality” (56). The narrator adds, In respect of character a face may make certain admissions by its outline; but it fully confesses only in its changes. So much is this the case that what is called the play of the features often helps more in understanding a man or woman than the earnest labours of all the other members together. Thus the night revealed little of her . . . for the mobile parts of her countenance could not be seen. (56)

In its plasticity –​not the permanent ridges and crevices –​the face admits itself. In this commentary, Hardy’s narrator is shifting the reader from 4 Ian Gregor notes that here the earlier description of Egdon Heath as a human face is reversed with human faces featuring landscape elements:  “pits,” “caverns,” and “ravines.” Described in material terms, “the human face becomes one with the inanimate world”; see The Great Web: The Form of Hardy’s Major Fiction (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 83. 5 An example of the strength of its popularity:  the captain of the Beagle, “an ardent disciple of Lavater,” almost did not allow Darwin to join his ship on account of his nose. See The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, i, 59–​60. 6 See Cohen’s suggestion that “[b]‌y animating the landscape and, at the same time, showing the porousness of human beings to nonhuman entities, Hardy erodes distinctions between subjects and objects,” reconfiguring “human subjectivity as material” (440). Mrs. Yeobright too reflects this porousness with the landscape; when she enters the scene, the narrator describes her face with the comment, “the solitude exhaled from the heath was concentrated in this face that had risen from it” (RN 35).

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Lavater’s physiognomy to Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, focusing the discussion on the physical processes underlying expressions rather than assumptions about abstract moral qualities. Darwin argued that specific expressions were connected directly to specific emotions, emphasizing continuity among nonhuman and human animals given the muscles of the human face evolved from the same progenitor as those of the animal.7 Darwin’s work responded to Sir Charles Bell’s The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression as Connected with the Fine Arts (1806), which argued that expressions proved a divine Creator because they were the unique “bond of the human family,” forming a “universal language” for humankind alone.8 According to Bell, the “nobleness observable” in the expressions of the human face “indicate[d]‌the prevalence of the higher qualities allied to thought.”9 Paradoxically, the more limited expressions of “brutes” did not reveal the presence of thought:  the horse’s seeming “exertion of mind,” for example, in the “consent between the motions of the ear and the eye” was simply “the result of incidental consent of animal motions.”10 Bell focused on expressions that he deemed “peculiarly human”  –​such as blushing, laughing, and weeping. For him, the fact animals could not perform “the accompanying action of laughter” proved “the capacity of receiving ludicrous ideas is . . . denied to animals.”11 Darwin built upon the physiological study of expressions and the nervous system outlined in Bell’s book, but his goal was the opposite:  to trace central principles behind expressions across species. Darwin outlined three principles: first, “the principle of serviceable associated habits” (expressions correlated with certain “states of mind [that] lead to certain habitual actions, which are of service” and are repeated from habit even 7 See also Angelique Richardson’s discussion of Darwin’s term “expressemotions” in “ ‘The Book of the Season’: The Conception and Reception of Darwin’s Expression,” in After Darwin, pp. 51–​88 (p. 54). 8 Sir Charles Bell, The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression as Connected with the Fine Arts, 7th edn (London:  Bell and Sons, 1883), p.  134. See also Bell’s The Hand:  Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as Evincing Design, 7th edn (London: Bell and Daldy, 1865), a book that was part of the Bridgewater Treatises series designed to promote the ideas of Natural Theology, as popularized by William Paley’s Natural Theology or, Evidence of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearance of Nature (1802). 9 Ibid., p. 28. 10 Ibid., p. 114. 11 Ibid., pp. 134, 129. Bell gives a vivid description of dogs with “a slight eversion of the lips” who “grin and snuff amidst their frolic and gambols, in a way that resembles laughter,” but concludes “in all this there is nothing which truly approaches to human expression” (129). In Expression, Darwin responds that “man himself cannot express love and humility so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master” (18).

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when serving no function); second, “the principle of antithesis” (expressions that are the inverse of the expression for the opposite emotion); and third, “the principle of actions due to . . . the nervous system” (expressions automatically triggered by the nervous system).12 As Paul Ekman explains, “[b]y showing how the same three principles that explain why a particular expression is the signal for a specific emotion clearly do apply to the expression of all animals –​from bees to humans –​Darwin demonstrated the continuity of the species.”13 Yet despite this goal, Darwin viewed some expressions to be more human than others. Hardy, on the other hand, viewed even the embers of a fire as expressive with his sense of the porous boundary between the human and the inanimate. Just before the narrator describes Eustacia’s face, she is shown tending a fire, from which “no appreciable beams now radiated, except when a more than usually smart gust brushed over their faces and raised a fitful glow which came and went like the blush of a girl” (RN 56). Hardy’s narrator attributes blushing  –​ which Darwin considered the most human of expressions –​to an inanimate object, albeit through a simile.14 The fire’s expressiveness sets the tone for the unveiling of Eustacia’s face. Upon meeting Wildeve, Eustacia asserts the power of her countenance, “throwing back the shawl so that the fire-​light shone full upon her face and throat” and asking, “Have you ever seen anything better than that in your travels?” (63). In the subsequent detailed description, the narrator carefully connects feature with feeling:  her eyes, if “the souls of men and women were visible essences,” reveal “the colour of [her] soul to be flame-​like,” with “sparks from it [rising] into her dark pupils”; and her mouth, described with an emphatic “k” sound consonance, “seemed formed less to speak than to quiver, less to quiver than to kiss. Some might have added, less to kiss than to curl” (66). In these impressions, the narrator sets up the expressiveness of Eustacia’s face, bordering ironically between dark and light, between her soul’s “flame-​like” color and the classical “divinity” of her form, between the cruelty that will be assumed of her and the relative innocence of her actions. The importance of the face is shown also in the development to the first presentation of Clym’s visage. Before the reader is shown his face, Thomasin muses aloud, “Dear Clym, I  wonder how your face looks now” (110). Eustacia, after encountering the Yeobrights in the dark upon the heath, dreams of dancing with an imagined Clym dressed in a suit of armor, but her dream “[falls] to fragments” when he lifts his visor to 12 Expression, p. 34. 13 Ibid., p. xii. 14 Ibid., p. 310. See also Hardy’s description of the blushing ewe, as discussed in Chapter 1.

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show his face, leading her to cry out, “O that I had seen his face” (116). In the chapter entitled, “The Two Stand Face to Face,” the narrator finally reveals Clym’s countenance. In this chapter, and in the opening chapter to the novel’s third book, his appearance is described in terms that seem to draw both upon Bell and Darwin’s works. As with Eustacia, his features are compared to fine art and to ancient Greek sculpture, but the pressure of his “wearing habit of meditation” ruins his beauty (135). Bell, believing that beauty was an expression of the divine within the human, looked to ancient sculpture to locate aesthetically ideal features. Clym’s face is compared to a Rembrandt and proposed as a prototype for “the typical countenance of the future”; the narrator comments, “should there be a classic period to art hereafter, its Phidias may produce such faces” (165). Yet the “zest for existence which was so intense in early civilizations” has been worn away into a “view of life as a thing to be put up with,” and it is this view –​the difficulty of living in a world operating under “the defects of natural laws” –​that marks Clym’s face (165). The narrator explains that although “[t]‌he face was well-​shaped,” “the mind within was beginning to use it as a mere waste tablet”: Clym’s “beauty . . . would in no long time be ruthlessly overrun by its parasite thought” (135). The activity of thought was frequently associated with the use of the corrugators: the facial muscles that, “by their contraction, lower the eyebrows and bring them together, producing vertical furrows on the forehead –​that is, a frown.”15 Darwin notes that Bell saw these muscles as “peculiar to man,” “convey[ing] the idea of mind” and a “mingling of thought and emotion with the savage and brutal rage of the mere animal,” but Darwin explains at length that the frown is not linked solely to distemper or, as others argued, to reflection, but rather to pondering “something difficult or displeasing encountered in a train of thought or in action.” He adds, “[d]eep reflection can . . . seldom be long carried on without some difficulty, so that it will generally be accompanied by a frown.”16 For Hardy, this type of reflection is inevitable in an age becoming aware of “the defects of natural laws” –​which place feeling creatures in an unfeeling world –​and Clym’s face portrays this dissonance: He already showed that thought is a disease of flesh, and indirectly bore evidence that ideal physical beauty is incompatible with growth of fellow-​ feeling and a full sense of the coil of things. Mental luminousness must be 15 Expression, p. 219. 16 Ibid., pp.  220–​221. Darwin also connects frowning to difficulty of vision  –​a problem which plagues Clym increasingly as the novel develops.

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Here, then, lies a salient difference between Clym and Eustacia:  while Clym feels the need to be “of use” to his “fellow creatures” (168, 171), Eustacia openly admits that she does not care for her “fellow-​creatures” (183). It is not that Eustacia lacks “a full sense of the coil of things,” but rather, she deals with this sense in a very different manner:  when faced with difficulty, “instead of blaming herself for the issue she laid the fault upon the shoulders of some indistinct, colossal Prince of the World, who had framed her situation and ruled her lot” (287). Eustacia deflects such responsibility as a way of coping with the world, of making sense of her situation. Furthermore, while Eustacia’s face is presented as expressive of trains of emotion, Clym’s face offers instead a record of thought. The narrator often presents Eustacia as having a rapid sequence of emotion-​expressions. For example, after first encountering the dusky figure of Clym on the heath, “Eustacia’s features went through a rhythmical succession . . . She glowed; remembering the mendacity of the imagination, she flagged; then she freshened; then she fired; then she cooled again. It was a cycle of aspects, produced by a cycle of visions” (115). Later in the novel, upon being faced with the decision to tell her husband that she missed his mother at the door (and more importantly, why she had missed her), “[t]‌hought, misgiving, regret, fear, resolution ran their swift course of expression in Eustacia’s dark eyes. She was face to face with a monstrous difficulty; and she resolved to get free of it by postponement” (280). In contrast to these minute and fleeting expressions, Clym’s face seems to be inscribed with his thoughts; as the narrator explains, “[h]is countenance was overlaid with legible meanings” (135). Later, the narrator compares Clym’s face explicitly to written language: The observer’s eye was arrested, not by his face as a picture, but by his face as a page; not by what it was, but by what it recorded. His features were attractive in the light of symbols, as sounds intrinsically common become attractive in language, and shapes intrinsically simple become interesting in writing. (165)

While these presentations of the face as expressive of emotion and as a record of symbols may seem at odds, they both require the viewer –​ whether it be another character or the reader –​to decode the meaning encoded therein. Yet, as William Cohen argues, the face in Hardy “is not a text that might be read for its singular, extractable meaning but a palpable

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surface.” The face makes internal emotion into visible, material expression, but it also takes in the external world through sensory perception, a material interior process in which the mental is inextricable from the physical. Crucially, as Cohen suggests, “the face can serve as both record and screen on which layers of conflicting meaning might variously arise,” meanings that “are unstable and flickering.”17 Keeping Cohen’s argument in mind, one might then add the importance of (and the difficulty resulting from) the face as the site of encounter between two creatures: especially in the encounters between Eustacia and Mrs. Yeobright and between Mrs. Yeobright and the adder. In the pivotal scene where Eustacia fails to open the door to Mrs. Yeobright in time –​mistakenly thinking Clym has heard the knock at the front door and choosing to use the moment to let Wildeve, who has come calling unbidden, out the back –​Hardy’s depiction of the complexity of encounter contains many of the elements later articulated by the twentieth-​century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas defines the face as “the way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me.”18 The face is the site of direct communication (“the way in which the other presents himself ”), and it highlights both immediacy (in the close physical proximity of the encounter) and infinite distance (in the unknowability of the other), moving “the idea of the other” into the material world (from an abstraction to flesh-​and-​blood reality). This movement forces one to reconsider one’s own assumptions and perspective (“exceeding the idea of the other in me”), and, without the mediation of language, to realize the necessity of ethical consideration for the other. For Levinas, the face speaks more clearly than speech itself. As he argued, speech “does not have the total transparence of the gaze directed upon the gaze, the absolute frankness of the face to face proffered at the bottom of all speech.”19 Hardy’s writings are full of these types of gazes that transcend any speech: take, for example, the narrator’s digression on the look Ethelberta gives Christopher Julian that applies Darwin’s analysis of languages in terms of species (as noted in the previous chapter) to the gaze: It was only a look, and yet what a look it was! One may say of a look that it is capable of division into as many species, families, tribes, orders, and classes as the animal world itself; that it rules schools and parliaments; is the 17 “Faciality and Sensation,” pp. 441–​442. 18 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 50. 19 Ibid., p. 182.

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Despite the brevity of the gaze, it communicates in a way speech cannot. In Levinas’s writings, the face-​to-​face encounter gives birth to ethical obligation to the other, placing the needs of the other before the self. Mrs. Yeobright seems to share this view, as can be seen in her conversation with Johnny Nunsuch, the onlooker to the misunderstanding, on her walk home from Eustacia’s house. Johnny recognizes Mrs. Yeobright’s expression, and his question is revealing in its implications: “Have you seen a ooser?” An ooser, a dialect term for a terrifying mask, represents the closure of one face from another, a material obstruction of the face-​to-​ face encounter. Mrs. Yeobright responds that what she has seen is worse: a “woman’s face . . . through a window-​pane,” “looking out at a weary wayfarer, and not letting her in” (RN 276). For Mrs. Yeobright as for Levinas, the face of the other –​in this case her own –​should have moved her daughter-​in-​law to open the door, if Eustacia had any sense of morality. The dialogue is brilliantly constructed, with the responses between the young child and the old woman failing to engage while at the same time interacting to highlight the irony of what it means to have a face. Johnny responds, “Once when I went to Throope Great Pond to catch effets I seed myself looking up at myself, and I was frightened and jumped back like anything!,” an anecdote that plays with the gap between the ontic experience of being inside a body and the ontological realization of the body (276). But Mrs. Yeobright does not hear him, replaying her perspective of the encounter with Eustacia in her mind and wondering, in a phrase that combines allusions to Lavater and King Lear, “Can there be beautiful bodies without hearts inside?”20 Her resolution, “I think so,” reinforces the irony of appearances: Eustacia repeatedly is described in terms of her beauty while being viewed as cruel for her behavior, but the behavior being critiqued is always what seems to be rather than what actually took place. The last sentence –​“I would not have done it against a neighbour’s cat on such a fiery day as this!” –​gestures forward to the application of ethical consideration to animals and echoes back, again, to King Lear (276).21 20 Compare with Shakespeare’s “Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?” in King Lear, ed. by R. A. Foakes (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), III.6.73–​75. 21 See, for example, Kent’s admonishment to Regan when she puts him in stocks (“Why, madam, if I were your father’s dog | You should not use me so”) (II.2.133–​134) or Cordelia’s expostulation upon discovering her sisters locked their doors against their father, leaving him to weather the stormy

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The philosophical implications of this pivotal scene between Eustacia and Mrs. Yeobright take on further resonance during the encounter between the dying Mrs. Yeobright and an adder about to be killed in an attempt to save her life. Having suffered an adder bite on her foot during her exposure on the heath on her attempted walk home from Eustacia and Clym’s house, she is carried by her son into a hut and surrounded by a group of the heath-​folk, who explain that the only cure for the bite requires oil extracted from the fat of other adders to be applied to the wound. Three adders are brought into the hut. Two are dead, but one is still “briskly coiling and uncoiling in the cleft of the stick” upon which it is being carried (285).22 This movement of coiling and uncoiling recalls Eustacia’s gaze toward Wildeve’s house much earlier in the novel, her thoughts “inclined thitherward; indefinitely, fancifully –​twining and untwining about him as the single object within her horizon on which dreams might crystallize” (93). The resonance of the movement is striking: first, it links the adder with Eustacia, the stick forming its “single object” on which to cling, and second, it connects physical movement with thought –​a capacity typically denied to animals, as seen in the previous chapter. Further implications arise with an earlier iteration of “twining.” Eustacia’s first “articulation” occurs after a description of “the linguistic peculiarity of the heath”:  the vegetable world, acted upon by the “plaintive November winds,” makes up a multitude of choir-​like voices, with “[t]‌reble, tenor and bass notes,” “the baritone buzz of a holly tree,” and the “worn whisper” of “the mummied heath-​bells” among the members (55). The narrator continues, Suddenly . . . there mingled with all this wild rhetoric of night a sound which modulated so naturally into the rest that its beginning and ending were hardly to be distinguished. The bluffs had broken silence, the bushes had broken silence, the heather-​bells had broken silence; at last, so did the woman; and her articulation was but as another phrase of the same discourse as theirs. Thrown out on the winds it became twined in with them, and with them it flew away. (55–​56)

Eustacia’s voice is bound up inextricably with the voices of the heath –​the same heath that gives rise to both Mrs. Yeobright and the adder.23 In the night on the heath (“Mine enemy’s dog | Though he had bit me should have stood that night | Against my fire”) (IV.7.36–​38). 22 This scene also recalls Lear, both in the use of a hovel to escape the heath and in the frying of the adders, which links to the fool’s story of cooking eels alive (II.2.310–​314). 23 See also “Faciality and Sensation,” p. 445.

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physical movement of tracing and retracing itself through space, the adder articulates its voice as a member of Egdon Heath. In this moment, Mrs. Yeobright makes eye contact with the snake and averts her gaze –​much in the manner that Eustacia met and turned away from her.24 The narrator relates, The live adder regarded the assembled group with a sinister look in its small black eye, and the beautiful brown and jet pattern on its back seemed to intensify with indignation. Mrs Yeobright saw the creature, and the creature saw her: she quivered throughout, and averted her eyes. (285)

The repetition of the word “creature” to refer to the adder is significant, highlighting the moment of face-​to-​face encounter across the human–​animal boundary. Mrs. Yeobright turns away shaken. Does she see the refusal of hospitality that she felt so bitterly in Eustacia’s failure to answer the door mirrored in the human removal of animals from ethical consideration? Perhaps she only feels the fear of the animal implicated in her state of dying; perhaps she thinks the adder resembles Eustacia.25 Whatever the case, it is clear that the gaze is mutual: both the human and the animal see each other, and the result is recognition.26 The group watching does not miss the gaze between the two. The conversation that follows not only links the adder to Eustacia through the superstition of “overlooking,” it also blurs the boundary between the human and the animal by relating the act of poaching to manslaughter. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Christian sees the Biblical serpent in the figure of the adder and exclaims, “ ’Tis to be hoped he can’t ill-​wish us!” –​a statement that echoes his grandfather’s declaration of his willingness to marry Eustacia in the beginning of the novel (285). In the earlier scene, Granfer Cantle affirms, “I’d be very glad to ask her in wedlock, if she’d hae me, and take the risk of her wild dark eyes ill-​wishing me” (52). The idea of overlooking refers to a superstition that the gaze has potential to carry harm; whether intentional or accidental, a being might “ill-​wish” 24 The image of Mrs. Yeobright and the adder gazing at each other echoes Frederic Leighton’s sculpture “An Athlete Wrestling with a Python,” which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1877 and started the “New Sculpture” movement. 25 The encounter brings to mind Edmund’s comment in Lear: “To both these sisters I have sworn my love, | Each jealous of the other as the stung | Are of the adder” (V.1.56–​58). While the word “jealous” denotes “suspicious,” one might consider the parallel triangle between Clym, Mrs. Yeobright, and Eustacia; again, the adder stands in for Eustacia. 26 See also Ron Broglio’s Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals and Art (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2011). Broglio writes, “[i]‌n this look from another species, we realize there are more points of view than our own” (67).

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another simply by staring at him or her. Christian asks, “Neighbours, if Mrs Yeobright were to die, d’ye think we should be took up and tried for the manslaughter of a woman?” and Sam replies, “No, they couldn’t bring it in that . . . unless they could prove we had been poachers at some time of our lives” (285). Sam’s response insinuates a link between poaching and manslaughter: evidence of poaching could corroborate a case for manslaughter, an idea similar to the one that violence toward animals leads to violence toward humans.27 Notably it is the adder who forms the other whom Mrs. Yeobright encounters in the moment of death, not a heathcropper or moth or other heath animal. While Mrs. Yeobright reflects upon other creatures in the natural world as having lives parallel to human ones –​thinking about the ancestry of a colony of ants, for example, on her walk across the heath and pondering the “happiness” of “innumberable obscene creatures” over a muddy pond –​she shrinks away from the adder’s face (267). From a historical perspective, her averted gaze makes sense in the context of the snake’s representation as the animal least likely to excite human sympathy. Carl Hagenbeck, the infamous exotic animal importer and creator of the modern zoological park, for example, spoke of the “universal abhorrence of these creatures.”28 Biologically speaking, Ekman notes that humans are predisposed “to respond in a fearful way to snake-​like shapes”: aversion is ingrained.29 Levinas himself –​who contemplated extending his philosophy of the face to the animal –​was not as sure about snakes, commenting, “I don’t know if a snake has a face . . . A more specific analysis is needed”; for him, the defining factor of possessing a face was man’s ability to be “unreasonable” –​to put the needs of the other before the self.30 If the adder is read in terms of its physiognomy, Christian Cantle’s fear is validated; in his passage on serpents, Lavater too alludes to the Biblical serpent, reading their faces as containing “characteristic signs of malice and falsehood” (despite having “faculties” that are “extremely limited”).31 The serpent, like the adder in the novel, is “made to bite the heel” (as 27 See P. B. Munsche’s Gentlemen and Poachers:  The English Game Laws 1671–​1831 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 69. 28 Carl Hagenbeck, Beasts and Men: Being Carl Hagenbeck’s Experiences for Half a Century among Wild Animals, abridged trans. by Hugh S.  R. Elliot and A.  G. Thacker (London:  Longmans, Green, 1909), p. 177. 29 Expression, p. 44n. 30 Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes, and Alison Ainley, “The Paradox of Morality:  An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,” in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. by Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 168–​180, (pp. 171–​172). 31 Essays on Physiognomy, ii, 127.

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one has bitten Mrs. Yeobright’s ankle) and “to be crushed under foot” (in this case, its body being crushed to extract the oil from its fat as it is fried).32 Yet this linking of the adder to the concept of deceit –​a capacity that requires theory of mind, or the ability to imagine the perspective of another being –​and to the superstition of overlooking suggests that the snake is a mysterious creature with the life of the other, unknowable and potentially powerful. In this sense, Mrs. Yeobright’s act of averting her eyes could imply that she does recognize the “absolute frankness” of the gaze and her obligation to regard the adder as the other, but she is unable to meet it.33 The uncertainty presented by this face-​to-​face encounter between a human and an animal is not unique, of course, to Mrs. Yeobright and the adder in Hardy’s fictional Wessex: fast forward to World War II Germany, where Levinas was a French-​Jewish prisoner war in a Nazi forestry unit when he encountered a dog named Bobby, whose seeming ability to see the prisoners “as ‘ends in themselves’ ” –​at a time when the guards and villagers around them refused to acknowledge their humanity –​made this canine “the last Kantian in Nazi Germany.” “For him, there was no doubt that we were men,” Levinas writes.34 Yet the story of Bobby comes at the end of a short essay, in which Levinas assesses “The Name of a Dog”: “someone who disrupts society’s games . . . and is consequently given a cold reception,” “whom we accuse of being rabid,” “who is given the dirtiest work,” and “whom we leave outside in all weathers, when it is raining cats and dogs, even during those awful periods when you would not put a dog out in it?”35 Like “the name of God,” the phrase “the name of a dog” is a mild curse in French; as discussed in Chapter 2, it is used as an epithet in English as well.36 Levinas frames the essay with a verse in Exodus, which leaves animals encountered dead as meat for dogs, prohibited to humans. What is this “right” of the dog? he asks –​a jab, or a reward? To put this verse in context, he looks back in Exodus to the chapter on the Israelites’ 32 Ibid., p. 128. 33 The encounter is echoed by D.  H. Lawrence’s poem “The Snake” (in which the speaker also encounters a snake on a “hot, hot day”). David Wood comments that in this poem, “Lawrence is being more Levinasian than Levinas”; see “Thinking with Cats,” in Animal Philosophy: Essential Readings in Continental Thought, ed. by Calarco and Peter Atterton (New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 129–​144 (p. 131). 34 “Name of a Dog,” pp. 152–​153. 35 Ibid., p. 151. 36 See also LN, i, 46, where Hardy notes “in these dialogues the oath is, ‘Yea, by the dog of Egypt,’ ” referring to Plato’s “Lysis.”

