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THOMAS HARDY'S CONC
AND THE NARRATION OF HIS NOVELS

presented by "

Sharon Elizabeth Cogdill

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THOMAS HARDY'S CONCEPTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

AND THE NARRATION OF HIS NOVELS

By

Sharon Elizabeth Cogdill

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1983

ABSTRACT

THOMAS HARDY'S CONCEPTION or CONSCIOUSNESS
AND THE NARRATION OF HIS NOVELS
By

Sharon Elizabeth Cogdill

Thomas Hardy's novels plot the first coming to consciousness of a

character in a basically unconscious world. Consciousness takes the

forms of: alienation from nature, society, and self; individuation from

the communalities of nature, society, and marriage; and awareness of the

consequences of actions, thoughts, and feelings. There are no clear di-

chotomies between nature and society or between thought and action in

this context. Hardy calls this first coming to consciousness "Taking

Thought"; it is the most fundamental action a character can make. Having

"Taken Thought," characters feel divided from the communal worlds of na-

ture and society and isolated in mental worlds made up of ideas and emo-

tions and their causes and consequences.

Many of Hardy's most important themes and images treat the distinc-

tion between the inner world of the conscious character and the outer

world of unconscious "Law," whether natural or social. From the con-

scious character's point of view, there is a discontinuity between per-

ception and reality, but many of Hardy's images assume a unity between

the processes of consciousness and the world. In characterization,

therefore, Hardy specifies shifting and delicate variations in the inter-
actions of a consciousness with the outside world: dreaming, blindness,
and secrecy show a character overcoming external reality from within, by

blotting it out; drunkenness and ignorance show the power of the outside

world to dim or destroy the inner vision.

Sharon Elizabeth Cogdill

Hardy's narration reflects this attention to the dual existence of
reality and perception. His novels seem Victorian in their reliable,
historicist narrators; his later novels, however, seem post-Victorian be—
cause of a more "modern" technique: presenting the inner world of percep-
tion by narrating from the character's perspective. This study confronts
the false opposition between these two kinds of narration by Showing that
not only does narration "close" to a character occur early in fiction,
many decades before Henry James, but also that authorial commentary is
too widespread and complex to be regarded as Victorian or premodern. The
perspectives of the story-teller and the characters allow Hardy simulta-
neously and sympathetically to present perception and the perceived, the

individual and the universal, the dream and the reality.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is my pleasure to acknowledge the unstinting assistance and un-
failing support Of the Beulah Williams Library at Northern State College,
Aberdeen, South Dakota, and especially that of Dr. Beth McNeer, Director,
Beth Marie Quanbeck, Inter-Library Loan Librarian, and Tedine Barbalace,

Reference Librarian .

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction: Consciousness and Individuation . . . . 1
A. The Problem Of Consciousness in Hardy's Fiction . . . 1
B. Individuation and Dichotomies in Hardy's Fiction . . . 6
c. The Narrative Forms . . . . . . . . . . 23
II. The Histor, Hardy's "Omniscient" Narrator . . . . . 38

A. The Histor: Its Use in Other Victorian Novelists and in

Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
B. Hardy's Histor . . . . . . . . . . . 58
III. Close Narration and the Personal Perspective . . . . . 83

A. The Terminology for the Presentation of Consciousness in
the Novel . . . . . . . . ‘. . . . 84
B. The Uses of Close Narration: Dickens, James, Wilde,

Chopin, and Hardy . . . . . . . . . . 98

IV. Close Narration in Hardy's Major Novels . . . . . . 133
A. Far from the Madding Crowd . . . . . . . . 133
B. The Return of the Native . . . . . . . . . 141

 

C. The Mayor of Casterbridge . . . . . . . . 152
D. The Woodlanders . . . . . . . . . . . 165
E. Tess of the d'Urbervilles . . . . . . . . 171
P. Jude the Obscure . . . . . . . . . . . 191

 

 

 

G. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . 201

V. Hardy's Conception of Consciousness . . . . . . . 205
A. "Taking Thought"--First Coming to Consciousness . . . 206

B. The Qualities of Consciousness . . . . . . . 220

VI. The Themes of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . 247
A. "Half-Somnolence" . . . . . . . . . . 250
1. Knowledge and Secrets . . . . . . . . 250

2. "Dimly Seeing" and Dreaming . . . . . . . 263

iii

(VI. The Themes of Consciousness)

B. The Real and the Corporeal

VII. Conclusion
Notes . . .

Bibliography .

iv

281

306

324

346

Chapter One: Introduction: Consciousness and Individuation

A. The Problem of Consciousness in Hardy's Fiction

In his fiction, Thomas Hardy concerned himself with consciousness,
with its manifestations in people and in the world, and with its impact
on the lives of those people. He talks about it directly outside his
fiction and, in the voices of his narrators, inside the fiction as well.
Most of the social issues presented in the novels depend conceptually on
an awareness of the individual and that individual's self-consciousness.
During the course of his fiction-writing career, Hardy developed a way
of individuating characters by presenting their consciousnesses through
the narrative, a technique which is often considered to be the revolu-
tionary invention of Henry James, James Joyce, or Virginia Woolf. Har-
dy's concern with consciousness even determines the conditions in which
his characters live and labor: what is tragic to Hardy about human life
is that consciousness is painful. It is painful because the forces at
work in the world--historica1 and biological processes, psychological
determinism, and social pressures towards conformity--these forces Oper-
ate independently of human ideas and desires.

Because of their internal consistency, Hardy thought of these forces
as "laws." Biological laws, particularly, and social ones as well, seem
immutable to him, and he apparently made the transition from scientific

evolution to social Darwinism with no difficulties. In The Life of

 

Thomas Hardy, he records for May 9, 1881:

2

After infinite trying to reconcile a scientific view of life
with the emotional and spiritual, so that they may not be in-
ter-destructive I come to the following:

General Principles. Law has produced in man a child who
cannot but constantly reproach its parent for doing much and
yet not all, and constantly say to such parent that it would
have been better never to have begun doing than to have over-
done so indecisively; that is, than to have created so far be-
yond all apparent first intention (on the emotional side),
without mending matters by a second intent and execution, to
eliminate the evils of the blunder of overdoing. The emotions
have no place in a world of defect, and it is a cruel injustice
that they should have developed in it.

If Law itself had consciousness, how the aspect of its
creatures would terrify it, fill it with remorse!l

 

Hardy used "consciousness" or one or another of its forms again and again
in all his writings, and he seems to have used the word in all of the
different ways that it can be used. In this entry about "Law," for in-
stance, "consciousness" seems to refer most directly to the "emotions"
which "have no place in a world of defect" and which would arise in "Law
itself" if it "had consciousness." "Consciousness" here also suggests
an awareness of events and consequences-~also, perhaps, self-conscious-
ness. Here, too, consciousness suggests development and evolution. The
problems with discussing consciousness in Hardy's fiction, however, mere-
ly begin with the definition of the word itself.

Another problem arises when one attempts to discover whether any

' in any of the relevant

particular character is or is not "conscious,'
meanings of the word. There is no way finally to resolve this question
both because of the broadness of the meaning of the term and also because
Hardy liked to think in opposites: many characters are conscious compared
to vegetable or stellar nature and are not conscious when compared to

the most sensitive or thoughtful of other characters. This preference

' while often

for thinking in what William Blake called "contraries,'
‘problematical, especially for readers who attempt to organize Hardy's

ideas, is also responsible for some of Hardy's best insights and can

3

explain why he retains both the old-fashioned Victorian narrator and ex-
pands in his later novels the newer, more subjective narration which, in
its extreme form, becomes stream of consciousness. It also explains why
he finds truth in ambiguity and coincidence, as a look at the endings of
almost all of his novels will show, for even in so simple a novel as Eng

der the Greenwood Tree the ending is curiously unresolved, the forces

 

which control the characters are so great that they seem to be random,
and many of the characters seem less conscious than the bees, dogs, and
horses.

It can be said, however, that some characters in Hardy are so much
more conscious than the rest of humanity that they have developed a con-
sciousness which makes them different. To be conscious in this way in
Hardy is to find that the "crowd," indeed, is "madding." For these char-
acters, consciousness usually develops as a result of experience. In its
most simple and essential form, this development may be regarded as a
plot, a sequence in which Hardy found meaning: what these characters
learn from experience is what they know, and what they know leads them
to concern themselves with the question of what to do with the knowledge.
This is the plot of those novels which begin with a character who is
thoughtless and end with that character's having learned to be thought-
ful, like Desperate Remedies, Under the Greenwood Tree, A Pair of Blue
Eyes, and Far from the Madding Crowd. Beginning with The Return of the
Native, Hardy focuses his novel more centrally on that character who has
already become thoughtful. The plot them becomes a tracing of the ef-
fects of knowledge in the character who has it and the effects of a know-
ing Character living in a basically unknowing world. The most fundamen-
ta1.effect of the possession of this knowledge in these later novels is

tflLat the character is alienated, from the communal consciousness that

4

Hardy saw in nature and the communal identity that he found in society.
Self-alienation occurs in Hardy characters when a character's ties with
nature and society are based, as they must be, on intrinsic requirements
and conditions, so that, for example, love is based on sexual attraction
(nature) and loyalty on civil or religious laws (society). Alienation,
in one kind or another, is the form which this act of knowing most often
takes in Hardy because what most of these conscious characters do is to
keep their knowledge a secret. Secret-keeping alienates Hardy's charac-
ters, especially from society, and causes them to develop awareness of
themselves as separate identities. Consciousness, then, is a function
of personality and a mode of thought: it is innocent rather than artifi-
cial, spontaneous rather than calculating or deliberate. To pick extreme
examples, it is Sue who is conscious in the way Hardy thinks of it, not
Arabella, whose plans and ruses serve the biological forces at work.
Sue's position as a conscious character is complicated by the fact that
she tries to lose the consciousness she has by trying to return to soci-
ety and the communal identity.

Two large perspectives each provide different contexts for looking
at Hardy's presentation of individual consciousness. One has to do with
how fiction changed during the nineteenth century to accomodate greater
and greater attention to mental rather than physical action. The other
has to do with how intrinsic consciousness is, in Victorian thought, to
the problems of human existence and to the best ways of understanding
them. Thus, in a way, this paper is about the development of the ideas
of individuality, identity, and consciousness, not among the phiIOSOphers
and scientists of Europe and England, but in the popular arena, where
Ikudy wrote and was read. Such large perspectives as these cannot be

avoided in this discussion because the two major ways in which Hardy

5

explored the meaning of consciousness have to do with traditions in
which Hardy himself plays a relatively small role. The first such tra-
dition concerns the history of narration, and this context will dominate
the first three chapters of this dissertation. It is necessary to ex-
plore Hardy's narrative in order to understand how his conception of con-
sciousness permeates the essential elements of his craft and also how .
his means of presentation of consciousness define in some ways his con-
tributions to literature and the novel. The second context, whiCh is
assumed in the last three chapters of this dissertation, has less to do
with the narrative itself and more to do with social and literary is-
sues--with what are called "themes." Each of these ways of discussing
Hardy's presentation of consciousness poses a certain number of critical
difficulties, most of which are met by discussing both. It is necessary
to include both the narration and the themes because Hardy's ideas and
assumptions about consciousness have methodological as well as conceptu-
al implications in his work. The attention to thematic structures can
be defended in this day of critical scholasticism because Hardy never
gives up in his fiction that authorial, cosmic perspective which allows
him to comment directly about his intentions or interpretations in his
own work.

Besides introducing the problems of discussing consciousness in Har-
dy's novels, this chapter will also sketch out the relevant dichotomies
and oppositions which dominate any such discussion of this problem in
Hardy. Essentially, the dichotomies appear in two forms, narrative and
thematic, each of which must at this point be handled separately. The
dichotomous elements in Hardy's themes of consciousness will be presented
next. The discussion of the conflicting elements in Hardy's narration

twill be begun in the last section of this chapter. The greatest extended

6

treatment of the thematic elements in this part of the study is given to
the relation between the individual and society, first, and nature, sec-
ond; in Chapters Five and Six, themes of first coming to consciousness,
Hardy's ideas about a split in the modern personality, natural conscious-
ness, secret-keeping, somnolence and wakefulness, and blindness and pre-
science will dominate the discussion. To begin with, however, it is
necessary to establish some of the dichotomies which are commonplace in
Hardy criticism by now and which can be made less paradoxical in a dis-
cussion of Hardy's presentation of consciousness. Some of these opposi-
tions are general in nature and at first do not seem to depend on a con-
ception of individual consciousness, like innocence and experience, women
and men, rich and poor, reality and corporeality, the spirit and the
flesh, and the country and the city. Others of these oppositions are
more obviously based on Hardy's interest in human consciousness, like
"omniscient" and "subjective" narration, cosmic and personal perspec-.
tives, and the individual as it contrasts with history, society, nature,
and the cosmos. A consideration of consciousness does not resolve these
dichotomies; it merely centers them in Hardy's concern for presenting

the double realities of what can objectively be said to be true and what

is true to a localized, emotional, particular perceiver.

B. Individuation and Dichotomies in Hardy's Fiction

Although certainly not the only way to think of individuation, most
'writers seem to regard it as somehow a separation from the natural—-or
:froniNature, the unconscious. But individuation is also a separation
:Erontthe community of other human beings. The interrelations among the

modern ideas of individuation, nature, and cormnunity make a discussion

7

of any one of them enormously complex. Hardy seems modern in this way,
since there is no such thing as a completely natural person in his fic-
tion, no natural character such as might have been imagined by Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, Emily BrontE, Mark Twain, or Herman Melville. Hardy's
more "natural" characters live, in fact, in communities--among groups of
people who hold traditions, histories, and dependencies in common. And
they identify themselves in terms of their roles in the community; their
most consistent element is, in fact, their communal identities. Some of
these characters, especially among the rustics, seem unique and highly

individualized, like the Cantle menfolk and Susan Nunsuch in The Return

 

of the Native, Tranter and Dick Dewy in Under the Greenwood Tree, and

 

 

Joseph Poorgrass and Jan Coggan in Far from the Madding Crowd.

 

The members of this rural population, who are "so local in feeling

or manner,’ are drawn from Hardy's conception of the "Dorsetshire Labour-

er, whose history he traced in his 1883 essay.2 Interestingly, Hardy

finds that experience causes these workers to lose their individuality,
especially as a group: "They are," he says, "losing their peculiarities
as a class."3 This change in the character which the popular press
called "Hodge" is, as Hardy recognized, one of the results of greater
economic freedom. As Hardy also recognized, an appreciation of "their

personal charm" is aesthetic rather than humane in nature and requires

the perspective of "romantic spectators":

That seclusion and immutability, which was so bad for their
pockets, was an unrivalled fosterer of their personal charm in
the eyes of those whose experiences had been less limited. But
the artistic merit of their old condition is scarcely a reason
why they should have continued in it when other communities
were marching on so vigorously towards uniformity and mental
equality. It is only the old story that progress and pictur-
esqueness do not harmonise. They are losing their individual-
ity, but they are widening the range of their ideas, and gain-
ing in freedom. It is too much to expect them to remain stag-
nant and old-fashioned for the pleasure of romantic spectators.

8

It appears that, from Hardy's point of view, the "individuality" and the
"peculiarities" which these workers lose are lost by them as a "class."
This is precisely what happens to this class in his fiction, and the
uniqueness of these characters in the novels depends largely upon class
characteristics. Hardy's conception of these characters who seem to us
to be straightforward and natural is in fact not a conception of simple,
natural individuals, but a conception of rustic community in which simi-
lar characters of different names show up again and again.

This is not to suggest, however, that Hardy considered close con-
nections to nature and society, or community, simple and primitive--for
to enter into a discussion of Hardy's presentation of society is to be
faced with a very complex issue. Essentially, in Hardy, society takes
three forms. For one thing, the society of the rural communities lies
at the heart of his rendition of Wessex. This is the society which pre-
serves traditions and ancient occupations and costumes. This is the so-
ciety whose disintegration Hardy chronicled. Second, there is also the
society of urban London and Paris, and of the larger communities in Wes-
sex like Melchester, Budmouth, and Christminster. In this "society,"
personal interactions are determined and controlled by the rules of eti-
quette, linguistic sophistication, and prescribed behavior. And finally,
there is society as a whole, the human community. Hardy's "natural"
characters have a kind of communal intelligence which makes others' per-
spectives accessible to them; because of this his conception of social
relationships is central to any understanding of.his idea of individual-
ity. Society is seldom set in direct opposition to nature in Hardy, in
spite of what the critical literature might suggest, because all of his
«:haracters live in social worlds whether or not they also feel their con-

nections to nature.

9

The difficulties inherent in generalizing about this aspect of Har-
dy's fiction become apparent when even so competent and comprehensive a
critic as Walter Allen is unable to take it all in at once. His view of
Hardy is typical of many scholars who see society in Hardy in only one
of its forms. Allen focuses almost exclusively on the rustics and their
novels, but he does not see even them in relation to the changes Hardy
saw in humanity--and in consciousness in humanity. What Allen is think-
ing of when he says "social life" is the society of the urban Victorian
upper classes, the society known first for its rules of behavior and em-
phasis on manners:
Hardy was attempting something very different from the aims of
most novelists. The art of the novelist who sets out to dis-
play human beings in the context of social life must be one of
constant differentiation and discrimination between characters.
But social life as we find it depicted variously in Jane Aus-
ten, Thackeray, Trollope, George Eliot, and James, scarcely
exists in Hardy. His characters stand in relation to other
things, the weather, the seasons, a traditional craft. He
sees his characters much as Scott does his, first in their
generic aspects; thus, before he is anything else, Giles Win-
terborne is the peasant good with trees, Gabriel Oak is the
shepherd, Tess the dairymaid. Individuality, as such, is not
at all what he is after; what concerns him most in human be-
ings is their response to the deep-rooted passions, above all
sexual love.5
There is no doubt that Hardy is deeply concerned with the realities of
the human basis in nature, but, for Hardy, the fact that some characters
are unconscious of any conflict between their desires and their needs
and some are quite conscious--always, in Hardy, painfully conscious-~of
them is the key to it all. As other readers have seen, Hardy's concern
with social status and economic freedom is an absolutely essential part
of his fiction.6 What is more, while he is clearly always concerned
wdth the universal qualities of his characters, it is also clear that

all.of Hardy's important characters exist in historical as well as occu-

pational terms. Giles Winterborne is a leaseholder unfairly and

10

unnecessarily turned out; Gabriel Oak is a shepherd becoming a landown-
er. Tess is the representative of a family whose decline makes her both
the oppressor and the victim, the aristocrat and the dairymaid.

There can be no denying that Hardy was deeply concerned with the
ways in which people come to represent classes or categories in society
or nature. It is, however, to ignore the context for the foreground to
see, as Allen does, Giles, Gabriel, and Tess only as "generic" represen-
tatives of their occupations, just as it is to see them, as David Cecil
does, "as representatives of a species, and in relation to the ultimate
conditioning forces of their existence"; Hardy's "subject," Cecil says,
"is not men, but man. His theme is mankind's predicament in the uni-

'O7
verse.

The mistake both these readers make is in insisting on a reso-
lution of the conflict or dichotomy between the individual and the "ge-
neric aspects" of that individual's socioeconomic class (in Allen's case)
and the individual and the "representatives of a species" (in Cecil's.)
Tess is clearly representative of many things, not the least among them
her temporary position as dairymaid. The conflict arises in Tess's and
Hardy's perception of her both as an individual and as a representative
figure: there is, in other words, a conflict inherent in the status of
any individual who has an identity both as an individual and as a member
of a social or natural class. This conflict takes the form of conscious-
ness in Hardy's fiction when the character comes to realize, as Hardy
puts it for Jude, "the flaw in the terrestrial scheme, by which what was
good for God's birds was bad for God's gardener."8 In Tess's case, this
conflict is expressed when she sees herself both as an individual and as
one in a long line of others who share either her family history or her

‘personal victimization: "Because what's the use of learning that I am

one of a long row only-~finding out that there is set down in some old

ll
book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her

part . . ." (Ch. XIX, p. 162).
In any of its forms, society to Hardy is hierarchical, it has "sto-

reys,’ and social class boundaries are instrumental in defining relation-

ships among characters (The Woodlanders, Ch. XXX, p. 260). His almost

 

Obsessive interest in the love between a working-class man and an upper-
class woman, the poor man and the lady, is widely recognized. Hardy's
first novel, unpublished and destroyed and therefore largely an instance

for conjecture, was in fact called The Poor Man and the Lady and dealt

 

directly with this issue. But there are others: novel after novel and
story after story present one or another form of this version of the Cin-
derella story. In a few cases, there is a clear class difference be-
tween the lovers: Swithin St. Cleeve and Lady Constantine in Two on a
32325; Lord Luxellian, Stephen Smith, and the young Jethway, and Elfride

Swancourt in A Pair of Blue Eyes; in A Laodicean George Somerset and

 

 

Paula Power, and, in the subplot, the separate and unrequited affairs of
Charlotte de Stancy and the Captain. In most of the rest of the novels,
the distance between the man and the woman is more a matter of attitude
and education than of any real class distinction: Dick Dewy and Fancy
Day in Under the Greenwood Tree; Gabriel Oak and Bathsheba Everdene in
Far from the Madding Crowd; Bob and John Loveday and Anne Garland in Th3.

Trumpet-Major; and Giles Winterborne and Grace Melbury in The Woodland-

 

ggg. Although most, by count, describe the problems of the lower-class
nmle aspiring upwards, some important works--The Romantic Adventures of
_§;Hilkmaid, The Hand of Ethelberta, The Well-Beloved, the Fanny Robin

subplot of Far from the Madding Crowd, and, of course, Tess of the d'Ur-

 

 

bemvilles--present the opportunities of working-class women to escape

thetdrudgery and poverty of their class and misfortune by marriage.

12

By setting his characters in the context of an economically struc-
tured society as well as in the context of a morally and historically
complex nature, Hardy explores the means and effects of social mobility.
In spite of the impressions left by the hopelessness of Jude's dreams of
education, his enslavement to the disadvantages of his class is the ex-
ception in Hardy. Michael Henchard, Grace Melbury, Alec d'Urberville,
and Gabriel Oak find little resistence to their movement up--or down--
the social ladder. What is noticeable is that, for almost all of Hardy's
highly individualized characters, social class boundaries are far less
restrictive than natural attractions and antipathies, and even less de-
cisive than random coincidence.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure explore the problems

 

of social classes in more complex ways than any of the novels preceding
them, especially early ones like The Hand of Ethelberta and Desperate
Remedies which lack the later novels' complexities and ambiguities. In
the case of 23229 the boundaries between classes are blurred by heredi—
tary titles and the question of inherited nobility. The boundaries, such
as they are, are further blurred--as they are by marriage--by the oppor-
tunity which the nouveau £3222 have to buy ancient names to dignify their
fortunes. Although the line Hardy draws between the social classes can
be as sharp as the extreme differences between squalor and luxury, there
is also a constant shifting of some characters between these extremes.
These characters develop a kind of social ambiguity as they move up and
down socially, by virtue of their moral rewards and punishments, their
‘material wealth and poverty, and their intellectual and emotional dreams
andidefeats. Inngudg_Hardy questions the very basis of social and eco-
nonfie class distinctions and seems to argue that nobility is a matter of

personal qualities. By his nature, Jude is deserving of the kinds of

I

13

opportunities available only to those of the upper classes. Hardy makes
two kinds of class distinctions in this novel: one is between the moneyed
class and the working class, to which all the characters belong and to
whom the doors of Christminster are closed; the second distinguishes the
poor from.the middle class. Hardy's point against the disparity in Op—
portunity offered to those of different classes is sharpened when he al-
lows Arabella admittance, if temporarily, to the middle class and denies
Jude anything but a kind of canonization as the patron of lost causes,
and a kind of employment as the tutor of St. Slums.

