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A SCULPTURAL AESTHETIC: REPRODUCTIOMS] IN
THOMAS HARDY'S THE PURSUIT OF THE WELL-
BELOVED AND THE WELL-BELOVED

presented by

ALLISON MERYL HARVEY

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

 

 

 

 

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A SCULPTURAL AESTHETIC: REPRODUCTION[S] IN THOMAS HARDY’S THE
PURSUIT OF THE WELL-BELOVED AND THE WELL-BELOVED

By

Allison Meryl Harvey

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Department of English

2004

ABSTRACT

A SCULPTURAL AESTHETIC: REPRODUCTION[S] IN THOMAS HARDY’S THE
PURSUIT OF THE WELL-BELOVED AND THE WELL-BELOVED

By
Allison Meryl Harvey

I use Hardy’s texts as a paradigm for examining an ambiguous sculptural aesthetic
that emerges in the late nineteenth century. The novels are embroiled in a debate over
whether popular art can be good art, and specifically, whether popular sculpture can be
good sculpture. I link the novels’ concern with popularity to the various forms of
reproduction that surface in the texts, namely sculptural, biological, and mechanical. The
inextricability of these forms of reproduction, coupled with an ambiguous aesthetic
terminology, promises a conceptualization of sculptural reproduction that knows no
boundaries. Given that sculpture inherently seeks to make ideas tangible, to instill
viewers with a sense of possession over the subject, and to fix objects in time and space,
it is ironic that Hardy’s texts suggest a sculptural aesthetic in the nineteenth century that

is, ultimately, anti-sculptural.

Cepyright by
ALLISON MERYL HARVEY
2004

To Mom...

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Dr. Judith Stoddart for her dedication to my project and her enthusiastic
support of my academic career. I also thank Drs. Scott Juengel and Jennifer Fay for
spending countless hours of their time advising me and helping me become a better
scholar. Most importantly, I thank my mother, Catherine, who is simply my biggest fan,

and the best editor any writer could ask for.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A SCULPTURAL AESTHETIC: REPRODUCTION[S] IN THOMAS HARDY’S THE
PURSUIT OF THE WELL-BELOVED AND THE WELL-BELOVED ........................ l

WORKS CITED .................................................................................... 26

vi

Both The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved and The Well-Beloved are continually
forgotten texts in Thomas Hardy’s oeuvre. According to many critics, the mechanics of
the works are weak, the themes are old, and the tone is bitter. However, I consider the
texts to be invaluable reflections on turn-of-the-century art and aesthetics. The plots of
The Pursuit of Well-Beloved], which appeared in serialized format in 1892, and the
substantially reworked version of the story, The Well-Beloved, which Hardy made into a
novel in 1897, are centered on a sculptor, Jocelynz, who falls in love with three
generations of the same woman, Avice Caro. Jocelyn’s sculptures are in and of
themselves reproductions, and his artistic quest to reproduce ideal love and beauty
informs and actually complicates the other types of reproduction that surface in the texts,
namely biological and mechanical. Many critics, notably J. Hillis Miller, Tess O’Toole,
and Patricia Ingharn,3 discuss several manifestations of the term in connection with the
novels, including narrative and genealogic reproduction; however, little attention has
been paid to the most obvious form of reproduction in the novel, sculptural. Miller even
notes in his essay that two of the texts’ central themes are literature and art, but his
discussion of sculpture is surprisingly sparse.

Aesthetic judgment comes to the forefront in both novels. The last line of The
Well-Beloved actually announces that Pierston’s artistic talents were “insufficiently

recognized in his lifetime” (336)4. I believe that the centrality of Jocelyn’s art to

 

' Hereafter referred to as The Pursuit.

2 His full name is Jocelyn Pearston in The Pursuit and Jocelyn Pierston in The Well-Beloved. So as not to
privilege either text, I refer to him by his first name. However, I revert to the specific last names when
distinguishing Jocelyn’s actions or attitudes in each text.

3 See Miller’s “The Well-Beloved: The Compulsion to Stop Repeating,” O’Toole’s “Genealogy and
Narrative Jamming in Hardy’s The Well-Beloved,” and Ingham’s “Provisional Narratives: Hardy’s Final
Trilogy.”

‘ If I am quoting from or referring to only one of the texts, then only a page number will appear in the
citation. However, if I speaking of an event that occurs in both texts, I will use ‘P’ to refer to The Pursuit
of the Well-Beloved and ‘ WB’ to refer to The Well-Beloved.

understanding the text is similarly “insufficiently recognized” by critics. Jocelyn is
afflicted with a need to possess and sculpturally represent ideal beauty, and this pursuit
motivates the plot. Likewise, the setting vacillates between an island comprised of huge
expanses of rock waiting to be chiseled into life and a London studio full of carved busts
and statues. Thus, one cannot grasp the full meaning of the novels without understanding
the roles sculpture plays in character delineations, plot, and settings. The goal of this
paper is to explore those roles and ultimately to present the novels as reflections upon
artistic reproduction in the late nineteenth century. Further, while many critics consider
only The Well-Beloved in their analyses, I find it imperative to consider both versions
since artistic reproduction differs considerably between the two texts. Most notably, in
the latter version of the work, Pierston loses his aesthetic discernment, while in the serial,
he retains it. Pierston’s loss of artistic sensibility leaves open the possibility that he might
have once had it, something that I argue he likely never has in The Pursuit.

I use Hardy’s texts as a paradigm for examining an ambiguous sculptural aesthetic
that emerges in the late nineteenth century. The novels are embroiled in a debate over
whether popular art can be good art, and specifically, whether popular sculpture can be
good sculpture. Jocelyn believes that most popular art is popular because it is
mechanically reproduced, meaning that it is produced mechanically by the artist, or
without artistic inspiration5 . Mechanical reproduction also suggests to Jocelyn that an
artist makes works to satisfy public tastes, regardless of whether or not the tastes reflect
his/her own. Hardy’s texts are written in a time when there is great public demand for
sculpture. Some scholars, like nineteenth-century writer Edmund Gosse, suggest that the

popularity of sculpture in the late nineteenth century indicates that the medium was

 

5 Jocelyn deems “the local” to be one possible and worthy source of artistic inspiration.

flourishing. Contemporary scholar, H.W. Janson, conversely argues that the sheer
number of sculptors at that time means that there is a greater possibility for merely
average talent and works that are overall mediocre. The novels provide a lens for
understanding this debate, as opposed to trying to solve it, since certain places in the texts
support both Gosse’s and Janson’s claims. Central to the debate is a question of
authenticity. Can popular art be authentic and what does authentic art look like? In the
texts, the defining qualities of this term, much like with other aesthetic terms that
permeate the text (likeness and copy, respectively), are ambiguous.6 The complexity of
these terms is revealed not only through the way artistic reproduction works in the texts,
but through the manifestation of other types of reproduction as well, which suggests that
notions of likeness, the copy, and authenticity trouble reproduction in general.