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delivery from slavery in Egypt. After the last plague –​the death of each household’s firstborn, a curse extended also to the dogs –​the Israelites were allowed to leave, and even the Egyptian dogs acknowledged their right to depart, standing silent as they left. It is this silence that moves Levinas: At the supreme hour of his institution, with neither ethics nor logos, the dog will attest to the dignity of its person. This is what the friend of man means. There is a transcendence in the animal! And the clear verse with which we began is given a new meaning. It reminds us of the debt that is always open.37

Bobby, as a “descendant of the dogs of Egypt,” is able to view the prisoners as human when the humans around them were unable to do so.38 While this encounter with Bobby seems to crack open a window to apply Levinas’s philosophy to encounters with all living beings, the philosopher adds that Bobby lacks “the brain needed to universalize the maxim and drives” of his Kantian recognition of the prisoners as ends in themselves. As critics have pointed out, Bobby is left outside the concept of “neighbor” designated in the Biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” because he is unable to understand the significance of his action as moral –​for Levinas, the dog who helped Fanny on the Casterbridge highway (a fictional forefather of Bobby, it seems) lacks a moral sense.39 His thinking on the animal remains within the humanist tradition, following in the footsteps of his predecessor, Martin Heidegger. Writing in the early twentieth century, Heidegger explained the difference this way: humans were “world-​forming,” but animals were “poor in world.”40 His description of a lizard on a rock is similar to Uxeküll’s idea of Umwelt; he explains that while the rock “is not given for the lizard as rock, in such a way that it could inquire into its mineralogical constitution” and the sun overhead “is 37 “Name of a Dog,” p. 152. Transcendence, for Levinas, indicates an ability to have a relation with an unknowable other that respects the other’s alterity:  the unknowability of the other does not destroy the relation, and the relation does not elide the unknowability of the other. See Totality and Infinity, p. 42. 38 Bobby’s status as a (metaphorical) descendant of ancient Egyptian dogs connotes a sense of his mysteriousness:  see, for example, Francis Power Cobbe’s statement that the “old Egyptians” regarded dogs “as if they were so many four-​footed Mysteries altogether beyond our comprehension” in “The Consciousness of Dogs,” p. 421. 39 For discussions of Bobby, see John Llewelyn’s “Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal),” in Re-​Reading Levinas, ed. by Robert Bernansconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 234–​243, and Peter Atterton’s “Ethical Cynicism,” in Animal Philosophy, pp. 51–​61. 40 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics:  World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 177.

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not given for the lizard as sun, in such a way that it could ask questions of astrophysics about it and expect to find the answers,” it is not true to say that the lizard merely crops up as present at hand beside the rock . . . in the same way as the stone lying nearby is simply present at hand amongst other things. On the contrary, the lizard has its own relation to the rock, to the sun, and to a host of other things.41

However, for Heidegger this relation exists only on a basic sensory level, without “the richness of all those relationships that human Dasein has at its disposal.”42 Like Müller, he marked the divergence in the human’s ability to name the world around it. In his essay “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” Jacques Derrida considers whether or not an animal could be the subject, the possessor of a face. He explores the question, “[d]‌o we have a responsibility toward the living in general?” in the context of Western metaphysical tradition (especially the writings of Heidegger and Levinas), “discerning a place left open, in the very structure of these discourses . . . for a noncriminal putting to death.” In short, Derrida explains, “ ‘Thou shalt not kill’ . . . has never been understood within the Judeo-​Christian tradition, nor apparently by Levinas, as ‘Thou shalt not put to death the living in general.’ ”43 The space left open allows the consumption of the animal body without moral consequence. The heath-​folk, existing within this tradition, can kill the adder without any sense of moral guilt. Yet Mrs. Yeobright’s reaction to the snake –​her recoiling at the gaze met –​seems significant given the shared state of vulnerability in which she and the adder find themselves. On her deathbed, Mrs. Yeobright recognizes a creature facing the same fate as her own. While Christian’s response to the exchange is humorous, the violence that follows this scene calls upon the reader’s empathy. For Hardy, the inability to empathize with the other is a problem of vision, and failure to see the face of the other or to imagine a perspective outside one’s own can have fatal consequences. Mrs. Yeobright never pauses to consider that extenuating circumstances may have prevented Eustacia from answering the door. After her death, Clym’s ability to see the world seems displaced by his grief. Eustacia tells him to notice the moon, which once was a 41 Ibid., pp. 197–​198. 42   Ibid., p. 193. 43 Jacques Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Points … Interviews, 1974–​1994, trans. by Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, ed. by Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 255–​287 (pp. 278–​279).

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central component of their romance on the heath, but he replies, “What’s the moon to a man like me? Let it shine –​let anything be, so that I never see another day. … Eustacia, I don’t know where to look” (298), a sharp contrast to his exclamation during their courtship: Let me look right into your moon-​lit face, and dwell on every line and curve in it. Only a few hair-​breadths make the difference between this face and faces I have seen many times before I knew you; yet what a difference –​ the difference between everything and nothing at all. (193)

Once Clym hears of Johnny’s conversation with his mother on the day of her death, he too assumes Eustacia’s role in the interaction without contemplating her perspective; as the narrator explains, “instead of there being before him the pale face of Eustacia . . . there was only the imperturbable countenance of the heath” (312). In the ensuing scene, Hardy highlights the irony of appearances to deceive. When Clym approaches Eustacia to confront her about the afternoon, Eustacia sees his “ashy, haggard, and terrible” face approach through the reflection of her looking-​ glass and takes on his emotion in her expression:  “the death-​like pallor in his face flew across into hers” (313). Clym reads this not as a mirrored response of emotion but as a sign of guilt, telling her, “You know what is the matter . . . I see it in your face,” and insisting on “Your face, my dear; your face” as evidence of her misconduct throughout the conversation (313–​314). He invokes a physiognomic reading of his mother’s face, telling Eustacia to “Call her to mind –​think of her –​what goodness there was in her: it showed in every line of her face!” and asking a condemnatory, “What came of it? –​what cared you?” (317). In his rage, Clym threatens to kill Eustacia, ironically violating the ethics of the face-​to-​face encounter. His inability to recognize the face of his wife seems a figurative dimension of his physical partial-​blindness, and his insistence upon his own understanding of events precludes the possibility of reconciliation. Perhaps, then, the inability to see the face of a snake is a part of human blindness in relation to animals. Despite their reputation, snakes can be friendly and even –​as Romanes argues in Animal Intelligence –​ affectionate. Romanes lists anecdotes of snakes showing affection in a manner like dogs or cats, noting that they “are well able to distinguish persons” and “possess an intensity of amiable emotion scarcely to be expected from this class.” Take, for example, an account he received of a family’s pet boa-​constrictor twining playfully . . . expecting to be petted and made much of like a kitten. The children over and over again took its head in their hands and

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In his next book, Romanes explores whether or not a snake can take on the perspective of another creature, a capacity often marked by the ability to deceive. Specifically, he examines the act of death simulation to trick a predator into thinking its intended prey is dead.45 While Romanes was unsure if the snake was pretending to be dead to deceive its predator or simply reacting out of fear, a 1991 study by the psychologist G. M. Burghardt shows that at least some snakes have a mental awareness of the effect of their actions upon an observer: the study compiles evidence that the “hognosed snake (Heterodon platirhinos),” when stimulated by a predator’s presence, “writhes erratically, defecates, turns over, and remains quiet with an open mouth, tongue hanging out, even bleeding at the mouth, and without appreciable breathing.” But what is remarkable is that “even in this state of apparent death, the hognosed snake watches the animal that stimulated. If the animal goes away, the snake recovers, but it remains in the state of death simulation longer if a human intruder looks at it.”46 A snake, then, is capable of lying through appearances, blurring the traditional human–​animal boundary delineated by deceptive behavior.47 Levinas, following humanist tradition, wrote that “[w]‌hat distinguishes human language from animal . . . expression” is the human’s ability to “remain silent” and “refuse to be exposed in sincerity.” For him, “the human being is characterized as human . . . because he is a being who can lie, who can live in the duplicity of language as the dual possibility of exposure and deception.”48 Yet in the act of death simulation, the snake borders between exposure and deception, between failing to trick its predator and succeeding. 44 Animal Intelligence, pp. 260–​261. Compare with the narrator’s comment that “the reptiles in the sun behaved as winningly as kittens on a hearth” in Hardy’s short story, “Interlopers at the Knap” (CSS 151). 45 Mental Evolution in Animals, pp. 303–​305. Modern psychology studies continue to use deceit as a central marker of Theory of Mind. 46 Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds:  Beyond Cognition to Consciousness (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 220–​221. 47 See also Derrida’s “And Say the Animal Responded,” trans. by David Wills, in Zoontologies:  The Question of the Animal, ed. by Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2003), pp. 121–​146. Derrida discusses the boundary of deception, considering how the animal traditionally is denied the power “to erase his traces” and deconstructing this idea to point out if the animal lacks this capacity, then the human, too, could be considered incapable of such erasure (138). 48 With Richard Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. by Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 13–​33 (p. 29).

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Significantly in Hardy, what seems to be is not always the truth. Even the truth can be deceptive, as both Hardy and Derrida point out.49 Eustacia chooses to allow Clym to believe his interpretation of events, although she tells him, “I can clear myself of half you believe by speaking” (315).50 Her choice to “remain silent” and “refuse to be exposed in sincerity” prevents the exposure of her innocence, not of guilt. Appearances too can be duplicitous, she argues, asserting that Clym has deceived her through their marriage: she tells him, “You deceived me –​not by words, but by appearances, which are less seen through than words” (318). This definition of deception by appearances opens the realm of deceit to animals. If animals are able to take on the perspective of others –​to have a Theory of Mind –​does this mean they are capable of being “unreasonable,” of putting the other before the self? Clym’s inability to see the events of the afternoon from Eustacia’s perspective suggests that humans too may fail to empathize. Although he reaches forward to tie Eustacia’s bonnet strings when her hands “quivered so violently . . . that she could not tie [them],” he chooses to avert his gaze from her face: “he turned his eyes aside, that he might not be tempted to softness” (319).51 What is at stake is the recognition of alterity –​of possible knowledge of “Earth-​secrets” –​not only in animals but between humans. As Bourke argues, “the acknowledgement of the unknowability of ‘the animal’ gestures towards a much broader point: the unknowability of all animals, including human ones.”52 To elide such alterity –​to deflect one’s gaze away from the face of the other –​becomes an act of violence. While the previous chapter opened with two images complicating the idea of language as uniquely human, this chapter will close with two examples demonstrating that for Hardy, the snake did indeed have a face. The first comes from the opening chapter of Life: Of his infancy nothing has been handed down save the curious fact that on his mother returning from out-​of-​doors one hot afternoon, to him asleep in his cradle, she found a large snake curled up upon his breast, comfortably asleep like himself. It had crept into the house from the heath hard by, where there were many. (19) 49 See Hardy’s quotation from Mark Twain, “Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth” (LN, ii, 115). See also “And Say the Animal Responded?,” p. 130. 50 Eustacia’s assertion “I’ll hold my tongue” in this conversation echoes the Fool’s line directed at Goneril in King Lear: “I will hold my tongue; your face bids me” (I.4.182–​187). 51 Nor is Eustacia absolved from this failure to empathize. While Clym is “poring over . . . the lines of her face,” she thinks about Paris “while in the act of returning his gaze” (234), and later she turns away from Clym’s grief because it “brought before her eyes the spectre of a worn-​out woman knocking at a door which she would not open; and she shrank from contemplating it” (299). 52 What It Means to be Human, p. 16.

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This image of a baby with a snake –​comfortably sleeping together in the cool of the house –​seems to mark the delight with which Hardy identified with the animal world, viewing them as kin. The second example, which comes from his poem “Drinking Song,” reinforces this idea. The poem outlines revolutions in thought akin to the Freudian traumas, from Copernican to Einsteinian: its stanza on the Darwinian trauma reads Next this strange message Darwin brings,    (Though saying his say    In a quiet way); We all are one with creeping things;    And apes and men    Blood-​ brethren, And likewise reptile forms with stings. (CP 906–​907)

This sense of kinship is intensified when the speaker envisions all living creatures “Like butterflies | Of many dyes | Upon an Alpine glacier’s face” (907).53 The delicacy of the butterfly juxtaposed against the cold indifference of the glacier’s “face” gestures toward the bond that makes the gaze between Mrs. Yeobright and the adder an ethical encounter: the shared vulnerability of mortality.

53 The image of the butterfly recalls Lear; the king, upon having his relationship with Cordelia restored, exclaims, “Come, let’s away to prison; | We two alone will sing like birds i’the cage,” and imagines “So we’ll live |And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh | At gilded butterflies” (V.3.8–​13). Clym enacts a similar life on the heath after becoming a furze-​cutter, perhaps reiterating Hardy’s view, as noted in Chapter 1, that “[a]‌ll are caged birds” (LW 178).

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“Artful” Creatures, Part III: “Can They Suffer?”

From this idea of the shared vulnerability of mortality the next human–​ animal boundary under consideration takes shape –​a boundary focused on Jeremy Bentham’s question in the late eighteenth century: “not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”1 Hardy’s novels are filled with suffering, and it is in the scenes of suffering that the neutral space created by the word “creature” as he zooms in and out on figures in the landscape becomes electrically charged. While this aspect of his writing has given Hardy a reputation as a gloomy writer, he argued that his perspective was “distinctly meliorist”; he regarded his books (as mentioned in previous chapters) as “but one plea against ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ –​and to woman –​and to the lower animals” (THR 35). This plea was based on an appeal to his reader’s sense of empathy: he believed, as he recorded in Life, that “Altruism, or The Golden Rule, or whatever ‘Love your Neighbour as Yourself ’ may be called, will ultimately be brought about I think by the pain we see in others reacting on ourselves, as if we and they were part of one body” (235). Similar to this idea is the note written in third person on an envelope, among the materials gathered for Life, on “H.’s altruism”: It must not be forgotten that H’s own life & experiences had been smoother & happier than many  –​perhaps than the majority. It was his habit, or strange power of putting himself in the place of those who endured sufferings from which he himself had been in the main free, or subject to but at brief times. This altruism was so constant with him as to cause a complaint among his readers that he did not say “all’s well with the world” because all was well with him. (PN 291–​292)

As critics have pointed out, Hardy’s empathy or his “strange power” of perspective did not apply only to the human world but to animals and even inanimate nature.2 Building upon discussions from the previous two 1 IPML, p. 283. 2 See Suzanne Keen, “Empathetic Hardy,” p. 383.

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chapters, this chapter will look to his depictions of suffering animals  –​ including their cries and expressions –​in his works, from pigs to sheep to bees to humans to birds. In the infamous pig-​killing scene in Jude, the voice, gaze, and face of the pig come together to demand consideration. Hardy offered the scene to the Animals’ Friend for publication as a stand-​alone commentary on slaughtering practices, expressing the hope that it “might be useful in teaching mercy in the Slaughtering of Animals for the meat-​market” (CL, ii, 97).3 Yet the scene is framed in pragmatic and even economic terms. There is an emphasis on the valuable resource of time:  the pig-​killing must occur “as soon as it was light in the morning” so Jude can “get to Alfredston without losing more than a quarter of a day” (57). When the pig-​killer does not arrive on time due to the snow, the event cannot be delayed until the next day. As Arabella explains, the process has begun already:  the pig has not been fed since the previous morning as part of standard practice to “save bother with the innerds” (58). She tells Jude, “There’s no more victuals for the pig,” and exclaims, “What ignorance, to not know that!” (57–​58). When Jude expresses his disdain for the undertaking, Arabella responds with the short and practical statements, “Pigs must be killed” and “Poor folks must live,” and Jude admits, “I know, I  know . . . I  don’t scold you” (58–​59). The task is referred to as “work,” “business,” a “job,” and a thing to “have had . . . to do” –​all labels which acknowledge that the pig-​killing is a vital part of Jude and Arabella’s income as a married couple (57–​59). Despite these assertions of the normality and necessity of the scene –​ “an ordinary obtaining of meat” –​the fact that Jude and Arabella have to kill the pig themselves reveals a level of discomfort with the act that turns it into “a dismal, sordid, ugly spectacle” (59). Jude’s sympathy with the animal world –​well established in the earlier scene where he allows the rooks to eat and walks carefully so as not to step on any earthworms –​is evident in his manner of addressing the pig he is killing. He calls the pig “creature” three times within a page and a half of text: moving from the exclamatory “Poor creature” to the reflective “A creature I have fed with my own hands” to the imperative “have a little pity on the creature!” (58–​ 59). The term here connotes his feeling of pity, but its appearance also

3 For the scene as a “moralising” moment, see Hardy’s November 1895 letters to Florence Henniker, the editor of Animals’ Friend, and Lady Jeune (CL, ii, 94, 97). See also “A Merciful Man,” Animals’ Friend, 3.2 (December 1895), 50–​51.

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quietly questions the categorization that allows pigs to be eaten: as Hardy wrote in a letter to Frederic Harrison, As long as . . . the non-​human animal was regarded as a creature distinct from man, there was a consistency in treating “brutes” brutally. “Arise Peter, kill & eat,” was a natural command to a man with a soul concerning animals without one. But now that this view of difference is exploded, a tremendous responsibility is thrust upon us –​an impossibility, almost, of doing right according to our new lights. (CL, iii, 231)4

In his humanitarian-​focused poems, Hardy inserts the word “creature” as an appeal to his reader’s empathy: the calf in “Bags of Meat,” for example, becomes a “creature sold” (CP 808), and its fellow in “The Calf ” is portrayed as a “creature with bewildered bleat” (945). Yet Jude’s disdain for the task does not come from an empathy that would refuse to eat the animal he has “fed with [his] own hands” but rather an attitude that views the committing of the deed as sordid. As John Stuart Mill points out in his essay on “Civilization,” with increased division of labour such tasks had been removed from the common realm; “All those necessary portions of the business of society which oblige any person to be the immediate agent or ocular witness of the infliction of pain, are delegated by common consent to peculiar and narrow classes: to the judge, the soldier, the surgeon, the butcher, and the executioner.”5 Jude exclaims that he “would sooner have gone without the pig than have had this to do” (58): a statement that echoes Anna Kingsford’s assertion that If all of us . . . were compelled to dispense with the offices of a paid slaughterer and to immolate our victims with our own hands, the penchant for flesh would not long survive in polite society. It would be indeed hard to find a man or woman of the upper or middle classes who would willingly consent to undertake the butcher’s duties, and go to the cattle-​yard armed with pole-​axe or knife to fell an ox or to slit the throat of a sheep or lamb, or even of a rabbit, for the morrow’s repast.6 4 Poet Alfred Noyes recalled hearing Hardy speak against cruelty to animals and asking him if he were a vegetarian. Hardy replied in a “dismal” tone: “Oh no, I’m not consistent” (THR 123). He told to Hermann Lea that “meat-​eating held a certain aesthetic repugnance in his mind” and “had he been younger in years he would assuredly have given vegetarianism a protracted personal trial”; see “Hermann Lea’s Notes for a Biography of Thomas Hardy,” in Thomas Hardy Through the Camera’s Eye, ed. by J. Stevens Cox (Beaminster: Toucan Press, 1964), p. 23. 5 John Stuart Mill, “Civilization,” London and Westminster Review (April 1836), iii, 1–​28 (pp. 12–​13). 6 Anna Kingsford, The Perfect Way in Diet: A Treatise Advocating a Return to the Natural and Ancient Food of Our Race (London: Kegan Paul, 1881), p. 63. Yet the upper classes enjoyed hunting as sport: a “pleasure” Hardy deemed “immoral and unmanly,” suggesting that the “destruction” of “fellow-​ creatures” should be considered “an odious task,” comparable to that of “a common hangman” (THPV 167).

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Jude’s concern for the discomfort of the animal seems a projection of his own unease with performing the task himself. He decides to “stick him effectually, so as to make short work of it. That’s the chief thing” (58). He places (or perhaps misplaces) this sense of kindness above workmanship:  as the narrator says, “[h]‌owever unworkmanlike the deed, it had been mercifully done” (59). The appearance of the gangly term “unworkmanlike” raises tensions between ideas of work and mercy. It seems to signify Jude’s moral crisis in the moment, distantly echoing the captain’s response to Edmund in King Lear upon being charged to kill Cordelia and the king or else give up his job:  “I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats. | If it be man’s work, I’ll do’t.”7 In an era that defined one’s value to society by one’s labour, Jude is faced with the question of what a man’s work is.8 Does it include careful slaughter of a pig: not just to maximize the potential value of the pig (as the sum of all its parts), but in a strange sense to respect that a pig’s “work” –​as traditionally conceived by humans –​is to become a product for consumption?9 In Lear, the captain’s execution of his work –​overriding a sense of mercy that might have stilled his hand  –​terminates the play in tragedy. In Jude, Hardy repeatedly emphasizes “the chief thing” as a quick and “effectual” slaughter. The excerpt is titled “A Merciful Man” in the Animals’ Friend, setting Jude and the way he performs the act at the center of the scene. While Henry Salt commented that “ ‘humane slaughtering’ . . . is a contradiction in terms,” Hardy believed that “[a]‌quick exit, with the minimum of suffering (mental & physical) is a right to which every victim is entitled, & if skilfully ensured may be less painful than the animal’s natural death . . . –​which is the only justification for killing such fellow-​creatures at all” (CL, iv, 144).10 Words like “victim” and “fellow-​creatures” suggest 7 King Lear, V.3.40. 8 For the Victorian need for a theory of work, see Phillip Mallett’s “Carlyle and Ruskin:  Art and Work,” in Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle:  The Fusions and Confusions of Literary Periods, ed. by C. C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 223–​234. Ruskin believed it was “the task of society . . . to see that the work it demanded . . . enhanced rather than depleted the lives of the workers” (230). 9 Leslie Stephen argued that “the pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at all,” an argument Henry Salt rejects as the “logic of the larder” and “the very negation of a true reverence for life, for it implies that the real lover of animals is he whose larder is fullest of them”; see Humanities of Diet, pp. 35, 37. 10 Hardy supported slaughter reform, as this letter to the Duchess of Hamilton and their further correspondence show (DCM). His especial cause was the promotion of the “pig-​killer,” which was essentially a pistol on an extension arm; he even accepted an honorary membership to the Wessex Saddleback Pig Society to proselytize its use (CL, v, 321, 340). For an explanation of humane killers, see S. M. Dodington’s “Mechanical Appliances for the Painless Killing of Animals,” in Society of Engineers: Journal and Transactions for 1914, ed. by A. S. E. Ackermann (London: Society of Engineers, 1914), pp. 309–​330.

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that Hardy saw eating animals as an irreconcilable injustice but part of the wider scheme of suffering endured by embodied creatures in an indifferent natural world. The paradoxes opened by the pig-​killing scene –​the sense of opposition between work/​mercy, and between pragmatics/​loving-​kindness, the contradiction inherent in “humane slaughter” –​complicate the notion of “an ordinary obtaining of meat.”11 Arabella, who approaches the process of pig-​ slaughter as a routine matter, becomes “thoroughly in a passion” and cries, “There’s a waste, all through you!” at Jude’s lack of workmanship (59). The scene reverses the attitudes of the two characters upon their first encounter:  in the earlier scene, it is Arabella who throws “the characteristic part” of a pig at Jude, an action she “deedily” (in this case, vigorously) denies, and it is Jude who comments, “Whoever did it was wasteful of other people’s property” (34). Jude’s easy acceptance in this scene of the fact “pigs must be killed” –​that they are property, that even throwing away the most “useless” part might be considered “wasteful” (33) –​shifts when he is the one forced to do the business of slaughtering. In any case, the pig-​killing is “a messy job” poorly executed (59); each character’s carelessness toward a different aspect of the act problematizing normative perceptions of slaughtering practices. Yet notably the narrator emphasizes not only Jude’s but also Arabella’s discomfort with the act. While for Jude the pig is an animal to be looked upon and pitied, Arabella becomes the object of the pig’s gaze and his cries.12 Hardy’s blurring of the boundaries along the two fronts already discussed in the previous ­chapters  –​language and the face  –​has been examined by scholars in excellent close readings of the scene.13 Richard Nemesvari traces the way the pig’s vocalizations change through the scene:  from “a squeak of surprise” to “repeated cries” of rage (accepted animal emotions, as Nemesvari points out) as the animal is being caught, to an unnerving “cry of despair; long-​drawn, slow and hopeless” after “the victim” is “hoisted . . . on to the stool, legs upward” (Jude 58). Nemesvari argues, “[d]‌escribing the pig as a ‘victim’ suggests a sensational crime is being committed; his ‘despair' moves this violence into a realm that breaks down the easy acceptance of the coming death.”14 The pig’s “shriek 11 Compare also with Charlie LeDuff’s “At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die,” in Zoontologies, ed. by Wolfe, pp. 183–​197: “Slaughtering swine is repetitive, brutish work . . . You hear people say, They don’t kill pigs in the plant, they kill people” (185). 12 For a discussion of gazing at animals, see John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?,” in About Looking (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), pp. 3–​28. See also Surface Encounters, pp. 67–​68. 13 Richard Nemesvari and Suzanne Keen’s readings of the pig-​killing scene have been especially helpful; see also Caroline Sumpter’s “On Suffering and Sympathy:  Jude the Obscure, Evolution, and Ethics,” Victorian Studies, 53.4 (2011), 665–​687. 14 TH, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode, p. 191.