One characteristic of Hardy's individualized characters is a kind
of experience with humanity which allows them to generalize their under-
standing of people beyond social and economic classes and beyond the pat-
terns of country or city values. They see themselves, that is, not only
as individuals but as members of a class. What Hardy's characters get
from their individual experience of the world is a broadening of their
understanding of human experience. Nest of his early and comic charac-
ters learn the lesson in small, and the price is cheap--few die for what
they learn. In fact, what they learn about humanity--and, usually about
human suffering--gains them admittance into the community, which is, as
D. H. Lawrence saw, the refuge from individual experience.

That Hardy's conception of society is inimiCal to the free and pro-
ductive flowering of the individual is, of course, the insight upon
'which Lawrence based his "Study of Thomas Hardy." The tragedy, Lawrence

says, in Hardy's novels, arises when an individual, a real, vital, po-

tential self," "suddenly bursts the shell of manner and convention and

"9

connonplace opinion, and acts independently . . . . This is a tragedy

‘precisely because these characters "subscribe,' as Lawrence says, "to

the system" of conventional mores "in themselves":

14
From the more immediate claims of self-preservation they could
free themselves: from money, from ambition for social success.
None of the heroes or heroines of Hardy cared much for these
things. But there is the greater idea of self-preservation,
which is formulated in the State, in the whole modelling of
the community. And from this idea, the heroes and heroines of
Wessex, like the heroes and heroines of almost anywhere else,
could not free themselves. In the long run, the State, the
Community, the established form of life remained, remained in-
tact and impregnable, the individual, trying to break forth
from it, died of fear, of exhaustion, or of exposure to at-
tacks from all sides, like men who have left the walled city
to live outside in the precarious Open.

This is the tragedy of Hardy, always the same: the tragedy
of those who, more or less pioneers, have died in the wilder—
ness, whither they had escaped for free action, after having
left the walled security, and the comparative imprisonment, of
the established convention.

Lawrence's sympathy clearly lies with the individual, and Lawrence's own
unalloyed rejection of the safety society offers shows how ambivalent
Hardy really is about individual freedom. In most of Hardy's best nov-
els, to get specific, the price of acting individually and perceiving
consciously is high, exacted as it is upon both peace of mind and life
itself. Clym and Sue survive, but without sanity. By finding peace be-
fore she dies, Tess is a rarity in Hardy, for the list of characters who
do not is long and touches almost all of the important novels: Elfride
Swancourt, Fanny Robin, Eustacia Vye, Viviette Constantine, Michael Hen-
chard, Giles Winterborne, and Jude Fawley. Clym Yeobright, Angel Clare,
and Jocelyn Pierston undergo symbolic death and survive, diminished, be-
yond the events of their novels. Like Angel, Jocelyn is reborn into
peace of mind after a period both of nearly fatal illness and of hallu-
cinatory insanity. Angel is the least damaged of these three characters
‘who begin again after symbolic deaths, because Tess dies for his and
'Liza-Lu's future as well as for the expiation of her own guilt. Strict-

ly speaking, therefore, all characters who survive in Hardy's novels do

so by joining the community. This seems terribly destructive in the

15

cases of Sue and Clym, but for characters like Diggory Venn and Angel
Clare it means safety, which appears in the form of a commitment to the
future. This is because the story of the species, the universe, is not
a tragic one--Arabella's survival is the triumph of the universal. The
tragic story is the story of the individual who is self-aware, who is
conscious.

In Hardy's most important novels, those characters who are educated
into a community join one which is dominated by social change, but human
society is also the locus for tradition and long-standing ideas. Har-
dy's characters find roots in society as well as in nature--they have
connections to roads and buildings as well as to forests and heaths.lo
Like the natural world, the social world provides Hardy a physical and
moral setting for action. Every novel has its natural setting with ma-
jor geological and topographical features explicitly described; every
novel also has its social setting, with traditions and buildings made
the subject of dialogue and action. Buildings, especially, in Hardy,
but also all architectural constructions, are like geographical phenome-
na: they have age and strength and become features of the landscape.
Some human constructions, like the Weatherbury barn and the old Roman
roads, seem to belong in nature in that, in Hardy's presentations in the
novels, they are essentially immutable. Other human constructions last
for centuries, but do so by changing as the community which supports
them changes. In general, as a matter of fact, the emphasis in Hardy is
not on the building of such structures but, if anything, on their re-
building and restoration. Existing buildings, like existing nature, de-
:fine the a priori physical reality in which the events of the characters'

lives take place; existing traditions define a priori mental reality for

them. Hardy's characters are made aware of social change in their

16

traditions and in their buildings.

Like society, nature for Hardy is extremely complex and best viewed
from.more than one perspective. Essentially, Hardy sees nature from two
potentially opposing points of view--the human and the cosmic perspec-
tive, or, as he calls it, "the celestial point of vision."ll It is gen-
erally thought that Hardy's cosmic point of view is never really pre-

sented until The Dynasts, but of course it exists in various forms

 

throughout his fiction. The cosmic perspective shows up as a narrative
technique--a way Hardy has of putting his characters in the context of
human or natural universals. It also appears in thematic form, direct-

ly, in Two on 3 Tower. It is the human rather than the cosmic perspec-

 

tive, however, which lends tragedy to the characters whose dreams are
shattered and which lends feelings and history to the earth itself.

There is no clearer example of this separation between universal and hu-
man natures than Egdon Heath, a conception of universal nature so intense
that many readers see it, as Lawrence did, as a characterization or per-
sonification.‘2 As nature, of course, the heath is impassive and has no
feeling for the personal dramas acted out on its face and under its in-
fluence. Both the astronomical universe of Two on a Tower and the more
terrestrial universe of The Return of the Native present perspectives--
backdrops, one could say--against which the human history is cast. Sim-
ilarly, the amazingly wasteful fertility of the forest in The Woodland-
ers serves as a contrast to rather than as an illumination of the usually
erratic and unproductive actions of the characters. It is quite inter-
esting that, although the stellar universe and the vegetable world of
wao on a Tower and The Woodlanders are notable for their changes and
‘regular'variations, Egdon Heath never changes. This is interesting be-

cause Hardy clearly regarded change in the light of post-Darwinian

17

conceptions of natural change--conceptions which saw important change
occurring to the species of animate or to the whole of inanimate nature.
And just as Copernicus and Galileo threatened the conception of the im-
portance of man with their conceptions of heliocentric astronomy, so did
Darwin threaten the importance of the individual in his conceptions of
evolutionary development. Hardy's way of justifying both the understand-
ing of history in Darwinian terms and the value of the individual was to
separate them from each other and regard them as two distinct, mutually
exclusive and simultaneously possible perspectives.

To Hardy, nature can be found not only in the physical presence of
Egdon Heath and outer space, but also in the forces of evolution which
operate in the world. Hardy felt that humanity was evolving: and during
the period in which he wrote fiction he believed that human evolution
was perceptible, both in the mass and in individuals. Among his charac-
ters, evolution manifests itself in individuals who, though still clear-
ly human and therefore not radically different from other humans, are
different both physically and psychically from.those who have not yet
changed. This distinction between physical and psychical evolution is
not absolute in Hardy; while the evolved characters from his early fic-
tion have changed physically, it is clear by the end of his fiction-
writing career that the significant change is the psychic one. In its
outward form, this evolution appears in novel after novel in characters
whose faces and bodies, as do George Somerset's, bear_"contradictory
testimonies to his precise age" (A Laodicean Ch. I, p. 37). This char-
acteristic shows up in Stephen Smith in A Pair of Blue Eyes, in Christo—
pher Julian in The Hand of Ethelberta, in Clym'Yeobright, in both George

Somerset and William Dare in A Laocidean, in Swithin St. Cleeve in Two

 

cum a Tower, in Tess, in Jocelyn Pierston in The Well-Beloved, and, of

18

course, in little Father Time. The cause of this physical difference is,
as Hardy says about Somerset, "the advance of juvenile introspection,"
as it makes its difference both in the individual and in the Species
(Ch. I, p. 5).

Hardy's description of Clym's face is worth quoting in full for its
summarizing in greater detail of many smaller passages, including the
more dramatic passage describing little Father Time's arrival at Jude

and Sue's house. Hardy begins the third book of The Return of the Na-

 

tive, in a chapter significantly entitled "My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is,"
focussed on Clym's face:

In Clym Yeobright's face could be dimly seen the typical
countenance of the future. Should there be a classic period
to art hereafter, its Pheidias may produce such faces. The
view of life as a thing to be put up with, replacing that zest
for existence which was so intense in early civilizations,
must ultimately enter so thoroughly into the constitution of
the advanced races that its facial expression will become ac-
cepted as a new artistic departure. People already feel that'
a man who lives without disturbing a curve of feature, or set-
ting a mark of mental concern anywhere upon himself, is too
far removed from modern perceptiveness to be a modern type.
Physically beautiful men—-the glory of the race when it was
young--are almost an anachronism now; and we may wonder wheth-
er, at some time or other, physically beautiful women may not
be an anachronism likewise.

The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive cen-
turies has permanently displaced the Hellenic idea of life, or
whatever it may be called. What the Greeks only suspected we
know well; what their AEschylus imagined our nursery children
feel. That old-fashioned revelling in the general situation
grows less and less possible as we uncover the defects of nat-
ural laws, and see the quandry that man is in by their opera-
tion.

‘ The new lineaments which will get embodied in ideas based
upon this new recognition will probably be akin to those of
Yeobright. The observer's eye was arrested, not by his face
as a picture, but by his face as a page; not by what it was,
but by what it recorded. His features were attractive in the
light of symbols, as sounds intrinsically common become attrac-
tive in language, and as shapes intrinsically simple become
interesting in writing. (Bk. III, Ch. i; pp. 197-98)

There is, then, meaning in the change in physical appearance; by reading

Clym's face, one knows not his momentary thoughts and feelings but his

l9

"perceptiveness."

Little Father Time also has a face which suggests the future to
Hardy--not his own future, however, but that of humanity. Although his
relationship to physical human evolution is clear from his appearance
and from what the doctor says about "boys of a sort unknown in the last
generation," what is significant about him is what he sees, what he un-
derstands and thinks of, his world view--his consciousness (Pt. VI, Ch.
ii; p. 406). Unlike the more familiar kind of children, who "begin with
the contiguous, and gradually comprehend the universal," little Jude

seemed to have begun with the generals of life, and never to
have concerned himself with the particulars. To him the
houses, the willows, the obscure fields beyond, were apparent-
ly regarded not as brick residences, pollards, meadows, but as
human dwellings in the abstract, vegetation, and the wide dark
world. (Pt. V, Ch. iii; p. 334)
In spite of her more ordinary appearance, Mrs. Yeobright also has a con-
sciousness which can be conceived in this way. She, too, sees the gen-
eralities of the particulate world, just as she sees Clym as an insect
at work, however ineffectually, in the nature defined by Egdon Heath.
While her special generalizing perception lets, or makes, her see the
fundamental truth of things, it does not give her any special understand-
ing or knowledge of important particulars in her life. She dies igno-
rant of Eustacia's real relationship to Wildeve just as little Father
Time dies not knowing how mutable Sue's pessimism can be.

The‘fate of the individual in this world of abstract and general-
ized reality which some characters can see is Hardy's central concern,
especially in his tragedies--and what makes them tragedies is that this
fate has meaning. It means, for one thing, that the less thoughtful and

(iiscriminating person has a greater chance for survival, even though

tirat person may have no idea of the truth. It also means that

20

sensitivity is a liability in the biological world of such survival, and
not the virtue it is thought to be in the more physically gentle worlds
of Jane Austen and Henry James. Action, in Hardy, loses its effective-
ness as thought is broadened by perception: "limitation, and not compre-
hensiveness, is needed for striking a blow" (Far from the Madding Crowd

Ch. XL, p. 306).

To Hardy, then, in summary, peOple exist both as individuals and as
parts of the mass of humanity. A character's individuality depends on
two kinds of human development. The first is simple: an adult character
requires "particularizing" in Hardy's fiction in a way which a child
normally does not. The church choir in Two on a Tower, for example, has
"small producers of treble, who had not yet developed into such distinc-
tive units of society as to require particularizing" (Ch. II, p. 17).
Second, Hardy is clear that the development of a sense of an inner world
in a character is a sign of that character's "evolution" as a human be-
yond and away from "the great mass of bustling mankind, little given to

."13 More often than not, this inner world which a

introspection . . .
character develops or discovers with consciousness is that wilderness
which Lawrence so vividly describes as existing outside "the walled se-
curity, and the comparative imprisonment, of the established community."
The wilderness these characters live in exists purely in their minds, as
a result of their thought and as a result of whatever independence they
achieve from community standards and conceptions. This is true even of
Clym and Eustacia; the wilderness of the heath on which they live is
nmodified considerably by Thomasin's pragmatic, unimaginative sense of

tuar surroundings and by the narrator's own sense of its indifference.

The kind of advanced thought which distinguishes characters like

21

these is, most typically, an extension of their experience--which, in
Hardy, must be mental experience to be profoundly important, regardless
of whether the experience and change happen to a class or to an individ-
ual. For the women, experience is largely sexual, even in the earliest
and most conventional novels; self-consciousness appears in these char-
acters as a result of experience which is hidden, kept secret, from oth-
er characters. This kind of experience causes an essential change in
the personalities of these characters. The only course of action open
to the women of the early novels is to hide the evidence of the change,
especially if they want to marry; the need to be secret puts them into a
conflict with themselves and with characters whom they love which is ul-
timately alienating. This is not to suggest that Hardy condemns women
who have had this kind of experience. Sexual attraction in Hardy is
clearly a function of biological--one might say, of Darwinian--forces.
What Hardy finds to be of importance in sexual attraction are its conse-
quences.

The fact that this character keeps the experience a secret becomes
part of the experience itself which then is necessarily the loss of her
innocence, both physical and mental. The sexual nature of this experi-
ence becomes more and more explicit in the later fiction; but even at
its most explicit, the sexuality is also a metaphor for a more general
kind of experience. In this way, Hardy compares a lack of individualiz-
ing experience to sexual and emotional virginity; there is, in the same
way, a clear relationship between the presence of individualizing expe-
rience and sexual and emotional complexity.

For the men, the metaphor Hardy uses for individualizing experience
and inner reality is the dream, a mental phenomenon which marks a radi-

¢:aJ.distinction, a separation, between what characters see and what they

22

want to see in the same way that secrets separate characters from each
other. The separation is purely a matter of consciousness. The plots
of the novels may be regarded as the stories of characters' conscious-
nesses. Essentially, Clym Yeobright's story is that of a man whose
dream is shattered, and its destruction is his destruction. The same is
true of Giles Winterborne and Jude Fawley. The shattering of the dream
is the effect of experience on the dreamer. It is possible to overstate
the differences between Hardy's male and female characters. Hardy seems
to have been concerned less directly with the differing effects of expe-
rience on men and women than he was with these effects on conscious peo-
ple of certain personalities, with particular histories and situations.
Henchard's story, for instance, is the one most completely about se-
crets: he keeps his secrets, builds his precarious public facade, and
loses everything when the knowledge is finally made general. Jocelyn

Pierston, too, in The Well—Beloved, makes an interesting exception to

 

Hardy's different conceptions of women's and men's inner worlds. _Not
until he gives up his quest for the ideal woman does his face bear the
marks of "the mutually destructive interdependence of spirit and flesh,"
as Clym's does (The Return of the Native Bk. II, Ch. vi; p. 162). Joce-
lyn keeps his preternatural youth because his thoughts and feelings are
only of his inner world; and experience does not change him because what
happens in the world outside Jocelyn's mind is not mental experience.

He does not age normally until his inner and outer worlds come into imp
nediate confrontation. Like the individual in society and nature, inner
and outer worlds form a dichotomy in Hardy which must be preserved rath-
er'than resolved by the reader. Only a character can resolve the con—
flict between inner and outer worlds, and those who survive in Hardy do

so by accomodating both rather than by choosing between them. Those

23

characters whose lives are tragic deny--or are forced to deny--one world

or the other.

C. The Narrative Forms

Hardy's concern with the role of the individual in relation to so-
ciety and nature dominates his fiction, both directly in thematic con-
tent and indirectly in his technique of narration. Hardy was quite ob-
viously not alone in his attention to this problem, for, in many ways,
it is clear that as a problem this idea also dominated his culture. Two
important manifestations, for example, of the Victorian definition of
the role of the individual appear substantially unchanged in Hardy's
fiction as themes. First, there was then as there is now a lively de-
bate on the relative 2223 of the individual and the society; in Hardy,
clearly, such questions of moral relativism as Tess's purity and Sue's
marriage are forms of this debate.'5 Another important manifestation of
the Victorian concern for the individual appears obvious to us now in
the long and complex sequence of public and legal acts for the reform of
education which made it available to members of the working classes and
separated it from the church. This shows up in Hardy, not only in its
obvious forms in.£22§ and £322, but almost constantly in the reading the
characters do or have done, the nearly absolutely complete penetration
of literacy into Wessex, the flow of writing produced in letters, tele-
grams, inscriptions on walls, tombstones, milestones, and so forth. A
relatively high degree of education is the hallmark of his most sensi-
tive protagonists and is one of the prerequisites for social mobility in
Ilia novels.

Another set of methods for approaching this problem of the

24

individual which Hardy inherited comes to him through the fiction of the

period. Hardy uses both a commenting, omniscient narrator and narration

which expresses the consciousness of a character by speaking, as it

were, indirectly in that character's voice. Both of these forms of nar-

ration are in some ways completely conventional, having appeared in nov-
els before Hardy's; in other ways they are new and take on added impor-
tance as the literary historian identifies Hardy's place in their devel-
opment and moves beyond Hardy to the present forms of narrative fiction.
This seemingly paradoxical assessment is matched by another: of the two
forms Hardy finds the most valuable, the "intrusive" one hearkens back
to the early Victorian novelists and the other suggests those who follow
Hardy. The one which looks back takes the form of the omniscient narra—
tOr and the other is "close" narration, the general form of which stream

of consciousness is an extreme form. This paradox is in fact a dichoto-

my which is intrinsic to Hardy's conception of human reality and which
Hal‘cly internalized as the opposition between the Darwinian conception of
the universe and the faith in the more spiritual value of the individual.
I t is also the dichotomy between the human perspective and the cosmic
011%, since "close" narration is the form Hardy employed to demonstrate
thQ perspective of the individual character as distinct from other char-
acters and the authorial voice is the cosmic perspective, the general-
ized locus of knowledge and values for which beliefs have no consequences

Q . .
Tb repurcussions. There 18 a general development from novel to novel in

1:1
at’cziy's use of close narration: the passages become more frequent and
are lengthy with each succeeding novel; there is, however, no concomi-
tQ . . . . .
ht: abatement in his use of the histor, the authorial v01ce. The more

HQ 0 0 o o .
I"dy wrote fiction the more uncompromISIng the Spllt between the two

a 1‘s pectives became .

25

It is surprising that, in spite of all the interpretation Hardy has
generated, there has been little significant discussion of his experi-
mentation with third-person narrative devices and their effects.16 This
is due in part to the apparent stability a term such as "omniscient nar-
rator" implies--few Victorian novels are analyzed by way of narrative
technique, even though we know that some of the great novelists of the

era took great pains with how their meanings were expressed. This crit-

ical lacuna is also due in part to the attention paid to the more ob-
viously different work done by the writers in the generations which im-
mediately follow Hardy, like Henry James, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence,
James Joyce, and William Faulkner. This kind of critical attention does
in fact exist in one form for Hardy--and for other Victorian novelists--
in the very useful and competent essays describing the revisions that
the ir manuscripts underwent from draft to draft, but these observations
do not appear to take any part in the more general studies of, for exam-
ple , Hardy and his artistry.l7 His development as a writer of narrative
is in part the refinement and subtilization of narrative technique from
the time he began writing novels until the time he returned to the full-
t inle writing of poetry. Neither Jude the Obscure nor The Well-Beloved
prresent the perfection or completion of Hardy's experimentation with
11aIcration. Ignoring for the moment his poetry, however, they do repre-
tht the furthest Hardy goes in his attempt to narrate characters' own
perceptions of their stories. The generations of writers after Hardy
tie‘Veloped both the general idea of experimentation and the particular
dQVices far beyond Hardy's most radical passages. Just as he did not
‘.berfect" any of the forms he experimented with, Hardy also did not in-

V
QIII: any of them. Examples of them all--and sometimes examples far more

8 . . . . . .
QI>histicated than can be found 1n his minor novels--can be found In the

26

works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and George Meredith,
to name only the most influential among the Victorians.

To speak precisely about the role of the narrator in the develop-
ment of the novel, it is important to distinguish between the different
narrative devices so that their changes, and the reasons for their
changes, can be traced. The greatest difficulty lies in the fact that
description of narrative devices is necessarily impressionistic, for the

value of narrative devices depends upon their effect upon the reader.
Most fundamentally in a writer such as Hardy, there is one "voice"--—the
fictional voice of the author--and all other impressions of variation
are the result of one or another narrative technique. It seems, for ex-
ample, in reading Hardy's fiction, that his narrator has moments when it
itlitrudes significantly into the reader's awareness and moments when it
is there only negatively, and we are not aware of "Hardy's" conscious-
ness but of one of his characters'. For simplicity's sake, however, I
propose to speak for the moment not of the stream of narration, its en-
t irety--probably the major force of unity in Hardy's novels--but of the
d i fferent "voices" he uses to achieve the different effects. Such a
d istinction will permit a fuller analysis of Hardy's thematic and mimetic
Q<>t‘icerns, especially with regard to consciousness, than is possible
without it; and this analysis, of course, will implicate the unity of
$1.3):st narrative more strongly than will either a discussion of the
thematic attention to consciousness or of the narrative expression this
theme seems to demand from Hardy.

A problem which exists in describing matters such as these is vo-

Q"313ulary--what terminology to use and how to delimit the meaning of the
items in the vocabulary. "Voice," "point of view," and "register," to

b - .
Qan with, are all common metaphors for the same rhetorical effects.

27

"Point of view" is the most widely used of the three, and it has two
sets of meanings depending on whether it is defined loosely, referring
generally to attitudes someone--the narrator, a character, the reader--
has about the events of the story, or whether it is defined in the more

traditionally academic way, referring to one of the three narrative

modes: omniscient, first-person, and epistolary. These genre-like dis-

tinctions in narrative fiction have caused more problems than they solve

to any but the most elementary discussions of them. The difficulties

which Sir Alexander Raleigh has in his brief description of them continue
to appear in modern critics' analyses, even though Raleigh was clearly

limited in what he could describe to what he had read of only the very

earliest of English novels. In his 1894 The English Novel: Being a

§1°rt Sketch of its History from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of

the subject comes up in the introduction to Samuel Richardson's

W:
.18

'I 0
Method of telling a story by way of letters. His discussmn of the

cunliiscient narrator, "a sort of diable boiteux," fades quickly into what
is to him the more important first-person narration, in which the tech-
niQue is "to put the whole story in the mouth of the principal charac-
te r."'9 By referring specifically to the "principal character," Raleigh
i3 defining this mode according to the literature which existed before
Walter Scott's Waverly, in such a way that peripheral characters whose
function and personality are those of the observer do not have a role,
even theoretically, in this kind of narration. Technically, this defi—
uit ion either prevents a character from later fiction such as Nick Car-

1':
away from being regarded as the first-person narrator of The Great Gats-

 

b
\X or it forces us to regard Nick as the "principal character" in the

nQVe 1 .

