The name of the character Little Father Time, in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, attests to the contradictions that surround this mysterious figure. That is, the appellation "Little Father Time" clearly posits this character as a figure of allegory (Moore 278) and signifies that he represents something abstract or ideal--in this case, time. By extension, it would also seem that Little Father Time carries with him more than just his "ensigns," a key and a ticket (289; Moore 279), which further attest to his role as a symbolic character. Indeed, one can rightly expect this figure of allegory to convey a moral lesson, and according to his stepmother, Sue Bridehead, he does. She makes sense of Little Father Time's killing of her children by framing the events in moral terms, thereby casting the murderer as a manifestation of God's judgment on herself. She cries, "My children are dead--and it is right that they should be! [. . .] They were sin-begotten. They were sacrificed to teach me how to live!" (384). Little Father Time's irrefutably allegorical name also draws attention to the similarly but more subtly symbolic names of most of the main characters in the novel.(n1) As a figure from allegory, Little Father Time is the locus of a fascinating contradiction in Jude the Obscure, for the novel's allegorical aspects are in direct contrast to the naturalistic details that Hardy's audience expects, given the author's place as a writer of naturalism par excellence. In allegory, the symbolic nature of the characters and the pat moral they convey circumscribe the narrative plot with an artificiality of which the novel of naturalism is supposed to be free, for it should reflect the unpredictable workings of natural law rather than the artifice of the writer's ordering imagination. Ironically though, as allegorical as Little Time is, he is also the harbinger of the workings of harsh reality in the novel. Hence, he establishes the novel as a work of naturalism, as well.

Little Time's unrealistic nature is partially revealed in his approach to time, which is very different from either that of his father, Jude, or of his natural mother, Arabella.(n2) Jude's life is guided by his love of the past, and this love is the very basis of his unfailing desire to be a scholar. As Moore puts it, "Jude takes to studying the outdated grammars of ancient languages. His books fall under the double rubric of the belated; they present dead mythologies for learning dead languages" (261). Jude's fascination with Christminster is also connected to his love of the past. Indeed, he lists as Christminster's most notable feature its history of having been home to the dead greats of old (104). By contrast, Little Time's mother, Arabella, is future oriented, so much so that she is practically prophetic. As the narrator puts it, she is "always imagining and waiting" (55), concocting plans that will set her up for her future life. One of these plans is to lie to Jude about being pregnant so that he will marry her, thereby ensuring her future comfort. Her deception is eventually revealed, but as the existence of Little Time eventually shows, she correctly guessed the future in her lie. She looks out for the comfort of her future self through marriage later in the novel as well, deciding that she wants Jude back only six weeks after her other husband, Cartlett, dies (327) and courting the attentions of Vilbert the physician while Jude is still warm in his deathbed (429). Furthermore, it is from this same doctor that Arabella buys future "immunity from the ravages of Time" in the form of pills (308). Unlike his parents, though, Little Father Time is not guided by his relationship to time, for he is time. He therefore approaches life without the usual limitations of time, "regarding his companions [on the train] as if he saw their whole rounded lives rather than their immediate figures" (343). Supernaturally, Little Father Time represents all moments of time, being both aged, as he is called Father Time and "preternaturally old" (347), and young, for he is a child.

Fantastic as this character seems to be in the terms outlined above, he is also presented as signifying a realism that contrasts with Jude and Sue's idealism. The harsh realism of Little Time is revealed in Hardy's first description of him: his "saucer eyes seemed mutely to say: 'All laughing comes from misapprehension. Rightly looked at there is no laughable thing under the sun'" (290). Moreover, the child's spoken words reveal his practicality, as his first complete sentences in the novel impart a harsh sense of imperative: he announces, "'I've got to go there'" and "'I must walk'" (291). He is a boy of few words, to be sure, and because of this characteristic, Jude and Sue are often "hardly conscious of him" (296). Yet, Jude and Sue are not only unwitting of Little Time's person, but also of that which he represents. In short, Jude has the unrealistic dream of rising out of the lot into which he was born and redefining himself as a great scholar, or even a bishop. In his idealism he is similar to Sue, who tries to thwart one of society's most cherished contracts, marriage, without the expectation of retribution. For a while, Jude and Sue do live together in an unwedded state of "Greek joyousness" (312), but Little Time eventually destroys their world after taking Sue's sad pronouncements on the state of their family too "literally" (357), as one would expect of a realist. He kills himself, as well as Jude and Sue's two children, for a starkly practical reason, which he reveals in his note to be "because . . . [they] are too meny" (355). Also significant is the fact that the idealists'--Jude and Sue's--two children die before they develop into distinct individuals, which is why Hardy neither mentions them separately nor describes them. It is as though the babies are abstract beings, or are merely embodiments of the idea of "child," who must be canceled out by reality in this novel of naturalism.

However shocking this murder scene is to readers, its consequences-the destruction of Jude and Sue's life together--might have been expected according to the dictates of naturalism. Indeed, "rightly looked at" as Little Father Time would say (290), it was only a matter of time before Jude and Sue's fantasy life would dissolve, and this collapse can literally be blamed on Time. Thus, we are reminded again of Little Father Time's allegorical associations. He is none other than stolid Time, "creep[ing] forward in a "steady mechanical" way (291), heedless of the vain hopes and desires in the lives to which he brings change and careless of such particulars as individual people (344). In an ironic way, the same function of Little Father Time that follows from his allegorical identity--as Time--also emphasizes Jude the Obscure's identity as a naturalistic novel.

(n1.) I refer here to the characters Jude Fawley ("Folly"), the virginal Sue Bridehead, and Arabella Donn, who teaches Jude about the world's ways.

(n2.) With regard to the concept of time, Little Time's difference from his parents is another element of the story that undermines its naturalism, for this child does not resemble his parents and in terms of the Victorian understanding of natural law, he should.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Ed. and intro. Patricia Ingham. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

Moore, Kevin Z. The Descent of the Imagination: Postromantic Culture in the Later Novels of Thomas Hardy. New York : New York UP, 1990.

~~~~~~~~

By Michelle Faubert, University of Toronto

That with this bright believing band
 I have no claim to be,
That faiths by which my comrades stand
 Seem fantasies to me,
And mirage-mists their Shining Land,
 Is a strange destiny.

Why thus my soul should be consigned
 To Infelicity
Why always I must feel as blind
 To sight my brethren see,
Why joys they've found I cannot find,
 Abides a mystery.

Since heart of mine know not that ease
 Which they know; since it be
That He who breaths All's Well to these
 Breathes no All's Well to me,
My lack might move their sympathies
 And Christian charity!

I am a gazer who should mark
 An inland company
Standing upfingered, with "Hark! hark!
 The glorious distant sea!"
And feel, "Alas, 'tis but yon dark
 And wind-swept pine to me!"

Yet I would bear my shortcomings
 With meet tranquility,
But for the charge that blessed things
 I'd liefer not have be.
O, doth a bird deprived of wings
 Go earth-bound willfully!

Enough. As yet disquiet clings
About us. Rest shall we.

A stable interpertation of Thomas Hardy's "The Impercipient"(n1) has existed since J. 0. Bailey's monumental The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (1970).(n2) Bailey noted that in manuscript the poem was titled "The Agnostic (Evensong: ( ) Cathedral)." The identification of "impercipient" with "agnostic" seems clear, and thus the famously agnostic Hardy, or his persona, is both the speaker of this poem and the person identified by the title. This interpretation has been affirmed as recently as 2002 by Keith Wilson, arguing that the title refers to "the first-person onlooker excluded from [...I visionary apprehensions" rather than to the "bright believing band" of worshipers mentioned in the poem.(n3)

"Impercipient," however, is an adjective amenable to singular or plural number, allowing us to ask of the poem both of the following questions: Who is this impercipient [one]? and Who are these impercipient [ones]? Bailey and Wilson choose to see the first question. Bui: the poem suggests that the second is equally likely. The perceptions of the "bright believing band" seem, to the speaker, to be "mirage mists."(n4) It sees by faith, whereas the speaker is blind. Or more accurately, as Hardy says in another philosophical poem from Wessex Poems, "A Sign-Seeker," he sees facts, not wishes. In that poem, parodying the faith expressed in Tennyson's In Memoriam,(n5) the speaker, like doubting Thomas, asks for the physical imprint of a dead lover's kiss as a sign before he will believe, or perhaps for a 'plume" dropped from Heaven to prove God "inscribes" right and wrong.(n6) The general multitude "word" these signs, which the speaker never perceives, even when he goes to greater lengths than any of them, lying in dead men's beds, walking tombs and graveyards. Likewise, the "bright believing band" have a suspiciously easy time of it, compared with the speaker, in perceiving "their Shining Land" (emphasis mine); the speaker will have no part of it.

The poem can be read, as Bailey suggests (following Hardy's own claim in his autobiography), as a humble statement of loss, without "any superiority as an emancipated modem."(n7) But it is also true that the tone belies so much humility. The "bright believing band" are like the naive children in inland Dorset who think they hear the sea, whereas to the more experienced, more careful elder, the sound is of a "wind-swept pine." As in much of Hardy's poetry, the elegiac tone is strong, but so is the irony. The poem displays the deep and heartfelt wish to believe, but not the will to believe in spite of the evidence. As such, it belongs with such frequently anthologized poems as "The Oxen" and "The Darkling Thrush." If the title had remained "The Agnostic," Bailey and Wilson would be correct in limiting its reference to the speaker. But Hardy changed the title to a more ambiguous word, befitting his more ambivalent, conflicted feelings about faith and the afterlife and what we know of them.

(n1.) Thomas Hardy, "The Impercipient," Wessex Poems (London: Harper & Brothers, 1850).

(n2.) J. 0. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (University of North Carolina Press, 1970).

(n3.) Keith Wilson, "Hardy's Poetry," English Literature in Transition 45.1 (2002): 100.

(n4.) Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1976) 67-68.

(n5.) Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (London: Edward Moxon, Dover Street, 1850).

(n6.) For a fuller discussion, see James Persoon, "'A Sign-Seeker' and 'Cleon': Hardy's Argument with Browning," Victorian Newsletter (Fall 1998): 32-36.

(n7.) Bailey 103.

~~~~~~~~

By James Persoon, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan

The lush dairy settings in George Eliot's Adam Bede and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles have traditionally been perceived as timeless, “natural” green “landscapes” rather than as “taskscapes,”[1] gendered workspaces that are specific to separate historical moments and hence, separate ideologies and technologies of labor. Consequently, the extent to which the woman's “art” of dairy work and its maternalist discourse are linked in each novel to muted, disrupted discussions of human lactation and maternity has gone unread (Marshall 185). Green readings must now address not just these epochal novels' representations of the “loss of place” to industrialism, but also their reliance on deceptively pastoral sites like the dairy to explore gendered practices (Bate 550).

It would not have been possible to write this essay without the help of many colleagues and friends. Fred Kaplan and Rhoda Weyr offered me their intellectual support, as well as etheir home and garden during a summer research stint in New York City. Auburn University funded my research with a Competitive Research Grant, and my college supported me as well through a Humanities Development Fund Graut and travel funds. Among those who read and responded to drafts of this essay and or listened to my ideas, I would like to thank Paula Backscheider, Ruth Crocker, Jacqueline Foertsch, Penny Ingram, Peter Logan, and Constance Relihan. Finally, the first half of my title responds to Derrick and Patrice Jellife's classical medical text of the same name, cited below.

In each novel, the dairy setting has a cultural value that critiques the complex “maternal pleasure[s]” of making human milk in the modern world (Traina 369).

Reading Adam Bede and Tess against the agricultural, architectural, and economic traditions of the farmhouse dairy and its elite counterparts, the “private” middle-class dairy and the country-house dairy (Beeton 1005), reveals the fictional dairy as the repository of deeply embedded anxieties over the erotic pleasures of the nursing “dyad,”[2] the infringement upon “maternal autonomy” by the same, and the problematic values of women's artisan work and breastfeeding within a system of industrialized capitalism (Chandler 272). As iconic images of the milkmaid in the dairy precede or follow representations of parturition in each narrative, both mid-century and fiun-de-si ècle novels chart the cultural depreciation of human milk and breastfeeding and the correspondent rise of cow's milk formulas such as “Milkmaid,” which came to replace human milk as an ideal infant food by the end of the nineteenth century (Palmer 186). Eliot and Hardy negotiate the historical depreciation of human milk, however, in complex ways. In Eliot's mid-century novel, as women move into and out of the Hall Farm dairy, a trusting site, they figuratively play at the pleasures of embodied maternity. But when real human milk comes in, disastrously for the infanticidal milkmaid Hetty Sorrel, the dairy and its sensuous largesse become a cruel joke. Ironically, women's “mastery” of traditional, preindustrial dairy work cannot be matched by their embodied experience of lactation, which indeed, is consistently represented negatively in the novel (AB 129). As feminists, we understand Eliot's critique of human lactation as an important challenge to Herbert Spencer or Chades Darwin's wholesale maternalism (Paxton 60). However, Eliot's representation of the lactating woman in general as a subject from whom “nothing else can be expected,” even if, as we shall see in Hetty Sorrel's case, lactation may cost her her life, has disturbing implications for modern understandings of the materiality of breastfeeding (194).

Indeed by the time of Hardy's Tess (1891), the experience of lactation had become doubly disembodied; Talbothays produces cow's milk for urban “babies who have never seen a cow” (147). When Tess's own baby dies and she goes to work for Talbothays, she becomes a cog in the late-century national project to replace human milk with cow's milk. Her own experiences with lactation make the process seem much more of an intense emotional gift, a moral sacrifice to her child of rape, part of what defines her as a “standard woman” (71). But Tess's milk, given only once during her 12-hour work day on the eve of the baby's death, seems insufficient to sustain the child. Unlike Eliot, Hardy has become nostalgic for the practice of breastfeeding; however, his nostalgia is confined not to human milk's nutritional goodness, but to the emotional sanctity of the breastfeeding dyad, mother and infant in nearly sacred isolation. Recently, Jules Law has argued that pro-breast-feeding rhetorics too often present lactation as the “proper” disciplinary function of the breast (“Politics of Breastfeeding” 409). Disciplinary representations of breastfeeding, however, often, like Law's essay itself, are extremely hesitant to explore its pleasures.[3] Indeed, Eliot's and Hardy's visions of breastfeeding are necessarily troubled because they follow unwanted pregnancies allowing each author to enter into the darker side of human lactation, its overwhelming materiality and inevitability, its conflicts with individual agendas or desires, anxieties over the wholesomeness of human milk, and the mysteries of lactation that seem to elude the surveillance and discipline of culture. In contrast, the nearly cultish high order of dairy work in each novel, a performance of woman's work that is potentially “expert” and acutely manageable, seems to be a foil to the disorder of human breastfeeding.

To call the practices and rituals of women's dairy work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a “cult” linked to essentialist ideals of women's nature is no exaggeration. In 1796, the agricultural writer William Marshall was careful to hail the English dairy workman's “NATURAL CLEVERNESS, to which we (male improvers) have no pretensions” (185). A philosophical maternalism which envisions women as possessing “‘gentle,’ ‘delicate,’ or ‘patient’ temperament[s] well suited to milking and cheese production” meets traditional Western assumptions regarding women's talent for natural intuition rather than rationalist discourse in such agricultural writings (McMurry 256). As women had been working in the dairy long before the scientific understanding of the properties of enzymes and bacteria, their “art [seemed] evidently destitute of principles. So far from being scientific, it is altogether immechanical. It may be said to be at present [1796], a knack involved in mystery” (Marshall 16–17). The time-honored gendered divisions of labor on the British farm had left dairy work in the hands of women so exclusively that it had come to be associated with qualities of the gender itself; the skill often crossed classes, but never genders. A polite lady's or a “good” working-class woman's “soft and perfectly clean” hands were thought well suited to dairy work (Beeton 455). Enclosing women in the dairy, often with female family members and often for long periods of time while cheeses or butters were made according to closely guarded regional recipes, was also thought a “wholesome discipline” or the sex (Jenkins 202).

In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British culture, then, the dairy became a symbol of wholesome country life and properly gendered femininity, and certainly, both George Eliot and Thomas Hardy knew the dairy's complex, classed cultural history in its plain farmhouse and its fancy manorial incarnations.[4] A space specially “consecrated to the sex,” the dairy was embraced as an agricultural project and architectural subject worthy of the landed elite and their great architects like Sir John Sloane (Marshall 17). “Ornamental dairies” crowded in maternalist iconography were ofien given to wealthy women as a space in which to pursue work that mimed their own reproductive roles as nurturing, “milk-giving Mothers” (Kittler 26). A model of “elegant simplicity and convenience,” Clarissa Haflow's “dairy-house” in Richardson's novel mirrors historical English dairy follies like the one Sir John Sloane designed for Lady Elizabeth Yorke in 1783 (See Figure 1).[5] Richardson's representation of Clarissa's dairy work is placed among the “learning” which “distinguish[es] her own sex” (Letter 529, emphasis Richardson's). But that image is countered in the novel by several erotic scenes in which Lovelace pursues working-class dairymaids who “greedily…swallow” first his praise of their “dairy-works” and then his kisses (3: Letter 12). The discursive representation of the dairy as a site simultaneously linked to an essentially reproductive womanliness and to woman's capacity to experience erotic pleasure reflects its potentially unstable cultural value. Induced, Clarissa's elegance and chastity in her dairy juxtaposed with the working-class dairymaid's “greed” articulates the paradoxes of a landed culture that insisted upon both the excessive production of children and the careful monitoring of women's sexual desires and pleasures. The intensely aesthetic and erotic elements of both Eliot's and Hardy's representations of working dairies, each of which contains a cross-class sexual liaison, link those agricultural spaces to their more playful architectural counterparts.

Victorian fancy dairies continue to express an anxiety over woman's fertility and her potentially disruptive sexual desires. In the ornate Gothic dairy designed by Prince Albert at Windsor, the interior space is encircled by heavy cameo reliefs of each of his children's heads, while it is dotted with frankly erotic fountain statues of water-bearing women.[6] Such interiors attempt to integrate appropriate visions of productive and erotic fecundity, locating an accessible eroticism made pleasing and productive in the eternally spouting female fountains. As women are contained as domestic “milk-givers” in dairy architecture, so in dairy ornament and iconography are their body fluids made, metaphorically, a gift to the onlooker. The space then becomes an extension of the “domestic carceral,” surveyed by those who manage their embodied experience (Morrison 12). But when milkgiving pleasures are not strictly made to conform to the “wholesome discipline” that proper surveillance should provide, they all too easily “lose control” to the pleasures on the other side of containment (Squires n. 159). These spaces, designed for women by men, seem clearly concerned with envisioning lactation as a spectacle subject to the voyeuristic male gaze and as an exclusively nurturing process to which women's and animal's pains and pleasures are irrelevant.

“Embowering” the dairy in architecture and literature seems a clear attempt to naturalize the work of the space and the consumption of its products (See Figures I and 2). Ann Gelder writes that in the tradition of literary pastoralism, “women train vines to make the house and the household appear lovingly sanctioned by the natural world” (255). In the slave-holding American South then “'beautiful groves and flowering vines' conceal cultural violence with images of nature and culture in harmony” (255). The British dairy too, in both its farmhouse and manorial incarnations, is often represented and analyzed as an example of such harmony, while ironically, in both settings it may have indoctrinated women into a properly disembodied form of milk giving.

Envisioning the dairy as a “pastoral setting” in a “realm markedly outside history and culture,” then can obscure its historical role in the disruption of human breastfeeding (Bronfen 82). Increasingly in the nineteenth century, “improvements” in dairy work encouraged the substitution of human milk for cow's milk.? Such substitutions were made and had long been made for complex reasons, by maternal or paternal choice or insistence, by medical prescription, by custom, or in the absence of a lactating woman. “Cow's milk emotionalism,” the belief that milk is an essential early food for human infants and children, had flourished in Europe and England before Rousseau articulated the ideas in his Emile (Jellifes 172; Rousseau 151). However, unless one had one's own cow and could be assured of its milk's freshness and cleanliness, the practice of giving cow's milk to human infants was extremely risky.[8] The “prettiness of the dairy” in its garden incarnation, its “being something of a toy of the owner's wife” is potentially a “landscape trick” that conceals the lost human milk quickly being replaced by cow's milk processed by women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Robinson 94; Gelder 255). The often troubled reproductive histories of those women—the labor of maternity, breastfeeding, and childcare in the lives of both landed women and the servants and wetnurses they or their husbands managed—are concealed within the pretty space of the dairy as well. The irony of Hardy's Talbothays Dairy, then, lies not only in its function as the type of large-scale factory dairy that was by 1890 displacing the small-scale, woman-run dairy and its techniques. But as well, “liquid-milk” dairies like Talbothays were enabling the process of replacing human milk with cow's milk on a national scale.

Placing Adam Becle and Tess of the d'Urbervilles within the linked histories of human milk and cow's milk in the “modern” world, it becomes clear that Eliot's mid-Victorian novel expresses a concern with the transforming, embodied experience of human lactation, while Hardy's late novel dramatizes the “erasure of Tess as a woman” even as it mutes the erasure of her milk from her experience of womanhood (Howe 417). If the triumph of Tess over Adam Bede is as Raymond Williams argues, its “strength to keep to the subject [of Tess herself] to the end” (173), I would like to examine what maternal practices and what aspects of maternal subjectivity are yet lost or silenced in Hardy's paradoxically “green” novel. When Eliot's Hetty abandons her baby, in contrast Willams charges, Eliot abandons Hetty “as a subject,” shifting her to become “an object of confession and conversion—of attitudes to suffering. This is the essential difference from Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervills” (173). Williams indicts Eliot's abandonment of Hetty, then, as itself fan act of creative infanticide, “a moral action more decisive that Hetty's own confused and desperate leaving of her child” (173). My goal is not to return to Williams's contrast in greatness, and surely not to his characterization of Eliot as somehow herself a murderous artistic mother. Rather, it is to begin the project of sifting through representations of nature and maternal subjectivity whose embodied details, like the practice of human breastfeeding, are often silenced in culture.

To begin with in Adam Bode (1859), the performative nature of the infanticidal milkmaid Hetty Sorrel's very maternal “little paintings and rollings” while butter making subversively flaunts the discipline of the construct that Jill H. Casid has described as the “good farm” (Eliot 129; Casid 305). Eliot's gracious, embowered dairy, coveted by the local gentry for its rustic charm and its pretty worker, clearly engages the architectural traditions of the ornamental dairy that Eliot knew so well. But the pointed irony in Hetty's work is that she refuses the maternalist messages such structures inscribe, Ironically representing the reproductive maternal body that is absent from the landed community of Hayslope, Hetty in the dairy enacts a “performance” of maternity for decadent aristocratic imitation that importantly masks her infanticidal body (128). Her beauty in the simple costume of the dairy, “the linen butter-making apron, with its bib, seemed a thing to be imitated in silk by duchesses, since it fell in such charming lines” (128). Eliot suggests that she mocks landed women's play at dairy work, but her narrative embraces the dairy's fertilized visual conventions wholeheartedly. Hetty's very work is, like her workspace, a delicious spectacle:

        … they are the prettiest attitudes and mow-ments
        into which a pretty girl is thrown in making up butter
        -tossing movements that give a charming curve to the arm,
        and a sideward inclination of the round white neck;
        little patting and rolling movements with the palm of
        the hand, and nice adaptations and finishings which
        cannot at all be effected without a great play of the
        pouting mouth and the dark eyes. And then the butter
        itself seems to communicate a fresh charm—it is so
        pure, so sweet-scented; it is turned off the would with
        such a beautiful firm surface, like marble in a pale
        yellow light! More over, Hetty was particularly clever
        at making up the butter; it was the one performance of
        hers that her aunt allowed to pass without severe
        criticism; so she handled it with all the grace that
        belongs to mastery. (129)

The eroticism of Hetty's work fetishizes the butter, and while the physical work of making butter does not expose her body, it transforms it into a commodity, displaying her “charms” for landed and working class consumption. As if reproducing the mother-infant dyad, Hetty and the butter seem to “communicate” in the novel's first dairy scene (129). But their contact has the rather confusing, disorienting effect of transformation; it is difficult to tell what Hetty is, desirous subject or object of desire, adult woman or “pouting” baby herself, with “a round white neck.” When her “charming” arm meets the “fresh charm” of the product, they merge into each other, losing their separate categories. The “curve to the arm” and the “sideward inclination” of her neck suggest the dyadic poses of the paintings of Madonna and child that Mary Ann Evans visited daily in Berlin as she wrote Adam Bede. Indeed, “like marble in a pale yellow light,” Hetty's butter recalls the flesh of golden-haloed Christ children, while the “pouting mouth and dark eyes” of the dairymaid suggest the erotic Madonnas that Eliot knew so well and that seemed particularly important to her as she composed this novel (84).[9] Hetty's beauty reflects the Madonna and child in more ominous ways as well. The Madonna and Christ child tableau gains much of its poignancy from its later-image, the pieta, in which Mary holds the maimed body of Christ. Each representation of Madonna and child provides the viewer's memory of Christ's death (Mavor 50).

Hetty's body too seems to rupture the categories which the dyad constructs. She evokes a raw violence in the beholder who sees her beauty as one to “crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you” (84). She is “made to turn the heads, not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women” (84). Hetty's adult female beauty is identified as also in fantile, “like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks” or “babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief” (84). If “scolding” most “naturally flowed” from Rachel Poyser, usually the “severest of mentors” on the farm, with Hetty she is “fascinated in spite of herself” and she “continually gazed at Hetty's charms by the sly” (85). Hetty's beauty overthrows the strict reproductive categories of the farm by simultaneously evoking maternal and infantile responses, the desires to consume, praise, nurture, and destroy. Rather than representing the preindustrial dairy as a sign of a “gentler green world” we may associate with the preindustrial setting, Eliot suggests its maternalist pleasures are quite dangerous (Bate 557). When women take pleasure in their work of milk giving, transforming work into play, or worse, work standing still like the woman early in the novel who lactates languorously, looking as if “nothing else can be expected of” her, their metaphoric or physical transformation seems to exile them to a dyadic place so exclusive as to be separate from thought itself (194). “She's got no conscience, no conscience,” complains the novel's schoolmaster Bartle Massey of his lactating dog, Vixen, “it's all run to milk” (245). Once mother's milk begins to run, moreover, it seems difficult to contain. Surely the suspect pleasures of Hetty's dairy play are a foreboding precursor to the painful excess of human milk that must be a convicting sign of her infanticide.

The desire for both mother's milk and its place of production, the visual scene of the dairy itself, is represented as well as a desire that is equally uncontrollable, a sickness: “The dairy is certainly worth looking at; it was a scene to sicken for with a sort of calenture in hot and dusty streets—such coolness, such purity, such fresh fragrance … pure water; such soft colouring” (AB 127). “Calenture” is a “disease incident to sailors within the tropics, characterized by delirium in which the patient, it is said, fancies the sea to be green fields, and desires to leap into it” (OED 33). The “hot and dusty streets” of the urban present are in the narrator's metaphor what a sailor's shipboard exile from green land was, while the sailor's green fields, a fantasy of his diseased mind, transforms into the “scene to sicken for,” the dairy itself. To watch dairy work as a spectacle is to view the cultural labor of the processing of “the green fields” themselves, which distinctly mark the flavor of “new pressed cheese” and “firm butter” (AB 84). To eat these products is to imbibe the landscape itself and to make Eliot's image of calenture a surreally organic synesthesia. The “sickness” of modern life, Eliot seems to suggest, lies in its distance from its rural origins and its “first foods.” The modern, displaced urbanite yearns for the country dairy as the stranded sailor yearns for land, but in Eliot's own fantasy dairy mother's milk and the act of milk giving become representations capable of transforming into a bitterly hard reality. Milk's “coolness, purity, and fresh fragrance” are fully fleshed out in all their tantalizing materiality. But like calenture's mirage of green fields, milk and milk giving are capable of abrupt shifts in meaning. A material product of maternity that is distinctly separate from the mother's will, the presence of milk seems to promise a harbor it may not deliver. The danger of calenture is that the process of transformation is a fantasy to drown in. Eliot tells the story of Hetty's pregnancy as a series of such terrifying transformations, often involving involving drowning pools and green earth. Hetty seeks to end her life in “water,” a “pool” in which to drown herself as both a pregnant and postpartum body (453). Later, she imagines an ironically green womb-like grave in the ground as a protecte d site in which to abandon her newborn. Meeting with the realities of her body, Hetty's attempts to assert her own will over biology, even during her stay at an inn, ironically named “the Greenman,” founder upon the “natural” signs of her postpartum state. The dairymaid's erotic play with “mother's” milk underscores the relentless materiality of her own biology.

While human lactation may destroy the beautiful but unintelligent Hetty, its figurative presence is even more disturbingly unmanageable for her far more acute mentor, Rachel Poyser. Hetty's aunt is a sharp wit, whose intelligence, business acumen, and expertise at her craft should signal her special authority as the archetypal preindustrial British dairywoman, national icon of the competent farm mistress who perpetuates female discipline as she passes down her secret recipes and techniques. However, Poyser's competence with cow's milk also seems to highlight, ironically, her incompetence as a maternal disciplinarian. Indeed, her own state of “inflammation,” some illness suffered after the birth of her daughter Totty, places her ailing maternal body in direct contrast to her thriving business in animal milk (76). When Eliot represents Poyser offering Adam Bede a drink of whey, her narrative again evokes the sensations of human maternity. As Poyser offers the whey, her pleasure in giving mimes both the “tranquility and contentedness” of the “let-down” lactation reflex: “a quiet complacency overspread her face like a stealing sunbeam, and gave a milder glance than usual to her blue-grey eyes, as she looked at Adam drinking the whey” (218). This report of Mrs. Poyser's quietly concealed pleasure in giving milk, like so many of Eliot's representations of the imbibing of cow's milk, is interrupted by the narrator's abrupt and enthusiastic intrusion into the scene with a cry of pleasure at receiving, “Ah! I think I taste that whey now-with a flavor so delicate that one can hardly distinguish it from an odour, and with that soft gliding warmth that fills one's imagination with a still, happy dreaminess” (218). In Eliot's fiction, the representational dyad is mutually pleasurable for both the matronly Poyser and the young suitor; Adam likes the whey better than “beer any day” (217). “Here's to your health,” he tells Poyser, “and may you allays have strength to look after your own dairy, and set pattern t'all the farmer's wives in the country” (218). The irony in the statement is of course that Rachel Poyser's excellent management of her dairy milk is met by her failures as a maternal guide. Were her dairy to “set pattern t'all the farmer's wives in the country,” it would be as an irresistible trysting site. Poyser's exacting surveillance of her dairy's goods is matched by her failures in maternal surveillance, and the improper regulation of sexual pleasure on the farm causes the novel's tragedy, her niece's transportation for child murder. As if to cleanse the novel of its undisciplined containment of human milk and its pleasures, Eliot attempts to remediate its tragedy through the marriage of Adam Bede and the preacher Dinah Morris. Infamously disembodied, Morris is an orphan (112), raised by hand rather than the breast and when the woman preacher becomes Adam's wife at novel's end, we meet her children only after they are grown and presumably, weaned. For Eliot, the pleasures of embodied maternity are consistently represented as potentially extraordinarily disruptive to women's productivity and even to their morality. Her dairy contains multiple ideological paradoxes that dramatize the potential conflicts between the demands and pleasures of “dyadic” maternity and individual desire.

Hetty's embodied experience of maternity costs her life and makes a strong case for protecting women against the alarmingly self-erasing physical powers of maternity whose “sly” and silent pleasures evade the discipline of culture and whose embodied demands concur with biological determinism, maternal self-sacrifice, and the expenses of an economy of reproduction that seem costly indeed to women. Earlier I mentioned Jules Law's critique of pro-breast-feeding rhetorics, which often present lactation as the “proper” disciplinary function of the breast (“Politics of Breastfeeding” 409). However, modern culture—its fictions, medical literature, and popular guides—often represents lactation quite discursively. In culture, though the function of breast-feeding might be represented as “proper,” it is also represented as a potentially mysterious, destablizing force in women's lives. Immersed in the pleasures of the Hall Farm or Talbothays, Eliot's Hetty and Hardy's Tess represent the historical difficulties of reconciling human breastfeeding with maternal pleasure, autonomy and productivity. Certainly, through Hetty, her infanticidal milkmaid, “Eliot challenges traditional assumptions and about the force of maternal instinct that [Herbert] Spencer” inscribes, that is, the assumption of women's essentially maternal and nurturing natures, a stereotype later “uncritically reinscribe[d]” by Darwin (Paxton 60). An important effect of Eliot's radical rejection of male science, however, is her treatment of embodied maternity as a transformation that impacts drastically upon women's autonomy and productivity. Eliot's fetishized dairy, then, seems a cultural mirage that conceals real narratives of the pleasures—and the pains —of milk-giving women.

By 1890, popular anxieties over the pleasures and pains of breast-feeding were exploited by the baby formula industry.[10] New techniques in dairy farming, milk processing, and transportation made possible the large-scale dairies like the fictional Talbothays Dairy in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. These innovations made maternal breast-feeding seem only one among a number of good options for infant-feeding. The large-scale “liquid milk” dairy, rather than the small-scale, artisan or Farmhouse dairy,[11] made enough milk and processed it quickly enough to sell it, condensed, dried, or even delivered fresh by rail, to the masses. The quality of such milk was debatable for once it reached its destination it was often diluted with water, as the “strength” of Talbothay's milk is “lowered” after it arrives for city folk to drink, disembodied “so that it may not get up into their heads” (147). Following so soon upon Tess's human attempts at infant care and breast-feeding, the diluted milk of Talbothays suggests a correspondence to Tess's own disembodied and disembodying experience of maternity. Her milk too is literally diluted in the novel, given sparingly to her intent son after she returns to work in the harvest field on the day the child dies. Tess's arrival at Talbothays after Sorrow's death follows a reproductive narrative that constructs breast-feeding as among the novel's rural labors lost to industrialization. Simultaneously, the traditional role of women as managers of their own dairies is also now lost. With mechanization, rail transportation, and large-scale farming techniques, the national icon of the dairywoman was replaced by an “innovation,” the dairyman.[12] Thus, Hardy's ironic placement of Dick Crick, the dairyman who manages Talbothays, refers to the aggressive historical entry of men into dairying by the end of the nineteenth century and clearly engages the gendered politics of that entry. Linking Tess's maternal history us Talbothays' agricultural project not only exchanges her failed maternal work for “fresh, virginal,” successful labor, but like the rest of England's large-scale liquid milk dairies, it replaces maternal milk on a grand, national scale. When Tess and Angel Clare ship their milk to London, she marvels that it will be consumed by “babies who have never even seen a cow” (147). As a milkmaid at Talbothays, she participates in both a dying agricultural tradition and a burgeoning industrial project.

The largesse of Hardy's dairy, moreover, seems poised to critique the difficulty of Tess's embodied experience of maternity that fails to sustain her child and fails, Hardy is careful to note, to provide her maternal pleasure. Breastfeeding the infant Sorrow, Tess is represented as “courageous,” disciplined, and altruistic, but fundamentally bodily incompetent, disembodied by the novel's dual rapes of industrialization and sexual exploitation, and perhaps by her working body's inability to be “useful” as a lactating mother (71). The mother-infant dyad is represented as symbolically important in Hardy's novel, and nursing produces “violent[ly]” conflicting emotions in Tess (70). But as a source of infant food, the breast is clearly inadequate to sustain the “tender and puny” child who fails to thrive (71). In the field in the light of day, Tess's exposed lactation, ironically unlike her hidden pregnant body, identifies her as a child-focused good mother, a “pure woman” who likely did not return Alec d'Urberville's sexual advances. But as a lactating woman, particularly in contrast to the vast efficiency of the late-nineteenth-century factory farm Tess's competency is doubtful.

Hardy also wrestles with the materiality of breastfeeding as an insistent mother-infant dyad impairs Tess's autonomy. He represents the practice of breast-feeding as the ultimate sign of Tess's biological vulnerability, the public end to her private sexual exploitation and her concealed, entombed pregnancy. The scandal of the novel for a Victorian audience lay in the subtitle: A Pure Woman. That radically suggests that even if Tess had not been raped but had engaged in sex with d'Urberville of her own volition and for her own pleasure, her morality remained pure and good. However, while it seems possible for Hardy to imagine Tess once experiencing pleasure as d'Urberville's lover, it seems impossible that he imagined Tess experiencing anything other than pain as Sorrow's lactating mother. Allowing any sensuous pleasure to disrupt the novel's disciplined dyadic picture of maternity remains verboten in the novel. Indeed, figuring Tess's public breast-feeding as a “courageous” sign of her moral purity, he also subtly associates breastfeeding with maternal depletion and sacrifice, representing the experience as clearly disciplinary rather than pleasurable. In stressing the maternal sacrifice of Tess's public breastfeeding, then, Hardy elides the practice's embodied pleasures. Refracting cultural depictions of breastfeeding that critique its pleasures while reifying its disciplines,[13] Hardy's breastfeeding scene resonates with Tess's sacrifice and martyrdom, a relinquishing of the “sweet independence” that Tess craves by the end of her pregnancy (71).

Tess then refuses to eat before nursing Sorrow. While the other harvesters “fell to, the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a cup,” Tess does “not accept [their] offer” of a drink of ale, but turns herself to the task of infant feeding (70). Nor does Tess talk while nursing the baby, but isolates herself from the social group. The baby, Sorrow, is clearly a “burden” to his young childcare providers, Tess's brothers and sisters who hand him over to the child-woman sister to feed while they run off to play (70). While nursing, Tess is represented as an island unto herself, a penal colony even. Ironically, Hardy suggests that were Tess to be on “a desert island,” she would have “taken” her maternity “calmly and found pleasures therein. Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations” (71). And yet, Hardy is careful to avoid representing those “innate sensations” of maternity and lactation, the “pleasures therein” of maternity. Tess's sensations are. entirely disciplinary: self-imposed silence, self-imposed thirst, and self-imposed hunger. That she carries on “courageously” with her public breastfeeding in the absence of satisfying the most basic maternal needs, particularly the piqued thirst and hunger experienced by many breastfeeding women,[14] ensures her canonization. Nursing the baby, Tess appears, significantly, to the community of workers as a bona fide victim of rape, rather than seduction: “A little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming o't [the baby], I reckon” says one of the field laborers watching Tess nurse, “There were they that heard sobbing one night last year in The Chase; and it mid ha' gone hard wi' a certain party if folks had come along” (70).

The absence of pleasure from Hardy's scene of “stealthy” human breast-feeding reflects the success of domestic ideology's historical prohibitions against women's embodied experience of breast-feeding as a maternal pleasure.[15] As Tess prepares to nurse Sorrow, she must overcome her shame at having to expose her breast and publicly feed her illegitimate child: “Tess, with a curiously stealthy yet courageous movement, and with a still rising colour, unfastened her frock and began suckling the child” (70). Although “the men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke,” Tess further isolates herself from the group of workers through her silence (70). She becomes an object of their discussion and of Hardy's free, indirect discourse. As she nurses the baby, one man “with absent-minded fondness, regretfully strok[es] the jar that would no longer yield a stream. All the women but Tess fell into animated talk, and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair” (70). Refusing to socialize, smooth her hair, or eat while breast-feeding places Tess within maternal nature and beyond culture itself. Moreover, Hardy's free, indirect discourse passes from Tess's breast of milk to a man's “jar that would no longer yield a stream,” an image of depletion that suggests either the field-man's desire for Tess's milk or the meagerness of the milk itself, now offered on an industrial schedule in which nursing breaks are dictated by the pace of the reaping machine (70). To keep up with her milk supply for a very young infant such as Sorrow would necessitate that Tess nurse the child very frequently, every few hours; the cessation of frequent nursing has the effect of reducing the maternal milk supply and ultimately, causes the failure of lactation (Jellife and Jellife 221).