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of agony” and gaze at Arabella after Jude has cut his throat “fully collapses the human/​animal divide” for Nemesvari: the cry “demands of the reader a fully shared affective response to this fellow creature,” and the description of the gaze with its implication of treachery “suggests the sensationally disturbing idea that such a killing may be translated directly into human terms.”15 Furthermore, as Suzanne Keen highlights, once the pig is dead, “Hardy makes his readers visualize the slaughtered pig as a being with a face, whose ‘lips and nostrils . . . turned livid, then white.’ Hardy foregrounds the facial expressions and physiognomy that humans and animals share.”16 Keen connects this with the image of Tess’s lips in the whistling scene, noting “Hardy’s fixation on mouths that issue cross-​ species communication”:  in the case of the pig, as an appeal to reader empathy.17 But it is perhaps Arabella’s recognition of the pig’s suffering that creates the most tension in the scene. With the pig’s final cry, the narrator explains, “his glazing eyes rivet[ed] themselves on Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends” (59). In the moment of encounter, the narratorial use of “creature” suggests the power of the pig and his likeness to his human “friends” who have betrayed him. Like Mrs. Yeobright, Arabella is unnerved by the pig’s “reproach” –​but instead of turning aside, she actively takes away the dying pig’s voice: “Picking up the knife from the ground . . . she slipped it into the gash, and slit the windpipe” (59). Unlike Jude who “plunged in the knife with all his might,” Arabella deftly silences the pig (58). Before she picks up the knife, she tells Jude, “Make un stop that! . . . I don’t want people to know we are doing it ourselves,” a sentence which rationalizes her action as embarrassment at the societal impropriety of killing a pig oneself instead of waiting for the pig-​killer to come, but the fact she grabs the knife herself to silence the pig seems a direct response to his “eloquent” gaze (59). This inversion of the gaze –​the animal looking at the human instead of the human looking at the animal –​moves the pig into a position that clearly disquiets Arabella. In his essay, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Derrida focuses on this act of looking that the animal performs, framing it with his encounter with his cat (discussed in the Introduction). He notes, 15 Ibid., p. 193. 16 “Empathetic Hardy,” p. 376. 17 Ibid., p. 376.

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it can allow itself to be looked at, no doubt, but also  –​something that philosophy perhaps forgets . . . –​it can look at me. It has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself seen naked under the gaze of a cat.18

Similarly, Arabella “sees [her]self seen” through the eyes of the pig and feels his reproach at her deception, appearing to be his “friend” when in reality she was in the business of meat production. Derrida describes his cat as this irreplaceable being that . . . enters this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked . . . here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized. And a mortal existence, for from the moment that it has a name, its name survives it. It signs its potential disappearance.19

Likewise, the pig’s existence –​its actions perforating the boundaries that repeated philosophical and scientific attempts to erect have failed to secure definitively –​cannot be delineated in a humanist conception of a pig, a system of valuation that would say (to borrow Nemesvari’s words) “it is only a pig.”20 Keen points out Hardy’s repeated use of the pronoun “him” rather than “it” to name the pig throughout the scene.21 The use of the gendered pronoun –​usually reserved for humans in English –​reiterates the existence of the pig as a named, mortal creature, and this sense becomes all the more poignant for the fact the pig is being killed, transformed into neutered “meat.” Confronted face-​to-​face with the pig, Arabella is forced to acknowledge her own vulnerability and her own potential to disappear. Her verbal response to the pig’s dying moment articulates this effect of the pig upon her most clearly. While the pig’s cries and gaze and expression are linked to ideas of capacity, of language and communication, and of mentation and emotion, his suffering is a sign of his inability in the scene. Derrida looks at the formulation of Bentham’s “Can they suffer?” as a paradox, a question that contains within it a contradiction: the ability to not be able, the pouvoir of impouvoir. He questions, what of this inability [impouvoir]? What of the vulnerability felt on the basis of this inability? What is this nonpower at the heart of power? . . . Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude 18 “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” p. 380. 19 Ibid., pp. 378–​379. 20 TH, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode, p. 190. 21 “Empathetic Hardy,” p. 376.

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Through inability rather than capacity human and nonhuman animals find common ground: the “nonpower at the heart of power” suggests that in the state of absolute vulnerability, the other demands moral consideration  –​ not due to a “lesser” status but because one recognizes one’s own vulnerability in the other’s suffering, the finitude of mortality that all embodied beings share. Arabella recognizes the pig’s power-​ in-​ nonpower in this moment and is unable to face his suffering and what it means about her own existence. Instead, she attributes to the pig the power of holding back his last clot of blood to prolong his death. “Artful creatures –​they always keep back a drop like that as long as they can!” she exclaims (59). While before she urged Jude to keep the pig “eight or ten minutes dying, at least,” here she accuses the pig of inconveniencing his killers by intentionally holding on to life (58). The phrase “artful creatures” is revealing. The plural form moves the pig from an individual being to an anonymous member of a collective (and easier to stereotype) group, yet the attribute “artful” resonates with traditionally “human” implications, looping back into earlier considerations of art and deception in previous chapters. While Arabella’s use connotes a sense of cunning and deception, “artful” can also imply skill in a positive sense, a capacity typically related to “elevated” human culture. This attribution of manipulative power to the pig in the term “artful” betrays Arabella’s self-​identification with him and a sense of her own vulnerability in his suffering. In the pages that follow, Jude learns of Arabella’s “artfulness” throughout their courtship  –​specifically her manipulation of him through her supposed pregnancy (having already learned of her false hair and contrived dimples). While Arabella defends her right to use whatever means necessary to secure a husband, Jude makes it clear that he would not have otherwise married her. The pig-​killing scene serves as the turning point in their marriage, and its dead body turns into their relationship’s carcass. They fight as Arabella melts the pig fat, and she makes a scene to accuse Jude of treating her unfairly. When Jude returns to the house drunk, he finds only “the marks of pig-​dressing, of fats and scallops” without the “materials themselves” –​along with a note from Arabella saying that she will not be returning (66). The next day he “sen[ds] off the carcase of the pig” and, upon receiving a further letter from Arabella announcing her departure to Australia, forwards her “the money that had been realized by the sale of the pig” (66). The disappearance of the pig, 22  “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” p. 396.

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then, signifies Arabella’s own disappearance: the very name “wife” gestures toward the potential to no longer be another’s beloved, as Jude and Sue later feel upon each attempt to get married. The scene calls for the reader’s empathy for animal suffering, but it does not provide an answer for the place of the animal in a utilitarian landscape –​which is the framework in which Bentham formulates “Can they suffer?” as the boundary between humans and animals. Jude feels “dissatisfied with himself as a man at what he had done, though aware . . . that the deed would have amounted to the same thing if carried out by deputy” (60).23 Yet while “[t]‌he white snow, stained with the blood of his fellow-​ mortal, wore an illogical look to him as a lover of justice, not to say a Christian,” his sentiment echoes Hardy’s statement to the Humanitarian League on “grappling”: Jude, like Hardy, “could not see how the matter was to be mended” (60). For the animal welfare and later animal rights movements, utilitarianism offered the chance to place animal suffering into a wider schema. As activist and philosopher Peter Singer suggests, If a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration. No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering  –​insofar as rough comparisons can be made  –​of any other being.24

The problem of utilitarianism as a way of promoting animal welfare (and, one might argue, in general) is its dependency on “rough comparisons” to quantify abstract concepts of pleasure and pain into a tidy algorithm: Hardy’s approach to animals (including human ones) pushes toward the unknown. Bentham’s “Can they suffer?” comes in a footnote within his treatise on the principles of morals and legislation, a work in which he introduces his principle of utility. Mill explains this principle in Utilitarianism (1861), writing, The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.25 23 This sentence returns to the question of what constitutes a “man’s work.” 24 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd edn (London: Thorsons, 1991), pp. 8–​9. 25 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism and On Liberty: Including Mill’s “Essay on Bentham” and Selections from the Writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, ed. by Mary Warnock, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 186.

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Bentham outlines how to measure the “value of a lot of pleasure or pain,” listing four main criteria for a single pleasure or pain in application to one person: its “intensity,” “duration,” “certainty or uncertainty,” and “propinquity or remoteness.” He considers two additional properties of the act (rather than of pain or pleasure itself ): its “fecundity, or the chance it has of being followed by sensations of the same kind” and its “purity, or the chance it has of not being followed by sensations of the opposite kind.” With a group of people, he adds the aspect of “extent; that is, the number of persons to whom it extends; or (in other words) who are affected by it.”26 Mill further describes happiness not as a state of constant excitation but as “moments” of “exalted pleasure”: “the occasional brilliant flash of enjoyment” in “an existence made up of few and transitory pains.”27 Like Hardy, who focuses on altruism as the “Golden Rule,” Mill states that “[i]‌n the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.”28 Yet the problem for Hardy’s characters is that they usually are only capable of half of this creed: they either love themselves or others to the neglect of their own good, the latter being what Keen notes was the Comtean reading of the Golden Rule, and which also matches Levinas’s idea of the human as an “unreasonable animal,” one who is willing to put the needs of the other before the self.29 Both Bentham and Mill extend the principle of utility to animals: Mill advocates that the “ultimate end” of this principle “is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments . . . secured to all mankind; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient creation.”30 Bentham asks, “[w]‌hat other agents then are there, which, at the same time that they are under the influence of man’s direction, are susceptible of happiness?,” including in his answer, “animals, which on account of their interests having been neglected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded into the class of things.”31 It is here Bentham places the footnote in which his 26 IPML, pp. 38–​39. 27 Utilitarianism, p. 191. See also Beer’s Darwin Plots and Levine’s “Hardy and Darwin” to compare Mill’s “moments” of “enjoyment” with Beer’s and Levine’s concepts of “moments” of “joy” and “enchantment,” respectively. 28 Ibid., p. 194. 29 “Empathetic Hardy,” pp. 359–​360; “The Paradox of Morality,” p. 172. 30 Utilitarianism, p. 190. Mill’s vision, while laudable, is vague in its terms: what does it mean to be free from pain “as far as possible,” and what are the limits of “the nature of things” in extending such an existence to animals? 31 IPML, p. 282.

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famous question is contained. He points out that in some eastern religions animals are given ethical consideration and questions why they have been neglected as “things” in more universal debates. While Bentham does not object to the eating of animals, stating “we are the better for it, and they are never the worse,” he is unable to find a reason for humans to torture animals; rather, he insists that there are several reasons why animals should not be tormented –​the main one being their ability to suffer, or in the words of the text, their “susceptibility” to happiness, a notion to which this chapter will return.32 In this extension of utility to the animal world, Bentham and Mill provide an account of “animal subjectivity” that matches Nemesvari’s description of “the general ethic both [Jude the character] and the text are moving toward, one that insists on connection rather than exclusion, and one that repudiates any system that, by objectifying the ‘other,’ denies autonomy through the unthinking imposition of a hierarchy of worth.”33 Yet Hardy’s narrator makes it clear that becoming untangled from such a system is not straightforward:  while Jude’s attitude might be one of empathy, the underlying framework through which he views the world is linked to a tacit “hierarchy of worth.” Jude  –​“in the secret centre of his brain” –​believes that “Arabella was not worth a great deal as a specimen of womankind” (51). Instead, “he kept up a factitious belief in her. His idea of her was the thing of most consequence, not Arabella herself, he sometimes said laconically” (52). While on one hand such a belief is almost inevitable in all relationships, where one falls in love with one’s own idea of a person rather than the person him/​ herself, on the other Jude’s ready admission of it and his willingness to see his idea of her as having greater consequence than Arabella herself undermines his attempt to move toward an ethic of empathy.34 While he cares for her as a “fellow-​creature” (as he later tells Sue), the transformative “magic thread of fellow-​feeling” felt with the rooks seems to be missing (255). When Arabella says that she is pregnant, Jude tells her, “Certainly we’ll marry: we must!” in the same way that Arabella later says “Pigs must be 32 Ibid., p.  282. Dix Harwood notes that Bentham loved animals:  he had a “ ‘beautiful pig’ which used to come to him and grunt contentedly as he scratched its back and ears,” and he was “very fond of mice, and fond of cats” but found it “difficult to reconcile the two affections”; see Love for Animals: and How It Developed in Great Britain (New York: [n. pub.], 1928), p. 168. 33 TH, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode, p. 190. 34 See J. Hillis Miller’s Distance and Desire for further reading on falling in love with one’s own idea of a person; see also Hardy’s The Well-​Beloved (1897).

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killed” (51, 59). Once he discovers that Arabella is not pregnant, he feels very differently about the marriage and its necessity: There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-​formed schemes involving years of thought and labour, of forgoing a man’s one opportunity of showing himself superior to the lower animals, and of contributing his units of work to the general progress of his generation, because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory . . . weakness. (56)

He views the situation as a “gin which would cripple him” and by extension Arabella because of his own unhappiness. Yet he does not consider Arabella’s perspective:  while she may view him as “a husband with a lot of earning power in him for buying her frocks and hats,” she also is described by the narrator as at times seeming genuinely in love with Jude (52–​53). When he approaches in the pig-​chasing scene, “[t]‌he lines of her countenance changed from the rigidity of business to the softness of love when she saw [him]” (46). After getting married she acknowledges her pride in her husband quietly to a friend who tells her, “He’s a dear good fellow, and you ought to be proud of un” (54). For Arabella, “Married is married” (54); having secured Jude through the act, she thinks herself assured of future happiness. Only when Jude disappoints her expectations –​not unlike the way Clym disappoints Eustacia’s –​does she leave him to emigrate with her parents to Australia, seeking a better life. What is revealing in Jude’s attitude to Arabella –​and his later treatment of Sue as a “creature” –​is the humanist hierarchy implicit in his conception of her as “not worth a great deal as a specimen of womankind” (51). If the question of suffering connects the human and the animal, the question of sentience again becomes a limit. Those with “higher faculties” were supposedly less likely to be happy because they would realize the imperfections in any good that occurred and ostensibly more likely to experience “more acute suffering.”35 As Mill wrote, “a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable . . . It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.”36 The capacity for greater reflection resulted in an increased capacity for pain and a more thoughtful approach to happiness:  an idea with which Jude would surely have agreed.37 The “susceptibility” to 35 Utilitarianism, p. 188. 36 Ibid., p. 188. 37 In FFMC, the narrator suggests that “[c]‌apacity for intense feeling is proportionate to the general intensity of the nature, and perhaps in all Fanny’s sufferings, much greater relatively to her strength,

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happiness, then, is bound up with a susceptibility to disappointment. “Few hurts which human beings can sustain are greater, and none wound more, than when that on which they habitually and with full assurance relied, fails them in the hour of need,” Mill writes, “and few wrongs are greater than this mere withholding of good.”38 Jude could be read as a novel with the trope of disappointment of expectations and the withholding of good: from the denial of grain to the rooks in the field, to the pig’s surprise at human treachery in shifting from caretaker to killer, to the university system’s rejection of Jude, to society’s refusal to shelter Jude and Sue and their children. On the opposite end of the humanist sentience scale, the “inferiority” of the “lower animals” raised the question –​from Descartes to the present –​of whether animals could feel pain. One Victorian writer’s treatise in support of vivisection declared, “Cries again do not prove pain: e.g. Pigs cry out when being killed; but the cause of the squealing is not any pain, but the loss of liberty they undergo.” Additionally, “Movement, Gesture, and Outcry do not necessarily connote pain . . . they prove in fact that brutes, like children, are in the habit of crying out before they are hurt!”39 Despite the seeming absurdity of such statements to most modern readers, the notion that animals do not feel pain was prevalent enough on both sides of the Atlantic that a minister giving a sermon in Detroit in 1895 addressed the topic, explaining, “[o]‌ur education is at fault. Our ordinary notion is that an animal is a kind of moving stone, an animated stick. We kick the piece of wood around. We cut it or bend it or burn it without any conscience, for it has no feeling.” Yet after the Darwinian revolution, he urged, comparative physiology showed that the “sensations of pleasure and pain” in animals “must be like ours,” resulting in the imperative to regard animal suffering as a valid form of pain.40 However, the capacity to feel looped back to the question of language and abstract thought. E. Kay Robinson, rephrasing Descartes on the idea that animals are incapable of feeling pain, wrote, “now the human point there never was a time when she suffered in an absolute sense what Bathsheba suffered now” as the latter watches Troy kiss Fanny’s corpse with expressions of “illimitable sadness” and an “indefinable union of remorse and reverence” on his face (292). While the statement seems very much influenced by Mill, Hardy leaves room for question: in addition to the tentativeness expressed in “perhaps,” what exactly is the “absolute” value of suffering (the distance from a state of zero suffering, to consider it in mathematical terms), and does the fact that Troy’s expressions become “illimitable” and “indefinable” change the terms of the equation, making it incalculable? Or, as Mill might argue, does Fanny have a lower capacity for feeling (and therefore suffering) than Bathsheba? 38 Utilitarianism, p. 232. 39 E. D. Girdlestone, Vivisection:  In Its Scientific, Religious, and Moral Aspects (London:  Simpkin, Marshall, 1884), p. 17. 40 Rev. Hamilton Morgan, “A Sermon: Animal and Man” (Detroit, January 1895), pp. 3–​4.

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of view is that of a conscious personality, a being who feels that he has an individual existence apart from his body, and who has the power of contemplating and considering the injuries which his body may suffer, translating them into terms of conscious pain.”41 The argument that only through reflection could pain be perceived was vital to the vivisection community. The physician James Warbasse, in his 1910 book on animal experimentation, put it this way: This pain-​appreciation is, moreover, dependent upon the mental development of the individual. Primitive peoples have an insensitiveness to pain which is beyond our comprehension . . . The savage who chops off his hand and presents it to the king has displayed a stoicism which is comparable to that of the fox who gnaws off his leg to get out of a trap. Neither one of them is much hurt. We must not interpret these things in terms of our own pain-​sense.42

While Warbasse’s argument takes Mill’s view that “highly endowed being[s]‌” feel pain more acutely to its extreme, it reveals the radical (in this case, racial) prejudice and potential violence such a perspective engenders. To believe some humans less capable of pain based on a supposed lower level of sentience is to make an unassumable assumption, given the unknowability of the other  –​human or nonhuman. Yet even today the debate over whether or not animals are capable of perceiving pain remains, with arguments that the sensation of pain without the linked perception of it causes no suffering –​making it possible to justify the continued and liberal use of animals in medical research.43 Kindness to animals was (and at times still is) promoted solely to protect human morality and civility rather than for the well-​being of animals.44 For Hardy, there is no doubt animals can feel pain. In the scene where the sheep get into the young clover in Far from the Madding Crowd, the relief the sheep feel after Gabriel’s life-​ saving operations is described as showing in their faces in a way that alludes to Mill and Bentham’s 41 E. Kay Robinson, The Religion of Nature (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906), p. 5. See also “The Modern Descartes,” in Henry Salt’s Consolations of a Faddist: Verses Reprinted from “The Humanitarian” (London: Fifield, 1906), p. 10, for a satirical response to Robinson. 42 James Warbasse, The Conquest of Disease Through Animal Experimentation (New York: Appleton, 1910), pp. 16–​17. 43 See, for example, Peter Harrison’s “Do Animals Feel Pain?,” Philosophy, 66.255 (January 1991), 25–​ 40. Harrison maintains that animals lack mental states, thereby making pain “superfluous” (38). 44 For the idea that cruelty to animals leads to cruelty to humans, see William Hogarth’s engravings “The Four Stages of Cruelty,” in Hogarth: The Complete Engravings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), pp. 224–​227. The idea that kindness to animals should be practiced to engender kindness to humans was often promoted by supporters of vivisection as the main reason to treat animals with consideration, and it is perpetuated even today: Harrison uses this concept to conclude his article.

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description of happiness as the absence of pain. The narrator tells the reader, “[i]‌t has been said that mere ease after torment is delight for a time:  and the countenances of these poor creatures expressed it now” (141). Suzanne B. Falck-​Yi traces the meaning of delight here to Edmund Burke’s definition in Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757): the “use of the word Delight to express the sensation which accompanies the removal of pain or danger” (414). For Warbasse  –​in a tradition that goes back to Bell’s interpretation of animal expressions  –​such a facial expression would be no more than a mere “accident” of features; as he notes, “[c]ertain animals, notably the dog, cat, sheep, cow, and horse, have an expression about the eyes which is often strikingly similar to the expression assumed by the human face when appealing for pity. This is one of the accidents of anatomical structure.”45 Hardy does not attempt to describe the specific arrangement of features in the sheep’s countenances of relief. Rather, he builds the reader’s trust in the narrator’s capacity to reliably connect emotion to expression with the high level of attention to human faces in the chapter’s opening, from Bathsheba’s “compression of her two red lips with which she had accompanied the exertion of pulling on a tight glove” (connecting the face to a physical act) to the varied arrangements of wrinkled concern on her “elderly” and “ancient” employees when they report the sheep’s trouble: Joseph’s countenance was drawn into lines and puckers by his concern. Fray’s forehead was wrinkled both perpendicularly and crosswise, after the pattern of a portcullis, expressive of a double despair. Laban Tall’s lips were thin and his face was rigid. Matthew’s jaws sank and his eyes turned whichever way the strongest muscle happened to pull them. (136)

By foregrounding this range of human facial formations to express varying levels of panic and worry, Hardy’s narrator is freed from making overly anthropocentric interpretations of ovine facial expressions, the reader’s trust in his ability to read faces already established. Yet Hardy does not shy away from describing the personalities of the animals that live in the pages of his prose and their individual capacities for happiness. While Derrida focuses on the idea of suffering as a “nonpower at the heart of power,” Bentham addresses the animal under the question of being “susceptible of happiness”: rather than capacity for happiness, he deems it susceptibility, a word that connotes vulnerability. In A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), the pig-​killer tells a story about a melancholy pig 45 Conquest of Disease, pp. 18–​19.

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that seems to express this susceptibility to the potential for happiness.46 The story comes after an anecdote about a “deaf and dumb” pig he knew (the inclusion of “dumb” quietly subverting the delineation of humans from animals through language, given that from the rest of his anecdote on this pig “deaf ” would have sufficed), whom he calls both a “poor soul” and “very tender eating, very; as pretty a bit of meat as ever you see” (215). He then tells of the “melancholy” pig: a pig that “went out of his mind … As clean out of his mind as the cleverest Christian could go. In early life ’a was very melancholy, and never seemed a hopeful pig by no means” (215). Substitute the word “child” for “pig,” and one might argue this could be an account of Jude the elder or the younger. While such descriptions could be interpreted as anthropomorphic, the intelligence of pigs has long been known, inspiring fictional works from Animal Farm (1945) to Charlotte’s Web (1952) as well as cognition studies by evolutionary psychologists that demonstrate pigs’ possible capacities for “episodic memory, intentional deception and even theory of mind.”47 In Under the Greenwood Tree, a similar discussion over agricultural creatures’ personalities occurs when Geoffrey Day and his assistant Enoch harvest honey from two beehives. Mr. Shiner, observing the proceedings, comments “reflectively,” “They were a peculiar family” (131). The reflection, while accepted by the gamekeeper with a nod, strikes the reader as unusual: first, that Mr. Shiner would know the personality of these bees, and second, that the bees are formulated as a family (rather than simply a community or a group) and as one defined by a specific trait –​being peculiar (what exactly is a “peculiar” bee like?). Perhaps the comment is directed quietly at the more obvious “peculiar family” of the scene (the Days), but Fancy follows up on the suggestion of the bees as individuals. Indicating the two holes in which kindling will be placed before being covered with the hives in order to suffocate the resident bees with smoke, she laments, “Those holes will be the graves of thousands . . . I think ’tis rather a cruel thing to do” (131). The reconfiguration of the holes as mass graves implies a view of a bee as the other, raising questions of whether or not it is “cruel” to kill it.48 46 Keen too notes that Hardy writes pigs as individuals; see “Empathetic Hardy,” p. 376. 47 Michael Mendl, Suzanne Held, and Richard W. Byrne, “Pig Cognition,” Current Biology, 20.18 (2010), R796–​R798 (R798). 48 Keith Thomas notes a sense of bees as “within the human community” dating back to the seventeenth century; he quotes Sir William Petty, who believed that the souls of bees were “like the souls of men” (The Petty Papers, ii, 29, as qtd. in Man and the Natural World Changing Attitudes in England 1500–​1800 [Middlesex: Penguin, 1984], p. 98).