The novels call into question the differences between the following set of terms:
ideal and copy, copy and likeness, local and modern, sexual possession and aesthetic
possession, and sculpture and other artistic mediums.7 Jocelyn attempts to define these
terms for himself, but his definitions are ultimately vague, as he is preoccupied with his
quest for ideal beauty. His quest never ends and only becomes more confirsing because
he is pursuing an ideal that is only a copy. There is no original embodiment of beauty for
him to represent. While readers question the motivations of his pursuit and his aesthetic
categorizations in both versions of the narrative, readers are more skeptical of his
conclusions in The Pursuit, because in The Pursuit, Jocelyn does not seem quite as

unique an artist as he makes himself out to be. In fact, the first image Hardy gives of

 

6 Benjamin’s rather straightforward assumption that an original is always easy to identify because it has
aura is not so simplistic in these texts. See his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction.”

7 For a more detailed reading of somewhat “dissonant” elements in Hardy’s works, see Rosemary Sumner’s
article, “Discoveries of Dissonance: Hardy’s Late Fiction.”

Jocelyn in that version is a rather stereotypical, bohemian one; this opening image is
absent from The Well-Beloved. Further, Jocelyn wants to die an artistic death at the end
of The Pursuit so he attempts to drown himself in the sea, whereas at the end of The
Well-Beloved, he is less concerned about the way he dies, but he wants to lead a
traditional life in his old age. Thus, reading Jocelyn somewhat skeptically, I argue that
problems with aesthetic categorization become the motivating force of the plots of the
novels and differentiate the texts.

The opening chapters of both The Pursuit and The Well-Beloved introduce the
multivalent theme of reproduction and foreshadow the roles that sculpting and aesthetic
judgment will play in each text. While the early characterizations of Jocelyn, Jocelyn’s
father, and the island of his birth are similar in each narrative, the specific language of the
characterizations and the order in which readers meet characters are unique to each text.
Further, The Pursuit opens with a scene which appears nowhere in The Well-Beloved,
distinguishing the novels from their beginnings.

Readers learn in the first sentence of The Pursuit that Jocelyn Pearston is a
sculptor of rising fame whose father is conversely “inartistic” and solely interested in
“trade and commerce” (9). Hardy immediately juxtaposes the romantic Pearston and his
business-minded father, as Pearston burns letters from his past loves. This juxtaposition
becomes significant later in the text when we learn that while Pearston’s father cannot
provide him with the genetic material to sculpt, he can, as a quarryman, provide Pearston
with a purchasable sculpting material, stone. This scene also introduces two qualities
which will continue to characterize Pearston: a desire for a tangible representation of

beauty and nostalgia for the past. As Pearston begins to burn his love letters, he realizes

that their authors have been the models for his statuettes and that the letters represent an
affection of his “which had once lived” (10). So, in a moment of guilt and fear, Pearston
reconsiders their value and decides to save them. He wants to preserve those artifacts
that represent his sculptural models and can also serve as archives of his aesthetic
judgment. Similarly, Pearston’s nostalgia for the past is reiterated soon thereafter in the
second chapter as he returns to visit both his father and the place of his birth, each of
which are harvesters of the very stone he carves.

This scene also delineates Jocelyn as embodying the “romantic bohemian”
stereotype of an artist. It is easy to envision a melodramatic artist, who cannot possibly
destroy something created by another, especially prose that proclaims love. Further,
readers immediately question Pearston’s narcissism. What is his true emotional impetus
for suddenly deciding to save the letters? Does he really have feelings for the letters’
authors, or does he selfishly want reminders that he was once loved, relics he can look to
in moments of self-doubt? Pearston’s intentions will continually be called into question
in The Pursuit, much more so than in The Well-Beloved.

Also more obvious in The Pursuit is sexuality and sexual encounters;
consequently, Hardy’s rhetoric in the opening of The Pursuit is much more overt with
sexuality than it is in The Well-Beloved. The island, which is described in both sexual
and masculine terms, represents Pearston’s origin. Not only is it the place of his birth,
but it births the stone for his sculptures. “The peninsula,” Hardy writes, “juts out like the
head of a flamingo into the English Channel” (10-11). Miller nicely articulates Hardy’s
representation of the island when he writes, “It is a single phallus-shaped block of

limestone jutting out into the sea, a male member of stone four miles long” (164).

Indeed, Pearston recognizes for the first time the substance and solidness of the island,
and reacquaints himself with it as he feels the warmth of the island’s “personal
temperature” and listens to the “nick-nick” and “saw-saw-saw” of the island’s “voice”
(11). The island is masculinized and personified because it represents a man;
specifically, it represents Pearston’s father, the quarryman. His father births Jocelyn, as
well as stone. Perhaps Pearston is destined to be a sculptor since he and stone are
quarried/bom from the person and island. Miller describes the father, son, island triad
when he writes, “The monumental stones the father cuts out of this living rock are erected
by Jocelyn in his studio and then made into images of his goddess” (164). Further, it will
become significant later in the text that both Pearston’s masculine father and the
masculine island of his birth can reproduce (children and stone, respectively), while
Pearston can only reproduce feminine images in stone, and according to Jocelyn, never
successfully.

In The Well-Beloved, there is no letter-burning scene to open the narrative. This
is a noteworthy difference since there is no immediate signifier of a desire to preserve
beauty in this narrative. The absence of such a signifier mirrors and foreshadows
Pierston’s loss of his ability to recognize beauty in The Well-Beloved, an ability he
conversely preserves in The Pursuit. Moreover, the absence of the scene is also
indicative of Pierston’s less bohemian personality in The Well-Beloved. While Pearston
dies romantically reflecting on his history at the end of The Pursuit, at the end of The
Well-Beloved, Pierston dies only after marrying for convention and logically trying to

make a sound future for the city of his birth.