Located within a highly exclusive representation of the mother-infant breast-feeding dyad, Tess is entirely absorbed with feeding the infant, thinking about the infant, loving, hating the infant:

    When the infant had taken its fill the young mother sat it
    upright in her lap, and looking into the far distance
    dandled it with a gloomy indifference that was almost
    dislike; then all of a sudden she fell to violently kissing
    it some dozens of time, as if she could never leave off, the
    crying at the vehemence of an onset which strangely combined
    passionateness with contempt. (70)

Tess becomes less a subject as she nurses than a spectacle and Hardy engages in one of his long digressions about the color of her eyes and her “almost standard” or paradigmatic beauty at this moment (71). While the women talk about the role her beauty may have played in her rape, they identify, her breast-feeding as a sign of affection for and commitment to her infant: “She's fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en, and say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard” (70). Tess's combination of “outdoor work” and public breast-feeding identifies her as an almost “standard” woman, a paradigm (71). So powerful is the visual representation of the nursing dyad that it is publicly taken for affectionate parenting, masking the conflicted “indifference” Tess feels for her baby (70). The same standard of female physicality that defines her as beautiful, insists that her “passionateness” fight her “contempt” for the child, particularly and heroically, when it dies (70).

Tess feels “useful” and “independent” only when she is working at paid labor: “She felt that she would do well to be useful again-to taste anew sweet independence at any price” (71). One “price,” it seems, of Tess having left her child to work in the fields, is the reduction of her own milk supply and possibly the compromising of her child's health.[16] In a pattern typical of the nineteenth-century agricultural laborer, Tess's infant is brought to her for feeding only at lunch. Historically, when a worker such as Hardy's Tess was absent from home, her baby received some form of supplemental milk. In both city and country, both working and non-working mothers were encouraged, after 1859, to supplement their own milk with cow's milk, formula, or pap in order to foster “independence” in both mother and infant.[17] However, preparing infant formulas in a laborer's cottage such as the Durbeyfields's would have been a perilous business. Insufficient sanitation could easily allow the bacteria E. coli to multiply in nipples, bottles, or in the impure water itself with which formula or cow's milk was mixed. In working class homes in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, E. coli-caused diarrhea was the leading killer of bottle-fed infants (Ross 143). Even if cow's milk formulas were canned and sterile, the implements used to open it rarely were as well. Hardy does not specify the cause of Sorrow's death, but clearly the baby has not been thriving, “some such collapse had been probable, so tender and puny was its frame” (72). Such small and frail infants were common amongst the hand-fed infants of the rural working classes and even of the middle classes when an infant would not “take to” hand-feeding (Lerner 241). It is unclear whether Sorrow's illness is related to feeding practices at all. However, it comes as no shock to the reader if Sorrow's death is considered in the context of turn-of-the-century infant-feeding practices, widely known now and in 1890 to play a significant role in infant mortality (72).

It is equally important, and all too easy to forget, that infant feeding amongst both agricultural and artisan working women historically involved hard choices such as the one Tess makes. The bottle was indeed a new technology that was difficult to wash, but it only replaced earlier technologies that could be equally lethal, feeding horns or rags soaked with sugar or pap, and, most dangerous of all, the administering of opium syrups to quiet infants whose caregivers were working or absent. Artisans who employed wetnurses, moreover, ran the risk of exposing infants to milk that was nutritionally inadequate or carried disease.[18] It was never easy to combine a consuming task like paid artisan or agricultural work with maternal breast-feeding (Fildes W 45). This makes Tess Durbeyfield's scant feeding of Sorrow, whom she nurses once during a 12-hour harvest day in the fields, a practice that predates the reaping machine that times Tess's day.

It is difficult to assess whether Hardy includes the breast-feeding scene under discussion here as a representation of the preindustrialized past or the industrialized future. The disciplined nursing scene that precedes the death of Tess's infant, however, seems to undermine her own biological role in his survival. Both her milk and her care-taking efforts seem “useless,” like her entire experience of maternity (73). Indeed, as the child slowly slips away from its unknown, wasting illness, Tess, like a child “rock[s] herself upon the bed” out of her own inability to help Sorrow (73). Where hours earlier she had “violently kissed it dozens of times” after nursing it, now she finds “it was useless to devour the little thing with kisses” (73). Her maternal body provides no sustenance for the child's body and she agonizes over the loss of its unbaptized soul. Tess's disembodied “passion” is never more ironic than when she christens the infant with a fluid she has faith in: water she has blessed with the help of the Book of Common Prayer. In the novel's extraordinary baptism scene, Tess is far more confident at blessing Sorrow with water and following the printed ritual for baptism than she is in feeding the infant with the doubtful fluid of her body.

Certainly, against the super efficient factory of bovine lactation that is Talbothays Dairy, Tess's human maternity and resulting ruin seem disproportionately “useless” and futile (72). The failure of her own milk is terribly magnified by the technology of Talbothays Dairy, a new kind of dairy farm run by a new kind of dairy farmer who, significantly, is a man of science rather than a female artisan. This essay argues against recent and long-standing trends in Hardy criticism that envision Talbothays as Hardy's attempt “to project Tess and Angel into a time and place outside history” (Silverman 18), a “pastoral setting” in a “realm markedly outside history and culture” (Bronfen 82). Indeed as architecture “gives tangible form” to “cultural memory” in Hardy's novels, Talbothays Dairy is sharply contemporary, attuned to both agricultural history and the new gendering of labor (Byerly 150). Talbothays Dairy resembles a preindustrial farmhouse dairy only on the surface. Underneath, it is something else entirely.

Several factors make Talbothays Dairy closer to a factory than to the typical farmhouse, family-run dairy. Talbothays has “nearly a hundred milchers”; its “fifty acres” is contrasted to the ten-acre farms to which Tess is accustomed (85). Crick uses machines to churn butler and produces not the complex artisan products of the farmhouse dairy but rather “liquid milk” and butter. More important is the absence of preindustrial “family labor” at Talbothays (McMurry 251). The farm uses seasonal labor, has no permanent staff, and is run by a dairyman rather than a dairywoman, a sign of industrialization and innovation in this very traditionally female work. Mr. Crick, the dairy manager, is an entrepreneur; his “long White ‘pinner’ was somewhat finer and cleaner than the wraps of the others” and his “jacket underneath had a presentable marketing aspect” (83). His “double character” as farmer and bourgeois business man “shining in broadcloth in his family pew at church” is “so marked as to have inspired a rhyme: Dairyman Dick all the week:—on Sundays Mister Richard Crick” (83). Mr. Crick's wife identifies herself as a member of the upwardly-mobile bourgeoisie, as she does not participate in the dairy business but holds herself aloof from it, making her place strictly within the house and its domestic confines, a tendency that would have struck Victorian readers as new-fangled. As the traditional keepers of regional recipes, dairywomen often refused outsiders entry to the dairy. However, Mr. Crick offers the dairy to Angel Clare as an open-classroom of agriculture. “Practical” (119), rational, scientific, Crick has no secrets to protect, and Angel Clare is interested in learning basic husbandry, not a specialized art. Talbothays location in “the Valley of Great Dairies” rather than in Tess's home, “the valley of Little Dairies,” also associates it with quantity of milk rather than quality of product. In the valley “milk and butter grew to rankness, and were produced more profusely, if less delicately, than at her home” (80). The land itself possesses a disturbingly pumped fecundity, an excess of production and reproduction with a high waste content; a metaphor for nature's and man's indifferent urge to recreate itself without, as Tess has recently discovered, regard for consequence, quality, or efficiency.

While Tess envisions the dairy as a recuperative setting, Hardy steeps it in images that make it a fecund wasteland: “The river had stolen from the higher tracts and brought in particles to the vale all this horizontal land; and now, exhausted, aged and attenuated, lay serpentining along through the midst of its former spoils” (83). The very call to the valley's “infinite cows” spread “as if by contagion” and as "each animal lingered for her turn to arrive the milk oozed [forth and fell in drops to the ground (83,82). In the valley of little dairies “the water-flower was the lily; the crowfoot here” (81). “Nothing is more likely,” writes Arthur Young, “to give that almost caustic quality which some cheeses are possessed of, than the common and bulbous crowfoots; not only their flowers, but their leaves, are singularly acrid” (Farmer's Calendar 375). Talbothays is a precursor to the factory that exploits an exhausted country and a surplus of seasonal human labor for profit. If the link between artisan and product is disrupted, so are the more primal links of family and community, both replaced by supply and demand at its most exploitive. And in this novel, in which place and self arc so consistently juxtaposed (who and what is not a ruin in Tess?), human ruin is embodied by environmental or architectural ruin. The Valley of the Great Dairies has this novel's particularly disturbing ability to evoke spaces that simultaneously represent a sepulchre and the comforts of home. Talbothays and the Valley of the Great Dairies, in historical context, is as much a tomb setting as the novel's Stonehenge or the d'Urberville crypt. Hardy's “great” dairy could not have existed before the railway system, improved technologies of refrigeration, and processes for drying, condensing, and canning milk—its vast amounts of milk, cream, and butter would have spoiled before they could have reached a market large enough to consume them. Enabled by technology, Talbothays is an altogether different space than the traditional British farmhouse dairy. Images of bitterness, death, and depletion are its harbingers. The serpentine river, a traditional signifier of the erotic or fecund female body in landscape architecture,[19] has buried itself, depleted, as it winds its way down the valley, a natural end that is none the less foreboding as Tess looks down on the valley and prepares to enter it.

But Talbothays Dairy is green in its rankness, so lovely that its very beauty often overshadows its generic role in the industrialization of dairy work. In the dairy, Hardy has been seen as representing the “aesthetic value both in natural objects and processes, and in the products of strenuous human labor” (Byerly 151). Irving Howe envisioned Talbothays as the antithesis of the factory and its “mechanization, impersonality, alienation, dehumanization” (Howe 417). At Flintcomb Ash, hell to the heaven of Talbothays, “Tess as a woman, Tess as a distinctive person hardly exists; she has become a factor in the process of production” (Howe 417). Jonathan Bate recently argues that Hardy generally “places mobile new men and advanced ideas in opposition to rooted types and traditional ways. The irreconcilable clash between the forces of tradition and of innovation is at the core of his tragic vision” (Bate 550). So Talbothays Dairy in Hardy criticism has been associated with those forces of “tradition” “rooted” in a green past. But agricultural and architectural history contest the green category of this late-century dairy. In Tess, Talbothays Dairy too erases “Tess as a woman,” and “as a distinctive” working individual. Even more ironic, Talbothays erases “Tess as a woman” because it erases her own milk, her reproductive history, and the milk of other women who will purchase cow's milk rather than breastfeed.

Tess comes to Talbothays through a “brief business letter” to work for the “hard-eyed” dairyman (84). The latter speaks a particularly deflating language that is consistently aimed at correcting the superstitions of women dairy workers. When, at the first breakfast at the dairy, Tess says that she has sometimes looked at the stars and felt her mind fall “hundreds and hundreds of miles away” from her body, the dairyman, placing his knife and fork “erect on the table, like the beginning of a gallows,” jokes that he has never felt his “soul rise so much as an inch above my shirt-collar” (94). Tess's disembodiment here is a critical legend, but it has never been connected to the disembodying nature of her work in the dairy. There, Crick cannot afford to tolerate any dairymaid's “fancy” or “choice” (95). To allow a woman to become used to milking a particular cow meant the latter might not accept a new milker, and help comes and goes with no permanence in large-scale dairying where work is also seasonal. No “fondness for a particular pair of hands” is allowed to develop then (95). “It was Dairyman Crick's rule to insist on breaking down these partialities and aversions by constant interchange.… The maid's private aims, however, were the reverse of the dairyman's rule” (95). By contrast, in the farmhouse dairy intimacy was welcomed as the precursor to quality. Large-scale production demands sacrifice, often of the human spirit, of the land, and of the animal body, and Talbothays reinscribes that loss. It is not a green refuge, but a simulacrum of the traditional British dairy. Even its name, strangely not a possessive, seems to have lost its original identity.[20] Talbothays, in fact no green space in Hardy's Tess, imagines a “gentler green world” (Bates 557); all spaces suggest nature's occupation by human industry.

In her recent book on Hardy and the visual arts, Alison Byerly has written that

    Work was defined by nineteenth-century philosophers its an
    alteration of nature, whose purpose is to mediate between
    human kind and the world. By characterizing work as an
    extension (rather than radical transformation) of nature,
    and allying it with art, Hardy brought art and nature closer
    together. (Byerly 151)

The gendering of the dairy and its arts promise that dairy work allows women to extend rather than radically transform the female ability of lactation, turning that labor not just into a valuable commodity and source of income, but into an art and status that they are denied at Talbothays Dairy. The preservation of the almost sacred dairy space in the architectural tradition of the ornamental dairy linked dairy workers to the biology of lactation in an almost ritualistic manner. Tess's short-lived maternity, which ends with the death of her child and the refusal of his proper burial, makes an ironic precursor to that time at the dairy where milking “bred serenity” and the promise of self invention (84). But human motherhood never permits Tess the “serenity” or the authority that dairywork can. The bionarrative of the novel overturns the incarceration of the house only to find a new prison on the farm where women's bodies bear unwanted children and “useless” milk in contrast to the high efficiency of technologically induced bovine lactation.

While critics have historically envisioned Hardy's dairy as a pinnacle of preindustrial labor that “only a few decades of technological change would” destroy (Howe 415), in actuality, Talbothays is technological change itself. This particular change in the nineteenth century, moreover, legitimized the negotiation of major changes in infant feeding practices in a market economy. Not surprisingly, when maternal milk is made unstable in value, fetishized as an adult pleasure or illness of desire, disciplined as sacrifice or denigrated as depleting or inferior, and withheld from human infants in each novel, biological discourses of female tenderness and placidity meet the desire for female autonomy in explosive scenes of child abandonment and infanticide. The reversal of the placement of dairy scenes discussed here, entering in Eliot's mid-century novel before the birth of Hetty Sorrel's child and in Hardy's late novel after the birth of Tess's child, suggests the sequential gains of an organized cultural abandonment of human breastfeeding. Immersed in the pleasures of Talbothays or the Hall Farm Dairy, Eliot's Hetty and Hardy's Tess represent the historical difficulties of reconciling human breastfeeding with maternalist discourses that mandate against maternal pleasure, autonomy, and productivity.

As Eliot and Hardy link the work of dairywomen to narratives of maternity, maternal breastfeeding is represented as a practice in conflict with the technologies and ideologies of the “improved” farm, prefiguring a pattern of representation that will critique the “cost” of maternal lactation even as it memorializes the practice as a luxury of “Old Leisure” (AB 515). The myth of loss created by juxtaposing these mid and late Victorian novels' rapid, progression to the abandonment of maternal breastfeeding is no small part of their construction of the “ache of modernism” (De Laura 380). Ironically, each milkmaid under discussion here makes the practice of providing human milk seem less a natural process than a series of difficult choices made to integrate infants' needs with cultural values and the will and desires of working mothers. The novels construct an increasingly discursive cultural discussion of breastfeeding and the supplementation of human milk, representing the practice of human breastfeeding as one increasingly subject to cultural discipline. Hence, while Eliot's mid-century representations of human lactation are very concerned with their potentially disruptive or counterproductive pleasures, Hardy's see the loss of that maternal pleasure as a fait accompli of culture. While each novel's representation of maternity is complex each clearly construct breastfeeding as a universally anxious practice, a green custom that is less “mourned” than disciplined in both pre and postindustrial settings that firmly contrast the intoxicating goodness of bovine milk to its more questionable human analogue.

1. A mythology of the “naturalness” of labor practices in the nineteenth-century dairy is olden found in the language used to describe the dairy setting in fiction. Particularly in Hardy's Tess, the dairy is located as natural by a diverse group of readers who, like Irving Howe, oppose its “pastoral” labor to the industrialized factory and the latter's “mechanization, impersonality, alienation, dehumanization” (“Tess of the d'Urbervilles: At the Center of Hardy's Achievement,” in Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Norton Critical Edition [New York, Norton, 1991] 417.) Kaja Silverman implies the natural qualities of Talbothays Dairy in its perceived ability “to project Tess and Angel into a time and place outside history” (18), while Elisabeth Bronfen envisions it as a “pastoral setting” in a “realm markedly outside history and culture” (82). These references can be found, respectively, in “History, Figuration and Female Subjectivity in TD,” and “Pay as You Go: Exchanges of Bodies and Signs,” in The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret Higgonet, ed. (Urbana, 1993). The term “taskscape” belongs to cultural studies scholar Barbara Bender's collection of essays on landscape, and in particular, her essay “Stonehenge: Contested Landscapes,” in her Landscape: Politics and Perspectives,” Oxford, 1993. Like Bender, I am interested in challenging the view of landscape that heretofore has informed Eliot and Hardy studies. As an aesthetic term, “landscape” itself imagines the beauty of a space separately from its value as a record of both political, environmental, and economic contest. The gendered economic and social history of the dairy as a place of work in addition to a site of visual performance is rarely discussed in reference to Adam Bede's preindustrial dairy or Tess's dairy factory, Talbothays, Despite each novel's references to industrialization, each dairy space has a tradition of being critically perceived as stable enduring, and legitimate or benign.
2. The term “dyad” is placed in quotations here in order to indicate its problematic envisioning of the nursing pair of mother and child its an exclusive entity, separate and inviolable. The construct of the nursing dyad intensifies the intimacy and privacy of the representation of human breastfeeding, excluding the presence of a third party (another pregnancy, another nursing child, a caregiver, a sexual partner or companion). It seems important to emphasize the role played by others in the nursing partnership, especially in light of the many, many powerful representations of the dyad as an ideal. Jules Law understates the complexity of the dyad in the history of breastfeeding discourse and rhetoric when he argues that “breastfeeding advocates regard women and children as a single biological unit,” the “mother-infant dyad” (“Politics” 421). The mother-infant dyad has been importantly deconstructed by breastfeeding advocates as it has been defended by those who oppose them. Law suits brought by breastfeeding advocate groups to assure a woman's right to breastfeed in public (a violation of the essentially private nature of the dyad in traditional representations) have only recently gained this right for women (Traina 380). The exclusivity of the dyad is also compromised by advocates who encourage “tandem” nursing (the nursing of an infant and his or her older sibling) and the pumping or expression of milk by lactating mothers. As Toni Bower shows in her discussion of Pamela II. moreover, the perception of the mother-infant dyad as a subjectivity so necessarily “single” leads Mr. B. in that howl to follow contemporary eighteenth-century British customs and prohibit maternal breastfeeding.
3. In his “The Politics of Breastfeeding,” it is Law's “sense” that “there is a category confusion involved in the idea of a woman's possessing a sex-right in certain modes of infant feeding. Regardless of what position one takes on the relationship between female sexual autonomy and the eroticization of parent-infant relationships, there is no logical necessity dictating the extension of this right to cover certain modes of infant feeding. An argument on behalf of breastfeeding for pleasure should not be made in terms of infant feeding and infant health, which are my concern here. Furthermore, it should be noted that the breastfeeding-advocacy literature that does argue seriously for breastfeeding as a sexual activity tends to avoid the most difficult ethical issues surrounding sexuality (e.g., reciprocity, consent, etc.) and to assume that, as an intimate sexually practice, breastfeeding is sexual in some unproblematic sense” (n. 442). Law refers to five pages (respectively pp. 14, 173–75; 225226) of Shelia Kitzinger's books The Experience of Breastfeeding (Harmondsworth, 1979) and Woman's Experience of Sex: The Facts and Feelings of Female Sexuality at Every Stage of Life (Harmondsworth, 1983), which, now almost 20 years old, briefly explore women's pleasure in breastfeeding, I am certainly not suggesting that the pleasures of breastfeeding are unproblematic, however, I envision the prohibitions and disciplining of its pleasures as amongst our culture's most disturbing responses to maternal pleasure. Indeed, while I agree very much that infant feeding needs to be discussed as a “practice that engages the entire social body and not just the bodies of women and infants” (442), I agree with Cristina Traina that the dialogue on the embodied experience of breastfeeding, in particular the dialogue on the embodied pleasures of breastfeeding, has been prohibited in modern culture, silenced and muted even in our fictional representations of breastfeeding such as the influential narratives under discussion in this article. See Traina's essay, “Maternal Experience and the Boundaries of Christian Sexual Ethics,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Winter 2000), 25:2, 369–405.
4. In Middlemarch, Eliot mocks the tradition of the “fancy farm” dairy, “making a parlor of your cow-house,” through Wedgwood tiles, professional architectural design, and interior decoration (8). She knew such projects through personal experience. Her lather, Robert Evans, managed several large estates in Warwickshire. The largest was the architecturally important Arbury Hall, on whose grounds, at Arbury Farm (now called South Farm) Mary Ann Evans was horn. Robert Evans's job involved building maintenance on the estate which included a fancy neoclassical dairy. As a child, the novelist often accompanied her father to work and knew the estate intimately. The dairy, which still exists, is outfitted in white Wedgewood tiles ordered by Sir Charles Newdigate in the eighteenth century. (See John Martin Robinson's Georgian. Model Farms: A Study of Decorative and Model Farm Buildings in the Age of Improvement 1700–1846, Oxford 1983.)

Thomas Hardy also knew both the farmhouse and the country-house dairy, and plans for the latter survive in his Architectural Notebook (90). Many of the country houses at which he attended weekend parties were likely to have included ornamental garden buildings such as dairies, poultry houses, swanneries, or dovecots, on their grounds. John Martin Robinson quotes an early twentieth-century British novel on the mundane profusion of such garden buildings on English estates, one “garden and dairy and nursery anti lending library, as like as two peas to all the gardens, dairies and nurseries for hundreds of miles around” (‘Saki’ The Unbearable Bessington 1912, qtd. in Robinson 93).

• 5. I would like to thank my colleague, Paula Backscheider, for alerting me to the presence of the dairy in Clarissa. For a discussion of the ornamental dairy, a type of building that remained popular in England until the turn of the twentieth century, see John Martin Robinson, Georgian Model Farms: A Study of Decorative and Model Farm Building in the Age of Improvement, 1700–1846 (Oxford, 1983).
• 6. For discussion of Albert's dairy see Hermione Hobhouse, Prince Albert: His Life and Work (London, 1983).
• 7. In her Book of Household Management (1859), for example, Isabella Beeton urges women to breastfeed. However, her advice is actually a guide to incipient weaning. She envisions maternal breastfeeding as a duty, but a draining one and urges women to accustom their “baby vampire” to artificial or “hand” feeding with cow's milk from birth. She stresses the need for establishing “in-dependence” in both mother and infant (495).
• 8. See Ross's discussion of Victorian infant feeding in Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870 1918 (NY, 1993), and Valerie Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh, 1986).
• 9. See The Journals of George Eliot, P. 304.
• 10. See Rima D. Apple's “'Advertised by our loving friends': The Infant Formula Industry and the Creation of New Pharmaceutical Markets, 1870–1910.” The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (1986) 41:3–23.
• 11. I should point out here that the liquid-milk dairy is distinguished from its predecessor, the artisan dairy, by the difference in perceived quality of the product. While the small-scale farmhouse dairy made a wide variety of products (e.g., cream cheese and many regional varieties of cheese, clotted cream, farmhouse cream, milk, butter, and whey), the large-scale liquid-milk dairy produced and marketed mainly milk. Although such large-scale dairies might manufacture some cheese and butter, these were thought to be inferior to artisan products made by smaller dairies with regional techniques.
• 12. See Sally McMurry's “Women's Work in Agriculture: Divergent Trends in England and America, 1800–1930,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (April 1992) 34(2):248–270.
• 13. See Cristina Traina's essay on this topic, “Maternal Experience and the Boundaries of Christian Sexual Ethics.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Winter 2000) 25(2) 369–405.
• 14. The politics of maternal breastfeeding include an economy of calories burned and calories consumed. In theory, the breastfeeding woman needs to consume all additional five-hundred calories per day. In theory, as well, breastfeeding has the effect of weight loss. However, as Jules Law points out, despite these medical theories, women in privation can continue to produce milk until they reach near drastic stages of nutritional deprivation. The moral and political implications of these theories and clinical evidence from the perspective of maternal autonomy is, as Law notes, disturbing (Law “Politics of Breastfeeding” 420).
• 15. Cristina Trains argues that “maternal pleasure” has been written out of “feminist ethics of sexuality. Most contemporary feminist writing on sexual ethics focuses on issues of personal and institutional power (exploitation, violence, injustice), on procreative freedom and its requisites, or own women's relational and psychological right to pursue pleasure alone or in adult relationships. Although reporting on women's sexual experience has become almost an industry over the past thirty years, few authors have ventured to discuss the moral meaning of the full range of that experience or to suggest how attention to it might alter the categories and norms that inform our moral descriptions of human sexual experience in general” (369–70).
• 16. The pattern of breast-feeding Hardy represents in Tess is typical of British agricultural workers in 1890. While Tess works in the fields, her infant is left in the care of her younger siblings who may or may not be supervised.

    When bottle feeding was popularized among the poor, who
    lacked facilities for sterilization or refrigeration, it
    presented health problems that its early advocates had not
    anticipated.… The bottle's association with summer
    diarrhea was suspected from the 1870s but was established
    definitely only in the early twentieth century.”
    (Ross, Love and Toil 143).

Between 1870 and 1911, however, bottle feeding amongst the poor continued to be advocated. “Death rates from infant diarrhea” climbed in the mid-1880s and did not begin to decline significantly until after 1911. Finally fresh cow's milk, pap, canned, condensed milk, or cereal and whey-based formulas presented another problem separate from bacterial contamination. These formulas were nutritionally inadequate, sometimes indigestible, and provided, of course, none of the immunities provided by human breast milk. Milk in a bottle could be murder itself to a “hand-fed” infant of the rural or urban working poor. The difficulty of combining the tasks of infant feeding and paid work that makes Tess feel “useful” is another difficulty shared by urban and rural working mothers, particularly after the decline of wet-nursing in the nineteenth century.

• 17. See Isabella Beeton, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management.
• 18. By “nutritionally inadequate,” I refer to the physiology of breastfeeding which determines the composition of milk. A newborn is best fed by a new mother who produces colustrum and then a milk high in fat content (although in many cases, colustrum which does not “look” like milk, was often withheld from infants). As an infant grows, maternal milk changes in composition. Wetnurses, however, were often at various stages of parturition. See Valerie Fildes, Wetnursing: A History from Antiquity to, the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
• 19. See Stephanie Ross, What Gardens Mean. Chicago, 1997, p. 79.
• 20. I am indebted to Constance Relihan for pointing out the significant absence of a possessive from the name “Talbothays.”

Address correspomdence to Alicia Carroll, Department of English, Auburn University, 9030 Haley Center, Auburn University, AL 36489-5203. E-mail: [email protected]

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): FIGURE 1. SirJohn Sloane, watercolor, c. 1783, Lady Elizabeth Yorke's dairy, Hamels, Hertfordshire. (Photo License: Victoria and Albert Museum.)

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): FIGURE 2. The show dairy, c. 1830—-1840 at Ham House. Surrey. Wedgewood's popular ivy pattern appears to embower the interior walls. (Photo: Andreas von Einsiedel for the National Trust.)

Apple, Rima D. ‘“Advertised by our loving friends’: The Infant Formula Industry and the Creation of New Pharmaceutical Markets, 1870–1910,” The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 41(1986), 3–23.

Bate, Jonathan, “Culture and Environment: From Austen to Hardy.” New Literary History 30(3) (1919), 541–560.

Bender, Barbara. Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Oxford: Berg, 1993.

Beeton, Isabella. Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management. Oxford: Oxford 2000.

Bower, Toni. “'A Point of Conscience”: Breastfeeding and Maternal Authority in Pamela, Part 2" in Greenfield and Barash.

Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Pay as You Go: Exchanges of Bodies and Signs” in Higonet 66–87.

Byerly, Alison. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Casid, Jill H. “Queer(y)ing Georgic: Utility, Pleasure, and Marie-Antoinette's Ornamented Farm,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38(3)(1997), 304–318.

Chandler, Mielle. “Emancipated Subjectivities and the Subjugation of Mothering Practices,” in Abbey 270–286.

Eliot, George. Adam Bede. New York: Penguin, 1986.

-----. The Journals of George Eliot. Eds. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Fildes, Valerie. Breasts, Bottle's, and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding. Edinburgh: Edinburgh P. 1986.

-----. Wetnursing: a History from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.

Gelder, Ann. “Reforming the Body: ‘Experience’ and the Architecture of Imagination in Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” in Greenfield and Barash 252–266.

Greenfield, Susan C. and Carol Barash, eds. Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650–1865. Lexington: U Kentucky P, 1999.

Hardy, Thomas. The Architectural Notebook of Thomas Hardy Dorchester, Dorset: Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, Dorset County Museum, 1966.

-----. Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1991.

Higonnet, Margaret R. The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy: Urbana: U Illinois P, 1993.

Hobhouse, Hermione. Prince Albert: His Life and His Work. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983.

Howe, Irving “Tess of the d'Urbervilles: At the Center of Hardy's Achievement,” in Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton. 1991.

Jellife, Derrick, and Patrice Jellife. Human Milk in the Modern World: Psychosocial Nutritional and Economic Significance. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.

Jenkins, H.M., “Report on the Cheese Factory System,” JRASE, 2nd ser., 6(1870), 201–202.

Johnson, Claudia. “Mary Wollstonecraft: Styles of Radical Maternity,” in Greenfield and Barash 159–172.

Kittler, Freidrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford UP 1990.

Kitzinger, Sheila. The Experience of Breastfeeding. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979.

-----. Women's Experience of Sex. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Law, Jules. “A Passing Corporeal Blight: Political Bodies in Tess of the d'Urbervilles,” Victorian Studies, 40(2), (Winter 1997), 245–270.

-----. “The Politics of Breastfeeding: Assessing Risk, Dividing labor,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 25(2), (Winter 2000), 407–445.

Lerner, Lawrence. Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1997.

Marshall, William. The Rural Economy of Gloucestershire. G. Nichol, 1796.

Mavor, Carol. Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photography. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1995.

McMurry, Sally. “Women's Work in Agriculture: Divergent Trends in England and America, 1800–1930,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34(2), (April 1992), 248–270.

Morrison, Paul. “Enclosed in Openness: Northanger Abbey and the Domestic Carceral,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 33, (Spring 1991), 1–23.

Oxford English Dictionary. London: Oxford UP, 1971.

Palmer, Gabrielle. The Politics of Breastfeeding. London: Pandora, 1998.

Paxton, Nancy. George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the Reconstruction of Gender. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton UP, 1991.

Richardson, Samuel. Clarissa. Or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life. In Eight Volumes. To each of which is added a Table of Contents. The Third Edition. In which Many Passages and Some Letters are Restored from the Original Manuscripts. And to Which is Added, an Ample Collection of such of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments Interspersed Throughout the Work, as may be Presumed to be of General Use and Service 3rd edition. London: Printed for S. Richardsorn, 1851 8 v.

Robinson, John Martin. Georgian Model Farms: A Study of Decorative and Model Farm Buildings in the Age of Improvement, 1700–1846. Oxford UP, 1983.

Ross, Ellen. Love, and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Ross, Stephanie. What Gardens Means. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1997.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile or On Education. Tr. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books, 1979.

Silverman Kaja. “History, Figuration and Female Subjectivity in Tess of the d'Urbervilles,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 18(1984), 5–28.

Squires, Michael. The Pastoral Novel: Studies in George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and D.H. Lawrence. Charlottesville: UP, Virginia, 1974.

Traina, Christina L.H. “Maternal Experience and the Boundaries of Christian Sexual Ethics,” Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 25(2), (Winter 2000), 369–405.

Young, Arthur. The Farmer's Calendar: Containing the Business Necessary to be Performed on Various Kinds of Farms During Every Month of the Year. London: Richard Phillips, 1805 (6th edition).

Williams, Raymond. The (Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

~~~~~~~~

By Alicia Carroll, Auburn University

In 1806 British diplomat Thomas Bruce, seventh earl of Elgin, purchased a number of Greek marble sculptures from the Turks, who ruled Greece at that time. The Elgin Marbles, as they came to be known, were purchased by the British government in 1816. The sculptures, the most significant pieces of which were created by fifth century B.C. master sculptor Pheidias, sparked a furor of enthusiasm for the culture of ancient Greece ("Elgin Marbles"). In "Christmas in the Elgin Room," Thomas Hardy uses such literary elements as setting, diction, and imagery to examine not only the Elgin Marbles and the fate of the religions of ancient Greece, but also his views on the ultimate fate of all religious belief.

In "Christmas in the Elgin Room," Hardy presents a vignette in which the Greek gods and goddesses, in the form of the broken marble statuary on display in the Elgin Room, converse concerning the significance of the tolling of the city bells on Christmas day. The poem is set at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the newly acquired collection was at the height of its fame. It is night, and outside the bells clamorously proclaim the celebration of the birth of another deity who has usurped these fallen gods. There are no human speakers in the poem; in fact, the only human present is the watchman who, apparently eager to go home, counts the clangs of the bells. In stark contrast to the celebration outside, the room that houses the discarded deities is filled with gloom and despair. Once held in awe and reverence, these gods are cast aside like discarded playthings, powerless even to prevent their own capture and exile, much less to be of help to mankind. Whereas they once reigned in splendor atop the sun-drenched Acropolis, they now reside in a "gaunt room / Which sunlight shuns, and sweet Aurore but enters cold" (Hardy 19-20). Even the hall itself seems to contribute to their further decay as it "blears [them ...] with its blight" (5). Although they hear the celebratory bells, these castoff gods find no delight in the revelry, wishing rather that they were still "Radiant as on Athenai's hill" (22). The victory of Christendom seems complete.

The time setting Hardy has selected for the poem is significant. The alliteration of the n's in the first line of the poem ("What is the noise that shakes the night") draws the reader's attention to the fact that it is night. Hardy thus implies that no religion, not even Christianity, has brought light--either in the form of knowledge or any other benefit--to the world. Hardy deliberately sets the poem on Christmas day to juxtapose the ancient religions of Greece with Christianity, implying that Christianity, the dominant religion of British culture, will suffer a fate like that of earlier religions.

By setting the poem at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hardy accomplishes at least two things: First, he subtly reminds the reader of the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in England and therefore implies that the scientific advances of the time would hasten the demise of religion. Second, by setting the poem nearly a century before its publication, Hardy reminds his contemporaries that the Elgin Marbles, although undoubtedly still of interest to historians, were no longer an object of wonder to the general public. Whereas the modern reader might miss Hardy's implication that society would eventually lose interest in all religions and gods, the attentive reader of Hardy's time would have had no difficulty making the connection.

Hardy repeatedly refers to the helpless state of the gods represented by the statues. In the first stanza, the gods refer to themselves as captives. In the second and third stanzas, the reader is told that the gods are exiles and that they have been overthrown by Christianity. The fourth stanza tells us that they have been sold and brought to the museum's "gaunt room" (19). It is worth noting that their impotence is not of recent origin. In stanza three, the gods speak of the time when:

"Pheidias knew

How to shape us
And bedrape us
And to set us in Athena's temple for men's view." (12-15)

In these lines, Hardy demonstrates not only the helplessness of these gods, but also, and most significantly, the fact that they were never anything more than creations of man.

Using the alliteration of the s's in line 2 ("And seems to soar to the Pole-Star height?"), Hardy draws the reader's attention to the image of the "Pole-star." He clearly intends to contrast the star, a means of navigation (guidance), to the guidance that religion has offered (or at least claimed to offer) over the centuries. By highlighting the contrast between natural phenomena and religions, Hardy demonstrates his belief that, whereas the natural phenomena have been and will continue to guide humans, the guidance offered by religion is on the wane.

James Granville Southworth notes that Hardy "sometimes doubted whether or not Christianity could be a religion of permanence.[...] Just as it had supplanted paganism, he thought another religion [might] well supplant it" (100-01). Richard Lloyd observes that Hardy ultimately concluded that "human beings were not subject to a benevolent or a malevolent God; instead, they were subject to the Immanent Will [...] the label Hardy gives to the cold and indifferent force in nature that drives the world and oversees the futile strivings of human beings." This force, in Hardy's view, was no more to be worshiped than gravity or electricity.

When Lord Elgin purchased the captive deities it was with the purpose of preventing their remains from being pulverized for use as building materials; their power to inspire awe or worship had long since vanished ("Elgin Marbles"). Hardy assumed that expanding scientific knowledge would ultimately lead to rejection of religious beliefs by advanced societies.

WORKS CITED "Elgin Marbles." Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 99. Microsoft Bookshelf 99. CD-ROM. Redmond: Microsoft Corporation, 1998.

Hardy, Thomas. "Christmas in the Elgin Room." Thomas Hardy: Selected Poetry. Ed. Samuel Hines. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

Lloyd, Richard. "Hopkins's 'The Wreck of the Deutchland' and Hardy's 'The Convergence of the Twain.'" Explicator 50.1 (1991): 23-25

Southworth, James Granville. The Poetry of Thomas Hardy. New York: Russell, 1966.

~~~~~~~~

By Gayle Holste, Moraine Valley Community College

    "Well, if you look at it their way," he grinned, "the whole
of bloody Australia's a sacred site."
    "Explain," I said.
                                               --The Songlines
                                               Bruce Chatwin[1]

    You upset me baby
    Yeah you upset me baby
    Like being hit by a falling tree
    Woman what you do to

                                              "Upsetter Blues"
                                                    B. B. King

A post-gallows autopsy of murderess and tragic heroine Tess Durbeyfield might, if performed, have begun by noting the presence of two extraordinarily well-developed pairs of body parts: lips and legs. Tess's lips--deep red, warm, kissable, defining features of a mouth Alec d'Urberville calls "maddening"--get her into repeated trouble by the simple fact of her being their possessor. "Poor Tess's sensual qualifications for the part of heroine," sniffed Mowbray Morris in an anonymous 1892 review of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, "are paraded over and over again with a persistence like that of a horse-dealer egging on some wavering customer to a deal, or a slave-dealer appraising his wares to some full blooded pasha."[2] Her legs are glimpsed as rarely as her lips are frequently (thanks to late Victorian hemlines), but they transport her over a remarkable quantity and variety of terrain in the course of the novel, much of it in an effort to avoid or ameliorate the heartache generated by her status as the most visually charismatic megafauna ever to roam the hills and dales of Wessex.[3] Surely no "passive" female protagonist has ever walked so many miles, milked so many cows, threshed so much wheat, harvested so many frozen beets, labored so hard-against the curse of spectacular good looks, above all.[4]

Yet the charge of passivity cannot simply be dismissed. Any character sketch of Tess which begins with lips and legs--unwillingly projected sensuality and wide-ranging bipedal mobility--must end by acknowledging a third defining mode: Tess as Dreamer, by night and day. "Tess is asleep, or in reverie," observes Penny Boumelha, "at almost every crucial turn of the plot: at Prince's death, at the time of her seduction by Alec, when the sleepwalking Angel Clare buries his image of her, at his return to find her at the Herons, and when the police take her at Stonehenge."[5] To these might be added: while floating across the Marlott landscape at dusk, while singing herself along the road to Talbothays Dairy, while wading through the garden towards the sounds of Angel's plucked harp, while harvesting frozen turnips and feeding the wheat-thresher at Flintcomb-Ash farm. NO JOB TOO BIG OR TOO SMALL, the sign on her back seems to read, FOR A MOMENT OF DOWN-TIME. "The incarnate state of Tess's soul," remarks Mary Jacobus, "appears to be as close to sleep--to unconsciousness--as is compatible with going about her work."[6] Feminist readers of Tess have generally been quick to mark such dreaminess as invidious, part of an ideological project through which Tess, with her "mobile peony mouth," is constructed as an instance of the natural--all skittering instinct and passive acquiescence and free-floating reverie, in contrast to Alec's focused willfulness and Angel's intellectual stringency. This politically retrograde "natural" Tess is both a sadistically exploited object of male scopic desire and a continually self-liquidating subject, the "charm[ing]" field-woman upon whose pulchritudinous form Hardy and his textual surrogates gaze with unseemly voyeuristic hunger.[7] "[T]hose of the other sex," remarks the narrator of Tess in an oft-cited passage,

   were the most interesting of this company of binders,
   by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when
   she becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is
   not merely an object set down therein as at ordinary
   times. A field-man is a personality afield; a field-woman
   is a portion of the field; she has somehow lost her own
   margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and
   assimilated herself with it.[8]

Yet such reverie-in-nature-the field-woman's losing of "her own margin"--may be a form of spirit-work, a legitimate mode of defense, a variety of religious experience struggling against colonial enclosure or male scopic desire. What the narrator refers to as "Tess's unassisted power of dreaming" (p. 362) might remind us, I suggest, of another subject people pressured--like the Durbeyfield tribe (indeed, like Hardy himself)[9]--by the force of a calculating metropolitan gaze, a people with a submerged but passionately embraced prehistory rooted in a primordial event known as "the Dreaming." I am referring to the Australian Aborigines--or, rather, the decimated remnants of five-hundred-odd tribes grouped under that name and bound into an informal polity by shared beliefs, rituals, and modes of long-distance communication, the "songlines" memorably evoked by Bruce Chatwin.