Obviously, what is left out is a range of possibilities in which

28

the modes are not clearly distinguishable from each other. The same
omission is apparent when Raleigh regards as error some of Defoe's effi-
ciencies:
. . . if the story extend over a number of years, a detailed
account of its earlier parts can only be given by sacrificing
the sense of vivid and present reality that attends the hear—
ing of a personal story told by a living voice; the sense of
perspective and contrast is lost, the near becomes far and the
far near, the narrator is forgotten in the actor. . . . Defoe,
in the intricate maze of his story is apt to forget the actual
speaker.20
This same kind of judgment is made today, as if the problem were in the
writer and not in the extrinsic formal categories. Raleigh's conception
0f point of view has relevance here, in spite of his subsequent obscuri-
ty , by demonstrating to what extent we are still dominated by what are
essentially eighteenth-century definitions of modes of story-telling.
In his famous study of the historical development of point of view,
Ne"l-‘tnan Friedman cites Seldon L. Whitcomb's 1905 The Study of a Novel as
i. t
ltl<e first to my knowledge which devotes a formal section to the rubric,

2' Unaccountably, however, he leaves

' The Narrator. His Point of View.'"
(>‘4l‘: the work of a critic whose obscurity is much less deserved than that
t) if her contemporaries, Violet Paget, who published her work under the
it“stthe of Vernon Lee. Paget's friendship with Henry James and her close
1(liowledge of his fiction had obvious influence on her perception of the
the Of narrative, but, as George Kenneth Graham has pointed out, Paget
had "fully" developed the idea of "the angle of narration" "twelve years
be fore Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction."22 In 1895, in an article origi-
nally published in Contemporary Review, she presents Eliot's use of
“point of view" in Middlemarch as a matter of particular aesthetic

Q. o ' . o o o
I“(>1ces Eliot makeS'in describing her characters:

There is yet another constructive question about the novel--
the most important question of all--whose existence the lay

29

mind probably does not even suspect, but which, I am sure, ex-
ercises more than any other the mind of any one who has at-
tempted to write a novel; even as the layman, contemplating a
picture, is apt never to guess how much thought has been given
to determining the place where the spectator is supposed to
see from, whether from above, below, from the right or the
left, and in what perspective, consequently, the various
painted figures are to appear. This supreme constructive
question in the novel is exactly analogous to that question in
painting; and in describing the choice by the painter of the
point of view, I have described also that most subtle choice
of the literary craftsman: choice of the point of view whence
the personages and action of a novel are to be seen. For you
can see a person, or an act, in one of several ways, and con-
nected with several other persons or acts. You can see the
person from nobody's point of view, or from the point of view
of one of the other persons, or from the point of view of the
analytical, judicious author. Thus, Casaubon may be seen from
Dorothea's point of view, from his own point of view, from
Ladislaw's point of view, or from the point of view of George
Eliot; or he may be merely made to talk and act without any
explanation of why he is so talking and acting, and that is
what I call nobody's point of view.23

‘7<Erxrnon Lee's idea is much more precise as a description of what the read-
‘3‘I? is reminded of than what an author does, but the essential value of
he]? categories cannot be denied. It is to be regretted that she did not
a~I>ply this system to her analyses of the styles of Meredith, Kipling,
S1:evenson, Hardy, Henry James, and Maurice Hewlett in "The Handling of
words," which is instead an evaluation of these authors' styles based on
word counts.“

A short digression for a discussion of "perspective" will be useful
hQ re. "Perspective" is a term whose wide usage reflects a need to dis-
t:Ii-‘nguish what a located observer can see from what "point of view" (or
..Voice") is used to describe it. The reason, of course, that such a
‘Elfiéeed exists is that, in the works of many novelists, instances of such a
tiljLstinction are not only interesting but important as well. In Hardy,
tor example, passages narrated from a character's "perspective" (regard-

less, again, of the "point of view") are easy to identify. As a means

Q C O O I O O l O
f characterization, this dev1ce has interest for its rich presentation

30

of consciousness without the slow ineffeciencies of narrating (in one or

another of the forms which approach stream of consciousness) what that

consciousness is doing. As a means of narrative, this device has impor-

tance for its obvious limitation of "omniscience" without the mysteries
and obfuscations which such limitation often entails. In this passage
:from A Laodicean, Hardy's interest is in George Somerset's delicate sen-
sibilities:

Down Somerset plunged through the long grass, bushes, late
summer flowers, moths, and caterpillars, vexed with himself
that he had come there, since Paula was so inscrutable, and
humming the notes of some song he did not know. The tunnel
that had seemed so small from the surface was a vast archway
when he reached its mouth, which emitted, as a contrast to the
sultry heat on the slopes of the cutting, a cool breeze, that
had travelled a mile underground from the other end. Far away
in the darkness of this silent subterranean corridor he could
see that other end as a mere speck of light.

When he had conscientiously admired the construction of the
massive archivault, and the majesty of its nude ungarnished
walls, he looked up the slope at the carriage; it was so small
to the eye that it might have been made for a performance by
canaries; Paula's face being still smaller, as she leaned back
in her seat, idly looking down at him. There seemed something
roguish in her attitude of criticism, and to be no longer the
subject of her contemplation he entered the tunnel out of her
sight.

In the middle of the speck of light before him appeared a
speck of black; and then a shrill whistle, dulled by millions
of tons of earth, reached his ears from thence. It was what
he had been on guard against all the time,--a passing train;
and instead of taking the trouble to come out of the tunnel he
stepped into a recess, till the train had rattled past, and
vanished onward round a curve.

Somerset still remained where he had placed himself, men-
tally balancing science against art, the grandeur of this fine
piece of construction against that of the castle, and thinking

'whether Paula's father had not, after all, the best of it,
when all at once he saw Paula's form confronting him at the
entrance of the tunnel. He instantly went forward into the
light; to his surprise she was as pale as a lily. (Ch. XII,
pp. 105-6)

11s,: . . . , . . .
Ciy'is not requ1red to explain Paula s feelings, and there is no hint
t:

Ilifit any such information is missing, when he limits his perspective so

t s
lgl'itly to Somerset.

31

Dale Kramer points out one very subtle use of perspective in The

Mayor of Casterbridg_, He calls it "a near-Jamesian sensitiveness to

 

scene in order to provide an oblique insight into Farfrae that acquires

full clarity only after the reader reflects upon Farfrae's behavior to-

"25

iward the end of the novel. The passage describes what Farfrae looks

eat in the conversation with Henchard in which the older man tells the
younger about his difficulties with the newly reappeared Susan and the
currently available Lucetta:

"But, damn it all, I am a lonely man, Farfrae: I have nobody
else to speak to; and why shouldn't I tell it to 'ee?"

"I'll be glad to hear it, if I can be of any service,’ said
Donald, allowing his eyes to travel over the intricate wood-
carvings of the chimney-piece, representing garlanded lyres,
shields, and quivers, on either side of a draped ox-skull, and
flanked by heads of Apollo and Diana in low relief. (Ch. XII,
p. 88)

ITiere are several ways to interpret this passage, including, as Kramer
1ne‘l‘ttions, the symbolic references to music, war (financial war between
H‘Ei‘tlehard and Farfrae), the ox (or bull, as it appears in the novel), and
I)‘ai‘t‘haps the marriage between Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae, in the allusions
to Apollo and Diana. Most important, however, is that Farfrae's atten-
t::i~<3n wanders just as Henchard is about to tell him some secret which he
js‘atfiéls to be a burden. In other words, we must look not only at what is
£3‘E=£i~n here but also who is doing the looking: "in the context in which it
a”DIDears, that is, the relationship between Henchard and Farfrae, the de-

<=Wtfiption shows how willing Farfrae is to be diverted from a direct and
‘qklnl<iuivided consideration of others' human troubles."

One more passage, from The Well-Beloved, somewhat shorter than

 

t:

lb1<3 one from A Laodicean and less ephemeral than the one from The Mayor
Q
“¥!§__53asterbridgg, will show how such a device as this can be used for

a . .
Q 8thetic effect as well as for more pragmatic concerns of

32

characterization. Pierston arrives back at the peninsula where he was
born just in time to see the funeral of the first Avice:

Ascending the steep incline to where the quarrymen were
chipping just as they had formerly done, and within sound of
the great stone saws, he looked southward towards the Beal.

The level line of the sea horizon rose above the surface of
the isle, a ruffled patch in mid-distance as usual marking the
Race, whence many a Lycidas had gone

"Visiting the bottom of the monstrous world";

but had not been blest with a poet as a friend. Against the
stretch of water, where a school of mackerel twinkled in the
afternoon light, was defined, in addition to the distant light-
house, a church with its tower, standing about a quarter of a
mile off, near the edge of the cliff. The churchyard grave-
stones could be seen in profile against the same vast spread

of watery babble and unrest.

Among the graves moved the form of a man clothed in a white
sheet, which the wind blew and flapped coldly every now and
then. Near him moved six men bearing a long box, and two or
three persons in black followed. The coffin, with its twelve
legs, crawled across the isle, while around and beneath it the
flashing lights from the sea and the school of mackerel were
reflected; a fishing-boat, far out in the Channel, being mo—
mentarily discernible under the coffin also. (Pt. II, Ch. iii,
pp. 78-79)

mere are passages like these throughout Hardy's novels. One signifi—
ca“(Ice which such passages have in a study of this kind is the evidence
they provide that Hardy was a deliberate craftsman (should evidence for
E“4l<:h an assertion still be required) in his narrative effects. It is

a:LSO significant that "perspective,'
‘l:

used in this rather narrow way, can
"3 distinguished from the larger and more theoretical phenomenon usually
‘2"El3lled "point of view" or "voice." I will continue to use this term in
t11:13 narr‘ow way.
"Voice" is no more scientific or objective a term than "point of

zi~€2vu" As a metaphor, it emphasizes the verbal reality and unity of a
QQVel rather than its visual perspective or its conceptual and aesthetic
E3 ji‘lhilarity, as a work of art, to painting. "Voice" expresses a strong

1 O O O O O O I O
n1I>i:'essmn which modern readers have of Victorian fiction, which is that

33
the novel is dominated by the narrator. The meaning of "voice" is pres-
ently a mixture of minute specificity and subjective generality. Some

cr :itics use the word to refer to the characteristic verbal habits of

particular authors. With little danger, for one instance, of confusing

the reader, a critic can make efficient and passing reference to "the

Au stenite voice" and "the mediatorial voice" (which refers to the func-

t: ion of the narrator in the text) in a discussion of E. M. Forster's

Howard's End.26 There is also a use Of the word to describe the effect

wh 5. ch an instance of narration may have upon the reader, like "intrusive"

vo i. ce. In essence, any theoretical discussion of the concept of voice

is a discussion of point of view, even if "point of view" is regarded in

it s more rigid, most systematic sense, i.e., as the old triad of first—

Pe rson, omniscient, and epistolary modes. "Voice" does not carry the

connotations in critical parlance of "perspective," which implies the

location of a perceiving human in a particular concept or to a particu-

lar spot in fictional space. It does not imply the act of seeing or
Perceiving. "Voice" implies the act of narrating, of telling, instead.
Gerard Genette's definitions and discussions of these terms are in-

teresting for their value as syntheses of various thinkers' ideas about

narrative.” To this end, he contrasts "voice" with "mode" (both bor-

rowings from grammar, that is, from descriptions of language), a term

whOse use Genette sumarizes:

Just as in grammar the term "mode" is used for those forms
of the verb which affirm more or less the action in question
and convey the various points of view from which the action is
considered, so in fiction the term "narrative mode" covers the
various possibilities of telling the events "more or less" and
of telling them from different angles.

The two main modalities governing the regulation of narra-
tive information are "distance" and "perspective."28

O! .
v°1Ce" has to do with time; a consideration of it leads Genette into

34

distinctions among narrative levels, or, as he calls them, "degrees":

It would be necessary thus to distinguish, from the simple
point of view of the temporal position, four types of narra-
tion: ulterior (classical position of the récit in the past,
without a doubt by far the most frequent), anterior (predic-
tive r€Cit, generally in the future, but which nothing pre-
vents from leading to the present, like Jocabel's dream in
Mo se sauve), simultaneous (récit in the present contempora-
neous with the actibn) and intercalated, between the moments
of the action.29

 

 

Considering, then, that a narrator may be in any one of these four "po-
sit: ions" in relation to the story being told, Genette distinguishes "two
types of rgcits: the first of a narrator absent from the story which it

recounts (example: Homer in The Iliad, or Flaubert in l'Education senti-

 

me nt: ale), the other of a narrator present as a character in the story

wt) ich it recounts (example: Gil Blas, or Wuthering Heights). I call the

 

first type, for obvious reasons, heterodiegetic, and the second homodi-

EEe t ic."3o

final form, so that there may be four different narrative voices, de-

 

Having come this far, Genette then carries his system to its

Pending upon whether or not the heterodiegetic and homodiegetic narra-
tor's tell their stories from within (intradiegetic) or without (extradi—
eget-12¢) their "levels" of narration.“
Clearly, an application of Genette's way of categorizing narration
does not depend on an uncritical acceptance of his contention that "it
is perhaps legitimate to treat" the text of a novel "as the development,
as Inonstrous as one wishes, given to a verbal form, in the grammatical

32

sense of the term: the expression of a verb." The metaphor in this

QaSE leads the critic to think of grammar rather than vision, or paint-

" or telling, as

1'38: in the cases of "point of view" and "perspective,
1 O O O D

n the less formal use of "vaice." In so far as it is metaphorical,
G I C I O

enelite's description of narrative is no more true than any other. The

v . . .
aIUE of the grammatical metaphor lies in the fact that a change in

35

Izaarration (from, for example, a detached description to one originating
from the consciousness of a character) will necessarily also be evident
j;:)_ the language the author uses to convey it, and not merely in the

‘y1:,115d8 but, more importantly, in the structure of the sentences and
groups of sentences as well.

At this level of analysis, distinctions between the traditional
mod es of narrative break down. This is especially apparent in the dis-
t: inction between first and third person (also a metaphor from grammar)--
and especially in Victorian fiction. Speaking of the actual structuring
of the sentences, there is no real or useful difference in Victorian
realistic novels between what is called the "omniscient narrator" and
what is regarded as the theoretically more limited first-person narra-

33

tor - Two rather striking examples from Hardy's fiction will illus-

Frate this point. First, in The Trumpet-Major, Hardy emphasizes here

 

his major theme, which is that people can have no significant awareness
°f their roles in history if they live, as they must, in their own times:

The present writer, to whom this party has been described
times out of number by members of the Loveday family and other
aged people now passed away, can never enter the old living-
room of Overcombe Mill without beholding the genial scene
through the mists of the seventy or eighty years that inter-
vene between then and now. First and brightest to the eye are
the dozen candles, scattered about regardless of expense, and
kept well snuffed by the miller, who walks round the room at
intervals of five minutes, snuffers in hand, and nips each
wick with great precision, and with something of an execution-
er's grim look upon his face as he closes the snuffers upon

~the neck of the candle. Next to the candle-light show the red
and blue coats and white breeches of the soldiers--nearly
twenty of them in all besides the ponderous Derriman--the head
of the latter, and, indeed, the heads of all who are standing
up, being in dangerous proximity to the black beams of the
ceiling. There is not one among them who would attach any
meaning to "Vittoria," or gather from the syllables "Waterloo"
the remotest idea of his own glory or death. (Ch. V, pp. 67-
68)

\The woodlanders, for another example, begins with a description of what

36

the reader might find if he or she were to visit the places that the
narrator has visited; the first sentence of the novel is: "The rambler
who, for old association's sake, should trace the forsaken coach-road
running almost in a meridional line from Bristol to the south shore Of
England, would find himself during the latter half of his journey in the

via inity of some extensive woodlands, interspersed with apple—orchards"

(Ch . I, p. 1). This is as effective as it is because the narrator seems

to ‘be Hardy, just as the place seems to be local-~that is, the "voice"

ta 1 ling the story seems to belong to our world, which includes "Bristol"

and "England," rather than the fictional one.

The project of this dissertation, then, is to see what forms Har-
dy ' s conceptions of consciousness take in his novels: for Hardy, narra-

tion means perception, and a narrator in his novels has a kind of iden-
tity and individuality which weaken distinctions between first- and

t1'13L‘I'3d-person narratives. There is, however, more than one way to per-

ce iVe of any event, and, to Hardy, because his narrator appears to be
more closely allied to reality and our time than to fictionality and the
evetits of the story, the character engaged in the events offers a per-
8Feetive without which our vision of the truth would be incomplete.

Be-

cau8e Hardy does not center his novels around characters who are not

conSeious, we can say that individual consciousness presents a perspec-
tive, the personal perspective, which is necessary for understanding the

truth of events and the world. The personal perspective, that of the

engaged consciousness, is not by itself to Hardy enough for a complete
u . . . . . .

rlc'el‘standing, but, in conjunction with the perspective of the narrator
who is looking back in time on familiar deeds and places, it is one of

t . . .
he necessary perspectives. Most of the time, there is a sharp

37

difference between the perspectives of the narrator and the characters;
11:: is possible, with some reservation, to regard them as irreconcilable,

as opposites. If they do seem contradictory it is because Hardy saw a

deep disjunction in the truths offered by scientific and artistic know-
18 clge--particularly those of Darwinian progress and the exterior, aes-
thetic world of painting and observation of, for instance, "The Dorset-
Hardy

sh ire Labourer"--and the importance of the perceiving individual.

avo ids choosing between the two sets of conflicting assumptions by em-

ploying both kinds of narration. Later, after all his fiction was writ-

te n , he came to a conception which could hold both these Opposing sets
of ideas, which could in fact resolve them; it is not until he was well
int c composition of The Dynasts that he considered directly conscious-

ne as as a potential force in history and evolution.

The next chapter will study Hardy's "omniscient" narrator and con-
sider its function in the light of its use in Victorian fiction. Chap-
ter Three will study Hardy's means of presenting the personal perspec-
tive of the characters as they compare to other authors' means of pre—

senting characters' consciousnesses. Using these explorations of kinds

0f narration as tools for analysis, the rest of this dissertation will
be devoted to Hardy's presentation of consciousness as it appears in the
na‘l-‘I‘ation of his major novels and as it appears in characters, situa-

tlous, and themes which repeat from novel to novel.

ch apter Two: The Histor, Hardy's "Omniscient" Narrator

Arriving at terminology to describe Hardy's "omniscient" narration
re quires both a direct look at the terminology itself as well as a
g1 amce at the use of this kind of narrative in other authors of Hardy's
cen tury. This more theoretical and historical discussion will make up
the first section of this chapter. Only after such a general context
has been established will it be possible to organize the more specific
and idiosyncratic Hardyan techniques. "Hardy's Histor," then, will make
UP the second section of this chapter. Finally, once Hardy's "omni-
Sci.erice" has been sorted out, it will then be possible to begin again
With a discussion of Hardy's presentation of consciousness.

A- The Histor: Its Use in Other Victorian Novelists and in Criticism

0f the several difficulties inherent in any discussion of omni-
scient narration, the first to arise has to do with terminology. "Omni-
Scient," "intrusive," and "authorial" all are usually used to refer to
the same .kind of narration, even though they obviously mean different
th iJigs outside of a discussion of "third-person" narrative. The reason,
of cOurse, that so many terms refer to the same phenomenon is that none

r O
efer to the phenomenon itself but all refer to one or another aspect of

i . . . . .
t' "IntruSive" seems different from the other two in that "omniscient"
a O O I O O 0
nd "authorial" statements can be identified by their contents, but "in-
trUSiVen

statements exist only in so far as the reader is fixed, as it

38

39

were, on the story being told rather than on the means of telling. That
a narrator or a narrative statement is "intrusive" means that it is out
o f place in some system of aesthetics in which a pretense of the story
as real and immediate takes priority over another pretense (which is
re ally just as viable), that the intimate relationship between story-

Ce Iller and reader is of higher aesthetic priority than, for example a

presentation of characters' thought processes. "Intrusive," then, refers

indirectly to a set of aesthetic assumptions about the nature of realism
in fiction. We might at first think that this idea about the primacy of
the story belongs to post-Jamesian schools of thought, but complaints
about "intrusions" occur in the Victorian criticisms and reviews of nov-
2 1 8 just as instances of intrusions occur outside of "third-person" nar—
ra t: :ives.l

The problem with "intrusive," then, as a term to describe this kind
0 f generalizing and detached narration, is that no indisputable examples

of it exist. Every such example would serve to illustrate the reader's

I"ather than the author's focus. "Omniscience" is, on the balance, easier

to define. An omniscient statement by a narrator is one in which the
narrator speaks of events or characters as real but is not limited in
l(tlowledge to what another such "real" observer would know at that time.
C1ear-1y, "omniscience" refers to the absence of a certain kind of limita-
tion on knowledge, and not to the presence of absolutely accessible know-
ledge. "Omniscient" narration has been discussed, condemned, and defend-
ed in a variety of situations, particularly since James. Most of the
less dogmatic of these discussions generally end up regarding "omni—
sci~ence" as a "point of view" rather than as a quality which a statement

may Or may not express; the many objections to this kind of narration

'ake the same metonymic generalization. A sober look at the term

40

"c>¢mniscience," however, makes immediately apparent that criteria for om-
ni scient narration can be drawn up which distinguish it from the perspec-
t;jLfl\Je which allows the author access to any character's consciousness.

There is not much profit in detailed and extended analyses of terms like
these, as numerous studies can illustrate, but enough delineation to
make the complexity of the terminology problem clear will, it is to be
hoped, cast doubt on all current typologies which confuse particular in-
stances of "omniscience" with general narrative strategies.2

In a 194! review of contemporary fiction, Howard Baker discusses

omn iscient narration in a different way. He too sees it as a form whose
s ty 1e and content are strictly limited. Baker calls this narration "au-
tho rial" here, but he is referring to the kind of generalizing commen-
tary which makes up "omniscience." Because of the term "omniscient" and
because of the habits of commentary which occur in omniscient narration,
we might at first think that the content of such narration is limited
Only by the thematic interests of whatever author is using it. Baker

finds, however, that the content is more likely to be based upon a small

l"V'Elt'lge of values which are "settled" and shared between the writer and

‘reaiidher:

The contemporary realist, as Professor Beach has remarked, is
characteristically "disinclined to discuss things with the
reader . . ., to point the moral for him, and explain the un-
derlying philosOphy. . . ." Such reticence, I believe, is
more than a recent convention. For in the past centuries when
'authors were apparently more communicative, they were communi-
cative on special grounds, and they observed their own kind of
silence. The easiest thing to say is that a Fielding or a
George Eliot drew upon settled and universally recognized
standards; they could point the moral and put the price on the
values because their readers shared in their attitudes towards
morals and values; they could do so, because their readers
would do so of their own accord anyway. Now we live in an age
of unsettled values, without these special grounds for agree-
ment between author and reader. But at the same time, when it
came to matters that lay outside these special grounds, the
older authors also held their silence.

41

Baker's assumption that the content of narrative omniscience will be in
‘glzgreement with the values of the readership seems to contradict conven-
2:.iLonal wisdom; it is not hard to find instances in which the argumenta-

t:,ji.ve tone of the narrator seems justified to later readers, like Hardy's
insistent defense of Tess. A closer look, however, at even the more
no torious conflicts between Victorian readers and authors bears Baker
on t. T_e_s_s_ is a good case in point because in it Hardy seems to hold his
irr¢E=.£aders responsible for the failures of the society he presents. "But,"
same; Hardy says in his 1892 Preface to the novel, "the responsive spirit
:ixr). which Tess of the d'Urbervilles has been received by the readers of
England and America would seem to prove that the plan of laying down a
£3 t:<:>ry on the lines of tacit opinion, instead of making it to square with

the merely vocal formulae of society, is not altogether a wrong one . . ."

‘2‘!) - xvii).
It is also of significance that the kind of commentary which Baker
'tliiss in mind is less authorial than it is omniscient, since, as we shall
£3<3€3, authorial statements refer in fact to the novel as a devised piece
(335' fiction, rather than as a record of truth. What Baker has to say
iibout the "style" of omniscient commentary, however, can be as true of

aI-Ithorial as omniscient commentary:

Readers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries got familiar
truths, and not--not characteristically in the novel-~the real
perplexities and the deeper meditations of those centuries.

‘ They got Augustan urbanity from Fielding, pleasant irony from
Jane Austen, comic homeliness from Dickens, embossed golden
rules from George Eliot. They got much more too, but not in
author's commentary. For successful commentary has always
been conventional, mannered, polished, often gay, never seri-
ous. It falls under the control of the principle that led
Dostoevsky to use an innocent and gentle little narrator to
tell about terrible things.4

while Hardy is often "serious" and rarely "gay," it is true that the

p‘:'5-11c1'.ple has its effect upon him, for what is notable about Hardy's

42

omniscience is his irony.