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While Mr. Shiner laughingly “incline[s]‌to Fancy’s notion,” her father’s response reveals an odd conflation of respect and disregard for the bees. He tells her that this method is preferable to newer strategies, explaining that “if you suffocate ’em this way they only die once: if you fumigate ’em in the new way they come to life again, and die o’ starvation; so the pangs o’ death be twice upon ’em” (131). Furthermore, he responds to Shiner’s laughter with the statement, “The proper way to take the honey, so that the bees be neither starved nor murdered is a puzzling matter” (131). His word choice –​especially “murdered” –​could echo Fancy’s concern for the bees as demanding ethical consideration, but it could also read as a jesting reply to Shiner, intentionally hyperbolic. Fancy replies that she “would like never to take it from them,” but her solution to the “puzzling matter” disregards the pragmatics underlying the practice. As Enoch reflects, the purpose of bee-​keeping “ ’tis the money . . . For without money man is a shadder” (131). Phillip Mallett notes the sacrilegious tone of Enoch’s comment, which metamorphoses a Biblical reference to man’s life “without the Lord” as being “a shadow that passeth away” into a materialist context (199). This subtle shift reveals the capitalist spirit imbedded into agriculture in a world moving away from rural communities to industrialized cities. The church choir must give way to the modern organ, and the occupants of the Days’ beehives must die so their honey can be sold. While the reader may find it difficult to take Fancy’s attitude toward the bees seriously, considering her earlier excuse to Dick for going with Shiner to learn how to use birdlime to catch wild bullfinches (“He looked at me  –​and I  looked at him, and he said, ‘Will you let me show you how to –​catch bullfinches down here by the stream?’ And I –​wanted to know very much –​I did so long to have a bullfinch! I couldn’t help that –​ and I  said, ‘Yes!’ ”), her father’s continued pronunciation of the bees as “mortals” in the following pages highlights a paradoxical attitude toward insect suffering (116, 132). The proceedings stir up the bees whose hives were smoked on previous days (whom the narrator describes as having become “marauders about the doors of other hives” after being “demoralized by affliction”), and the group takes cover in the surrounding shrubbery  –​except Geoffrey, who remains “unmoved” (131). Enoch calls out, “Have the craters stung ye?” (131). This dialect use of the word “creature” marks a physical, embodied encounter between the surface of the human and the nonhuman: the bees sting Geoffrey.49 He addresses the bees that 49 For more on physical contact between humans and animals, see Broglio’s Surface Encounters, pp. xxiii–​xxiv, 60.

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make their way into his clothing in the act of stinging him, saying, “You lively young mortals –​how did you get inside there!,” but he adds an aside to his human companions:  “However, they can’t sting me many times more, poor things; for they must be getting weak” (132). His comment to the bees highlights their capacity –​their liveliness and ingenuity at getting under the surface of his clothes –​as well as their finitude through the title “mortals.” To the humans around him, he emphasizes pity and incapacity, referring to the bees as “poor things” –​an expression of sympathy that, while often applied to humans (e.g., by Bathsheba to Fanny, as discussed in Chapter 2, or Grace to Felice and Suke, as seen in Chapter 1), suggests an objectification of the pitied other. Yet the bees’ endurance outlasts Geoffrey’s expectation and interrupts his task: he continues to expostulate, “Bother these little mortals,” and he decides to “go indoors and take ’em out, poor things; for they won’t let me alone. There’s two a-​stinging wi’ all their might now,” adding, “I’m sure I wonder their strength can last so long” (133). While the episode is comedic, Geoffrey’s acknowledgment of both the bees’ capacity and their vulnerability –​their ability to keep stinging as well as their inevitable death that will result from the act –​complicates the otherwise straightforward business of obtaining honey in a manner similar to the pig-​slaughter scene in Jude.50 Geoffrey’s job, of course, is the role of gamekeeper: a position that routinely involves the destruction of animals. In a later scene, he and Enoch are depicted “shoveling up ant-​hills in the wood,” sweeping what Mrs. Yeobright views as whole civilizations away with a lift of a shovel (143). While in the previous scene his refusal of Dick’s request to marry Fancy occurs in conjunction with his removal of the stinging bees, in the “emmet”-​clearing scene, he kills an ant “that was prowling round his ear” as he hears Enoch’s news of Fancy’s languishing diet due to her supposed heartbreak over not being able to marry Dick (143). For Geoffrey, despite the familiarity with these insects that causes him to view them as “mortals,” there is still a hierarchy of worth that places them outside the range of ethical consideration; similarly, he views Dick as too inferior a candidate for Fancy’s hand in marriage. While the consequences in Under the Greenwood Tree are humorous on the 50 Bees are often present at crucial moments in Hardy’s novels: Dick becomes engaged to Fancy on his way back from delivering bees (UGT 101, 112); Bathsheba agrees to meet Troy in the fern hollow after he dons her bee-​keeping costume and helps her with a hive (FFMC 178–​180); and Tess and Abraham are taking bees to the market when Prince dies (Tess 35, 39). Emma Hardy recalled a superstition that when bees made their hive on a house, it portended a death within; see Some Recollections: Together with Some Relevant Poems by Thomas Hardy, ed. by Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 32.

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surface, this sense of marginalizing those deemed as “lesser” has tragic consequences when contemplated, for example, in light of the era’s rampant imperialism that swept out “lesser” cultures on the basis of the colonizer’s supposed superiority. (Forster makes a similar metaphor with the wasp in A Passage to India.) Yet the suggestion is not that killing insects is comparable to victimizing humans; rather, the elision of the unknowability of the other leads to violence –​on more than one scale. Critics have often categorized Hardy’s characters into types, especially through their interaction with the natural world.51 Geoffrey’s comments on the bees –​despite his actions –​foreshadow Gabriel Oak’s feeling for his sheep, despite his eventual sale of them for mutton. Geoffrey, like Gabriel, manages to navigate the humanist society he finds himself in. Yet characters like Jude and Sue and Tess (the overly sensitive characters, as they have been deemed) overidentify with the suffering they see in the natural world and especially the sounds of suffering that they hear –​the squeal of the pig being slaughtered, the sigh of trees being planted, the groan of Prince being stabbed by an oncoming cart. Irwin argues, The hints here are plain enough: the sounds derive from a sustained metaphor. Tess and Jude, too, are tormented animals, eventually hounded to death. They have the stoicism of most of Hardy’s characters; the animals who stand in for them, metaphorically, are made to squeak or shriek on their behalf.52

When Jude and Sue hear “the cry of a rabbit caught in a gin” and know that “the little creature’s habit” was to “not soon repeat its cry,” the rabbit’s suffering overlaps with Sue’s, who –​caught in the metaphorical trap of her marriage to Phillotson and speaking to Jude through the physical barrier of the window casement  –​gives an impulsive cry of her sorrow (205). The nighttime meeting precedes the turning-​point kiss on the road the next day, which then “traps” Jude. He asks Sue, “Is it . . . that women are to blame; or is it the artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-​impulses are turned into devilish domestic gins and springes to noose and hold back those who want to progress?” (209). Jude sees the traditions of hunting and marriage as parallel, antediluvian products of an unsympathetic society.53 Yet one might argue that Jude’s strike across the 51 See Michael Campbell’s “Thomas Hardy’s Attitude towards Animals,” Victorians Institute Journal, 2 (1973), 61–​71, (p. 68), and Lawrence’s Study of Thomas Hardy, pp. 48–​49. 52 Reading Hardy’s Landscapes, p. 46. 53 Compare, too, with Felice Charmond and Grace’s exchange about man-​traps early in The Wood­ landers, which might be read as a metaphor for the institution of marriage. Felice explains her

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rabbit’s head to put it out of its misery is echoed hauntingly by the young Jude’s murder/​suicide of his half-​siblings and himself: what does it mean to impose too broad a reading onto suffering in a world full of creatures struggling for survival? For Tess, the identification of suffering with animals she encounters moves beyond the metaphorical.54 She sees herself as a part of the natural world, undivided by any sense of Cartesian dualism. When Prince dies, she views herself “in the light of a murderess” (40), a word legally and philosophically reserved for the putting to death of a human, not an animal.55 Later in the novel, when she encounters the dying pheasants after fleeing from her own male human predator, she kills them “tenderly,” crying, “Poor darlings –​to suppose myself the most miserable being on earth in the sight o’ such misery as yours!” She continues, “And not a twinge of bodily pain about me! I be not mangled, and I be not bleeding” (298). Ironically, Hardy’s narrator describes the hunters who shot these pheasants as “so unmannerly and so unchivalrous towards their weaker fellows in nature’s teeming family,” a statement that, while reading humorously, gestures toward concepts typically associated with the female domain in trivialization of the sex: manners, chivalry, and feminine weakness (298). Here, it is the narrator who moves between the human and animal worlds, using irony to address boundaries set in place by patriarchal humanism. The birds’ traumatic death calls for a more serious response than that of the maintenance of manners and chivalry by the hunters; in the same way, Tess’s plight is not to be trivialized, and neither is the situation on the road that caused her to feel unsafe and to flee into the plantation.56 Tess’s shift to dialect as she kills the birds is notable: leading up to this scene and after it, she speaks in standard English, despite the fact she is surrounded by others who speak in dialect. Furthermore, the words she speaks to these birds are the first addressed to another living being since fleeing the road to escape the man from Trantridge who had insulted her in front of Angel (Farmer Groby, Tess’s soon-​ to-​ be employer at husband was a “connoisseur” of such objects and “knew the histories” of his collection, adding “playfully, ‘Man-​traps are of rather ominous significance where a person of our sex lives are they not?’ ” Grace “thoughtfully” calls them “relics of a barbarous time,” to which Felice replies, “we must not take them too seriously” (60). 54 See also “No Insignificant Creature,” pp. 509–​516, for Cohn’s reading of animal suffering in Tess. 55 See William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, ed. by William Hammond (San Francisco: Bancroft-​Whitney, 1890), p. 198, and Derrida’s “Eating Well,” p. 279. 56 Hardy viewed hunting for sport as “proof that [humans] have not yet emerged from barbarism,” as he wrote in his March 2, 1904 letter to Reverend S. Whittell Key (BR 201). See also his October 14, 1926, letter to Wilfred P. H. Warner (THPV 455).

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Flintcomb-​Ash). When she encounters him on the road, she replies “civilly” to his greeting; then he turns and recognizes her, addressing her as “young Squire d’Urberville’s friend.” Tess does not respond, feeling instead “[a]‌spasm of anguish,” and as he demands she apologize for Angel’s blow, “[s]till no answer came from Tess. There seemed only one escape for her hunted soul. She suddenly took to her heels with the speed of the wind” (296). As she attempts to sleep in a nest she makes for herself out of leaves, she talks to herself, repeating “All is vanity” like a mantra until finally deciding, “this was a most inadequate thought for modern days . . . If all were only vanity who would mind it? All was, alas, worse than vanity –​ injustice, punishment, exaction, death” (296). She touches her bony brow and wishes aloud, “I wish it were now” (297). It is not until the next day when she realizes she has been surrounded the whole time by dying bodies that she feels ashamed for her wish. Tess’s grappling with her thoughts seems to demonstrate what twenty-​ first-​ century philosopher Cora Diamond describes as “the difficulty of reality”:  a phenomenon that occurs when something is resistant to thought or “painful in its inexplicability.”57 The difficult reality that Tess faces is bound up with the circumstances surrounding and consequences of her earlier night on The Chase with Alec. The elision of the act itself in the earlier scene (leading to the familiar debate of rape/​consent) perhaps suggests both that what “actually” happened does not matter in the overall narrative of the novel –​either way, Tess is a “pure woman” –​and, more importantly for the argument here, that there is an inadequacy in language itself to express the wounding Tess experiences (and continues to experience throughout the novel) because of that night.58 Faced with such situations, language fails to capture reality:  both during the input of experience from the body to conceptual thought and the output from felt experience to spoken language. As Diamond explains of the latter, “[w]‌hen we put, or try to put, that experience in words, the words fail us, the words don’t do what we are trying to get them to do.”59 Tess comes face to face with her own difficult reality when she encounters the man on the road, and she finds herself unable to speak. Her reaction is instead physical: she runs, a “hunted soul.” Alone with her thoughts, she deflects from the difficulty of her situation, turning to Solomon’s “[a]ll is vanity” and 57 Or, on the other end of the spectrum, is “astonishing in its inexplicability”; see “The Difficulty of Reality,” pp. 45–​46. 58 See the novel’s subtitle, “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented by Thomas Hardy,” and Shakespearean epigraph: “Poor wounded name!” (2). 59 “The Difficulty of Reality,” p. 67.

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repeating it “mechanically,” until she rejects it as an “inadequate thought” to capture experience. Yet the next morning, face to face with the reality of what it means to suffer to death, she realizes just how abstract her wish –​articulated into spoken language –​was, and again words fail her. Such moments point toward what posthumanist philosopher Cary Wolfe calls a “second finitude”: not just a failure of language around a site of difficulty but a broader sense of language as limiting one’s relation to flesh-​and-​blood experience, a limit inextricably and paradoxically linked to the finitude of shared mortality discussed by Bentham and Derrida. While humans can only conceptualize the vulnerability of what it means to be a living being through language, at the same time the very act of contemplating one’s mortality distances one from death’s reality, changing the unspeakable into an abstraction.60 While Wolfe, following Derrida, sees language as prosthetic (a tool that has evolved with humans), there is no way to separate human experience from language:  the two have become so “entwined” that “our relation to flesh and blood” can only be conceived of through language, as a “precondition of our subjectivity.” This reveals a doubling of the finitude of mortality, a second finitude as Wolfe terms it: while language may be considered a power, one’s subjection to it becomes a “nonpower at the heart of power,” one “shared,” Wolfe adds, “by humans and nonhumans the moment they begin to interact and communicate by means of any semiotic system.”61 Acknowledgment of this limit calls for a focus on the materiality of being. Yet instead of a more intense focus on embodiment, there is a tendency to turn away and to write off the immediate difficulty of reality as part of a wider philosophical or moral issue –​to say hunters will hunt or “pigs must be killed” instead of facing the “sense of the inability of thought to encompass what it is attempting to reach” –​a shift Diamond describes as “deflection.”62 Faced with the bleeding bodies of the dying birds, Tess experiences, as Diamond argues, “how much that coming apart of thought and reality belongs to flesh and blood,” and shifts into dialect.63 The birds’ exposure parallels her own; both exist in a system that does not regard their suffering 60 Cary Wolfe, “Exposures,” in Philosophy and Animal Life, pp. 1–​41 (pp. 25–​26). See also Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? pp. 88–​89, 119–​121. 61 “Exposures,” pp. 30, 27. Wolfe adds, “I simply want to mark how this second kind of ‘not being able’ renders uncertain and unstable . . . the relationship of the human to itself because it renders unstable not just the boundary between human and animal but also that between the organic and the mechanical or technological” (28). 62 “The Difficulty of Reality,” pp. 57–​58. 63 Ibid., p. 78.

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as requiring a compassionate response. The birds are, after all, game-​ birds: “creatures” who were “brought into being by artificial means solely” for hunters’ pleasure (298); and Tess is a “fallen woman,” with whom the “President of the Immortals . . . sport[s]‌” (420). Tess kills the birds “[w]ith the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers as much as for herself,” but she views her own pain as immaterial set up against the physical suffering of the birds (298). Yet the narrator’s vivid description of their pain evokes possible options for the elided description of Tess on The Chase: “Under the trees several pheasants lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched out –​all of them writhing in agony” (297). Significantly, Tess’s first response to the birds’ suffering  –​and to Prince’s earlier  –​is physical. She strangles the birds; she places her hand over the horse’s wound. These reactions suggest a dynamic in the text –​and in Tess’s relation to the animals’ suffering –​that in some way exceeds or evades linguistic representation; her responses occur on a basic level of shared embodiment that cannot be articulated in conceptual language, that focuses instead on the materiality of existence.64 Tess comes into physical contact with these dying animals, encountering them not just face-​to-​face but skin-​to-​ skin: an experience Hardy himself had that was so vivid it remained with him from childhood to old age, when he recalled holding a dead bird, “light as a feather, all skin and bone, practically starved. He said he had never forgotten how the body of the fieldfare felt in his hand: the memory had always haunted him” (LW 479). In these moments of encounter and of contact, empathy is born. Hardy’s writing complicates assertions of boundaries between humans and animals based on language, faces, and suffering:  by quietly shifting the reader’s perspective (often with a sense of humor), he invites empathetic reconsideration of one’s own preconceptions of the other. In place of the tradition of enacting kindness to animals as a measure of protecting human morality, compassion for creatures themselves invites, to quote from Uexküll, “walk[s]‌into unknown worlds”:  willingness to imagine another’s point of view implies that such viewpoints have value, even if such value is not quantifiable by human measures.65 Like Uexküll’s use 64 See also Anat Pick’s Creaturely Poetics; Pick sees these intersections between Diamond and Derrida (via Wolfe) as a shift toward “creaturely thinking” (7). 65 Foray into the Worlds of Animals, p. 41.

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of illustrations to help readers visualize the perspective of a fly (with the details of a photograph obscured by a screen or rendered as abstract objects in a watercolor) or the difference in depth perception between an adult and a child (with a picture of nearer as simply being “bigger” for the child and further “smaller”), Hardy creates images that disorient the reader, rearranging the environment to gesture toward a plurality of worlds rather than a single time and space shared by all.66 Take, for example, his depiction of the field where Tess and Marian work toward the end of Tess: it was a complexion without features, as if a face from chin to brow should be only an expanse of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, 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. (304)

Here, it is the field and the sky that are pictured as having faces –​without any defining features to create expression or emotion, yet gazing at each other in an oppressive, locked exchange, much like the social system the girls find themselves trapped within.67 Tess and Marian are compared to flies, a simile that seems on the surface to demote them along the Great Chain of Being, but for Hardy –​as seen in “An August Midnight” –​flies have hands. Closely tied to the ideas of possessing language and a face is the attribution of hands: to be able to grasp, to be able to give, to be able to write, to create traces and to wipe them out.68 Rather than a slight, the simile suggests a new outlook on the situation, one that sees the girls as potentially powerful creatures caught in an uncaring system as old as the field itself.69 66 Ibid., pp.  64–​65, 67. In Darwin’s Plots, Beer notes that Hardy was “hyperconscious of multiple scale, multiple time, and of the unique problem consciousness created in persuading the human to attempt to live in all of them” (252). 67 Arguably, the image of the “white face looking down on the brown face” evokes the injustice of slavery, linking Tess and Marion’s plight to broader systematic societal oppression. 68 For an overview of the philosophical tradition that only humans have hands, see Derrida’s “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” trans. by John P. Leavey, Jr., in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. by John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 61–​ 196. See also Leonard Lawlor’s “ ‘Animals Have No Hand’: An Essay on Animality in Derrida,” CR: The New Centennial Review, 7.2 (2007), 43–​69. For a nineteenth-​century claim that only humans have hands, see Bell’s The Hand. For further context on this idea in relation to Hardy’s depiction of hands, see J. Hillis Miller’s “Hands in Hardy,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. by Rosemarie Morgan (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 505–​516. 69 As J. Hillis Miller points out, the simile also alludes to King Lear, placing the girls in the hands of the “President of the Immortals” in the same way flies are vulnerable to “wanton boys” who “kill [them] for their sport,” to quote from Hardy’s selection of the play in his preface to the fifth edition of Tess; see Distance and Desire, p. 104n.

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The starkness of the situation is further attenuated by the arrival of “strange birds from behind the north pole . . .; gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes” (307). “These nameless birds” –​like the wild mallard that Diggory Venn encounters in The Return of the Native –​have seen a whole range of catastrophes in the Arctic, as discussed in Chapter 1. Yet as they approach the girls, they remain silent: the narrator explains, of all they had seen which humanity would never see, they brought no account. The traveller’s ambition to tell was not theirs; and with dumb impassivity they dismissed experiences which they did not value for the immediate incidents of this homely upland –​the trivial movements of the two girls in disturbing the clods with their hackers so as to uncover something or other that these visitants relished as food. (307)

The description of these birds emphasizes a sense of their unknowability. They are “nameless birds”: paradoxically both named and unnamed, they occupy a liminal ground between being classifiable animals (“birds”) and evading the idea of human mastery through “the naming of a thing” (“nameless”:  not just lacking a name or unidentified, but also unnameable, eluding name, possessing the quality of something inexpressible or indefinable). The narrator depicts them as choosing to remain silent, to bring “no account” of the past. Instead, these birds are focused on the present moment; their “world” consists of the “trivial movements” that stir the ground to reveal food, which they “relish” as nourishment. Likewise, Tess and Marian maintain a “dumb impassivity,” focused on the present moment of their world, which is hacking swedes to earn a living. The sensory attention to the experience of the two girls invokes the reader’s empathy in a way that an abstract discussion of their plight would not: the narrator describes the rain, the frost, and the snow in detail, creating an affective response in the reader. In this shift toward an emphasis on embodied experience, Hardy’s writing seems a precursor to posthumanist thinking, which calls for closer attention to embodiment as a way of rethinking one’s perspective. To quote Wolfe, posthumanism “requires us to attend to that thing called ‘the human’ with greater specificity, greater attention to its embodiment, embeddedness, and materiality, and how these in turn shape and are shaped by consciousness, mind” while “pay[ing] proper attention . . . to the material, embodied, and evolutionary nature of intelligence and cognition.”70 Attention to embodiment, then, forces us to rethink our taken-​for-​granted modes of human experience, including the normal perceptual modes and affective states of Homo sapiens 70 What Is Posthumanism?, p. 121.

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Hardy’s willingness to create ambiguity –​to “not know,” in the words of Linda Shires –​while simultaneously grounding the text in sensory detail creates a tension that causes the reader to reconsider his or her perspective on the world.72 Furthermore, as Irwin observes, Hardy’s awareness of “that duality of experience, that movement in our minds between the world within us, which is yet an aspect of physical life, and the world without us, which is yet an aspect of our thought” shows both “the limitations of human consciousness” and “the relativity of experience.”73 As Romanes and Lewes explored, the world within is nerve-​based, physical, and the seemingly concrete world around us is filtered through the interiority of each being. While ordinarily sensation is seen as shaping perception, perception can also modify one’s physical sensations.74 Hardy’s writing reminds one that experience is relative, not just between but within species. For him, the world is flexuous and changing, dependent on perspective, ambiguous and shifting. Often, such a perspective brings about humor; almost always it demands empathy. This final chapter on “artful” creatures returns to the opening anecdote of Chapter 3 to conclude, this time recast in two poems of Seamus Heaney’s sequence “Squarings.”75 Heaney moves beyond recounting a playful encounter between a child and a group of animals, framing it instead as a metaphysical “[experiment] with infinity” which ripples outward while retracing itself inward, an image akin to the Möbius strip. Space is configured as “sniffed-​at” and “bleated-​into,” and language occurs through the face (Hardy’s “brow” becoming “an anvil” that will “sing . . . | Of his dumb being”). Heaney “misremember[s]‌” the story and has Hardy play dead, but he corrects himself in the next poem: “He went down on all fours, | Florence Emily says, crossing an ewe-​leaze. | Hardy sought the creatures face to face.” He then extends the experiment to the human world, “the flock’s dismay” at Hardy’s pretense becoming “the blinks and murmurs and deflections | He’d know at parties in renowned old age | When he sometimes imagined himself a ghost | And circulated with that new perspective”:  moving the concept of the trace into a question 71 Ibid., p. xxv. 72 “And I Was Unaware,” p. 36. 73 Reading Hardy’s Landscapes, p. 165. 74 See Atul Gawande’s “The Itch,” New Yorker (June 30, 2008), www.newyorker.com/​magazine/​2008/​ 06/​30/​the-​itch (accessed August 30, 2014). 75 Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), pp. 60–​61.

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of spectrality.76 The poems destabilize limits not only between humans and animals, between the animate and inanimate, but between life and death. In them, Hardy’s willingness to shift perspective lives on, inviting the reader to walk with him on excursions into unknown worlds. Once, as a child, out in a field of sheep, Thomas Hardy pretended to be dead And lay down flat among their dainty shins. In that sniffed-​at, bleated-​into, grassy space He experimented with infinity. His small cool brow was like an anvil waiting For sky to make it sing the perfect pitch Of his dumb being, and that stir he caused In the fleece-​hustle was the original Of a ripple that would travel eighty years Outward from there, to be the same ripple Inside him at its last circumference. *** (I misremembered. He went down on all fours, Florence Emily says, crossing a ewe-​lease. Hardy sought the creatures face to face, Their witless eyes and liability To panic made him feel less alone, Made proleptic sorrow stand a moment Over him, perfectly known and sure. And then the flock’s dismay went swimming on Into the blinks and murmurs and deflections He’d know at parties in renowned old age When sometimes he imagined himself a ghost And circulated with that new perspective.)