Australia is mentioned explicitly at several points in Hardy's novel it, like the American West, is one of several frontiers Angel considers making his fortune on--but my argument here is not for Hardy's deliberate mapping of Aboriginal modes of religious belief onto the inhabitants of Wessex. It is, instead, for a series of striking parallels between the two communities, arising from what might be termed an aboriginal collective unconscious, which throw the overarching plot of Tess in sharp relief and force us to rethink the nature/culture opposition (Tess-as-Nature's-Body, desired/inscribed/raped by men) on which many readings of the novel have pivoted.[10] What passes for an ideological encoding of the natural in Tess--for example, her explicitly remarked continuity with the hills, dales, fields, and photosphere of Wessex--may be seen from an Aboriginal perspective as a sign both of proper acculturation and spiritual attainment, the achieved power of mapping oneself onto and into numinous ancestral terrain. "So long as human consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and sky," insists Leslie Silko, "the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading. 'A portion of territory the eye can comprehend in a single view' does not correctly describe the relationship between a human being and his or her surroundings."[11] The depth of Tess's kinship with her native grounds is suggested when the narrator says of his heroine that "[e]very contour of the surrounding hills was as personal to her as that of her relatives' faces" (p. 75); she has personalized those terrainian curves not by gazing at them, but by tramping them.[12] Yet Tess herself is a kind of numinous terrain, unwillingly mapped by male desire in a manner not wholly separable from the more general colonial project: a "virgin" harbor, like a pretty country-girl, may seem to smile bewitchingly at the keen-eyed explorer who first encounters her. The peculiar agony suffered by Tess, I argue in my reading of the novel, may be glimpsed most clearly at the intersection of these two diametrically opposed mappings: the moment when, to borrow the titles of two exemplary texts, The Mysteries of the Dream-Time are confronted by The Society of the Spectacle.[13]

Confrontations between Aboriginal society and the spectatorial Western eye had been taking place in Australia, in some form or other, since the British government's First Fleet entered Port Jackson in 1788, and had entered a decadent late phase by the time Hardy wrote Tess more than a hundred years later. Few native peoples were more picturesque and entertaining, from the colonial perspective, than down-and-out Abos. "The decay of fringe-dwelling blacks on the edge of white urban culture," writes Robert Hughes, with a hardboiled vividness that makes its own kind of literary spectacle out of aboriginal abjection,

   --the remnants of the Iora, Gammeraigal and
   Daruk--was inexorable and all-pervasive; to
   sympathetic onlookers it seemed a plague,
   and to racist ones a bestial joke. Stupefied
   with the cheapest grade of rum, racked with
   every new disease from tuberculosis to syphilis,
   begging and babbling in the flash-talk and
   gutter argot of the convicts, they were
   caricatures of misery. Even their traditions
   of authority had been parodied by the whites,
   who insisted on giving some elders patronizing
   identity cards in the form of crescent-shaped
   copper plates, with their rank as "chief"
   engraved on them in English.[14]

The traditional artifact being parodied here was the tjuringa, which Bruce Chatwin describes in The Songlines as "an oval-ended plaque, carved from stone or mulga wood, and covered with patterns which represent the wanderings of its owner's Dreamtime Ancestor. In Aboriginal law, no uninitiated person was ever allowed to look on one" (p. 43). One can hardly imagine better proof for Guy Debord's assertion in The Society of the Spectacle that "spectacle's essential character... [is] as a visible negation of life--and as a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself" (p. 14). All that was sacred becomes a floodlit bad joke.

A variety of bad joke is precisely what Parson Tringham plays on John Durbeyfield at the beginning of Tess when he encounters the tipsy peasant one evening and calls out "Good night, Sir John." Tringham has been doing researches; his revelation of Durbeyfield's "ancient and knightly" genealogy provokes delighted babbling shock. "'I've got a wold silver spoon, and a wold graven seal at home, too,'" Durbeyfield cries; "'but, Lord, what's a spoon and seal? ... And to think that I and these noble d'Urbervilles were one flesh all the time. 'Twas said that my gr't-grandfer had secrets, and didn't care to talk of where he came from'" (p. 45). Of course, Tringham continues, there's the problem of ancestral homelands: nothing left except the burial vaults at Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill. "'You don't live anywhere,'" he adds, taking away with his right hand what he's just given with his left. "'You are extinct --as a county family.'" Declining Durbeyfield's offer of a quart of beer at a local tavern, Tringham rides off, leaving Tess's father to "[walk] a few steps in a profound reverie." Later Durbeyfield will show up drunk at the local May-Day procession, leaning back in a rented wagon, "singing in a slow recitative--'I've-got-a-gr't-family-vault-at-Kingsbere - and knighted-forefathers-in-lead-coffinns-there!'" (p. 51). "Before the whites came ... ," writes Chatwin, "no one in Australia was landless, since everyone inherited, as his or her private property, a stretch of the ancestor's song and the stretch of county over which the song passed. A man's verses were his title deeds to territory" (p. 57). Durbeyfield's drunken ditty is a travesty of Aboriginal songline ritual, to be sure, but one that hints at a substratum of shared feeling. The reverie into which he falls on being informed of his submerged genealogy--the last in a line of Olympians!--and its subsequent issue in parceled-out song finds strong parallel in Aboriginal conceptions of creation as a time of "Dreaming" in which a pristine landscape was endowed with geographical features and criss-crossed with songlines. "Not until the period of tjukuha or Dreaming," recounts James Cowan,

   and the mysterious appearance of Sky Heroes, either
   from inside the earth itself or from an ill-defined
   upper region, did the landscape take on a truly
   cosmic significance and attain to form. At the
   conclusion of the Dreaming period the Sky Heroes
   disappeared from the face of the earth, leaving in
   their place their personalized "signatures" in the
   guise of topographic landmarks, contour variations,
   trees, animals--in fact, all manifestations of life
   on earth. (Pp. 25-26)

An Aborigine makes contact with "his" Dreaming--with the Sky Heroes responsible for singing his local habitat into being--by setting off on a Dream-Journey; he goes Walkabout, descends into reverie, sings or dances, regains his soul by reestablishing his bond with numinous ancestral territory. "Ritual," Cowan continues,

   is the instrument by which the Aborigine explores
   the otherworld, the Dreaming. He is the supreme
   liturgist capable of devising ceremonies to embrace
   all aspects of Sky Hero activity, whether they are
   real or imagined ... By embodying the immaterial in
   an action (dance) or a musical construct (song) he
   gives physical credence to a range of numinous
   values and emotions. (P. 122)

Which is, in his own sad way, precisely what the newly-annointed Sir John is attempting to do as he sprawls drunkenly in the back of that hired wagon: devise a liturgy by which he might at once invoke and fuse himself with his Sky Heroes. Sing himself along his ancestral songline towards the Kingsbere vault. Behave for all the world like a man who has suddenly been reunited with his Dreaming.[15]

Literary criticism--the product of a culture premised on an extreme heightening of the visual sense over all others[16]--is uneasy with the sort of language I've just been using, which it tends to dismiss as mystification. Modern regimes of knowledge are regimes of sight, after all: the prisoner observed, the disease-carrier labeled, the narrative anatomized. To this extent criticism is bound up with the general Western drift towards spectacularity--a separation of vision from participation--and is thus, to quote Debord, "heir to all the weakness of ... Western philosophy, which was an attempt to understand activity by means of the categories of vision" (p. 17). I make this point as a way of introducing the figure of Tess, whom, I would argue, criticism has had a far easier time seeing than inhabiting. The very notion of "inhabiting" a character is suspect, an imposition of power effected with the help of hungry, oppressive eyes. "To realize Tess as consciousness," insists Bourmehla, "with all that entails of representation and display, inevitably renders her all the more the object of gaze and of knowledge for reader and narrator" (p. 120). It is true that we "know" Tess only through the narrator's eyes, eyes which both report on and take part in her construction as a fetish-object of extraordinary visual charisma. But the Tess so-depicted has another quality--a chameleonic insistence on melting into the landscape, retreating into reverie--which represents both a negation of the pressure of so many prying eyes and a positive assertion of spiritual identity. Tess uniquely exemplifies the pain inflicted by spectacularity on a soul that knows its own deepest pleasure as a mode of unselfconscious, unconstrained being which is antithetical to spectacle. The real Tess (so to speak) may escape us in those moments of reverie and dissolution if we insist on reading them solely as an annihilation of self, if we refuse to acknowledge the existence and claims of her Dreaming.

That her transformation into spectacle might be a source of spiritual disease for Tess is established from the moment she enters the narrative. We first glimpse her as one of a group of Marlott girls participating in a spring ritual called club-walking. "A difficulty of arranging their lips in this crude exposure to public scrutiny," the narrator tells us, "an inability to balance their heads, and to dissociate self-consciousness from their features, was apparent in them, and showed that they were genuine country girls, unaccustomed to many eyes" (p. 50). Tess herself is initially described as "a fine and handsome girl--not handsomer than some others, possibly--but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape" (p. 51). That mouth is returned to almost immediately, hovered over like a disembodied vulva filmed closeup: "The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word" (p. 52). It was this kind of not-so-subtle eroticization that Mowbray Morris presumably had in mind when he wrote Hardy a letter in 1889 refusing to accept Tess for serialization: "Perhaps I might say that the general impression left on me by reading your story--so far as it has gone--is one of rather too much succulence."[17] But Hardy's aesthetic, influenced by the Symbolists, demanded a certain measure of heightening for the sake of effect: "Art," he wrote in 1890, "is a changing of the actual proportions and order of things, so as to bring out more forcibly than might otherwise be done that feature in them which appeals most strongly to the idiosyncrasy of the artist."[18] Hardy the literary artist was, it would seem, a lip man; the narrator of Tess bodies forth that idiosyncratic fetish, as do Alec d'Urberville and Angel Clare. The Aborigines would say that the men in Tess's life have Holmberry-Mouth Dreaming.

Tess's own Dreaming is less clear, and that lack of clarity--her suspendedness between a Dream-Journey quest to reconnect with ancestral sources of life and a double seduction plot, driven in part by economic necessity, which reduces her repeatedly to spectacle--will last until she acts decisively in the novel's final pages. Both plots are inaugurated when the issue of approaching a nearby d'Urberville family and "claiming kin" is raised. If Tess's Dream-Journey is incited by visions of reclaiming her paternal inheritance, then it is her embodied maternal inheritance--the voluptuity she owes to a long line of dairymaids and peasants, the "trump card" celebrated by her mother--that will precipitate in the men she encounters sex-charged dreams of claiming her as their own. She makes a first foray off her traditional homelands, past those surrounding hills whose every contour "was as personal to her as that of her relatives' faces" (p. 75); but as she steps off the van at Trantridge Cross and walks uphill towards what she is expecting to be an ancient manorial estate, she is surprised to see "a country-house built for enjoyment pure and simple, with not an acre of troublesome land attached to it beyond what was required for residential purposes" (p. 77). It lacks, in other words, precisely that spiritual anchor in accumulated-knowledge-of-place which characterizes Tess herself. An imperial outpost plopped down on what Debord might have termed "pseudocountryside" bordering The Chase, "one of the few remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date," the house proudly bespeaks its cash-nexus origins: "Everything looked like money-like the last coin issued from the Mint." The modern spiritual declension wrought by capital--from being to having to appearing--has found its paradigmatic instantiation in this pleasure-palace. "[A]ll effective 'having,'" as Debord observes, "must now derive both its immediate prestige and its ultimate raison d'etre from appearances."[19] Hardly surprising, then, that its young male lord should be a creature of hypertrophied visuality[20]--appraising the confused Tess with his "bold rolling eye," calling out to her "Well, my Beauty," perking up mightily as "her rosy lips curved towards a smile" (p. 79). Entranced by those lips, Alex enacts a symbolic rape with the help of home-grown strawberries:

   D'Urberville began gathering specimens of the fruit
   for her, handing them back to her as he stooped; and,
   presently, selecting a specially fine product of the
   "British Queen" variety, he stood up and held it by
   the stem to her mouth.
     "No - no!" she said quickly, putting her fingers
   between his hand and her lips. "I would rather take
   it in my own hand."
     "Nonsense!" he insisted; and in a slight distress
   she parted her lips and took it in. (P. 81)

This is what the Society of the Spectacle does: transforms a source of nourishment and delight into a form of enacted pornography. Tess's distress is grounded, I would suggest, less in a gendered dismay at being "used" than in the reflexive species-fear of an animal forced to display charismatic mating-plumage in the vicinity of an evident predator. She accepts his repeatedly-proffered berries--involuntary conspicuous consumption--as they wander the grounds:

   When she could consume no more of the strawberries
   he filled her little basket with them; and then
   the two passed round to the rose trees, whence he
   gathered blossoms and gave her to put in her bosom.
   She obeyed like one in a dream, and when she could
   affix no more he himself tucked a bud or two into
   her hat, and heaped her basket with others in the
   prodigality of his bounty. (P. 81)

D'Urberville's relationship with his natural habitat--using available flora to spectacularize his future prey, constructing a hyperreal simulacrum of Pluckable Maidenhood--could not be more at odds with Tess's. Her dreaminess is a species of vertigo masking despair; the autonomic shutdown of an aboriginal sensorium confronted with hyperaesthesia. She emerges from this hypnotic reverie later, during the van-ride home:

   She did not know what the other occupants said
   to her as she entered, though she answered them;
   and when they had started anew she rode along
   with an inward and not an outward eye.
       One among her fellow-travellers addressed her
   more pointedly than any had spoken before: "Why,
   you be quite a posy! And such roses in early June!"
       Then she became aware of the spectacle she
   presented to their surprised vision: roses at her
   breast; roses in her hat; roses and strawberries
   in her basket to the brim. She blushed and said
   confusedly that the flowers had been given to
   her. (P. 84)

If Tess here suffers the uneasiness of a woman who senses herself the future object of a possessional claim grounded in the superimposition of surplus value--a young woman, like virgin land, may be "developed" by a shrewd speculator--then her next encounter with Alec gives her little cause to relax. Forced to accept a job as poultry-keeper at The Slopes, Tess accepts a ride in Alec's fancy horse-driven gig; she manages, with the help of her surveying eyes, to maintain a tenuous connection with the homelands from which he is uprooting her: "Rising still, an immense landscape stretched around them on every side; behind, the green valley of her birth, before, a gray country of which she knew nothing except from her first brief visit to Trantridge" (p. 94). Then comes the plunge downhill, a terrifying blur which forces her to grab hold of him; he offers his waist as a substitute for the stabilizing terrain he's just deprived her of. "Let me put one little kiss on those holmberry lips, Tess!" he cries a moment later, revealing the true purpose of this uprooting (p. 96). Her agony is palpable; "inexorable," he gives her the same "kiss of mastery" his family has given the plot of land on which their business-sponsored pleasure-palace has been built.

Her response, characteristically, is twofold: to retreat into reverie as a way of undoing the damage ("[she] took out her handkerchief, and wiped the spot on her cheek that had been touched by his lips ... the act on her part had been unconsciously done" [pp. 96-97]), and to get out of the rig and walk. Walking and dreaming, out of doors, are the constituent modes of Tess's spirituality. She walks very little at Trantridge; Alec is always coming along and lifting her into his gig, lifting her onto his horse--a sham Sky Hero come to her rescue. The Stokes-d'Urbervilles, who have purchased the latter name and appended it to theirs as a way of mystifying industrial lucre with Norman prestige, have no connection with her putative ancestors; her pilgrimage to their doorstep is a stillborn Dream-Journey which ends with her rape in the densely-wooded Chase. Yet even in this moment of spiritual gloom Tess retains a measure of agency--wholly circumscribed, to be sure, but significant. Alec has abandoned her shortly before the rape takes place; the narrator paints her as an object which seems to dissolve beneath his brush: "With the setting of the moon the pale light lessened, and Tess became invisible as she fell into reverie upon the leaves where he had left her" (p. 118). Minutes later Alec returns, almost stumbling over her, and calls out her name. "There was no answer. The obscurity was now so great that he could see absolutely nothing but a pale nebulousness at his feet, which represented the white muslin figure he had left upon the dead leaves" (pp. 118-19). Granted that Tess's dissolution participates in the more generalized climate of moral obscurity into which she has been dragged; granted that her invisibility symbolizes grievous powerlessness: the fact remains that Tess's is a self-erasure, a chameleonic transformation which finds its closest parallel in the blending-in of a sea-skate with the ocean floor. The power of her reverie is such that in the elided moment of her actual rape she deprives Alec of mastery even as he seems to have achieved it:[21]

        Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine
   tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically
   blank as snow as yet, there should have been
   traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to
   receive; why so often the coarse appropriates the
   finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong
   woman the man, many thousand years of analytical
   philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of
   order. (P. 119)

Where are those lips, that mouth? Those flashing eyes? Where is Tess? This is, late-Victorian literary mores notwithstanding, a remarkably unspectacular moment of possession-taking. Tess has somehow escaped, fled into a dream and left behind a gossamer spore-shroud.

Violence, nonetheless, has been done. What follows is a period of physical and spiritual retreat--home to Marlott--in which Tess desires "[t]o be as much out of observation as possible for reasons of her own" (p. 133). The pain wrought by having been rendered a spectacular object and then attacked has, we might say with Freud, transformed the male gaze for Tess from a quasi-danger situation into a thoroughgoing trauma situation.[22] Her response is a particular kind of therapeutic reimmersion in nature:

         The only exercise that Tess took at this time
   was after dark; and it was then, when out in the
   woods, that she seemed least solitary. She knew how
   to hit to a hair's-breadth that moment of evening
   when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced
   that the constraint of day and the suspense of night
   neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.
   It is then that the plight of being alive becomes
   attenuated to its least possible dimensions...
        On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent
   glide was of a piece with the element she moved in.
   Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral
   part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would
   intensify natural processes around her till they seemed
   a part of her own story. Rather they became a part of
   it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon,
   and what they seemed they were. The midnight airs and
   gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and
   bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter
   reproach. A wet day was the expression of irremediable
   grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical
   being whom she could not class definitely as the God of
   her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.
   (Pp. 134-35)

One has the sense here of Hardy playing out an idea--the Naturally Virtuous Woman, Unfairly Haunted By Shame, Refuses To Show Her Face In Public-without acknowledging the degree to which he has conspired with Alec in her construction as a sex-toy with inflatable lips; without understanding why the character he had created might prefer haunted near-invisibility to continued pained exposure; without understanding, in short, his own authorial sadism. Such unconscious authorial sadism (which has by this point accumulated a considerable body of critical commentary)[23] is nowhere more starkly exemplified than the moment when Alec, an apparently chastened and changed man, reenters Tess's life. No sooner do his eyes fall on her "familiar countenance and form" than he accuses her of looking at him with ill-intent. "[T]here was revived in her," Hardy tells us, "the wretched sentiment which had often come to her before, that in inhabiting the fleshly tabernacle with which nature had endowed her she was somehow doing wrong" (p. 388). Nature? Tess is what the Playboy philosophy used to call a good girl in a bad girl's body; this particular bunny, haunted and hunted, is all Tom's work. "As a writer of novels," Irving Howe observed at a more innocent cultural moment, "Thomas Hardy was endowed with a precious gift: he liked women."[24] He liked Tess enough, one is forced to admit, that he strove mightily to grant her the illusion of choosing her own fate, even as he endowed her with a "fleshly tabernacle" that would hurl her repeatedly into a perilous sexual economy.

"Wherever [an Aborigine] might happen to be in terms of tribal nomadic patterns," observes James Cowan, "he will always find himself in close proximity to his ancestors, to his Dreaming cult-heroes (Sky Heroes) and to his totemic birthplace. An Aborigine, even when he is physically alone, lives in, and is sustained by, a metaphysical community" (p. 118). As Tess prepares to leave Marlott for a milkmaid's job at Talbothays farm after several years of recuperative consolidation, she resolves that

   there should be no more d'Urberville air-castles in
   the dreams and deeds of her new life ... Yet such
   is human inconsistency that one of the interests of
   the new place to her was the accidental virtue of its
   lying near her forefathers' country ... [S]he wondered
   if any strange good thing might come to her being in
   her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose
   automatically as the sap in the twigs. (P. 151)

The trip itself, which lasts only the space of a day, nevertheless constitutes a sort of Dream-Journey, a euphoric mapping on foot of self into terrain, sustained by an overarching quest for useful ancestry. That need leads Tess to think on the dead d'Urbervilles when she passes near their Kingsbere burial vaults early in her walk, then dismiss them as a useless burden even as she retains the tjuringa that binds her to them: "She had no admiration for them now; she almost hated them for the dance they had led her; not a thing of theirs did she retain but the old seal and spoon" (p. 156). She walks for miles, revels in unencumbered space. The glory of the day, above all, is the apparent escape it represents from male spectatorship:

   [T]he sense of being amid new scenes where there
   were no invidious eyes upon her, sent up her
   spirits wonderfully. Her hopes mingled with the
   sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded
   her as she bounded along against the soft south
   wind. She heard a pleasant voice in every breeze,
   and in every bird's note seemed to lurk a  joy.
   (P. 157)

The "ideal photosphere" is a double-edged figure, at once Tess's fantasy of unconstrainted daylight freedom (no lusty young men spying on me!) and the author's voyeuristic fantasy of perfect lighting conditions. "What he paints chiefly is light as rood(fled b), objects," Hardy had written of Turner's watercolor technique in 1889, and he might as well have been speaking of his own contemporaneous literary practice.[25] His fantasy immediately engages the narrator, who finds in the prettiness of Tess's face an exact representation of her spiritual condition:

        Her face had latterly changed with changing
   states of mind, continually fluctuating between
   beauty and ordinariness, according as the thoughts
   were gay or grave. One day she was pink and flawless;
   another pale and tragical. When she was pink she
   was feeling less than when pale; her more perfect
   beauty accorded with her less elevated mood; her more
   intense mood with her less perfect beauty. It was her
   best face physically that was now set against the south
   wind.

The logic here is as muddled as the calculus is perverse. Since we have just been told that Tess's glorious solitary afternoon out of doors has "sent up her spirits wonderfully"-meaning, we assume from this analysis, that she is currently in a beauty/gay/pink/flawless mode-how can she also be "feeling less than when pale"? Is "her less perfect beauty" the pale face or the pink face? If "her best face physically" is now set against the south wind, how is she feeling? If she is feeling terrific, why should we care how she looks? Here we have Hardy at his most ethically obtuse: reinscribing Alec d'Urberville's "bold rolling eye" in the narrative gaze at the very moment he treats his recuperating heroine to her first precious moment of al fresco privacy. Whatever sympathy leavens the narrator's scrutiny here hardly mitigates the novel's central project, which is to construct Tess as a kind of eroticized Little Baby Blush-a-Lot whose complexion can be deepened and mouth turned upward with the twist of an invisible authorial button.

Spied on or no, Tess will have her reverie. It is a crucial moment, the happiest she will ever be, a moment of supreme spiritual dilation. It is accompanied, not insignificantly, by song:

        And thus her spirits, and her thankfulness, and
   her hopes, rose higher and higher. She tried several
   ballads, but found them inadequate; till, recollecting
   the psalter that her eyes had so often wandered over
   of a Sunday morning before she had eaten of the tree
   of knowledge, she chanted: "O ye Sun and Moon ... O ye
   Stars ... ye Green Things upon the Earth... ye Fowls
   of the Air ... Beasts and Cattle ... Children of
   Men ... bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him
   for ever!" She suddenly stopped and murmured: "But
   perhaps I don't quite know the Lord as yet."
        And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a
   Fetichistic utterance in a Monotheistic setting; women
   whose chief companions are the forms and forces of
   outdoor Nature retain in their souls far more of the
   Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the
   systematized religion aught their race at a later date.
   However, Tess found at least approximate expression for
   her feelings in the old Benedicte that she had lisped
   from infancy; and it was enough. (Pp. 157-58)

Here, in short, is Tess the supreme aboriginal liturgist, devising--as per Cowan--"a ceremony to embrace all aspects of Sky Hero activity," real and imagined. Where her father's drunken, decadent songline had led directly to the dead-end of the d'Urberville crypts, Tess has reached out and beyond-beyond even the tragic circle limned by the ballad-tradition she has inherited from her musical mother. "Aboriginal Creation myths," observes Chatwin, "tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path-birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes--and so singing the world into existence" (p. 2). For one sustained, healing moment, Tess has managed to evoke and interfuse herself with the "Pagan fantasy" of her "remote forefathers," a desperate late-Victorian reinvention of Aboriginal Dreamtime.

The "ideal photosphere" which had surrounded Tess now becomes the numen which binds her in glorious communion with her physical and metaphysical environment. I am thinking of a much-discussed moment shortly after Tess has arrived at Talbothays farm, when the entranced milkmaid is drawn helplessly--and surreptitiously--towards the music issuing from Angel Clare's harp:

      The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found
   herself had been left uncultivated For some years,
   and was now damp and rank with juicy grass which
   sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with all
   blooming weeds emitting offensive smells--weeds
   whose red and yellow and purple hues formed a
   polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated
   flowers. She went stealthily as a cat through
   this profusion of growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle
   on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot,
   staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime,
   and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights
   which, though snow-white on the apple-tree trunks,
   made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite
   near to Clare, still unobserved of him.
      Tess was conscious of neither time nor space.
   The exaltation which she had described as being
   producible at will by gazing at a star, came now
   without any determination of hers; she undulated
   upon the thin notes of the second-hand harp, and
   their harmonies passed like breezes through her,
   bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen
   seemed to be his notes made visible, and the
   dampness of the garden the weeping of the garden's
   sensibility. (Pp. 178-79)

What makes this passage so extraordinary is the absolute disjunction between how Tess experiences herself--as unobserved, disembodied soul, drawn in ú and embraced by nature in synaesthetic euphora--and how we experience her through the narrator: as completely and spectacularly exposed, extruded by the landscape in a hyperreal visual riot. Our voyeurism trumps hers, yet hers is in fact something very different from voyeurism. She is drawn forward, after all, by a desire to merge with an overheard melody, not to spy on its maker. One might almost describe her reverie as, in miniature, the Dream-Journey tracking of a suddenly-perceptible songline. The "floating pollen" which seems to be "his notes made visible" is merely one aspect of a more general lyric mapping of Talbothays terrain onto and through Tess's freshly en-souled body. "[The Aborigine's] landscape is an extended myth," insists Cowan. "He does not live 'off' the land, but 'in' a terrainian relationship with the otherworld, the Dreaming. His association with birds and animals also partakes of cofraternity, not separateness. These are a part of his totemic life, which means that their existence is an echo of his own" (pp. 122-23). The Tess who moves "stealthily as a cat" represents, by this conception, an evolved spirituality rather than the politically retrograde Natural Woman. She has Stealthy Cat Dreaming; she obeys its dictates when they present themselves.

It is Angel, by contrast, who is spiritually devolved, precisely because the visual hypertrophy from which he suffers as a member of the book-learned class makes him incapable of experiencing either Tess or the natural environment in which she swims without the distorting blinders of Christian moralism and Platonic idealism, not to mention the implacable male demand for female physical attractiveness. He selects Tess, we are told, "in preference to the other pretty milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous womankind" (p. 176). His spiritual education at Talbothays, accordingly, will consist of a progressive shedding of his habits of abstraction in favor of direct, unmediated experience; an unlearning of received ideas about rustic ignorance. He is successful in every respect but one: the closes' he draws to sympathetic and sensuous participation in Tess's world, the more helplessly his unreconstructed visual bias renders Tess a spectacular object of lust. His passion reaches a fever-pitch one day in midsummer, "a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization" (p. 207). He's watching Tess, who is leaning her forehead against a cow's flank as she milks it, "her eyes fixed on the fat' end of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation" (p. 208). Like the narrator in the "ideal photosphere" passage, Angel can't keep his eyes off her reverie:

        How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there
   was nothing etherial about it; all was real vitality,
   real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her
   mouth that this culminated ... [H]er mouth he had
   seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a
   young man with t11c least fire in him that little
   upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was
   distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never
   before seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced
   upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old
   Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow...
        Clare had studied the curves of those lips so
   many times that he could reproduce them mentally
   with ease; and now, as they again confronted him,
   clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over
   his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which
   wellnigh produced a qualm; and actually produced,
   by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic
   sneeze. (Pp. 208-209)

That sneeze, we may fairly say, symbolizes the daylight equivalent of a nocturnal emission, a distinctly unmysterious culmination of pornographic autohypnosis. "Incarnation" is the magic word for this lapsing Platonist; Tess's lips are the spectacular embodiment of a particularly hungered-for form. They verily demand to be kissed, which is why Clare suddenly jumps up, draws Tess into his arms, and kisses them. A dreary and familiar narrative, claims Andrea Dworkin:

        The love of or desire for or obsession with a
   sexual object is, in male culture, seen as a
   response to the qualities of the object itself.
   Since the first preoccupation is with the form of
   the object, men make great claims for the particular
   forms that provoke lust or the ability to fuck in
   them. What Becker refers to as a dependable response
   pattern, in the field of sexual psychology, is most
   often called objectification. Objectification is the
   accomplished fact: an internalized, nearly invariable
   response to a form that is, in his estimation and
   experience, sufficiently whatever he needs to provoke
   arousal. The proper bounds of objectification as an
   appropriate response to an appropriate object are set
   by psychologists, the high priests of secular
   culture: the form of a woman, a composite of women's
   attributes, a part of a woman's body.[26]

Tess' lips, for example. A less invidious way of construing Angel's unmasterable desire is suggested by Camille Paglia:

        The anxiety in sexual experience [for men]
   remains as strong as ever. This man attempts to
   correct by the cult of female beauty. He is
   erotically fixated on woman's "shapeliness"
   ... By focusing on the shapely, by making woman
   a sex-object, man has struggled to fix and
   stabilize nature's dreadful flux. Objectification
   is conceptualization, the highest human faculty.
   Turning people into sex objects is one of the
   specialties of our race.[27]

Paglia's formulation suggests an intriguing line of thought: that the progressive collapse of Angel's Platonic certainties brought about by his unmediated immersion in "nature's dreadful flux" at Talbothays Farm--the "rush of .juices," the "hiss of fertilization"--is what precipitates an extreme anxiety which must be fixed by his imaginative spectacularization of Tess. As Nature dissolves before his eyes into squishy, fungible glop, his neurotic need to conceptualize must find a new cathexis. As Nature's maw yawns, threatening to engulf him, he must recreate a safe, possessible alternative. Thus his waking wet-dream of holmberry-lipped Tess.

The notable instability of his imaginative construction-and the extraordinary cruelty latent in it-becomes visible in the dreadful aftermath of Tess's wedding-night confession that she is not, through no fault of her own, quite the Virginal Flower he thought she was: "He looked upon her as a species of impostor; a guilty woman in the guise of an innocent one. Terror was upon her white face as she saw it; her cheek was flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect of a round little hole. The horrible sense of his view of her so deadened her that she staggered" (p. 299). "His view of her" is literally that: a visual construction, the substitution of a horrifying spectacle for a lust-provoking one, and in this respect a vivid proof of the truth of Debord's formulation: spectacle as "a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself." The real Tess is deadened by this superimposition, staggered, effectively annihilated. Her pained warning shortly before the wedding-night revelation--"she you love is not my real self, but one in my image; the one I might have been!" (p. 281)--has been proven sadly prophetic. The "ideal photosphere" evaporates, leaving her world as devoid of numinous relatedness as his is lacking in spectacular focus.

"Thus Tess walks on," intones the narrator as she sets forth on yet another solitary cross-country journey, this one utterly bereft of Dreaming (p. 355). Her destination is Flintcomb-Ash farm, a "starve-acre place" of unremitting barrenness which seems both material insult added to spiritual injury and a perfect expression of that injury. If the Dreamtime in Aboriginal cosmology is a period when the Sky Heroes sing each feature of the landscape into being, the endless turnip-fields of Flintcomb-Ash seem to have been decreated, wiped clean of transcendental melody: "Each leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as her 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" (p. 360). "If a landscape becomes 'dead' as a bearer of hiero-history," observes Cowan, "or when the animals have departed (a form of physical 'deadness') because ritual life has abated, then a tribal territory is in danger of becoming a metaphysical desert... Often it becomes 'rubbish country,' a term Aborigines use to denote country devoid of its hiero-history" (p. 123). Flintcomb-Ash's status as rubbish--country evacuated of spiritual vitality derives directly, we arc made to understand, from the curse of absentee ownership and the accompanying reduction of all human connectedness-with-the-land to the productive configurations of mechanized labor. To this extent Hardy's depiction of Greater Wessex reflects the more general historical displacement of Dorset's rural population from the land-a displacement which helps explain the spiritual kinship between his fictionalized country-folk and the similarly-uprooted Australian Aborigines.[28] Yet even within such straitened circumstances--or perhaps because of them-Tess and her fellow toiler Marian are able to preserve a space for reverie, albeit one unknowingly pressured by Hardy's ever-surveillant narrator: "They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect they bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice of their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible to exist in a dream" (p. 361). That dream-spell is broken by the reappearance of Alec d'Urberville--incompletely converted from reckless rake to fanatic preacher-and his profoundly ennervating reimposition of spectatorial hungers. "[T]he moment that she moved ... he recognized her. The effect upon her old lover was electric... She went on without turning her head. }let' back seemed to be endowed with a sensitiveness to ocular beams---even her clothing-so alive was she to a fancied gaze which might be resting upon her" (pp. 384-85). Within days he has tracked and cornered her, helpless in the throes of his resurgent obsession. "[Y]ou," he tells Tess, "have been the means-the innocent means-of my backsliding, as they call it ... I was firm as a man could be till I saw those eyes and that mouth again-surely there never was such a maddening mouth since Eve's!" (p. 402). This transference of blame-the process of projection and mystification by which won]an is transformed into a charismatic assemblage of body parts which demands to be possessed.--has long been the gesture by which anxious masculinity is consolidated. "It is taken for granted [in male culture]," notes Dworkin, "that a sexual response is an objectified response: that is, a response aroused by an object with specific attributes that in themselves provoke sexual desire" (p. 113).

Such a logic, followed to its conclusion, leads to the death-in-life which a reformed but broken Angel Clare discovers when he catches up with Tess in the resort town of Sandbourne, the "glittering novelty" of a "pleasure city" where Alec's kisses of mastery have installed her. The overt spectacularization of her looks unnerves him: "Her great natural beauty was, if not heightened, rendered more obvious by her attire" (p. 465). Her eyes are "shining unnaturally" (p. 466). More shocking is what seems to him the near-total divorce of her spirit from her body, a radical de-incarnation: "[H]is original Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize the body before him as hers--allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissociated from its living will" (p. 467). The tortuousness of this formulation 'why not "ceased to recognize her body as her own"?-shows us a Tess renouncing all male gazes, Angel's included, at the very moment his observation of "the body before him" insists on reinscribing her objectification by producing her as visible solid. Her Dream-Journey, overtaken by male desire and economic necessity, has terminated in paralysis, decay, spiritual annihilation.

It is at this moment, when all avenues of escape seem to have been closed off by fate, that "Hardy's original strong Tess," as Rosmarie Morgan has called her, manages to resurrect herself.[29] "Resurrect" may seem too strong a word for an action-the murder of Alec d'Urberville and escape with Angel--which will lead within a week to Tess's recapture and eventual hanging. Some might have preferred a third alternative, Tess neither kept nor dead at the novel's conclusion. What the ending at Stonehenge offers us, I suggest, is a Tess who has miraculously fought her way back into contact with what turns out to have been her true ancestral songline all along; a Tess whose death, while tragic in the sense of grossly premature, is nevertheless the ritual completion of a spiritual quest that she has been pursuing, if not always consciously then with fortuitous intuition, since the novel's opening pages. This quest, it should be noted, has nothing to do with Angel Clare; the "marriage-of-true-minds" plot, by which Tess murders Alec in a spasm of agonized resurgent love for Angel, is merely the mechanism for freeing her to resume a Dream Journey from which both men are, albeit in different ways, wholesale distractions.

Tess's murder of Alec in the hotel room at Sandbourne we are not shown, courtesy of the peeping eyes of their hostess Mrs. Brooks, are keyhole glimpses of the keening Tess. "It was from her lips that came the murmur of unspeakable despair" (p. 469). Those lips, so long the spectacularized focus of narrative and male-suitor voyeurship, are suddenly reclaimed by their owner, forced to speak a grief that is at least in part a direct result of such voyeurship. If Alec would own Tess by the sheer force of the heavily-capitalized gaze within which he imprisons her, she will free herself by mutilating the pristine surface on which that gaze (and the narrator's) rests: "In writhing, with her head on the chair, she turned her face towards the door, and Mrs Brooks could see the pain upon it; and that her lips were bleeding from the clench of her teeth upon them" (p. 469). She murders Alec a moment later, quietly and unobserved. She sets off after Angel, rejoining him on the open highway. The simple fact of having emerged from indoor confines seems to have strikingly revivified Tess, given her what Cowan identifies among the Aborigines as "a body perfectly adapted to spaciousness."[30] "I feel strong enough to walk any distance," she tells Angel after lunch (p. 477). After a five-day idyll in an abandoned mansion, their flight continues with Tess as guide. "To walk across country without much regard to roads was not new to Tess, and she showed her old agility in the performance" (p. 483). "Aboriginals," notes Chatwin, "... could not imagine territory as a block of land hemmed in by frontiers: but rather as an interlocking network of 'lines' or 'ways through'" (p. 56). The songline Tess and Angel have been tracing as darkness falls, it turns out, is Stonehenge:

        They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three
   miles further when on a sudden Clare became conscious
   of some vast erection close in his front, rising
   sheer from the grass. They had almost struck
   themselves against it.
        "What monstrous place is this?" said Angel.
        "It hums," said she. "Hearken!"
        He listened. The wind, playing upon the
   edifice, produced a booming tune, like the note
   of some gigantic one-stringed harp. (P. 483)

"'Older than the centuries; older than the d'Durbervilles!'" Angel cries. To which Tess responds: "'One of my mother's people was a shepherd hereabouts, now I think of it. And you used to say at Talbothays that I was a heathen. So now I am at home'" (p. 484). In forsaking the paternal burial vaults at Kingsbere for the maternal monoliths at Stonehenge, Tess has improvised a fascinating variation on what Chatwin calls the Aboriginal "question of dual paternity." A man, he observes,

   knew very well who his father was. Yet there
   was, in addition, a kind of parallel paternity
   which tied his soul to one particular point in
   the landscape.
        Each ancestor, while singing his way across
   country, was believed to have left a trail of
   "life-cells" or "spirit-children" along the line
   of his footprints. (P. 60)

Stonehenge is Tess's Uluru (Ayer's Rock), a terrainian point of ancestral and spiritual convergence, Home Base on the cosmological map. Her Dream-Journey has come to an end, which is why sleepiness suddenly overtakes her. "'I like very much to be here,' she murmured. 'It is so solemn and lonely-after my great happiness-with nothing but the sky above my face'"(p. 485). She falls asleep shortly before dawn, when a band of pursuers emerges from the countryside to bring her in. They allow her to sleep on for a few moments before the sun pushes under her eyelids. Those spectacular lips, cause of so much of her grief, are nowhere to be found in these final pages, as though some escape from burdening embodiment has finally been achieved, tier last words, as she walks forward towards her pursuers, are "I am ready" (p. 487). This is great theater, of course, which detracts in no way from the essential integrity of the journey Tess has made. "[T]he mystics," writes Chatwin,

   believe the ideal man shall walk himself to a
   "right death." lie who has arrived "goes back."
        In Aboriginal Australia, there are specific
   rules for "going back" or, rather, for singing
   your way to where you belong: to your "conception
   site," to the place where your tjuringa is stored.
   Only then can 5ou become-or re-become-the Ancestor.
   (P. 293)

Late Victorian Wessex was not Australia; Tess had been given no rules for "going back." Forced to improvise, repeatedly sidetracked by an economy of male desire in which her spectacular good looks were deadly currency, she manages to walk herself to the rightest available death. Her spiritual economy triumphs as the bearer of it is extinguished: a familiar theme in the West's various narratives of colonial expansion and tribal sundown, no cause for celebration, but a small and important victory even so.