When we come to Hardy, indeed, this term "omniscience" seems even
less practicable than it does in the abstract, because time and time
again he will limit what his narrator knows to less than omniscience.
Ckhers, also, have noticed that Hardy does not pretend to omniscience
.about his characters' motivations or about their secret actions. One is

Bdichael Millgate, who thinks that these non-omniscient passages, and
c>tflaers in which Hardy adopts the perspective of a character to narrate a
scene, reflect Hardy's unwillingness to engage himself in the world of

<:<>nnplex moral and "intellectual commitments":

It is almost as though Hardy shrank from the responsibilities
of omniscience, from the necessity of moral judgements and
firm intellectual commitments, and found a certain security in
adopting--usually quite inconsistently and on a scene-to-scene
basis--the limited but essentially human perspectives avail-
able to particular characters.5

E’- IN. Furbank goes even further in relating general patterns of ideas in
HEifitrciy's work to his habits of limiting the source of narration to one
Who is not omniscient. Furbank finds that Hardy is generally unwilling
‘:<> Iae what he calls the reader's "teacher": "Narration, for him, tends
'3C> lae a matter of someone 'reading appearances'. . . . He likes to ab-
tleaigzite responsibility for the witnessing and interpreting of events and

to shuffle it off on to the shoulders of his characters, converting them

1t1to eavesdroppers and voyeurs."6

The most important objection to "omniscient" and "intrusive" is that
they describe the reader's impression of the extent and appropriateness
‘C>15 Inarrative commentary rather than emphasizing something more important
£it>(>‘4t this function of narration, like how fundamental a role this kind
c’if

Inarrator has played in the history of the novel and of narrative it—

E:
‘3“1-15; for this reason, I prefer "histor." From.the term used by Homer

43

to mean "inquirer," histor is used by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg
to mean a person, "in short, of authority, who is entitled not only to
present the facts as he has established them but to comment on them, to

draw parallels, to moralize, to generalize, to tell the reader what to

think and even to suggest what he should do."7 The voice of authority,

of thought, of articulated values and beliefs, the histor sets scenes

and moods, describes characters, and cements on events. The histor's is
the voice we get to know as Hardy's, although this voice is not so much
Hardy's as it is that of what Wayne Booth calls "the implied author," a

voice familiar with the characters and expressing implicit and explicit

opinions about them or about some quality, possession, or action of

the irs.8 This voice knows what will happen at the end of the novel; it

knows the countryside and its history, the towns and their histories. It

Seems to be an omnipresent character in Hardy's fiction. Distinguishable
from the author, whose handiwork may be seen in irony, symbolism, names,
juxtaposed or contrasting events and scenes, and the logic inherent in
the plot, the voice of the histor spells out the moral universe of the
no"e1.

The histor's is the voice with which we are to identify ourselves,
the voice we must believe if we are to read the novel in its own terms,
for the explicit terms of the novel are in the words of the histor. The
words of the narrative line make up the substance of the histor; the

voice of the histor is a structural element in the novel as a whole. In
the voice of the histor, for instance, Hardy spells out Arabella's crude-

neas and unfitness for Jude; he sympathizes with Jude's, Sue's, and Phil-

1 . . .
Qtson's unfitness for the society in which they live; and he details the

e
ffects of the unassuageable "ache of modernism."9 The large perspective

0
f events which leads the viewer to see humanity as a whole rather than

44

any human, the cosmic perspective is the perspective of the histor.

In the history of narrative, according to Scholes and Kellogg, the
voice of the histor is as ancient as the voice of Thucydides, "basing his
authority on the accuracy of conclusions he has drawn from evidence he
has gathered," and as commonly associated with reliability as the voice
c>f the eyewitness.lo Everyone recognizes the fictional value of an eye-

tvitness, especially when that eyewitness is a trustworthy character nar-
reating anomolous events, but novelists since James have also recognized
time: powerful ambiguity possible in the narration of an unreliable eye-
sriLtrness. This has led writers and critics to the conclusion that all
perceivers are inherently biased and therefore untrustworthy. For Har-
¢15r , however, such unreliability is never a matter of concern; in some
very important ways Hardy's histor is an eyewitness and, of course, the
re 1 iability of the histor is unimpeachable. The result for Hardy is
that his narrator can offer a personal perspective with none of the un-
re3Liability associated with regular human perceptions.

As a term, "histor" has a critical value other than its reminder of
tt1‘3- Tlong and powerful tradition of the story-teller, for it also suggests
that fiction may be a kind of history, especially if Thucydides is to be
regarded as the model. This notion is an old one, and story-tellers and
historians alike have long been aware of the difficulties in separating
truth from fiction in any kind of narrative. In "Narrative and History,"
J

‘ Iiillis Miller lists the effects that this entanglement has had on the

f .
orlns which fiction can take:

The traditional notions of form in fiction . . . are displaced
versions of ideas about history. The entire fabric of assump-
tions about form and meaning in the novel . . . stands or falls
with the metaphor defining a work of fiction as a species of
history.

The assumptions about history which have been transferred
to the traditional conception of the form of fiction may be

45

identified. They include the notions of origin and end ("ar-
cheology" and "teleology"); of unity and totality or "totaliza-
tion"; of underlying "reason" or "ground"; of selfhood, con-
sciousness, or "human nature"; of the homogeneity, linearity,
and continuity of time; of necessary progress; of "fate,"

"destiny," or "Providence"; of causality; of gradually emerg-

ing "meaning"; of representation and truth . . . .11

Like Fielding and Thackeray, whose The History_of Tom Jones, a Foundling
and The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., A Colonel in the Service of Her
Iflajesty Q. Anne, Written by Himself make explicit their debts to this
ixiea about history, Hardy too makes use of the reliability inherent in a
tiairrator who is a reporter of historical facts. The effect is intimate-
ly tied up with the "realism" which these novels adopt as aesthetic
standards; by referring to historicism, or, as Miller says,
By calling a novel a history its author at one stroke covers
over all the implications of gratuitousness, of baseless cre-
ativity and lie, involved in the word "fiction." At the same
time he affirms for his novel that verisimilitude, that solid
basis in pre-existing fact, which is assOciated with the idea
of history.l
The histor dominates Victorian fiction at all levels. Even though
the important Victorian novelists often used the histor as a means of
Presenting authorial concerns, it is a serious mistake to assume that
this is its only-~or even its most important--use. Disraeli, Thackeray,
I)i'zkens, Trollope, Meredith, and George Eliot all have complex narrative
I"i‘E.>.sentations, a part of which is due to each author's individual inter-
p‘l-‘etation of this voice. Like all serious writers of fiction, these au-
titl<>ms were deeply concerned with the question of fictionality itself,
£lt1<3 they used the reliable and historicist voice, the one which denies
trt“3= difference between fiction and history, to raise this very question.
Disraeli, in particular, broached directly the point at which fiction and

1118tory merge, in his subject matter as well as in his style, and in

C: - . . .
””EEEEEEEEEEZ.(1844)’ he even goes so far as to discuss how it is that the

46

absent author of a book can carry over into the reader's non-reading

life:

There are some books, when we close them--one or two in the
course of our life-difficult as it may be to analyze or ascer-
tain the cause,--our minds seem to have made a great leap. A
thousand obscure things receive light; a multitude of indefin-
ite feelings are determined. Our intellect grasps and grapples
with all subjects with a capacity, a flexibility and a vigour,
before unknown to us. It masters questions hitherto perplex-
ing, which are not even touched or referred to in the volume
just closed. What is this magic? It is the spirit of the su-
preme author that by a magnetic influence blends with our sym-
pathizing intelligence, directs and inspires it. By that mys-
terious sensibility we extend to questions, which he has not
treated, the same intellectual force which he has exercised
over those which he has expounded. His genius for a time re-
mains in us.13

mis communion between reader and the rare "supreme author" sets up, as
air). ideal, a direct and intimate relationship between them and ignores in-
te rmediating forms like novel or narrator.

Thackeray's histor in Vanity Fair (1847-48) offers an interesting
cornitrast to Disraeli's serious and unspectacular use of this voice. Dis-
ITEIGEilifs histor serves to support the mimetic aims of his fiction, while
the reliability of Thackeray's histor often serves to subvert the mimesis
iirl liis novel. We are told at the beginning and end and reminded again

£rr1<i. again that the characters in Vanity Fair are merely "puppets" and

 

that the story has a didactic rather than a mimetic purpose. The last
I"3fitflagraph, for example, probably the most famous passage in this very

p‘D‘Ehilar novel, concludes the novel simply by ending it. Not only are

the characters dolls, but we, presumably for our belief in the reality

of the fiction and for our pleasure in being entertained by fiction, are
<=115i51dren: "Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! which of us is happy in this world?

which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?--come, children,
let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out."'4

firt‘iiczkeray's histor, however, is not always so antimimetic. In this

47

passage, for instance, he uses the histor to argue the realism of his
method and the antiheroic style of his presentation:

I know that the tune I am piping is a very mild one (al-
though there are some terrific chapters coming presently), and
must beg the good-natured reader to remember that we are only
discoursing at present about a stock-broker's family in Russell
Square, who are taking walks, or luncheon, or dinner, or talk-
ing and making love as people do in common life, and without a
single passionate and wonderful incident to mark the progress
of their loves. The argument stands thus--Osborne, in love
with Amelia, has asked an old friend to dinner and to Vaux-
hall--Jos Sedley is in love with Rebecca. Will he marry her?
That is the great subject now in hand.

We might have treated this subject in the genteel, or in
the romantic, or in the facetious manner. Suppose we had
shown how Lord Joseph Sedley fell in love, and the Marquis of
Osborne became attached to Lady Amelia, with the full consent
of the Duke, her noble father: or instead of the supremely gen-
teel, suppose we had resorted to the entirely low, and de-
scribed what was going on in Mr. Sedley's kitchen--how black
Sambo was in love with the cook (as indeed he was), and how
he fought a battle with the coachman in her behalf; how the
knife-boy was caught stealing a cold shoulder of mutton, and
Miss Sedley's new femme de chambre refused to go to bed with-
out a wax candle; such incidents might be made to provoke much
delightful laughter, and be supposed to represent scenes of
"life." Or if, on the contrary, we had taken a fancy for the
terrible, and made the lover of the new femme dg_chambre a
professional burglar, who bursts into the house with his band,
slaughters black Sambo at the feet of his master, and carries
off Amelia in her night—dress, not to be let loose again till
the third volume, we should easily have constructed a tale of
thrilling interest, through the fiery chapters of which the
reader should hurry, panting. But my readers must hope for no
such romance, only a homely story, and must be content with a
chapter about Vauxhall, which is so short that it scarce de-
serves to be called a chapter at all. And yet it is a chapter,
and a very important one too. Are not there little chapters
in everybody's life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect
all the rest of the history?15

Much of the interest in Vanity Fair is interest in its histor, in Thack-

 

e‘rey's cynical and sarcastic humor at the expense of his characters, who
relhi'esent the grasping and the sentimental of humanity. As passages
l‘jLISJe these make clear, the histor is at the center of our attention; such
has sages are not intrusive--they are the substance of the novel.

One of the major attractions to Dickens' Bleak House (1853), of

 

48

course, is the narrative itself, and one of the most interesting aspects
of the narrative of this novel is that Dickens uses his histor for the
more descriptive and poetic passages and uses the first-person, rather

flat narration of Esther Summerson to narrate the mundane and slow-mov-

ing part of the story. What is unusual about this is that the histor

is individualized in a way that the character is not; in this same way,

it is Esther who may be said to be detached in this novel, not the nar—

rator (of the "third-person" sections). The histor of Bleak House is

(Drie of the most important in the history of omniscient narration; Dickens
is clearly reaching for a particular aesthetic (and didactic) effect in
1:13 is novel, for not only are there two narrators, the bland Esther and

the dramatic histor, but Dickens moves the histor to the present tense--

and therefore to the world of the reader. This present tense is differ-

ent: from the kind of summarizing present found, for example, at the end

0 f the novel in "The Close of Esther's Narrative"--it is immediate, and

Particular, and non-fictional. The novel is crowded with many passages

o f beautiful and powerful narration, so it is hard to find one which may

be regarded as typical. Jo's death is narrated in a relatively re-

8trained fashion; then, after a long passage of conversation (Jo attempts

to repeat the Lord's Prayer after Dr. Woodcourt) in which there is no

t‘~e‘::rator's voice, the histor says:

The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!

Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead,
Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men
and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And

dying thus around us every day.16
1:1: is impossible to remember the histor of Bleak House, however, without

a180 remembering the Chancery and Dickens' vivid descriptions of life un-

der its "draw," as Miss Flite describes its power. The long paragraphs

make full quotation impractical, but a part of the beginning can show

49

both the effect of the present tense and the directness of the didactic
message:

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets,
much as the sun may, from the spongy fields, be seen to loom
by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two
hours before their time--as the gas seems to know, for it has
a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest,
and the muddy streets are muddiest, near the leaden-headed old
obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a lead-
en-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple
Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits
the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come
mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and flounder-
ing condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pesti-
lent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven
and earth.‘8

Trollope's more normal histor in Barchester Towers (1857) shows, by

 

contrast, how original Dickens' is. This is not to slight Trollope,
however, whose aims are different. Like most "onmiscient" narrators,
the histor of Barchester Towers is used to discuss aesthetic problems.
Th is discussion itself provides the "frame" in which the novel is set
and serves, like Thackeray's, as a structural element at the beginning
Eltisfl. end of the novel. It is worth quoting this passage in full for its
clear concentration of Trollope's style:

We most now take leave of Mr. Slope, and of the bishop also,
and of Mrs. Proudie. These leave-takings in novels are as dis-
agreeable as they are in real life; not so sad, indeed, for
they want the reality of sadness; but quite as perplexing, and
generally less satisfactory. What novelist, what Fielding,
what Scott, what George Sand, or Sue, or Dumas, can import an

‘ interest to the last chapter of his fictitious history? Prom-
ises of two children and superhuman happiness are of no avail,
nor assurance of extreme respectability carried to an age far
exceeding that usually allotted to mortals. The sorrows of
our heroes and heroines, they are your delight, oh public!
their sorrows, or their sins, or their absurdities; not their
virtues, good sense, and consequent rewards. When we begin to
tint our final pages with couleur £2 rose, as in accordance
with fixed rule we most do, we altogether extinguish our own
powers of pleasing. When we become dull we offend your intel-
lect; and we must become dull or we should offend your taste.
A late writer, wishing to sustain his interest to the last

 

50

page, hung his hero at the end of the third volume. The con-
sequence was, that no one would read his novel. And who can
apportion out and dovetail his incidents, dialogues, charac-
ters, and descriptive morsels, so as to fit them artificially
at the end of his labour? Do I not myself know that I am at
this moment sick with cudgelling my brains to find them? And
then when everything is done, the kindest-hearted critic of
them all invariably twits us with the incompetency and lame-
ness of our conclusion. We have either become idle and neg-
lected it, or tedious and over-laboured it. It is insipid or
unnatural, overstrained or imbecile. It means nothing, or at-
tempts too much. The last scene of all, as all last scenes we
fear must be,

In second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

I can only say that if some critic, who thoroughly knows
his work, and has laboured on it till experience has made him
perfect, will write the last fifty pages of a novel in the way
they should be written, I, for one, will in future do my best
to copy the example. Guided by my own lights only, I confess
that I despair of success.

Trollope's histor, as it is shown here, in concentrated form, and as it

appears elsewhere in his fiction, is as idiosyncratic as the histor of

<3‘\7£ary other author who uses the form. It is also what could be called

the "standard Victorian narrator" or, as Wayne Booth says of the histor

(>115 The Mayor of Casterbridge, "the 'old-fashioned' narrator's voice.

"20

The histor of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) is the means by

“°}1cich the novel sounds like an ironic medieval allegory. Meredith's

1'1istor stays close to the story throughout most of the novel, as it does

M

ltlGare:

A poor Dyspepsy may talk as he will, but he is the one who
never gets sympathy, or experiences compassion: and it is he

' whose groaning petitions for charity do at last rout that

Christian virtue. Lady Blandish, a charitable soul, could not
listen to Hippias, though she had a heart for little mice and
flies, and Sir Austin had also small patience with his broth-
er's gleam of health, which was just enough to make his dis-
ease visible. He remembered his early follies and excesses,
and bent his ear to him as one man does to another who com-
plains of having to pay a debt legally incurred.21

That the histor does not depart on flights of independent narrative means

‘:11£3t there are few passages in this novel like those of Disraeli and

51

Tr0110pe, which focus the reader's attention upon authorial problems of
realism and fictionality. Because of the ironic detachment of the BEE?
£23, Meredith's entire novel seems filtered through an engaged and pur-
poseful consciousness which, because it never really disappears into the

story and because it seems so engaged, seems authorial. The Ordeal of

 

Richard Feverel is like Vanity Fair and Bleak House in that the key to

 

 

it is in the histor, not in the story; the reading of any of these nov-
els is the reading of the histor's interactions with the materials of
the novel.

Meredith's histor is usually much less central to the subject of
his novels than it is in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Perhaps an apt

characterization is that found in the Introduction to Sandra Belloni

 

(1864), when Meredith identifies the histor's role as that of the "Phi-
losopher."22 This is not so far from the histor in, for instance, The
Egoist (1879), in which the histor is used more sparingly and subtly
than it is in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. The only extended passage
of this kind of narration occurs in the Prelude, "A Chapter of Which the
Last Page Only is of Any Importance." In the Prelude, Meredith intro-
duces what might be called the histor's aesthetic companions, the Comic
Spirit, which, as Muse, serves as inspiration to the histor, and the
"imps" who find the Egoist to be ridiculous:

You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our

‘ time and country, of wealth and station; a not flexible figure,
do what we may with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples
the surface and is distinguishable but by very penetrative,
very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some general—
ly imperceptible stroke of his quality, have first made the
mild literary angels aware of something comic in him, when
they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on the
heading of the records baldly (where brevity is most compli-
mentary) as a gentleman of family and property, an idol of a
decorous island that admires the concrete. Imps have their
freakish wickedness in them to kindle detective vision: Malign-
ly do they love to uncover ridiculousness in imposing figures.

52

Wherever they catch sight of Egoism they pitch their camps,
they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their lanterns,
confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that their
grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their
game, never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and
antic, unknown to himself, and comes out in the native steam
which is their scent of the chase. Instantly off they scour,
Egoist and imps. They will, it is known of them, dog a great
House for centuries, and be at the birth of all the new heirs
in succession, diligently taking confirmatory notes, to join
hands and chime their chorus in one of their merry rings round
the tottering pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as
if they had (possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed
colossus of Egoism in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of
the stuff of the family. They dare not be chuckling while
Egoism is valiant, while sober, while socially valuable, na-
tionally serviceable. They wait.23

In many ways, George Eliot's histors are exemplary for their inte-
gration into and resonance throughout all levels of their novels. At

her best, in Middlemarch, Eliot brings a philoSOphical understanding of

 

the advantages and failures of objectivity and detachment to bear exact-

ly on that treatment of her own characters. In fact, Middlemarch may be

 

said to be about the effects and responsibilities of engagement, just as,
as J. Hillis Miller has pointed out, it is also about the failure of
traditional "notions" of history (including those held by her charac-
ters).24 Part of the excellence of her narrative comes from its com-
plete integration into her story; like Dickens' and Meredith's, that is,
Eliot's nearly omnipresent histor is the necessary basis for our compre-
hension of the novel. It is difficult therefore to lift a single pas-
sage out and call it typical of Eliot's histor, for no single passage
seems sufficient. One passage, unusual in its separability from the
text, seems personal in its self-relevation and its reference to Field-
ing; it is quite ironic, however, in that what appears to be hurried
summary to Eliot's histor is leisurely expansiveness to many of her read-
ers:

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had

53

the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and
so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our
living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his
copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of
his work, . . . and especially in those initial chapters to
the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring
his armpchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the
lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the
days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our
needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock
ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians
must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is
probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if deliv-
ered from a camp-stool in a parrot-house. I at least have so
much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how
they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can com-
mand must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dis-
persed over that tempting range of relevancies called the uni-
verse.25

This histor of Middlemarch, even though she stops to discuss problems of

 

narrative, consistently speaks of the characters as real, as if the
weaving of the characters' "lots" were not done by the author, and never
presents them as anything but actual people. The Finale of Middlemarch
maintains this position; it begins, as many Victorian conclusions do,
with the histor discussing fictionality, but Eliot never uses her histor
to distinguish between the contents of the novel and life. All the
characters are reduced at the end from the heroic to the ordinary so
that they can disappear in the mass of humanity and undistinguished
lives. In her two marriages, the "determining acts of her life," Doro-
thea is no different from the rest, whatever we might have thought of
her potential:

Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideal-
ly beautiful. They were the mixed results of young and noble
impulse . . . struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect
social state, in which great feelings will often take the as-
pect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For
there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it
is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new
Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a con-
ventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her he-

roic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial:
the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is for ever

54
gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and
acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which
may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea
whose story we know.

Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though
they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river
of which Cyrus . . . broke the strength, spent itself in chan-
nels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of
her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for
the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistor-
ic acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as
they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived
faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.26

There is little that can be said in summary of all these authors'
uses of the histor. The aesthetic choices which lead to the organiza-
tion of a novel around a central intelligence do not, it seems to me,
also lead these authors to a similarity in style. On the contrary, the
differences among them are emphasized in a study such as this, when ex-
amples from each are set side by side. The irreducible habits of gar-
rulity or restraint, expressiveness or analysis show up most clearly in
long passages like the ones above, when an author's "authorial" voice or
personality can be isolated from the story it narrates. The point is

' comes at last to

that the histor, though technically only a "voice,'
seem to be a personality, whose interests and consistencies make up the
index around which the novel is organized. Because this "personality"
is as much an impression as are "omniscience" and "intrusiveness," simi-
lar objections can be raised to the use of "histor" as were raised to
the other two terms. Mere important, there is "third-person" narration
which is not dominated by commentary and central authority and which,
therefore, is not the narration of a histor. We can conclude this sec-
tion of this chapter, then, by putting the histor in the larger context
of all narration, in a theoretical rather than historical context.

In his search for a comprehensive typology of narrative, Gerard Ge-

nette disregards those aspects of the histor which seem to coalesce into

55

a fictional personality and concentrates on the discours or text of the

novel. He describes what is here called the histor in several ways. In

considering the distance between the narrator and what would be reality

if the fiction were life, he finds that the narrator can present dialogue

as "limited or reported discourse," a technique by which the narrator

appears to be absent and the characters appear to speak, and as "narra-
tivized discourse," the more commonly recognized form of narration in

which the narrator summarizes and abstracts what would have been the di-

alogue if there had been any.27 Genette calls "non-focalized rECit" the

text of the histor because the narrator is not limited ("focalized" or
"focussed") consistently to the perspective of any particular charac-

ter-.28 "Non-focalized récit" describes, then, the text of all narration

that is not limited to the perspective of a character, assuming, of
course, that the narrator can in no way be regarded as a character. In

a "nonfocalized" text--or in narration with "zero" focalization, the nar-
rator is extradiegetic and heterodiegetic; this is, as Genette says, the
"classical" focalization (or "focus of narration" as Brooks and Warren

express it.) "Externally-focalized" narration describes the text in
Which "we are never allowed to know the thoughts or sentiments" of the
Characters.“ Dashiel Hammet and Ernest Hemingway (in "The Killers" and
"Hills like White Elephants") produced "externally-focualized r€cits."29
In Victorian fiction, I believe that the L653; is in fact often "focal-
ized" to the perspective of some kind of story-teller, "Philosopher,"
"historian," "chronicler," or "leader of the chorus" which the author
choOses as a central intelligence for narrating the novel.

Genette's system is intelligent and useful, especially for the or-

ganization and consideration of groups of novels. Once faced with a

pa":ti.cular text, however, or with particular parts of a text, the reader

56

finds two objections to such a macrosystem of "third-person" narration.
The first is that it too absolutely assumes the fictionality of the nar-
rator; in fiction, and especially in Victorian realistic novels, the
narrator is often "authorial," referring to the novel as a narration of
fiction. This is the only function of the narrator which can properly

be called "authorial."31 Obviously, this authorial narrator is fictional
in the same way that the novel is fictional, but it is fictional in a
different way than a character, like Huck Finn or Tristram Shandy, is.