Instead of opening with Pierston burning letters, The Well-Beloved begins with a
similarly nostalgic scene. Pierston appears already upon the island, as an urban stranger
walking along the rocks. Before readers learn of Pierston’s identity, though, the narrator
describes the topography of the island and “the stranger” listens to its sounds. The
peninsula is still a solid block of stone, but it does not “jut” into the ocean as it does The
Pursuit. Similarly, Pierston hears the island snore, instead of speak. The fact that the
island now snores makes it less of a phallic symbol of regeneration and indicates the lack
of sexual encounters in this version of the text. As Pierston listens to the island, his old
neighbors, Avice and her mother, Mrs. Caro, recognize him and Mrs. Caro explains
Pierston’s profession to her daughter. Mrs. Caro describes Pierston: “He’s what they call
a sculptor, and he means to be a great genius in that line some day, they do say” (181).
Her comment implies that sculpting is an unfamiliar activity on that island, but it also
adds some credibility to Pierston’s artistic ability. Unlike the opening scene of The
Pursuit, which calls into question Pearston’s uniqueness as an artist, Mrs. Caro’s
comment suggests that others see him as a rising star, someone whose sculpture will rise
above the rest. After these events, readers secondarily learn something of Pierston’s
father, who remains inartistic and business-minded. The fact that Jocelyn’s occupation is
revealed later in The Well-Beloved than in The Pursuit is indicative of the role sculpture
plays in each novel. Much like Pierston appears as a mysterious stranger in The Well-
Beloved, so too is sculpting a mysterious occupation for the island’s natives. This
opening further parallels the fact that Pierston’s need to constantly seek and sculpt ideal
beauty is a mysterious and unexplainable curse in The Well-Beloved, which is lifted only

at the end of that novel. Marcia, Pierston’s only wife in this version,8 claims that his

 

8 Marcia is Pearston’s first wife in The Pursuit.

sudden loss of the love of beauty is “strange,” but Pierston is not sorry for the loss as it
has brought him his “greatest sorrows, if a few little pleasures” (333). Further, the last
line of The Well-Beloved indicates that the full extent of Pierston’s power as an artist will
forever remain a mystery to art critics and ultimately, readers.

Both of these openings bind genealogic reproduction to sculptural reproduction
through Jocelyn’s father and the island fertile with stone. But, on another level,
genealogy is always bound to questions of likeness and resemblance. This coupling,
though, is problematic for Jocelyn, especially in his conceptualization of the ideal.
Jocelyn claims that throughout his life, his well-beloved, the spirit of ideal beauty, has flit
from woman to woman. At twenty years old, Jocelyn proposes marriage to his childhood
friend, Avice, though the well-beloved is not embodied in her. Just before their marriage,
Jocelyn’s well-beloved incamates a woman, Marcia, and he pursues her, leaving Avice in
the lurch. Twenty years later, he is still plagued by guilt, but continues pursuing his
flitting well-beloved. At a dinner party, and at the very moment he is deciding whether
or not his well-beloved has found a new residence, he reads of Avice’s death in a letter
addressed to him. Immediately disturbed by the news, he returns home to find a
photograph of her. Looking at her picture, Jocelyn decides that Avice is now the
embodiment of ideal love and ideal beauty. The photograph “completed in his emotions
what the letter had begun” (P 58; WB 231). The fact that it is not Avice herself who
embodies the J ocelyn’s ideal and the ideal is instead a representation or copy of her is
significant, especially given that Jocelyn never loved or idolized the original Avice when
he was with her. The narrator explains this irony when he says, “He loved the woman

dead and inaccessible as he never loved her in life” (P 58; WB 231). “Inacoessible” is the

key word here because Jocelyn cannot access Avice, whom he deems is the embodiment
of the original idea]. But, he can access her photograph. Thus, the problem of the plot
becomes that Jocelyn believes he has access to Avice because he has access to a
representation of her, one that is so like her, it even has “much of the softness
characteristic of the original” (P 58; WB 231). Jocelyn’s misconception leads him to
believe that by sculpting her, he can both represent and access the original, and ultimately
satisfy his quest to both possess and represent ideal beauty. But, he does not realize that
all he can ever access or represent is a photograph of her; after all, he loves the
photograph of her, but not her.9
Jocelyn has a brief moment where he is aware of the absurdity of his obsession
with someone he can no longer access. The narrator describes Jocelyn’s feelings as he
looks at Avice’s photograph:
Pearston was almost angry with himself for his feelings of this night, so
unreasonably, motivelessly strong were they towards that lost young
playmate. “How senseless of me!” he said, as he lay in his lonely bed.
She had been another man’s wife ahnost the whole time since he had been
estranged from her, and now she was a corpse. Yet the absurdity did not
make his grief the less: and the consciousness of the intrinsic, almost
radiant, purity of this new sprung affection for a flown spirit forbade him
to check it. The flesh was absent altogether; it was love rarified and
refined to its highest attar. He had felt nothing like it before. (P 58; WB
231)
Thus, Jocelyn initially questions his developing obsession, but the magnitude of his
feelings for Avice causes him to ignore his own reasoning. This is one of the first
instances in the story where readers become aware that Jocelyn can be easily blinded by

desire. If he can ignore the reality of his loving a photograph, what other realities can he

ignore?

 

9 Loving a photograph of a person instead of the person is a recurring theme in Hardy’s works. See his
short story, “The hnaginative Woman.”

Much like Jocelyn does not want to see the absurdity of his worshipping a dead
woman, he also does not want to be able recognize the Avices’ likenesses, or the traits
that make them similar to, but not exactly like one another. Instead, he wants the last two
to be copies of the first Avice, in whom his well-beloved is supposedly embodied,
meaning they should not be similar to her, but should instead replicate her. So, after
recognizing the subtle differences among the Avices, Jocelyn forces himself to deny his
observations, tricking himself into believing that the second and third Avices are copies
of the first. For example, as Jocelyn begins to develop a relationship with the second
Avice, he recognizes that while she is similar to her mother, she is not exactly like her in
either appearance or demeanor. The narrator describes J ocelyn’s early perceptions of the
second Avice: “Honest perception had told him that this Avice, fairer than her mother in
face and form, was her inferior in soul and understanding” (P 70; WB 240). These
differences, which make Avice the second like her mother but not a copy of her, become
increasingly difficult for Jocelyn to identify. In fact, Jocelyn wants the second Avice to
be an exact copy of her mother so badly that he begins to ignore the subtle differences
between them, consequently losing his ability to distinguish likenesses from copies. The
narrator describes Jocelyn’s developing inability when he says,