VASSAR COLLEGE

1 Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (1987; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1988), p. 4.

2 Mowbray Morris, anonymous review of Tess in Quarterly Review, April 1892, Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 287.

3 The phrase "charismatic megafauna" I take from Albert Borgmann's essay, "The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature," Reinventing Nature?: Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease, illus. Alan Gussow (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995), p. 36.

4 For a critique of the various claims for Tess's passivity, see Rosemarie Morgan, "Passive Victim?: Tess of the d'Urbervilles," The Thomas Hardy Journal 5 (1989): 28-46.

5 Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 121.

6 Mary Jacobus, quoted in Bourmelha, Thomas Hardy and Women, p. 121.

7 For a brief, skeptical survey of Tess-as-Nature and Hardy-as-sadist readings of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, see Robert Schweik, "Less than Faithfully Presented: Fictions in Modern Commentaries on Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles," New Perspectives on Thomas Hardy, ed. Charles P.C. Pettit (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), pp. 33-56. For other recent surveys of feminist scholarship on Hardy, see The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Urbana & Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993) and Patricia Ingham, Thomas Hardy (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1990). In "Hardy's Tess and 'The Photograph': Images to Die for," Criticism 35 (1993): 616, 618, Julie Grossman reads Tess's dreamy self-liquidation into the natural world as liberating rather than retrograde, a way of "escaping entrapment by public surveillance [i.e., the devouring male gaze] through an heroic stance of passivity", (p. 618). This passivity, according to Grossman, is Hardy's way of constituting Tess "as an artistic subject, imaginative creator of other than male-defined possibilities for herself" (p. 616).

8 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891; New York: Penguin, 1981),pp. 137-38. All subsequent citations are from this edition.

9. See Grossman (n. 7), esp. pp. 617-619, for a discussion of the way in which Hardy's portrait of Tess reflects both his anxiety about being "an object of public inspection" as a novelist and guilt at having projected that anxiety into his "guilty" heroine on whom all eyes feast.

10 See, for example, Laura Otis, Organic Memory: History and the Body in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 172: "The Tess Angel finally abandons is a palimpsest, a body onto which a variety of texts have been inscribed, none of which do justice to the woman bearing them."

11 Leslie Silko, "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination," On Nature, ed. Daniel Halpern (Sanfrancisco: North Point Press, 1987), p. 84.

12 For a discussion of the contemporary cultural context within which Hardy's novelistic dialogue of"modern rationalism and primitive perception" (such as Tess's personification of the landscape) was situated, see Patricia O'Hara, "Narrating the Native: Victorian Anthropology and Hardy's The Return of the Native," Nineteenth-Century Contexts 20 (1997): 147-63. Victorian evolutionary anthropologists such as E. B. Tylor, according to O'Hara, "insisted upon an essential difference between the ancient mythmaker, who believed in the reality of his personification, and the modern writer [such as Hardy], whose analogies 'are but fancies': '[Men of past ages] heard the voices of the hill-dwarfs answering in the echo, and the chariot of the Heaven-god rattling in thunder over the solid firmament ... [W]hat we call poetry was to them real life, not as to the modern versemaker a masquerade of gods and heroes'" (p. 150).

13 James Cowan, Mysteries of the Dream-Time: The Spiritual Life of Australian Aborigines (1989; Dorset, UK: Prism Press, 1992); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (1967; reprint, New York: Zone Books, 1994).

14 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding (1986; New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p. 274.

15 Hardy himself seems to have engaged in a kind of ritual reunification with his Dreaming prior to writing Tess, complete with rhythmic utterance. "Hardy," writes Laura Otis, "the descendant of masons and peasants, fancied himself a member of the ancient Jersey Le Hardy family, 'an old family of spent social energies,' and at one point was considering restoring the 'le' to his name ... Before writing Tess of the d'Urbervilles, he made a pilgrimage to his ancestors' villages and remarked sadly about his family, 'So we go down, down, down.' He even commented that he would have called his novel 'Tess of the Hardys' if it had not seemed too personal" (Organic Memory, p. 158).

16 See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962; New York: Signet Books, 1969).

17 Mowbray Morris, letter to Thomas Hardy, 25 November 1889, Thomas Hardy, Michael Millgate, p. 285. For more on Tess as eroticized visual object, see Cathy Lynn Preston, "Writing the Hybrid Body: Thomas Hardy and the Ethnographic 'Money Shot,'" Folklore, Literature, and Cultural Theory, ed. Cathy Lynn Preston (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 43-82.

18 Thomas Hardy, quoted in Florence Emily Hardy, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy: 1840-1891 (London: Macmillan, 1928), p. 299.

19 Debord, pp. 16, 125.

20 For a discussion of the way in which ownership of a masculine gaze in Hardy is culturally--rather than biologically--determined, a marker of social empowerment available to the woman of property, see Daryl Ogden, "Bathsheba's Visual Estate: Female Spectatorship in Far From the Maddening Crowd," The Journal of Narrative Technique 23 (1993): 1-15.

21 That Hardy intended to depict Tess's rape, rather than seduction, is evident in the novel's first (1891) edition, according to William A. Davis, Jr.; Hardy toned down the criminal aspects of the assault in later editions. See William A. Davis, Jr., "The Rape of Tess: Hardy, English Law, and the Case for Sexual Assault," Nineteenth-Century Literature 52 (1997): 221-31.

22 Sigmund Freud, "Supplementary Remarks on Anxiety," Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, rev. and ed. James Strachey (1925; New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), pp. 100-105.

23 See, for example, Mary Childers, "The Man Who 'Liked' Women," Criticism23(1981): 317-34: "Tess's circumstances are ... sadistically enjoyed," and James Kincaid, "'You Did Not Come': Absence, Death and Eroticism in Tess," Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990), p. 14: "We are all of us Alecs, Angels, Hardys ... We are all sadists, producing images or cadavers to induce sexually titillating pain."

24 Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p. 108.

25 Thomas Hardy, quoted in J. B. Bullen, The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), p. 197.

26 Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1980; New York: Dutton, 1981), p. 113.

27 Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990; New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. 30.

28 See George Wotton, Thomas Hardy: Towards a Materialist Criticism (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1985), pp. 15-25.

29 Rosmarie Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 85.

30 Cowan, p. 90.

~~~~~~~~

By Adam Gussow

"How could there be any good in a woman everybody spoke ill of?''2 In the most emotionally charged scene between husband and wife in Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, Clym Yeobright thus finally succumbs to the view of Eustacia Vye's identity that has been constructed by public surveillance and conjecture. Deemed a witch, a temptress, and even a murderess by the voice of the social "every-body," Eustacia is liable to the terms of such judgment, the consequences of which are most obviously literalized in her suicide by drowning. Yet punishment itself also definitively shapes identity on Egdon Heath. The numerous forms of punishment applied to Eustacia-stabbing, torture of her effigy, expulsion from her marriage serve to confirm social interpretation, unequivocally defining her as a witch, rebel, and, in short, fallen. Insofar as it confirms the conclusions drawn by public speculation and gossip, punishment is shown to be inextricably linked to observation and utterance.

This tension in The Return of the Native between self-inflicted and socially-enacted discipline thus deserves examination. While critical attention has frequently been given to "that socially approved method of subordinating women: the inculcation of guilt''3 that Hardy's novels expose, the very way in which social discipline is applied is equally significant. The Return of the Native is particularly revealing in regards to Hardy's view of the capacity of speculation and blame to shape public identity and induce self-destruction. Discussing Hardy's use of coincidence, Lawrence Jay Dessner cites T. S. Eliot's telling discernment of the intense preoccupation with punishment evident in Hardy's work: "to Eliot, Hardy 'seemed to be deliberately relieving some emotion of his own at the expense of the reader. It is a refined form of torture on the part of the writer, and a refined sort of self-torture on the part of the reader. This transition from externally- to self-enacted torture is mirrored in The Return of the Native, where ongoing physical and emotional torment leads ultimately to self-destruction, where the social readings of the heroine lead her to rewrite her plot in accordance with the identity that such readings have constructed.

Yet the self-destructive function of this seemingly primitive enforcer of social discipline-torture-points to an evolution toward a more subtle, yet potent, method of control in The Return of the Native, In "Observation and Domination in Hardy's The Woodlanders," a notably rare interpretation of Hardy that directly invokes Michel Foucault's theories of social discipline, Cates Baldridge observes that "In the world of The Woodlanders . . . modernity arrives not amidst coal smoke or dragging a steam thresher, but rather emerges from optics-both moral and manufactured whose very composition relentlessly transforms acts of seeing into projections of power? The traceable tension in The Return of the Native between primitive and modern forms of authority positions Foucault's theory of discipline as a fitting analogy by which this novel's preoccupation with surveillance, judgment, transgression, and retribution can be examined.

In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault's example of the quarantined town illustrates how, under conditions of isolation, surveillance and power operate:

This enclosed segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded .... in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism.6

A self-contained social unit, Egdon exhibits the capacity for stringent control that is accessible through perpetual confinement and surveillance. Foucault's engagement of Bentham's structure of the Panopticon in his analysis of a self-regulatory society where "the gaze is alert everywhere" (p. 195) demonstrates how such constant, ubiquitous observation is achieved:

At the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower... pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other. (P. 200)

"By the effect of backlighting," Foucault continues, "one can observe from the tower.., small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible." Hardy's portrayal of the "watchful intentness" (p. 4) of Egdon and its inhabitants demonstrates how a "faceless gaze . . . transformed the whole social body into a field of perception" (p. 214). The Return of the Native exhibits an obsessive preoccupation with what Foucault terms "constant visibility"; its emphasis on "the observer's eye," "surveying," and "spying" is ceaseless (pp. 138, 140, 53).

Although observation and voyeurism preoccupy Hardy's texts generally, Egdon's literal resemblance to the structure of the Panopticon is striking. Individuals often resemble prisoners in the Panopticon, appearing as silhouettes against a flame: Wildeve is seen as "a vast shadow, in which could be dimly traced portions of a masculine contour, blott[ing] half the ceiling" (p. 39), and Hardy introduces Eustacia as a mysterious dark "form" or "figure" (p. 11 ). In the text's opening pages, the dancing furze-cutters with their "shadowy eye-sockets" and "dark wells" for nostrils are marked by "sooty shades" upon which "blots of shade and flakes of light.., changed shape and position endlessly" (p. 15).

While these latter figures precisely resemble Foucault's prisoners in the Panopticon, their literal activity-celebrating Guy Fawkes Day-situates them firmly in the realm of primitive ritual. Foucault's delineation of the social evolution of punishment in Discipline and Punish equally applies to the collision in Hardy's text between ritualized, traditional disciplinary methods and self-rendered punishment, the mark of modern social discipline. Foucault illustrates how this subtle methodology, whereby an individual exerts authority upon him- or herself through self-regulation, has evolved from more traditional forms of punishment, namely public humiliation and torture. Emphasizing its dependency on spectacle, Foucault terms this traditional form of discipline a "liturgy of punishment": "It must mark the victim: it is intended, either by the scar it leaves on the body, or by the spectacle that accompanies it, to brand the victim with infamy;.., torture.., traces around or, rather, on the very body of the condemned man signs that must not be effaced; . . . men will remember public exhibition, the pillory, torture, and pain duly observed" (p. 34). Social discipline thus developed from a point where the body served as the locus of crime, guilt, and admission, to the panoptic schema, "a network of mechanisms that would be everywhere and always alert, running through society without interruption in space or time" (p. 209).

According to Foucault, the internalization of power relations cultivated by the Panopticon makes such constant "visibility... a trap" (p. 200). The Panopticon "induc[es] in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power" (p. 201), As Foucault argues, this structure ensures "that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers; ... power should be visible and unverifiable." This subtle yet constant operation of power ultimately facilitates the internalization and operation of authority by the individual.

This essay shall demonstrate that both forms of social authority operate in The Return of the Native, and that both are bound up in Eustacia Vye's life and death. Eustacia's suicide particularly exemplifies the destruction enabled by internalized social judgment, as well as the text's preoccupation with physical suffering. That the spectacle offered by the body of the condemned coincides, in Hardy's text, with the operation of internalized authority indicates how the body is itself a sign, a manifestation of the power operating within this structure. Yet this juxtaposition also illustrates how Egdon is representative of a primitive society on the verge of modernity, one in which more modern methods of judgment and punishment finally prove more devastating in their capacity for emotional and physical destruction.

Since the internalization of patriarchal dictates for behavior most significantly affects the women in the text and works primarily to promote middle class value systems, an application of Foucault's analysis of the "condemned man" (p. 34, italics added) to The Return of the Native must be inflected in order to consider Hardy's preoccupation with the roles of class and gender in relation to the exercise of authority. Taken up by the middle class, lowerclass speculation and gossip provide the ammunition for definitively destructive judgment. Most useful is an examination of the novel's depiction of the often annihilative consequences that result from the control and operation of power accessed through those issues fundamental to Foucault's understanding of discipline: surveillance, torture, and the internalization of social judgment.

Most problematic for the inhabitants of Egdon Heath is the threat Eustacia poses to the community's traditional power relations. "Not equipped for the conventional world,'8 she defies those classifications that underpin Egdon society. The text's opening chapters, for example, portray the power transversing both age and class that Eustacia seemingly exercises over three men: she reigns as "absolute queen" over her grandfather, over Johnny (her "little slave") and over Wildeve, who goes to Eustacia in "obedience to her call" (pp. 56, 61 ). Foucault describes how the "mechanisms of power.., are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him" (p. 199). As an outsider, "a lonesome dark eyed creature.., that some say is a witch" (p. 47), Eustacia stands as this figure of threatening abnormality who the people of Egdon must label in order to control.

While positioned as the central object of observation, Eustacia herself continually adopts a "spying attitude" (p. 53). In the course of the novel, for example, she peers through a telescope (p. 52), eavesdrops beneath a chimney (p. 105), and peeks through a hole (p. 123). In fact, we initially find her not in the periphery of the Panopticon, but high atop the heath, as if in the Panopticon's observatory tower: "Had the reddleman been watching he might have recognised her as the woman who had first stood there so singularly, and vanished at the approach of strangers. She ascended to her old position at the top... There she stood still, around her stretching the vast night atmosphere" (p. 50). This image of Eustacia represents her aim to usurp a position of power and to orchestrate, through surveillance, the events that go on below. Eustacia's attempt to occupy a sphere of "higher" authority, a place of monitoring and control reserved for men, renders her disruptive to the social framework of Egdon Heath, and thereby establishes her as a marginal figure who must, through adequate discipline, be appropriately realigned within this framework.

If, as Foucault suggests, the "mechanisms of power" encourage the branding of the abnormal individual, The Return of the Native emphasizes the link between the operation of these mechanisms and both class and gender in its representations of Eustacia's social transgressions. Her participation as a mummer, for example, takes Eustacia far beyond the bounds of social normalcy since, as such, she takes part in the "traditional pastime" (p. 122) of lower-class individuals with whom she would never otherwise associate. Other than Charley, "the other mummers have never spoken to [her] in their lives" (p. 125). In fact, "of mummers and mumming Eustacia had the greatest contempt" (p. 122). Her sensitivity to the codes of propriety attached to these class distinctions marks Eustacia's behavior as a conscious act of defiance.

Eustacia's complicity in her social decline is connected to her sexual degradation. "Changed in sex, brilliant in colours, and armed from top to toe" (p. 128) when posing as the Turkish Knight, Eustacia crosses the limits of gender which, in a society dependent on surveillance, must be maintained by such external markers as clothing. Although she usurps the phallic armaments of male power-"sword and staff' (p. 26)-this sequence reveals more about the limitations of Eustacia's power than its extent. Her dressing in "boy's clothes" (p. 125) is ironically juxtaposed with the pseudo-prostitution scene in which she permits Charley to hold her hand in exchange for his assistance with her plan. Eustacia can only obtain the means for increased latitude and access to Clym that the guise of the mumming costume will provide by first offering her body in exchange. Even the scope of Eustacia's liberty as a mummer is highly questionable. Although she hopes that this temporary transgression will facilitate her relationship with Clym, Eustacia soon realizes that the power she sought is entirely elusive. Dressing as a man conceals the allure of her attractive physicality, now that "the power of her face [was] all lost, the charm of her motions all disguised, the fascinations of her coquetry denied existence" (p. 144). Notably, Clym seeks to reestablish those gender categories that Eustacia has disrupted, asking, "Are you woman?" (p. 145). Over the course of the text, the categories he will apply to her-wife, mistress, witch, murderess-will increase in their capacity to limit, and even destroy identity.

Gender indeed has significant implications for the external construction of identity and for the application of judgment and punishment, which most often diverges along gender lines. The narrator describes Wildeve, for example, as "one in whom no man would have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen anything to dislike" (p. 40). Direct commentary by the people of Egdon also provides a microcosmic view of the debate that will culminate in the conflict between Clym and Mrs. Yeobright regarding Eustacia. It is significant that, particularly at the beginning of the novel, the negative portrayal of Eustacia is rendered primarily by the women of Egdon Heath, a pattern that continues throughout the novel. A brief exchange between Susan Nunsuch and Humphrey illustrates the gendered nature of this debate:

"She is very strange in her ways, living up there by herself, and such things please her," said Susan.

"She's a well-favoured maid enough," said Humphrey the furzecutter; "especially when she's got one of her dandy gowns on." (P. 27}

Timothy and Grandfer Cantle perpetuate the division between what "some say" (p. 47) and what men think about Eustacia. Timothy doubts that he "ever ú.. should call a fine young woman such a name" as witch, and Grandfer would "be very glad to ask her in wedlock, if she'd hae [him], and take the risk of her wild dark eyes ill-wishing [him]" (p. 48). What men see as erotic mystery in Eustacia, female observers perceive as the dangerous power of a "witch" (p. 47).

Although posited in contrasting terms, both these gendered attitudes are derived from superficial judgments based only on Eustacia's external appearance and discernible behavior. Anticipating the expulsion and ruin that will befall Eustacia, Thomasin's disgrace and marriage to Wildeve likewise illustrates the terms of judgment that apply specifically to women in this society and of the extensive systems of regulatory surveillance at work therein. While picking apples (a symbolically appropriate activity for a disgraced woman), Thomasin offers an astute treatise on the degraded state of the "fallen" women that illustrates how, as with Eustacia in the mumming sequence, degradation in terms of class necessarily accompanies a woman's perceived sexual transgression: "I am a warning to others, just as thieves, and drunkards, and gamblers are... What a class to belong to! Do I really belong to them-'tis absurd!... Yet why, aunt, does everybody keep on making me think that I do, by the way they behave towards me? Why don't people judge me by my acts? Now look at me as I kneel here, picking up these apples-do I look like a lost woman?... I wish all good women were as good as 1!" (p. 111). Relegated to the company of lower-class pariahs, Thomasin stands as a living marker of the consequences of what is deemed reproachable female behavior. As a result, she exhibits a scopophobic fear of "being stared at" since the "air is full of story" regarding her apparent jilting by Wildeve (pp. 11 l, I 13). Mrs. Yeobright explains in reply that "Strangers don't see you as I do... They judge from false report" (p. 111). Yet Mrs. Yeobright does not condemn these false reports and, when later giving Clym her opinion of Eustacia, she is quick to subscribe to the views put forth by such rumor: "I have never heard that she is of any use to herself or to other people. Good girls don't get treated as witches even on Egdon" (p. 180). Like Thomasin's, Eustacia' s public identity is a construct derived not from culpable action that can be traced to her own behavior, but from public report, opinion, and gossip. Such speculation carries with it significant implications for the fate of its object since, as Patricia Meyer Spacks writes, gossip's "purposefully malicious" nature has the capacity for "sowing the insinuations which generate tragedy.''9

Public identity, particularly women's-Thomasin as fallen, Eustacia as witch-thus complies with strict categorization based on inescapable observation and judgment. Confined within these categories and living in virtual exile where "the gaze is alert everywhere" (Foucault, p. 195), Eustacia finds Egdon Heath a "jail" (p. 180). The continual references to Eustacia as a prisoner subject to ceaseless surveillance illustrate how on Egdon, "the panoptic schema spread through the social body.., to become a generalized function" (Foucault, p. 207). Constantly the target of this pervasive network of surveillance and suspicion, like Foucault's prisoner, Eustacia "is the object of information, never a subject in communication" (Foucault, p. 200).

Although Wildeve, rather than Eustacia, is the primary target of his observation, Diggory Venn is particularly complicit in Egdon's regulatory structure. Significantly, his position as a lower-class oddity-a reddlemangrants him much opportunity for covert surveillance. Yet Diggory's "well-to-do air.., suggested that he was not poor for his degree. The natural query of an observer would have been, why should such a promising being as this have hidden his prepossessing exterior by adopting that singular occupation?'' (p. 8). The answer seemingly lies in the mobility and concealment that such an "isolated" (p. 75) occupation affords him. Despite his lower-class status, Diggory's opportunity to observe permits his interaction with members of the middle class, such as Eustacia and particularly, Mrs. Yeobright (on whose behalf he acts as a go-between). Diggory not only vacillates between classes, but between modes of existence: "He was one of a class rapidly becoming extinct in Wessex, filling at present in the rural world the place which, during the last century, the dodo occupied in the world of animals. He is a curious, interesting, and nearly perished link between obsolete forms of life and those which generally prevail" (pp. 7-8). As such, Diggory embodies the text's more general preoccupation with how lower-class surveillance operates largely in service of middle-class orthodoxy. Diggory's oscillation leads us to consider the text's own movement from lower-class conjecture to the more destructive judgment of the middle class in relation to the primitive and modern methods of discipline at work therein.

Despite its structural and functional resemblance to the Panopticon, the Egdon community in The Return of the Native also relies on primitive methods of regulation. According to Foucault, traditional modes of discipline dating back before the Inquisition depended upon the spectacle of punishment. Hardy's depiction of Egdon points to the survival of such primitive forms of correction on the Heath. Indeed, Egdon is a particularly rich manifestation of Hardy's fascination with a traditional society on the verge of modernity. On Egdon, late nineteenth-century ideas embodied in Clym's Parisian socialism collide with the primitive: Guy Fawkes Day rituals, furzecutting, medieval Christian mythology (Saint George conquering the Turkish Knight). Similarly, in The Return of the Native, modern methods of regulatory surveillance coexist with more primitive methods of social control. In their resemblance to methods of torture traditionally enacted on witches, the punitive measures applied to Eustacia particularly illustrate, in addition to its panoptic regulatory structure, Egdon's primitive disciplinary underpinnings.

The scene wherein Eustacia becomes the object of Susan Nunsuch's "long stocking-needle" anticipates the tension between modern and primitive punishment that will develop more explicitly in the course of the text. Christian's report "about a witch" illustrates the superstitious nature of Susan's violent treatment of Eustacia: "She've waited for this chance for weeks, so as to draw her blood, and put an end to the bewitching of Susan's children that has been carried on so long. Sue followed her into church, sat next to her, and as soon as she could find a chance in went the stocking-needle into my lady's arm" (p. 179). Susan's pricking of Eustacia aptly invokes the "old tests or trials-ordeals, judicial duels, judgments of God" (Foucault, p. 40) that characterized traditional, confession-seeking forms of discipline and punishment. In her attempt to draw blood and, therefore, the capacity for evil from Eustacia, Sue enacts "a physical challenge that must define the truth ú . . In the practice of torture, pain, confrontation and truth were bound together: they worked together on the.., body" (Foucault, p. 4 l). Significantly, this act occurs in church, the communal locus of morality and the chief location for "seeing and being seen" (Return, p. 120). When Eustacia earlier "betakes herself to scrutinize the person of a native son" (i.e., Clym) in church, she is disappointed. Instead, their meeting must be deferred until that time when Eustacia is fixed as the subject of judgment and punishment during her encounter with Susan Nunsuch.

Susan's treatment of the effigy of Eustacia on the night of Eustacia's death exemplifies the text's preoccupation with the collision between physical punishment and modern vigilance's more subtle, effective destruction of the spirit. Significantly, Susan's creation and piercing of a wax figure of Eustacia is juxtaposed with Eustacia's telling last words, "a frenzy of bitter revolt":

How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me!... 1 donut deserve my lot!... I was capable of much; but 1 have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at all! (P. 359)

Yet it is Susan, hardly a representative of heaven, who repeats the Lord's Prayer backwards, and who devises a torture "calculated to bring powerlessness atrophy and annihilation" upon Eustacia. Having fashioned a wax form in Eustacia's image, she

took a paper of pins... These she began to thrust into the image in all directions, with apparently excruciating energy. Probably as many as fifty were thus inserted, some in the head of the wax model, some into the shoulders, some into the trunk, some upwards through the soles of the feet till the figure was completely permeated with pins... [Then] seizing with the tongs the image that she had made of Eustacia she held it in the heat, and watched it as it began to waste slowly away. (Pp. 360-61)

Susan's torture of the Eustacia effigy symbolizes those emotional tortures against which Eustacia despairingly protests. Yet Eustacia's power is considered so threatening that she must be eradicated, in both body and spirit.

Judgment and punishment thus represent a purgation of those forces that threaten to disrupt social order. In the Foucauldian view, with which Mrs. Yeobright agrees, "one could not be the object of suspicion and be completely innocent" (Foucault, p. 42). Indeed, the witch-trial representation of society's treatment of Eustacia does not remove her complicity in her own incrimination. Rather, the public spectacle surrounding Eustacia's physical punishment, together, as we will see, with her confession, necessarily implicates her as the "herald of [her] own condemnation" (Foucault, p. 43):

From the judicial torture to the execution, the body has produced and reproduced the truth of the crime or rather it constitutes the element which, through a whole set of rituals and trials, confesses that the crime took place, admits that the accused did indeed commit it, shows that he bore it inscribed in himself and on himself, supports the operation of punishment and manifests its effects in the most striking way. The body, several times tortured, provides the synthesis of the reality of the deeds and the truth of the investigation, of the documents of the case and the statements of the criminal, of the crime and the punishment. (Foucault, p. 47)

Thus, from the pricking of her arm in church to her very drowning, Eustacia's body provides the textual, incriminating evidence of the capacity for destruction which she has long been charged to possess.

Significantly, the physical subjection of Eustacia's body typically renders her a penetrable and, thus, an approachable object for men. While the piercing of her effigy/body anticipates an event-her suicide-that will bring all the men in the novel running to her, the drawing of Eustacia's blood and the public confirmation of her status as a witch, along with report of her "beauty" (p. 180), ironically intrigue Clym. The needle itself stands as a phallic foreshadowing of the union between Clym and Eustacia, which is aptly anticipated, then, in terms of violence and destruction. While Clym condemns Susan's treatment of Eustacia as a "cruel shame" (p. 181), he does not denounce the terms of the judgment applied to her, but employs them, inquiring after the "young witch-lady" with slight amusement. Ultimately, the appropriation of this judgment by such representatives of middle-class morality as Mrs. Yeobright and Clym will have the most detrimental consequences for Eustacia.

"The man from Paris" (p. 253), Clym initially represents a means of escape for Eustacia. Ironically, he becomes increasingly complicit in her confinement on Egdon, "her Hades" (p. 64). The isolation of their home temporarily removes Eustacia from constant observation by the people of Egdon. Yet Eustacia becomes increasingly "supervised... by [this] sequestered and observed solitude" (Foucault, p. 201 ) as Clym, despite his physical blindness, assumes the role as her chief observer. Clym's literal blindness aptly coincides with their marriage; when his understanding of her should be made clearer by their intimacy, it becomes increasingly clouded and leaves Eustacia increasingly frustrated. "Must I not have a voice in the matter, now l am your wife, and the sharer of your doom?" (p. 249), she demands when Clym rejects her wish to go to Paris. Although his association with Paris may mark Clym as a figure of enlightenment, his "return" to his native Egdon represents his regression to its strictly codified patriarchal morality. While judgment of Eustacia is delivered initially by the women of Egdon, it culminates in Clym's unequivocal condemnation of her upon discovering her actions on the day of his mother's death: "May all murderesses get the torment they deserve" (p. 327).

The events surrounding Mrs. Yeobright's death indicate the extent to which judgment and surveillance are linked to physical punishment in this novel, and are at the root of its tragedy. Had she not seen Eustacia's "face at a window" (p. 288) when her knock at Clym and Eustacia's door went unanswered, Mrs. Yeobright would have been unable to implicate Eustacia. Significantly, the means of Mrs. Yeobright's death-a snake bite-points to the breakdown of Clym and Eustacia's marriage, the destruction of their "Eden" (p. 241). Framed in an allusion to "Aeneas with his father" (p. 296), Clym's carrying of his injured mother likewise places their relationship in the context of a society on the verge of collapse (Troy), While the snake bite may represent Eustacia's destructive capacities, it also seems symbolic of the mental poison (that is, her "wicked opinions" [p. 248) of Eustacia) that has possessed Mrs. Yeobright, and, therefore, the entire social body, Ironically, like Eustacia, Mrs. Yeobright is subject to physical torment that is grounded in primitive, mythic symbolism. As a woman, she can only give voice to the dictates of Egdon's patriarchal orthodoxy for so long. bier death thus aptly effects the transference of this charge to her son who, as the rightful representative of middle-class social normalcy, takes up the position of Eustacia's moral nemesis.

Relegating Eustacia to the category of "murderess," Clym defines her in legal terms and, in doing so, invokes not only accusation, but also the confirmation of guilt and the inherent necessity of retribution. The subsequent dialogue wherein Clym accuses Eustacia of the "crime" of murder shows, in its court-room style verbal barrage, the voice of what Foucault would term the "administrative machine" (p. 213) in action:

"Tell me now; where is he who was with you on the afternoon of the thirty-first of August? Under the bed? Up the chimney?"

A shudder came over her, and shook the light fabric of her nightdress throughout. "1 do not remember dates so exactly," she said. "1 cannot recollect that anybody was with me besides yourself."

"The day 1 mean?" said Yeobright, his voice growing louder and harsher, "was the day you shut the door against my mother and killed her.-O, it is too much too bad!... You shut the door--you looked out the widow upon her-you bad a man in the house with you-you sent her away to die-The inhumanity-the treachery-I will not touch you-stand away from me-and confess every word!" (Pp. 329-31)

Positioning himself as moral detective, judge, and jury, Clym assumes his mother's place of judgment in relation to Eustacia. During this quasi-legal assault Clym removes himself from Eustacia and their marriage, his refusal to "touch" her abrogating her physical and legal status as his wife. Significantly, Clym's charge against Eustacia coincides with his classification of her as a fallen woman and her designation as a member of the lowest of classes. No longer considering her a "cultivated woman" (p. 146), Clym now indicts Eustacia as a prostitute: "1 shall no doubt be gratified by learning in good time what a well-finished and full-blown adept in a certain trade my lady is" (pp. 331-32), Finding herself indefensible, Eustacia is directly exiled from the domestic sphere,10 while Clym realigns himself with the sphere from which she was always exiled, that of moral vigilance.

Although initially she "remains doggedly silent" and refuses to confess, Eustacia ultimately admits to "the extent of [her] crime" (p. 334): "1 confess that l-willfully did not undo the door the first time she knocked but-I should have unfastened it the second-if I had not thought you had gone to do it yourself... Best natures commit bad faults sometimes, don't they-" (p. 333). Eustacia's articulation of her culpability finally confirms Clym's limited view of her. Her admission of guilt not only establishes her as deserving of the further physical torture that will befall her, but also indicates the extent to which she is complicit in it. According to Foucault, the confession "transcended all other evidence; an element in the calculation of the truth, it was also the act by which the accused accepted the charge and recognized its truth" (p. 38). Eustacia thus becomes the bearer of her own condemnation and, as her suicide will so plainly show, the embodiment of Foucault's idea of a modern subject who renders her own punishment.

This movement from external accusation to the internalized bearing of guilt is conspicuous elsewhere in Hardy's texts. In Jude the Obscure, for example, Sue Bridehead finds a similar form of humiliation and torture a rightful end for herself: "Self-renunciation-that's everything! I cannot humiliate myself too much. I should like to prick myself all over with pins and bleed out the badness in me."11 Sue proceeds to "bleed out [her] badness" by returning to Phillotson, her former husband, and submitting to the terms that, in their previous marriage, she entirely rejected: those of the body. Sue's self-derision draws attention to Hardy's preoccupation with the torture of the body as a means of self-inflicted purification, which likewise functions as a form of social control. Indeed, in The Return of the Native. Eustacia's self-destruction most obviously marks this transition from externally enacted punishment to that which is actively rendered by its female recipient.

The image on the Egdon inn sign of "the Quiet Woman, the figure of a matron carrying her head under her arm" ( p. 39) points to the physical torment that Eustacia undergoes throughout The Return of the Native. Yet this image also emblematizes the psychological machinations endured by Foucault's criminal who, as a result, ultimately becomes the bearer of his own punishment: "He who is subjected to a field of visibility and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection" (p. 202). Since it is gendered female, however, Hardy's image of the Quiet Woman draws specific attention to how women in particular come to render their own punishment, itself a manifestation of internalized social judgment. Thus, at the heart of the community, and likewise the novel as a whole, is the image of woman's "disruptive potentiality put to rest [as] she obligingly carries her own severed head.''12

On Egdon, women's "disruptive potentiality" is most clearly linked to their marital relationships. Marriage serves as a trial-by-fire of conventional womanhood. Although Thomasin voices her dissatisfaction with society's categorization of her, she is publicly quick to accept the blame assigned to her when her initial marriage attempt with Wildeve fails. She first petitions her aunt, "Excuse me-for humiliating you, aunt, by this mishap" (p. 38), recognizing that she must marry in order to prevent her tainted reputation from further detracting from her family's "credit" (p. 158): "1 belong to one man. Nothing can alter that. And that man I must marry, for my pride's sake" (p. 111). Thomasin thus exemplifies the operation of the "automization of power" (Foucault, p. 202) within Egdon's social network. Unlike Thomasin's, however, Eustacia's self-regulation does not merely take the form of censure and submission, but rather effects her utter eradication.

Eustacia's failure to conform to the expectations of womanhood leads her to an end so contrary to that of Thomasin. Thomasin marries, not once, but twice, and gives birth to a child, thereby reconfirming her place within the status quo. Significantly, her second marriage is to Diggory Venn, the novel's covert moral watchdog. Throwing off the lower-class stigma attached to the reddleman's position, Diggory appears before Thomasin toward the novel's close, "exhibiting the strangely altered hues of an ordinary Christian countenance . . . Red, and all approach to red, was carefully excluded from every article of clothes upon him" (p. 388). His union with Thomasin thus marks the restoration of Egdon society to conventional middle-class values. Eustacia, in contrast, finds marriage disappointingly constrictive and spurns her connection to her husband's family. What ultimately distinguishes her from Thomasin is her refusal to submit to the judgment applied to her:

O, you are too relentless-there's a limit to the cruelty of savages! I have held out too long but you crush me down. I beg for mercy I cannot bear this any longer-it is inhuman to go farther with this! If I had killed your mother with my own hand-I should not deserve such a scourging to the bone as this. (P. 334)

Although she recognizes that she is "to blame" for the death of Clym's mother and that, as a result, "there is evil in store for" her (p. 307), Eustacia cannot finally accept the judgment given her and, apparently, seeks escape in death.

Not surprisingly, Eustacia's suicide has elicited varied critical responses. In her analysis of this issue, Dixie Lee Larson concludes that "For Eustacia, drowning is more the means of ending an enforced compromise with life than anything else.''13 Jennifer Gribble views Eustacia's end as that of "scapegoat and ritual victim," but insists that "Hardy's narrative refused to take sides or assign blame."14 Penny Boumelha exhibits scepticism about the nature of Eustacia's demise, comparing Emma Bovary's fate to "Hedda Gabler's suicide and Eustacia's death.'"15 "Hardy," she continues, "veils this in an ambiguity similar to that which surrounds the rape or seduction of Tess, and presumably for the same reason-to evade those questions of free choice, and individual moral responsibility that a tradition of moralistic criticism might otherwise press upon the text" (p. 56). In considering Hardy's intentions, Rosemarie Morgan submits that he "cannot permit her simply to drown. The skies must break and the Barrow must seek to draw her back to itself. Her death must become a victory over life-a mortal life that had, to her, been empty of significance and purpose.''16

How then are readers to interpret her suicide? Is Eustacia finally free from the internalization of social judgment? Is her death, as Morgan suggests, "a victory over life"? In the portrayal of her suicide, Hardy depicts, in overwhelmingly negative terms, the destructive capacities of a community that cannot tolerate individuals-particularly women-who transgress social dictates for behavior. Finding herself in a state where she has no place, Eustacia, in a final act of "rebellion," seeks in death to remove herself from the constraints of her life. Yet simultaneously, this act renders her entirely without autonomy. Insofar as she subjects herself to death, she admits herself to be deserving of punishment. Thus, her suicide suggests that Egdon's social disciplinary strength is so pervasive, its control so absolute, that those individuals who resist its authority will ultimately acquiesce to it, even if to do so, they must eliminate their conscious resistance to it by eradicating their physicality. Eustacia can only finally be subsumed within this social structure when utterly deprived of her power to resist it, when, as a dead body bereft of mental cognition, she can "obligingly" carry her head under her arm.

While throughout the text she seemingly resists those labels applied to her, telling Clym, for example, "your mother will influence you too much; 1 shall not be judged fairly: it will get afloat that I am not a good girl, and the witch story will be added to make me blacker" (p. 208), Eustacia ultimately realigns herself with the views of Egdon society. This realignment aptly takes the form of self-objectification: "To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was" (pp. 343-44). Standing outside herself and observing herself in the third person, Eustacia actively reinscribes herself within Egdon's panoptic structure. This movement marks Eustacia's internalization of the social norms aligned with Egdon surveillance; it is thus the very moment at which her former defiance gives way to complicity in her imminent demise. Furthermore, the event that directly follows this detachment of identity appropriately anticipates the form that her tragic end will take: "While she stood she heard a sound. It was a splash of a stone in the pond" (p. 344). Eustacia's death ironically reproduces that auditory image which, both here and throughout the text, facilitates her covert, socially disruptive encounters with Wildeve: the sound of something being dropped into a pool. At the point of her death, however, Eustacia's submission to society's judgment of her necessarily distorts the pool into a "boiling hole" (p. 375). Analogous to Eustacia's willful passion, the witch's own menacing equipage-her cauldron-aptly becomes the mechanism of her destruction. While she herself is silenced, the very form of her suicide articulates the extent of Eustacia's complicity in her punishment.

Despite the novel's preoccupation with surveillance, it denies the reader visual access to the final deliverance of this judgment, the precise moment of Eustacia's death. Hardy instead focuses on her "cold form, which was all that remained of the desperate and unfortunate Eustacia" (p. 377). Instead of seeing her actively choosing death, the reader sees only her passive corpse. What was perceived as threatening sexual power in life is all but removed in the angelic spectacle of her dead body, the image of which sharply contrasts with the dangerous, dark obscurity that surrounded Eustacia's living being. Her "reign" over three male observers is inverted; Clym, Charley, and Venn can now comfortably view Eustacia at close proximity:

They stood silently looking upon Eustacia, who as she lay there still in death eclipsed all her living phases. Pallor did not include all the quality of her complexion, which seemed more than whiteness; it was almost light. The expression of her finely carved mouth was pleasant as if a sense of dignity had just compelled her to leave off speaking. Eternal rigidity had seized upon it in a momentary transition between fervour and resignation. Her black hair was looser now than either of them had ever seen it before, and surrounded her brow like a forest. The stateliness of look which had been almost too marked for a dweller in a country domicile at last found an artistically happy background. (P. 381)

The intense irony of the "happy background" encompassing Eustacia in death emphasizes the dreadful conditions of her life. Hardy here conveys the double-bind of Eustacia's existence: only death can restore her to innocence. Insofar as drowning represents the traditional test applied to a witch (if guilty, she would float and escape death), it is the instrument of Eustacia's vindication. Furthermore, the need of Eustacia's body for a more aesthetically suitable "background" marks her body as a part of a larger cultural mythosan objet d'art, a lifeless spectacle for viewing.

The positioning of a woman's dead body as material evidence that serves to incriminate the living and vindicate the dead is not unique to The Return of the Native; its appearance elsewhere is consistent with Hardy's use of the female body as a sign to be interpreted through close observation. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, for example, only in death is Elfride finally absolved of the relentless insinuations of Mrs. Jethway, who blames Elfride's fickleness for the death of her son. In Far From the Madding Crowd, the sight of Fanny Robin's corpse drives Troy to invert the application of the titles of mistress and wife; in his eyes and, significantly, at his word, Bathsheba is fallen and Fanny is elevated to the position of his wife.17 Similarly, the discovery of Mrs. Yeobright's dead body leads Clym to indict Eustacia as a "murderess," while the sight of Eustacia's corpse leads him to her absolution: "She is the second woman I have killed this year. I was a great cause of my mother's death; and I am the chief cause of hers" (p. 381). While her corporeal end provides the definitive evidence of Eustacia's guilt and submission to punishment, it simultaneously restores her to innocence through the transformation of her corpse into a vision of submissive beauty.

Eustacia's drowning thus situates her as a spectacle to be gazed at, "a figure or representation that in part always reflects and sustains the narcissism of the viewer."18 Indeed, her death invokes acclaimed contemporary works of art and literature, particularly those which eroticized the drowning suicides of famous heroines, such as Millais' Ophelia (1852) and Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott" (1832). While giving space to the tragic lives of women, such works simultaneously hold up the body of the silent, powerless, but beautiful woman as a spectacle for detailed observation and a source of erotic pleasure. Eustacia's attitude toward the world--"I am weary of it, weary" (p. 340)-also invokes the refrain of Tennyson's "Mariana" (1830),19 a poem which likewise depicts a lone, imprisoned woman who, deserted by her lover, wishes death upon herself, Tennyson's narratives offer fitting parallels for the life of such a woman as Eustacia whose end seems "to be ordained by fate in the shape of popular legend."20 In death, Eustacia becomes "the common property not of a private textual world, but of public oral tradition.''21 Indeed, Hardy makes this distinction explicit: "The story of the deaths of Eustacia and Wildeve was told throughout Egdon, and far beyond, for many weeks and months. All the known incidents of their love were enlarged, distorted, touched up, and modified, till the original reality bore but a slight resemblance to the counterfeit presentation by surrounding tongues" (Return, p. 385). Eustacia's position as a lifeless text that can be reviewed and rewritten according to the whims of Egdon "tongues" confirms her reinscription within this society that she so defied and, in doing so, ensures the eradication of her identity.

The Return of the Native thus returns us to where we began, with Egdon's preoccupation with conjectural narrative at the fore. Through his focus on the construction and subsequent demise of Eustacia's identity, Hardy exposes and condemns the destructive power of such restrictive "disciplinary mechanisms'' (Foucault, p. 209). Ironically, however, by enacting her own death, Eustacia subjects herself in perpetuity to those tortures from which she sought escape in life: surveillance, judgment, and physical punishment. A spectacle of self-inflicted torture, Eustacia's suicide conflates the traditional and modern methods of discipline that operate in constant tension throughout the text. The extent of her internalization of social judgment demands that she die not merely a defiant object of surveillance and censure. Rather, as the bearer of her own punishment, Eustacia finally renders herself an erotic spectacle entirely submissive to ocular penetration and, thus, to social control.

1 Numbers 5:31. Quoted in Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895), ed, Patricia Ingham (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985). p. 335.

2 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878), ed. Simon Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. 1990), p. 333. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition.

3 Rosemarie Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, 2nd ed. {New York: Routledge. 1991), p. 157.

4 Lawrence Jay Dessner, "Space, fine, and Coincidence in }lardy," Studies in the Novel 24 (1992): 154.

5 Cares Baldridge, "Observation and Domination in Hardy's The Woodlanders," Victorian Literature and Culture 21 (1993): 208.

6 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth o/the Prison. 2nd ed., trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 197. Subsequent parethentical references to Foucault are to this edition.

7 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey. ed, Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 199,

8 Morgan, p. 61,

9 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, (1985), p. 4.

10 In Hardy's fiction such exile typically follows a breakdown in a marital relationship and sexual humiliation and/or degradation of the heroine by her husband and seems indicative of a desire to return to a pre-sexual state free from gender distinctions. For example, Sue, in dude the Obscure. hides in a closet beneath the stairs in order to avoid sharing the bed of her new husband, Phillotson; and here Eustacia returns to her grandfather' s home where she is tended to by Charley. In "Narrative, Gender, and Power in Far From the Madding Crowd," The Sense R/Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Hardy, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 49-65, Linda M, Shires points to the womb-like nature of the thicket into which Bathsheba, in Far From the Madding Crowd, retreats following Tray's rejection and humiliation of her and emphasizes its significance for negotiations of gender and authority in the novel.

11 Hardy, Jude the Obscure, p. 364.

12 Jennifer Gribble. "The Quiet Women of Egdon Heath," Essays in Criticism 46 (1996): 235.

13 Dixie Lee Larson, "Eustacia Vye's Drowning: Defiance Versus Convention." Thomas Hardy Journal 9 (1993): 62.

14 "The Quiet Women of Egdon Heath," pp. 252, 253.

15 Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (Madison; Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1982), p. 56 [italics added].

16 Morgan, p. 81.

17 See Elisabeth Bronfen, "Pay As You Go: On the Exchange of Bodies and Signs," The Sense of Sex: Feminist Perspectives on Thomas Hardy, pp. 66-86 for a thorough interpretation of this scene and the significance of the female dead body in Hardy's fiction in relation to the construction of trope.

18 "Pay As You Go," p. 68.

19 Alfred Tennyson, "Mariana" Tennyson's Poetry, ed. Robert Hill Jr. (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 20.

20 Jo Devereux, "Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes: The Heroine as Text." Victorian Newsletter 81 (I 992 ): 22.

21 Ibid.