' as a "perni-

lienry James regards this authorial commentary as a "crime,'
<:ious trick," which robs the novelist of the only justification for fic-
txion that there is. Trollope's is "a suicidal satisfaction in reminding
tile: reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-be-
lieve."32
It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to
be unless he regards himself as an historian and his narrative
as history. It is only as an historian that he has the small-
est locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is
nowhere; to insert into his attempt a backbone of logic, he
must relate events that are assumed to be real.
-J- Iiillis Miller rightly points out that to regard authorial commentary
38 a "crime" is to imply that the novelist is a kind of historian and
that fiction cannot be justified for its own sake or for the sake of
beauty. The truth is, as these examples of the histor in Disraeli,
Thfieleceray, Dickens, Trollope, Meredith, and Eliot make clear, that this
kind of narrative commentary was not only deliberate but essential to
the aesthetic purpose of the authors. What is more, each author's use
of it is different enough from the others that James limits the narrator
unnecessarily by thinking of fiction only as history, and Genette makes

1': too much like what Booth calls "undramatized" narration by lumping

t . . .
ogether all narrators that are out81de of the story (heterodiegetic)

57

and outside the time of the story (extradiegetic).33
The second objection is Genette's typology is more intangible as
well as more theoretically problematical, in that "extradiegetic-hetero-
diegetic," which describes most of Hardy's narration (not to mention
that of Disraeli, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, Meredith, and Eliot),
does not take into account the impression that most readers have (and
that many critics insist upon) that the narrator of a Victorian realis-
tic novel has a personality, a unified, identifiable "sound" or "feel."
This sense of a personality is merely an impression, hence the problem,
lust it is in part the reader's reaction to authorial statements about
tile fictionality of the work; it is also a reaction to other statements
rallich are clearly fictional in that they pretend, as Hardy often does,
titiat the setting is real, that the characters are people, or that the
rmairrator actually witnessed the events. Mest important, probably, this
impression of a whole and human personality is based in the conscious
and unconscious recollection of general philosophical statements and
SWJInmarizing little aphorisms that seem to expand the subject of the nov-
ECl from the particulars of the characters and their actions at this time
and place to all people at all times and places. The histor in £293,
ft>r' instance, describes Jude and Arabella's wedding:
And so, standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two
swore that at every other time of their lives till death took
them, they would assuredly believe, feel, and desire precisely
‘ as they had believed, felt, and desired during the few preced—
ing weeks. What was as remarkable as the undertaking itself
was the fact that nobody seemed at all surprised at what they
swore. (Pt. I, Ch. ix; p. 65)
llt is possible, therefore, to reduce the histor to a collection of lin-
guistic characteristics (extradiegetic-heterodiegetic), but to do so ig-

nol‘es the reader's clear impression that there is in this kind of narra-

thn a personal perspective, however comprehensive, with which to

58

identify. This impression must be recognized in critical parlance and be
placed within the context of the fictionality of realistic, authorial

narration and whatever relationship exists between reader and writer.
B. Hardy's Histor

Hardy's histor has attracted quite a bit of critical attention,
most of it negative, especially when his more turgid style is emphasized;
the histor is the locus for all those Latinate words, references to
painting and architecture, and generally learned phrases.“ In "Hardy's
'Pedantry,"' C. H. Salter finds consistency in as well as justification

for Hardy's habits of using learned allusions and Latinate expressions
in their reference to the world outside Wessex. That is, he finds Har-
dy 's "pedantry" to belong to a way of describing his fictional world in
terms which the outsider to Wessex would use. There is, he says, "an

obvious but fundamental duality or contrast in Hardy between Wessex and
the rest of the world. Hardy's 'pedantic' language is part of the lan-

guage which Wessex meets in the rest of the world."35

Salter goes on to
distinguish among various uses of learned language, but essentially they
311 compared what is small in Wessex with what is similar or identical,
hoWever much larger, in the outside world.36 Hardy's histor speaks in a
Voice from outside Wessex, using "language which Wessex meets in the
rest of the world." Ian Gregor finds Hardy's allusions to be a form of
characterization of the histor, which he thinks of as an authorial "con-

8(‘-3L<>usness":

Hardy's references to artists--and the same applies to all his
"cultural" allusions--have a dramatic function rather than a
descriptive one. They are employed as means of altering the
reader's response, so that he is kept moving, in the way that
the novel itself is constantly moving, from a dramatic to a

59

contemplative mood, and then back again. The allusions are
one of the means through which Hardy keeps us alert to the
mediating consciousness of the author, which is always inte-
gral to his meaning.37

Robert Schweik looks at Hardy's use of the histor in Far from the

Madding_Crowd as evidence of Hardy's strategies for handling narrative

 

problems as they arose. The mixture of ironic and sober narration in
the first five chapters, for instance, Schweik says,

was certainly not characteristic of Hardy, nor was it likely
to have been entirely congenial to him. Probably it came
about as a result of his initial effort to combine a number of
not entirely compatible objectives-~the more serious treatment
of character he had been groping toward in A Pair of Blue
Eyes, the comic tone and rustic humor of Under the Greenwood
Tree . . ., and the "incident" necessary to satisfy Stephen's
demand for "some distinct and well arranged plot". . . . In
any case, Hardy seems to have found the manner he had adopted
increasingly difficult to maintain, and by Chapter V it had
become something like a see-saw between wry comicality and
profound seriousness. Yet, although Hardy no doubt felt the
strain of keeping a balance between such diverse objectives,
the result was a remarkably controlled opening; and his han-
dling of scene and action leaves the impression of a narrator
of broad awareness and flexible sensibility.38

2112. Chapters IV-XVI, Hardy continues to apply different narrative "tones"
't<> the different groups of characters, "but for the most part the vari-
ous strands of their stories are developed separately, and the charac-
t81‘s, so far as they act upon one another, do so mostly at a distance,

"39 Chapters XIX-XXIII tell

8ePz-u-ated physically and psychologically.
tale! story of Boldwood's courtship of Bathsheba; because Hardy had intend-
ed to spend six chapters on this, they are "fleshed out" by "carefully
wronght and highly particularized accounts of the sheep-shearing process"
which, "at best only peripherally relevant to the Bathsheba-Boldwood af-
fair, had to be brought to the foreground and allowed to assume propor—
ti011s which nearly obscure the main action without providing any centre

0 f [their] own ."40

After Chapter XXV, Schweik says, there is a "marked reduction in

 

 

60

Hardy's use of authorial generalization" which "was probably a result of
the increased time pressure under which he worked; . . . in any case, it
marks still another distinct shift in narrative method--and the begin-
ning of a gradual decline into increasing dependence upon 'strong' ef-
fects, shock, surprise, and external melodrama."41 Schweik, advises,
then, that we proceed cautiously when generalizing about Hardy's methods
of narration, since, in Far from the Madding Crowd at least, they seem
much more the result of ad_hgg solutions to current narrative problems
than the result of a consistent aesthetic. It is possible, however, to
find a number of narrative acts and qualities that seem characteristic of
Hardy. A few of these characteristic narrative actions or patterns de-
mand discussion; it is important, for example, to attempt to describe or
identify Hardy's "omniscient" narrator, since just who he is, where he
is standing, and where he got his knowledge can be something of a puzzle.
This question of the identity of the histor does not usually arise
in Victorian fiction, mostly because authors like Thackeray, Meredith,
and Eliot either announce the convention whereby the narrator came by
his or her knowledge or they so completely dramatize the narrator that
we read the novel in order to enjoy the histor's story-telling. Occa-
sionally, Hardy makes use of the usual conventions explaing the origin
of the narrator's knowledge, as he does in The Romantic Adventures of a
Milkmaid by claiming that his knowledge comes from "the testimony of the
land-surveyor, my authority for the particulars of this story, a gentle-
lnan with the faintest curve of humour on his lips" (Ch. I, p. 305) and
directly from Jim Hayward himself ("In relating this incident to the
Present narrator Jim used to declare . . ." [Ch. XVII, p. 401]). In The
Trumpet-Major, Hardy's histor refers to himself as "writer," names his

8C’Lll'ces, and ties it all to reality by suggesting that he still visits

 

6|

Overcombe Mill: "The present writer, to whom this party has been de-
scribed times out of number by members of the Loveday family and other
aged people now passed away, can never enter the old living-room of
Overcombe Mill without beholding the general scene through the mists of
the seventy or eighty years that intervene between then and now" (Ch. V,
pp. 67-68).

In general, Hardy's use of the histor is the same as that of any
other major Victorian author, but his narrator is so often so obviously
located in the novel that he seems paradoxical: he is both there, in the
fictional time and space, though nonexistent as far as the characters
know, and is not there, since he is in a later time, narrating the story
as if it happened in the past. There are so many examples of this ap-
parently physical locating of the narrative perceiver that no choice can
be said to be truly representative. First, a relatively simple descrip-

tion of Dick Dewy from Under the Greenwood Tree:

 

Having come more into the open he could now he seen rising
against the sky, his profile appearing on the light background
like the portrait of a gentleman in black cardboard. It as-
sumed the form of a low-crowned hat, an ordinary-shaped nose,
an ordinary chin, an ordinary neck, and ordinary shoulders.
What he consisted of further down was invisible from lack of
sky low enough to picture him on.

Shuffling, halting, irregular footsteps of various kinds
were now heard coming up the hill, and presently there emerged
from the shade severally five men of different ages and gaits,
all of them working villagers of the parish of Mellstock.
They, too, had lost their rotundity with the daylight, and ad-
vanced against the sky in flat outlines, which suggested some

‘ processional design on Greek or Etruscan pottery. (Pt. I, Ch.
i; pp. 4-5)

.It is, of course, possible to analyze this passage at some length, con-

necting the reference to the "processional design on Greek or Etruscan
13<>t:tery" with the formal structure of the novel, with its theme of van~
ish ing beauty, and with the artist's attempt to preserve ancient rituals.

l?c>]:- the present, however, what is most important is the situation of the

 

62

narrator as a perceiver with a local point of view, a perspective, even
to the point of how the Mellstock choristers sound as they approach in
the dark.

The next example of Hardy's habit of clearly locating the perceiver
in the perspective, as it were, of the entire scene has the added virtue
of introducing a related technique--that of a theoretical or hypothetic-

al observer. From Desperate Remedies, this passage could have been from

 

Cytherea Graye's perspective, except that Hardy does not identify her as
the perceiver. Instead, the perceiver is some unidentifiable "spectator
in the Town Hall," "a person on the ground":

The picture thus presented to a spectator in the Town Hall
was curious and striking. It was an illuminated miniature,
framed in by the dark margin of the window, the keen-edged
shadiness of which emphasized by contrast the softness of the
objects enclosed.

The height of the spire was about one hundred and twenty
feet, and the five men engaged thereon seemd entirely removed
from the sphere and experiences of ordinary human beings.

They appeared little larger than pigeons, and made their tiny
movements with a soft, spirit-like silentness. One idea above
all others was conveyed to the mind of a person on the ground
by their aspect, namely, concentration of purpose: that they
were indifferent to--even unconscious of—-the distracted world
beneath them, and all that moved upon it. (Ch. I, No. iii;

pp. 9-10)
Again, much could be made of the description here of the detached minds
of concentrating humans and their observers, but what is most important
right now is the fact that the narrator is given a kind of identity
which is the result of our knowing where he is standing and where he is
looking. There is no Town Hall, of course, and there is no spire, but
the location of the narrator in this space seems to give it reality. We
almost always know where Hardy's histor is standing, and knowing that
giVes us a sense not only that he is real but that what he describes is
17€3£31 as well. This, then, is Hardy's usual explanation for the source

‘3if? his narrator's knowledge: he was there and saw what "a spectator" or

 

63

a "person on the ground" would have seen.

Very often, Hardy uses this technique of a clearly delineated per-
spective to suggest that the setting of the novel is an actual site in
England which can be reached and seen by anyone who wishes to visit
there. The second chapter of Tess, for instance, locates the setting
and even comes with advice:

The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern undula-
tions of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor afore-
said, an engirdled and secluded region for the most part un-
trodden as yet by tourist or landscape-painter, though within
a four hours' journey from London.

It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it
from the summits of the hills that surround it--except perhaps
during the droughts of summer. An unguided ramble into its
recesses in bad weather is apt to engender dissatisfaction
with its narrow, tortuous, and miry ways.

This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the
fields are never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded
on the south by a bold chalk ridge that embraces the promi-
nences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe Tout, Dogbury,
High-Stoy, and Bubb Down. The traveller from the coast, who,
after plodding northward for a score of miles over calcareous
downs and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of
these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold, ex-
tended like a map beneath him, a country differing absolutely
from that which he has passed through. Behind him the hills
are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give
an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white,
the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless. Here,
in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a small-
er and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so
reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a network
of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the
grass. (Ch. II, pp. 9-10)

By this same device of lending reality to the narrator by the clear de-
scription of the setting and to the setting by the clear identification
‘Df the narrator, Hardy also makes his characters seem as real as their
.sllrroundings by moving from a description of what could be a real place
:1) .a description of his characters in that place. This happens again
and again and, obviously, is an essential part of the mimetic as well as

Jo-1'-‘C>Inic nature of Hardy's fiction. To see how such a technique Operates,

64

it is best to work with a particular example, the opening of The Return

 

of the Native, but any number of other passages, like the beginning of

Under the Greenwood Tree, the chapter on the Great Barn in Far from the

 

Madding Crowd, or the description of Shaston in.gggs, would also serve.
Hardy begins The Return of the Native with the time and place so

specified and so localized that the pretense is that the narrator is on

the spot.42 The first truly "hypothetical" observer is a furze-cutter,

but the narrator describes the scene in such a way ("moment by moment,"

"heron, the horizon "seemed to be a division in time") that we have the

impression that the histor is actually there at that time:

A saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time
of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as
Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the
hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a
tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the
earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the
horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore
the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up
its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had
to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in
the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been in-
clined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided
to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the
world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no
less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its
mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in
like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frown-
ing of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of
a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread. (Bk. 1,
Ch. i; p. 3)

Not only is the histor present at the scene, he also knows the heath
better and with more sensitivity than anyone else in the novel:

In fact, precisely at this point of its nightly roll into
darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste be-
gan, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had
not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it
could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation
lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn:
then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. . . .

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for
when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared

 

65

slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form
seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved,
during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things,
that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis--the
final overthrow. (Bk. I, Ch. i; pp. 3-4)

Part of the reason that Egdon Heath seems so well characterized to
readers, of course, is that the histor, who knows and describes that
heath, is also vividly characterized. Having described the heath "now,"
on a Saturday evening in November, and having described it at this point
on every "nightly roll into darkness," Hardy reveals something about his
narrator and, therefore, something pertinent to the unity of his novel:

It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who
loved it with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity.
Smiling champaigns of flowers and fruit hardly do this, for
they are permanently harmonious only with an existence of bet-
ter reputation as to its issues than the present. . . . Fair
prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas, if times be
not fair! Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a
place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of
surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a
subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emo-
tion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called
charming and fair.

. . . The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived,
when the chastening sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain
will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the

moods of the more thinking among mankind. (Bk. I, Ch. i; pp.
4-5)

Clearly, the histor is meant to be describing the world, but the sugges—
tions of personal feelings ("a more recently learnt emotion") and of a
personal life ("an existence of better reputation as to its issues than
the present") hint at meaning in both directions--in the story, with the
characters and their lives, and in the world, with the narrator and our
lives. This impression of the personal nature of Egdon and its perceiver
.113 intentisifed as the region is located historically and geologically,
and then personally, in the unconscious of the individual human: in the
winter, the histor says, "it became the home of strange phantoms; and it

'“’£313= found to be the hitherto unrecognized original of those wild regions

 

66

of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be encompassing us about in mid-
night dreams of flight and disaster, and are never thought of after the
dream till revived by scenes like this" (Bk. I, Ch. i; pp. 5-6).

Hardy's histor is often thought to be distant and cosmic, but in
the opening of The Return of the Native it has a strangely personal and
individualized feel. The presentation gets even more specific when Har-
dy introduces references to the novel. He mentions the barrow, "present-

' and "The above-mentioned highway," but not to re-

ly to be referred to,‘
mind us of the fictionality of his novel (Bk. I, Ch. i; p. 7). Indeed,
just where we might expect this to happen, Hardy locates the histor in
the scene itself:
We seem to want the oldest and simplest human clothing where
the clothing of the earth is so primitive.

To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Eg-
don, between afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could
reach nothing of the world outside the summits and shoulders
of heathland which filled the whole circumference of its
glance, and to know that everything around and underneath had
been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the stars over-
head, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed
by the irrepressible New. (Bk. I, Ch. i; pp. 6-7)

This tantalizingly organized and unified perspective shatters in
the next chapters into a series of vantage points from which to describe
the scene. Hardy uses Captain Vye's perspective to introduce Diggory
Venn, and Venn's perspective to describe the barrow and the figure of
Eustacia on top, and the rustics' perspective to describe the bonfires,
but he dOes not stop there. Once he has used up the available charac-
ters, including the histor reclining "on a stump of thorn in the central

‘nalley," Hardy shifts from one possible or hypothetical observer to an-
¢>tfller, unmindful of where each was before being discovered or where each

goes after being used.

David Lodge notices this same feature in Hardy's style and relates

 

67

his use of these observers to his "cinematic" techniques:

The invocation of a hypothetical or unspecified observer in
description is one of the signatures of Hardy's narrative
style. His novels are full of phrases like, "An observer
would have remarked", "a loiterer in this place might have
speculated", or verbs of perception, often in the passive
voice ("it was seen", "it was felt", etc.), that are not at-
tached to any specified subject. Why should a novelist who
did not shrink from exercising the authorial priviledge of in—
trusive philosophical comment feel compelled to invent surro-
gates for himself when it came to description? The habit is
linked with Hardy's heavy reliance on specified observers in
his fiction: there are an extraordinary number of scenes in
which one character observes, spies on or eavesdrops on oth-
ers. . . . But we may also interpret Hardy's reliance on spec-
ified and unspecified observers as evidence of the importance
he attached to visual perspective--it is as though he is.try-
ing to naturalise devices of presentation that would require
no such explanation or justification in film.43

' of course,

What does not require "explanation or justification in film,‘
is that all perceivers are located in space and time, an idea which
seems more natural to Hardy than one which implies that an observer can
be an inanimate machine like a camera. Not to dispute Lodge's generally
insightful point that Hardy's world is a visually rich one, what is
really striking about Hardy's descriptions is the consistency with which
he located his perceivers, especially the theoretical ones.44 This con-
sistency finally comes down to consistency in the treatment of the char-
acter or setting being described. The detached description of Eustacia,
for instance, continues through several chapters in the novel, until she
speaks and until there is light enough to see her by. Even though Har-
dy has returned to the perspective of an observer who is not there ("Had
the reddleman been watching he might have recognized her . . ."), he
still does not allow his histor omniscience:

That she was tall and straight in build, that she was lady-
like in her movements, was all that could be learnt of her
just now, her form being wrapped in a shawl folded in the old
cornerwise fashion, and her head in a large kerchief, a pro-

tection not superfluous at this hour and place. Her back was
towards the wind, which blew from the north-west; but whether

 

68

she had avoided that aspect because of the chilly gusts which
played about her exceptional position, or because her interest
lay in the south-east, did not at first appear.
Her reason for standing so dead still as the pivot of this
circle of heath-country was just as obscure. (Bk. 1, Ch. vi;
pp. 59-60)
We learn about Eustacia's profile when she lifts her head to use her

"see" just a part of her face ("two matchless lips and

telescope, and we
a cheek only") when she blows on a glowing coal (Bk. I, Ch. vi; p. 63).
It is not important, then, that there is a discernible single locus of
narrative so long as the treatment itself is consistent; we forget, in
the reading, the physical laws that would control the perspective of an
individual perceiver as long as what is perceived seems to obey those
laws.

Hardy's striking characterization of the histor at the beginning of

The Return of the Native, however, has its effect. Even though it never

 

organizes again into a unified and personal perspective, the histor con-
tinues to seem to be interested and individual. It shows more clearly
here than anywhere else in Hardy's fiction that the perspective external
to any character is still intensely sympathetic and that there is a sub-
text of personal meaning to the visually rich world of nature. Numerous
examples of this sympathy in external treatment and assumption of mean-
ing in the world can be found in Hardy's novels. The external treatment
by which Eustacia is introduced or Fanny Robin is described seems objec-
tive at first, but apparent detachment is in reality emotion restrained;
What seems to be objectivity is merely the presentation of the context
.in.which the characters seem most sympathetic. Eustacia is at her best
“flien appreciated for her beauty.
Hardy's narrative treatment of Fanny Robin in Far from the Madding

.52255232 is an important example of this kind of external perspective

 

69

because of its consistency. All of the characters important to the
plot--Bathsheba, Gabriel, Boldwood, and Troy--all get narration from in-
side their perspectives, all except Fanny. Hardy limits his narrator to
a visual perspective such as might be offered by some human observing
the scene, and that limitation is also applied to knowledge of the char-
acters' circumstances and thoughts. Contrary perhaps to expectations,
these limitations do not have the effect of highlighting Fanny's weak-
nesses and mistakes, as a truly objective perspective might do; they put
them, mutely, in the context of a harsh, wintry world in which, friend—
less, Fanny singlehandedly tries to influence her fate.

Limited in knowledge of Fanny and Troy, the hypothetical "close ob-
server" of Fanny and Troy's plan to get married is not limited to know—
ledge of the scene as it appears at this point--he knows how "The river
would have been seen by day." It is as if Hardy wanted to let the ap-
pearances of the actions carry the full meaning to the reader, as if
Hardy thought that the moral clarity in Fanny's situation would be con-
fused by argument or a direct appeal to open-mindedness. It is worth
quoting an extensive passage to show the consistency and effect of the
treatment:

About this hour the snow abated: ten flakes fell where
twenty had fallen, then one had the room of ten. Not long af-
ter a form moved by the brink of the river.

By its outline upon the colourless background a close ob-
server might have seen that it was small. This was all that

‘ was positively discoverable, though it seemed human.

The shape went slowly along, but without much exertion, for
the snow, though sudden, was not as yet more than two inches
deep. At this time some words were spoken aloud:--

"One. Two. Three. Four. Five."

Between each utterance the little shape advanced about
half-a-dozen yards. It was evident now that the windows high
in the wall were being counted. The word "Five" represented
the fifth window from the end of the wall.

Here the spot stopped, and dwindled smaller. The figure

was stooping. Then a morsel of snow flew across the river to-
wards the fifth window. It smacked against the wall at a

 

 

70

point several yards from its mark. The throw was the idea of
a man conjoined with the execution of a woman. No man who had
ever seen bird, rabbit, or squirrel in his childhood, could
possibly have thrown with such utter imbecility as was shown
here.

Another attempt, and another; till by degrees the wall must
have become pimpled with the adhering lumps of snow. At last
one fragment struck the fifth window.

The river would have been seen by day to be of that deep
smooth sort which races middle and sides with the same gliding
precision, any irregularities of speed being immediately cor-
rected by a small whirlpool. Nothing was heard in reply to
the signal but the gurgle and cluck of one of these invisible
wheels--together with a few small sounds which a sad man would
have called moans, and a happy man laughter--caused by the
flapping of the waters against trifling objects in other parts
of the stream.

The window was struck again in the same manner.

Then a noise was heard, apparently produced by the opening
of the window. This was followed by a voice from the same
quarter:

"Who's there?"

The tones were masculine, and not those of surprise. The
high wall being that of a barrack in the army, and marriage
being looked upon with disfavour in the army, assignations and
communications had probably been made across the river before
to-night.

"Is it Sergeant Troy?" said the blurred spot in the snow,
tremulously.