All this time Pearston was thinking of the girl — that is to say, Nature was
working her plans for producing the next generation under the cloak of a
dialogue on linen. He could not read her individual character owing to the
confusing effect of her likeness to a woman whom he had valued too late.
He could not help seeing in her all that he knew of another, and veiling in

her all that did not harmonize with his sense of metempsychosis. (P 73; WB
244)

10

Thus, likeness becomes a tool'0 that obscures Jocelyn’s vision, which then, in turn,
allows Jocelyn to reincarnate the first Avice in her successors’ images.ll This
reincarnation is then fully realized when Jocelyn actually sees the second Avice as no
longer like her mother, but as a copy of her. Only pages after the narrator describes
Jocelyn’s affliction, the second Avice becomes “this ‘daps’ of her mother, [a] perfect
copy,” and “literally assume[s] the personality” of her mother (74). Though the quotation
says that Jocelyn veiled in Avice the characteristics that distinguish her fiom her mother,
Jocelyn was really veiling the truth from himself. ‘2 Jocelyn’s willful ignorance
continues to keep readers questioning his claims.

Jocelyn’s continual negotiation of the differences between likeness and copy
becomes a motivating force of the plot. The concepts problematize Jocelyn’s
understanding of both genealogic and sculptural reproduction. Jocelyn decides that his
well-beloved is embodied in the original Avice, and so she epitomizes ideal beauty. He
uses Avice’s successors as models for his statues in an attempt to represent this ideal. He
sculpts the second and third Avices, but is fi'ustrated with his results. Jocelyn relentlessly
pursues ideal beauty, but repeatedly fails, since he has no ability to recognize the Avices’
differences, to distinguish likeness from copies and ultimately, the copy from the ideal.‘3

He thinks he is reproducing ideal beauty in his sculptures, since the original Avice’s

 

'0 I use the word “tool” purposefully here because likeness helps Jocelyn pursue his dream. The narrator
describes this benefit when he says, “As a physical fact, no doubt, the preservation of the likeness was no
uncommon thing here, but it helped the dream” (121). Without the likeness between the first and second
Avices, he might not ever see them as a copy. If Jocelyn did not eventually believe the second Avice to be
a copy of her mother, then he might not have ever sculpted her, relinquishing his quest to sculpt ideal
beauty, the very quest that moves the novel forward.

” For a discussion of how genealogy and narratives are “a problematic coupling” in the text, see Tess
O’Toole’s essay, “Genealogy and Narrative Jamming in Hardy’s The Well-Beloved”

'2 This veiling mechanism is also why in The Well-Beloved, Pierston refuses to call the second Avice, Ann
Avice, by her full name; he wants her to be her mother, simply “Avice” (237).

'3 I refer to Avice’s photograph as a copy instead of a likeness because Jocelyn makes all things that are
like Avice into copies of her.

11

“copies” are his models. But, the succeeding Avices are not really copies, nor is what he
deems the original really the original. Given that the last two Avices are merely like their
ancestor, the sculptures Jocelyn produces of them only resemble the first Avice. Jocelyn,
though, cannot see this mere resemblance; he can only feel dissatisfaction with the
results. Blaming Aphrodite (his supposed muse) for his dissatisfaction, instead of his
own refusal to see the truth, Jocelyn continues on his quest.14

While J ocelyn’s difficulty in recognizing likenesses troubles Jocelyn’s ability to
make sculptural reproductions that satisfy him, it also affects his perception of the third
Avice. What happens when a third woman/copy enters the scene who is more like the
original woman than the second one, when that second one is already deemed a copy of
the first? This is Jocelyn’s dilemma. In The Pursuit, Pearston returns home to Slopeway
Well at fifty-nine years old, after a twenty year sojourn abroad. What he discovers upon
his return is that the second Avice’s husband has recently died. After visiting her, he
decides that he will propose to her, that her companionship will make him content, and
that he will finally be able to right the wrong he committed upon her mother.” As he is
about to propose, however, he catches a glimpse of the third Avice. Suddenly, all bets
are off. This is because the third Avice represents her mother better than does the second
Avice; in fact, now it is she, and no longer her mother, who is a copy of the original
Avice. Or is she? Apparently, when considering the three Avices together, the second is
only “much like the first,” while the third is “actually a double of the first” (124). At first

glance, it appears that Pearston has regained the ability to distinguish likenesses fi'om

 

'4 In his book, Proust and the Victorians, Robert Fraser draws a parallel between The Well-Beloved and
Proust’s A la recherche since both novels contain an ideal beloved and a character that has a skewed sense
of perception. .

‘5 His guilt is also what drives him on his quest to marry the Avices. Barbara Schapiro links this guilt to
Jocelyn’s narcissism in her essay, “Thomas Hardy and the ‘Well-Beloved’ Self.”

12

copies. But readers must question this reacquisition. Readers know how easily Pearston
was blinded before, how the first Avice became reincarnated in the second one to the
point that the second became a copy of her. Predictably then, the three Avices morph
into one image for Pearston and he expresses the pain this causes him: “When I went
away from the first Avice, [I] had a presentiment that I should ache for it some day. And
I am aching — have ached ever since this jade of a Well-Beloved learnt the
unconscionable trick of inhabiting one image only” (130). 16 Thus, Hardy could have
happily ended the story by having Pearston and the second Avice marry. However, he
does not and consequently, readers become aware of how crucial the distinction between
likeness and copies is for motivating the plot. Pearston constantly believes that if he
possesses the copy then he can possess the ideal; so, he ignores mere likenesses and sees
the third Avice as yet another chance for possession. But what Pearston never realizes is
that he has possessed the copy (Avice’s photograph) the entire time.