~~~~~~~~

By SARA A. MALTON, UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA

Five MINUTES BEFORE he died, Thomas Hardy posed his last question to the universe. "What is this?" He had been asking it for most of his 88 years. It epitomizes his lifelong intellectual and spiritual efforts to understand "Life with the sad seared face."(n1) The question, with its many variations, like a revolving mirror trained on the human predicament, is treated in his many prose works (14 novels, numerous short stories, essays, and sketches), in his over 800 short lyrics, and in the massive three-part verse drama, The Dynasts. The "answers" that Hardy worked out did not make him happy. Indeed, his naturalism, with its bleak philosophy, exposed him to negative, often harsh criticism until nearly the end of his life.

Nevertheless, his death, on January 12,1928, was an international news event. British literature, said the London Times, had been deprived of its "most eminent figure"--a sentiment echoed worldwide. The burial in Westminster Abbey of the ashes of the country boy from the poor county of Dorset was a national rite. The Abbey was crowded with the famous in politics, the arts, education, and society, while crowds waited in pouring rain to file past the open grave in Poet's Corner. He was the first novelist to be buried there since Dickens, in 1870, and the first poet since Tennyson, in 1892. Leading the list of the distinguished participants were the Heads of Magdalene and Queens Colleges, of Cambridge and Oxford, of which Hardy was an Honorary Fellow, and the pallbearers included Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the Opposition, and six of the most eminent men of letters of the day. Simultaneously, in a "divided funeral," in Stinsford Churchyard, at Hunsford, where Hardy's grandparents, parents, and first wife, Emma, were buried, Hardy's heart was returned to his native earth.(n2)

For by then, though he was one of the most controversial writers of his time, this gentle, soft-voiced, self-effacing little man was the acknowledged master of the English novel in his age. He had also become an astounding poet. Born in 1840, he is the third Victorian poet with Browning and Tennyson. And now, in comparison, he seems more comprehensive, more dynamic, technically more original and ingenious, and philosophically more uncompromising.

Hardy's poetry suggests an eclectic landscape, with several varieties of "plants" growing out of differing kinds of soil. First, there was his rural heritage, his detailed knowledge of the flora and fauna of the countryside, its dialect and rustic characters. That gave him not only an authentic voice, but such a keen knowledge of nature that, for example, he was able to identify by their calls not only many species of birds but also their characteristic environs. Then, exceptionally sensitive to music, both instrumental and vocal, he early became an amateur violinist, often accompanying his stone-mason father, Thomas, also a violinist, as a second fiddler at weddings, dances, and other rural occasions. That gave him a sense of rhythm and meter, in poetry. From the age of fifteen, and for a number of years thereafter, he studied and practiced architecture, repairing Gothic churches, an interest he maintained during his life. That gave him a sense of design and structure. At the same time, he was sketching and painting in watercolor. That made him aware of visual patterns and tone color. Meanwhile, financially unable to attend Cambridge, a dream he held for many years, he educated himself, reading in the Greek and Roman classics, English and French literature, and philosophy. Moving to London in 1861, he had access to great paintings, music, and the theater. During these years, he often read in his room from six o'clock in the evening until midnight. In a touching gesture, a few hours after his death the scarlet robe of his honorary D. Litt. from Cambridge (1913) was fitted over his nightshirt. His favorite Spirit of Irony, of which he was the most eloquent voice of his age, must have smiled.

The year 1998 marked the centennial of the publication of Hardy's first volume of verse, Wessex Poems and Other Verses. Hardy's poetic career covered the second half of his life, from the 1890s, when he abandoned fiction, following his critical bludgeoning after the publication of Tess (1891) and Jude (1895), to his death. But for many years he had been studying poetry--Greek, Latin, French, and English poetics--and he had already published a few poems. His often-printed "Hap" dates from 1866 when he was 26.3 Here, with a note of unmerited suffering, he complains, like Job, on the source of his pain. We have here an early suggestion of Hardy's concept of an indifferent cosmos and an uncaring Primal Cause. Life, it seems, is a matter of blind Chance:

...How arrives its joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever
 sown?
Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a
 moan ....
These purblind Doomsters had as readily
 strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain ....(n4)

Hardy's basic philosophy only grew darker with the years. And though he lived to see the end of World War I, the so-called Jazz Age, and especially the changes in subject-matter, style, and technique in poetry, under the aegis of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and their followers, and the French Symbolists, Hardy's poetry did not change in content or form. He remained consistent with his own individuality.

Critical responses to his Wessex Poems were mixed, ranging from somewhat favorable to puzzlement to harshly negative. "What induces Hardy to commit himself to verse?" exclaimed Meredith. The Saturday Review noted "this curious and wearisome volume, these many slovenly, slipshod, uncouth verses, stilted in sentiment, poorly conceived, and worse wrought .... It is impossible to understand why the bulk of this volume was published at all." A more sympathetic critic, Lionel Johnson, who had already written on an early Hardy novel, noted "the arresting, strenuous, sometimes admirable poems," but regretted their "almost uniform grimness and absence of Humour."(n5) Hardy himself complained not of the critics' unkindnesses, but that their comments had shown "such depths of imperceptivity."(n6)

But there were some alleviating comments. Although reviews tended to focus upon the technique of the poetry rather than the content, one reviewer complaining of "the unmusical expression," another found "little to please the ear, but much to please the mind that is capable of the charm of melancholy." One reviewer wrote in The Bookman that Hardy was "essentially a poet .... What justifies Mr. Hardy's verse to the full is his gift of a peculiar intensity of expression which could hardly find legitimate use in prose." And even reviewers disturbed by Hardy's pessimism found the poems "challenging." The Athenaeum found that Hardy's poems "voiced a matured and deliberate judgment of life."(n7)

Of course the repeated note on Hardy's pessimism resonated again. Hardy rejected the term, insisting that he was only "a harmless agnostic" or, as he called himself, an "evolutionary meliorist," implying a hope that as human intelligence and conscience developed, conditions in the world must improve. In an interview in January 1901 he said, "My practical philosophy is distinctly meliorist. What are my books but a plea against man's inhumanity to man--to woman--and to the lower animals?" As Michael Millgate observes

Fundamentally pessimistic about the human condition, in the sense that he believed birth and coming to consciousness to be a kind of original doom, Hardy could nevertheless respond with compassion to human and animal suffering, and bring a reformist zeal to bear upon evils perceived as social and hence as potentially susceptible to amelioration or even eradication .... Abstractly, theoretically, generally, he could only see an incomprehensible and probably meaningless universe; concretely, practically, specifically he cared deeply about the human condition, perceived value in individual lives, supported humanitarian causes, and thought that things could and indeed did get better.(n8)

The opening poem of Hardy's first volume, "The Temporary The All," is typically Hardian, with "the dense stresses, the strict yet unfamiliar forms, the inverted syntax, the archaisms and odd coinages."(n9) But we may find two other surprising aspects. First, there is a link to the complex, often inverted, jammed-up, oddly-worded poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Contemporary with Hardy, Hopkins's poems were not published until 1918, ten years before Hardy's death; and Hardy's first volume of poetry was published nine years after Hopkins's death. Of course, spiritually they were widely disjunct: Hardy, the agnostic, and Hopkins, the anguished Jesuit priest. But the stylistic echoes are intriguing. Another bit of shadow-casting links Hardy and Robert Frost. Both are acute depicters of nature and human nature, and of a specific locale--Hardy, of the "Wessex" country of south-western England (the country around Dorchester), and Frost, of New England.

But more important is the fact that both poets profit aesthetically from being read aloud. In Hardy's poems, the oral tradition is especially evident. He grew up with gifted narrators in his family, with their stores of local legends and country sayings. He was "probably England's last and greatest product of the oral tradition."(n10) In the style of oral rendering, Hardy often uses ballad-measures, narratives of love betrayed or lost, and folk legends. Further, the poems of both Hardy and Frost frequently contain rough metrical lines or passages, that create a bumpy effect. When such lines are read aloud, however, the metrical roughness easily absorbs into the natural stresses and pauses of a conversational tone--a principle Frost was later to describe as "the sound of sense." Hardy may or may not have known the poetry of Hopkins. Frost did know Hardy's work, once commenting, in another context, that "Hardy has planted himself upon the wrongs that can't be righted."(n11)

Hardy's second volume of poetry, Poems of the Past and Present (1901), received generally more positive reviews. In his Preface to this volume, anticipating criticism about "a lack of cohesion and thought or harmony of coloring," he wrote, "I do not greatly regret this. Unadjusted impressions have their value, and the road to a true philosophy of life seems to me to lie in humbly recording diverse readings of phenomena as they are forced upon us by time and chance."(n12) There is much essential Hardy here, particularly in the shaping and often fateful forces of Coincidence and Time.

So, for nearly thirty years Hardy wrote poetry: love poems and narratives, dramatic monologues and dialogues, occasional poems, and philosophical and theological speculations. The Dynasts, his epical three-part verse drama of the Napoleonic Wars, first conceived in 1875, was completed in 1908. It entailed reading history and military history, plus invoking family and regional legends, as well as contacts with old men who had lived through some of the campaigns. Never intended for stage production, parts of The Dynasts have nevertheless been staged. Hardy had planned to publish his last poems, Winter Words, on his ninetieth birthday. It was posthumously published in 1928 by his second wife, Florence, who noted that even in his old age she had seen no decrease in his poetic powers.

The inner and outer freedoms of Hardy's poems, plus tonal and stylistic links to such poets as Hopkins and Frost, suggest this poetry is definitely pre-modern. Increasingly a significant presence, since the 1970s and notably in the last fifteen years, Hardy's work has engaged fulsome and various literary scholarship. There are new biographies and interpretive volumes. Critics of diverse stances have discovered unsuspected depths and dimensions. Exponents of structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics have offered new insights.(n13) Detailed studies have focused upon Hardy's repetitions; on his use of prosopoeia; the "gaps" in time and perspective in the poems. And literary psychologists have invoked Freud in discussing the Poems of 1912-1913, the 21-poem elegiac sequence written after the death of his first wife, Emma, in 1912.

Nor should we forget the recent emergence of Hardy novels on television, responding to Hardy's powerful and characteristic dramatic impulse. We have seen stagings of The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure, Far From The Madding Crowd, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Several versions of several novels, some of which Hardy himself adapted for the stage, were produced in London and Dorchester during his lifetime; and in the twenties a proposal to publish all of the novels as dramas was seriously considered.

I wish now to consider six poems, suggestive of Hardy's poetic art and of various states of mind and heart, youthful and aged. I am primarily concerned here not with contemporary technical exegesis, but with the poems as they show Hardy's capacities for lyrical expression, and as they document particular situations and emotions that become universally moving.

Hardy was one of the most autobiographical of poets. For years he carried pocket notebooks in which he recorded acute observations of natural scenes, rural characters and events, animals, ideas for poems, moods and moments of the human drama. Anything might become the basis for a poem; and judging from the massive corpus of his Collected Poems, nearly anything did. Often the poems were specifically dated--day, month, or year. But since many of them suggest a kind of inherited "peasant caution," background information is sometimes necessary. "When I Set Out For Lyonesse" profits from such knowledge.

In 1870, Hardy was assigned by his employer, an ecclesiastical architect, to design the re-building of an old church at St. Joliet, a tiny hamlet in Cornwall, near the fabled Lyonesse, known in Celtic mythology as the birthplace of Tristram. Immediately, we have a highly appropriate and romantic setting. Calling on the rector of the old church, he was met by the rector's sister-in-law, Emma Lavinia Gifford, a niece of the Archdeacon of London. It was a fateful meeting, for it involved the following 42 years of their lives. Hardy's visit lasted four days; their marriage, in 1874, lasted 38 years.

"When I Set Out for Lyonesse"

When I set out for Lyonesse
 A hundred miles away,
The rime was on the spray,
 And starlight lit my lonesomeness
When I set out for Lyonesse
 A hundred miles away.

What would bechance at Lyonesse
 While I should sojourn there
 No prophet durst declare,
Nor did the wisest wizard guess
What would bechance at Lyonesse
 While I should sojourn there.

When I came back from Lyonesse
 With magic in my eyes,
All marked with mute surmise,
My radiance rare and fathomless,
When I came back from Lyonesse
 With magic in my eyes!(n14)

This poem records a journey, a departure and a return. It is also a record of a transforming experience. The "lightness" of tone contrasts sharply with the deep and permanent significance of the event. The first stanza gives a nighttime departure, in a mood of characteristic Hardian "loneliness." In the second stanza, we feel a mysterious immanence. In the third stanza, a transformation has occurred. But we did not see it. It has happened between the second and third verses--an example of one of Hardy's "gaps"--a shift in time or perspective, here, from loneliness to "rapture," and from past to present. This poem "feels" as though the opening two lines came "ready-made," out of an intense emotion. The development needed only to follow the given direction.

The form is a Hardy "original." The basic ballad-form is individualized in both rhyme and metrical patterns. In each stanza, the first and fifth, and the second and sixth lines are identical. This both emphasizes the opening line, and also forms a "frame" for the inner lines that tell the "story." And the repetition enhances the overall lyrical effect. The lyricism is increased by the phoneme "s" which ends 12 of the 18 lines of the poem. The melodic word "Lyonesse" gives the initial pattern, which Hardy intuitively followed. I say "intuitively," because we have here an interesting example of "sound symbolism" or articulatory gesture,(n15) in which the movement of the speech organs echoes or imitates or reproduces a quality or characteristic or feature of the referend. Here, the referend is a journey, which embodies movement. "S" is a fricative, like "f" or "v," and here the movement aspect of the letter "s" underlines the basic fact of the poem, namely, movement. The total effect of all the elements here makes this one of Hardy's most graceful, and charming love lyrics. Hardy did have "magic in his eyes," because he had fallen deeply in love with Emma.

But, alas, romance does not always last. Our second poem, "The Walk," written 42 years later, belongs to the 21-poem sequence, Poems of 1912-1913, which Hardy began only a few weeks after Emma's death. Responses to this group move from "some of the most unconventional and impressive elegies in English," to "one of the best three series of love poems in English," to "some of the finest love poetry in our language."(n16) In contrast, however, a fulsome amount of Freudian interpretation suggests that in these poems Hardy expiates years of neglect and indifference to Emma, his self-reproach being intensified on reading her diaries of 20 years, in which she complained bitterly of his indifference. This theme is critically expanded into indifference, neglect, anger, guilt, self-reproach.

Probably there is much to be said on both sides. Hardy was determined to do his writing, and artists are not the most easy people to live with. Emma had literary aspirations of her own, wrote some essays and poems, and often assisted Hardy with his manuscripts. She resented his growing fame, and her own subordination. Also, there were several women to whom Hardy was attracted, and whose literary aspirations he encouraged and assisted. One of these was Florence Dugdale, first his secretary, and later, his second wife, whom he married in 1914, and who published the Life (1928-1930) and Winter Words (1928). All of this, then, the bitter sense of a failed marriage which had begun so rosily, inspired the Emma-sequence. Altogether, over the years, Hardy wrote more than 100 elegies for Emma, memorializing his courtship and idealizing the early relationship.

You did not walk with me
Of late to the hill-top tree
 By the gated ways,
 As in earlier days;
 You were weak and lame.
 So you never came,
And I went alone, and I did not mind,
Not thinking of you as left behind.

I walked up there to-day
Just in the former way;
 Surveyed around
 The familiar ground
 By myself again;
 What difference, then?
Only that underlying sense
Of the look of a room on returning
 thence.(n17)

"The Walk" seems not to have attracted much attention. It is short and poignant, and lacks the dramatic "anger" or "self-reproach" now so often read into other poems in the sequence. Between the stanzas we sense the frequent time-shift from past to present. The poet recalls that often in the evening he and Emma had walked a spiral path from the end of the garden to a "hilltop tree." Later, for physical reasons, his companion did not accompany him; but he "did not mind," having still the sense of her presence. In the second stanza, now a present moment, he walks again the familiar path. Nothing has changed. "What difference, then?" he asks.

Only that underlying sense

Of the look of a room on returning thence.

It does not take Freud to define the peculiar impact of this brief poem. But this poem is not for everyone. It is only for one who has known that painful moment of entering a place haunted by the sense of a beloved personality, now lost. There is a moment of starkness. One does not want to enter. It is as simple as that. As simple as the difference between Life and Death.

In keeping with the situation, the diction is flat, prosaic, with the colloquial, "I did not mind." In 1914, Lytton Strachey commented on "the flat undistinguished poetry of Mr. Hardy," but added, "Hardy has found out the secret of touching our marrow-bone.(n18) This is another example of Hardy's intuitive power.

The visual pattern of the poem is created by its varied metrics, the first two lines being trimeter, the next four, dimeter, and the last two, tetrameter. With his keen structural sensitivity, enhanced by his architectural experience, Hardy designed his poems for the eye as well as for the ear. Further, I suggest that this rhythmical variation may have been an instinctive response to the physical situation. The walk covered a slightly uphill path. The varied meters may reflect the physical "pull" as the walker adapted to the varying levels. And the ground is "familiar"--physical and psychic. He has done it all before. But the sting is in the last two lines. This poem is a special kind of human document, for a special kind of reader.

Hardy has a genius for last lines. We see it repeatedly, as in our next poem, "The Oxen":

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They knelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come, see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb,(n19)
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.(n20)

This poem is dated 1915, when Hardy was 75. Its four stanzas carry the poet back to the lost certainties of childhood and youth. Each half of two stanzas marks a time period: past and present. The first half presents a rural meeting on Christmas Eve, a group gathered in a "flock," recalling a folk belief of cattle kneeling at midnight. The second half contrasts this "fair fancy," which no one there doubted, with "these years," a twentieth-century world now in the second year of World War I. The poem conveys a sense of profound wistfulness, and regret.

For, arriving in London, in 1861, at the beginning of the turbulent 1860s, Hardy had gradually lost his youthful religious faith. Traditionalism was under various assaults; from Darwinism, the scientism and agnosticism of T.H. Huxley, the agnostic oratory of Robert Ingersoll, the Oxford Movement, especially the voice of the future Cardinal Newman, and Liberalism, the "Higher Criticism," lately arrived from Europe. Plunged into this ideational vortex, Hardy, like many English intellectuals such as Matthew Arnold, whom he knew and whose influence he noted, was unable to maintain his early beliefs. He continued, however, to respond to the music and rituals of religious service, which answered both his emotional and his aesthetic needs, and which had given direction to his early social ambition, when his dream was to be a parson. Indeed, he once amazed a group of both Christians and agnostics, when he shyly admitted to being a believing communicant of the Church of England.(n21) This apparent inconsistency is really a matter of different levels of intellectual and emotional involvements. Millgate notes that much of Hardy's best work "emerged directly from the juxtaposition of deeply traditional attitudes and intensely localized country lore, with an emotional susceptibility to the music and ritual of the Church of England, and a subsequent intellectual acceptance of some of the more radical and skeptical trends in late nineteenth-century thought. Remarkably, these influences did not supersede each other, but co-existed."(n22)

The appropriate ballad form, with its lyrical rhymes and meters, makes this poem especially touching. But there are some significant metrical variations in which the basic iambic pattern becomes trochaic: as in "Christmas Eve," "Now," in the second line, "in these years" in the third stanza, followed by a caesural pause. "Yet" another heavy accent, "Come, see," both accented, and the last line, "Hoping." The heavily accented words are all keywords. "Might," the subjunctive verb, emphasizes the contrary-to-fact impulse of the poem. We are left with the sad knowledge that this lovely folk-belief is indeed a "fairy tale." The diction is appropriately simple, most of the words being of one syllable, with the dialectical "barton" and "coomb." "Gloom" is metaphoric, suggesting both the darkness of midnight and the poet's aging spirit. The integration of all the elements--situation, form, diction, theme, metrics, and tone--makes this one of Hardy's memorable poems.

For a change of key, here is "Starlings on the Roof":

"No smoke spreads out of this chimney-pot,
The people who lived here have left the
 spot,
And others are coming who knew them
 not....

"If you listen anon, with an ear intent,
The voices, you'll find, will be different
From the well-known ones of those who
 went."

"Why did they go? Their tones so bland
Were quite familiar to our band,'
The comers we shall not understand."

"They look for a new life, rich and strange;
They do not know that, let them range
Wherever they may, they will get no change.

"They will drag their house-gear ever so far
In their search for a home no miseries mar,'
They will find that as they were they are,

"That every hearth has a ghost, alack,
And can be but the scene of a bivouac
Till they move their last--no care to pack!"(n23)

This is an avian dialogue that may remind us of an Aesop's fable in the bird's comment on a perennially foolish humanity. The theme, a domestic "moving," notes an empty house, the occupants having left in hope of bettering their situation. "Why did they go?" asks the second bird. The first three stanzas simply offer casual comment. But with the fourth stanza an ominous note develops. "Seeking a new life," answers the first bird. But, he continues, wherever they go, "They will get no change," nor will they find a home with "no miseries," until their final move. There can be no real change for the movers, for they must take themselves with them. The "answers" are uttered with a flat calmness, the fatalistic equations brooking neither addition nor subtraction. It is not a comforting observation.

We must not overlook the poem's title. It is starlings that sit on the roof and make their sardonic comments. Hardy knows his birds. It is not robins, or mourning doves, or some other species of quite friendly birds. Starlings are chatty, noisy, greedy, aggressive. They are well cast here as doom-sayers. This poem could appear in a collection of Frost's poems. Both Frost and Hardy are fond of conversational, philosophical birds, and both can make their birds suggest doom-like implications.

We continue with a darkly contrasting "bird poem," possibly the most anthologized Hardy poem. Originally titled "By the Century's Deathbed," it is known and loved as "The Darkling Thrush," and even our cursory sampling must include it. The poem is dated December 31, 1900, and marks the hour of transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. Perhaps it may hold special meaning now as we enter a new millennium.

The poet, presumably on a walk, leans upon a coppice (a small wood) gate, from which he records a desolate winter scene: a generally deathlike aspect. The frost is "spectre"-like, the "dregs" of winter in the "darkling" (deepening) twilight increase the sense of desolation, and local "haunters" have retreated to fireside warmth. All aspects, "the sharp features" of the landscape, combine to suggest the century's "corpse"; the sky its "crypt" and the wind is "death-lament." The remains of vegetation, the "ancient pulse of germ and birth" is "shrunken hard and dry," and Hardy (now at the age of 60), identifies in spirit with the depressive scene.

I leant upon a coppice gate
 When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
 The weakening eye of day,
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
 Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
 Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
 The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
 The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
 Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
 Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
 The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
 Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail gaunt, and small,
 In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
 Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
 Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
 Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
 His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, wherof he knew
 And I was unaware.(n24)

The poem is divided into two equal
halves, the first presenting the winter
scene. But the second half moves us
from Death to Life. And now comes the
wonderful third stanza. It marks a triple
"transposition" into a different key, like
moving from a minor to a major mode.
First, the plane of action rises from
ground-level to "overhead"; second, the
poet's vision moves from eyes to ears;
third, we sense at least a suggestion of a
"lightening" of the poet's spirit from his
"fervourless" state. What has happened?
From above, in the "bleak twigs" comes

...a full-hearted even-song
 Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small
 In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
 Upon the growing gloom.

This bird--not a starling--is a thrush, a bird with a particularly clear, sweet, liquid song. This is an old bird; and he is having a hard time. The physical details are pictorial: Not only is he markedly frail, but the sharp wind has ruffled his feathers, and we can almost see the tail-feathers blown nearly inside-out by the sharp blast. The contrast between his appearance and his song is noteworthy. How can that song project such joy into this "growing gloom"? The poet can see no reason for such brightness "on terrestrial things," or near or far. But now he touches on "some blessed Hope," "whereof he knew/And I was unaware."

Hardy is suggesting here that the bird, through its natural wisdom, brings comfort and relief from the present desolation which the poet himself, with all his obsession for knowledge, has so far not discovered. The thrush not only sings; he "flings his soul" upon this desolate world. He takes his place here like a small, death-defying soldier, confronting, with his sacred essence, an implacable death-dealing universe. Hardy would have known that for ages a bird has been a symbol for the soul. Here the bird seems illumined by a ray of special grace which throws Life against the Death-aura of the scene. As we feel the literal upsurge of the situation, I think we may regard this poem as one of the "permanent things" in the repertory of English poetry.

The ballad-like form is metrically flawless in its tetrameter/trimeter progression, with but one exception:

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small

The first two feet and the last are perfect lambs. But in the third foot, "frail" and "gaunt," each syllable is heavily accented, and further, each is set off by a caesura. This double emphasis heightens the contrast between the frail old bird and his life-giving message. We should also note that the marked regularity of the poem's movement is unusual for Hardy, who did not like too much "smoothness" in lines. But his basic response to experience is emotional (usually quickly moved to a rational level) and here the "gloom-to-joy" progression and the climactic song underlie the lyrical effect. The integration of all the elements-the subject, theme, the singable ballad-measure, the metaphors, gloom to joy, and death to hope--makes this a favored Hardy poem.

The characteristic "gloom," however, leads us now to Hardy's theological-philosophical poems of questioning and speculation. Hardy is not a philosopher. He is a poet. His speculative knowledge, based in his wide but not strictly organized reading, his supersensitive responses to experience, his intuitive powers, his deep compassion for human and animal suffering, his romantic temperament, and his keen social conscience contribute to his special genius, and to his basic attitude toward life and the universe. He was continually trying to explain to himself the mystery of the origin of Evil in its variety, and getting no answer except in his sense of a dark universe, created by some Primal Cause and then left to run itself, at the mercy of Time and Chance, exerting untold woes on sentient life. He had differing names for his Primal power: "It," the Prime Mover, the Immanent Will, Nature, the Spinner of the Years, the Absolute, the Causer, God.

There is considerable variety in these poems, a variety that suggests aspects of Hardy's view of existence. Some, especially those of his last years, such as "The Absolute Answers," are long, 16 or 18 stanzas. Sometimes they are dialogues between the speaker (the poet) and Deity, who may answer in a voice that somewhat suggests the God who speaks to Man in Genesis. (Hardy had read the Bible through more than once, and he frequently annotated texts or passages, upon which later poems were based.) By the middle of his twenties, he had already established a kind of philosophical home base which did not essentially change over the years, except, perhaps, to darken. Most of these poems are too long for presentation here, but we can do quite well with a few sample quotations. Perhaps it is important to note that sometimes Hardy called these intellectual excursions "Phantasies," which gives them a sort of fable-quality.

In the early "Nature's Questioning," the poet perceives various aspects of Nature--"Field, flock, and lonely tree," sadly asking "why we find us here."

"Has some Vast Imbecility
 Mighty to build and blend,
 But impotent to tend,
Framed us in jest, and left us now to
 hazardry?

"Or come we of an Automaton
 Unconscious of our pains?...
 Or are we live remains
Of Godhead dying downwards, brains and
 eye now gone?"(n25)

This poem concludes, "No answerer
I." But here we have most of the basic
premises.

In "The Sleep-Worker," the poet addresses
Nature as "the Mother" (in modern
mythology, "The Great Mother") as
having created "unwittingly"

Fair growths, foul cankers, right enmeshed
 with wrong,
Strange orchestras of victim-shriek and
 song....(n26)

and asks, should Nature some day "wake"
to her creations,

"How wilt thou bear thyself in thy surprise?
Wilt thou destroy in one wild shock of
 shame
The whole high heaving firmamental frame,
Or patiently adjust, amend, and heal?"

Again, Hardy's "last line" hits home.
The heavy iambic accents highlight the
conclusion, which offers a faint hope that
a suffering universe may one day be relieved.
The progression is meaningful.
There is a dim hope here for ultimate
betterment in the universal scheme.

A similar hope may be discerned in
"To the Unknown God" (the original title
is written in Greek), in which the poet
addresses a "Wilier masked and dumb/
Who makest Life become," and asks

"How much of consciousness informs Thy will,
Thy biddings, as if blind,
Of death-inducing kind,
Nought shows to us ephemeral ones who fill
But moments in thy mind."

Perhaps, he suggests,

"that listless effort tends
To grow percipient with advance of days,
And with percipience mends."(n27)

Perhaps this universal wrong may one day be discerned as "a wrong/Dying as of self-slaughter...?"

These samples may imply Hardy's fundamental attitudes toward universal life. It is quite wrong to brand Hardy as an "atheist." Agnostic, yes. He does not know. But who does? He is deeply religious in temperament, and simply believed that "if way to the Better there be/ It exacts a full look at the Worst."(n28) Hardy observed, meditated, and wrote what he believed to be truth--at least, for himself, at a time when such sentiments were, to say the least, unfashionable, and were often harshly criticized.

I select our final poem not because its subject has captivated the public for 86 years--in the last several years almost to the point of popular hysteria--but because this is an extraordinary, even an amazing poem. Hardy titled it, "The Convergence of the Twain," and it was written within two weeks of the catastrophe. It was "made" for him, in its subject, theme, instances of coincidence and irony, and essential tragedy. I refer, of course, to the sinking of the Titanic, on April 14, 1912.

           I

In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her,
 stilly couches she.

          II

Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic
 tidal lyres.

          III

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls--grotesque, slimed,
 dumb, indifferent.

           IV

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and
 black and blind.

            V

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vain gloriousness
 down here?"...

           VI

Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges
 everything

          VII

Prepared a sinister mate
For her--so gaily great--
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

          VIII

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg
 too.

           IX

Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history,

           X

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august
 event,

           XI

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two
 hemispheres.(n29)

This is an "occasional" poem, one written for a special situation or occasion. Hardy is especially effective with this type of poem, another memorable one being "And There Was a Great Calm," written shortly after the end of World War I, and commemorating Armistice Day, November 11, 1918.

The Titanic disaster is toned by Hardy's favorite voice, Irony. The story is one of hubris, and Hardy saw in it the spirit of classical tragedy. Historically, this disaster came to symbolize the end of an era--when Victorian smugness and sense of certainty gave way to its opposite, a loss of certainty and confidence which has colored life ever since.

The poem is divided into eleven three-line stanzas, numbered in Roman numerals, suggesting formality and care. Stanzas one through five, and six through ten divide the poem neatly into two parts, with the final stanza acting as a kind of "summary," and stating the critical moment of the action.

The first stanza is itself extraordinary. In twenty words and three lines we are given the setting, the theme, and the situation. In "solitude," 12,460 feet deep in the North Atlantic, far removed from human vanity and pride, "stilly couches she." The inverted syntax puts the (female) subject of the poem and of the long sentence at the end, now calm, and as though she is resting. Contrasting the elegance of the ship and its passengers, "the opulent" with the dark subterranean depths, we meet again this theme of "vain gloriousness." (We remember that this ship was designated "unsinkable.")

In the second five stanzas we begin to sense a growing tension. Thousands of miles away, "a sinister mate for her," "so gaily great," a "Shape of Ice" is slowly developing:

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg
 too.

Nothing, it would seem, could have
been farther apart than these two dramatis
personae.

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one august
 event.

Here again is Hardy's law of coincidence.
And then the climax:

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two
 hemispheres.

The imagery of the poem, the personification of the ship and the iceberg, She, feminine, "a creature of cleaving wing" half-bird and half-ship and the Shape, presumably masculine, but more effective for not being specifically described, are brought together for the main metaphor of the poem, a "consummation"--a kind of unholy marriage, an "intimate welding." And we know that never again will this ship and this iceberg be sundered.

A marked use of alliteration in the poem can be discerned, for example, in stanza IV:

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and
 black and blind.

The metrical pattern is also interesting: basically iambic, and the accent on the last line falls heavily on "bleared" and "black" and "blind." The first two lines of each stanza are in trimeter, the last line being in hexameter. Twice three is six. It is easy to feel that each of the two short lines suggests one of the actors in this drama, and the last line, the coming together of the two. Also, if you look at the visual pattern of any stanza in the original publication, you see that the lines form an outline of a ship. Here again, Hardy's architectural sense seems to be working.

There is a significant shift in the tone of the poem, from the formal quality of the first half to the more relaxed conversational tone introduced by "Well." Then follows an answer to the question, "What does this vain gloriousness down here?" We note also that the first five stanzas--the first half--are all in the present tense. The next five shift to the past tense, which continues until the "Now!" of the last verse when, at the moment of the "consummation," the present tense comes, making the climax immediate and effective.

The poem is masterly, and a fitting conclusion to our sample consideration of Hardy's poetry. As analyses continue, we will increasingly find Hardy to be the poet he always was, and as he wished to be known.