This person was so much like a mere shade upon the earth,
and the other speaker so much a part of the building, that one
would have said the wall was holding a conversation with the
snow.

"Y68,'
you?"

"O, Frank--don't you know me?" said the spot. "Your wife,
Fanny Robin."

"Fanny!" said the wall, in utter astonishment.

"Yes," said the girl, with a half-suppressed gasp of emo-
tion.

There was something in the woman's tone which is not that
of the wife, and there was a manner in the man which is rarely
a husband's. (Ch. XI, pp. 97-98)

' came suspiciously from the shadow. "What girl are

This passage, long as it is, by no means constitutes the entire scene;
as Fanny and Troy plan their wedding, Hardy effaces the narrator almost
entirely and only returns the scene to it briefly, at the end, after
Fanny has left and after Troy has closed the window. The point is that
this external treatment of Fanny and her story, which is maintained

throughout, is as typical of Hardy's histor as is his commentary on the

 

71

general applications of the thematic particulars. The hallmark of Har-
dy's histor, whether suppressed or explicit, is localization of his nar-
rator in the fictional space.

In Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy, Dale Kramer points out that

 

it is the absence of authorial commentary on Farfrae that gives his char—
acter complexity and ambiguity.45 Kramer's idea is that Farfrae is just
as flawed as Henchard is but that Hardy suppresses criticism of and
judgment against him until after Henchard has been completely over-
thrown. Once "Farfrae's narrowness in personal relations" is made
clear, by his ease in getting over Lucetta's death, we remember that his
emotions seem shallow in his early relations with Henchard ("The young
man appeared much moved by Henchard's warm convictions of his value") as
well as in his sudden infatuation with Lucetta just after deciding to
marry Elizabeth-Jane.46 This narrative discretion serves the same func—
tion here that it does in Eustacia's introduction and in Fanny Robin's
story, for the truth lies in the appearances. In the case of The Mayor

of Casterbridge, Farfrae's personal strengths and weaknesses are irrele-

 

vant next to his role as Henchard's challenger and replacement--irrele-
vant, that is, until he is mayor himself and therefore vulnerable to
destruction caused by general social change. At that point, the point
at which Fanny dies in her story and the point at which Hardy turns to
Eustacia's inner world, Farfrae is Opened to inspection and analysis.

The narration of personal histories, then, requires that the histor
"keep his own silence" as well as keep a particular kind of temporal
distance.47 That Hardy's characteristic kind of narrator is an expres-
sion of his desire to keep distance from emotional involvements as well
as to live them vicariously is J. Hillis Miller's great insight into

Hardy.48 This distance, which except for the very end of The

72

Well-Beloved takes the form of temporal, historical distance, shows Har-
dy (and his histor) to be outsiders of the world he describes. This con-
dition of being an outsider is at the heart of all of Hardy's histor's
attributes. In general, that is, a histor is recognized by the authori—
tative commentary which he or she provides to the novel: Hardy's histor,
however, is individual in that, whether or not he comments explicitly on
a character, he tells the story from outside the milieu in which the
character acts. This exteriority explains the "pedantic" language,
which is the language of the outside world; it explains the strongly
historical context for all the novels, including the just-off-stage
presences of George III, Napoleon, Admiral Nelson, and the Royal Person-
age who visits Casterbridge when Farfrae is mayor.

P. N. Furbank believes that Hardy's "model, for himself as a novel-
ist," comes first from his image of himself as a "countryman," a native
to Wessex."9 This "countryman" must, however, first of all be seen to
be a countryman returning from the outside world to narrate the story;
Hardy's histor is not a native who has stayed to tell stories from with-

in the community. Hardy himself is most explicit about this in the open-

ing of The Woodlanders which, like the opening of The Return of the Na-

 

tizg, describes the condition of the narrator as clearly as it does the
location of the setting. Even though Hardy will soon use Barber Per-
comb's perspective to present Little Hintock, he adopts the persona of
"The rambler" or "the loiterer" who comes to this spot "for old associa-
tion's sake":

The rambler who, for old association's sake, should trace the
forsaken coach-road running almost in a meridional line from
Bristol to the south shore of England, would find himself dur—
ing the latter half of his journey in the vicinity of some ex-
tensive woodlands, interspersed with apple-orchards. . . . At
one place, on the skirts of Blackmoor Vale, where the bold
brow of High-Stoy Hill is seen two or three miles ahead, the

 

73

leaves lie so thick in autumn as to completely bury the track.
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
have wetted it, return upon the mind of the loiterer. (Ch. I,
p. 1)
Clearly, the "outside" from which the narrator returns is separated from
Wessex by more than the kind of distance which can be crossed by train,
since these woods carry with them "associations" of personal and general
historical significance. The persona is that of a historian of both
personal and collective histories.

To pick up all the threads again, then: the "pedantic" language of
the histor is the language of the outside world applied to Wessex; Har-
dy's histor is a precisely located observer, whose perspective is as
firmly attached to the fictional space as any character's, however mov-
able it may be from moment to moment; Hardy's histor makes his points as
much by letting appearances tell their tales as by direct authoritative
commentary; this histor whose language is that of the outside world is a

"countryman,"

one who knows well the regions he describes, but who is no
longer a "native" and is in Wessex again only as a visitor; finally, the
histor knows not only the area but its history, and not only its history
but the personal histories of those who live there.

To call Hardy's persona "historian," then, is to tell only half the
story, since a historian narrates the world's events, while Hardy's hig-

tor narrates personal ones. J. Hillis Miller has everything right in

this description of Under the Greenwood Tree except the proximity of the

 

histor to "living memory" of the events (Pt. I, Ch. i; p. 5). Hardy's
histor is excluded from living under the greenwood tree, but he is not
so far from it that he does not remember it. Miller says:

Outside these two levels of consciousness, the numb involve-
ment in traditional life of the rustics and the relative

 

74

self-consciousness of Fancy and Dick, there is the conscious-
ness of the narrator who tells the story. He is more knowing,
objective, and cynical than any of the characters. In his ob-
jectivity, the objectivity of the "loving" historian of old
country ways, he undercuts what he describes. He destroys it
in the act of celebrating it, according to that paradox of the
historical imagination whereby the deliberate representation
of a traditional way of life testifies to the historian's ex-
clusion from it. To see life under the greenwood tree so
clearly and to describe it with such optic detachment, however
sympathetically, is to be separated from it, to be unable to
live it unthinkingly from the inside.50

Criticizing Miller, Daniel R. Schwartz puts emphasis on the fact that
the novel ends with the nonverbal, natural, and expressive nightingale:
The narrator's reliance upon literary convention, in the form
of the nightingale's call, to convey the novel's moral signif-
icance seems finally a refusal to take on an interpretive role
that would bridge the distance between his position within the
pastoral community and the world of the "madding crowd." His
use of the pastoral calendar to measure time, the prose epi-
thalamium of the closing chapter, and his refusal to intellec-
tualize the greenwood tree into a literary symbol demonstrate
that the narrator is a part of the world that he lyricizes.51
Supporting Schwartz's case are the many instances in which the histor
seems to be describing a world he knows intimately; supporting Miller's
are these same examples, which present the narrator as one returning,
from the outside, to places he used to know intimately. Keeping in mind
that, more often than not, Hardy's histor is somehow returning to the
scene of his own past, as it were, it is exactly correct to characterize
the histor as a historian or, as P. N. Furbank puts it better, as "the

52

local antiquarian." This persona is explicit in quite a large number

of Hardy's novels and stories. A Group of Noble Dames and Life's Little

 

 

Ironies are both groups of stories told within the frame of traditions
of local narrative histories. The histor is "the judicious chronicler"
in Two on a Tower and "a chronicler of moods and deeds" and "the chroni-
53

cler of these lives" in Jude.

The Trumpet-Major concerns itself directly with history, with the

75
historian, and with the impact of history on the personal lives of citi-
zens peripheral to the large figures who normally go to make up our his-
tories. As "the local antiquarian" of the lives of those touched by the
world's events, the narrator dominates this novel. The first paragraph
has a nostalgic quality that suggests the "Once upon a time" opening of
traditional fairy tales, but even this early in the novel Hardy is con-
cerned to dramatize the narrator as learned, as a reporter of researched
and researchable events:
In the days of high-waisted and muslin-gowned women, when the
vast amount of soldiering going on in the country was a cause
of much trembling to the sex, there lived in a village near
the Wessex coast two ladies of good report, though unfortu—
nately of limited means. The elder was a Mrs. Martha Garland,
a landscape-painter's widow, and the other was her only daugh-
ter Anne. (Ch. I, p. 37)
The reference to the two women being "of good report" is in keeping with
the general attitude of the histor in this novel as one who, as it were,
footnotes his observation. Benjamin Derriman's house is a case in point:
The hall was as interesting as mansions in a state of declen-
sion usually are, as the excellent county history showed.
That popular work in folio contained an old plate dedicated to
the last scion of the original owners, from which drawing it
appeared that in 1774, the date of publication, the windows
were covered with little scratches like black flashes of
lightning; that a horn of hard smoke came out of each of the
many chimneys, that a lady and a lap-dog stood on the lawn in
a strenuously walking position; and a substantial cloud and
nine flying birds of no known species hung over the trees to
the north-east. (Ch. V1, p. 71)

These references to more or less scholarly substantiation are bal-
anced consistently through the novel by clear references to the personal
memory of the histor. We know that the histor has visited Overcombe
Mill and has heard this story from the members of the Loveday family.54
All these memories are filtered through the memory of the "local anti-

quarian," who at every turn also "remembers" the futures of the charac-

ters whose pasts he is describing:

76

While the troops loitered on their horses, and chatted to the
miller across the stream, he gathered bunches of [hherries],
and held them up over the garden hedge for the acceptance of
anybody, who would have them; whereupon the soldiers rode into
the water to where it had washed holes in the garden bank,
and, reining their horses there, caught the cherries in their
forage-caps, or received bunches of them on the ends of their
switches, with the dignified laugh that became martial men
when stOOping to slightly boyish amusement. It was a cheer-
ful, careless, unpremeditated half-hour, which returned like
the scent of a flower to the memories of some of those who en-
joyed it, even at a distance of many years after, when they
lay wounded and weak in foreign lands. (Ch. III, p. 52)

This sense in which the futures of the characters are a part of what is
already past is as essential to Hardy's presentation as the historical
posture of his narrator. Barbara Hardy also points out this passage as
an example of "Hardy's historical imagination," of how such an imagina-
tion emphasizes what the narrator knows as well as what the characters
do not know:
Unlike the tensions we feel for dramatic characters' innocence
of the future, what we feel in Hardy is a double vision of the
A soldiers' innocence and the author's and readers' wisdom after
the events. The two points of view are not implicit as in
Shakespeare, but explicitly set side by side. The admission
that the simple story of the three lovers, so important and
urgent to them, is all over is a truth native to Hardy's his-
torical imagination. It has many effects. One of them is a
poignant underlining of the casual moment.55
Another of the "effects" of "Hardy's historical imagination," and
one of its most important, is his recurring use of cycles or repetitions
in his novels. That Hardy uses the cycle of repeated actions and char-
acters to structure his novels is a critical commonplace, and a cyclic
form can be seen in virtually all his fiction. Any succession of lovers,
as can be found in young Jethway, Stephen Smith, Henry Knight, and Lord
Luxellian in A Pair of Blue Eyes, Gabriel Oak, Frank Troy, Farmer Bold-

wood, and Gabriel Oak again in Far from the Madding Crowd, Suke Damson,

Grace Melbury, Felice Charmond, and Grace Melbury again in The Woodland-

 

ers, and Marcia Bencomb, the three Avices, and Marcia Leverre again in

77
The Well-Beloved, makes up a cycle when Hardy narrates it. Any replace-

 

ment of one character by another, as can be found in the two Cythereas

in Desperate Remedies, Henchard and Farfrae in The Mayor of Casterbridge,

 

 

and Tess and 'Liza-Lu in Tess, makes up another. Most important for

this study, however, is the fact that each of these cycles begins, as it

were, outside the novel, with some other people at some other time.56

To Hardy, it is the fact that there is, as in Eustacia's case, "the list
of those who love too hotly to love long and well" that makes her story
worth telling (Bk. III, Ch. v; p. 245). This is a conception of the in-
dividual in a community which requires an external and historicist voice
to describe, because the characters are never completely aware of their

places in the cycle. Even when Tess explicitly acknowledges that she is

"one of a long row only,‘ she says it to avoid knowing more:

". . . what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row
only, finding out that there is set down in some old book
somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her
part; making me sad, that's all. The best is not to remember
that your nature and your past doings have been just like
thousands' and thousands', and that your coming life and do-
ings 'll be like thousands' and thousands'." (Ch. XIX, p. 162)

The exception to this apparent requirement that this theme be ex-

pressed in direct commentary is The Well-Beloved, which is an experiment-

 

al and only partially successful novel. It is concerned most explicitly
with the idea of repeating lives and actions, but it is Hardy's novel
least dominated by the histor. The point of The Well-Beloved is that
Jocelyn Pierston's search for the Well-Beloved has logic and consistency
from his point of view, however bizarre it may appear outside it. Hardy
manages to illustrate both the consistency and the bizarreness in the
same idea, that of the succeeding generations of Avices, a complexity of
purpose which usually calls for the histor in his fiction. By using the

three Avices to symbolize the persistence of the ideal, Hardy sacrifices

78

his usual more realistic and psychological orientation, a loss for which
the concentration on Jocelyn's perception does not quite substitute. It
may be no coincidence that The Well-Beloved is the only one of the cy-
clic novels that provides a way out of the repetitions: this is Hardy's
novel least narrated by the histor and it is Hardy's only novel in which
the repetitions come to an end; it may be possible to read into this
that the only way to stop the cycle is to abandon the more objective and
historical perspective and to immerse the novel into the perspective of
a particular individual, even one who believes, as it were, in the Roman
gods. It may be, in other words, the long view that the histor provides
that encourages Hardy to see his characters as elements in a cycle.

It would be a mistake to end a discussion of Hardy's histor without
once mentioning The Dynasts which, while not prose, can certainly be re-
garded as narrative and which, while not purely fictional, can certainly
not be regarded as history. In fact, the most important difference be-

tween The Dynasts and Hardy's other narratives is that in The Dynasts he

 

gives identities to the perspectives external to the characters and
there is no internal presentation of characters' mental processes. As
soon as we remember, however, Hardy's hypothetical observers and the
specified, however shifting, locations of his narrative perceivers, we
can see that the personifications of Pity, Irony, and History are not so
very different from the multiple roles played by Hardy's histor in the
novels. It is interesting that the effect of personifying these per-
spectives, these ways of observing and interpreting events, is to make
them seem personal and local to a particular point of view, the "pas-
sionless" and consistent Spirit of the Years as well as the "impression—
able and inconsistent" Spirit of the Pities.S7 There is another "voice"

in The Dynasts which also replaces the narrator in the novels; there are

 

79

the descriptions of what happens and what characters do, including their
entrances and exits, and descriptions of what things look like. The
content of these descriptions makes this voice as important as, for exam-
ple, George Bernard Shaw's stage directions and authorial commentary in

his plays. Essential to the meaning of The Dynasts is the last stanza

 

of the Chorus, at the end, which says:

But-~a stirring thrills the air
Liketgsounds of joyance there
That the rages
Of the ages
Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts
that were,
Consciousness the Will informing, till It fashion all things
fair! (After Scene, p. 256)

 

 

 

Just as essential, in the voice Hardy uses for stage directions, is the
description in the After Scene of Europe as it appears from the Over-
world:
Europe has now sunk netherward to its far-off position as in
the Fore Scene, and it is beheld again as a prone and emaci-
ated figure of which the Alps form the vertebrae, and the
branching mountain-chains the ribs, the Spanish Peninsula
shaping the head of the €corche. The lowlands look like a
grey-green garment half-thrown off, and the sea around like a
disturbed bed on which the figure lies. (After Scene, p. 251)
It cannot be said, then, that Hardy's histor disappears or even loses
importance during the course of his career. To regard The Well-Beloved
as Hardy's last novel is to give it its due place as his most "subjec-
tive" work, the one narrated most consistently from the perspective of
a character, but to regard The Well-Beloved as Hardy's last narrative is
is to over-emphasize his decreasing reliance on the histor.58
The perspective of the histor is as native to Hardy's imagination

as the historical nature of narrative is; as much as anything else can,

this perspective can be regarded as Hardy's "idiosyncratic mode of

80

"59 A "mode of regard," perception, is related to perspective in

regard.
Hardy; no matter how fictive or "omniscient," every perceiver sees
things from a particular point of view, from a single vantage point,
which helps to make that perception local to the perceiver. The per-
ceiver of a Hardy scene, whether narrator of character, whether histor
or hypothetical observer, can almost always be located in the fictional
space. It is to believe terminology over experience, then, to charac-
terize Hardy's histor as "objective" and his characters as "subjective."
There is more to perception in Hardy, moreover, than merely seeing. Oc-
casionally, he credits a community or group of people with opinions or

ideas, as he does here, in this passage from Far from the Madding Crowd:

 

It was eventually known that Gabriel, though paid a fixed wage
by Bathsheba independent of the fluctuation of agricultural
profits, had made an engagement with Boldwood by which Oak was
to receive a share of the receipts--a small share certainly,
yet it was money of a higher quality than mere wages, and ca-
pable of expansion in a way that wages were not. Some were
beginning to consider Oak a "near" man, for though his condi-
tion had thus far improved, he lived in no better style than
before, occupying the same cottage, paring his own potatoes,
mending his stockings, and sometimes even making his bed with
his own hands. But as Oak was not only provokingly indiffer-
ent to public opinion, but a man who clung persistently to old
habits and usages, simply because they were old, there was
room for doubt as to his motives. (Ch. XLIX, p. 381)

Most often, however, judgments and opinions are associated with a single
observer who has a particular perspective. Even though Hardy maintained
his use of the histor, he also increasingly depended on perspective as a
determining factor in characters' ideas. This left Hardy in the para-
doxical position of using a fictional device which allows for impersonal
and omniscient narration of a world which, Hardy believed, could be
known only personally and locally. This is faith in the value of a per-
sonal perspective, and such a faith led Hardy to characterize his narra-

tor specifically, however incompletely in the novels. Hardy's use of

81

this voice affirms in a kind of backwards way the authority of the indi-

vidual perceiver, whose qualifications for authority in Hardy's case ex-

ist merely in distance--temporal and cultural--from the events which are

so engaging and encompassing to the participants. The perspective, how-

ever, of the participants, of the characters in Hardy's novels, is also a
-source of truth.

Hardy's histor is such an essential part of his novels that any
summary seems too brief to be true. Almost any discussion of themes in
Hardy's novels, for example, would also be a discussion of Hardy's 2337
£25, with critical focus being drawn to what might be called the narra-
tor's "conceptual," rather than visual, perspective. Daniel R. Schwarz
finds a pattern in the development of Hardy's histor through his major
novels: in Far from the Madding Crowd the histor's "effort" is "to re-

cover for himself the innocence of rustic life"6o; in The Return of the

 

 

Native the histor imposes order on the chaotic heath by describing it,
even in the first chapter, as it pertains to Clym's eventual fate; be-

ginning with The Mayor of Casterbridge, Schwarz says, Hardy's "narra-

 

tors become increasingly the chroniclers of patterns of history that
Hardy viewed with despair"--he does this as "the spokesman for Tess's
emotional and moral consciousness" and by focussing on "the emotional

"6' The apparently "disproportion-

and psychic responses of . . . Jude.
ate" "gloom and bitterness" at the beginning of'gudg, like that at the
beginning of The Return of the Native, is the result of "Jude's com-
pleted life" dominating the "consciousness" of the histor. The greatest
advantage to a continuation of a study of Hardy's histor is that it
might be able to correct those instances in which a phrase like "'Jus-

tice' was done, and the President of the Immortals, in AEschylean phrase,

had ended his sport with Tess" is used to indicate Hardy's philosophical

82

ideas rather than the formulation for a particular novel of that novel's
histor's more or less consistent perspective (Ch. LIX, p. 508).

This study, however, is concerned not only with Hardy's histor, but
also with his other means of narration and how they relate to his ideas
about consciousness. There is a noticeable change in Hardy's narration
over the years in which he wrote novels, from a reliance on the histor,
sometimes relatively impersonal in the early ones, to a reliance on the
characters' perceptions, accompanied by a more personal and sometimes
less obtrusive histor. To put it in mechanical terms, it is possible to
count the number of instances in which Hardy narrates from a character's

perspective in Desperate Remedies, while the histor seems ubiquitous;

 

The Well—Beloved is narrated almost exclusively from Jocelyn's perspec-
tive, and instances of narration by the histor can be identified and
counted. The difference is in the matrix of narration, the perspective
which Hardy used as the norm. Just as the histor in Hardy is reliable
and central for an understanding of the forces at work in the world, his
characters are a source of truth, precisely because they are the partic-
ipants in the events. It is necessary, then, to turn to Hardy's means of
narrating the perspectives of his characters to understand the nature of
his presentation of consciousness and his development as a writer of fic—

tion.

Chapter Three: Close Narration and the Personal Perspective

This chapter deals with "close" narration, which Hardy used to nar-
rate the perspectives, thoughts, and feelings of the individual charac-
ters. Hardy's steadily increasing use of this kind of narration makes
him seem modern in the same way that his steady dependence on the histor
makes him seem Victorian. As will be seen, however, narration which
presents the processing of a character's consciousness is no more modern
than the novel itself, but a reliance on this kind of narration means
that the author's focus is on the unique perspective of the individual
and on the actions of the consciousness of that individual. There comes
a point for some authors, moreover, at which the focus shifts from the
consciousness of a perceiving character to the narration used to present
that consciousness and that perception. There is no evidence that Hardy
ever deliberately decided to use or not to use narration close to a char-
acter for any particular passage. There is plenty of evidence that he
experimented with the identification and number of main characters and
with structural units in a novel, and with descriptions of consciousness
itself. There is also plenty of evidence that he was actively concerned
with the condition of the "sensitive" individual in the world.1 His con-
cern with these abstract notions of the novel and of consciousness led
him, perhaps unconsciously, to the use of close narration.

The first half of this chapter will show that the use of close nar-
ration is not a good means of identifying the early modern writers, for
Charles Dickens and Henry James both well before 1890 seem to have an

83

84

acute awareness of its value and use. The second half of this chapter

will explore instances of close narration in Charles Dickens' Dombey and

 

Son, Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Hardy's Desperate Remedies,

 

Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Hardy's The Well—Beloved, and

 

 

Kate Chopin's The Awakening. The close narration in Hardy's major novels

 

is the subject of Chapter Four.

A. The Terminology for the Presentation of Consciousness in the Novel

Ever since James Joyce published Ulysses, critics have been trying
to define the stream-of-consciousness technique, to document its origins,
and to describe its boundaries. The very abundance of this critical
work suggests the revolutionary impact which this technique has had on
fiction and on the description of narration. The develOpment of the
technique itself is the result of large forces at work in western soci-
ety since the Renaissance, and most intensely since the beginning of the
nineteenth century.2 It is well, therefore, not to claim too much for
any single author or critic. This change in fictional style presupposes
a change in the subject-matter of fiction--from the world outside people
to the one inside them. For many reasons and in many ways, there has
been a change in the popular understanding of perception and it is this
which has caused the change in fiction. Historically, with the advance
of stream of consciousness, the use of a characterized, independent,
"objective" narrative voice recedes. One thing which sets Victorian
fiction apart from preceding and subsequent fiction is that, in the
great realistic novels of the nineteenth century, both narrative tech-
niques appeared in some form in the same novels--there were both "sub—

jective" and "objective" narration and neither was quite was it is

 

 

 

85

independently. Hardy's fiction is significant in this context in that
his search for a way to express the actions of his characters' minds
takes him increasingly closer to stream of consciousness even though he
never gives up the reliability of the authorial, "omniscient" voice of
the story-teller. It can also be said that, in spite of notions of
"progress" in the novel, both forms still exist and often coexist today.