With the third Avice in the picture, readers also learn that for Jocelyn, genealogy
always signifies the copy and when likeness does trouble genealogy, it only does so
temporarily. Likeness does, however, continue to complicate both his aesthetic pursuit
of beauty and the results of his pursuit, his sculptures. Since genealogic reproduction
signifies “the copy” for Jocelyn, it becomes inextricable from aesthetic reproduction and
the idea that all art is a copy. In fact, Jocelyn sees people as things that can be

mechanically reproduced and mechanical reproduction of any sort saddens him, though

 

'6 I should note here that in The Well-Beloved, the three Avices also become “one image only,” however, in
that version, there is only a hint that Pierston ever intended to marry Avice (300). Upon Pierston’s seeing
the third Avice for the first time, while visiting the second Avice, the narrator says, “Warm friendship,
indeed, he felt for her; but whatever that might have done towards the instauration of a former dream was
now hopelessly barred by the rivalry of the thing itself in the guise of a lineal successor” (290). In fact, the
second Avice, instead, asks Pierston to consider marrying her daughter. Thus, Jocelyn’s negotiation of
likeness and copy is more essential to the plot of The Pursuit.

l3

ironically, he does not realize that he, himself, is obsessed with a copy and not an
original. Thus, the novels’ overarching concerns with mechanical reproduction surface
when Jocelyn sadly sees the first Avice becoming a reproduction of thousands of other
people and the Slopeway Well community likewise becoming a copy of thousands of
other communities:
He observed that every aim of those who had brought her up had been to
get her away mentally as far as possible from her natural and individual
life as an inhabitant of a peculiar isle; to make her an exact copy of tens
of thousands of other people, in whose circumstances there was nothing
special, distinctive, or picturesque; to teach her to forget all of the
experiences of her ancestors; to drown the local ballads by songs
purchased at the Budmouth fashionable music-sellers’, and the local
vocabulary by a governess tongue of no country at all. She lived in a
house that would have been the fortune of an artist, and learned to draw
London suburban villas from printed copies.
Avice had seen all of this before he pointed it out, but, with a girl’s
tractability, had acquiesced. By constitution she was local to the bone,
but she could not escape the tendency of the age. (P 18; WE 186-87)
In this passage, Jocelyn realizes that the influential power of mechanical reproduction is
beyond that of the individual. Rather, collective groups and cultures are abandoning their
local customs, those traditions, which with their origin in the past, retain a sort of
authenticity that modern inventions and art can only lack. Indeed, for Jocelyn
reproduction is positive when it is rooted in the local, or that which he deems authentic.
Though Jocelyn’s fellow islanders may look, sound, and act alike, they are, as a
community, distinct, and they have the ability to perpetuate their distinctiveness.
Jocelyn’s appreciation for Slopeway Well is also why he continually distinguishes the
native islanders from everyone else, the foreigners or “kimberlins.” But, is it that these

natives are more authentic, or does Jocelyn rationalize their sameness because of his

nostalgia for the past and his community? Readers certainly call his notion of

14

authenticity into question since he is never quite aware that his ideal is embodied in
something that is already a copy.

Jocelyn acknowledges that only the island and islanders together could produce
ideal beauty and J ocelyn’s ideal love, as they did with the first Avice; according to
Jocelyn, the Caro family “was yet the only family he had ever met, or was likely to meet,
which possessed the material for her making” (WB 251). Yet, the Caro’s did not make
his ideal, a camera did. But unaware of this fact, Jocelyn acknowledges the potentially
beneficial results of reproducing islanders, and seeks reproductions or copies of the
original Avice when he is on the island. He takes pleasure in the fact that Avice the third
reproduces his childhood, and grows up in his own bedroom. And his pleasure is
justified since his love is also initially for a copy. The more copies that are produced of
the original Avice, the more intense his love becomes, because copies of her, being that
they are merely copies, are as vacuous as the original copy, the photograph.17

Conversely, when he sees his friend and fellow artist, Somers’ daughters as exact
copies of their mother, Mrs. Pine-Avon, and Mrs. Pine-Avon as a copy of her ancestors,
he degrades all of them, likely because they are not from Slopeway Well and are,
consequently, only mere representations of modernity, and namely, London. The
narrator describes Jocelyn’s perception of the Somers’ family:

Mrs. Somers — once the intellectual, emancipated Mrs. Pine-Avon — had
now retrograded to the petty and timid mental position of her mother and
grandmother, giving sharp, strict regard to the current literature and art
that reached the innocent perspective of her long perspective of girls, with
the view of hiding every skull and skeleton of life from their dear eyes.

She was another illustration of the rule that succeeding generations of
women are seldom marked by cumulative progress, their advance as

 

'7 J. Hillis Miller also acknowledges that Jocelyn’s well-beloved is really an absence, but he argues that this
is because she is a “projection” of Jocelyn himself (168). See his essay, “The Well-Beloved: The
Compulsion to Stop Repeating.”

15

matrons; so that they move up and down the stream of intellectual
development like flotsam in a tidal estuary. And perhaps not by reason of
their faults as individuals, but of their misfortune as child-rearers. (P 130-
31; WB 301)
Reproduction that is not grounded in the local strips individuals of taste and affect. Mrs.
Pine-Avon, Jocelyn’s former love interest, has, he feels, grown emotionally indifferent to
“good” art and literature and imposes her indifference on her daughters, who are not
allowed to enjoy culture. Further, Mrs. Pine-Avon is bound to the past in a negative way;
she does not allow past works of art and literature to shape her discernment of current
works, but rather, she simply rereads those works over and over again, closing off her
eyes and mind to new material. Jocelyn is, perhaps, critical of Mrs. Pine-Avon’s
aesthetic judgment because he is frustrated with his own. He too is bound to the past, to
his experience, or lack thereof, with the first Avice. His obsession with her renders him
unable to see the other Avices as different in appearance from the first Avice and each
other. Over and over again, he sees the first Avice’s image in the images of her
ancestors. His mind, like Mrs. Pine-Avon’s is closed off fi‘om new material. Thus,
Jocelyn inadvertently links himself to her, and ultimately the fi'uitless reproduction of
modern kimberlins.

Fruitless or futile is in fact how Jocelyn perceives the act of reproducing and
rearing offspring, a chore that Jocelyn claims specifically belongs to women. Women,
except for those who pass down local charms and traditions, are merely reproducing
copies of themselves and are thus machines of mechanical reproduction.18 Because they

lack the ability to give birth, men are not destined for any particular reproductive role.

Jocelyn compares women to flotsam in an estuary because he thinks women are, as

 

'8 In her essay, “Genealogy and Narrative Jamming in Hardy’s The Well-Beloved,” Tess O’Toole notes
Hardy’s use of “machinery” rhetoric in the text.