76 Ibid., p. 61. This moves into an entirely new discourse in Derrida’s work, but one that Hardy too was interested in, as can be seen throughout his oeuvre.

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Useful Creatures: Rethinking Hardy’s Humanitarianism

Hardy’s sense of kinship with animals has pervaded previous chapters. Through his representations of animals in the fictional world of Wessex –​ based on the flesh-​and-​blood creatures he had encountered growing up in rural Dorset  –​Hardy alternately questions, reinforces, and undermines the notion of an absolute division between humans and animals. Yet a letter written to his wife Emma in 1908  –​during one of her spur-​of-​ the-​moment jaunts to France  –​serves as a reminder that his belief in a “shifted . . . centre of altruism” was not always realized in his daily life. The letter updated Emma on quotidian household matters, but between a sentence about woodwork and a reminder of the expense of purchasing The Times abroad, Hardy wrote, “Kitsy is having her kittens this afternn. We are going to drown them to-​morrow morning except one” (CL, iii, 335).1 While cat news was a regular feature of the Hardys’ correspondence, the image created in the sentence –​of Hardy, implicated in the “we,” allowing the kittens to be drowned –​is jarring in contrast to reports of the eminent author answering the door to visitors “in his stockinged feet” with the explanation there were kittens underfoot, and it was an act Emma likely would have protested had she been home.2 Perhaps, though, her presence at Max Gate would have made no difference, and the tradition of drowning newborn kittens to curb feline overpopulation would have been carried out with her acquiescence. Yet the tensions suggested by this letter highlight the way Hardy  –​and other Victorians –​viewed and interacted with the animal world. Despite Hardy’s feeling of a “shifted . . . centre of altruism” after Darwin, moving the animal from inferior to equal, the day-​to-​day relationship between Victorians and animals –​as between today’s society and animals –​often 1 Abbreviation of “afternoon” Hardy’s. 2 In PBE, Elfride “surreptitiously preserv[es] some blind kittens that ought to have been drowned” (100); Emma, who served as an inspirational source for Elfride, may have carried out similar actions from time to time.

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depended upon economics. Animals engaging with human society were seen as existing for human purpose: as resources to be used. While Hardy reviled acts that “used up” animals in the name of entertainment or sport, his approach to animals was at times utilitarian, especially when considering animals in the context of labor or research. Like Gabriel, he “had poetical ideas, . . . discreetly diluted with the practical” (FFMC 394). But to what extent were they “diluted”? When did he explicitly advocate for animals, and when did he choose to withhold his support? What did it mean to be a humanitarian? This chapter will explore the question of Hardy’s humanitarianism in three parts. First, it will take horses in Hardy’s fiction, poetry, and personal writings as a case study to examine the difference between his portrayal of the species and his encounters with them in life. From there, the chapter will take a closer look at the traditional image of Hardy’s humanitarianism, rethinking especially his participation in the anti-​vivisection movement. Before reaching the conclusion, the chapter will return to the story of the drowned kittens. Hardy recognized the dissonance between what “ought” to be and what was, but his difficulty in reconciling the ideal and the actual demonstrates the broader issues concerning animal welfare. If the goal of previous chapters was to reveal the way “creature” complicates notions of human–​animal boundaries, this chapter seeks to problematize simplistic readings of Hardy’s humanitarianism. Balancing the images of a man who both felt intense kinship with insects and ordered the drowning of kittens opens a space for addressing the difference between “grappling with the question” of “a re-​adjustment of the altruistic morals” in the representational realm and in the real.

“If All Had Their Rights” Horses provide a profitable entry point to examining Hardy’s humanitarianism due to not only their ubiquity in his novels but also their prominence in the Victorian public eye. As Hilda Kean explains, an animal’s visibility was key to its treatment and to the changing identity of the humans who were doing the observing. She argues The changes . . . in the treatment of animals relied not merely on philosophical, religious or political stances but the way in which animals were literally and metaphorically seen. The very act of seeing became crucial in the formation of the modern person. Who you were was determined by where you were and what you saw –​as well as how you interpreted it.3 3 Animal Rights, p. 27.

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While the number of traditional farm animals (such as sheep and pigs) raised within city limits decreased in the mid-​nineteenth century, the demand for horses in urban employ increased drastically: from approximately 350,000 horses in British towns and cities in the 1830s to around 1,200,000 by the early twentieth century.4 During Hardy’s years working as a young man in Arthur Blomfield’s London architecture firm from 1862 to 1867, he would have noticed the growing use of horses along with the widening boundaries of the metropolis; Kean’s comment on the “act of seeing” animals as shaping a person is relevant for Hardy. While as a child he would have encountered horses in rural environments  –​horses with names, individuals whose role on the farm was clearly defined –​the horses he met in London were nameless and interchangeable, part of a system of transportation. In his novels, Hardy does not forget the unnamed horses working in transport. One example that highlights his sense of dissonance between “poetical” and “practical” ideas can be found in the opening pages of The Woodlanders. After Barber Percomb mounts Mrs. Dollery’s passenger van, the narrator tells the reader: This van was rather a movable attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who knew it well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and colour of heather, whose leg-​joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted by harness and drudgery from colthood –​though if all had their rights he ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of some Eastern plain instead of tugging here –​had trodden this road almost daily for twenty years. Even his subjection was not made congruous throughout, for the harness being too short his tail was not drawn through the crupper, and the breeching slipped awkwardly to one side. He knew every subtle incline of the ten miles of ground between Abbot’s Cernel and Sherton –​the market-​town to which he journeyed –​as accurately as any surveyor could have learnt it by a Dumpy level. (6–​7)

The passage reads almost as if it were written for an animal protection society. As Hardy often does, he moves from the description of a living creature as a part of the general landscape to a specific, individual being. The reader, who has been learning of the highway’s ancient past and the loneliness of the stretch presently encountered, can infer that if the van is a “movable attachment” of the road, then by extension the horse pulling the van –​whose hair is the same “roughness and colour of heather” –​is the 4 F. M.  L. Thompson, “Horses and Hay in Britain, 1830–​1918,” in Horses in European Economic History:  A  Preliminary Canter (Reading:  British Agricultural History Society, 1983), pp. 50–​72 (p. 59), as qtd. in Ritvo’s Animal Estate, p. 311.

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same: a moving, living part of the road. One might pause to contemplate the depiction of the road, which the narrator views as having a face whose “physiognomy” expresses “solitude,” the barrenness of the “thoroughfare” in stark contrast to the abundant woodlands around it (5). The road seems to grieve “the contrast of what is with what might be” –​if things had been different, if the landscape had not been altered, the road would be part of the woodlands, covered with trees. Instead, the narrator describes one step “from the edge of the plantation into the adjoining thoroughfare” as an “exchange” of “the simple absence of human companionship for an incubus of the forlorn” (5). The horse, then, is a part of this “incubus of the forlorn,” and the narrator extends “what might [have been]” to the animal, imagining life “if all had their rights”: the horse “ought” to be grazing on an open grassland, not bound from “colthood” to a life of harness and heavy loads pulled alone. Like the landscape interrupted by the road, the horse’s body has been shaped by its “too short” harness. Despite this subjection, the horse is described as an intelligent, perceptive individual, having learned by repetition the subtleties of his route with the same accuracy “as any surveyor” aided by manmade instruments.5 This brief aside to the idea of “rights” with Mrs. Dollery’s horse brings up a historically and politically complicated issue. Most modern readings of animal rights in the Victorian era point out the emphasis on the human in humanitarianism, or, the effect of animal (mis)treatment upon humans. With the French Revolution and Thomas Paine’s 1791 The Rights of Man spurring a reconsideration of natural and civil rights, the rights of animals for their own sake provided fertile ground for parody in the early nineteenth century.6 As mentioned in the previous chapter, kindness to animals was (and continues to be) promoted only as a way to protect moral treatment of humans. William Hogarth’s engravings The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), for example, directly linked cruelty to animals to later cruelty to human animals.7 While some of the earliest promoters of 5 Hardy extends this likeness further to Marty, who also is denied what might have been, her face, hands, and hair marked by the demands of a hard life. 6 See Thomas Taylor’s A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (London: Jeffrey, 1792), which mocks the notion of inherent human rights by suggesting they be extended to animals, plants, and minerals. The title is, of course, a play on Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). For one of the earliest animal rights’ treatises, see John Oswald’s The Cry of Nature (1791). Most of today’s animal rights advocates are indebted to Henry Salt’s Animals’ Rights: Considered in Relation to Social Progress (1894). Salt configures animal rights not as legal status but as human duties toward animals; like Hardy, he believed in extending “The Golden Rule” to the nonhuman animal world. 7 In Hogarth’s engravings, “Tom Nero” is portrayed in four tableaus: first, observing cruelty to animals as a young man; second, whipping a horse; third, murdering a woman; and fourth, as the

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animal rights –​Lord Erskine, William Wilberforce, and Richard Martin, among others –​were the same parliamentarians who supported the abolition of the slave trade and sometimes used the same language to defend both humans and animals, more often than not “humanity to animals was about safeguarding human civilisation,” as historian Rob Boddice observes.8 When Martin’s Act was passed in 1822, the law protected animals not for their intrinsic value as beings, but as property: cruel treatment of “Horses, Mares, Geldings, Mules, Asses, Cows, Heifers, Steers, Oxen, Sheep, and other Cattle” became punishable by fine or imprisonment.9 Kean notes that the animals chosen for protection in this list were valuable possessions highly visible in the urban landscape. The law protected the animals’ owners from financial loss caused by negligent employees working with the animals. The discussion of Mrs. Dollery’s horse’s rights, however, seems to consider the horse for its own sake and not for the sake of the humans around him. Mrs. Dollery, despite failing to fit her horse with a proper harness, is not depicted as cruel or thoughtless:  she is a practical woman, the type who wears “short leggings under her gown for modesty’s sake” and “a felt hat tied down with a handkerchief to guard against ear-​ache” (7). Putting aside Hardy’s “poetical ideas” of animal rights, the use of horses in rural Wessex was an integral part of his characters’ everyday lives, just as it would have been in the Dorset where Hardy grew up. Several of the central characters in his novels depend upon horses for their livelihood. In Under the Greenwood Tree, Dick Dewy joins his father in the business of tranters and hauliers; their business card reads, “N.B. Furniture, Coals, Potatoes, Live and Dead Stock, removed to any distance on the shortest notice” (158). Earlier in the novel, Hardy’s narrator defines Tranter Dewy’s occupation as an “irregular carrier” (14):  while Mrs. Dollery transports passengers (and possibly goods) on a regular schedule as a carrier, Dewy delivers goods upon order. According to the OED, the unifying meaning behind various local usages of tranter “chiefly denot[es] a man who does jobs with his horse and cart.” It further notes its association to “cadger” or corpse-​subject of dissection; see Hogarth, pp. 224–​227. For a children’s version of this theme, see “Cruelty to Animals,” Children’s Friend, April 7, 1826, in which a child who is cruel to a horse dies after being thrown from the cart. 8 A History of Attitudes and Behaviours toward Animals, p. 326. 9 See Animal Rights, p. 34; A History of Attitudes and Behaviours toward Animals, p. 170; and James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 40. Martin’s Act was the first piece of legislation to protect animals in the United Kingdom. Hardy himself once served as a witness in defense of a mistreated cow; see THPV, pp. 325-​26.

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“haggler” –​“one who buys things up to sell elsewhere”: the occupation of John Durbeyfield in Tess.10 For tranter, carrier, and haggler, the role of a horse is vital. The differences in attitudes toward and treatment of horses in Hardy’s novels reveal much about the human characters and who they are, to apply Kean’s earlier argument.11 Dick and his father talk of their horses Smiler and Smart by name not only within the household but to those they encounter on the road as well (UGT 101, 156). Their horses make inferences about the end of conversations (96) and the meaning of a slight flick of the whip (98), and the horses’ humans take good care of them in turn: walking to pick up a repaired collar (156) and breaking a day’s journey into stages to allow the horse adequate time to eat and rest (111). In contrast, the Durbeyfields’ horse Prince has been worked into decrepitude (so much so that after his death, “the knacker and tanner would give only a very few shillings for [his] carcase”), yet he is not only accepted as a part of the family but identified as the “breadwinner” (Tess 40). John Durbeyfield refuses to sell him for “cat’s meat” and instead holds a family funeral for the horse. Abraham asks “Is he gone to heaven?,” and Tess is expressionless, “as though she regarded herself in the light of a murderess” (40). While Smiler and Smart are respected as intelligent, perceptive animals and treated with care by their owners, Prince –​who seemingly fails to see the oncoming cart that impales him –​is anthropomorphized by the Durbeyfields. Through his representation of Prince, Hardy reveals the danger of such anthropomorphization. For Tess, the consequence is fatal: violence to animals (albeit a “murder” of neglect) does indeed lead to violence to humans (both the murder of Alec and her own death by capital punishment). Yet rather than perpetuating the idea that cruelty to animals leads to cruelty to humans, Hardy problematizes it. Tess, after all, is highly sensitive to living creatures rather than inured to their suffering. 10 James Murray wrote to ask Hardy about the meaning of tranter, and the author clarified its usage as an irregular carrier either “to order” or “of articles for sale not of his own manufacture,” although he added that “the fundamental meaning of a tranter’s business is that of going about with a vehicle that carries something, not of selling” and promised to inquire around for any further meaning (CL, iv, 312–​313). 11 In “A Few Crusted Characters,” a short story framed as the tales told by passengers traveling in a carrier’s van who are joined by a returned native, the master-​thatcher tells a story of the parson and the clerk that comments ironically on this idea. The two forget about a couple waiting to be married at the church and join a fox hunt with the excuse that it is “[f ]‌ine exercise for the horses!,” adding that “[a] merciful man is merciful to his beast” –​whom they proceed to run “tired down to the ground” in process of catching the fox (which is cornered after “running into a’ old woman’s cottage, under her table, and up the clock-​case” where it meets its death; CSS 539–​540). The parson, it is noted, had “been in at the death of three thousand foxes”; it is no surprise that he accidentally leaves the waiting-​to-​wed couple locked in the church tower overnight (538).

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Perhaps the most effective means Hardy has to advocate for the cause of horses in his prose is to represent Equus ferus caballus not as a faceless species but as individuals within the text: characters with names, whose actions and choices often affect the plot of the story. As Derrida would later argue, in order to consider the animal one must “envisage the existence of ‘living creatures’ whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity.”12 Derrida highlights the irony of using the singular term “animal” to represent a diverse group of species (and individual beings within each species) by coining the term “animot,” combining an oral homophone for animals (les animaux) with a singular form of “word” (le mot). Similarly, Hardy appropriates the term “Hodge” to undermine its representation of a vast array of farm workers. Parallel to Hardy’s argument in his 1883 article “The Dorsetshire Labourer,” Angel Clare discovers that as he spends more time with the people at the dairy, the “conventional farm-​folk of his imagination –​personified in the newspaper press by the pitiable dummy known as Hodge –​were obliterated . . . At close quarters no Hodge was to be seen” (Tess 133). While this “typical and unvarying Hodge ceased to exist” for Angel, the limit he felt between himself and the people he had homogenized into one stereotype does not vanish altogether, but it becomes much more complicated. Hodge disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-​creatures, beings of many minds, beings infinite in difference; some happy, many serene, a few depressed, one here and there bright even to genius, some stupid, others wanton, others austere; some mutely Miltonic, some potentially Cromwellian; into men who had private views of each other, as he had of his friends; who could applaud or condemn each other, amuse or sadden themselves by the contemplation of each other’s foibles or vices; men every one of whom walked in his own individual way the road to dusty death. (134)13

Close association with the farm workers humanizes them for Angel as he discovers their individual personalities; he is able to identify with them as human and mortal. Linked to this description of the Wessex laborers, as Hardy points out at the end of “The Dorsetshire Labourer,” is “the vast topic of the Rights of Man” (THPV 57).14 12 “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” p. 415. 13 See also “The Dorsetshire Labourer,” in THPV, p. 40, for a nearly identical passage. Hardy borrows from himself for Tess, and the passage itself borrows from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (stanza 15) and Shakespeare’s Macbeth (V.5.3). 14 See also Fred Reid’s “The Dorsetshire Labourer,” in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. by Mallett, pp. 177–​187. Reid argues that Hardy’s essay “resists closure and is multi-​vocal throughout, viewing

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What is important in this process of discovery is the sense of what Derrida terms the “unsubstitutable singularity” of each living creature. Hardy’s horses –​like Hodge –​become more than just a stereotype of a horse as readers encounter them in his fiction. Their actions impact the plot and the lives of the human characters with whom they interact. The horse that pulls the bread-​cart in Jude learns the route and conducts it independently, allowing the young Jude to study Latin and Greek while “the bony old horse pursued his rounds” (Jude 27). When Elfride lets her horse, Pansy, decide whether to return home or carry her on toward an elopement with Stephen Smith, she thinks her choice safe, speculating, “Horses, if left to themselves, make for where they are best fed,” which she assumes is home (PBE 104). Yet Elfride is not considering Pansy’s perspective in her generalization, and Pansy carries on to St. Launce’s where “she always had a feed of corn to support her on the return journey” –​an oversight that leads Elfride along a series of events that end with her death of heartbreak (104). Darling, “the aged light grey mare which Winterborne bought for Grace,” plays a significant role in The Woodlanders as well (W 200). When Fitzpiers falls asleep in the saddle on the way home from a nighttime rendezvous with Felice Charmond, it is Darling’s “perfect docility” and “almost human intelligence” that allow him to return home safely. Melbury marvels, “if it had been any other horse [Fitzpiers would] have had a broken neck” (210). Grace, standing in the stable the next morning and “look[ing] at poor Darling,” realizes that a different horse might have freed her from a difficult marriage –​and in typical Hardy irony, the very qualities that caused Winterborne to select Darling for Grace are what preserve Fitzpiers’s life (212).15 The danger of viewing all horses as the same –​ or of stereotyping humans into groups like “Hodge” (or in this case “Farmer”) –​is demonstrated when Fitzpiers, “ever unwitting in horse-​ flesh,” mistakes Melbury’s horse Blossom for Darling (249). His lack of perception perhaps serves as a contrast to Darling’s sensitive intelligence. Both horses have similar light grey coloring, but the similarities between the horses end there: while Darling is gentle and needs little guidance, the question from many historical and social perspectives; a woven texture, in the manner of his fiction, rather than a structure of logic. Yet it is not simply relativistic. It opens the way to an alignment of new thinking” (184–​185). The same might be said of Hardy’s representations of animals, as this monograph argues. 15 Darling is regarded as an intelligent individual by many of the human characters; when she appears “hag-​rid” (a folklore concept of being visited by witches or demons during the night), her appearance of having had a nightmare inspires “a whole series of tales about equestrian witches and demons” (200).

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Blossom is young and spirited. When a young boy walking on the road that night, scared by the sight of Fitzpiers on the pale horse, places the horse collar he was carrying by a tree and hides, The only other pair of eyes on the spot whose vision was keen as the young carter’s were those of the horse; and, with that strongly conservative objection to the unusual which animals show, Blossom, on eyeing the collar under the tree –​quite invisible to Fitzpiers –​exercised none of the patience of the older horse, but shied sufficiently to unseat so second-​rate an equestrian as the surgeon. (254)

Fitzpiers’s impercipience continues after Melbury rescues him:  drunk from the restorative rum Melbury has given him, he addresses him as “Farmer What’s-​your-​name” and speaks to him not only condescendingly, but to the extent of exposing his desire that his wife –​Melbury’s daughter –​would die so he could be free to marry his lover (250).16 His failure to recognize the individual loses him his seat once more:  this time it is Blossom’s owner who flings him from the horse’s back. The irony is perhaps heaviest in Tess, where Prince’s death forces the heroine to take up work at her supposed relatives’ nearby estate, The Slopes. As Tess, who sees herself as “a murderess” after the accident, explains, “I killed the old horse, and I suppose I ought to do something to get [the family] a new one” (Tess 53). In her view the human–​animal boundary is ambiguous both in terms of murder and replaceability: horses can be murdered, and humans, like horses, are replaceable. When Tess is facing her impending capture and death, she insists that Angel marry her sister Liza-​Lu, whom Tess declares “has all the best of me without the bad of me; and if she were to become yours it would almost seem as if death had not divided us” (416). Her fate is foreshadowed by Alec’s description of his relationship with his horse, Tib, on her move to Trantridge: Alec tells her that he owns Tib because “fate” deemed it so, despite the fact the horse “killed one chap; and . . . nearly killed [him]” as well (59–​60). Alec treats Tess the same way he treats Tib, using the horse to manipulate the woman: he urges Tib to race down a hill, drawing upon Tess’s timidity after the accident to force her to hold onto him. For Tess, despite her sensitivity to the natural world around her and all the living creatures in it, “fate” does seem to be in control. She struggles to see herself as a unique being: as she says to Angel while picking lords and ladies on the bank near the dairy, 16 The address of “Farmer What’s-​your-​name” ironically comes in the middle of Fitzpiers’s speech about his vast intelligence.

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what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row only –​finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that’s all. The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your coming life and doings’ll be like thousands’ and thousands’. (142)

Tess does not recognize her own “unsubstitutable singularity.” If Prince is replaceable, so is Tess. Yet the plot of Tess proves that Prince is irreplaceable; there is no going back to the way things were after his death even when Alec gives the Durbeyfields a new horse. The possession of a new horse cannot restore the Durbeyfield household to life as it was before, and it is clear that Tess, too, cannot be replaced in the lives of those who now must carry on without her.17 The Durbeyfields may have anthropomorphized Prince, but Tess seems to have commodified herself. Hardy shows there is a danger in both. Horse or human, Hardy’s characters are represented as individuals with unique personalities and perspectives, and it is in his fiction that he most clearly accomplishes his goal, as articulated in the William Archer interview, to protest against “ ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ –​and to woman –​and to the lower animals” (THR 35). In his day-​to-​day life, Hardy struggled to find a practical solution to the inhumane treatment of flesh-​and-​blood horses he encountered. While he often was moved by their condition, he did not always act in accordance to his sympathy when it clashed with the pragmatics of the situation and societal opinion. Despite the continuing growth of the railway system –​ and indeed, perhaps because of the increased mobility it offered –​horses were a vital and overworked part of the Victorian transportation system in England, a situation which Hardy often deplored. Unlike their rural counterparts who were named individuals, these cab horses and coach horses were defined by what they pulled. A series of entries on horses in the Hardys’ diaries in the 1880s shows the contrast between their humane impulse and the reality of the need for horses in transportation. In September 1882, Hardy and Emma were finishing a small tour of their neighboring counties when they encountered an exhausted coach horse. The incident is recounted in Life with an excerpt from Hardy’s diary: 17 As Judith Weissman points out, Angel cannot marry Liza-​Lu. The Deceased Wife’s Sister Marriage Act (which made such a marriage legal) was not passed until 1907; they would have to live as man and mistress if at all. See Weissman’s “The Deceased Wife’s Sister Marriage Act and the Ending of Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” American Notes and Queries, 14.9 (May 1976), 132–​134.

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Thomas Hardy and Animals From Axminster to Lyme the journey on the coach was spoilt for them by the condition of one of the horses: “The off-​horse was weak and worn. ‘O yes, tender on his vore veet,’ said the driver with nonchalance. The coach itself weighed a ton. The horse swayed, leant against the pole, then outwards. His head hung like his tail. The straps and brass rings of the harness seemed barbarously harsh on his shrinking skin. E., with her admirable courage, would have interfered, at the cost of walking the rest of the distance: then we felt helpless against the anger of the other passengers who wanted to get on.” They were, in fact, on the tableland half-​way between the two towns. But they complained when they alighted –​with what effect Hardy could not remember. (159)

The cost  –​of walking and of incurring the wrath of people who were simply trying to get somewhere themselves  –​outweighed any action to help the horse, besides the complaint registered at the end. Yet the impression of the trip, and the attention to detail in noting the suffering of the horse, may have well inspired Hardy’s description of Mrs. Dollery’s horse in the opening of The Woodlanders, which began serialization four years later in 1886. Repeatedly, Hardy admired Emma for being more proactive than him in defense of weak horses, but Emma’s humanitarianism shows hints of being a means to hold herself in superiority to those around her. As Kean points out, “increasingly the way in which people treated animals became a distinguishing feature of being humane and of membership of a new middle class.”18 During their trip to Florence in 1887, Millgate records an instance that demonstrates such a sensibility: Emma, with her usual sensitivity to such matters, noticed that the horse was very weak, but she was disconcerted by the driver’s responding to her rebuke not with the ‘offensive reply’ of a London cabman but with expressions of gratitude for her interest in the animal’s well-​being. (BR 260)

The idea that the Italian driver cared about the horse and was grateful for her notice of its health seems to have disquieted Emma: his response was perhaps not what she had expected from the “lower classes” that she disparaged, or from a foreigner. In her article “The Egyptian Pet,” she wrote condescendingly of “servants and cottagers” for their improper treatment of such a “superior” animal as the cat.19 Nor did Emma focus only on 18 Animal Rights, p. 24. See also Animal Estate, pp. 137–​153, where Ritvo suggests the RSPCA’s enforcement of animal protection laws targeted the lower classes and social discipline. 19 Emma Hardy, “The Egyptian Pet,” (Leaflet, DCM; repr. from Animals’ Friend, March 1898). It may be important to note that class was an issue that divided Emma and Hardy. While Emma never let her husband forget that she came from a higher social class than him before their marriage, Hardy spent his career exploring the nuanced problems of the class system. See Christine Devine’s “Hardy and Social Class,” in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. by Mallett, pp. 167–​176.