Some of the terminology created to name this "subjective" technique
is limited by definition to what appears at the end of Ulysses and in
Finnegans Wake--the two most important are "monologue intérieur" and
"stream of consciousness." Edouard Dujardin, who is most famous for the
use of the term "monologue intérieur," insists that it is not a general
technique but the form Joyce takes, at the end of Ulysses, in Molly's
monologue.3 In fact, Dujardin finds only a few lines of it in Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man." In tracing the origins and development
of this very precisely named and constituted technique, he finds examples
of it in only a few novels, scattered through Danish, English, French,
and Spanish early twentieth-century fiction, and he insists that the
"formula" which these novels exemplify is new. He concludes that the
environment which created the technique arose with the "movement of 1885"
in France and is that of the symbolist poets.5 The form of the mono-
logue itself comes from the theatre, in which, he says, "true dramatic
dialogue" is made up of the continual combination of "concealed dialogue"
(which expresses the "soul" of the character) and "so-called dialogue"
itself.6

To be monologue intérieur, a passage must meet four requirements.
The character must be directly self-expressive so that "the intervention,
at least the apparent intervention of the author" is eliminated.7 Basi-

cally, the sentences in the passage must literally be in first person;

 

 

 

86
and that is why Dujardin finds so little of it in Portrait. Second,

monologue intérieur must be of the genre of the "traditional monologue"
of the theatre and be "a discourse without listener," if we disregard,
as is usual, any phenomenon outside the world of the fiction like the
reader, audience, or actors off-stage.8 Having fulfilled the require-
ments of the monologue, the passage must also be "interior." The dig-
222£§_is not written as if it were "pronounced"--also like the "tradi-
tional monologue"--because "if the monologue in the theatre is spoken
aloud, it is by virtue of a convention which is necessary; . . . theo-
retically, the object of the monologue is to express the thoughts and
not to report the words."9 The fourth requirement also has to do with

interiority and is the "essential novelty which the monologue interieur

 

brings to bear." Its "object" is "to evoke the uninterrupted flux of
thoughts which flash across the soul of the character, in proportion as
they are born and in the order in which they are born, without explain-

ing the logical sequence, and giving the impression of a 'tout

t.'"lo

venan In other words, the thoughts expressed by the characters

must be represented in their prerational, preverbal--or, as Dujardin
prefers--their "irrational" form.

"Stream of consciousness" is, in this context at least, a relative-
ly old term, coined by William James to describe mental processes for
psychologists. Speaking as precisely as possible about the term, Robert
Humphrey defines it as

a type of fiction in which the basic emphasis is placed on ex-
ploration of the prespeech levels of consciousness for the
purpose, primarily, of revealing the psychic being of the
characters.

When some of the novels which fall into this classification
are considered, it becomes immediately apparent that the tech-
nique by which the subjects are controlled and the characters
are presented are palpably different from one novel to the
next. Indeed, there is no streamrof-consciousness technique.

87

Instead, there are several quite different techniques which
are used to present stream of consciousness.ll

The point that stream of consciousness is best regarded as "a type of
fiction" and as mental processing is a very useful one, and it helps
classify much more exactly than usual who writes this kind of fiction

and for what purposes. The greatest flaw with this kind of precision, of
course, and it is not Humphrey's flaw, is that almost nobody uses the
term this narrowly. It seems most wise to understand as symptomatic the
need for terminology to describe, not what is narrated, but the technique
used to narrate it rather than merely to dismiss as "loose" the current
usage of "stream of consciousness."

Different conceptually from Dujardin's monologue intérieur and from

 

Humphrey's "stream of consciousness," Charles Bally's "style indirect
libre" and Gfinter Steinberg's "erlebte Rede" describe a larger and more
wide-spread phenomenon. Although Bally defines the form in grammatical
terms (i.e., by the presence and form of introductory verbs), he does
not see the ggylg_indirect as "a form of grammar, it is an attitude of
the spirit, and aspect, a particular angle from which one perceives
things."12 And, he goes on to say, "it is not purely a psychological
observation which makes it possible to detect this form of thought, it
is inferred from the very study of the language."'3 There are five "imr
perceptible" steps from k Eli-E indirect p_u_r_ to _13 s_tyl_e_ indirect _l_i_b__r_e.,
depending on how extensively and explicitly the indirect object in the
sentence is subordinated. Essentially, however, the EEZlE indirect is
the general form of the presentation of consciousness; the §£y12_indirect
pug is an extreme and highly specialized form and it is probably identi-

cal to the monologue intErieur.

Richard Ohmann translates "le style indirect libre" into "free

 

 

 

88

indirect style" and uses it to describe only the linguistic characteris-
tics of passages. Using the rules of Generative-Transformational gram-
mar, he analyses the sentence, "She had made him lie" from Ernest Hem—

14 Ohmann's kind of linguistic analysis is

ingway's "Soldier's Home."
valuable for the understanding of narrative forms as well as of style,
since it allows him to discern and describe distinctions among different
kinds or intensities of these forms as well as distinctions and differ—
ences among authors. Ohmann's analysis of "free indirect style" in
"Soldier's Home" demonstrates that this particular technique is a matter
of the author omitting or deleting syntactic items which would be pres-
ent in the "normal" third-person narrator's voice. There are three rules
which transform the sentence "He thought, 'She has made me lie'" to the
one which finally appears in Hemingway's story-~"She had made him lie"--
which, in context, is not a statement of "fact" but of the character's
perception. From the "quotation, or reported thought" ("He thought,

'She has made me lie'"), changes of "pronouns and of verb tense" produce
the sentence in the form of indirect discourse: "He thought that she had

' A deletion rule transforms the sentence into its final

made him lie.‘
form. Although the terms of Ohmann's analysis are modern, it is differ-
ent from other grammatical descriptions of this technique only in that
Ohmann makes no attempt to connect his analysis to implications concern—
ing the narrator as an entity, fictional or not.

Barbara Hardy finds erlebte §£§§_to be a "useful concept," describ-
ing as it does the grammatical relationship between the discours of the
narrator and that of the character.'5 Gfinter Steinberg says that a
reader may know what a character says by the fact that the language

takes the form of direct discourse (directer Rede), indirect discourse

(indirecter Rede) or experienced discourse (erlebte Rede). Steinberg

 

89

sees this technique as an attempt to merge written and spoken language,
making the written form syntactically simpler and, hence, more like the
spoken language.16 He also finds that certain adverbial phrases of

' and conditional verb forms, like "would," are very

time, like "now,'
common in English erlebte Rede.l7 Less common, perhaps, but just as in-
teresting, is the mixing of verb forms, as in this example from Ulysses

which Steinberg cites:

And Father Conmee smiled and saluted. How did she do.
A fine carriage she had.18

 

 

Often there are interrogatives in erlebte BESS! usually occurring exact-
ly as the character would ask them (without, however, quotation marks or
the usual signals that the character is actually speaking); the explana-
tion of the origin of this practice and its relation to other instances
of erlebte Redg_has been a point of discussion among critics from the
beginning.'9

Steinberg finds and reports the finding of instances of erlebte
3522.1“ the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Ariosto, Mateo Aleman,
Cervantes, and Sebastian May.20 He calls, with Bally, La Fontaine "the
first virtuoso" of erlebte 3325 in French literature. In the eighteenth
century, Steinberg finds erlebte Redg_"sporadically" in authors of
French, English, and German literature; he names particularly Marivaux,
Richardson, and Wieland. The change with the nineteenth century is a

matter of the technique becoming integral to novelists art" and

"style .

In the 19th century, then, Jane Austen, . . . above all Flau-
bert . . . and George Eliot . . . made [erlebte Redg? one
characteristic component of their narrative art and, through
their model, contributed to the fact that this presentation of
discourse in their language turned into an important feature
of the style of the more recent narrative literature. While
[érlebte Rede) is embedded in the report in Flaubert's and al-
so 1n George Eliot's novels, it begins to push back and to

90

overrun the report in particular works of Meredith . . . and
Zola . . . .21

Steinberg identifies the second half of the nineteenth century as the

time when this form proliferated; erlebte Rede is a description of the

 

same phenomenon which the "indirect style,‘ especially the "free indi-

rect style," describes.

There are other terms for this kind of narration than these, which
are in more or less common use. Philip Stevick identifies what he calls
"naive narration," which occurs, for example, when "the anonymous author
does not merely affect the voice suggestive of a hungry and clever boy
but writes, ventriloquist style, as if the words issued from the boy

22

himeelf." "Naive narration" seems to refer to something corresponding

to the st le indirect, ran in in intensit from libre to u :
._JL__.________ 8 8 y _____. IL_.

In some sense, most of the novels of the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries contain versions of naive narration. A sub-
stantial number of novelists, for example, play here and there
at self-derogation: Fielding, Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens,
Meredith. Other novelists contrast forms of rustic simplicity
with urban corruption, as Mrs. Gaskell does, or Hardy, a jux-
taposition that lends itself to passages in which the novel-
ist's voice is apt to take on a certain sympathetic naiveté.23

Stevick's main emphasis is towards the pur end of the style indirect,
since his interest is really in "sustained" narration of this type.
In his knowledgeable "Types of Subjective Narration in the Novels

of Dickens," Robert W. Duncan adds these names to the list we already

have: "subjective narration, reported speech, substitutionary
speech," and "free indirect speech."24 Arguing that Dickens deserves
more credit than he gets for his narration, Duncan finds that the usual
terminology is insufficient for making the necessary distinctions in
Dickens' narrative:

While discussions of subjective narration generally make dis-

tinctions between dialogue and monologue, and between thought
and speech, the play of ambiguity and the possibility of a

91

choral source in a number of passages in the novels [of Dick-
ens] suggest the need for specifying four distinct groups: 1)
speech of single characters; 2) dialogue; 3) thoughts of char-
acter; and 4) choral voice or presence of the narrator as an
imagined participant. The first three involve communication--
spoken, implied, or thought--while the last may introduce an
invisible narrator as a participant in an action or as a cho-
ral commentator.25

Duncan's system is provocative in that he makes equally important all
four "groups" of impled sources for narrative information, regardless of
their general relative frequency or use in heightening the most impor-
tant scenes. His most useful contribution is his defense of Dickens'
subjective narration: Dickens, Duncan says, "was issuing his eleventh
novel when Flaubert's first novel appeared," even though Flaubert has
sometimes been credited with being "the decisive innovator in this
field."26
Once begun, the list of terms for this kind of narration seems to
go on infinitely. Sometimes the critic introduces new terminology to
make distinctions, as Duncan does, which reflect the particularities of
the author under study; at other times, critical interest seems focussed
on larger concerns relating, for instance, the author to the fictional-
ity of the work. J. Hillis Miller, for whom these minor distinctions
are unimportant, reports yet another term:
A novel is in various ways a chain of displacements-—displace-
ment of its author into the invented role of the narrator,
further displacement of the narrator into the lives of imagi-
nary characters whose thoughts and feelings are presented in
that odd kind of ventriloquism called "indirect discourse,"
. . . displacement of the "origin" of the story (in historical
events or in the life experience of the author) into the fic-
titious events of the narrative.27
He calls "indirect discourse" "odd," he says, because
rather than speaking directly as the character, as Edgar Ber-
gen speaks as Charlie McCarthy, or as Joyce speaks as MOlly
Bloom in the interior monologue of her soliloquy, the author

in indirect discourse pretends to be a narrator who speaks for
the character, lending him words in a form of language which

92

always involves some degree of ironical distance or difference.

The displacement involved is present in the linguistic strate-

gy employed.28
Before calling a halt to all this naming, it is necessary to introduce
two more sets of terms. The first, "close narration," is the term which
will be used in this dissertation for the general form of narration
whereby the consciousness of a character, whether thoughts, feelings, or
words, are presented, using the voice of the narrator but enough of the
language and style of the character to make his or her voice "audible,"
or at least recOgnizable, as well. The second set of terms, from Gerard
Genette, has to do with the larger context of the kind or genre of nar-
rative to which the entire novel belongs.

All of these terms describe one or another part of the general
technique of narration in which a character's consciousness is rendered
for the reader while it remains mediated by the structural elements of
the narrator's discourse. Stream of consciousness and monologue interi—
ESE are different from the rest in that they are not mediated in this
way except, as always, insofar as dialoue itself is mediated. The rest
signify, essentially, the same phenomenon, and some make distinctions
among kinds or forms of this same phenomenon. "Close" is a more conve-
nient term for the kind of narration usually called erlebte £2923 £5212.

' in which the character's mono-

indirect 12255, "free indirect style,‘
logue or dialogue is mediated by the narrator but still knowable as the
character's. "Close" is borrowed from sewing to suggest the rich effect
for the reader it provides and the sometimes tedious care for the author
it requires; such a borrowing provides for the density of texture and
detail in the flow of the narrative which is the hallmark of twentieth-

century fiction. For the writer, its emphasis on technical virtuosity

connotes the precise planning and slow reworking of a piece or section

93

which we know that most serious modern writers take. The term also has
the merit of suggesting for the reader that the character is not indi-
vidualized from the narrator as usual, that there is no necessary dis-
tance between them: that they are intellectually and emotionally "close."
The lack of distinction between the voices of the narrator and the char-
acter allows authors, without the aid of allegory, to use as plot and
setting the events and interiors of characters' minds. "Close," then,
refers neither to the perceiver nor to the producer, but to the form
narration takes when the narrator renders the character's consciousness.
For Gerard Genette, what I call "close" narration is divided into
several different kinds of narrative discourse. "Transposed discourse"
refers to the technique of rendering dialogue in the free indirect style,
and thus it describes the operation of the narrator summarizing dialogue
that is never reported directly, summarizing it as if the fiction were
reality. Charles Dickens used this form of narration quite frequently.
One of the best examples of "transposed discourse" in all of English-

language literature occurs in Bleak House (1852-53) at Nemo's.inquest

 

when Anastasia Piper and Jo give their evidence. Although the length of
the passage makes full quotation impractical, it is important to remem-
ber that this bit of it, Jo's testimony, occurs in the context of narra-
tive treatment which purports to present the characters in their most
unvarnished and, for most of them, undignified state:

0! Here's the boy, gentlemen!

Here he is, very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged. How,
boy!--But stop a minute. Caution. This boy must be put
through a few preliminary paces.

Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don't know that
everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don't
know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough
for him. Hg don't find no fault with it. Spell it! No. He.
can't spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been
to school. What's home? Knows a broom's a broom, and knows

94

it's wicked to tell a lie. Don't recollect who told him about
the broom, or about the lie, but knows both. Can't exactly
say what'll be done to him arter he's dead if he tells a lie
to the gentlemen here, but believes it'll be something wery
bad to punish him, and serve him right--and so he'll tell the
truth.29

"Transposed discourse" is common in Dickens, even in novels with less

spectacular narrative effects than Bleak House. Hardy uses it as well,

 

but nowhere as extensively or as centrally as Dickens does.

The general phenomenon of close narration Genette calls "internally
focalized," and its text he calls an "internally focalized £§£i£."30 It
is distinguished from the "externally focalized" or "nonfocalized Eggit"
which describes narration which is "focussed" outside the consciousness
of the characters. Because Genette seems to refer to the general orien-
tation of the narrative as a whole rather than to shifting orientations
within the text, "internally focalized EEEEE? is not identical to "close

' which refers to passages of narration which dramatize a

narration,‘
character's perception within a text which is usually what Genette would
call "externally focalized" or "nonfocalized." To handle smaller units
of text, Genette distinguishes between "fixed" and "variable" focaliza-
tion, so what I am calling "close" narration would be in Genette's sys-
tem an instance of internal focalization in a "variable internally focal-
ized fit." (A "multiple internally focalized 5.6.23." is epistolary.)
All of Hardy's novels, then, are variable internally focalized recits,
and our interest is in the instances of internal focalization in them.
Close narration, as I have described it here, is not the same as
stream of consciousness or the interior monologue, as they have been
narrowly defined. It is an interesting question what exactly the rela-

tionship between close narration and these extreme forms is. If there

is a qualitative difference between close narration and stream of

95

consciousness, then that difference must be describable and it must be
possible to determine in every instance whether a passage is close to a
character or whether that passage is a representation of that charac-
ter's stream of consciousness. Moreover, if "interior monologue" is
different from "stream of consciousness," then that difference too
should be definable. The problem of the multiplying terminology is fur-
ther confused by the fact that each author interprets the possibilities
and formal characteristics of each kind of narration in different ways,
so that close narration in Dickens can be distinguished from that of
Hardy, as stream of consciousness in James Joyce can be distinguished

from that of William Faulkner. Even Dorothy Dayers in The Nine Taylors

 

(1932) makes her rendition of Lord Peter's stream of consciousness re-
flect the literary sources of her imagination rather than the conven-
tions offered by Joyce, Woolf, or Faulkner: the passages presenting his
stream of consciousness are set off from the rest of the text by quota-
tion marks and the individual thoughts are separated from each other by
ellipses.3|
It will be recalled that for Edouard Dujardin the difference be-
tween the two kinds of narration is qualitative. Austin Warren, on the
other hand, seems to regard them as the same "device":
A characteristic technical device of the objective novel is
what the Germans call "erlebte Rede", and the French "le st le
indirect libre" (Thibaudet) and "lg_monologue int€rieu?"'(Du-
jardin); and in English, the phrase stream of consciousness",
which goes back to William James, is the loose, inclusive cor-
respondent.32
For Charles Bally, the difference between l_e style indirect libre and l_e_
_3_t.L1e_ indirect pur is the result of "imperceptible" steps."3 This means

that:, for Bally, if the difference is not quite quantitative, then it is

certainly not a qualitative one. For Robert Humphrey, who advocates the

96

strict use of the term "stream of consciousness," there is a clear dif-
ference between stream of consciousness and other forms of narration,
partly based on the content of the passage in question and partly based
on class characteristics. Here, for example, Humphrey explains that he
does not consider Henry James in his list of stream-of—consciousness
writers
because it is obviously true that James is frequently con-
cerned with description of mental content. The salient thing
that differentiates him from.the stream-of-consciousness writ-
ers is the fact that he describes the rational weighing of in-
telligence; hence, he is concerned with consciousness on a
level which corresponds to the speech level. It lacks the
free-flowing, elliptic, and symbolic quality of true stream of
consciousness.
Humphrey handles the main problem of defining stream of consciousness--
as a narrative device--by insisting that there is more than one narra-
tive technique for depicting stream of consciousness; in fact, he says,
there are four: "direct interior monologue, indirect interior monologue,
omniscient description, and soliloquy. There are, in addition, several
special techniques with which a few writers have experimented."35
It is most interesting that "omniscient description" is one tech-
nique by which stream of consciousness can be rendered, since we usually
think of Joyce's near first-person rendering of Molly's consciousness
when we think of stream of consciousness as a technique. Humphrey's ex—
ample of omniscient stream of consciousness is Dorothy Richardson, whom
Humphrey calls "the twentieth-century pioneer in stream of conscious--
ness."36 Even more available for generous application (than "omniscient"
stream of consciousness) is what Humphrey calls the "indirect interior

monologue."

When he gets right down to describing these techniques and
providing examples of them, we can see that close narration is different

from "indirect interior monologue" only in that close narration appears

97

in realistic novels and "indirect interior monologue" appears in novels
of the genre stream of consciousness, a genre which, Humphrey admits,
began to disappear into the mainstream by the time of Faulkner.37 In
Humphrey's system, then, allowing for his original limitation of "stream
of consciousness" either to the form which mental processing takes or to
a genre of novels which flowered briefly at the beginning of this cen-
tury, close narration is a way of rendering characters' stream of con-
sciousness. The relation between them is that of a subset to a set:
what I call "close narration" is one of several forms possible.

One difference between close narration (erlebte BEES! l£.§£ZlS.EET
direct 13233) and stream of consciousness and interior monologue is that
one precedes the other two historically. As Steinberg suggests, close
narration and early forms for rendering stream of consciousness seem to
have appeared naturally and increasingly in the fiction of the nineteenth
century. The greatest single strides in the development of the tech-
nique appear in French and German fiction, but British literature is no-
table for its steady and almost universal adoption of the technique. In
the interests of space, I will not repeat any of the authors that Stein-
berg mentions; my interests lean towards extended passages of close nar-
ration whose placement in the novel has structural or thematic impor-
tance.38 There are, to my knowledge, no such central passages in Jane
Austen or George Eliot, though there are short passages which articulate
the intelligent characters' perspectives, usually to show their partial
comprehension. The examples presented here, from Charles Dickens, Henry
James, Oscar Wilde, Kate Chopin, and Hardy have more than historical imp
portance, especially those from Dickens and James. The examples from
Wilde and Chopin turn again slightly to Steinberg's emphasis on the his-

torical importance of the use of the technique: because of its impact on

98

the general--rather than the academic--readership, close narration sug-
gests very clearly the general understanding of individualism and the
popular conception of consciousness; that is, by virtue of the very
presence of close narration in a novel, the reader knows that there is

a kind of democracy in consciousness in the author's fictional world,
that (in Victorian parlance) no matter how common or ill-bred, any char-
acter, and therefore any person, can have awareness and have a personal

perspective.

B. The Use of Close Narration: Dickens, James, Wilde, Chopin, and Hardy

It is always entertaining to look for narrative effects in Dickens'
works, mostly because, whatever the effect, the critic is nearly guaran-
teed of at least partial success. Close narration is no exception, and
one can choose among a large number of examples from nearly every novel,
each with varying degrees of closeness and intensities of style. Dick-
ens seems to find the greatest stimulus for writing this kind of narra-
tion in the illness of his characters, and he often goes to some trouble
to present the perspective of a character who borders on the delirious
and who slips in and out of consciousness.

Richard Swiveller, for instance, in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-
41), suffers what might be regarded as typically Dickensian symptoms in
his illness. He and "the Marchionness" are improved during the course of
the novel by acts of kindness and by each other, so that, by the end,
they are committed to goodness. This moment marks the turn-around for
each of them:

He awoke. With a sensation of most blissful rest, better

than sleep itself, he began gradually to remember something of
these sufferings, and to think what a long night it had been,

99

and whether he had not been delirious twice or thrice. Hap-
pening, in the midst of these cogitations, to raise his hand,
he was astonished to find how heavy it seemed, and yet how
thin and light it really was. Still he felt indifferent and
happy; and having no curiosity to pursue the subject, remained
in the same waking slumber until his attention was attracted
by a cough. This made him doubt whether he had locked his
door last night, and feel a little surprised at having a come
panion in the room. Still he lacked energy to follow up this
train of thought; and unconsciously fell, in a luxury of re-
pose, to staring at some green stripes on the bed-furniture,
and associating them strangely with patches of fresh turf,
while the yellow ground between made gravel-walks, and so
helped out a long perspective of trim gardens.

He was rambling in imagination on these terraces, and had
quite lost himself among them, indeed, when he heard the cough
once more. The walks shrunk into stripes again at the sound;
and raising himself a little in the bed, and holding the cur-
tain open with one hand, he looked out.

The same room certainly, and still by candle-light; but with
what unbounded astonishment did he see all those bottles, and
basins, and articles of linen airing by the fire, and such-
like furniture of a sick chamber--all very clean and neat, but
all quite different from anything he had left there, when he
went to bed! The atmosphere, too, filled with a cool smell of
herbs and vinegar; the floor newly sprinkled; the-~the what?
The Marchionness?

Yes; playing cribbage with herself at the table. There she
sat, intent upon her game, coughing now and then in a subdued
manner as if she feared to disturb hime-shuffling the cards,
cutting, dealing, playing, counting, pegging--going through
all the mysteries of cribbage as if she had been in full prac-
tice from her cradle!39

That Dick Swiveller and the Marchionness are redeemed is important in
this novel, and it explains why they are treated as closely as they are;
it suggests that a nurturing environment and the doing of good can in-
fluence people, especially those rather passive or weak individuals who
are controlled by the doers of evil.

In Nell's death, The Old Curiosity Shop offers a contrast to the

narrative treatment of Jo's death in Bleak House and Paul Dombey's death

 

in Dombey and Son. All three of these novels have complex narrative
structures, but The Old Curiosity Shgp seems in some ways, especially in
the narration, to be a less deliberately crafted novel than the others.