16

merely copies of their mother, excesses or remains. Further, this analogy is significant
since at another point in the novel, the narrator designates Jocelyn’s own role in the
hypothetical river. At Lady Channelcliff’s house, Jocelyn “was like a stone in a brook,
waiting for some particular floating object to be brought towards him and to stick upon
his surface” (P 47; WB 219). He and women are passive objects. They float instead of
swim and he, as a stone, sits and waits. Metaphorically, these analogies suggest that both
Jocelyn and women have limited voice in their marrying and reproducing. And Jocelyn
would like to believe that his ability to produce was limited by another, like Aphrodite,
because his art, in reality, is not that unique and his quest is propagated by a copy.

Jocelyn, of course, either does not realize or denies the fact that his own art is not
solely grounded in the local. While his sculptures are made from the stone of his
homeland, they are produced in London, in a modern “flat” that could be the studio of
any artist (P 94; WB 264). This conflict between the local and the mainstream, or the
good and bad types of reproduction, may also contribute to a paradox in Jocelyn’s
sculpting. He is on an unending quest to sculpt ideal beauty, yet can only sculpt the same
figure over and over again.19 Jocelyn realizes that his repetitive subject matter and his
repeated use of (what he believes to be) the same image, typecasts him as a sculptor of
beautiful goddesses.

His recognizable subject matter consequently has him concerned about the
popularity of his own art and his role in an art world dictated by mechanical
reproduction: “For all these dreams he translated into marble, and found that by them he

was hitting a public taste he had never deliberately aimed at, and mostly despised. He

 

'9 For a detailed discussion of Jocelyn’s repetitive loving and sculpting, see Miller’s “The Well-Beloved:
The Compulsion to Stop Repeating.”

l7

was, in short, in danger of drifting away from a solid artistic reputation to a popularity
which might possibly be as brief as it would be brilliant and exciting” (P 44; WB 212).
J ocelyn’s concern is one that would have likely been the concern of a sculptor working in
nineteenth-century Britain.20 All over Europe, there was such a public demand for
monuments and portrait busts during this time that the sheer proliferation of works often
resulted in mediocrity. H.W. Janson, in his book, Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, explains
that artists were tired fiom all of their commissions, and their sculptures began to reflect
their fatigue (177). This mediocrity ultimately contributed to a vast decrease in the
popularity of sculpture moving into the early twentieth century (Janson 177). Janson
also claims that sculptors contributed to their own demise because there was a loss of
“common understanding” between sculptors and the public; they instead “conceived
public monuments on their own initiative which society did not want” (177). Jocelyn
claims that his initiative is all his own, and that his popularity was just chance:
He would have gone on working with his chisel with just as much zest if
his creations had been deemed to be seen by no mortal eye but his own.
By reason of this indifference to the popular reception of his dream-
figures he acquired a curious artistic aplomb that carried him through the
gusts of opinion without suffering them to disturb his inherent bias (P 42;
WB 211).
Jocelyn seems to suggest that his “personal motivations” for sculpting are what
distinguish him fiom other sculptors, but with J anson’s sentiment, we have reason to
suspect that Jocelyn might, in fact, be like every other sculptor in the nineteenth century,

popular but mediocre. Moreover, because he can only see to sculpt one image, readers

question his ingenuity.

 

2° Hardy’s presentation of the sculptural world does, in fact, reflect the artistic climate of the late
nineteenth-century. Moreover, Michael Millgate’s biography of Hardy, coupled with Hardy’s own letters,
reveals that Hardy associated with several sculptors, art critics, and was a frequent visitor of the Royal
Academy, which exhibited sculpture.

l8

Jocelyn’s popularity coupled with his failure to recognize how grounded in the
“modern” his sculptures are, similarly causes readers to query Jocelyn’s professed
uniqueness. Jocelyn’s fiiend and fellow artist, Somers, seems to think that Jocelyn is
unique, but this sentiment is coming from an artist who is just as (if not more)
mainstream than Jocelyn, and who is shown to not be able to recognize genius.21 Somers
attempts to alleviate J ocelyn’s fear by applauding his ingenuity when he says,

Pearston, you are our only inspired sculptor. You are our Praxiteles. You
are almost the only man of this generation who has been able to mold and
chisel forms living enough to draw the idle public away from the popular
genre paintings into the usually deserted lecture-room, and people who
have seen your last piece of stuff say there has been nothing like it since
sixteen hundred and — since the sculptors ‘of the great race’ lived and died
(59).22
The ‘great race’ of sculptors which Somers mentions likely refers to sculptors like
Bernini, Canova, and Roubillac, who flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries (Gosse 163). Edmund Gosse, one of Hardy’s frequent dinner companions, 23
says in his 1883 essay “Living English Sculptors” that the early to mid nineteenth century
was a dark age for sculpture in England and the medium only began to regain popularity
and talent in the late nineteenth century (164). Thus, he argues, contrary to J anson, that
the late nineteenth century, when the story is purportedly set, would be the ideal age for a

thriving, ambitious sculpture. The popularity of sculpture at this time also led a renewal

 

2' The narrator describes Somers’ lack of uniqueness and loss of aesthetic taste: “The landscape-painter,
now an Academician like Pierston himself - rather popular than distinguished — had given up that peculiar
and personal taste in subjects which had marked him in times past, executing instead many pleasing aspects
of nature addressed to the fumishing householder through the middling critic, and really very good of their
kind” (P 131; WB 301). Though on one level, this passage seems to distinguish Jocelyn and Somers, it
actually compares the two artists. And since it implies that Somers might have once had more taste, he and
the Pierston of The Well-Beloved are really similar, since Pierston also loses aesthetic discernment at the
end of the text. For a reading that argues the opposite idea, that Somers and Jocelyn are quite different
artists, see Helmut Gerber’s essay, “The Well-Beloved as a Comment on the Well-Despised.”

22 This quotation also appears in The Well-Beloved, though with the alternative spelling of Jocelyn’s name,
Pierston, and with the addition of “or rather our Lysippus” after the mention of Praxiteles. Lysippus was
another famous sculptor.

23 In his biography of Hardy, Millgate mentions several times that Gosse and Hardy dined together.

19

of interest in great sculptors, like Praxiteles; thus Somers’ mention of him is not chance.24

Perhaps Jocelyn’s own carved Aphrodites are as magnificent as Praxiteles’ statues; after
all, both of these sculptors pursue ideal beauty (Barrow 60).25 But more than likely,
Somers compares Jocelyn to Praxiteles because both of them are popular sculptors at that
time.