Hardy is not Shakespeare or Milton or Wordsworth or Yeats, though he may have affinities with each. And in the massive corpus of his poetry there is some inevitable unevenness. Sometimes the polemic of a poem weighs too heavily on the "poetry." Sometimes the technical ingenuity becomes the major focus.

Nevertheless, today Hardy looms like a modern Colossus, bestriding the pages of English poetry, one foot firmly on the nineteenth century, the other on the shores of the twentieth, while beneath, the swirling waters of poetic fashions come and go. As Ezra Pound said of T.S. Eliot, "Read him!" It is a fitting epigraph.

Painting a neighborhood you paint the world.
Portraits of doctors, postmen, wives, daughters--

Figures who came to an atelier looking for God knows what,
but becoming companions, parts of dreams--look out

At us or at each other naturally, as they sit or stand,
being themselves even in the careful, long-held poses, playing

At being themselves, holding a glass, toweling off from a bath,
dancing a little, all a-wonder that "an artist would bother us

"To do such things, pay good money, talk to us afterwards,
in a while treat us as friends. Oh, and at times take us outdoors

"'Here, hold this watering-can. Look at your dog. Stay'--until
a cloud appears, and he throws up his brush, helpless,

"Complaining about the light. Why does light matter so much?
What's light? 'The one model that won't hold a pose.'

"That's what he says, peeved, then adds another daub:
'The painter's third eye. It's work to see anything well,

"'But to see for years to come, to make others see, takes
light of a subtle kind, one that can--eventually--be made
to stay.'"

Did they guess--they too were made of light? No painter
would insist, too strongly. Gentlemanly Renoir, courteous Sisley

Among floods and snows: nothing escaped them. Even the poses
radiate into movement. Monsieur, mademoiselle, le petit

Haven't gone anywhere, caught up in an eerily constant sun.
We follow their gestures, smiles--alive, more than many

Of the living. Casual as kisses, they're our neighbors, too.
We invite them into our lives. We invite the world.

(n1.) "To Life," Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (New York, 1937), 107.

(n2.) Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy, A Biography (New York, 1982), 575.

(n3.) "Hap," a person's luck or fate. A happening.

(n4.) Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, 7.

(n5.) Quoted in Thomas Hardy, A Biography, 394.

(n6.) Ibid.

(n7.) Quoted in Neil Covey, "The Decline of Poetry and Hardy's Empty Hall," Victorian Poetry, Vol. 31 (Spring 1993), 63.

(n8.) Thomas Hardy, A Biography, 410-411.

(n9.) Ibid., 392-393.

(n10.) Ibid., 36-37.

(n11.) John E. Walsh, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost (New York, 1988), 224.

(n12.) Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, 75.

(n13.) Lance St. John Butler, Alternative Hardy (London, 1989), xi.

(n14.) Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, 293.

(n15.) See Otto Jespersen, Edward Sapir, Alexander Johannessen, E. Prokosh, Sir Richard Paget.

(n16.) Quoted in Jahan Ramazani, "Hardy and the Poetics of Melancholia: Poems of 1912-13 and other Elegies of Emma," English Literary History, Vol. 58 (Winter 91), 957.

(n17.) Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, 320.

(n18.) In the New Statesman. Quoted in Hardy, A Biography (New York, 1994), 810.

(n19.) "barton," dialect, a barnyard. "coomb," dialect, a small valley or hollow.

(n20.) Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, 439.

(n21.) Ford Madox Ford, "Thomas Hardy," Portraits from Life (New York, 1937), 137.

(n22.) Thomas Hardy, A Biography, 38-39.

(n23.) Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy, 366.

(n24.) Ibid., 137.

(n25.) Ibid., 58.

(n26.) Ibid., 110.

(n27.) Ibid., 171.

(n28.) Ibid., "In Tenebris," II, 154.

(n29.) Ibid., 288.

~~~~~~~~

By Louise Dauner

LOUISE DAUNER is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at the University of Indiana, Indianapolis.

In Jude the Obscure, Hardy's framed images--be they photographs, windows, mirrors, or doorways--serve as "active signifiers" (Mast 85) that "[carry] themes" (Berger 55). As a whole, Hardy's prolific use of the framed image throughout the novel reflects its most prominent theme, namely Sue Bridehead's and Jude Fawley's attempts to overcome the strictures/frames of social status and convention. As Elizabeth Langland writes, those strictures are exacerbated for Sue because of her sex: "Sue's is not simply a class conflict; it is a conflict of genders, a conflict finally between what woman can and is expected to do" (20). This distinction between male and female experience is symbolically represented in Hardy's framed images: while Sue's image is often encased, Jude consistently eludes almost all frames, both pictorial and social.

Sue's image is repeatedly framed in windows and photographs. Jude voyeuristically observes Sue through the window at her training school (196), at her house in Shaston (266), and at Marygreen, where she is staying with the Widow Edlin (274). On one occasion, Richard Phillotson and his friend Gillingham also engage in the same activity (442). Furthermore, photographs of Sue are much sought after and revered by the men with whom she is involved; Jude longs for, and eventually receives, Sue's photograph from their Aunt Drusilla, after which he "put the photograph on the mantelpiece, kissed it--he did not know why--and felt more at home" (132). Jude is not the only man to possess and kiss Sue's image: Phillotson also keeps photographs of Sue as a girl and a young woman in his desk drawer, the latter being "a duplicate of the one she had given Jude, and would have given any man" (217). Although Phillotson hesitates before kissing Sue's photograph, he "ultimately [kisses] the dead pasteboard with all the passionateness, and more than all the devotion, of a young man of eighteen" (217).

The monitoring and/or ownership of Sue's image is thus equated with the possession of her sexually elusive self. That motif is reiterated when Sue returns briefly to Shaston to visit Phillotson, from whom she has recently separated. Phillotson notes to himself that Sue is Jude's "'from lips to heel'" (316), then lies in his bedroom after she departs "writhing like a man in hell as he pictured the prettily dressed, maddening compound of sympathy and averseness who bore his name, returning impatiently to the home of her lover" (317). With this, Sue is turned into an image, labeled, and framed by her movement from one man to another. Although Phillotson attributes to Sue and Jude the cohabitation of a single bodily frame (293), Sue proves unable to maintain this connection because of her repugnance at being defined by the strictures of conventional marriage, paradoxically coupled with her inability to escape those strictures. When Sue returns permanently to Phillotson, she distances herself from him emotionally and intellectually, but physically continues to be defined by masculine parameters--Phillotson proves willing, after all, to engage in sexual relations with her in spite of her physical aversion to him (479).

Sue is much more rigidly defined by society than Jude, who is a self-educated man who speaks in a more elevated language than the residents of Marygreen or the regular clientele at the public house in Christminster. As a stonemason, however, he can repair, but not enter, the frames of the colleges and universities he dreams of attending. He therefore exists in a space between societal frames, and his elusion of categorical definition is represented in Hardy's use of framed images: Jude's image is curiously lacking within the novel's window frames, looking-glasses, and photographs. Jude is never reflected in any surface, a fact evidenced in the first chapter, when young Jude looks down into the well at Marygreen, seeing "a long circular perspective ending in a shining disc of quivering water at a distance of a hundred feet down" (49). The well, framed by stone, moss, and hart's tongue, is "as ancient as the village itself" (49); it is one of the hamlet's oldest surviving monuments (50). Here, where Jude might see himself, he sees only a distant light framed by stone; the image is evocative of Jude's search for a way of life that can fit within the established structures (the old stone wells) of his society.

When Jude is captured by frames he appears to be unrecognizable, as when he comes across his own framed portrait in a pawnshop. Arabella has discarded his picture with all of her other belongings in her haste to set out for Australia, and when Jude discovers it, he purchases it from the pawnbroker, who makes no mention of his resemblance to the framed image (118-19). And again, at the Great Wessex Agricultural Show, Arabella's friend Anny does not recognize Jude from the pictures of him that Arabella has shown her in the past (359). We know that Jude has given Sue pictures of himself because he wonders if it is his photograph she is looking at when he watches her through her window at Shaston (267), yet his portrait is conspicuously absent from the collection of photographs that Sue has in filigree and velvet on her dresser at the training school (194). All of this is in keeping with Jude's existence between frames--his bucking of the strictures of his class, his exclusion from the walled academy. But juxtaposed against the continual framing of Sue in the novel, the rationale cannot exclude considerations of gender: Sue is framed by a society that values her appearance and her body, whereas Jude exists in a masculine realm, freed from those constraints.

The world in which Sue and Jude live lacks parameters, or frames of reference, for the life they have generated. For Sue, this world cannot be sustained; she fulfills Jude's accusation that she is "'as enslaved to the social code as any woman [he knows]'" (305) and comes to lead an enclosed life, pretending at real marriage with Phillotson. But to believe that Jude's brief life has been entirely for naught is to swallow completely the view that only formal institutions can impart the knowledge he sought. The text, in its undermining of Jude's idealization of the university town of Christminster (the rotting buildings [130]; Sue's verbal dismantling of the academy [205]), asserts the value of Jude's independent study. Furthermore, Jude acknowledges that in his own lifetime, the doors of the academy are slowly creaking open to admit poor but determined men like himself (345). Thus Jude remains the true idealist because he has something to believe in: the progress of mankind. It is this certainty that strengthens the courage of his convictions. Ultimately, the only frame that completely and irreversibly encloses Jude's life is death.

Berger, Sheila. Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures: Framing, Disruption, Process. New York: New York UP, 1990.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Ed. C. H. Sisson. London: Penguin, 1978.

Langland, Elizabeth. "A Perspective of One's Own: Thomas Hardy and the Elusive Sue Bridehead." Studies in the Novel 12 (1980): 12-28.

Mast, Gerald. "On Framing." Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 82-109.

~~~~~~~~

By Sara Crangle, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Higher Bockhampton may be called a "village," but only as a courtesy rifle. A scant three miles east of Dorchester in the heart of England's Dorset County, Higher Bockhampton contains no church, green, or pub--nothing but a scattering of cottages and barns off a narrow hilltop lane that disappears under the leaves of the large, ancient Puddletown Forest.

The last of those cottages, although modest, is particularly handsome, a well-built brick home with upper-storey windows tucked under a thick thatched roof and framed by the prolific flowers of its front garden. Owned by the National Trust, it has become famous as a symbol for Dorset and for the sort of beauty that people expect of the Dorset countryside. Nonetheless, this cottage is neither distinctive nor unusual save for its history: Thomas Hardy, Dorset's most famous literary son, was born here and wrote Far from the Madding Crowd from its upper-storey window.

Hardy was a talented novelist, architect, and poet, and his greatest love was for Dorset. His other talents strengthened as he concentrated on his home region and waned as he wandered into other areas. He didn't wander much. Most of his enormous literary output takes place in Dorset and surrounding counties, most famously his novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Ubervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Return of the Native, and Jude the Obscure. He set these, and many other stories, in a Dorset thinly disguised as "South Wessex," the centre and heart of a greater region, "Wessex," extending from the Berkshire Downs to the sea cliffs of Cornwall.

His grandfather, the first Thomas Hardy, built the Hardy Cottage in 1800, locating it at a remote lanes-end by a large, trackless forest--a remoteness convenient for supplementing his builder's income with a cautious bit of rum smuggling. The novelist's father, the second Thomas Hardy, inherited the cottage in 1837 and brought his new wife home to it in 1839; six months later, the third Thomas Hardy was born in a tiny upper-storey bedroom. Thomas Hardy senior turned his stonemason's craft into a successful local business, becoming what a modern American would call a "general contractor." Eventually Thomas senior saved enough money to invest in a small farm, Talbothays, in the great dairy lands of the river Frome, two miles to the south. Despite this he continued to live in the Hardy Cottage until his death in 1892.

Hardy's mother, believing that her son should be educated in the classical as well as the practical arts, made sure that young Tommy walked the three miles to a respectable Dorchester school every morning. Early each day, good weather or bad, young Thomas walked through the old, twisted forest of Thorncombe Wood and past the ponds and bogs of Bhompston Heath, later to become Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native. He then descended to the rich dairy farms that lined the valley of the river Frome, the "Vale of the Great Dairies" in Tess of the d'Ubervilles. He followed the banks of the Frome past the manor at Kingston Maurward and his own parish church at Stinsford, the home of the "Mellstock Quire" in Under the Greenwood Tree. Finally, he crossed into Dorchester's High Street at the old Grey's Bridge--described and idealized as Casterbridge in The Mayor of Casterbridge. On Sundays he repeated this walk with his family as far as the church in Stinsford, where the senior Thomas played the viol in the church choir.

Surrounded in school by the sons of respectable merchants, young Thomas began to appreciate that he was not quite an equal of his classmates. Stonemasons were labourers no matter how successful their practice, and their sons were labourers' sons. This could be worse only for an illegitimate labourer's son--and Hardy found out that both he and his father were conceived out of wedlock. This, in Hardy's mind, was made worse by the existence of a prominent gentry family named Hardy. This other Hardy family could claim a 17th-century Thomas Hardy, memorialized in the church as a great community benefactor, and a recent Thomas Hardy immortalized with a giant hilltop monument west of town for his service as a captain under Lord Nelson. These feelings of inadequacy dogged him the rest of his life. They also proved to be well-springs of inspiration in later years, as he would write about the vain struggle to escape the destiny of social class, the heavy scars the class system could leave on those who love too warmly, and the irrecoverable sink into infamy.

These boyhood influences became the themes of Hardy's mature art. His finest and most successful books showed village rustics people Hardy knew as friends and family, struggling against a fate decreed by blind chance rather than a kindly guiding hand. His low-born subjects lived and worked on the hills his parents and grandparents had walked. And even as Hardy achieved (and embraced) the highest success and status as a novelist, he remained close to his peasant family and continued to feature people like them in his books and poems.

PHOTOS (COLOR): Facing page: Hardy's birthplace in Higher Bockhampton with spring flowers in bloom. Left: The simple sitting room in Hardy's cottage, now maintained by the National Trust. Below: Hardy's bedroom.

PHOTO (COLOR): Right: Terry Linee, custodian at the Hardy Cottage, works in the garden. Below: Just one of the many interesting modern-day inhabitants of "South Wessex," Robins Phillips, a travelling knife sharpener, in the town square of Beaminster.

PHOTO (COLOR): In the Frame River Valley, this cheerful-looking cottage goes by a dark name from Hardy's time-"Hangman's Cottage."

PHOTOS (COLOR): Above: The Maumsbury Rings still catch the Dorset sunlight in varying hues. Below: A thatched cottage outside the village of Batcome, as seen from the downs near Cross & Hand. Facing page: Shaftesbury viewed from the north at Abbey Walk.

These [riverside] precincts embodied the mournful phases of Casterbridge life, as the south avenues embodied its cheerful moods. The whole way along here was sunless, even in summer time; in spring, white frosts lingered. ... The river-slow, noiseless, and dark-ran beneath a low cliff, the two together forming a defence which had rendered walls and artificial earthworks on this side unnecessary. ... Above the cliff, and behind the river, rose a pile of buildings, and in the front of the pile a square mass cut into the sky. It was like a pedestal lacking its statue. This missing feature, without which the design remained incomplete, was, in truth, the corpse of a man; for the square mass formed the base of the gallows. ... In the meadow where Henchard now walked the mob were wont to gather whenever an execution took place, and there to the tune of the roaring weir they stood and watched the spectacle. ... He went on past the cottage in which the old local hangman had lived and died, in times before that calling was monopolized over all England by a single gentleman; and climbed by a steep back lane into town.

The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very finest, remaining in Britain. ... It was to Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly of the same magnitude. The dusk of evening was the proper hour at which o true impression of this suggestive p/ace could be received. Standing in the middle of the arena at that time there by degrees became apparent its real vastness, which a cursory view from the summit at noon-day was opt to obscure. Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot for appointments of o furtive kind. ... Pugilistic encounters almost to the death had come off down to recent dates in that secluded arena, entirely invisible to the outside world save by climbing to the top of the enclosure ... So that, though close to the turnpike-road, crimes might be perpetrated there unseen at mid-day.

Shaston ... was, and is, in itself the city of a dream. Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent apsidal Abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches, its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions-all now ruthlessly swept away-throw the visitor, even against his will, into a pensive melancholy. ... The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain; but strange to say ... are bypassed over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in England stands virtually unvisited today.

Modern visitors still find Shaftesbury "queer and quaint" though no longer little-visited. It remains much as Hardy described it, and the Abbey Walk has stunning views.

In time [Tess] reached the edge of the vast escarpment below which stretched the loamy Vale of Blackmore, now lying misty and still in the dawn. Instead of the colourless air of the up/ands the atmosphere down there was a deep blue. Instead of the great enclosures of a hundred acres in which she was now accustomed to toil there were little fields below her of less than half a dozen acres, so numerous that they looked from this height like the meshes of a net. Here the landscape was whitey-brown; down there, as in the Frome Valley, it was always green. ... Keeping the Vale on her left she steered steadily westward. ... Still following the elevated way she reached Cross-in-Hand, where the stone pillar stands desolate and silent, to mark the site of a miracle, or murder, or both.

A line of chalk downs wanders through the northern portions of Dorset, with valleys lying beneath its northern escarpment. Like other chalk downs throughout England, its crest and gentle southern flanks were in the past rendered desolate from lack of water--not a lack of rainfall, but the tendency for the rain to drain down immediately into the porous chalk and run underground until reaching some less receptive stratum. Throughout history, the lack of surface water made agriculture quite impossible, and the crest of the downs was given over to open grasslands. This made it easy walking, and the escarpment edge would have had a well-defined path or track since the most ancient of times. Tess crosses this bleak landscape on a clear, hard winter morning; it would have been much more pleasant on a warm spring afternoon. Today the downlands are all fenced and farmed, largely in grain crops, but Cross & Hand (the official Ordnance Survey spelling) still stands by the lane, and experts still argue over whether it is a stump from a cross or some other relic. Look for it carefully, stop and enjoy the view, and leave a coin for the ancient gods that it may (or may not) commemorate.

Overlooking the River Stour

The swallows flew in the curves of an eight

Above the river-gleam

In the wet June's last beam:

Like little crossbows animate

The swallows flew in the curves of an eight

Above the river gleam.

Planing up shavings of crystal spray

A moor-hen darted out

From the bank thereabout,

And through the stream-shine ripped his way;

Planing up shavings of crystal spray

A moor-hen darted out.

Closed were the kingcups; and the mead

Dripped in monotonous green,

Though the day's morning sheen

Had shown it golden and honeybee'd;

Closed were the kingcups; and the mead

Dripped in monotonous green.

And never I turned my head, alak,

While these things met my gaze

Through the pane's drop-drenched glaze,

To see the more behind my back ...

O never I turned, but let, alak,

These less things hold my gaze!

Hardy and his wife, Emma, spent two of their happiest years in the historic old market town of Sturminster Newton in northern Dorset. Hardy later called it their "Sturminster idyll." He wrote this poem many years later, after Emma's death, remembering his neglect of her that led to her later estrangement. Sturminster retains much of its charm from Hardy's days. A nice walk starts at the Sturminster Mill, now a museum, then crosses the Stour on weirs to go along the river bank, through the town park where school children practice football during recess, and along the river below the Hardys' old home. The view from the Hardy home is still very much as described in this poem. The cast-iron Conway footbridge, described in another poem, stands a few hundred yards further on.

They ... duly met Stannidge the landlord [of the Three Mariners Inn]; a silent man, who drew and carried frothing measures to this room and to that, shoulder to shoulder with his waiting-maids--a stately slowness, however, entering into his ministrations by contrast with theirs, as became someone whose service was rather optional. It would have been altogether optional but for the orders of the landlady, a person who sat in the bar, corporeally motionless, but with a flitting eye and a quick ear, with which she had observed and heard through the open door and hatchway the pressing needs of customers whom her husband overlooked though close at hand.

The Three Mariners, one of several Dorchester pubs Hardy mentions by name, "now, unfortunately, pulled down, was built of mellow sandstone, with mullioned windows of the same material, markedly out of perpendicular from the settlement of foundations."

Dorset beer was, and is, particularly distinctive. "It was of the most beautiful colour that the eye of an artist in beer could desire; full in body yet brisk as a volcano; piquant, yet without a twang; luminous as an autumn sunset; free from streakiness of taste; but finally rather heady. The masses worshiped it; the minor gentry loved it more than wine." About the time Henchard was mayor, another Dorchester pub, the Green Dragon, transformed itself into the regional brewer Eldridge Pope & Company. Thomas Hardy's good friend Alexander Pope owned the brewery and built its wonderful Victorian warehouses, still a major landmark just north of Maumsbury Rings. The famous Dorchester brews now carry the Thomas Hardy label, after a recent spin-off from Eldridge Pope.

Afternoon Service at Melstock

(Circa 1850)

On afternoons of drowsy calm

We stood in the paneled pew,

Singing in one voice a Tate-and-Brady psalm

To the tune of "Cambridge New"

We watched the elms, we watched the rooks,

The clouds upon the breeze,

Between the whiles of glancing at our books

And swaying like the trees.

So mindless were those outpourings!--

Though I am not aware

That I have gained by subtle thought on things

Since we stood psalming there.

Thomas Hardy would have been ten in 1850, the time of this memory of a "Mellstock" (Stinsford) Church service. The Hardys were dedicated Church of Englanders, and Thomas's father and grandfather had played viol in the Stinsford choir. As a teenager and young man Hardy remained a faithful believer and had ambitions to enter a university and become a clergyman. However, during his six years in London (from age 21 to 27) his contact with worldly intellectuals and the writings of Mills and Darwin left his simple village faith in tatters. When he returned to Higher Brockhampton at age 27, his health broken, he believed in a random, undirected universe--a major theme throughout his novels and poems. Hardy's heart is buried in Stinsford Church in the grave of his first wife, beside the graves of his parents, grandparents, and siblings. Nearby is the grave of poet laureate C. Day Lewis, who wished to be buried near the "Father of Modern Poetry."

PHOTOS (COLOR): Above: Hardy family graves at Stinsford Church. Left: The Thomas Hardy Brewery, formerly the Eldridge Pope & Co. Dorchester Brewery. Opposite, top: Sturminster Newton Mill at haying time.

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Text and Photos by Jim Hargan

In Thomas Hardy's novel The Mayor of Casterbridge, there is a scene in which Michael Henchard forces "Poor Abel" Whittle to go to work without his trousers "to teach [him] a lesson" in punctuality (74-77). But then Henchard backs down when his new manager, Donald Farfrae, insists that Whittle be sent back home to dress properly. Hardy implies that the scene plays a crucial role in the conflict between the two men that is the main theme of his novel. Hardy's telling metaphor for this process is that "the seed that was to lift the foundation" of their rugged manly friendship was "at that moment taking root in a chink of its structure." Given this importance, the scene requires and rewards close critical scrutiny. Many readers may be inclined to take it as the literary stereotype of helpless victim being rescued from cruel tyrant by the brave intervention of a modern knight. There is some validity to this reading; the hapless Whittle is certainly at the mercy of his employer, who is treating him with an abnormal degree of severity. Farfrae is clearly impelled by the noblest of motives to come to the rescue. But this is far from being the whole truth about the encounter. Indeed the author's depiction of it subtly evokes a deep sympathy for the supposedly cruel bully and a lack of sympathy for the two seeming innocents.

The reader is left in no doubt about the seriousness of the problems caused by Whittle's "inveterate habit of oversleeping himself and coming late to his work." As he has special responsibilities in the team, his lack of punctuality must indeed be "productive of much inconvenience." For two mornings in the present week, to say nothing of previous weeks, months, and perhaps even years, he has "kept the others waiting nearly an hour" and has been given what sounds like a final warning by his desperate employer: "I'm not going to be trifled with any longer." But despite the dramatic preparation for the next day's work-"it now remained to be seen what would happen tomorrow"-Whittle is late again, this time by half an hour, but still he is not fired. In fact nothing happens to him: He gets off with yet another warning that "this was the last time; that if he were behind once more, by God, [Henchard] would come and drag him out o' bed." The effect of bathos subtly underlines how elastic is Henchard's patience, how tolerant he has been and is still being toward an unreliable employee. The precise nature of his threat falls far short of what one might expect under the circumstances.

Instead of being grateful for this clemency, Whittle amusingly and self-pityingly depicts himself as a helpless victim--"I've fretted my gizzard green about it, maister, but what can I do?"--and outrageously portrays the long-suffering Henchard as unreasonable and autocratic. The fact that Henchard has angrily cut him short in the midst of a long, irrelevant account of what he ate the night before is distorted by Whittle into a flagrant violation of justice. "He asked me and he questioned me, and then 'a wouldn't hear my points!" His employer certainly did not ask him anything about his diet. The fact that this accusation is made "to the yard in general" further suggests an attempt to stir up feelings against his employer in the manner of a wily modern shop steward. Whittle is by no means the village idiot that his appearance seems to suggest. He is first introduced as "a round-shouldered, blinking young man of nineteen or twenty, whose mouth fell ajar on the slightest provocation, seemingly because there was no chin to support it." But far from being stupid or helpless, as might be suggested by his habit of "breathless deprecation," he reveals considerable skill in manipulating the feelings of his fellow workers to his own advantage. This same trait manifests itself in his discussion with Farfrae, in his dire prediction that he will "twitch like a moment-hand all night [...] for fear of [Henchard]." Nevertheless he sleeps deeply enough to make him late yet again. And Henchard has no alternative but to "carry out [his] word."

It then transpires that Henchard's threat of dragging Whittle out of bed entails marching him off to work without his breeches. Some readers may feel that, however much Henchard's patience has been tried, a more orthodox form of punishment is called for, and that it is cruel to march the poor man out in public "half-naked." The degree of "mortification" inflicted is, however, not quite clear: the hapless man does at least have the lower part of his shirt "fluttering [...] below his waistcoat." Besides, this measure is not adopted out of spite. Henchard, driven to desperation, has concluded that something must be done to teach Whittle punctuality and that "nothing else will do him any good." His claim that it is "to teach ye a lesson" is not just a rationalization. There is an aptness and a wild sort of logic in this punishment in that Whittle's failure to get up in time can be construed as allowing him no time to dress himself properly. The time spent dressing can only compound the offense.

Ignorant of the background to the scene, Farfrae falls completely for Whittle's emotional blackmail and in his righteous indignation doesn't hesitate to intervene:

"Get back home, and slip on your breeches, and come to wark like a man! If ye go not, you'll ha'e your death standing there!"

"I'm afeard I mustn't! Mr. Henchard said--"

"I don't care what Mr. Henchard said, nor anybody else! 'Tis simple foolishness to do this. Go and dress yourself instantly, Whittle."

"Hullo, hullo!" said Henchard, coming up behind. "Who's sending him back?"

All the men looked towards Farfrae.

"I am," said Donald. "I say this joke has been carried far enough."

"And I say it hasn't! Get up in the wagon, Whittle."

"Not if I am manager," said Farfrae. "He either goes home or I march out of this yard for good."

Even if a grave injustice were being done, Farfrae's behavior would not be acceptable. As Henchard later says, he might at least "have stopped till [they] were alone," and gently remonstrated with his employer or appealed to his better nature, as he does once Henchard seems to relent. His tone until then is provocative and defiant, a direct challenge to his employer's authority in front of his workmen. No wonder Henchard feels "bitterly hurt."

A subtle irony in this situation is that Farfrae's motive was presumably to save a fellow worker from public humiliation, but that is exactly what he has inflicted on the proud Henchard. Furthermore there is something distasteful about the tactic that clinches his ascendancy over Henchard. Perhaps to the naive it is as if he is nobly putting his job on the line for a fellow worker. But he knows his value to Henchard, both as a worker and as a friend, and it is ignoble to trade on this and force his employer to back down. The older man is given no chance of saving face. Such behavior is hardly chivalrous.

Finally, there is a vital aspect of this moral crisis that is frequently overlooked in that Henchard has not actually forced Whittle to appear in public without his breeches. He gives him an alternative: "Out of bed, sir, and off to the granary, or you leave my employ today!" The latter punishment would even today be regarded as perfectly reasonable under the circumstances. But Whittle knows the value of his job and of a generous employer, who we later learn "had kept [his] old mother in coals and snuff all the previous winter," and without hesitation Whittle chooses the bizarre alternative offered him. Farfrae knows nothing of the choice and rushes in, but one can see the utter falsity of Whittle's claim that he will "kill himself afterwards." As with the workmen in the earlier scene, he is deliberately manipulating the feelings of the well-meaning young man, who is naive enough to accept Whittle's diagnosis of himself as exhibiting the first symptoms of suicidal depression (which Whittle can "feel [...] coming on").

Considering the lack of sympathy for Henchard that Farfrae demonstrates, although well-meaning, and the destructive effects of this, one is puzzled at his suddenly being referred to as "Donald" by the end of the scene, while "Henchard" remains "Henchard" throughout. Isn't this, to use Lawrence's well-known metaphor, a case of authorial pressure improperly applied to one pan of a delicately poised scale? But the blemish is minor in the light of the delicacy of the whole dramatization.

Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Ed. James K. Robinson. Norton: New York, 1977.

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By J. B. Thompson, University of Stellenbosch f Beirut y rica

I have always loved Hardy, but not uncritically. He opens himself to criticism, positively invites it. Critics recognise the extraordinary alternations in his prose -- sublime passages of description followed by a paragraph of jargon, clumsy rhetoric or novelistic clich. Did he never notice, or had he no critical sense? Was there no-one to tell him? (Certainly not Emma!) The case is more curious, but it can be summed up simply: he had genius, but no taste.

Anyone familiar with Hardy's life and surroundings can see it. The house he built for himself, Max Gate outside Dorchester, is hideous, a lower middle class villa; so too the interior furnishings, the garden, the trees he planted -- firs! In the Cornish church of St. Juliet, which he spoiled in restoring it (and afterwards repented), he put up a memorial tablet to Emma in ghastly white Carrara marble, with black-lead lettering! Such a contrast to John Betjeman's oval plaque to his father at St. Enodoc in beautiful grey Cornish slate with italic script.

Hardy's poetry takes us into the heart of the man. He thought of himself as a poet first and last, began and ended with poetry, and actually disconsidered his novels -- as he wrote to Quiller Couch. He wrote a vast amount of verse -- far too much of it, as professional poets do, or did. A proper critical selection would leave perhaps one-third as enough. Many poems could go, with advantage, and many are repetitive, uninspired and automatic, far too often ending in churchyard and grave.

All the same he is a strong poet, inspired at his best, with an idiosyncrasy and idiom of his own, of a most unusual character. Unlike the Victorians, unlike his contemporaries or most poets in our tradition, he was self-educated. He did not go to public school or university; he did not go through the classical treadmill. He learned Greek and Latin, but it was not the conventional grind; he knew the Greek tragedians, but he knew the Bible better, and in the Vulgate; he knew the early Christian Fathers. Oddly enough, he knew the Prayer Book by heart and the hymns of the church as he knew the traditional folksongs, catches, tunes and dances of the countryside.

On this basis the countryman reached up to attain something of metropolitan culture -- not altogether successfully. He had a sense of inferiority about it, as he once admitted to Desmend McCarthy, who consoled him with, 'clever men are as common as blackberries, it is genius that is rare'. And Leavis, who had neither, was right that taste (which Bloomsbury had) was a secondary matter compared with genius.

A man's vocabulary is very revealing of him, and Hardy's takes us straight into the heart of the subject. It is strange and curious -- as he was. I often play a game -- insttead of crossword puzzles, to which Eliot was addicted -- of replacing words in Hardy's poems, easily bettering them. Nothing immodest in doing so, for any average critic can see where the poems can be bettered. Often Hardy will spoil a poem by adding a stanza at the end, a general reflection which the poem is better without, an anti-climax mining the effect. Hardy seems not to have noticed, or perhaps even known.

His odd vocabulary, his verbal usage, raises several questions. In one poem the stars wag; in another, fingers at an organ once wagged there. What a word to use! Why couldn't the stars gleam, or shine? If he wanted to suggest movement, he could say that they move; while the fingers at the organ moved or even played. Other musical instruments, viols or violins, are described as 'of glossy, gluey make'-- polished would be better, and fit the line -- same scansion, one has to reckon with that. Of bells, 'their sweetness swelled in tripping tings of glee.' 'Tings' will not do -- it spoils the line, where 'tongues', very close, would save it.

Often with his odd words Hardy is trying to express the thing precisely, say exactly what he heard or saw. That is a proper rule, especially for a poet. But a second consideration enters in -- whether the word is suitable or not. I am not arguing for a confined poetic vocabulary, such as eighteenth century poets subjected themselves to -- it is simply that some words are not right for verse. 'Moustache' has been given for an example.

More subtly, a psychological factor comes in, which is difficult to express. Let me find an example. 'The lamplit, snow-flaked, sloppimess around.' Or he will insert the word ghastly. It is not just that these words are prose, but that prosaic judgment has inserted itself, intruded into poetic evocation. 'Her beautous gear' -- the word detracts from the finery Hardy is suggesting, unless he meant it ironically -- it is a rather lower-class word, like Max Gate's interior furnishings. 'The bandsmen boom a throbbing waltz' -- well, they would do better to play a thrilling waltz. Somewhere 'children hobnailed off his nose' -- they might as well have trampled. One does not object to a rumble at the door, but knocking would be more effective: all have recognised how effective, how sinister is the knocking at the gate in Macbeth.

                  This is the story a man told me
                  Of his life's one day of dreamery --

I do not object to the word itself, and one has to find a word that rhymes and scans. 'Fantasy' would suit, and be better. In one poem while 'the phasm of him appears . . . the woman sobs'. Oh, well, why not the ghost or wraith; 'phasm' puts one off, so does the woman sobbing. One would sympathise more if the woman weeps -- and one gains alliteration too. 'Upping ghosts press achefully' will not do -- apart from the comic thought of the 'upping' of swans. I would suggest, 'peering ghosts press painfully', more alliteration again.

I confess that I do not like a 'dribbling bough'--lower-class again-why not a dripping bough? Or soul-smart for heart-ache; umbraged ghost, for shadowy, a more suggestive word and therefore more appropriate. Nor 'the silent bleed of a world' for the slow bleeding of a world, which preserves the scansion. Hardy fancied words like umbrage and roomage: they are all right in their place, but he uses them several times over, and 'the heaven's wide roomage' would be better expressed as the heaven's ,wide spaces -- same scansion.

Sometimes one has to replace a word with another that rhymes. Hence for 'who dreams such dree'. I suggest 'in dreams that be'.

It seems that he liked lower-class words, or was unaware that they were unattractive. He writes 'winged whiffs from the north', when he meant winds or blasts; again, the wind whirled back, when it might have whistled. Sometimes one is defeated, for example by 'Death's mew or Life's top cyme'; or something warmed it weariful. That will not do. Nor whimmed her, for fancied herself; nor a weetless child for an innocent one, to keep to the scansion 'blameless' will do. 'A blackbird upped to where', why not 'flew up'? 'A car whangs along' -- I suppose it just whizzed along. Dampss of doubt for moods of doubt; 'his aurore' (a word that he uses several times) for glad dawn, since one needs two syllables to replace it. 'Typic minds' for common minds. Suffered blot and died, for suffered blame, or blows. All these words are improvable and obviously replaceable.

He had a quaint fondness for turning nouns and adjectives into verbs. He smaller; she thinned. 'She rased as maidens can', for blushed. Or again. 'till she freshed at the pink and brown.' Was he avoiding the word blushed? Did he flush at it? If so, one could use the word flushed, or perhaps glowed. 'That song, that song! Will such again be evened quite?' Why not equalled? He has a marked liking for ugly words, chancewise, anywhen, samewise. No doubt he deliberately roughened the texture, in reaction to Tennyson (he preferred Browning, as I do not). But are we to approve 'The hills in samewise to me', for the hills then alike to me? This occupies the necessary three syllables, though sometimes, in a freer line, the number of syllables does not have to be the same. 'Orbs' for eyes. Children in a cemetery are laid 'like sprats in a tin'. Unquestionably lower-class. Yet he is not to be confined to the category of peasant poet.

We know Hardy's liking for odd, sometimes archaic words that he fancied, and just stuck them in for their rarity.

              Come weal, come wanzing, come what may.

Wanzing is a very old medieval word: it means wasteing. But it does not work in the line, for nobody knows what it means. One could substitute the word 'wasteing'; or, better for the scansion: 'Come weal, come woe, and come what may.' In a poem on the Armistice of 1918 he writes, 'Hell and Shell were yapped at Lovingkindness'. Then 'The Spirit of Irony smirked out.' The intention may be ironical or, rather, sarcastic, but these words are not right in a grave Armistice Day poem.

We may doubt if he would take criticism, for he had the obstinacy of a countryman or peasant. In an unpublished letter to Quiller Couch, propos of some critic, Hardy wrote, 'Damn him, I know better.' Of 'these thin elbowers few of the inmates win'. No objection, but 'figures' actually betters the scansion and adds alliteration.

Sylph-like surrounders for companions. Passionate pulsings for rhythms. Upfetched for they fetched, or fetched up. 'Where such inbe' for such may be. 'Dropping broken lipwords only', he uses that coinage of his several times: unobjectionable, but what is wrong with 'broken phrases'? He fancied the words he frequently coined: oncreeping, ondrew, onfleeing, unfulfill, outshrilled, onbearers, intermell, unwombs. A few of these may do for occasional use, but he uses them regularly, too much of a good thing. They are usually replaceable, but sometimes one is defeated bythe necessity of rhyme. Not here, however:

               The real mind mend the seeming,
               Facts better their foredeeming,
               And Life its disesteeming.

Two such formations in successive lines are too much, one can emend the last line to 'false esteeming'. Already in the previous stanza we have 'And unilluded view things.' I would prefer 'without illusion view things.'

In the same pages we find, 'the breeze frizzled her hair', when it might as well have lifted it, or ruffled it. But one is defeated by 'But the disease of feeling germed', for it requires a rhyme. Also 'In cots to the blink of a dip.' I do not see what can be done about that. How to explain these inartistic formations, deformations of good poems? I think Hardy was essentially creative, the poems poured out, and he wrote them down as they came, without going over them, let alone criticising and cutting them down. He just left it to inspiration.