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the lower classes; as Harriet Ritvo and Kean explain, the upper classes, too, were outside the “carefully drawn boundaries of the [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals]’s social map.”20 Emma vociferously attacked the upper classes in open letters to newspapers: from “the disgusting gourmands” who ate larks to the people in “high quarters” who approved the use of animals in performances.21 In her letter to the Daily Chronicle in 1899, editorially titled “The Tormented Tiger,” she indicts the image of England as a humane country  –​another popular trope of the era –​questioning, “Why should human beings have the power to lower the national character by such means?”22 For Emma, humanitarianism was a signifier not only of individual moral character but of an emerging –​ and importantly English –​upper middle class. In contrast to Emma’s vocal outrage, Hardy appears to have been quietly haunted by the plight of working horses, despite the gap between his diary notes and (self-​dubbed) “selfish” actions. Compare these entries, the first written in 1888: 13 July. After being in the street:  –​What was it on the faces of those horses? –​Resignation. Their eyes looked at me, haunted me. The absoluteness of their resignation was terrible. When afterwards I heard their tramp as I lay in bed, the ghosts of their eyes came in to me, saying, “Where is your justice, O man and ruler?” (LW 220)

and the next in 1889: January 8. To the City. Omnibus horses, Ludgate Hill. The greasy state of the streets caused constant slipping. The poor creatures struggled and struggled but could not start the omnibus. A man next me said: “It must take all heart and hope out of them! I shall get out.” He did; but the whole remaining selfish twenty-​five of us sat on. The horses despairingly got up the hill at last. I ought to have taken off my hat to him and said: “Sir, though I was not stirred by your humane impulse I  will profit by your example”; and have followed him. If Em had been there she would have done it. (225)

Here, reverberations of “if all had their rights” are heard in the imagined questioning of justice and in what Hardy felt he “ought” to have done after the man’s example on the omnibus. Yet while Hardy believed a shifted center of altruism was necessary, he did not know how to reconcile

20 Animal Estate, p. 157. 21 Emma Hardy, “The Destruction of Larks,” The Times, February 26, 1895, p. 3 (clipping, DCM). 22 Emma Hardy, “The Tormented Tiger,” Daily Chronicle, September 4, 1899 (clipping, DCM). For England as “humane” versus “cruel” European countries, see Ritvo, “Afterword,” p. 127 and Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 144.

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this imperative with the quotidian realities of life, and he was haunted by this dissonance, the horses’ faces and “the ghosts of their eyes” vivid years later when he compiled his Life. In a letter to Florence Henniker in March 1897, Hardy relayed a sense of hope in sighting an electric omnibus: “Driving up Regent St in the rain one day, & looking at the tyranny of the strong over the weak I met an electric omnibus, & it seemed a joyful presage of the future” (CL, ii, 150). The combination of immediacy and abstraction –​“looking at the tyranny of the strong over the weak” –​ for the human use of horses in transport fits into the wider rhetoric of social reform, demonstrating Hardy’s sense that justice for animals was part of the broader scheme of life under “The Golden Rule.” While the electric omnibus foreshadowed the switch to motorized vehicles after the turn of the century (resolving the problem of horses in urban employment), horses faced a different plight in 1899 with the start of the second Boer War. As J. O. Bailey and Richard Sylvia suggest, Hardy likely wrote his poem “Horses Abroad” in response to the use of horses in this conflict.23 The poem captures the experience of the Boer War horses from a human perspective: Horses in horsecloths stand in a row On board the huge ship, that at last lets go: Whither are they sailing? They do not know, Nor what for, nor how. –​ They are horses of war, And are going to where there is fighting afar; But they gaze through their eye-​holes unwitting they are, And that in some wilderness, gaunt and ghast, Their bones will bleach ere a year has passed, And the item be as “war-​waste” classed. –​ And when the band booms, and the folk say “Good-​bye!” And the shore slides astern, they appear wrenched awry From the scheme Nature planned for them, –​wondering why.

(CP 785–​786)

The fact Hardy captures these horses on board a ship about to sail is relevant: according to Kean, during the Boer War “over 16,000 [horses] . . . died on the arduous sea voyage before they even reached a war zone,” many of them shipped from South America to South Africa. The image evoked in the lines “in some wilderness, gaunt and ghast, | Their bones 23 Richard Sylvia, “Florence Henniker, Hardy, and the Anglo-​Boer War Horses,” Hardy Society Journal, 7.2 (Summer 2011), 51–​66 (p. 51).

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will bleach ere a year has passed” aligns with the fate these animals faced. As Kean explains, over 400,000 animals used in the second Boer War died “through neglect and lack of food and rest” rather than in battle: according to reports, “only 163 animals died of bullets and a mere three of shellfire.”24 The unembellished imagery of the poem emphasizes the cold, detached attitude toward animal life lost in war: living horses are transformed into items –​“war-​waste,” moving from useful to used up. Without doubt, the plight of horses at war was a cause that moved Hardy, as the descriptions of horses in The Dynasts show. Hardy names important horses of the war –​from Napoleon’s Euphrates to Wellington’s Copenhagen –​and describes the agony of horses in the chaos of a losing battle, “wandering about without riders, or crying as they lie with entrails trailing or limbs broken” (501). He implicitly comments against the use of cavalry –​describing in graphic detail the deaths caused by trampling upon the wounded left behind in previous charges over the same territory:  as one servant comments, the “horses’ hoofs squash out our poor ­fellow’s bowels as they lie” (500). Furthermore, in a work that has sometimes been criticized for having nationalist overtones –​perhaps most evident in the early naval battles with Nelson and Hardy –​the author depicts both the English and Spanish in retreat as leaving their animals half dead. Napoleon, upon noticing “another of their dead horses,” is informed by an officer that they “have counted eighteen hundred odd | From Benavente hither, pistoled thus. | Some we’d to finish for them:  headlong haste | Spared them no time for mercy to their brutes” (211). As he was writing these scenes for The Dynasts, Hardy likely was recalling a dinner in 1901 with a solider “home on sick leave from S. Africa” who described “dreadful experiences of being compelled to drive his horse to death on the forced march, & of having to abandon others not quite dead” (CL ii, 288). Despite this clear concern expressed later in The Dynasts and the recurring topic of the plight of warhorses in his correspondence with Henniker during the Boer War, Hardy did not publish “Horses Abroad” until 1925 in Human Shows. Why, as Sylvia questions, did Hardy wait so long to publish it, if it were indeed “written during the early months of the Anglo-​ Boer War”? Rather than serving as an example of Hardy’s humanitarian efforts, the poem –​according to Sylvia –​“furthers our understanding of the Henniker/​Hardy relationship.”25 Henniker, whose husband served as a major in command of the Second Battalion of the Coldstream Guards 24 Animal Rights, pp. 165–​166. 25 “Florence Henniker, Hardy, and the Anglo-​Boer War Horses,” pp. 63, 52.

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in the Boer War, dedicated herself to the cause of the Boer War horses, working to prevent their mistreatment.26 (The problem of horses being left to die in agony was one of the focuses of Henniker’s campaign, as articulated by her friend and fellow RSPCA member Laurence Pike.27) While Hardy often commiserated with Henniker on the issue, he did not seem to actively help her campaign, aside from a letter written to W. T. Stead in January 1899 for publication in War Against War in South Africa. Perhaps, as Sylvia notes, Hardy withheld “Horses Abroad” for the same reasons he chose to wait before printing “The Puzzled Game-​Birds”; as Hardy explained to Henniker in a letter on October 11, 1899, he decided to wait before sending the latter poem out because “other [human] slaughter will fill people’s minds for some time to come” (CL, ii, 232). Sylvia views Hardy’s choice to postpone publication of the poem as “a surprising degree of chauvinism on Hardy’s part, inconsistent with his life-​long love of animals.”28 Yet the choice is very much consistent with the image of Hardy as a writer of fiction –​which in 1899 still would have been his central claim to literary culture, as his first collection of poetry, Wessex Poems, was only published in 1898. Hardy was still in transition between novelist and poet, and it seems that these two different roles of the writer informed the way he viewed his position as a public figure. When Maude Hadden, the secretary of the Humane Diet Department of the Humanitarian League, wrote to him in October 1896 to ask him to join their society, Hardy responded I will consider your request; though I think that a writer of fiction (unlike other people) is more likely to exercise an influence for humanity in any given direction by belonging to no Committee pledged to a course, as he then escapes the charge of exaggerating for a purpose. For instance, if the pig-​killing scene in “Jude” did any good at all in the Cause for which you are working, it was through being obviously written as merely a faithful description of such doings by an unbiassed person. (CL, ii, 135–​136)29 26 See One Rare Fair Woman:  Thomas Hardy’s Letters to Florence Henniker 1893–​1922, ed. by Evelyn Hardy and F. B. Pinion (London: Macmillan, 1972), p. 84. Sylvia shows that Henniker’s work with the RSPCA and the War Office (which can be traced in the Henniker family archive in the Suffolk County Record Office) “led to reforms that greatly reduced loss [of horse life] in World War I, although she was never recognized for it” (65). 27 Sylvia points out that while Henniker petitioned the government, Pike appealed to the public with open letters to The Times  –​and asked Hardy, who was a mutual friend, to speak out on behalf of warhorses as well (58–​59). See letter to F. Henniker, November 24, 1899 (CL, ii, 238); see also L. Pike to TH, December 2, 1899 (DCM). 28 “Florence Henniker, Hardy, and the Anglo-​Boer War Horses,” p. 63. 29 Hardy also avoided “any appearance of espousing a particular political viewpoint,” as Millgate notes, although he identified himself as a Liberal in a letter to John Morley accompanying his article “The Dorsetshire Labourer” (BR 219).

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By 1911  –​well established as a poet with three volumes published  –​he changed his mind, writing to Florence Henniker, “I will be a member, or on the Committee of, the Council of Justice to Animals, if you think it will be of any service to the cause. In that event please let them have my name. I fear I shall not be able to do much, but I will do what I can” (CL, iv, 143). Part of Hardy’s willingness now to lend his name to a society seems to match his emerging public voice as a poet: from Samuel Coleridge to Robert Burns to Percy Bysshe Shelley, the role of the poet had long been associated with kindness to animals and the humanitarian impulse.30 As Kathryn King and William Morgan suggest in their article on Hardy’s Boer War poems, if he wanted to “be of any use” in this new light, he had to “address himself to [his country’s] moral condition by encouraging his readers to cultivate those gentler feelings –​sympathy, compassion, fellow-​ feeling  –​whose ascendance, he believed, would make of war” (and one might add, cruelty to animals) “an anachronism.”31 While Hardy wrote both public and private poetry, he chose to publish as an “occasional” poet at key moments: his poem “Compassion,” commissioned for the centennial anniversary of the RSPCA in 1924, for example, solidified his image as the poet-​humanitarian of his day  –​but notably the ode (which was meant to be set to music and sung) advocates for widespread compassion toward all creatures, including oppressed humans (LW 458).32 Sylvia suggests that Hardy’s inclusion of “Horses Abroad” in Human Shows, the first collection after Henniker’s death in 1923, shows regret at a lost opportunity to speak out.33 The final poem of the collection, “Why Do I?” might suggest her influence on Hardy’s humanitarian voice, with the speaker wondering “Why do I  go on doing these things?” and “Is it that you are yet in this world of welterings | And unease, | And that, while so, mechanic repetitions please?” and concluding he will “leave off doing these things” when “You have dropped your dusty cloak and taken you wonderous wings | To another sphere, | Where no pain is:  Then shall I hush this dinning gear” (CP 831). As their correspondence shows, 30 See, for example, Kith and Kin: Poems of Animal Life, ed. by Henry Salt (London: Bell & Sons, 1901). Salt names these poets (along with other Romantics) as the “true poetical pioneers of humaneness to animals” (ix). 31 King, Kathryn A., and William Morgan, “Hardy and the Boer War: The Public Poet in Spite of Himself,” Victorian Poetry, 17.1/​2 (1979), 66–​83 (p. 68). 32 The poem was published with slight variations in The Times (June 16, 1924, p. 15), in Human Shows, and in the society’s centennial publication, Edward G. Fairholme and Wellesley Pain’s A Century of Work for Animals: The History of the R.S.P.C.A., 1824–​1924 (London: Murray, 1924), pp. xv–​xvi. For the details of its commission, see CL, vi, 243–​244 and FEH’s The Later Years of Thomas Hardy 1892–​1928 (London: Macmillan, 1930), p. 238. 33 “Florence Henniker, Hardy, and the Anglo-​Boer War Horses,” pp. 64–​65.

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Henniker encouraged his public participation in the humanitarian movement. They often wrote to each other about their dogs (Henniker’s Milner and Hardy’s Wessex) and their sympathy for animals, agreeing about the need for slaughter reform but differing in their opinions on vivisection (as will be seen). After Henniker’s death, Hardy replied to requests for lines of support from various societies with an increasing terseness; Florence Hardy is said to have “lamented after [Henniker’s] death that they had no one to assist them, as she had done, in this cause.”34 Having already stated his views on a wide range of humanitarian concerns, Hardy perhaps felt his responsibility as a public voice had been fulfilled; as he explained in a 1926 letter to Margaret Bradish, he believed that “it is a mistake to be over-​emphatic even in a good cause” (CL, vii, 12). This is not to suggest that Hardy no longer felt for animals in his late life; indeed, as others have argued already, toward the end of his life the suffering of animals seemed to weigh heavily upon his mind: one might consider his simple yet moving sketch of “bullocks and cows going to Islington” on a train that he saw while on a walk with Florence, and in his will, he left money to two animal societies to ease the suffering of animals in transit to slaughter (PN 95, LW 468).35 Yet the complication Sylvia raises to the traditional view of Hardy the humanitarian through the delayed publication of “Horses Abroad” reminds those interested in the biographical side of the Victorian author of two things: first, that he continually struggled with the attempt to align his principle of a “shifted . . . centre of altruism” with the dependence upon animals in human society; and second, that he curated his image as a humanitarian as part of his overall legacy as a writer. Whatever the reason was that prevented Hardy from publishing “Horses Abroad” during the Boer War, he did focus on their plight in his January 1899 letter for War Against War in South Africa (which, as Millgate notes, was “tangential to the main thrust of Stead’s campaign” for peace) (THPV 151). While the letter as printed in Stead’s journal emphasizes Hardy’s pragmatic sensibilities, his commentary on an excerpt of it reproduced in Life demonstrates his sensitivity in regards to his public image. The letter was originally published under the editorial heading “A Plea for the Horses” and contains two short paragraphs. The first, formed by a 34 See Appendix I, “The Letters of the Hon. Mrs Henniker to Thomas Hardy (1906–​1922),” in One Rare Fair Woman, p. 204. 35 See Keen, “Empathetic Hardy,” p. 379; see also BR, p. 528, where Millgate reports Hardy’s solicitude for Florence’s chickens in the months preceding his death.

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single sentence, argues that the realization of war’s “absurdity” would be a “moving force” toward peace. The second paragraph reads, As a preliminary, all civilised nations could at least show their humanity by covenanting that no horses shall be employed in battle, except for transport. Soldiers at worst know what they are doing, but these animals are denied even the poor possibilities of glory and reward as compensation for their sufferings. The feasibleness of their disuse would largely depend on the truth of what has been asserted –​that the cost of cavalry expended on infantry would produce more effective results. (THPV 151)36

In Life, Hardy includes only the first two sentences of this paragraph, and he makes minute changes to word choice and punctuation (likely preserving his original draft punctuation, as Hardy worked from his drafts when composing Life). “Could” becomes “might,” and “shall” turns into “should”:  both changes that slightly temper the force of the statement. The comma before “except” is removed, and the phrase “at worst” is offset by commas, shifting the emphasis created by those slight pauses away from the horses to the soldiers (LW 325–​326). The most drastic difference is the absence of the final sentence in the letter written for War Against War. In place of his economic evaluation of the situation –​which pits the cost of a cavalry against that of an infantry, essentially arguing that the money used for the costly process of transporting and maintaining horses could be better used to employ a greater number of soldiers, a somewhat cold and military approach to the problem  –​his autobiography instead comments on the reactions elicited by his letter: “His reply brought upon Hardy, naturally, scoffs at his impracticable tenderheartedness from the fire-​eating swashbuckler class, and on the other hand, strong expressions of agreement from those who saw eye to eye with him” (LW 326).37 These two very different ways of wrapping up a letter on the plight of warhorses illuminates Hardy’s editorial hand in tailoring information to format and intended audience, shifting the focus for posterity from his perhaps too practical lens on the matter to his role as a humanitarian. 36 Millgate includes the version as printed in War Against War, but he notes that variations exist both in the draft version (extant at the DCM) and in Life. He also mentions a shortened reprint in the Daily Chronicle, January 25, 1899, p. 8, that was pasted into the “Personal” scrapbook. 37 One “strong expression of agreement” was from W.  R. Paton, the translator of mythology, who concluded that “even if the horses have some obscure sense of sacrifice for fame, this is not satisfied. As a fact I think they have none and are simply butchered.” Yet even Paton saw the proposition of eliminating the cavalry as extreme, a proposal “beyond the daring of the Czar.” See Paton to TH, February 9, 1899 (DCM).

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In his Who’s Who 1928 entry (Hardy’s “final act of self-​description in his own lifetime,” Millgate notes), the author identified his humanitarianism by including the phrases “Member of the Council of Justice to Animals; is against blood-​sport, dog-​chaining, and the caging of birds” (THPV 473). While the list may seem odd on the first read –​with the last two items narrowing in on what seem like small, eccentric concerns –​it offers a sense of the depth of Hardy’s involvement with and commitment to animal welfare. Perhaps dog-​chaining and the caging of birds were the simplest causes to address and encourage action against with the brevity required by the format.38 The more complex issues –​the use of animals in labor and research and the slaughter of animals for food –​required an expanded explanation to reconcile his feeling of kinship with his sense that such practices could “only be mitigated,” even if in “rightness” they should be stopped.39 Furthermore, the list reads with a poetic quality to its rhythm: starting with “blood-​sport,” it could be read with a trochee, a dactyl, and two anapests.40 The first two causes are linked by the repetition of the hyphen; the second two by the use of the gerund. Hardy tacked these two clauses to “[h]‌olds Gold Medal of Royal Society of Literature” before placing a full stop, which suggests the pride he felt in his role as a humanitarian –​and perhaps quietly implies that his strongest work for the cause of animals, from dogs and birds and rabbits to pigs and cows and horses, was not through his public voice but through his literary writings.

“That Vivisection Question” Already, it can be seen that Hardy’s approach to humanitarianism was not as straightforward as it has sometimes been depicted. When it came to the question of vivisection, for example, Hardy recognized the possible utility of the practice, which might offer a trade-​off of inestimable benefits from a minimum amount of inflicted pain. His stance was much more ambiguous than traditional readings of his view on the topic suggest.41 Hardy has 38 In his “Walks and Talks with Thomas Hardy,” Newman Flower claims that Hardy annotated his personal copy of the earlier Who’s Who 1918, extending the list to “against bird-​catching, performing animals, careless butchering, and the chaining of dogs” (THR 231). 39 See Hardy’s response to a letter on the feeding of live goats to snakes at the London Zoo, in which he views the act as “but an infinitesimal part of the general blameworthiness of man in dealing with the weaker animals” and lists the practices he would see “prohibited” or “mitigated” (THPV 268). 40 Bird-​caging was a significant concern for Victorians; see Ernest Bell’s “Bird-​Caging and Bird-​ Catching,” in The Animals’ Cause:  Being Papers Contributed to the International Anti-​Vivisection and Animal Protection Congress, ed. by L. Lind-​af-​Hageby (London:  Animal Defence and Anti-​ Vivisection Society, 1909), pp. 195–​202. 41 See, for example, Evelyn Hardy’s preface to One Rare Fair Woman, in which she names the “hatred of vivisection” as Hardy and Henniker’s “chief ” humanitarian interest (xxiii).

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been considered an anti-​vivisectionist, based on a paragraph he provided for the Vivisection Investigation League of New  York in 1909 for their publication “Vivisection: From the Viewpoint of Some Great Minds” and reprinted later in Life. The statement reads, The discovery of the law of evolution, which revealed that all organic creatures are of one family, shifted the centre of altruism from humanity to the whole conscious world collectively. Therefore the practice of vivisection, which might have been defended while the belief ruled that men and animals are essentially different, has been left by that discovery without any logical argument in its favor. And if the practice, to the extent of merely inflicting slight discomfort now and then, be defended on grounds of good policy for animals as well as men, it is nevertheless in strictness a wrong, and stands precisely as would its practice on men themselves.42

In the Life version, he inserted the bracketed phrase “[as I sometimes hold it may]” after the word “defended” (373–​374). This insertion draws attention to the ambiguity throughout the passage:  while the first sentence strongly foreshadows his 1910 letter to the Humanitarian League with its idea of a “shifted . . . centre of altruism,” the last sentence equivocates, noting that vivisection may hold benefits for animals as well as humans at the cost of only a slight amount of pain. He maintains that even this type of vivisection is “in strictness a wrong,” but his qualification that it “stands precisely as would its practice on men themselves” is hardly as reassuring as it might seem, in light of his letter on warhorses.43 In contrast to this often-​quoted statement, consider Hardy’s draft reply to the Duchess of Hamilton’s invitation to serve as a vice-​president of the Animal Defence and Anti-​Vivisection League in 1923. Hardy wrote, Shd be delighted, if it does not commit me to absolute anti-​vivisection … Maybe cases in wh. a very small amount of suffering, such as a human being wd. submit to, may lead to enlightenment on some point of great value in relieving the future suffering both of men and of animals themselves so I don’t know what to say. Phps you cd. suggest –​say title “Animal Defence and Controlled Viv Soc” or “A. Defence Soc.” alone –​and I wd join.44 42 See S.  Farrell to TH, November 13, 1922 (DCM), where she requests permission to reprint the statement in 1922. Hardy’s draft reply is penciled on the letter: “permission granted with pleasure.” 43 See also his “Swiftian” letter on sport to Rev. S. Whittell Key in 1904 that echoes A Modest Proposal (1729). In this way, Hardy’s approach comes closer to Peter Singer’s controversial suggestion that such experimentation is only justifiable if “speciesist” attitudes that hold human life as more important than nonhuman animal life are overturned, allowing the use of human or nonhuman animals under specified conditions (see Animal Liberation, p. 85). 44 Draft reply to N. Hamilton, November 10, 1923 (DCM).