John Ruskin, a nineteenth-century critic and lecturer on the arts, was the era’s
primary commentator on artistic popularity and the sculptural aesthetic. Ruskin’s
opinions of sculpture, in fact, provide a lens through which to examine Jocelyn’s
sculpting. Ruskin explains how sculptural imperfections separate “common” sculptors
from “fine” sculptors:

There must be, therefore, two degrees of truth to be looked for in the good
graphic arts; one, the commonest, which by any partial or imperfect sign
conveys to you an idea which you must complete for yourself; and the
other, the finest, a representation so perfect as to leave you nothing to be
farther accomplished by this independent exertion; but to give you the
same feeling of possession and presence which you would experience
from the natural object itself (105-106).
Ruskin’s sentiment is quite suggestive of the novels’ overarching problems: J ocelyn’s
ambiguous place in mechanical reproduction and the conflict between the ideal and the
copy. Given Ruskin’s categorization, Jocelyn could be classified as a fine sculptor, hence
the comparison of him to Praxiteles (if readers accepted the comparison as genuinely

suggestive of Jocelyn’s talent). The problem with this classification though, is that

Jocelyn’s sculptures of Avice would have to serve as a substitute for her, to make the

 

2‘ Throughout the mid to late nineteenth century, The British Museum continued to acquire works from the
fourth century, the age of Praxiteles (Barrow 50). Two of the most popular statues at the time were,
consequently, Praxiteles’ Leconfield Aphrodite and his Aphrodite of Cnidus (Barrow 58) (Ingharn 345).

2’ Notably, Gosse also praises sculpture Item the era of Praxiteles when he says, “If we want to see what is
truly beautifirl in sculpture, let us look at such fragments of genuine old Greek work, down to the age of
Praxiteles, as the piety of the modern world has collected out of chaos” (166).

20

spectator feel just as if they were in the presence of the first Avice. It is questionable,
though, whether this feeling is even possible since Jocelyn never possesses Avice or
perceives the ideal in her while she is alive. Therefore, it might be more appropriate to
classify Jocelyn as a common sculptor, especially since he finds his sculptures wanting.
Because he sculpts fi'om models who are only like the original Avice, he never produces
statues that make him feel as if he was in the presence of her, or more importantly, that he
possesses her in all of her ideal beauty.

Ruskin also conceptualizes sculpture as “the art of fiction in solid substance” (27).
His idea can quite literally be applied to Jocelyn’s finished sculptures and his motivation
for sculpting. The ideal never becomes a reality for Jocelyn except when it is no longer
important to him, which happens only in The Well-Beloved. As such, the ideal is always
fiction that he continues to represent sculpturally. The ideal is also fictional because it
masks as an ideal; in reality, the ideal is only a copy. Still, he tries to make it tangible.
Jocelyn believes that his well-beloved is forever elusive and he wishes he could quit
chasing her. Therefore, he wants to turn her, the one who continually appears in
“mutable flesh,” into “durable shape” (P 43; WB 211). Ruskin claims that sculpting feeds
an “irresistible human instinct” to capture “living creatures in such permanent form that
one may play with the images at leisure” (28). Jocelyn wants the opportunity to play
with his well-beloved, as he is convinced she so often plays with him. He ultimately
sculpts for the same reason he decides to save the love letters in the opening of The
Pursuit: he wants to preserve something that is never quite there.

Readers are much more skeptical of Jocelyn’s artistic genius in The Pursuit, and

this skepticism is reinforced by the ending of this version. In The Pursuit, Pearston

21

actually marries the third Avice. After he learns of her current love for and prior
commitment to her old teacher, Henri Leverre, he decides that they need to be together.
His solution is to make it appear as though he heard that his first wife, Marcia, is still
alive and he has subsequently gone to America to be with her. However, his real plan is
to sail out to sea and drown himself in a dangerous part of the ocean, known as the race.
But, his suicide attempt is unsuccessful and he awakes from a coma, only to discover
Marcia actually by his bed side. This ending, much like the opening, is highly
romanticized. In the last moments of his life, Pearston begins to acknowledge his gross
misperceptions of things and his revelation reinforces the skepticism readers have had of
him all along. As he lies in bed staring at Avice’s photograph, “the single object he cared
to bring” from his old house to the house where he dies, he realizes the ironic pay off of
his quest for beauty: “The contrast of the ancient Marcia’s aspect, both with this portrait
and with her own fine former self, brought into his brain a sudden sense of the
grotesqueness of things. His wife was — not Avice, but that parchment-covered skull
moving about him” (168).26 The irony of his final marriage partner ultimately sends
Pearston to his death. He dies laughing and exclaiming to himself “Oh — no, no! I — I — it
is too, too droll — this ending to my would-be romantic history! Ho-ho-ho!” (168).
Conversely, the ending of The Well-Beloved imbues Pierston with artistic
credibility. Instead of attempting to give his life a romantic end, he instead intends to
marry the third Avice, but it she who dramatically flees her home in the middle of the
night to meet and marry Henri. They leave a note for Avice’s mother and sail off to the

mainland, braving and surviving the same “Race” that almost takes Pearston’s life in The

 

2" Michael Ryan, in his essay, “One Name of Many Shapes: The Well-Beloved,” similarly proposes that
The Well-Beloved should be read through an ironic lens since it is a mockery of aestheticism.

22

Pursuit. Pierston, instead of responding dramatically in tum, merely resigns and reflects
rather mournfully on his life. As Pierston reminiscences, the narrator describes Pierston’s
reflections on his pursuit of beauty, and the description presents a more self-aware and a
potentially more truthful person. Pierston might have actually been plagued by the curse
of Aphrodite. The narrator says,
Nobody would ever know the truth about him; what it was he had sought
that had so eluded, tantalized, and escaped him; what it was that led him
such a dance, and had at last, as he believed just now in the fi‘eshness of
his loss, been discovered in the girl who had left him. It was not in the
flesh; he had never knelt low to that. Not a woman in the world had been
wrecked by him, though he had been impassioned by so many. Nobody
would guess the cordial loving-kindness - which had lain behind what
had seemed to him the enraptured fulfilhnent of a pleasing destiny
postponed for forty years. His attraction to the third Avice would be
regarded by the world as the selfish designs of an elderly man on a maid.
(325)
In this passage, Pierston seems aware that others may rnisperceive his desire for the
Avices as something selfish and controllable. Much like sexuality is removed from this
version of the text, Pierston removes sex as a possible motivation for his quest. No
matter what readers believe about his attachment to Avice, he knows that his love for her
has been genuine. Though it is possible to still question Pierston’s claims in this passage,
he seems truly saddened by his pursuit, and hints that he would have changed it if he
could.