Larkin loved Hardy, and would not have his immense output of poems diminished by a fraction. That is mistaken, it would improve his image and standing. Larkin himself was a perfectionist as a poet: he would never have committed these aesthetic ineptitudes. But he had the advantage of a critical background, an Oxford education, and a First in English Literature -- little as he recognised it. Harddy was very much on his own. Nothing of this is demeaning to him as a poet. It is a secondary matter, and I regard him as a great poet, who rises above such faults. Metrically he was exceptionally skilled and varied, if not so much so as Kipling. But he was much more a philosophic poet, in depth and breadth. Here one can put him alongside Eliot, without his illusions, or Yeats, without his Irish rhetoric and table-turning, Rosicrucian crankery.

~~~~~~~~

By A. L. Rowse

A. L. Rowse's new book, The Regicides and the Puritan Revolution, is published by Duckworth.

In chapter thirty-five of Tess, Hardy deliberately uses the Greek word Agape, the technical term for the love-feast, the Lord's Supper, of the early Church. [1] The Eucharistic context thereby given to Tess and Angel's honeymoon is significant because, within this sacramental setting, Angel becomes clearly the one responsible for their failed communion. Although this conclusion is nothing new since no reader, not even partisans of Angel, would doubt he is at fault, this connection to the Eucharist does help us define more precisely the nature of Angel's fault.

Hardy depicts the two glasses of wine that Angel had earlier poured out for Tess and himself as "remain[ing] on the table untasted," then comments, "This was what their Agape had come to" (300). [2] Reference to "their Agape" points out how amiss the situation is, for Tess had just made her confession. Confession, as we see from the Communion service in the Book of Common Prayer, far from obstructing, is what should open the way to full communion, yet the wine stands here "untasted." The obstruction to the communion that should have been fulfilled between Tess and Angel proves not to be in the quality of Tess's confession, which, as we shall see, meets all the criteria for a sound confession, but in Angel's merciless stance on lofty moral ground as her judge.

That the problem is to be located, as Tess correctly defined it, "in [Angel's] own mind" is clear (302). For before Tess's confession, Angel and Tess, even though within the ominous confines of an old D'Urberville mansion, enjoy virtually unrestrained communion [3] as they wash their hands together in a single basin, eat from the same bread-and-butter plate, Angel going so far as "to brush crumbs from her lips with his own" (284), and even, what Hardy sets up in stark contrast to the untasted glasses of wine, "in the freakishness of affection," drink from a common teacup (300).

Angel could enter into such communion with Tess, because, as at Talbothays, when he and Tess, in all the innocence of Adam and Eve, would meet together before the dawn, Angel "little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side" (187). The Magdalen, who was the first person to see Christ after the Resurrection (John 20: 1-18), the immediate context for the allusion (see 187), was identified in western Christian tradition with the notorious sinner, probably a prostitute, who washed Jesus's feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair (Luke 7:37-50). This is, of course, the ironic power of this allusion, for Angel little thinks of Tess as sexually impure, since he apotheosizes her in the next paragraph as Artemis, the Greek goddess upholding virginity, as every reader of Hippolytus is aware. [4] To his devastating discovery that the Magdalen as sinner was at his side in Tess, Angel responds, "forgiveness does not apply to the case. You were one person; now you are another" (298). How wrong Angel is, the earlier association of Tess with the Magdalen makes clear: Christ freely forgave Mary Magdalene; Angel, if he had imitated Christ's moral example, should have done no less. [5]

Even the Church of England, which is characterized in this novel as bound by superannuated dogmas and as the bastion for conventional morality, [6] would have extended communion to Tess given the nature of her confession, arising as it does so purely out of her own character. According to the introductory rubrics to the Communion service, the minister would have been bound to admit Tess to communion because she was not "an open and notorious evil liver" since Tess had "truly repented and amended [her] former naughty life." [7] The only other disqualification for communion defined is if one is at malicious variance with another. Tess is not in this state for, in the words of the rubric, she has been "content to forgive from the bottom of [her] heart all that the other hath trespassed against [her]" (BCP). This Tess did when she, with such gladness and relief, fully forgave Angel his trespass, viz., his "eight-and-forty hours' dissipation with a stranger," not even pausing for an instant to be "indignant with [him] for not telling [her] before" as he ought to have done (291). In fact, Tess is so full of "love and charity" [8] in her selflessness that Hardy sees in Tess "Apostolic Charity herself returned to a self-seeking modern world" (312).

Tess, then, so fulfills the qualifications for true confession that even Angel's father, the Revd Mr. Clare, whose "narrow dogma" Angel cannot accept and who is certainly not open-minded (229), being "an Evangelical of the Evangelicals" who "had in his raw youth made up his mind once for all on the deeper questions of existence, and admitted no further reasoning on them thence forward" (217), this clergyman, in whom Angel detects a "want of sentiment" (222), would have been bound by the rubric to admit Tess to communion. But Mr. Clare's acceptance of Tess, we are told, would have gone beyond merely technical acquiescence to some rubric. As Southerington points out, for Hardy, "religious belief becomes meaningful if it is seen as an expression of personality, anti irrelevant if it is seen as a crippling social restraint ill-adapted to the conditions of existence." [9] And Mr. Clare's personality, for all his "narrow dogma," is sound because he is responsive to human need. Mr. Clare would assuredly have accepted Tess had she gone through with her resolve to approach the vicarage, for he "despite his narrowness, was far less starched and ironed than [Angel's brothers], and had to the full the gift of charity" (377,emphasis mine). Nor does the dogmatic religion of Mr. and Mrs. Clare constrain their affective response, for "their hearts went out of them at a bound towards extreme cases" and Tess would have been considered "a fairly choice sort of lost person for their love" (378). [10]

We have in the vicar at Marlott another churchman who responds with the heart to Tess. In the Clares, human affection is channeled through their sincere practice of religion; in the vicar at Marlott, who, unlike the Clares, is actually a skeptic (147), his human feeling transcends his sense of religious rules and even his sense of his own dignity. The power of Tess's presence, her "dignity" and "strange tenderness," release the vicar's "nobler impulses": "the man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory fell to the man" (147). The vicar's humanity, in response to Tess, breaks through the constraint of principles.

Ironically, then, Angel, for all his self-professed liberal thought, proves more bound by rule and principle than his dogmatic parents, than even the vicar at Marlott. Angel turns out to resemble far more the paint-pot man of chapter twelve; who dispassionately plasters his Bible texts over the countryside, indifferent to their wounding effect on those who read them. In reply to Tess's tremulous query, "suppose your sin was not of your own seeking," the paint-pot man shrugs, "I cannot split hairs on that burning query . . . I leave their application to the hearts of the people who read 'em" (128). Likewise, Angel, while conceding that Tess was "more sinned against than sinning," merely intones his principle: "I cannot help associating your decline as a family with this other fact -of your want of firmness. Decrepit families imply decrepit wills, decrepit conduct" (302). In effect, he waves away all extenuating circumstances, so set is he on applying his high-sounding principles. It is true that immediately hereafter Angel explodes emotionally, yet his emotion bespeaks less a softening toward Tess than his own bitterness over, to use Angel's earlier phrase, "such a grotesque -- prestidigitation." Angel, once he has latched onto a principle, is obdurate; despite being "so gentle and affectionate . . . in general," Angel has hidden within "a hard logical deposit," which having "blocked his acceptance of the Church," now "blocked his acceptance of Tess" (311).

This "hard logical deposit" and bitterness at his disappointment drive Angel onto high moral ground in his judgment of Tess. Unlike the vicar at Marlott, who was able to respond with compassionate humanity to Tess's plea, "Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner but as you yourself to me myself -- poor me" (147), Angel does address Tess "as saint to sinner," with no little inconsistency given his own recent confession. [11] Moreover, Angel is unable to respond to Tess herself, only to the image in his own mind, as even Tess realized: "It is in your own mind what you are angry at, Angel: it is not in me" (302). Angel comes close to seeing Tess herself when, on the morning after, she appears "absolutely pure, Nature, in her fantastic trickery, ha[ving] set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's countenance" (307). But Angel soon dispels this image when he sets about defining his position (see 308).

For all Angel's protests to the contrary, his position is really founded on the basis of conventional Victorian morality. The context for the ensuing discussion of Angel's position in chapter thirty-six is set when, at the opening of this chapter, he calls for Tess "in a conventional voice" (306; emphasis mine). That convention constrains Angel's humanity is made clear when we are told much later Tess "grieved for the beloved man whose conventional standard of judgment had caused her all these latter sorrows" (377-8,emphasis mine). James Hazen generously excuses Angel's uncompromising judgment of Tess, considering him "essentially a victim of a 'surprise' unconsciously engineered by Tess, and in these circumstances 'custom and conventionality' re-assert themselves, causing the error in judgment" [12] -- rather too generously, for Angel is meerciless in the application of his principles. That Angel is setting himself up as Tess's lofty judge is perhaps adumbrated in the "Last Day luridness" of the fire (292), an allusion to the Last Day when Christ shall return to judge "both the quick and the dead." But unlike the Christ, who forgave Mary Magdalene (vide supra), Angel shows no mercy to Tess, despite her direct plea for mercy upon Angel's breaking into "horrible laughter -- as unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell" (298). Angel, in reply to her plea, says nothing, and the demoniacal laughter reverberates in the reader's ear as it does in Tess's.

This laughter surely marks a fallen Angel, fallen because, while having dropped the creedal and religious Christian foundation, Angel remains "the slave to custom and conventionality" (338), [13] which ethical standard he applies rigorously without the mollifying influence either of Christian charity or of human compassion. The criticism Angel reserves for Mercy Chant with her "curiously unnatural sacrifice of humanity to mysticism" (339) proves to be, mutatis mutandis, a critique of himself, for he is guilty of having unnaturally sacrificed his humanity to moralism. Perhaps it seems to the agnostic Angel that "God's not in his heaven: all's wrong with the world" (325) because he, in acting the part of Tess's judge, has, like the Fallen Angel of Christian tradition, sc., Lucifer, tried to put himself in the place of God and cannot measure up to the task. In his pride, Angel withholds meaningful forgiveness from Tess, while "standing on an intellectual and moralistic system which, erected by himself, he believes absolutely sound." [14] Moreover, as long as he persists in applying his moralistic system to Tess rigorously as an absolutist and in treating Tess as no more than a violator of his code, [15] there can be no communication between them as persons, let alone deep communion. In the end, of Angel one might say what Milton did of Lucifer: "His Pride/ Had cast him out from Heav'n" (Paradise Lost 1.35).

Angel and Tess cannot experience communion until Angel, knocked from his high moral horse by suffering, learns humility and returns, seeking forgiveness from Tess. Angel undergoes his conversion in Brazil, outside the limits of English social convention, where he is free to re-evaluate his moral system. By the time Angel returns home, he repents of his rig-orist stance, asking himself "why he had not judged Tess constructively rather than biographically, by the will rather than by the deed" (456). From meditating back in Brazil upon Tess's self-sacrificing love for him as reported by Izz and "upon her inability to realize that his love and protection could possibly be withdrawn" (422-3), Angel's love is reborn. Might it be significant that when Angel announces himself at The Herons in Sandbourne, he gives Angel as his "Christian name" (465)? Of course, it is his Christian name, being his forename, but perhaps this designation hints at Angel's having become a Christian at least in respect to charity, to Agape, and is, therefore, finally qualified for communion.

Angel, his love at last able to match the fullness of Tess's, can now regard Tess as she herself is and respond affirmatively to Tess's earlier impassioned query,

I thought, Angel, that you loved me -- me, my very self! If it is I you do love, O how can it be that you look and speak so? . . . Having begun to love you, I love you for ever -- in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are yourself. I ask no more. Then how can you, O my own husband, stop loving me? (2989)

For Angel, after his conversion, rises to Tess's expectation of him, affirming, "I will not desert you! I will protect you by every means in my power, dearest love, whatever you may have done or not have done" (475)! [16] In the context of this mutual love, Angel and Tess are able to commune in Agape while on the road (476-7) and -- at last -- to consummate their marriage while in the restored innocence they enjoy at Bramhurst Court in chapter fifty-eight.

Yet, because of Angel's delay, their happiness is overshadowed: "within [Bramhurst Court] was affection, union, error forgiven: outside was the inexorable" (481). Tess's murder of Alec had allowed for their communion together, signified perhaps in the "wafer" his blood forms on the ceiling (471), but, at the same time, it had made Tess's own death inexorable. Had Angel not been too late [17] in coming to acceptance of Tess for who she was, their Agape would have been consummated on their honeymoon and the tragedy that is this novel would have been averted. Perhaps, as this attention to broken communion intimates, tragedy in Tess comes when people are constrained, by various creeds or moral principles, from responding spontaneously to another with human compassion, in full, unstinting charity.

1 Hardy had originally written "love-feast," which he deleted in favor of Agape. See Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Facsimile of the Manuscript with Related Materials, ed. Simon Gatrell (New York: Garland, 1986) vol. I, f. 289.

2 Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, ed. David Skilton (New York: Penguin, 1978). All page references, set in parentheses, are to this Penguin edition.

3 "Virtually" unrestrained, because, in this setting, Tess is "thoughtful to excess" and must endeavor "to be gayer than she was" (284).

4 The danger of being an exclusive votary of Artemis is made clear in Euripides' play. Unlike Hippolytus, however, Angel, by prideful adherence to his principles, ends up destroying not himself but only Tess.

5 That Angel accepts Christ as a moral teacher is clear from Tess's affirmation, "I believe in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, and so did my dear husband" (400). Of course, in this Sermon, Jesus teaches His disciples to forgive others (Matthew 6:14f; cf. 7:1, where Jesus says, "Judge not, that ye be not judged"), lessons Angel would have done well to have heeded.

6 As to the Church's superannuated dogmas, see, for instance, Angel's call for the Church to rid herself of "an untenable rederuptive theolatry" (170); as to its connection with conventional morality, Angel's position as "slave to custom and conventionality" is ascribed to "his early teachings," viz. his Christian upbringing (338).

7 The Book of Common Prayer, According to the Use of the United Church of England and Ireland (London: SPCK, 1839). This edition lacks page numbers, but all passages cited can be found in the Communion service of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. All references to the Prayer Book henceforth will be indicated in parentheses by BCP.

8 Cf. the priest's words to those "that come to receive the holy Communion": "ye that do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in love and charity with your neighbors, and intend to lead a new life . . . Draw near with faith . . ." (BCP, emphasis mine).

9 William Southerington, Hardy's Vision of Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971) 130.

10 Meera Ramachandran rightly points out the flaw in their charity, for the Glares would have received Tess as a fallen woman, thereby making permanent the social stigma. See "Optimism in Tess of the D'Urbervilles," Punjab University Research Bulletin (Arts) 17 (1986): 67-71.

11 Cf. Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1967) 123, on Angel's insufferableness: "At least Alec does not pontificate, wrap himself in a cloak of principles. He [Alec] may not be admirable but he can be likable, simply because commonplace vice is easier to bear than elevated righteousness."

12 James Hazen, "Angel's Hellenism in Tess of the D'Urbervilles," College Literature 4 (1977): 133.

13 Cf. David De Laura, "'The Ache of Modernism' in Hardy's Later Novels," ELH 24 (1967): 380-99, where Angel is seen as a prime example of the Arnoldian compromise being "metaphysically agnostic yet emotionally and morally traditional and 'Christian'" (381).

14 Allan Brick, "Paradise and Consciousness in Hardy's Tess," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 17 (1962): 121-2, cited with kind permission from the Regents of the University of California.

15 Cf. Bernard Paris, "'A Confusion of Many Standards': Conflicting Value Systems in Tess of the d'Urbervilles," Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24 (1969): 73: Angel "becomes a villain in the ethical drama of the novel when he violates his own standards and treats Tess as a means rather than as an end, as an 'it' rather than as a 'thou'." Cited with kind Permission from the Rengents of the University of California.

16 NB: we are told "tenderness was absolutely dominant in Clare at last' (475).

17 The tragedy of Angel's delay in coming around is marked by Tesa's cry at Angel's return, "Too late, too late!" (466) Moreover, one of Hardy's proposed titles for the novel was "Too late, beloved!"

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By William Bonnell

The variety of meters and verse-forms employed by Thomas Hardy has long been a subject of critical notice. More so perhaps than any of his contemporaries (with the exception of the revolutionary Gerard Manley Hopkins), Hardy delighted in experimenting with a wide range of traditional and unorthodox metrical schemes. As an example of a rather exotic (in an English setting) verse-form that the poet made use of more than once we might single out terza rima. All in all, terza rima constitutes the unique or dominant meter for eight of Hardy's poems, to wit: "The Burghers," "Friends Beyond," "In a Cathedral City..... George Meredith," "A Plaint to Man," "She Charged Me," "The Jubilee of a Magazine," and "The Letter's Triumph."[1] In none of these can terza rima be said to have been employed by the poet for extra-rhythmic purposes or, to paraphrase Roman Ingarden, as vessels of information, except "The Burghers." In this, the earliest poem by Hardy to employ terza rima,[2] the choice of metrical pattern seems to be a conscious nod in the direction of Dante, by which the poet aimed to convey to the receiver a subtle commentary on the subject matter of the verse narrative that could not be delivered with the same effect by words.

The poem describes the murderous vengeance that a cuckold plans to exact on the bodies of his wife and her illicit lover. Lurking in the bushes near their rendezvous, the disdained husband seethes:

I crossed my pleasaunce hard by Glyd' path Rise,
And stood beneath the wall. Eleven strokes went,
And to the door they came, contrariwise,

And met in clasp so close I had but bent
My lifted blade on either to have let
Their two souls loose upon the firmament. (19-24)

Yet he will not consummate the bloody deed; he is prevented from doing so by a truly "Hardyesque" sentiment: In a flash, he recognizes his rival's better claim to the heart of his wife. For upon noticing their would-be murderer, the illicit pair show themselves to be ready each to sacrifice self in defense of the person they love, and this renders the jealous husband harmless:

Blanked by such love, I stood as in a drowse,
And the slow moon edged from the upland nigh,
My sad thoughts moving thuswise: "I may house

And may husband her, yet what am I
But licensed tyrant to this bonded pair?
Says Charity, Do as ye would be done by." (34-39)

The striking semantic inversion of the verbs "bond" and "license" in these lines-the husband, "bonded" to his spouse by the marriage service, is actually only "licensed" to deny his wife her freedom, while the usurper of his bed, carrying on an illicit liaison with another man's wife, is in reality "bonded" to her by something greater than a "mere vow"-calls to mind the matrimonial philosophy discussed in the pages of Jude the Obscure.

More than one commentator on this woefully undercriticized poem has drawn our attention to the obvious resemblance between the narrator of "The Burghers" and the character of the schoolmaster Phillotson from Hardy's last great novel.[3] However, there are two other emotional reactions to the lovers' crime in the poem, and as we shall see. "Phillotson's" is not the dominating one.

First of all, the husband's murderous first reaction, encouraged by a friend, is similar to the reaction of Guido Franceschini in Browning's The Ring and the Book: he determines to slay the guilty pair. His rationale for doing so, provided by his "friend," is identical to the rationalization of the Comparini murders as expounded by "half Rome" in the second canto of Browning's work:

"I've news concerning her," he said, "Attend.
They fly to-night at the late moon's first gleam:
Watch with thy steel: two righteous thrusts will end
Her shameless visions and his passioned dream.
I'll watch with thee, to testify thy wrong--
To aid, maybe.-Law consecrates the scheme." (7-12)

However, as we have seen, physical revenge is rejected by the injured party when he observes the true love of the pair, which he recognizes as being something which he does not, nor ever shall, share with the woman whom he is "licensed" to rule.

And yet the wronged spouse does not abandon revenge totally, and here we see the Dantean influence on the poem coming to the forefront. Although in lines 55-60 the husband seems to undergo a spiritual change by virtue of the simple love of his wife for his rival and her determination not to add robbery to adultery (she will go away "without robbing my lord unaware," "in homespun") and although the seemingly charmed cuckold asserts that he had "now grown wholly hers" (by virtue of her peculiar brand of "honesty," we are given to understand) and even calls the pair "friends," it is plain to see that there is a very dark side to his heroic charity. Upon the departure of his "friends," the husband muses:

"'Fool,' some will say," I thought.--"But who is wise,
Save God alone, to weigh my reasons why?"
--"Hast thou struck home?" came with the boughs' night-sighs.

It was my friend.  "I have struck well.  They fly,
But carry wounds that none can cicatrize."
--"Not mortal?" said he.  "Lingering-worse," said I. (64-69)

It is as if the husband, stung to the quick by his failed experience in matrimony and remembering the tortures he underwent through his wife's infidelity, were foreseeing the suffering that the two lovers-happy in their illicit "bond"-would undergo as a result of the "licensing" of their love by the husband's charitable decision to let them fly without harm or scandalous alarum.

The narrator of "The Burghers" is, in effect, doing the pair of lovers no favor at all, but is rather sending them off to a fate worse than death-to their own personal Hell. Although it is likely that the "Hell" of "The Burghers" is of the terrestrial, Hardyesque stamp, rather than the Judeo-Christian place of eternal suffering described by Dante in the Inferno,[4] considering the ending of the poem, it seems teasingly evident that the poet employed terza rima for the express purpose of evoking the eschatological atmosphere, and the consequent message, of the Inferno. And true to form, the punishment he envisions for the pair, while not eternal, is just as horrid to him as any Dante could imagine: as their love cools, they will become each other's tormentor.

Several textual peculiarities other than meter and rhyme-scheme point to the similarity of this poem to the most famous third of Dante's Divina Commedia. As a short, yet defining episode in the life of its main character, narrated in the first person to an audience of some sort, "The Burghers" is astonishingly similar to the racconti that the condemned souls offer Dante and Virgil when they pause on their travels to ask the reasons for the damned souls' being sentenced to eternal punishment. The insertion of the appeal to God's judgment of the action of the husband reinforces, however subtly, the idea of an ordered universe in which the actions of mortals are judged, and their recompense given, by an all-discerning, absolutely just Providence. The above-cited encouragement of the husband by his friend to take matters into his own murderous hands, "Law consecrates the scheme" (12), introduces the Christian dialectic between the Law of Moses ("an eye for an eye," etc., which we find in The Ring and the Book) and the Law of Mercy, or "Charity," as the second half of the equation is named in line 39 of the poem. Even more than that, however, the friend's suggestion to the husband that he avail himself of a perverted type of "justifiable" homicide lends the cuckold's decision to murder the pair of lovers a grotesque air that recalls the sense of "justice" possessed by the tormented (and tormenting) souls of Lake Cocytus-of which Ugolino della Gherardesca in canto 33 is the prime example.[5] Besides this, we have the curious opening stanzas of the poem, in which the husband describes the sunset on the eve of his intended crime:

The sun had wheeled from Grey's to Dammer's  Crest,
And still I mused on that Thing imminent:
At length I sought the High-street to the West.

The level flare raked pane and pediment
And my wrecked face, and shaped my  nearing  friend
Like one of those the Furnace held unshent. (1-6)

It would be very difficult not to see in these lines-formed as they are in terza rima-a broad hint at a Dantean scenario. The husband's face is "wrecked" Hardy uses this interesting adjective to suggest that his narrator's face is "racked" with torment, and, taking "wrecked" on its own, he suggests, in a very Danteesque manner, how the inner turmoil of sin can deform the outer appearance of the person. The reference to unrepentant souls in Hell found in lines 5-6 requires no commentary.

Thus, the narrative style of the poem, the despairing conclusion of the work, which affords the pair of lovers no happier fortune than that of the windswept Paolo and Francesca, as well as other references to Providence, damnation, and divine retribution (whether inverted or not) incline the reader to suspect that Hardy's choice of terza rima for "The Burghers" was no haphazard thing, but rather a conscious poetical strategy aimed at invoking Dante's Inferno in the reader's mind. When one takes into account the poet's own rather skeptical approach to the Judeo-Christian cosmos, Hardy's quasi-eschatological poem "The Burghers" stands out as one of his strongest comments on man-woman relationships, fidelity, and the "eternal" bond of matrimony.

1. It seems that terza rima was a metrical strategy that Hardy especially favored in his youth. With the exception of "The Letter's Triumph," collected in the posthumous volume Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928), these poems all saw the light of day between 1898 and 1914.

2. From Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898).

3. Thus, for instance, Samuel C. Chew in his Thomas Hardy: Poet and Novelist (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964) 147, and J.O. Bailey in The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1970) 67, 310.

4. Infidelity and (heterosexual) perversion are punished in two places in Dante's Inferno: in the second circle, where lussuria (lust, the first of the sins of incontinence) is punished, and where we meet the souls of Francesca da Rimini and her brother-in-law/lover Paolo (see 5:88 ff. "O animal grazioso e benigno, etc."); and in the first bolgia of the eighth circle, where the panders and seducers of women are punished (see 18:22 ff. "A la man destra vidi nova pieta, etc' "). There is no evidence to suggest that Hardy had either of these two locations particularly in mind.

5. Vide Inferno 33:1-78. "La bocca sollevo dal fiero pasto / Quel peccator, forbendola a' capelli / Del capo ch' elli avea di retro guasto . . . " etc. Archbishop Riggieri degli Ubaldini (upon whose head Ugolino gnaws for eternity) treacherously starved Ugolino and his two sons to death in Pisa. Dante introduced the supposition of desperate cannibalism into the otherwise true historical account.

~~~~~~~~

By CHARLES S. KRASZEWSKI, Larksville, Pennsylvania

The Return of the Native (1878) is widely regarded by scholars as Thomas Hardy's most literary and consciously allusive novel. Indeed, a number of readers have pointed out the novel's deliberate, wide-ranging, and prolific use of literary allusions that Hardy gleaned from his reading and recorded in his working notebooks specifically for eventual incorporation into his fiction. [1] The result of this scholarly activity, writes F. B. Pinion, is a novel that "shows a wider range of scholarship than any of his previous works."[2] Robert Gittings goes as far as to suggest that "nearly all the main themes which critics have discovered in The Return of the Native have their origins in his [Hardy's] notebook entries."[3] However, one instance of Hardy's scholarship that has yet to receive commentary is his reading of Arthur Hugh Clough's Amours de Voyage during the spring of 1876. Evidence shows that Hardy was thinking about, and almost certainly studying, Clough's poem while laying the foundations for his literary and intellectual experiment in writing a "learned" novel. This reading gave Hardy an early if not a first look at three key concepts that would later form the plot and the thematic development of The Return of the Native: the discontent with one's native country and the resulting desire to go abroad; the complication of this desire by the characters' involvement in a love triangle; and the resulting moral statement that it is better to stay at home. [4]

Amours de Voyage a narrative epistolary poem of some 1200 lines, was first published serially in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858 and subsequently in volume form in 1862, 1863, and 1869, thus ensuring a wide Victorian readership. The method of the poem is quite simple. Claude, a bored Englishman who has gone to the continent to relieve his ennui, writes a series of letters to his friend Eustace, who presumably remains in England. In his letters, Claude describes his travels and shares his thoughts on continental living, politics, war, and love, this last topic inspired by his uncertain and ultimately unsuccessful affair with the very English Miss Mary Treyellyn, another of Clough's wandering correspondents. Claude's musings rarely come to any certain conclusions, but Mary's departure for home does bring his chance for a continental romance to an abrupt end. Claude is left to his travels and to further introspection, now aggravated by self-criticism and frustration over lost love.

One might assume that Hardy's scholarly preparation for a new novel would have led him, by accident or by design, to Clough's poem in 1876, and the factual evidence supports such an assumption. After the publication of Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), Hardy's interests had begun to turn away from rural subjects and toward more urban and social themes such as those addressed by Clough. By the mid-1870s, as the Life of Thomas Hardy points out, Hardy was looking to a "new and untried direction," having "not the slightest intention of writing for ever [sic] about sheepfarming." [5] The first result of his efforts was The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), a comic novel about London society "which had nothing whatever in common with anything he had written before." [6] Hardy's next move, as the studies cited earlier suggest, was even more deliberate and far-reaching, and this time he sought guidance. Hardy's plan was to distance himself from "sheepfarming" by studying the world's literature, contemporary works included, and infusing his learning into his next novel.

Thus in 1876 Hardy read, among many other works, J. A. Symonds' Studies of the Greek Poets (1876) and penned the following entry in his notebook for possible incorporation into the novel then being planned: [7]

Greek philosophy of life -- What Clough described as a "Stoic-Epicurean acceptance" of the world.

Gk. Poets --J. A. Symonds.[8]

The "Stoic-Epicurean acceptance" phrase, which receives no further attribution by Hardy (or by Bjork), is quoted from Canto I of Amours de Voyage and announces one of the poem's major themes. Closer analysis of the entry suggests that Hardy was very likely reminded of the poem as he read Symonds' passages on endurance and acceptance in Greek tragedy (what Hardy refers to here as the "Greek philosophy of life"). Thus, as this entry shows, Hardy was thinking about, and probably reading, Amours de Voyage while establishing the literary foundations for his novel. [9] This reading, I believe, provided the raw material for Hardy's study of discontent, escape and return in The Return of the Native. The notebook entry, in other words, represents a shorthand notation of what was actually a significant source of inspiration for Hardy's creative imagination.

Discontent, which in many ways constitutes the antithesis of "Stoic-Epicurean acceptance," is an important feature of Claude's personality in Amours de Voyage. Clough announces the "Stoic-Epicurean acceptance" theme at the beginning of the poem but quickly shows that Claude is far from claiming the philosophy as his own. He is, rather than accepting, quite discontent. During the course of the poem, Claude vacillates between discontent and acceptance and eventually achieves a partial sense of self-knowledge, acceptance of his lot, and well-being. His apparent dissatisfaction with his native England is what initially compels him to leave home and travel to Europe, an action that Hardy's Clym Yeobright will later duplicate. (As we shall see, Clym, like Claude, follows a journey from discontent to acceptance.) Although psychological analysis might expose any number of other causes for Claude's general ennui, his quarrel with England and things English stirs him to action. Claude expresses from afar his strong dislike for his native London: "Rome is better than London, because it is other than London," he informs his friend Lustace. [10] He later refers to his native country as "my stupid old England" (2. 23). According to Claude, unsatisfying travel is preferable to living in a "stupid old" country. At the end of Amours de Voyage Claude notes that "Rome will not suit" and tells Eustace that he will go next to Naples and then Egypt (5. 186). Claude slowly begins to realize the truth of the words contained in the prologue to Canto I: "The world that we live in, / Whithersoever we turn, still is the same narrow crib" (1. 5-6).

The characters who take up the "stupid old England" theme in The Return of the Native are Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye, whose names may owe something to Hardy's encounter with Claude and Lustace. [11] Clym, like Claude, leaves England and resides in Europe (in Hardy's novel the locale shifts to Paris). Hardy does not treat us to a full account of Glym's life before or during Paris, but a realization similar to Claude's "Rome will not suit" clearly underlies Clym's decisions first to leave and then to return to England. Like Claude, Clym moves from discontent to acceptance and return. Hardy suggests the permanence of Clym's return to England by giving him the decidedly rural occupation of furze-cutter, or tiller of the soil, on Egdon Heath. Hardy is clearly implying that Clym no longer finds any fault with his native England.

In Eustacia Vye, Hardy creates a character whose dislike for Egdon Heath becomes a familiar topic in her conversations, and whose desire to leave England eventually results in her death. Eustacia's character, too, reveals important similarities to the character of Claude. She is described as being as "restless as Ahasuerus the Jew," and she confesses to being "in search of events." [12] A sampling of Eustacia's speech reveals further similarities to Claude. Just as Claude refers to "my stupid old England," Eustacia tells Clym, "I cannot endure the heath" (209). Similarly, Claude refers to the "tyrannous sense of a superincumbent oppression" (1.36) that he feels while traveling, while Eustacia describes a like feeling when she complains that "the heath is a cruel taskmaster to me" (209). Finally, Claude's belief that "Rome is better than London, because it is other than London" (1. 27) conveys essentially the same message found in Eustacia's plan to leave England via Budmouth harbor: "Steamers sail from there across the Channel, and so I can get to Paris, where I want to be" (360). Eustacia's words thus remind one, if not in their expression then certainly in the sentiments they convey, of Claude's remarks to Eustace. Both characters voice their displeasure with England and their resulting feelings of mental oppression, and both characters "want to be" in foreign cities.

Thus Hardy may have learned something about how to enunciate the dislike of one's country and about how to make such a topic the foundation of a narrative. Further comparison of the two works reveals similarities in the conception and dramatization of the resulting conflicts between characters, conflicts familiar to readers of Hardy's novel. Both works employ a love triangle to bring the conflicts to a point of crisis and to prepare the way for a moral conclusion.

Signs of conflict are obvious in Amours de Voyage. Clough unhappily pairs the restless Claude with Mary Trevellyn, a young woman whose traveling party is winding up its tour and preparing to return to England. While Mary finds Claude interesting and somewhat attractive, her main interest by the end of the poem is her anticipated return to her native England: "We go very shortly to England" (5. 216), she tells her friend with unmistakable excitement, and Clough lets her words stands as the final words spoken by a character. Claude, of course, is still far from acting the part of the returned na-five, and all thoughts of Mary's distancing herself from him, geographically and otherwise, produce anguish and an overactive imagination: "Every word," he tells Eustace, "that I utter estranges, hurts, and repels her" (2. 299). He realizes, further, that his nature and Mary's are opposites:

Wherefore and how I am certain, I hardly can tell; but it is so. She doesn't like me, Eustace; I think she never will like me. Is it my fault, as it is my misfortune, my ways are not her ways? Is it my fault, that my habits and modes are dissimilar wholly? 'Tis not her fault, 'tis her nature, her virtue, to misapprehend

them: 'Tis not her fault, 'tis her beautiful nature, not ever to know me. Hopeless it seems, --yet I cannot, though hopeless, determine to leave it: She goes, -- therefore I go; she moves, --I move, not to lose her. (2.282-89)

Claude does lose Mary to England and to his own desire to go in a different direction. He imagines, however, that there is probably another man waiting for Mary. He writes to Eustace, by way of theoretical explanation, "For the woman, they tell you, / Ever prefers the audacious, the wilful, the vehement hero; / She has no heart for the timid, the sensitive soul" (2. 291-93). In writing these words, Claude releases Mary and provides an explanation for her departure that his "sensitive soul" will be able to accept and justify for years to come.

Readers of Hardy will recognize in Claude's imagined love triangle the identical character types found in The Return of the Native Hardy gives us "the woman" (Eustacia), her "wilful" and "vehement hero" (Damon Wildeve), and the less fortunate "sensitive soul" (Clym). However, what is painfully imagined by Claude is more painfully endured by Clym. Eustacia allies herself with the very real Wildeve, who is determined to leave "this dog-hole of England for ever [sic]" (127). The divergent goals and separate natures of Clym and Eustacia move the novel from incident to incident and infuse their speech with foreshadowings of separation and tragedy. Their conversation about the heath is typical and reminds one of Claude's realization that he and Mary are hopelessly different:

"You are lonely here." "I cannot endure the heath, except in its purple season. The heath is a cruel taskmaster to me." "Can you say so?" he asked. "To my mind it is most exhilarating, and strengthening, and soothing. I would rather live on these hills than anywhere else in the world." "It is well enough for artists; but I never would learn to draw." "And there is a very curious Druidical stone just out there." He threw a pebble in the direction signified. "Do you often go to see it?" "I was not even aware that there existed any such curious Druidical stone. I am aware that there are Boulevards in Paris." Yeobright looked thoughtfully on the ground. "That means much," he said. "It does indeed," said Eustacia. "I remember when I had the same longing for town bustle. Five years of a great city would be a perfect cure for that." "Heaven send me such a cure!" (209-10)

Clym and Eustacia thus reenact the different natures conflict that quickly brings about the separation of Claude and Mary. While Clough's method is to use character introspection and insight to advance the conflict, Hardy uses dramatic dialogue to show that all is not well between Clym and Eustacia. As the similarities between the two texts illustrate, however, Clough and Hardy have produced essentially the same scene in order to foreshadow the same hopeless ends.

Not surprisingly, the end of each work brings the pattern of discontent, departure, and return around to the same moral statement. For Claude, Amours de Voyage ends where it began, with more travel and introspection ahead. Mary Trevellyn, we are to presume, has become a returned native. Hardy, too, gives us one returned native, Clym, and one restless character, Eustacia, whose discontent finally results not in more travel but in her attempted escape and violent death. With the conflicts settled and the characters in their final places, both Clough and Hardy invite their readers to speculate (with guidance) on the moral implications of what has transpired.

Clough actually begins to question the escape response to discontent as early as the prologue to Canto II, when the narrator voice of the poem asks,

Is it illusion or not that attracteth the pilgrim transalpine, Brings him a dullard and dunce hither to pry and to stare? Is it illusion or not that allures the barbarian stranger, Brings him with gold to the shrine, brings him in arms to the gate? (2. 9-12)

Here Clough plants a first seed of doubt and suggests that the "shrine" sought by the traveling pilgrim may well be nothing more than illusion. By Canto V, Clough replaces innocuous illusion with the more frightening image of the siren's song and brings the prologue to a close with a prescription for return:

the Siren, Neapolis, seated Under Vesevus's hill, -- are we receding to thee? -- Sicily, Greece, will invite, and the Orient; -- or are we to turn to England, which may after all be for its children the best? (5.5-8)

Mary, of course, returns to England, affirming through her action both the illusion of escape and the wisdom of returning to one's home. By the end of the poem, Claude is in the early stages of asking for himself the first set of questions posed by Clough's narrative voice. He will, by implication, ask the second set of questions in time, if his inner voice is not drowned out by the song of the siren.

Clough therefore proffers a clear moral message while at the same time leaving the future of Claude in some doubt. Hardy, on the other hand, embodies his moral message in the future words and actions of his returned native, Clym, who assumes the role of "itinerant open-air preacher and lecturer on morally unimpeachable subjects" in the novel's last pages (423). His own siren now silenced in death, Clym travels Egdon Heath giving "moral lectures or Sermons on the Mount" (422). The "story of his life," Hardy tells us, "had become generally known" (423). Clym's subjects seem to be drawn from this life: "He left alone creeds and systems of philosophy, finding enough and more than enough to occupy his tongue in the opinions and actions common to all good men" (423). Clym's sermonizing, therefore, seems to answer the very questions asked rhetorically by Clough. Unlike Claude, Clym has "more than enough" by way of an answer.

What, then, did Hardy learn from his reading of Amours de Voyage?. First, his reading exposed him to the basic discontent-departure-return plot. Amours de Voyage places two characters, Claude and Mary, in this plot but staggers the timing of their placement so that Mary precedes Claude in her desire to return home. Conflict and separation inevitably follow. In The Return of the Native, Hardy follows much the same course. He places Clym, who is already at the point of return at the beginning of the novel, next to Eustacia, who is eager to depart. The results of this pairing provide Hardy with ample material for conflict and tragedy. Second, within this plot, Hardy found in Amours de Voyage specific character types, motivations, attitudes, speeches, and conflicts, together with their resulting moral implications. All of these elements undergo transformation in Hardy's novel, yet all come through the transformation with their resemblance to Clough's poem intact. Hardy's assimilation and use of Clough's ideas are therefore best seen as creative rather than formulaic, inspired rather than simply derivative.

An understanding of Clough's Amours de Voyage thus helps Hardy's readers to appreciate the familiar themes of The Return of the Native in the same context in which Hardy was inspired to create those themes. The Return of the Native provides readers with what is perhaps the best record that Hardy left of his "conscious preparations for his craft." [13] His reading of Amours de Voyage represents an important point in that preparation. To appreciate the similarities between the two works is to know the author, his method, and his novel a little better.

1 On Hardy's incorporation of his reading into his fiction, see Robert Gittings, Thomas Hardy's Later Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978); F. B. Pinion, A Hardy Companion: A Guide to the Works of Thomas Hardy and Their Background (New York: St. Martin's P, 1968); and Marlene Springer, Hardy's Use of Allusion (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1983). For background on Hardy's allusions to specific authors in The Return of the Native, see the above studies and Marcia Lee Anderson, "Hardy's Debt to Webster in The Return of the Native," MLN 54 (1939): 497-501; C. Heywood, "The Return of the Native and Miss Braddon's The Doctor's Wife: A Probable Source," NCF 18 (1963): 91-94; Martin Ray, "Hardy's Borrowing from Shakespeare: Eustacia Vye and Lady Macbeth," Thomas Hardy Yearbook 14 (1987): 64; Edward P. Vandiver, Jr., "The Return of the Native and Shakespeare," Furman Studies 12 (1964): 11-15; and Michael D. Wheeler, "The Defects of the Real: The Return of the Native and Tess of the d'Urbervilles," The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979) 137-58. In "Hardy's Reading," Thomas Hardy: The Writer and His Background, ed. Norman Page (New York: St. Martin's P, 1980) 102-27, Lennart Bjtrk notes that in the "spring of 1876 Hardy seems to have entered on an ambitious course of study, directly designed for his career as a novelist" (107). Bjork writes in the introduction to The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1985) that "approximately one third of the 'Literary Notes' appears to be from the interval between the completion of The Hand of Ethelberta [January 1876] and the start of The Return of the Native' (1. xxi).

2 Pinion 31.

3 Gittings 9.

4 Hardy had used these elements of plot, though for different purposes, and with varying emphasis on each element, in such earlier novels as Under the Greenwood Tree, Far From the Madding Crowd, and A Pair of Blue Eyes. The turn of the Native, however, marks Hardy's first use of these combined elements for the main plot, a use that was suggested in part, I believe, by his reading of Clough. I briefly mention Hardy's debt to Clough in my "Patterns of Displacement in Thomas Hardy's Novels," diss., U of Delaware, 1987, 44-45.

5 Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928 (London: Macmillan, 1962) 102.