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This, of course, is not what the image-​conscious Hardy chose to print in his Life, but there is an honesty here that explains the depth of Hardy’s sensitivity to the matter even though he did not align with the anti-​ vivisectionists of his day.45 Indeed, one could argue that a close reading of Hardy’s letters that mention animals reveals that the author, while keenly sensitive to animal suffering in everyday life and in his prose and verse, was resistant to aligning himself entirely with any humanitarian movement. He approached each matter carefully, at times asking to reword letters with multiple signatories and even the names of societies.46 Hardy’s correspondence with Henniker (and Hamilton) demonstrates his uncertainty over a practice that was both outside his experience and potentially beneficial to animals as well as humans. Despite Henniker’s frequent tirades against vivisection  –​and Emma’s anti-​vivisection meetings at Max Gate –​Hardy himself remained passive on the issue, tending to skirt the question by pointing out the broader picture of cruelty.47 In an 1894 letter to Henniker –​whom he had only recently met and fallen in love with –​he wrote, “I think more cruelties are perpetrated on animals by butchers, drovers, & cab-​people, than by vivisectors,” adding a slightly eager “I wish you & I could work together some day for the prevention of such barbarities” (CL, ii, 47). He turned down her request to ask Zola to write a book on anti-​vivisection (CL, ii, 148). When Henniker sent him the controversial book The Shambles of Science (1903), he wrote that he had “not yet really read [it], but everybody who comes into this room, where it lies on my table, dips into it, &, I hope, profits something” (CL, iii, 74).48 He continued that in his perspective, “the world is so greatly out of joint that the question of vivisection looms rather small beside the general cruelty of man to the ‘lower’ animals.” In a later letter, he concluded that “[a]‌ltogether the world is such a bungled institution from a humane point of view that a grief more or less hardly counts” (CL, v, 30). 45 For diatribes against vivisection composed by other authors, see Lewis Carroll’s “Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection,” Fortnightly Review, 23 (June 1875), 847–​854, Mark Twain’s May 26, 1899, letter to the London Anti-​Vivisection Society, or George Bernard Shaw’s preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma: A Tragedy, ed. by Dan H. Laurence (London: Penguin, 1946). 46 See, for example, the “Unsigned Letter on the Plumage Trade” (THPV 395). 47 See a March 1897 letter, in which Hardy informs Henniker, “We –​or rather Em –​had an anti-​ vivisection meeting in our drawing-​room last week” (CL, ii, 157). 48 The book chronicled the experiences of its two female authors, Louise Lind-​af-​Hageby and Leisa Schartau, who attended physiology demonstrations at approximately fifty different laboratories in London. It was subject to libel trials, especially for its chapter on “Fun” in the first edition (which displayed scientists joking with their students during demonstrations on a “thrice vivisected brown dog”); see The Shambles of Science: Extracts from the Diary of Two Students of Physiology, 5th edn (London: Animal Defence & Anti-​Vivisection Society, 1913), pp. xvii–​xix.

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In 1909  –​the year that he wrote the statement for the Vivisection Investigation League of New  York  –​Hardy apologetically wrote to Henniker, saying, “I fear I shall never win your forgiveness for not entering into that vivisection question”:  he had turned down her request to serve as a vice-​president at the International Anti-​Vivisection and Animal Protection Congress with which she was involved that summer (CL, iv, 34).49 He continued by explaining, I find myself almost unable to do anything at all by reason of innumerable worrying difficulties on outside matters, & I have to decide either to neglect these important though not well understood questions (by me), or to give up writing a single page more. I cannot boast of the manysidedness possessed by some men, & am but a poor creature in practical things. (34)

His reluctance to take a public stance against vivisection was marked by the fact that, unlike slaughter or sport, he had never witnessed the practice. While he closed with a sense of “creature” that connotes self-​deprecation, the mention of “practical things” reminds the reader that the author was an economic, conscientious thinker: one concerned with the “manysidedness” of the issues he faced. (At the same time, the term “poor creature” may have been an appeal to Henniker’s sympathy, classifying him with other creatures.) Just as he recognized the unjust treatment of cab horses alongside the need for their employment in transportation, Hardy discerned that while causing suffering to animals in the name of science was wrong, the knowledge gained by vivisection might be useful. In one sense, Hardy’s 1909 statement seems a concession to Henniker. The statement’s meticulous wording allowed Hardy to lend support to the anti-​vivisection movement –​in the United States, where it was printed, not in the United Kingdom –​without altogether condemning vivisection as a practice (or, one might note, distancing his friends in the scientific community who also belonged to his London club, the Athenæum). Hardy’s stance on vivisection illuminates an often-​ elided middle ground in the vivisection debates  –​one that comes closer to Darwin’s viewpoint than to Frances Power Cobbe’s. While often depicted on the pro-​vivisection side of the issue, Darwin too had conflicting feelings about vivisection.50 On one hand, he wrote that the thought of vivisection 49 For more on the congress Hardy did not attend, see its published proceedings, The Animals’ Cause: Being Papers Contributed to the International Anti-​Vivisection and Animal Protection Congress (1909). Vice presidents listed include the Duchess of Hamilton and “The Hon. Mrs. Arthur Henniker.” 50 For a reading of Darwin as pro-​vivisection, see Richard D. French’s Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 70–​71.

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“for mere damnable and detestable curiosity” was “a subject which [made him] sick with horror.”51 On the other, he perceived that physiology –​like any other science –​could only offer medical advances through a process of trial and error slowly over time, and he felt “certain that physiology can progress only by experiments on living animals,” as he explained in a letter to his daughter.52 He too felt such experiments might produce “incalculable benefits” for both humans and animals.53 As David Allan Feller shows in his article “Dog fight:  Darwin as animal advocate in the antivivisection controversy of 1875,” the naturalist uncharacteristically became involved with the public debate.54 The normally reclusive Darwin worked in London to draft legislation “to protect animals, and at the same time not to injure Physiology.”55 The Playfair bill that he helped shape in 1875 was in several ways stricter about preventing animal cruelty than the anti-​ vivisection lobby’s Henniker Bill (which gained its name from the support of Florence Henniker’s brother-​in-​law). The Playfair bill mandated that no experiment should be performed without anesthesia unless absolutely necessary, that all experiments be conducted by professionals in laboratory settings, and that no live animals be used for student practice or demonstrations. Unlike the Henniker bill, which proposed a scheme of inspections and licensing to ensure humane standards were maintained, the Playfair bill demonstrated a level of trust in the physiologists, many of whom were Darwin’s personal friends.56 In the end neither bill was passed; instead, a Royal Commission with members on both sides of the issue was appointed to draft a joint bill. Hardy, who knew Huxley and other distinguished scientists, also felt trust was an important facet in the debate. When Henniker expressed a wish that “some mad woman would burn down” a new laboratory that had opened at Cambridge, Hardy responded, “I suppose one must take the words of vivisectors as honest when they assure us that they never torture 51 Life and Letters of Darwin, ii, 200. 52 Ibid., p. 203. Darwin was explaining why he could not support Cobbe’s petition against vivisection, despite his sympathetic tendencies. 53 CD to The Times, April 18, 1881 (Life and Letters of Darwin, iii, 205–​206). 54 David Allan Feller, “Dog Fight: Darwin as Animal Advocate in the Antivivisection Controversy of 1875,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 40 (2009), 265–​271; Feller points out that the only other time Darwin spoke out publically was when “he wrote a local newspaper in 1863 protesting at the use of steel traps to capture vermin” (269). 55 CD to J. Hooker, April 14, 1875 (Life and Letters of Darwin, ii, 204). 56 “Dog Fight,” pp. 269–​270. Feller notes that the Playfair bill imposed more serious penalties than the Henniker bill, including significant fines and possible imprisonment.

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animals” (CL, v, 30).57 In 1927 Hardy repeated this view, responding to a letter asking him to sign the Dog Protection Bill with the statement, I am unable to sign any protest against vivisection, either on dogs or other animals, being without evidence thereon, except hearsay. The scientific men who write to the Times say “painless experiments,” or words to that effect. Are these men truth-​tellers or liars? It would seem that this is the main point to be ascertained by the opponents of vivisection.58

The final phrase, “by the opponents of vivisection,” implies that Hardy did not include himself in that group, instead aligning himself with the bracketed phrase inserted into his self-​citation in Life  –​that vivisection sometimes may be defended. Despite the polarized depiction of these two prominent Victorians on opposite sides, they shared very similar concerns (the minimization of animal suffering and trust in the scientific community), suggesting that the debates over vivisection were not always dichotomized. A Century of Work (1924), for example, lists at least six different viewpoints on vivisection by members of the RSPCA alone.59 According to Ritvo, an 1881 survey showed “[o]‌nly about 11 of the 118 local prevention of cruelty societies had gone on record against vivisection,” and furthermore, “some of the societies were inclined to take the scientific side.”60 Locating Hardy as a moderate –​with conflicting thoughts on the matter –​ aids in restoring a more complex narrative of historical attitudes toward animal experimentation, a discourse that continues to be articulated in polarized terms to the present day.61

“Never Another Pet for Me!” Having contextualized Hardy’s humanitarianism in regards to horses and vivisection, this chapter returns to its opening dilemma:  the drowning of the kittens. What happened to the Max Gate cats (Kitsy and Marky) and the kitten to be spared from the drowning? In Hardy’s next letter to Emma on September 30, 1908, he reported, 57 F. Henniker to TH, June 10, 1914 (DCM). 58 Draft reply to R.  Gillbard, July 9, 1927 (DCM). Hardy also recognized that protecting a single species might cause further injustice to another; see his letter to Trist that enclosed what he called a “horribly suggestive” newspaper article on the purchase of monkeys for experimentation “due to the strong public feeling that exists against the utilisation of dogs for vivisection” (THPV 312). 59 A Century of Work for Animals, pp. 195–​196. 60 Animal Estate, p. 161. 61 See, for example, Nuno Henrique Franco’s “Animal Experiments in Biomedical Research: A Historical Perspective,” Animal, 3 (2013), 238–​273 (p. 262).

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Thomas Hardy and Animals We had a great fright on Monday night about Marky. She slipped out of the dining room about 7 o’clock, & absolutely disappeared. The servants & I wandered about the garden with lanterns till nearly 12; I came down at 1, & at 4, but cd not find her. When they got up at 7 she calmly walked down out of the stable loft. The reason of her affront was that Kitsy thought she wanted to get away her kitten, & flew at her. The kitten (the last one) is now drowned –​such a pretty one –​white, with black streaks on its back. Marky is now quite happy, & lives mostly in the dining room. (CL, iii, 339)

The last remaining kitten was killed because of the conflict it caused in the domestic affairs of the established household cats. Hardy’s tone –​“such a pretty one,” complete with a description –​indicates that he saw its death as a necessary pity.62 Hardy went on to tell Emma that their maid would “[nurse] Kitsy . . . as part of her work, till she gets over the loss of her kittens” directly before mentioning a parallel human loss: a neighbor whose son died (340).63 When the two cats involved in the kitten’s fate –​its mother, Kitsy, and the affronted Marky  –​died, Hardy’s response was much more extreme. If one traces the mentions of cats in Hardy’s Collected Letters, it is easy to see why Millgate concluded that the Hardys “increasingly and almost pathologically made children of their pets” (BR 283): the names and welfare of their cats appear repeatedly in correspondence between the couple and to friends. In her study of pet elegies, Ingrid H.  Tague observes a shift in the form from satire to sentiment with rise of pet-​keeping; by the nineteenth century, such works focused on “the emotional bond” with pets.64 The shift of feeling toward pets is also evident in the pet cemeteries that became popular in the Victorian era; Hyde Park contains hundreds of dogs and cats buried in the now out-​of-​sight Pet Cemetery started in the 1880s near Victoria Gate. The Hardys offer a perfect example of Victorian sentiment toward dead pets: they had a special “Pet Cemetery” 62 Customarily, the litter’s prettiest kitten was spared from drowning. See, for example, Mary Pilkington’s Marvellous Adventures; or, the Vicissitudes of a Cat (London: Blackader, 1802), pp. 3–​4, in which the feline narrator gives an account of her preservation and “[a]‌Description of the cruel Death of her Relations” (1). 63 See also Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Early Purges,” which describes the drowning of kittens as a part of life “on well-​run farms” where “pests have to be kept down”:  a closing line that takes on further resonance in the following poems, arguably creating slippage along the human–​animal boundary; Death of a Naturalist (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), pp. 23–​28. 64 Ingrid H. Tague, “Dead Pets: Satire and Sentiment in British Elegies and Epitaphs for Animals,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies, 41.3 (Spring 2008), 289–​306. Tague also discusses the way the death of pets blurred human–​animal boundaries. This can be seen in Wessex’s death: after falling ill at age thirteen, he had to be put down, “chloroform administered in his sleep by 2 good-​natured Doctors (not vets),” as Hardy wrote to the Granville Barkers on December 29, 1926, concluding, “[a]‌dog of such strong character required human doctors!” (CL, vii, 54).

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at Max Gate, and Hardy often composed elegiac poems to his pets. When Snowdove, a beloved white cat, was hit by a train on the tracks that were a quarter mile away from the house in 1904, Hardy carved the gravestone himself and wrote “Last Words to a Dumb Friend” in his memory, a poem that opens with the line “Pet was never mourned as you” and exclaims, “Never another pet for me!” (CP 657–​658).65 Emma even asked Clement Shorter to publish a photo of Snowdove in one of the journals he edited (LEFH 29–​30). Writing on Victorian animal memorials, Teresa Mangum notes that this implementation of “aesthetic forms used to honor human dead,” while giving meaning to the grief felt at the passing of a pet, brings forward “the paradoxical nature of human-​animal relationships”:  while the humans mourned their pets’ deaths as personal losses, such acts could elide the reality of the “uses and understandings of animals” in society, where they were conglomerated into types rather than regarded as individuals.66 For the Hardys, involvement with the humanitarian movement may have been a way of reconciling these two very different ways of viewing animals. The effect of Kitsy’s and Marky’s deaths upon the Hardys gains a rather comical effect when traced through the perspective of Florence’s (then Dugdale) letters.67 Florence mentioned the death of Kitsy, Hardy’s white cat, four times in her letters to Edward Clodd between November and December 1910. In the first, on November 8th, she reported that Hardy was “in the depths of despair at the death of a pet cat” (LEFH 65). Three days later she wrote to Clodd again. The wife of a close friend had passed away the previous night, and she compared this to Hardy’s grief over his cat: “In face of such calamity I cannot write & sympathise very deeply with T.H. upon the death of ‘Kitsey,’ although he writes, poor man, to ask: ‘Was there ever so sad a life as mine?’ ” (66). Just over a week later, Florence’s patience with Hardy’s grief over his cat was pushed further. In this letter, she related going into Hardy’s study to find “him working at a pathetic little poem describing the melancholy burial of the white cat” 65 See his letter to Hamo Thornycraft asking about a chisel (CL, iii, 137). Many of the Max Gate cats met the same fate on these tracks; see Hardy’s April 4, 1901, letter to F. Henniker about the “tragic death of a favourite cat –​my cat –​the first I ever had ‘for my very own’ ” in which he mentions the passing of three other cats in this manner (CL, ii, 283). See also Emma Hardy’s letter to Rebekah Owen on the passing of the 1901 cat (LEFH 22). 66 Teresa Mangum, “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize Their Pets,” in Victorian Animal Dreams, ed. by Morse and Danahay, pp. 15–​34, (pp. 18–​19). Mangum argues that the focus on pet memorials could at times “supplant actual animals and their suffering” (31). 67 For an explanation of Marky’s name (“the Marquise”), see TH’s letter to Reymond Abbott, October 10, 1909 (CL, iv, 51).

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(68). After reading one particular line –​“That little white cat was his only friend” –​Florence “ramped around the study exclaiming: ‘This is hideous ingratitude.’ ” She continued, “the culprit seemed highly delighted with himself, & said, smilingly, that he was not exactly writing about himself but about some imaginary man in a similar situation.” According to the postscript of Florence’s December 11th letter to Clodd, Hardy made some changes “in deference to [her] feelings,” but he kept the offending line, which appears in the fifth stanza of “The Roman Gravemounds” (74).68 Hardy’s elegies to Kitsy and Snowdove seem to straddle the line between satire and sentiment. In “The Roman Gravemounds,” upon being informed that “Cæsar’s warriors” are buried where he is digging a grave for his pet, the speaker exclaims “Could [this cat] but live, might the record die | Of Cæsar, his legions, his aims, his end!” (CP 396–​397). “Last Words to a Dumb Pet” ponders, Strange it is this speechless thing . . . Should –​by crossing at a breath Into safe and shielded death, . . . Loom as largened to the sense, Shape as part, above man’s will, Of the Imperturbable. (CP 657–​658)

For Hardy, there is an irony in the shifting of scale, in considering a “small furred life . . . worth no one’s pen” who “never won from the world a thought” as part of the larger “Imperturbable” that typically belongs to human history. The poems focus on the human mourner, for whom the immediate sorrow is most pressing, not the tragedies of an unknown past:  yet the sense of hyperbole subverts the sentiment Mangum finds problematic. It effects a decentering of human perspective and a realization of the Satires of Circumstance (1914), as the volume containing “The Roman Gravemounds” is aptly named. This shifting of perspective is perhaps best illustrated by “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?,” a poem in which a dog forgets about his mistress and digs on her grave to find his 68 The line echoes Bryon’s epitaph for his Newfoundland “Boatswain” on a mausoleum at Newstead Abbey, which concludes, “To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise; | I never knew but one, –​ and here he lies.” See Mangum, “Animal Angst,” p. 25; see also the story of Walter Scott excusing himself from a social obligation because of the death of a “dear old friend” (which he did not mention was his dog, Maida) on p. 26.

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bone: a playful inversion of the Greyfriars Bobby trope, perhaps, but in another sense not unlike “The Roman Gravemounds,” in which the man digs not to find Roman relics or burials but for his own immediate purpose (that is, burying the cat) (CP 330–​331).69 In contrast to her annoyance with Hardy’s display of grief over Kitsy and his “pathetic little poem” about the cat’s death, Florence took a much more sympathetic tone with Emma when Marky died shortly after Kitsy. In a letter on January 13, 1911, to her “dear Mrs. Hardy,” Florence wrote, “I hope that you have quite recovered from the shock of Marky’s death. Poor little creature. I often speak of her. You should write one of your delightful poems to her memory, just as Matthew Arnold did to his canary, & Mrs Browning to Flush” (LEFH 72). Surely Florence must have also been thinking, “and Hardy to Kitsy,” but she made no mention of Emma’s husband’s writing: a silence that reveals the state of affairs between Emma and Hardy at the time.70 While the disparity in Florence’s approaches to each of the Hardys is ironic, her efforts to befriend Emma are clear in the letter. Given the time Hardy spent grieving his cats through creative acts, it is perhaps no surprise that when his estranged Emma died, he responded by remembering all the good characteristics of his deceased wife and writing an outpouring of moving poems in her memory. In January 1913, Florence wrote to Clodd, I must say that the good lady’s virtues are beginning to weigh heavilly on my shoulders. I had three pages of them this morning. Chief among the virtues now seems to rank her strict Evangelical views –​her religious tendencies, her humanitarianism (to cats I suppose he means). (LEFH 77)

Florence’s parenthetical comment, while humorously sarcastic, makes a valid point about humanitarianism  –​mainly, that it has limits. Emma’s sensitivity extended to animals –​even to flies and mosquitos –​but certain humans, such as her husband, were not regarded with the same degree of empathy.71 69 Elsewhere Hardy reverses the scale: his poem “The Death of Regret” (CP 395) was composed after the death of a cat, but he “thought the poem too good for a cat, & so made it apply to a person” (LEFH 105). 70 Ironically, Florence later expressed dismay when Hardy put off writing a poem on Wessex because he felt he only “could write one if Wessie were dead” (LEFH 182). She exclaims to Sydney Cockerell, “why should the poor little animal have to die before a poem is written to him?” (182). Hardy gave in and wrote “A Popular Personage at Home” in 1924, two years before Wessex died (CP 800). After the dog’s passing, he wrote “Dead ‘Wessex’ the Dog to the Household” (CP 915–​916). 71 See LEFH, pp. 49–​50, for Emma’s letter on kindness to insects. Compare with Emma’s insistence that Hardy walk uphill to a dinner they attended instead of taking a carriage on a particularly hot summer day in 1907 (BR 414).

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For Hardy, if a clear and expedient measure could be taken to reduce suffering, he supported it, but he struggled with the difficulties presented by the fact that animals were  –​and continue to be  –​useful creatures. After Darwin, animals could not be considered as purposefully “created for humanity to use,” as Ritvo explains of earlier attitudes toward the nonhuman animal population, but “the system that allows us to view animals as our resources, here for us –​to be eaten, or surgically manipulated, or exploited for sport or money,” to quote Tom Regan, persisted both in Hardy’s time and to the present day.72 As Taimie Bryant points out, To remove this human definitional overlay on animals that they are commodities for human consumption, while operating in a society that has gone very far downstream in defining animals as such, requires careful thought as to duties that can be imposed in ways that actually lead to less utilization of animals.73

Hardy’s struggle with many of the issues addressed by animal protection societies –​his meticulous attention to wording, his feeling of the discrepancy between what “ought” to be and what was necessary for everyday life in regards to the animals used for food and labor –​shows a grappling with the problems of human–​animal relations. Drowning kittens, then, was a practical solution to a problem without more humane alternatives.74 Furthermore, as evidenced in Jude and in his letters, Hardy did not necessarily think that coming into existence was inherently good –​for kittens or for children.75 With life comes suffering. Rethinking Hardy’s humanitarianism does not dismiss his sensitivity to animals; rather, it reveals the workings of a man who was concerned with and thought through a complex set of issues about what it means to be a creature whose world overlaps with the unknown worlds of other beings. Cats provide an exceptional counter-​example to traditionally useful creatures:  while most domestic animals could be literally shaped to human will, cats “did not seem disposed to acknowledge human dominion,” as 72 Animal Estate, p. 17; Tom Regan, “The Case for Animal Rights,” in Animal Experimentation: The Moral Issues, ed. by Robert M. Baird and Stuart E. Rosenbaum (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), pp. 77–​88 (p. 78). 73 Taimie Bryant, “Animals Unmodified: Defining Animals/​ Defining Human Obligations to Animals,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (2006), 137–​194 (p. 189). 74 See, for example, Stephen Coleridge’s evasive answer to the question, “Do you object to drowning dogs as a means to getting rid of superfluous dogs?” in The Royal Commission on Vivisection (London: National Anti-​Vivisection Society, 1907), p. 256. 75 Hardy tended to view death as an escape from suffering. See his 1917 letter to the Hoares on the death of their son, where he quotes Macbeth: “Nothing | Can touch [him] further” (CL, v, 235).

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Ritvo words it.76 (To this day, cats are not typically used for research, as they “will sometimes refuse to perform tasks they have already learned, preferring even starvation to the degradation of compliance with human demands,” as Alan Freeman and Betty Mensch observe.77) Perhaps thinking with cats –​who lose any “useful” capacity once they take on the role of pet –​can once again open a space for thinking differently about animals. On the second anniversary of Hardy’s birthday after his death, Florence wrote to Arthur Pinero about her cat Cobweb: Two years ago today my little cat was given to my husband . . . & today our stable was turned into an operating theatre & the poor little creature had an abscess opened by a veterinary surgeon . . . its very melancholy & I hope I’ll never be weak enough to have another pet. (LEFH 292)78

In the stable-​turned-​operating theatre, the “poor little creature” seems to embody the liminal space between human and animal:  both in the human-​like treatment of its surgery and in the emotional links at stake.79 Florence’s bond to this cat –​her cat, her husband’s cat –​was in all likelihood intensified by the fact Cobweb may have been the last living link to her husband. Florence’s response –​“I hope I’ll never be weak enough to have another pet” –​reveals her emotional investment in an animal who somehow straddled the boundary between wild creature and household member. Her solution, rather than modify her relationship with pets, was to hope that she would not again practice pet ownership. Her approach  –​while likely said offhand  –​mirrors a strategy for engaging with animal welfare issues that Bryant terms “thoughtful advocacy”:  acting in a way that eliminates cruel practices rather than modifying them (given the latter simply redefines the parameters in which abuse can occur), as Hardy (and Henry Salt) hoped would be possible at some future date.80 Perhaps Hardy was correct to feel that the most efficient method of advocating for animals was through his fiction as an “un­biassed” writer:  by contextualizing animals within specific scenarios 76 Animal Estate, pp. 21–​22. 77 Alan Freeman and Betty Mensch, “Scratching the Belly of the Beast,” in Animal Experimentation, ed. by Baird and Rosenbaum, pp. 161–​178 (p. 168). 78 Millgate identifies the cat as “Cobweb” (or “Cobby”) (LEFH 293n; BR 526). 79 Erica Fudge uses the term “boundary breakers” to describe pets and their unique status as both named family member and unknowable animal other; see Pets, p. 18. For the idea of pets as “bridge-​ builders,” see James Serpell and Elizabeth Paul’s “Pets and the Development of Positive Attitudes to Animals,” in Animals and Human Society: Changing Perspectives, ed. by Aubrey Manning and Serpell (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 127–​144 (p. 129). 80 “Animals Unmodified,” p. 189. See Humanitarianism, p. 15.

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and imagining them with a sympathetic vision, Hardy imparted his sensitivity toward living creatures in a manner that his readers then gained as one of the profits of reading. Current research in cognitive psychology offers evidence that reading fiction increases empathy; the more closely one attends, the greater the empathy.81 Moreover, the novels provided a platform for Hardy to demonstrate the everyday cruelties he had seen perpetrated rather than abstracting them the way many societies did through a list of prohibitive measures included in their manifestos. To look at the fullness of Hardy’s humanitarianism –​as shown in his letters, both public and private, his poetry, his fiction, and his ghosted autobiography  –​is to see a realistic and unavoidably human awareness of the complexity of the issues at hand, issues that continue to pose difficult questions to the present day.