Pierston is also made out to be less of a hypocrite in this version, since he does
embrace the local in his old age. The narrator describes the change in his appearance:
“He had now changed his style of dress entirely, appearing always in a homely suit of
local make, and of the fashion of thirty years before, the achievement of a tailoress at

East Quarriers. He also let his iron-grey beard grow as it would...” (334). Further, there

23

is little suggestion of stereotypical artistic behavior in this version; rather, Pierston makes
the logical decision to “give a geometrical shape” to his story and marry Marcia for
companionship (335). As a married couple, he reasons that he and Marcia will no longer
have to strain their aged bodies by walking to each other’s houses.27 And, with his
decision to marry Marcia, Pierston actually realizes that is giving his life a mechanically
reproduced end, in “the best machine-made conventional manner” (3 34).

Finally, the fact that in this version Pierston loses his artistic sensibility implies
that he once had it. There is a significant scene where Pierston goes to a museum to
“test” the survival of his artistic tastes, which the narrator claims were formerly good
(333). Readers are inclined to believe that his tastes were sound, since he heads straight
to works by those artists that readers would also deem as fine, Perugino, Titian, and
Sebastiano. However, Jocelyn suddenly cannot see any more aesthetic worth in their
works than in those works of “the pavement artist [he] passed on the way” (333). And at
the very end of the novel, Pierston becomes a father-figure for Avice and Henri, further
rejecting the bohemian artist stereotype. The narrator informs us in the last line of the
novel that after his death, his artworks were held in high regard, but that his potential as
an artist was “insufficiently recognized in his lifetime” (336). Readers can choose to take
the narrator seriously, or they can assume that the narrator is communicating what
Pierston would have said about himself, but this version of the novel pointedly leaves
open the possibility of that choice.

The fact that it is ambiguous whether or not Jocelyn possessed artistic ingenuity
reflects the overall difficulty one has in defining the terms of artistic reproduction. Miller

perhaps best articulates this difficulty in the novels as an “aporia of interrninability,” or

 

27 He also accepts his old age in this version, which is something he denies his whole life in The Pursuit.

24

the impossibility of “ever reach[ing] a definitive explanatory end” (173). He claims that

9 6“

this aporia is perpetuated by the novels mterlocking repetition,” but more importantly
for this paper, it is also caused by the fact that Hardy provides us with a “potentially
interminable set of other possible endings” and “possible interpretations” (173). The
inextricability of the various forms of reproduction in these texts likewise promises a
conceptualization of sculptural reproduction that knows no boundaries or definition.
Given that sculpture inherently seeks to make ideas tangible, to instill viewers with a
sense of possession over the subject, and to fix objects in time and space, it is ironic that
Hardy’s texts suggest a sculptural aesthetic in the nineteenth century that is, ultimately,
anti-sculptural. There is little that is tangible in the definitions of terms like authenticity,
likeness, copy, and ideal, the very words which become central to discussions of
sculpture in the texts. Because of this intangibility, readers gain little mastery of and feel
no sense of possession over those terms, nor can readers definitively claim whether
popularity indicated a certain quality of work in the nineteenth century. Gosse’s
description of a flourishing sculptural climate might best be coupled with The Well-
Beloved, since such a climate would be ideal for producing extraordinary sculptors.
Janson’s nineteenth century, full of popular, mediocre artists, might better describe the
environment of The Pursuit. Our conceptualization of the sculptural milieu in the late

nineteenth century is obviously not one that is either fixed or permanent and Hardy’s

texts insure that it never will be.

25

WORKS CITED
Barrow, Rosemary. “Drapery, Sculpture and the Praxitelean Ideal.” Frederic Lord
Leighton: Antiquity. Renaissance, Modernity. Eds. Tim Barringer and Elizabeth
Prettejohn. New Haven: Yale UP, 1999. 49-66.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
Illuminations. Ed.Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. 217-252.

Fraser, Robert. Proust and the Victorians. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

 

Gerber, Helmut. “Hardy’s The Well-Beloved as a Comment on the Well-Despised.”
English Language Notes. 1.1 (1963): 48-53.

Gosse, Edmund W. “Living English Sculptors.” The Century Magazine. 26 (1883):
163-185.

Hardy, Thomas. “The Imaginative Woman.” Wessex Tales. London: Osgood
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--------- . The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved. The Pursuit of The Well-Beloved and The
Well Beloved. Ed. Patricia Ingharn. London: Penguin Books, 1997. 1-168.

--------- . The Well-Beloved. The Pursuit of The Well-Beloved and The Well Beloved.
Ed. Patricia Ingharn. London: Penguin Books, 1997. 169-338.

Ingharn, Patricia. “Provisional Narratives: Hardy’s Final Trilogy.” Alternative Ha_rgl_y.
Ed. Lance St. John Butler. Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1989. 49-73.

Janson, H.W. Nineteenth-Century Sculpture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985.
Miller, J. Hillis. “The Well-Beloved: The Compulsion to Stop Repeating.” Fiction and

Repetition: Seven English Novels. Ed. J. Hillis Miller. Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1982. 147-75.

 

Millgate, Michael. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. Athens, GA: The University
of Georgia Press, 1985.

O’Toole, Tess. “Genealogy and Narrative Jamming in Hardy’s The Well-Beloved.”
Narrative. l (1993): 207-222.

Ruskin, John. Ammjentelici. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1880.
Ryan, Michael. “One Name of Many Shapes: The Well Beloved.” Critical Approaches to

the Fiction of Thom_as Hardy. Ed. Dale Kramer. London: Macmillan Press,
1979.

26

Schapiro, Barbara. “Thomas Hardy and the ‘Well-Beloved’ Self”. Narcissism and the
Text. Eds. Lynne Layton and Barbara Ann Schapiro. New York: New York UP,
1986. 130-148.

Sumner, Rosemary. “Discoveries of Dissonance: Hardy’s Late Fiction.” The Thomas
Hardy Journal. 11.3 (1995): 79-89.

27

   

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