6 Florence Emily Hardy 103.

7 John Addington Symonds, Studies of the Greek Poets, 2nd series (London, 1876).

8 Bjork, Literary Notebooks 1, 65.

9 The exact dating of the notebook entries is in many cases difficult to establish. However, the context in which this entry appears and the date of Symonds' Studies of the Greek Poets (1876), which inspired Hardy to make the entry, suggest an early date in Hardy's reading for The Return of the Native (i.e., spring 1876). See Bjork, Literary Notebooks (1. xxxiii and xxxv-xl) on the question of dating the notebook entries.

10 Arthur Hugh Clough, The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. F. L. Mulhauser, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1974) 1.27. All further references to Amours de Voyage appear in the text and cite canto and line numbers.

11 For Hardy's explanation of the sources of the characters' names, see Florence Emily Hardy's Life (117).

12 Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, ed. P. N. Furbank (London: Macmillan, 1974) 172. All further references to The Return of the Native appear in the text.

13 Bjork, Literary Notebooks 1. xiv.

~~~~~~~~

By William A. Davis, Jr., College of Notre Dame of Maryland

Thomas Hardy's novels were composed in an age obsessed with the idea of encountering and communing with ghosts. Janet Oppenheim has argued that the Victorian fascination with spiritualism and psychical research grew out of a desire to find alternative answers to the questions of mortality that traditional religious paradigms were no longer able to answer with satisfying rigor in an increasingly skeptical, scientific culture.[1] Of course, this is not to say that psychical research was uniformly rigorous or scientific, but it did reflect a widespread cultural desire for such rigor. Read in the context of Victorian spiritualist enthusiasms, Hardy's novels reveal their own brand of fascination with the other side of death, as well as their own peculiar effort at scientific rigor in the pursuit of that other side. Like most of his fellow Victorian novelists, Hardy tried his hand at the genre of the ghost story, but it is in his "realistic" fiction that a belief in ghosts is most palpable, for it is there that Hardy's literary art is most consistently and convincingly oriented toward the possibility of overcoming the pain associated with the idea of death and arriving at a mysteriously satisfying experience of "posthumous" pleasure.

The most apt name for that pleasure is "melancholy satisfaction," a phrase Hardy uses in describing his own personal strategy for overcoming the intolerable idea of death:

For my part, if there is any way of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life it lies in dying, so to speak, before one is out of the flesh; by which I mean putting on the manner of ghosts, wandering in their haunts, and taking their views of surrounding things. To think of life as passing away is a sadness; to think of it as past is at least tolerable. Hence even when I enter a room to pay a simple morning call I have unconsciously the habit of regarding the scene as if I were a spectre not solid enough to influence my environment, only fit to behold and say, as another spectre said: 'Peace be unto you.'[2]

Several critics have sought to use this passage as a key to an understanding of Hardy's narrative and lyric strategy, but no one has yet managed to use the passage without reducing its palpable oddness to a more or less conventional sentiment.[3] Perhaps the problem is that most of us have a hard time taking the idea of strategic ghostliness seriously. It seems ludicrous to suppose that, by some flight of fancy, Hardy has substantively triumphed over the threat of death. And yet, I suggest, that is precisely what we must suppose, if we are to hope to grasp the deeper logic of Hardy's narrative strategy.

The essence of that strategy is close to the logic of "encrypted presence" elaborated in the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Abraham and Torok's psychoanalytic theory of haunting is an attempt to clarify and extend Freud's commentary on the distinction between introjection and incorporation--particularly as that distinction applies to the related distinction between mourning and melancholia. As defined by Freud, the work of "normal" mourning ends when the grieving person is forced to "defer to reality" and acknowledge that the beloved object no longer exists in the material world. The object continues to exist in the mind of the mourner, but only in a transformed condition. The object has been "introjected"--which is to say, it has been taken into the psyche of the mourner and preserved in an idealized form. This process is entirely normal. In certain cases, however, the process of introjection may give way to the more fantastic process of incorporation, by which the object is also taken into the psyche and preserved, but with a key difference: in incorporation, the essentially metaphorical process of introjection has been literalized.

Introjection, according to Abraham and Torok, brings the lost object into the organization of the ego by means of a metaphorical absorption:

To introject a wish, a grief, or a situation is to dispose of it through language in a community of empty mouths. Thus food absorption, in the literal sense, becomes introjection in the figural sense. To achieve this transition, presence of the object must be superseded by auto-apprehension of its absence.[4]

The requisite moment of "auto-apprehension" is the deference to reality that Freud speaks of; in normal mourning, the grieving subject comes to acknowledge and accept the fact of loss, thus enabling a culturally sanctioned, essentially linguistic ritual, in which the lost object is metaphorically absorbed and its material substance transformed. The object is recognized as a mere figure, a signifying image with no material reality.

By contrast, the process of incorporation seeks to make the absorption of the lost object literal:

The fantasy of incorporation aspires to accomplish the absorption! by magic, as it were, by carrying out in a literal sense something that has meaning only in a figurative sense. It is to avoid "swallowing" the loss, that one imagines swallowing, or having swallowed, what is lost, in the form of an object. In the magic of incorporation, then, one finds two interrelated procedures: demetaphorization (taking literally what is meant figuratively) and objectivation (what is experienced is not an injury to the subject but the loss of an object). (4-5)

In incorporation, the person faced with the loss of a beloved object refuses to defer to reality, refuses to acknowledge that the object is lost in reality, and thus tries to "avoid 'swallowing' the loss" metaphorically by swallowing it literally. Of course, this process is entirely unconscious. There are only two signs of its presence: first, the person's refusal of the normal work of mourning and, second, the odd traces of "demetaphorization" that reveal themselves in the person's discourse.

In making use of Abraham and Torok's ideas in our reading of Hardy, we must be careful to distinguish their notion of incorporative "demetaphorization" from the "tendency to dis-figure" that Paul de Man identifies as being part of the nature of language itself.[5] The issue, for Abraham and Torok, is not, as it is for de Man, the "aberrant referentiality of language" but rather the capacity of the psyche to reverse (and otherwise manipulate) the normal substitutive structure of language in the pursuit of "pathological" forms of pleasure. To be sure, there is something aberrant in the literalization of a process that is properly metaphorical, but the question that should be of concern to us is the question of whether the aberrant strategy works. If, as I am suggesting, Hardy's narratives and certain of his characters--those I am calling his "noble melancholics"--have in some sense incorporated a cryptic source of pleasure, a submerged plot of melancholy satisfaction that is discernible beneath the explict plot of suffering and despair, then the important questions will concern not the "truth" or "reality" of the hidden story, but rather the efficacy of that story. Does it work as a means of obtaining pleasure?

The Woodlanders reveals the key to its cryptic plot of pleasure in its opening scene, where it focuses our attention on the importance of topography. The novel begins with a description of a hypothetical "rambler" walking a Wessex road. This rambler, upon reaching a certain haunted "spot" along the way, finds himself compelled to contemplate the meaning of a suddenly intensified air of gloom:

The spot is lonely, and when the days are darkening the many gay charioteers now perished who have rolled along the way, the blistered soles that have trodden it, and the tears that wetted it, return upon the mind of the loiterer.

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools. The contrast of what is with what might be, probably accounts for this. To step, for instance, at the place under notice, from the edge of the plantation into the adjoining thoroughfare, and pause amid its emptiness for a moment, was to exchange by the act of a single stride the simple absence of human companionship for an incubus of the forlorn. (emphasis added)[6]

At the very beginning, Hardy's narrative draws attention to the act of entering a mysteriously organized topography, a spatial arrangement in which a "single stride" can take us from "the simple absence of human companionship [to] an incubus of the forlorn." To step in this one particular "spot" is to enter a very different world, a world marked by a palpable sense of isolation and by the air of the contrast between "what is and what might be." Yet, while the feeling engendered by this "spot" is undeniable, its significance is far from clear--a point Hardy's narrator emphasizes in the next two paragraphs, where the narrative action proper begins:

At this spot, on the louring evening of a bygone winter's day, there stood a man who had thus indirectly entered upon the scene from a stile hard by, and was temporarily influenced by some such feeling of being suddenly more alone than before he had emerged upon the highway.

It could be seen by a glance at his rather finical style of dress that he did not belong to the country proper; and from his air, after a while, that though there might be a sombre beauty in the scenery, music in the breeze, and a wan procession of coaching ghosts in the sentiment of this old turnpike-road, he was mainly puzzled about the way. (I, 5--emphasis added)

This man, later identified as Barber Percomb on his way to coax Marty South into selling him her hair, feels the isolation of the "spot," but seems indifferent to its cryptic meaning. "[M]ainly puzzled about the way," he cares nothing for the ghosts that seem to live within the peculiar space he has just entered.

The opening to The Woodlanders is an implicit reading lesson, in which Hardy's text hints at its organizing logic. Like the rambler who both feels and contemplates the meaning of this mysterious "spot" on a road, the reader should try to stay attuned to the hidden significance of the various topographies within the text. Specifically, we must be alert to the presence of ghosts within the houses, huts, and graves to which the narrative obsessively returns. It is within the space of those enclosures that the novel's ghost plot--its inscribed, but seemingly unrealized, storyline of what might be--becomes more than just a metaphor for missing pleasure.[7] It is within this cryptic topography that Hardy's narrative locates and sustains its melancholy satisfactions.

According to Abraham and Torok, the reason it is so difficult for an analyst to gain access to a patient's "crypt"--the mysterious space in which an incorporated object is at once lost and preserved--is that the patient defends vigorously against any alteration in the mental topography. The crypt serves as an essential marker within a "secret topography" of pleasure, a literalized spatial arrangement within the mind that preserves those satisfactions the patient would be forced to give up, were he or she to acknowledge the reality of their loss.[8] Within The Woodlanders, Giles Winterborne is the character whose relationship to a private topography and a secret crypt is most readily discerned.

The relationship begins with Giles's reaction to his loss of Grace Melbury as a potential wife:

Two simultaneous troubles do not always make a double trouble; and thus it came to pass that Giles's practical anxiety about his houses, which would have been enough to keep him awake half the night at any other time, was displaced and not reinforced by his sentimental trouble about Grace Melbury. This severance was in truth more like a burial of her than a rupture with her but he did not realize so much at present; even when he arose in the morning he felt quite moody and stern: as yet the second note in the gamut of such emotions, a distracting regret for his loss, had not made itself heard. (XIII, 73--emphasis added)

What is striking about Giles's grief is the way it appears as a refusal to mourn that takes the form of mourning in advance. Faced with the prospect of losing Grace as a lover, Giles responds by thinking of her as being already dead, a corpse to be buried. In its general structure, Giles's response is simply a form of denial, a refusal to acknowledge the reality of a "severance." But the special mechanism of the response (i.e., "burial") gives Giles's act of denial the character of an incorporative fantasy. Rather than face a painful "rupture" with a living Grace, Giles opts to encrypt her instead, stowing her away within his head in an effort to preserve a threatened pleasure.

Grace is now inside Giles's head, but in thinking this we must follow the narrative's lead in revising our understanding of the opposition between inside and outside. The crypt, as Abraham and Torok define it, is a space that is at once inside and outside: a space radically closed off from consciousness and from linguistic exchange--and hence, "outside," in some sense of the word--yet also emphatically within the psyche, wielding influence over the topographical organization of the mind and also indirectly shaping all of the patient's experience. The notion of an "encrypted presence" depends upon our ability to think between and around the internal/external oppositon.[9] Hardy's narrative logic demands a similar conceptual flexibility, for it surrounds Giles's "burial" of Grace with obsessive literal and figural play on the opposition between inside and outside, culminating in an image that forces us to think of the buried Grace as an object both inside and outside, both preserved and lost, at once.

The various dramatic tensions in The Woodlanders all arise from conflicts between woodland insiders and the outsiders who have thrust themselves into the cloistered environs of Little Hintock. Barber Percomb, who takes that "single stride" at the novel's beginning, comes to Little Hintock, bent on cutting the hair of the insider Marty South. The Barber's assault on Marty is repeated by a host of parallel acts or threats of disfiguration by outsiders against insiders: Dr. Fitzpiers's proposed dissection of Grammer Oliver's brain, his actual dissection of John South's brain, Felice Charmond's relentless felling of timber, and her equally relentless pulling down of houses. Given such a dramatic structure, it would be easy to conclude--as many readers have--that The Woodlanders is Hardy's elegy for a vanishing pastoral corner of Wessex. But Hardy's treatment of the inside/outside tension resists such an easy reading. Repeatedly, the narrative complicates the inside/outside tensions by adding tensions arising wholly from within. John South's mental pathology is the clearest example, and by looking closely at his illness, and at the network of figural associations that surround it, we can see how Hardy's text manages to develop its own cryptic space, its own topography located neither in the outside nor the inside, but in both at once.

South's illness is really nothing but a pathological fear of death, which takes the form of an obsession with a large elm tree that sits outside his window. The tree was planted in the same year as South's birth, and he has come to see his life and its life as being intimately and antagonistically intertwined. As a child, South recalls, he had a chance to kill the tree while it was still small, "But I put off doing it, and then I again thought that I would; but I forgot it, and didn't. And at last it got too big; and now `tis my enemy, and will be the death of me. Little did I think, when I let that sapling stay, that a time would come when it would torment me, and dash me into my grave" (XIII, 70-71). South's fear of death is marked by a specifically spatial dimension. Hardy presents South's life as a figure for the houses he occupies under the terms of a "life-hold lease." At one point, South moans significantly, "Oh--he's [i.e., the tree] rocking this way; he must come! And then my poor life, that's worth houses upon houses, will be squashed out o' me ... " (XIV, 78). In other words, part of what South fears is that the space he currently occupies and even embodies--the house--will be transformed into a more forbidding space: the grave. The tree is there to "torment [him], and dash [him] into [his] grave." This spatial rearrangement, which South so vehemently and vainly resists, is precisely the spatial rearrangement that Giles will later compulsively pursue: He will die in order to sustain the self-imposed banishment from his own house which contains Grace.

The narrative supplies the interpretive tool needed to unravel the obsessive figural bonding of lives, houses and graves in a strange scene that follows in the aftermath of South's death. On the evening after having learned that he will indeed lose his house as a result of South's death (due to the terms of the life-hold lease), Giles "fancie[s] that he hear[s] a scraping on the wall outside his house." He investigates and discovers that someone (Marty South, it turns out) has written a bit of anonymous poetry on an exterior wall:

"O Giles, you've lost your dwelling place, And therefore, Giles, you'll lose your grace" (XV, 83).

Giles had already been thinking, in light of his change in fortunes, that he should acquiesce in Grace's request that the budding engagement between them be abandoned. "[The words on the wall] decide[ ] the question for him," and he immediately writes a note to the Melburys agreeing to give up Grace. But Grace, who happens to walk by Giles's house at this moment, is feeling sorry for her erstwhile lover, and when she sees the writing on the wall, her impulse is to negate its message. "[S]he quickly [goes] up to the wall, rub[s] out `lose,' and insert[s] `keep' in its stead." This act does not result in a reconciliation between Grace and Giles, but it does produce a silent tableau in which we can read the truth of what has already happened as a result of the prior act of "burial." The two words on the wall of the house "lose" and "keep" superimposed--silently suggest that, by sealing Grace within a tomb in his head, Giles has both lost and kept the object of his desire. The message of Marty's text and the message of Grace's negation are both true, and both are true at the same time. The object-Grace is, for Giles, both there and not there, preserved and possessed inside the tomb, but also inaccessible in reality, banished to the vast "outside" made up of all that Giles can't have.

The effect of Hardy's figural play surrounding the inside/outside opposition is to invite us to think in terms of a logic of encrypted presence, a logic that cuts across the spatial boundaries of both houses and graves--and of bodies as well. For, if we are to take seriously the idea that Grace is both inside and outside of Giles's at once, then her body must also have been transformed. Certainly, she is no longer just Grace, the object of both Giles's and Fitzpiers's desire; she is also now Grace, the material body "buried" within a crypt in Giles's head. It is characteristic, in cases of pathological mourning involving incorporation, for the subject's pleasure-in-grief to be dependent on the preservation of the lost object in its materiality. The incorporated body becomes an "exquisite corpse," a material entity that can be cut and manipulated in order to create pleasure.[10] The object Giles has taken inside and preserved is not like the object that would be introjected in the course of normal mourning. Giles has incorporated, not the idealized essence of Grace, but rather her dead body, the superficial material in which the essence of Grace had lived. Normal mourning calls for the mourner to substitute for the object-in-the-world a figure-in-the-mind. Melancholic incorporation calls for something like the same thing; only it takes its figural substitute literally. The lost object is absorbed not simply as a recollected being, but as a literal dead body, a powerfully affective corpse.

Hardy's last novel The Well-Beloved offers a particularly clear example of how this psychological dynamic is manifest in a literary text. In Part First of the novel, Jocelyn Pierston is a man obsessed with a floating well-beloved-an ideal that flits from woman to woman, body to body, and name to name. From Part Second to the end, Jocelyn becomes a man obsessed with a fixed well-beloved--an ideal that comes home to roost if not in a single woman, then at least in a single name, Avice Caro, and perhaps also in a single body, insofar as the second and third generation Avices are figured as "resurrections" of the dead Avice the first. As the transition from a floating to a fixed well-beloved unfolds, Hardy's text seems to mime its own metaphors: that is, certain key expressions used as figures in Part First become realities in Part Second; the text's tropes are literalized.

For example, in Part First Jocelyn uses the figure of "a corpse" to characterize the dramatic change that occurs in his perception of a woman once the well-beloved has fled from her body:

`We are a strange, visionary race down where I come from, and perhaps that accounts for it. The Beloved of this one man [i.e., Jocelyn himself! has had many incarnahons--too many to describe in detail. Each shape, or embodiment, has been a temporary residence only, which she has entered, lived in awhile, and made her exit from, leaving the substance, so far as I have been concerned, a corpse, worse luck!'[11] (my emphasis)

This figure recurs repeatedly throughout Part First, always as a description of the women Jocelyn no longer loves. In Part Second, however, after Avice the first's death, the figure is literalized and its meaning is reversed.

The crucial passage is found in chapter three, entitled "She Becomes an Inaccessible Ghost." Jocelyn is at a dinner party in London, where he thinks he is in the presence of a new incarnation, by the name of Nichola Pine-Avon. However, after reading a letter containing news of Avice's death, Jocelyn's consciousness undergoes a change:

By imperceptible and slow degrees the scene at the dinner-table receded into the background, behind the vivid presentment of Avice Caro, and the old, old scenes on Isle Vindilia which were inseparable from her personality. The dining room was real no more, dissolving under the bold stony promontory and the incoming West Sea. [...].

More than all, Nichola Pine-Avon lost the blooming radiance which she had latterly acquired; she became a woman of his acquaintance with no distinctive traits; she seemed to grow material, a superficies of flesh and bone merely, a person of lines and surfaces; she was a language in living cipher no more. (II, 3, 50)

In short, she has become a "corpse"--or so we would expect, given the pattern the text has established. But the narrator here withholds the figure as a description of the hapless Miss Pine-Avon, because--as we discover in the very next paragraph--the word "corpse" has taken on a new designation: no longer the label for the flesh the well-beloved has left behind, "corpse" now names the literal dead body which has become the focus of Jocelyn's memory and desire:

When the ladies had withdrawn it was just the same. The soul of Avice--the only woman he had never loved of those who had loved him--surrounded him like a firmament. Art drew near to him in the person of the most distinguished of portrait painters; but there was only one painter for Jocelyn--his own memory. All that was eminent in European surgery addressed him in the person of that harmless and unassuming fogey whose hands had been inside the bodies of hundreds of living men; but the lily-white corpse of an obscure country-girl chilled the interest of discourse with such a king of operators. (II, 3, 51--my emphasis)

The conventions of elegy--not to mention the normal psychology of mourning[12]--would call for a figuring of the dead as living. Our expectation is to see Jocelyn seeing Avice in his mind's eye, as news of her death causes memory to bring the past swelling to the surface where it overwhelms present reality. And,.in part, Hardy's text conforms to this expectation, except that instead of representing the remembered Avice as alive, it represents her as dead, "a lily-white corpse" in the head.

As the story of Jocelyn Pierston progresses, it seems that Avice Caro has become an "exquisite corpse." It is Avice's "deadness," as distinct from her death, which accounts for the renewed, and newly powerful, attraction Jocelyn feels for her: "He loved the woman dead and inaccessible as he had never loved her in life." Read in relation to the odd force of Hardy's literalized metaphors, this statement suggests more than just an idealization of the dead. "He loved the woman dead" comes to mean precisely what it says: he loved her "lily-white corpse." During the transformation in Jocelyn's desire between Part First and Part Second, Hardy's text displays a form of repetition which we might, following Abraham and Torok, call "antimetaphorical;" a form of repetition in which the pattern of metaphorical or metonymic movement in Part First is countered by the pattern of antimetaphorical stasis in Part Second and thereafter. Hardy's epigraph to the novel, taken from Shelley, reads "One shape of many names." In Part First, the significance of the line is perhaps too obvious, as Jocelyn recounts how he has pursued a chain of displaced objects, a series of well-beloveds, all with different names. But after Part First, Hardy turns Shelley's line on its head by having Jocelyn pursue, not "One shape of many names," but rather "One name of many shapes"--not one spiritual ideal with many physical incarnations, but rather one physical substratum onto which many meanings might be overlaid.

There is a sense in which Hardy's entire oeuvre is like the incorporated well-beloved: an exquisite corpse; a material body onto which pleasurable inscriptions might be grafted. Something like this could, of course, be said of any writer's "body" of work, but with Hardy we are inclined to take the metaphor literally, for in talking about his writing, Hardy has the habit of referring to his novels as bodies which he has had to "dismember" (to satisfy his serial publishers) and then "restore" (to satisfy himself when preparing for volume publication).[13] But the more telling evidence comes in the way the narratives are structured. So often the plot is propelled by means of a bit of severed hair or even severed flesh. Jude falls for Arabella because she hits him in the face with a piece of pig's flesh. Tess impales the body of the horse Prince and so must make up for the family's loss by taking the fateful trip to see Alec. In The Woodlanders, Hardy exploits this device without restraint.

We have already noted how John South's mental illness functions as an agent of causation, but that is not the whole story. After South is dead, Fitzpiers takes his brain to study it under the microscope. Like George Eliot's Dr. Lydgate, Fitzpiers has grandiose ambitions: he wants "to carry on simultaneously the study of physiology and transcendental philosophy, the material world and the ideal, so as to discover if possible a point of contact between them." To this end, he is studying South's brain. At the same time, of course, he is studying the various women in Little Hintock, and when his fancy lights on Grace Melbury, he uses a bit of South's brain to seduce her:

`Look into [the microscope! please; you'll be interested,' he repeated.

She applied her eye and saw the usual circle of light patterned all over with a cellular tissue of some indescribable sort. `What do you think that is?' said Fitzpiers.

She did not know.

`That is a fragment of old John South's brain which I am investigating.'

She started back, not exactly with aversion, but with wonder as to how it should have got there. Fitzpiers laughed.

`... your finer sense is quite offended!'

`Oh no, Mr. Fitzpiers.... Instead of condemning you for your studies I admire you very much!' (XVIII, 100-1)

The brain tissue captures Grace's imagination and before long she is married, betrayed, and looking to rekindle the old relationship with Giles.

The piece of flesh here is a catalyst propelling the narrative's forward movement, but it is also a mnemonic agent, an image that serves to remind us of what has gone before. In this, the bit of brain is like the severed locks of Marty South. In one of the novel's first scenes after the advent of Barber Percomb on that particular "spot" on the old coach road, Marty South tragically cuts her precious hair and sells it for two much-needed Guineas. Her hair, however, is not gone; it lingers throughout the narrative, serving, like South's brain, as both a device to propel the plot and as an image to recall the past.[14]

The link between severed or dissected body parts and memory is crucial to our argument, for it allows us to see that Hardy's cutting up of bodies is related to a larger narratological art of memory. This art is cryptically announced in the rambler's prologue, where the text invites us to read and remember in a certain way. Following the rambler's lead, we are to look into the melancholy topoi of Wessex and to search there for a certain cryptic chance of pleasure. At certain "spots" within the Wessex landscape and within the rambler's mind, the mnemonic traces of "what might be" come into view. The "spot" at which the narrative begins is like one of the topoi in the mnemotechniques described by Francis Yates in The Art of Memory. According to Yates, one of the most basic mnemonic devices is the memory walk, a procedure for relating places to images. The memory artist would attach images (standing for ideas or words) to places along a familiar road, and then by simply "walking" the road the images could be recovered. Hardy begins The Woodlanders with a picture of this very procedure: the rambler walking the old coach road "for old association's sake." Hardy also structures the entire text as a kind of memory walk--a stroll through a gallery of what Yates calls "imagine's agentes" or "dynamic memory images"-disfigured images, bloodied faces, mutilated body parts. The ancient mnemonists found that such images were most effective because they create an air of melancholy, and it was believed that "a `dry-hot melancholy' is the temperament most suitable to effective memory."[15]

An air of "dry-hot melancholy" certainly pervades most of Hardy's narratives, but that air is supplemented by an air of farce or low comedy. And in The Woodlanders, this air of farce emerges most palpably in those very scenes in which Hardy seems to play on the ancient mnemotechniques. One of the mnemotechniques described by Yates involved the use of a figure of the old woman Grammatica as a memory image; the mnemonist would refer to the image of the old woman in his or her head and use it "to remember material about grammar through inscriptions on her" (119). Yates includes a picture of Grammatica showing that the "inscriptions" were in fact huge cuts in the shape of birds and other animals. Taken literally, it is a very cruel image indeed. As Hardy transforms this image in The Woodlanders, however, the picture of an old woman being dissected is more funny than melancholy.

Hardy announces his appeal to the ancient mnemotechnique in a decidedly unsubtle pun on the word "grammar."[16] Before having the good fortune to land South's brain, Fitzpiers is on the look-out for quality specimens. He has contracted with the Melbury family's live-in housekeeper, Grammer Oliver, for her to give him her brain should she happen to die. In what follows, Grammer and Grace discuss the deal:

`Well--he talks of buying me; so he won't go away just yet.'

`Buying you--how?'

`Not my soul--my body, when I'm dead. One day when I was there cleaning he said, `Grammer, you've a large brain--a very large organ of brain,' he said. `A woman's is usually four ounces less than a man's; but yours is man's size.' Well then--hee-hee--after he'd flattered me a bit like that he said he'd give me ten pounds to have my head as anatomy after my death. Well, knowing I'd no chick nor chief left, and nobody with any interestin me, I thought, faith, if I can be of any use to my fellow-creatures after I'mgone they are welcome to me; so I said I'd think it over, and would most likely agree, and take the ten pounds. Now this is a secret, miss, between us two. The money would be very useful to me; and I see no harm in it.' (VI, 39)

Hardy's mnemotechnical principle of composition here takes a comic turn; the melancholy image of cruel dissection gives way to the kind of spontaneous spasms of laughter characteristic of good farce.

It is no accident that this transformation occurs in relation to a cutting up of Grammer/grammar, because the text's characteristic treatment of language is to cut it up all the time. Like the name Avice Caro for Jocelyn Pierston, language for Hardy is an exquisite corpse, a material to be "dismembered" and "restored" as a means of giving satisfaction. What the proposed dissection of Grammer allows us to see is that Hardy's cutting up of bodies is part of larger struggle to provide the requisite air of "dry-hot melancholy" necessary for the art of memory to perform its work: only within the charnel house of language are Hardy's narratives able to achieve the melancholy satisfaction they pursue.

But, of course, this peculiarly Hardyan pursuit of pleasure is not risk free. The figures and images situated at the mnemonic topoi are like the tree in South's brain. They are incorporated images, material bodies with the potential to serve as sources of pleasure. But they are also "enemy" agents with the capacity to intensify pain. As we saw, South's incorporative identification ultimately leads to his death. So also does Giles's incorporation of Grace, only there is a crucial difference between the two deaths. Whereas South dies wretchedly, obsessed with fear, Giles dies triumphantly, as if ultimately fulfilled. What accounts for this difference?

By transforming Grace into a corpse in his head, Giles creates what Abraham and Torok would describe as a "secret topography"[17] of pleasure: So long as Grace is buried within his psyche, her body gives Giles pleasure; were she to escape, were she to alter the topography by leaving her tomb and becoming a living figure in the real, she would no longer satisfy. The force of Giles's secret topography is most evident in the strange representation of his death. The death scene has often been ridiculed, for reasons that are summarized in the following passage by Irving Howe:

... the crucial scene in which the badly treated Giles Winterborne lies shivering with fever outside his own hut because, having yielded it as a shelter for Grace Melbury, he does not wish any word of scandal to pass, seems close to absurd. And not only absurd. It induces in readers unvexed by aspirations to saintliness a response very different from that which Hardy intended: no one, neither man nor dog, should have to be that loyal.[18]

But Howe has missed the point. There is nothing particularly loyal about Giles's behavior. Giles simply understands where his pleasure lies. As Frank R. Giordano has persuasively demonstrated, Giles's "martyrdom seems achieved for personal satisfaction rather than for any social or spiritual good." Recalling Freud's description of melancholia, Giordano shows how the details of Giles's self-immolation correspond with the structure of the melancholic's masochistic pleasure.[19]

But Giordano does not make the connection between the cause of Giles's death (i.e., exposure to the elements) and the "burial" of Grace which had marked the advent of Giles's melancholic pleasure. He does note the "burial" as a sign of melancholia, but he says nothing about how the "burial" inaugurates the figural play on the inside/outside opposition which is so prominent throughout the novel, and which is particularly emphatic in the scene of Giles's death. In describing the scene, Hardy is careful to emphasize Giles's unwillingness to occupy the enclosed space he has created for Grace:

He gently urged her to pass the doorway, and was relieved when he saw her within sitting on his bed. Without so much as crossing the threshold himself he closed the door upon her, and turned the key in the lock. Tapping at the window he signified that she should open the casement, and when she had done this he handed in the key to her.

"You are locked in," he said; "and your own mistress." (XLI, 227-my emphasis)

Giles's parting words here have a paradoxical tone, since they declare that Grace is both a prisoner ("locked in") and the mistress of her own fate. We know, in general, what Giles means. Grace is free to leave anytime. But while she is in the hut she is protected against anyone's entering unannounced. We also know, however, that Giles's words express an additional truth: Grace is free--Giles has given her up--but she is also locked within a tomb in Giles's mind.

Grace's presence within the hut figures as a concrete representation of Grace's more abstract presence as an exquisite corpse within Giles's head. Thus, seeing Grace as his prisoner, Giles seems to understand that he has gotten what he wants:

But sleep he could not for many reasons, of which not the least was thought of his charge. He sat up, and looked towards the cot through the damp obscurity. With all its external features the same as usual he could scarcely believe that it contained the dear friend--he would not use a warmer name--who had come to him so unexpectedly and, he could not help admitting, so rashly. (XLI, 228)

In his dialogue with Grace before his death, Giles repeats this sentiment of surprised pleasure several more times, and each time it becomes increasingly clear that Giles needs Grace to stay within the hut if his pleasure is to be sustained:

"I hope you do not feel over-much melancholy in being a prisoner? [ ... ] I fear you are sorry you came and that you think I should have advised you more firmly than I did not to stay. [... ] I--I don't like you to go away." (XLI, 230-31)

Giles's need is to hold Grace within, to maintain her presence within a space he himself cannot enter. In fulfilling this need, Giles gives up his life. He does so, though, not out of any misplaced sense of loyalty, nor out of any allegiance to social convention, nor even out of any general desire for death. Rather his aim is to "preserve the topography" of his pleasure. To do this he must, at all cost, keep Grace within and himself without. In short, Giles accepts death before he will accept a violation of the "tomb" in which Grace has been placed.

After Giles's death, the novel seems to praise its hero's triumph by having his pattern of melancholy satisfaction repeated in the mourning of Marty South. This time, however, as we see in the novel's closing lines, Giles himself has become the exquisite corpse. Marty addresses Giles's grave in precisely such terms:

"Now, my own own love," she whispered, "you are mine, and only mine; for she [i.e., Grace] has forgot 'ee at last, although for her you died. But I-- whenever I get up I'll think of `ee, and whenever I lie down I'll think of `ee again. Whenever I plant the young larches I'll think that none can plant as you planted; and whenever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the ciderwring I'll say none could do it like you. Ifever I forget your name let me forget home and heaven.... But no, no, my love, I never can forget `ee; for you was a good man, and did good things!" (Hardy's ellipsis; XLVIII, 276-77)

The touching beauty of Marty's devotion has led most critics to view her as an epitome of Hardyan nobility. Mary Jacobus even goes so far as to assert that Marty's act of remembrance is the model for Hardy's "post-Romantic substitute for Imagination"--not a symptom of the pathology of consciousness that pervades the novel, but rather the emblem of that pathology's only possible cure:

Marty's fidelity partially heals the breach between Nature and Imagination, making available the only source of immortality permitted in a depleted and demythologised world. Rooted in experience, memory displaces the floating obsessions with love and death that impel Fitzpiers' quest for Felice and John South's obedience to his tree. It alone transcends the limitations of Nature and mortality--providing the Post-Romantic substitute for Imagination which makes Hardy's characteristic mode the backward-looking, elegiac vision of The Woodlanders, while allowing him a necessary arboreal ghost in the `Machine of the Universe.[20]

But if we are to acknowledge Marty's act of remembrance as a triumph--as I would argue we should--we must also acknowledge its palpable strangeness. Indeed, instead of trying, as Jacobus does, to drive a wedge between Marty's mourning and Fitzpiers' and South's obsessing, we must acknowledge the kinship between them. For, to Hardy's way of thinking, Marty's triumph and her "pathology" are the same thing. What is triumphant about Marty's mourning is that it is also an expression of joy, a declaration that pleasure has at last arrived: "`Now, my own own love,' she whispered, `you are mine, and only mine; for she has forgot `ee at last, although for her you died."' In the early hair-cutting scene, Marty had effectively renounced her private claim on Giles. But, as in the case of Giles's renunciation of his engagement to Grace, "this severance was in truth more like a burial ... than a rupture." The hair-cutting scene unfolds like a private funeral, with Marty performing the surgery on a "coffinstool-table," a household relic salvaged from a mortuary. And, as described by the narrator, Marty's arranging of her severed tresses appears as a laying out of a corpse: "Upon the pale scrubbed deal of the coffin-stool-table they stretched like waving and ropy weeds over the washed white bed of a stream" (III, 17). Now that Giles is dead, however, Marty has resumed her merely "buried" claim. Giles was never truly abandoned. Like the severed locks themselves, Giles's body was simply secreted away for private use. Marty's final assertion of triumph then does not really announce a new condition. Rather it explains a condition of pleasure that has existed for the duration of the narrative. In saying that she possesses Giles "now," at the moment that Grace has "forgot [him] at last," Marty is acknowledging that her pleasure begins at the point where the work of "normal" mourning ends. At the moment of "deference to reality"-- at the moment when the dead figure would be displaced by a figure in the realm of the living--Marty has truly taken possession of her exquisite corpse, "[her] own own love."

The view I am proposing of both Giles and Marty should force us to rethink our understanding of a whole class of characters in Hardy's fictions: those so called "noble rustics," like Gabriel Oak and Diggory Venn, who go farther than most of Hardy's creatures toward finding pleasure in this world. For these characters, the ghost plot is not always missed, the phantom chance of pleasure not always just out of reach. Indeed, these characters seem to exist within the ghost plots as ghosts themselves, or at least as figures possessed by ghosts. In idealizing such figures--in the way that Jacobus idealizes Marty South-we have failed to account for their obsessiveness, their strangeness, their pathology. In my revisionary reading of Marty and Giles, I have tried to show how the relative "happiness" of such characters, the "melancholy satisfaction" they take out of life, is made possible only by their odd propensity for trafficking with ghosts.

We can now see that Hardy's desire to "put on the manner of ghosts" is not just a fantasy. Embedded within it there is a subtle and nuanced theory of how the psyche might transform the irreducible pain that the idea of death engenders. Giles and Marty transform the pain they feel over the loss of another by absorbing the full force of that pain all at once and in advance. Knowing that death or rupture is coming, they rush to have that separation now. In doing so they lose and keep at the same time. They absorb an intensification of the pain of loss so as to keep open the possibility of pleasure. And they look for that pleasure on the other side of mourning's end; the point at which the pain of loss would normally end is the point at which their pleasure-in-continued-pain begins.

[1] Oppenheim, The Other World (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) 1-4. See also Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago P, 1989) and Daniel Cottom, Abyss of Reason: Cultural Movements, Revelations, and Betrayals (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991).

[2] Hardy The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1985) 218.

[3] See, for example, Miller, Distance and Desire (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970),1-28, 89-90; Mary Jacobus, "Hardy's Magian Retrospect," Essays in Criticism, 32 (1984), 258-79. Miller reads Hardy's strategic ghostliness as a means of maintaining a detached perspective, a means of seeing without becoming involved. Jacobus sees it as an expression of the poet's desire for immorality.

[4] "Introjection--Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia" in Psychoanalysis in France, eds. Serge Lebovici and Daniel Wildocher (New York; International UP, 1980), 6.

[5] See de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978), 151.

[6] Hardy, The Woodlanders (Oxford UP, 1979), I, 5.

[7] I borrow the term "ghost plot" from Gillian Beer, who uses it to describe the stories of missing pleasure inscribed alongside Hardy's stories of palpable pain. See "Finding a Scale for the Human: Plot and Writing in Hardy's Novel's" in Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy: The novels, ed. Dale Kramer (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990), 56-57,64.

[8] Introjection--Incorporation" 4 and 9.

[9] See Jacques Derrida, "Fors," The Georgia Review, 31 (1977), 64-116.

[10] See Maria Torok, "Maladie du deuil et fantasme de cadavre exquis." Rev. Franc. Psychanal. 32 (1978),715-33.

[11] Hardy. The Well-Beloved (New York: St. Martins P, 1986), 7, 54.

[12] See Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Work, (London: Hogarth, 1966-74), vol. XIV, 244-5. Freud writes here of the mourning subject's normal reluctance to acknowledge the reality of his or her loss. For a time there is an avoidance of reality, a tendency to "keep the dead alive," as it were, through a form of "wish-psychosis."

[13] See Hardy, Life, particularly chapter XVII, "More Town Friend's and a Novel's Dismemberment," and chapter XXII, "Another Novel Finished, Mutilated, and Restored."

[14] Barber Percomb takes the hair and uses it to construct an artificial "fall" to supplement the locks of Felice Charmond. With her appearance thus enhanced, Felice will later lure the inconstant Fitzpiers into an adulterous affair. Still later, Felice will be killed, in part because the secret of her false hair is revealed.

[15] The Art Memory (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966), 69.

[16] In the Life, Hardy recalls his own use of a mnemonic device for learning Latin grammar: he would color the verbs to indicate gender. In Jude Obscure, Hardy alludes to the existence of similar devices that might help the young Jude. The boy believes that the "grammars" he has sent for will contain a "secret cipher" or a "law of transmutation" that will allow him to avoid the labor of "commit[ting] to memory each word of Greek or Lath at the cost of years of plodding." Jude is devastated to discover that the grammars he receives don't contain such a device. But the narrator, in a parenthesis, contradicts the young Jude. He says that a law of transmutation does "in some degree" exist, although the grammarian does not know it. The device that does insom degree exist is perhaps nothing more than the cutting of Grammer that we see in The Woodlanders.

[17] "Introjection--Incorporation" 4 and 9.

[18] Irving Howe, Thomas Hardy (New York: MacMillan, (1967),104.

[19] See Frank R. Giordano, Jr. "I'd Have My Life Unber": Thomas Hardy's Self-destructive characters (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1984), 137-58.

[20] Mary Jacobus, "Tree and Machine: The Woodlanders," in Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, ed Dale Kramer (London: MacMillan, 1979),132-3.

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By BRANDON B. BENNETT