“Single Acts on a Small Scale” Hardy’s most enduring legacy as a humanitarian exists in his depictions of animals and the natural world in his writings, especially his fiction. His work provides an alternative framework for how humans might think about and relate to animals in their everyday environments, upending or at least pushing askew human–​animal boundaries in his explorations of what it means to be a creature. In one sense, this study might be described as a close reading of the discourse of creature in his oeuvre. In his book Animals Erased (2012), Arran Stibbe analyzes the way various animal-​related discourses present nonhuman animals, noting that even in discourses meant to be “pro-​animal,” animals are not depicted as agents or individuals. He urges the importance of alternative discourses, pointing to the Japanese tradition of the haiku as an example. What he writes about the discourse of the haiku is applicable to Hardy’s discourse of creature: each of these discourses, one might argue, uses language to encourage the reader to go beyond language, beyond the world of intellectual abstractions, and reconnect directly with the more-​ than-​human world. The way it does this is to describe actual encounters with everyday nature . . . using a minimal amount of metaphor and 81 See David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano’s “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science, 342 (2013), 377–​380, and Dan Johnson’s “Transportation into a Story Increases Empathy, Prosocial Behavior, and Perceptual Bias toward Fearful Expressions,” Personality and Individual Differences, 52 (2012),150–​155; see also Jamil Zaki and Kevin Ochsner’s “You, Me, and My Brain; Self and Other Representations in Cognitive Neuroscience,” in Social Neuroscience: Toward Understanding the Underpinnings of the Social Mind, ed. by A. Todorov, S. Fiske, and D. Prentice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 14–​39.

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abstraction, placing poetic emphasis on individual animals and plants, representing them as agents of their own lives living according to their natures, with implicit assumptions of empathy and positive regard built into the discourse.82

Hardy’s vision of Wessex and the creatures in it encourages readers to live, in the words of Jonathan Bate, “with thoughtfulness and with an attentiveness, an attunement to both words and the world, and so to acknowledge that, although we make sense of things by way of words, we do not live apart from the world.”83 While humans live in a world that they process and understand through language, the emphasis on embodiment and on creatureliness in Hardy’s writings reminds one to attend to sensory experience and to the multiplicity of modes of being. The past six chapters have tracked the appearance of creatures in the “Novels of Character and Environment,” locating the term and its usage in Hardy’s lexicon; followed the dogs and sheep of Far from the Madding Crowd in an exploration of Hardy’s stance on the Victorian debates over moral sense, moral agency, and moral responsibility in regards to nonhuman others; reflected on the roles of language, the possession of a face, and the ability to suffer in constructing what means to be a human or an animal; and considered his involvement with the Victorian humanitarian movement. Hardy’s novels and poetic writings invite the reader to join him on excursions into other Umwelts, to imagine other points of view: forays that gesture toward the unknowability of each individual, toward the possibility of “Earth-​secrets” unrevealed to the human reader. In place of boundaries, his works call for “boundless compassion for all living things,” to quote from Schopenhauer.84 Schopenhauer’s influence on Hardy is well known, and perhaps it is his definition of compassion that best fits with Hardy’s approach to creature.85 Schopenhauer defined compassion as having two components: justice (“do no harm”) and loving-​kindness (“help everyone as much as you can”).86 As Schopenhauer explains, compassion means that upon regarding the other, I no longer look at him as if he were something given to me by empirical intuitive perception, as something strange and foreign, as a matter of indifference, as something entirely different from me. On the contrary, I share 82 Arran Stibbe, Animals Erased: Discourse, Ecology, and Reconnection with the Natural World (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), p. 162. 83 Jonathan Bate, Song of the Earth, (London: Picador, 2001), p. 23. 84 Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality, trans. by E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995), p. 172. 85 For an overview of Schopenhauer’s influence on Hardy, see Mallett’s “Hardy and Philosophy,” pp. 30–​34. 86 Basis of Morality, pp. 148–​149, 167.

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Thomas Hardy and Animals the suffering in him, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enclose my nerves. Only in this way can his woe, his distress, become a motive for me; otherwise it can be absolutely only my own. I  repeat that this occurrence is mysterious, for it is something our faculty of reason can give no direct account of, and its grounds cannot be discovered on the path of experience. And yet it happens every day.87

Schopenhauer’s description of the “mysterious” occurrence of compassion matches Hardy’s note on his “strange power of putting himself in the place of those who endured sufferings from which he himself had been in the main free” (PN 292), as outlined in Chapter 5. Notably, the emphasis in both Schopenhauer’s and Hardy’s descriptions of the experience of empathy is upon an embodied experience. The accent on embodiment is what separates Hardy’s use of “creature” from other usages of the term in the Victorian era. In his novels, skin meets fur, feathers, hide. Importantly, the animals in his writings are not exotic species on display. Rather, they are ordinary animals that Victorian readers –​and even readers today  –​could encounter in their day-​to-​day life:  the “hedgehog travel[ing] furtively across the lawn” and the “black cat . . . wide-​eyed and thin” on one’s doorstep (CP 553, 733). In her book When Species Meet (2008), Donna Haraway suggests the term “companion species” to describe nonhuman animals: from “cum panis” (with bread) and “specere” (to look, to behold).88 From a shared meal to a returned gaze, the term implies that empathy with animals is grounded in simple demonstrations of neighborliness. Loving-​kindness occurs, as Schopenhauer notes, “in single acts on a small scale.”89 Such acts are scattered throughout Hardy’s writings, from Gabriel’s attentiveness to the toad underfoot in Far from the Madding Crowd to the closing stanza of “Snow in the Suburbs,” where the speaker appears in the final line of a mostly observational poem to respond to a cat’s “feeble hope” for entry into the warmth of the house with the words, “And we take him in” (CP 733). With an understated emotive effect, these five simple words move the speaker into an interaction with the world outside his front door. More could be written on Hardy’s animals (especially his cows, who so often appear as named individuals in the text), on their presence in 87 Ibid., p. 166. 88 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 19. In Haraway’s words, “to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention” are actions “tied to . . . constituting the polis, where and when species meet” (19). 89 Basis of Morality, p. 116. Santer closes On Creaturely Life with Rosenzweig’s similar idea of “acts of neighbor-​love”: “small miracles, as it were, performed one by one, moving from one neighbor to the next (rather than by way of a love directed immediately to all humankind)” (207).

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his short stories, and on the term “fellow-​creature.”90 On a broader scale, more could be written about the conceptualization and representation of “creatures” in Victorian literature. Looking at animals in Hardy’s oeuvre  –​and building upon the foundation of scholarship on Darwin and the natural world in relation to his work –​marks pathways for exploration into texts by other authors in the Victorian era, a period marked by a shift in human understanding of animals. Furthermore, placing Hardy in dialogue with twenty-​first-​century theoretical approaches to animals gives abstract, language-​based ideas habitation and form in an embodied, material world –​albeit the fictive Wessex. Hardy’s expansive vision –​one that views even ephemerons as having intrinsic value as creatures living their own lives  –​challenges readers to reconsider their preconceptions about others around them. To see the world from another’s point of view –​to have the willingness and sense of humor to imagine a perspective outside one’s own  –​opens the door to compassion, to empathy, and to loving-​kindness.91

90 While the term “fellow-​creature” implies an extension of fellow-​feeling and kinship, its use by Hardy’s characters tends to indicate a general notion of mankind in the abstract rather than flesh-​ and-​blood individuals. 91 Prior to World War I, Hardy believed that war was “doomed by the gradual growth of the introspective faculty in mankind –​of their power of putting themselves in another’s place, and taking a point of view that is not their own,” a power he saw as “the growth of a sense of humour” (THR 35), and even after the war, he expressed hope for increased compassion in the “Apology” to Late Lyrics (CP 562).

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Appendix

Table 1 Appearances of Creature (and Fellow-​Creature)

UGT FFMC RN MC W Tess Jude Overall

Human

Animal

3 6 9 8 18 18 22 84

2 9 9 3 6 10 7 46

Inanimate

General

Figurative

1

2 1

1

2 1 1 3 8

1 4

1

Overall

(Fellow-​ Creature)

6 17 20 13 25 30 32 143

(1) (1) (3) (2) (1) (3) (6) (17)

35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 UGT

FFMC

RN

MC

Human

W Animal

TD

JO

Overall

Figure 1  Appearances of Creature in the “Novels of Character and Environment”

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Texts by Thomas Hardy Hardy, Thomas, The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. by Richard Purdy and Michael Millgate, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–​1988).   The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Volume 8.  Further Letters 1861–​1927, ed. by Michael Millgate and Keith Wilson (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012).   Collected Short Stories, ed. by F. B. Pinion, intro. by Desmond Hawkins (London: Macmillan, 1988).   “Compassion: An Ode in Celebration of the Centenary of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals,” The Times, June 16, 1924, p. 15.   The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. by James Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976).   Desperate Remedies, ed. by Patricia Ingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).  “Dearest Emmie”: Thomas Hardy’s Letters to His First Wife, ed. by Carl Weber (London: Macmillan, 1963).   The Dynasts, The Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1924).   Far from the Madding Crowd, ed. by Suzanne B. Falck-​Yi, intro. by Linda Shires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).   Far from the Madding Crowd, ed. by Rosemarie Morgan (London: Penguin, 2000).   Fifty-​Seven Poems (Gillingham: Meldon House, 2002).   The Hand of Ethelberta, ed. by Tim Dolin (London: Penguin, 1997).   Jude the Obscure, ed. by Patricia Ingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).   A Laodicean, ed. by John Schad (London: Penguin, 1997).   The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. by Michael Millgate (London: Macmillan, 1984).   The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, 2 vols, ed. by Lennart A. Bjork (London: Macmillan, 1985).   The Mayor of Casterbridge, ed. by Dale Kramer (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008).   “A Merciful Man,” Animals’ Friend, December 1895, pp. 50–​51. 193

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207

Index

Agamben, Giorgio, 85–​87, 106n69 altruism, 1, 6, 11, 54, 56, 68, 83, 129, 138, 156, 167, 175 animal studies, 6–​7 Animals’ Friend, 130, 132, 166n19, 193, 198 anthropocentrism, 7, 97 anthropodenial, 68, 68n52 anthropomorphism, 7, 60, 61, 61n35, 63, 68, 97, 143, 161, 165 Archer, William, 14, 43, 165 Aristotle, 89, 89n14, 96, 108 automatism, 21, 22, 23, 47, 99, 100–​101

Boddice, Rob, 6n14, 160 Bourke, Joanna, 3, 34n38, 94, 127 Bowie, G. G. S., 74 Broglio, Ron, 120n26, 145n49 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 94, 183 Bryant, Taimie, 184, 185 Burke, Edmund, 143 Byrne, Richard, 98, 144

Babb, Howard, 70n57 Badmington, Neil, 7 Bailey, J. O., 168 Bate, Jonathan, 187 Beer, Gillian, 5, 7, 15, 19, 27, 29n32, 61n35, 90, 97, 103n63, 138n27, 152n66 Bell, Charles, 113, 115, 143, 152n68 Benjamin, Walter, 10, 20n15 Bentham, Jeremy, 13, 88, 129, 135, 137–​139, 142, 143, 150 Berger, John, 133n12 birds, 6, 21, 24, 26, 28, 30–​31, 42, 88–​109, 128n53, 148, 153, 174 blackbirds, 30, 96 bullfinches, 88, 95–​96, 145 chickens, 172n35 fieldfares, 151 goldfinches, 28 herons, 94 mallards, 27, 31, 153 nightingales, 30, 96 owls, 94, 109 parrots, 89, 90 pheasants, 30, 148, 151 pigeons, 7, 105 rooks, 105, 106–​108, 130, 139, 141 starlings, 105 thrushes, 30, 94, 96

Capie, Forrest, 77 Carroll, Lewis, 15, 44, 176n45 Cartesian dualism, 47, 59, 100, 148 cats, 9, 24, 59, 101, 118, 125, 134, 143, 156, 161, 166, 179–​186, 188 cattle, 77, 131, 160 bulls, 27 calves, 30, 44, 131 cows, 32, 86, 99, 143, 172, 174, 188 Chain of Being, Great, 25, 87, 95, 152 Chain Salpæ, 25 Chapman, Raymond, 94 Clodd, Edward, 181, 183 Cobbe, Frances Power, 58, 60n32, 63n41, 123n38, 177, 178n52 Coetzee, J. M., 11 Cohen, William, 110n1, 112n6, 116, 117, 119n23 Cohn, Elisha, 4, 10, 10n32, 11, 31n35, 148n54 Coleridge, Stephen, 184n74 Cornhill, 48, 51, 58, 60n32, 70n59 Cox, J. Stevens, 106 creaturely, discourse of the, 10–​12, 151n64 Crist, Eileen, 92n25 Danahay, Martin, 7n15, 94 Darwin, Charles The Descent of Man, 12, 48n7, 57–​59, 65, 65n44, 67, 88, 90, 96, 98n44, 98n45, 99n48 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 13, 58, 97, 103, 112–​114, 115 The Origin of Species, 5, 15, 18–​19, 59 views on vivisection, 177–​179

207

208

208 de Waal, Frans, 57, 68n52 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 7, 8–​9, 11, 16, 97n38, 124, 126n47, 127, 134–​136, 143, 148n55, 150, 151n64, 152n68, 155n76, 162, 197, 200 Descartes, René, 8, 22n18, 68, 98, 99, 100, 141 Diamond, Cora, 11, 104n66, 149–​151 Dickens, Charles, 44, 61n34 dogs, 26, 35, 46–​68, 101, 111, 113n11, 118n21, 119n21, 125, 143, 172, 174, 174n38, 176n48, 179, 180, 182, 184n74 Bobby, 122–​123 George, 46, 56, 59–​61, 64, 92 donkeys, 93 Douglas-​Hamilton, Nina, 78n81, 132n10, 175 Ebbatson, Roger, 5, 55n18, 81n87, 93, 95 Ekman, Paul, 68, 114 Eliot, George, 44 empathy, 3, 5, 16, 33, 50, 54, 55, 62, 68, 88, 108, 109, 129, 131, 137, 139, 151, 153, 154, 186, 187, 188 Escher, M. C., 3n5 Fairbairn, John, 72, 74, 82n88 Falck-​Yi, Suzanne, 143 farming diseased meat, 76–​78 honey harvesting, 144–​146 pig-​killing, 130–​134 sheep-​rot, 71–​75 Feller, David Allan, 178 Forster, E. M., 99, 147 Foucault, Michel, 7, 75n74 foxes, 54, 142, 161n11 Freeman, Alan, 185 Fudge, Erica, 7, 87n10, 185n79 Gregor, Ian, 112n4 Hadden, Maude, 170 Hagenbeck, Carl, 121 Haraway, Donna, 188 Hardy, Emma, 14, 146n50, 156, 165–​167, 176, 179–​181, 183 Hardy, Florence, 70n60, 85, 172, 172n35, 181, 183, 185 Hardy, Thomas childhood memories of animals, 85, 128, 151, 154 humanitarianism, 1, 14, 44, 156–​186 pets, 179–​186 Cobweb, 185 Kitsy, 156, 179–​183 Marky, 179–​183 Snowdove, 181, 182 Wessex, 172, 180n64, 183n70

Index Works by (Novels) Desperate Remedies, 36n41, 43 Far from the Madding Crowd, 21–​22, 25–​26, 34–​35, 46–​84, 93–​94, 142–​143 The Hand of Ethelberta, 93, 117 Jude the Obscure, 32–​33, 40–​43, 48, 76, 94, 106–​107, 130–​141, 147, 163, 184 A Laodicean, 27n29 The Mayor of Casterbridge, 27–​28, 36–​37, 92, 103 A Pair of Blue Eyes, 143, 156n2, 163 The Return of the Native, 19, 22, 26–​27, 35, 61n35, 92, 100, 128, 153 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 20, 23, 30–​32, 39–​40, 50, 55, 88–​89, 95–​96, 146n50, 148–​151, 152–​153, 160–​162, 164–​165 Two on a Tower, 94 Under the Greenwood Tree, 24, 34, 51, 88, 108, 144–​147, 160, 194 The Woodlanders, 20, 28–​30, 37–​39, 147n53, 158–​160, 163–​164, 166 Works by (Poems) “Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?,” 182 “An August Midnight,” 86–​87, 152 “Bags of Meat,” 44, 131 “The Bedridden Peasant,” 43 “The Bullfinches,” 95n33 “The Calf,” 44, 131 “Compassion,” 44, 171 “Dead ‘Wessex’ the Dog to the Household,” 183n70 “The Death of Regret,” 183n69 “Drinking Song,” 2n4, 128 The Dynasts, 24n22, 25n26, 89, 101, 108, 169 “Horses Abroad,” 168–​172 “The Lacking Sense,” 43 “Last Words to a Dumb Friend,” 181 “The Mongrel,” 32 “A Philosophical Fantasy,” 43 “A Popular Personage at Home,” 183n70 “The Puzzled Game-​Birds,” 31n34, 32, 170 “The Roman Gravemounds,” 182–​183 “Snow in the Suburbs,” 188 “Surview,” 108n75 “The Wind Blew Words,” 108 “Why Do I?,” 171 “Winter in Durnover Field,” 88, 105–​106 Works by (Short Stories) “A Few Crusted Characters,” 161n11 “The Fiddler of the Reels,” 103n65 “Interlopers at the Knap,” 126n44 “A Son’s Veto.” 32n36 Works by (Other writings) “Apology,” 1, 19, 189n91 “The Dorsetshire Labourer,” 162, 170n29 “The Science of Fiction,” 103

209

Index Harrison, Edward, 73, 78 Harrison, Frederic, 24, 131 Harrison, Peter, 142n43 Heaney, Seamus, 154, 180n63 heathcroppers, 26, 55n18, 121 hedgehogs, 188 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 123 Henniker, Florence, 130n3, 168–​172, 174n41, 176–​179, 181n65 Hobaiter, Catherine, 98 Hobbes, J. Oliver, 91 Hogarth, William, 142n44, 159 horses, 6, 32, 32n36, 35, 44, 53, 113, 143, 157–​174 Blossom, 163 Dainty, 93 Darling, 30, 163–​164 Pansy, 163 Prince, 25, 31, 147, 148, 151, 161, 164 Smart, 161 Smiler, 161 Tib, 164 Huber, Jean Pierre, 98 Humanitarian League, 1, 1n1, 3, 137, 170, 175 hunting, 131n6, 147, 148n56, 150, 161n11 Huxley, Thomas, 6, 22n18, 24, 47, 100–​101, 112, 178 Ibsen, Henrik, 94 insects, 4, 24, 183n71 ants, 3n5, 6, 15, 24n22, 98–​99, 121, 146 bees, 24, 86, 99, 114, 144–​146, 147 butterflies, 128 dumbledores, 86 ephemerons, 189 flies, 26, 86, 99, 151, 152 longlegs, 86 moths, 19, 27, 86, 121 wasps, 100, 147 Irwin, Michael, 4, 25n25, 84, 87n8, 109, 147, 154 James, Henry, 12, 46–​47, 56, 84 Kean, Hilda, 78n81, 157, 160, 161, 166, 168, 169 Keen, Suzanne, 129n2, 134, 135, 138, 144n46 King, Kathryn, 171 Kingsford, Anna, 131 Kreilkamp, Ivan, 4, 10, 47, 61n34, 67n50, 69, 75n74, 77n76 Lacan, Jacques, 8, 10n33, 105n68 Lavater, Johann, 13, 110–​113, 118, 121 Lawrence, D. H., 23, 33n37, 46, 122n33 Lea, Hermann, 131n4 Levinas, Emmanuel, 8, 13, 64n43, 88, 110, 117–​118, 121, 122–​124, 122n33, 126, 138 Levine, George, 5, 50, 54, 55, 63, 138n27

209

Lewes, George Henry, 100, 112, 154 Lind-​af-​Hageby, Louise, 176n48 lizards, 123 loving-​kindness, 3, 19, 38, 50, 133, 187, 189 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 10, 17n7 Mallett, Phillip, 5, 18n11, 26n27, 41n45, 48, 61, 65, 87n8, 132n8, 145 Mangum, Teresa, 181, 182n68 Maxwell, Herbert, 107–​108 Melville, Herman, 45 Mensch, Betty, 185 Mill, John Stuart, 66, 83, 131, 137–​139, 140–​141, 142 Miller, J. Hillis, 23n20, 25n25, 139n34, 152n68, 152n69 Millgate, Michael, 166, 170n29, 172, 173n36, 174, 180, 185n78 Möbius strip, 3, 3n5, 13, 16, 25n25, 43, 45, 47, 84, 87, 154 Montaigne, Michel de, 91, 97, 108 Morgan, C. Lloyd, 13, 101–​102 Morgan, Rosemarie, 51, 54, 66, 71, 71n61, 88n12 Morgan, William, 171 Morse, Deborah Denenholz, 7 Mozley, J. B., 103 Müller, F. Max, 6, 17, 23n19, 89, 96, 97, 98, 101, 108, 124, 201 Murray, James, 17, 161n10 Nagel, Thomas, 85 Nemesvari, Richard, 133, 135, 139 Paton, W. R., 173n37 performing animals, 28, 167, 174n38 Perren, Richard, 77 physiognomy, 13, 110–​113, 121, 134, 159 Pick, Anat, 10–​12, 151n64 pigs, 32, 76, 130–​137, 141, 143, 147 Pike, Laurence, 170, 170n27 Pinero, Arthur, 185 Pinion, F. B., 87n9, 95n33 Poe, Edgar Allan, 106 Poole, Adrian, 60n33 posthumanism, 4, 7–​8, 14, 150, 153–​154 primates, 97–​98, 103 apes, 15, 97, 128 bonobos, 58, 97 chimpanzees, 97, 98, 104 gorillas, 97 monkeys, 100, 179n58 Quammen, David, 68 rabbits, 6, 30, 32, 33, 63, 131, 147, 174 rats, 32

210

210

Index

Regan, Tom, 184 Richardson, Angelique, 5, 56, 62, 67, 95n32, 113n7 Ritvo, Harriet, 16, 73n66, 167, 167n22, 179, 184 Robinson, E. Kay, 141 Romanes, George, 6, 13, 98, 101–​102, 125, 154 Rosenzweig, Franz, 10, 188n89 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 167, 170, 170n26, 171, 179 Salt, Henry, 1n1, 2n2, 83, 91, 132, 142n41, 159n6, 171n30, 185 Santer, Eric, 10–​12, 188n89 Schartau, Leisa, 176n48 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 86n4, 187–​188 Schweik, Robert, 70, 71 Shakespeare, 60n33, 149n58, 162n13 King Lear, 118, 127n50, 132, 152n69 The Tempest, 10 Shaw, George Bernard, 176n45 sheep, 25, 46–​48, 59, 60, 68–​84, 92, 103, 131, 142–​143, 147, 154 ewe in shearing scene, 25 lambs, 46, 50, 69 Shelley, Mary, 44 Sherman, George Witter, 5 Shires, Linda, 48, 54, 56, 64, 68, 79n85, 154 Short, Clarice, 70n58 Simonds, James Beart, 73 Singer, Peter, 137, 175n43 slugs, 6, 28–​29, 39 snails, 29, 74, 94 snakes, 2, 13, 174n39 adders, 3, 13, 26, 88, 92, 110, 117, 119–​122, 124, 128 serpents, 93, 120, 121 sport, 30, 131n6, 148n56, 152n69, 157, 174, 175n43, 177, 184

Stead, W. T., 170, 172 Stephen, Leslie, 6, 48, 51, 54, 58–​61, 63, 71, 96, 132n9 Stibbe, Arran, 186 Sylvia, Richard, 170, 171, 172 Symonds, John Addington, 90n20, 104 Tague, Ingrid, 180 Taylor, Dennis, 17 Thackeray, William, 44 Theory of mind, 57, 58n24, 102, 103, 122, 126n45, 127, 144, 186n81 Thomas, Jane, 49, 103, 105 Thomas, Keith, 144n48, 167n22 toads, 7, 26, 188 Tooke, Horne, 91 Trollope, Anthony, 44 Turner, Lynn, 8 Twain, Mark, 45, 91, 127n49, 176n45 Uexküll, Jakob von, 85–​87, 151 Umwelt, 85–​87, 91, 123, 187 utilitarianism, 137–​141, 157, 174 vivisection, 14, 141, 142, 142n44, 157, 172, 174–​179 Waddington, Keir, 77, 78 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 6 War Against War, 170, 172 Warbasse, James, 142, 143 Weber, Carl, 28n30, 66n47 Weil, Simone, 11 Wessex Saddleback Pig Society, 132n10 Wolfe, Cary, 8, 11, 150, 153 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 94, 159n6 Woods, Abigail, 75n75, 77 Woolf, Virginia, 104, 109