This distinction is relative, since, when The Old Curiosity Shop is

100

considered by itself, there is no lack of interesting narrative to dis-
cuss. First, the novel begins in the first person, with the narrator
identifying himself as someone who knew Nell, Kit, and the old man.
Second, Nell's death is not really narrated: we learn from the villagers
(in Chapter LVII) that she is surely dying, but we are not told of her
death until she has been dead for two days (in Chapter LXXI) after the
scene in which Kit arrives to take her home with him, only to find her
grandfather mistakenly believing that she is asleep in the next room and
that she is on the mend. Her dying is described so quickly, and with
such reserve and detachment, that our attention is inevitably turned to
the real subject of the narration, Nell's grandfather. The end of the
novel is really about him and his capsizing, not about her. Dickens'
histor, called a "chronicler," keeps the focus on the old man and on the
lessons to be learned from the death of one so young and good as Nell.40

In Dombey and Son (1847-48), Dickens' attention to narrative ar-

tistry is far more effective than it is in The Old Curiosity ShOp. This

 

is especially true of Paul's death: his dying takes two chapters, and
Paul remains at the center of narrative attention, except for one digres-
sion to show the effect of the news of his illness on some of his old
friends, from the time he gets sick at the private party with Mr. Feeder
and Mr. Toots until his death in his own bed at home. Paul's last ill-
ness takes up Chapter XIV, and in it Paul comes to terms with his past
and with his fears; even though he is unaware of the severity of his
illness--sometimes he even seems unconscious that he is sick at all--and
surprised by the solicitous behavior of the people around him, we know
how serious it is for him by what he overhears and by his unconscious
preparations to die. Dickens' project, in other words, is to convey to

us a whole series of ideas which Paul, the consciousness through which

10!
these ideas are filtered, does not know or understand. In order to carry
this off, so that it is clear that Paul will die and that he knows noth-
of it, Dickens narrates at length what Paul thinks and feels. The chap-
ter is narrated remarkably consistently in close narration and is as-
tounding for its modern narrative effects.

At the same time that he has strictly limited the perspective of
the narration, Dickens also begins the organization of images referring
to death which culminate when Paul dies. References to Paul's "old-
fashioned" appearance, to the river rushing to the sea, and to the light
reflected off it are made either close to Paul or in the words of one of
the characters. Only after Paul is dead, and his consciousness stopped,
does Dickens return to the voice of the histor to make clear that Paul
is finally dead and to make explicit the metaphors for death. Although
it is well worth reading, it is impossible to quote the entire passage,
running on as it does for pages, but a few examples from Paul's more ex-
cited moments will show how extensive the close narration is and how
central it is to Dickens' presentation of this child's death. First,
Paul is quite ill but eagerly waiting for the day he can see his sister
Florence:

There was a certain calm apothecary, who attended at the
establishment when any of the young gentlemen were ill, and
somehow he got into the room and appeared at the bedside with
Mrs. Blimber. How they came there, or how long they had been
there, Paul did n't know; but when he saw them, he sat up in

' bed, and answered all the apothecary's questions at full
length, and whispered to him that Florence was not to know
anything about it if be pleased, and that he had set his mind
upon her coming to the party. He was very chatty with the
apothecary, and they parted excellent friends. Lying down
again with his eyes shut, he heard the apothecary say, out of
the room and quite a long way off--or he dreamed it--that there
was a want of vital power (what was that, Paul wondered!) and
great constitutional weakness. That as the little fellow had
set his heart on parting with his schoolmates on the seven-

teenth, it would be better to hear from Mrs. Pipchin, that the
little fellow would go to his friends in London on the

102

eighteenth. That he would write to Mr. Dombey, when he should
have gained a better knowledge of the case, and before that
day. That there was no immediate cause for-dwhat? Paul lost
that word. And that the little fellow had a fine mind, but
was an old-fashioned boy.

What old fashion could that be, Paul wondered with a pal-
pitating heart, that was so visibly expressed in him; so
plainly seen by so many people!41

Given freedom from his studies, Paul busily thinks and reflects on the
minutia of the other characters' behavior and reactions to him, and
Dickens goes to great lengths to narrate how busy Paul's thoughts are.
In spite of all the evidence, however, Paul does not understand that he
is sick, as Dickens, still in narration close to Paul, carefully shows:

Doctor Blimber was so particular about him, that he requested
Johnson to retire from the dinner-table one day, for having
thoughtlessly spoken to him as "poor little Dombey"; which
Paul thought rather hard and severe, though he had flushed at
the moment, and wondered why Johnson should pity him. It was
the more questionable justice, Paul thought, in the doctor,
from his having certainly overheard that great authority give
his assent on the previous evening to the proposition (stated
by Mrs. Blimber) that poor dear little Dombey was more old-
fashioned than ever. And now it was that Paul began to think
it must surely be old-fashioned to be very thin, and light,
and easily tired, and soon disposed to lie down anywhere and
rest; for he could n't help feeling that these were more and
more his habits every day. (Ch. XIV, p. 204)

At a party given in his honor Paul begins to give up his mundane
concerns and his ties to current problems for what are at first vague
memories of his early childhood; that is, his busyness and Dickens' de-
tail begin to be replaced by serenity and large, synthetic images. This
peacefulness, which Dickens never really dramatizes for Nell, is de-
scribed at great length--even so far as to show its development--for
Paul. As Florence is singing, Paul's mind wanders to what is now more
important:

For all that the child observed, and felt, and thought, that
night--the present and the absent; what was then and what had
been-dwere blended like the colours in the rainbow, or in the

plumage of rich birds when the sun is shining on them, or in
the softening sky when the same sun is setting. The many

 

103

things he had had to think of lately passed before him in the
music; not as claiming his attention over again, or as likely
ever more to occupy it, but as peacefully disposed of and gone.
A solitary window, gazed through years ago, looked out upon an
ocean, miles and miles away; upon its water, fancies, busy
with him only yesterday, were hushed and lulled to rest like
broken waves. The same mysterious murmur he had wondered at,
when lying on his couch upon the beach, he thought he still
heard sounding through the hum of voices, and the tread of
feet, and having some part in the faces flitting by, and even
in the heavy gentleness of Mr. Toots, who frequently came up
to shake him by the hand. Through the universal kindness he
still thought he heard it, speaking to him; and even his old-
fashioned reputation seemed to be allied to it, he knew not
how. Thus little Paul sat musing, listening, looking on, and
dreaming; and was very happy. (Ch. XIV, pp. 211-12)

The memories of the ocean and the reference to the "broken waves" are,
of course, prefigurations of death in the same way that "his old-fash-
ioned reputation" and water are, especially the river moving into the
sea outside Paul's bedroom window. This movement is the source of the
murmur he hears at the party, and it, too, prefigures his death.

Like the little cart which represents Jo's breathing in Bleak House,

 

the river expresses Dickens' sense of a kind of life force in Paul.
Dickens takes care that Paul's worsening condition corresponds to his
greater awareness of the river. After he is taken home his illness con-
fines him to his bed, and he lies in it,

not caring much how the time went, but watching it and watch-
ing everything about him with observing eyes.

When the sunbeams struck into his room through the rustling
blinds, and quivered on the opposite wall like golden water,
he knew that evening was coming on, and that the sky was red
and beautiful. . . . His fancy had a strange tendency to wan—

- der to the river, which he knew was flowing through the great
city; and now he thought how black it was, and how deep it
would look, reflecting the hosts of stars--and more than all,
how steadily it rolled away to meet the sea.

. . . His only trouble was, the swift and rapid river. He
felt forced, sometimes, to try to stop it--to stem it with his
childish hands--or choke its way with sand--and when he saw it
coming on, resistless, he cried out! . . .

When day began to dawn again, he watched for the sun; and
when its cheerful light began to sparkle in the room, he pic-
tured to himself--pictured! he saw--the high church towers
rising up into the morning sky, the town reviving, waking,

104

starting into life once more, the river, glistening as it
rolled (but rolling fast as ever), and the country bright with
dew. . . .

By little and little, he got tired of the bustle of the
day, the noise of carriages and carts, and people passing and
repassing; and would fall asleep, or be troubled with a rest-
less and uneasy sense again--the child could hardly tell
whether this were in his sleeping or his waking moments-—of
that rushing river. "Why, will it never stop, Floy?" he would
sometimes ask her. "It is bearing me away, I think!" (Ch.
XVI, pp. 231-32)

This image of the flowing river keeps us aware of the progress of Paul's
disease without Dickens ever having to make it the explicit subject of
narration. This is important, because the nearer Dickens gets to Paul's
death, the more centered on Paul his focus becomes. Once Paul fixes on
the river's "resistless" movement, Dickens, with one small exception,
strictly limits the narration close to him or to his perspective.

The account of Paul's death is worth recording here, because of the
care with which Dickens narrates it, and because Dickens' control over
his narrative and his sense of scene show up here as well as they do
anywhere in his novels. Technically, the paragraph which describes
Paul's hands is not from his perspective, since it describes what he
cannot see, but since the narrator is never absent in close narration,
what "they" see does not seem to interrupt the otherwise consistently
limited narrative. Paul's mother died before he could know her, so this
is his first glimpse of her:

Sister and brother wound their arms around each other, and

‘ the golden light came streaming in, and fell upon them, locked
together.

"How fast the river runs, between its green banks and the
rushes, Floy! But it's very near the sea. I hear the waves!
They always said so!"

Presently he told her that the motion of the boat upon the
stream was lulling him to rest. How green the banks were now,
how bright the flowers growing on them, and how tall the rush-
es! Now the boat was out at sea, but gliding smoothly on.

And now there was a shore before him. Who stood on the bank!--

He put his hands together, as he had been used to do at his
prayers. He did not remove his arms to do it; but they saw

105

him fold them so, behind her neck.

"Mama is like you, Floy. I know her by the face! But tell
them that the print upon the stairs at school is not divine
enough. The light about the head is shining on me as I go!"

After Paul's last speech, the narration returns to the histor, who com-

pletes the metaphors, who makes certain that we know that Paul is dead,

and who prays that the "angels of young children" look after us when we

die. In this novel, the histor does not have to argue that Paul is bet-
ter off dead than alive, as he does for Nell, because, knowing Dickens,

we know that for Paul to be met by his mother is for him to be well. In
his usual, lyrical and emphatic histor, then, Dickens finishes the scene
of Paul's death:

The golden ripple on the wall came back again, and nothing
else stirred in the room. The old, old fashion! The fashion
that came in with our first garments, and will last unchanged
until our race has run its course, and the wide firmament is
rolled up like a scroll. The old, old fashion--Death!

Oh, thank God, all who see it, for that older fashion yet,
of Immortality! And look upon us, angels of young children,
with regards not quite estranged, when the swift river bears
us to the ocean! (Ch. XVI, p. 236)

The more we look at these chapters narrating Paul Dombey's death, the
more "modern" they seem: in the context of the whole novel, these chap-
ters constitute a digression of sorts, in which the novelist presents
the consciousness of a character for its own sake, and not for the fur-
therance of the action. This kind of detailed and personal digression
is much more typical of the histor, and it was many years before a nov-

elist, Henry James, was to use close narration for these purposes again.

A discussion of the close narration in Hardy's Desperate Reme-

 

dies (1871) will be useful here as a transition between Dickens and Hen-
ry James for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that this novel,
Hardy's second, is notable for how derivative it is of popular fiction

of the day. His inexperience as a writer and dependence on other

106

writers for many of the novel's formal characteristics make his use of
close narration in it indicative of his less deliberate stylistic fea-
tures. The second reason is that an analysis of the close narration in
this novel is more productive, in general, in a discussion of the use
of close narration in Victorian fiction than it is in a discussion of
Hardy's novels, since it brings to light how a writer's use of this
technique can determine our sense of the integrity of the novel, the
identity of the protagonist, and the locus of the action.

Cytherea Graye should be the protagonist of Dgsperate Remedies--it
is her virtue which is embattled and her goodness which is rewarded-—and
she dominates the narration of the first half of the novel; she disap-
pears completely from it, however, in the second half. Hardy replaces
her perspective with that of Anne Seaway, a character whose only real
importance in the novel is in the narrative, for her impact on the events
of the novel is minimal: she does not dg_anything except go where she
can see what others are doing. Her most important moment in the action
of the plot is the one in which Owen Graye discovers that her eyes are
not the same color as those of Eunice Manston, the woman she is supposed
to be. Anee's entire role in Desperate Remedies is that of a substitute:
she is Aeneas Manston's substitute for the murdered and therefore mis-
sing Eunice, and she is Hardy's substitute for the sensitive and high-
strung Cytherea. Anne's perspective in the second half of the novel is
fully as-dominant as Cytherea's is in the first half. The first half of
the novel is a love story of which Cytherea is the complex and impres-
sionable heroine, set in a rather unlikely study of class structure; the

second half of Desperate Remedies is a murder mystery, and Hardy uses

 

Anne's perspective to narrate the solution of the mystery.

Anne, of course, is not the only character to attempt to solve the

107

mystery of what happened to Manston's wife Eunice. Hardy treats a fair-
ly large number of peripheral as well as central characters with short
bits of narration close to them. Because no one suspects Manston of
having murdered Eunice and hidden her body, Hardy can use the perspec-
tives of these other characters to review the clues in the case without
giving the solution away. The thinking and figuring that these charac-
ters do replaces, in a way, the chasing and fighting in which such char—
acters would be involved in a novel of action. In this novel of thought
and deduction, however, the pursuit is mental, and in order to detail
the events of the "chase," the narration is close to the pursuers. That
Anne is a better and more practical thinker than Edward Springrove, Owen
Graye, or Rector Raunham--the pursuers--explains Hardy's use of her con-
sciousness for the telling of the mystery. The question of what happened
to Eunice cannot be answered until a series of smaller mysteries are
solved first. Strictly speaking, it is Anne who solves the smaller mys-
teries that relate to Manston's behavior and that provide the important
clues to the murder.

Even though he is married to Cytherea, Manston has asked Anne to
pretend to be Eunice, whom he first claimed had died in the fire at the
inn. Since everyone, including Anne, considers Cytherea superior, Anne
is puzzled that Manston now says he prefers her to Cytherea and confused
by his desire to convince others that Eunice is alive. While he is out,
she takes the opportunity to do some dusting, against his wishes, in his
office. She notices that the dust on a cabinet has been disturbed in an
unexpected way, in a way which suggests that two panels are in fact
doors. Like most actions in this novel, this one is mental rather than
physical. Anne's "pondering" is presented close to her:

She balanced herself on one foot and stood pondering. She

108
considered that it was very vexing and unfair in him to re-
fuse her all knowledge of his remaining secrets, in the pecu-
liar circumstances of her connection with him. She went close
to the cabinet. As there was no keyhole, the door must be ca-
pable of being opened by the unassisted hand. The circles in
the dust told her at which edge to apply her force. Here she
pulled with the tips of her fingers, but the panel would not
come forward. She fetched a chair and looked over the top of
the cabinet, but no bolt, knob, or spring was to be seen.
(Ch. XIX, No. i; p. 388)
The passage continues from her perspective as she figures out how to
open the cabinet and as she finds Manston's cache of letters and reads
them. The cast letter Eunice wrote, to her cousin James in America,
evokes close narration for Anne:
From creases in the paper it was plain that the writer, having
got so far, had become dissatisfied with her production, and
had crumpled it in her hand. Was it to write another, or not
to write at all? (Ch. XIX, No. i; p. 393)

The fact that Manston is in possession of a letter written by Eu-
nice the night she died is one of Hardy's most important clues that she
was murdered by Manston. He expands its place in the narrative, without
having to explain it by means of any knowledgeable perspective, by put-
ting the clue before us close to Anne. Her erroneous deductions-—that
Manston and Eunice communicated around the time he asked Anne to live
with him and that the worst result of honesty for Manston will be di-
vorce court and damages--are red herrings, as it were, to draw our at-
tention away from the possibility that Manston met and murdered Eunice
the night of the fire. Close to Anne, then, Hardy emphasizes that the
riddle of how Manston got Eunice's letter must be solved before the mys-
tery itself can be:

If she had been burnt, this letter, written in her bedroom,
and probably thrust into her pocket when she relinquished it,
would have been burnt with her. Nothing was surer than that.
Why, then, did he say she was burnt, and never show Anne her-
self this letter?

The question suddenly raised a new and much stranger one--
kindling a burst of amazement in her. How did Manston become

109

possessed of this letter?

That fact of possession was certainly the most remarkable
revelation of all in connection with this epistle, and perhaps
had something to do with his reason for never showing it to
her.

She knew by several proofs, that from the fire to his mar-
riage with Cytherea, and up to the time of the porter's con-
fession, Manston believed-—honestly believed--that Cytherea
would be his lawful wife, and hence, of course, that his wife
Eunice was dead. So that no communication could possibly have
passed between his wife and himself from the first moment that
he believed her dead on the night of the fire, to the day of
his wedding. And yet he had that letter. How soon afterwards
could they have communicated with each other?

The existence of the letter--as much as, or more than its
contents--implying that Mrs. Manston was not burnt, his belief
in that calamity must have terminated at the moment he ob-
tained possession of the letter, if no earlier. Was, then,
the only solution to the riddle that Anne could discern, the
true one?--that he had communicated with his wife somewhere
about the commencement of Anne's residence with him, or at any
time since?

It was the most unlikely thing on earth that a woman who
had forsaken her husband should countenance his scheme to per-
sonify her--whether she were in America, in London, or in the
neighbourhood of Knapwater.

Then came the old and harassing question, what was Man-
ston's real motive in risking his name on the deception he was
practising as regarded Anne. It could not be, as he had al-
ways pretended, mere passion. Her thoughts had reverted to
Mr. Raunham's letter, asking for proofs of her identity with
the original Mrs. Manston. She could see no loophole of es-
cape for the man who supported her. True, in her own estima-
tion, his worst alternative was not so very bad after all--the
getting the name of libertine, a possible appearance in the
divorce or some other court of law, and a question of damages.
Such an exposure might hinder his worldly progress for some
time. Yet to him this alternative was, apparently, terrible
as death itself. (Ch. XIX, No. i; pp. 393-95)

Hardy's message to us about the importance of the clue transcends Anne's
necessarily limited and self-involved questioning. When, close to Anne,
Hardy poses the question, "Was, then, the only solution to the riddle
that Anne could discern, the true one?" and when Anne realizes that the
"alternative" of honesty for Manston is "terrible as death itself," we
are presented with clues to which Anne, in a way, does not have access.
Knowing that Manston has taken money from his bank account and

fully aware of his anxiety about Cytherea and Eunice, Anne continues to

110

search for explanations for his behavior. Her suspicions make her very
observant and Hardy keeps his narrative largely limited to her perspec—
tive. This way, he does not have to narrate Manston's confession to
Miss Aldclyffe. The night that Manston plans to run away is narrated
scrupulously from Anne's perspective or close to her. Her perspective is
maintained until Eunice's body is identified by the detective. Saving
the solution of the mystery of how Manston actually murdered Eunice un-
til his letter of confession, Hardy preserves Anne's perspective so we
are not aware that there has been an important shift away from Anne as a
source of knowledge:

"It is the body of his first wife," he said quietly. "He
murdered her, as Mr. Springrove and the rector suspected--but
how and when, God only knows."

"And I!" exclaimed Anne Seaway, a probable and natural se-
quence of events and motives explanatory of the whole crime--
events and motives shadowed forth by the letter, Manston's
possession of it, his renunciation of Cytherea, and instalment
of herself--f1ashing upon her mind with the rapidity of light-
ning.

"Ah--I see," said the detective, standing unusually close
to her: and a handcuff was on her wrist. (Ch. XIX, No. vi; p.
418)

Hardy's use of Anne as the consciousness through which he records
the complex series of events (however mental) which make up the last
half of the novel is responsible for much of the aesthetic failure of
Desperate Remedies, because Cytherea's consciousness should be much more
central than it is. It is necessary to understand the presentation of
her character in order to see the loss which Anne's close narration con-
stitutes. If we look only at the narration close to Cytherea, we see a
shallow character whose responses are immediate and ephemeral. The char-
acter requires the sustained and objective effort of Anne's thinking in

order to be intellectually active enough to be truly sympathetic. Many

of the important characteristics of Hardy's sensitive and conscious

111

characters are present in Cytherea; the most important quality she lacks,
intelligence, is attributed to her but never demonstrated as it is for
the common, and irrelevant, Anne. By refusing to let her have a hand in
solving the mystery so close to her own life and future, Hardy makes her
unfit to be his heroine. We have it in her own voice that she under-
stands and suffers from a conflict between her inner and outer worlds,
but Hardy does not give her the strength--the mental strength, in this

novel-~to save herself.

Partly because of the weakness in the novel itself, discussion of

close narration in Desperate Remedies is hollow and superficial unless

 

it takes into account the larger issues with which Hardy was more direct-

ly concerned. Desperate Remedies, therefore, cannot be regarded as an

 

attempt on Hardy's part to improve or expand the role played by close
narration in his fiction. It was not until Henry James that close nar-
ration got an exponent, one who would argue its merits in the criticism
and one who would explore its limits in the fiction. This is not to say
that James worked alone, of course; clearly, the work of Flaubert and
Dickens, not to mention the more conventional writers, puts James square-
ly in the mainstream of a long tradition in the use of this form. One
difference between James and Hardy, especially early Hardy, is that we
have indisputable evidence that James employed narration close to a char-
acter as a deliberately chosen means of telling his story.

Like Dombey and Son, what is most important about The Portrait of a

 

Lady is not the numerous short passages of close narration, but James's
devotion of an entire narrative unit--a chapter--to it, to dramatizing
Isabel's thoughts about her relationship and future with Osmond. Like

Dombey and Son, The Portrait of a Lady is notable for this single

 

112

chapter, which today seems to be its most significant contribution to

the history of the novel. This chapter (Chapter XLII) is deserving of
all its critical acclaim for its centrality to the novel and for its uni-
fied and extended arrangement as an entire chapter in close narration.

The Portrait of a Lady is also important, in the history of the novel,

 

because it was first published in 1881, long before Hardy was devoting
such long passages of narration close to a character, and long before
Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, or Conrad began to have influence on the concep-
tion of narration.

James stops all the action to present Isabel doing nothing but
thinking; that is, she is doing more than reacting to Osmond's sugges-
tion that she prevail upon Lord Warburton to marry his daughter Pansy--
she is building speculations and conclusions upon that suggestion which
is merely the premise for the rest of the thinking that she does. The
distance between the narrator and Isabel varies considerably in this
chapter, from passages which are as she might have said them to passages
outside her, summarizing her thoughts and the events of her past. One
passage from the beginning of the chapter, just after Isabel has sat
down to think, can show the obvious care James took to present not only
Isabel thinking, but the logic and sequence of her thoughts:

The suggestion from another that she had a definite influence
on Lord Warburton--this had given her the start that accompa-
nies unexpected recognition. Was it true that there was some-
’ thing still between them that might be a handle to make him
declare himself to Pansy--a susceptibility, on his part, to
approval, a desire to do what would please her? Isabel had
hitherto not asked herself the question, because she had not
been forced; but now that it was directly presented to her she
saw the answer, and the answer frightened her. Yes, there was
something--something on Lord Warburton's part. When he had
first come to Rome she believed the link that united them to
be completely snapped; but little by little she had been re-
minded that it had yet a palpable existence. It was as thin

as a hair, but there were moments when she seemed to hear it
vibrate. For herself nothing was changed; what she once

113

thought of him she always thought; it was needless this feel-
ing should change; it seemed to her in fact a better feeling
than ever. But he? had he still the idea that she might be
more to him than other women? Had he the wish to profit by
the memory of the few moments of intimacy through which they
had once passed? Isabel knew she had read some of the signs
of such a disposition. But what were his hopes, his preten-
sions, and in what strange way were they mingled with his evi-
dently very sincere appreciation of poor Pansy? Was he in
love with Gilbert Osmond's wife, and if so what comfort did he
expect to derive from it? If he was in love with Pansy he was
not in love with her stepmother, and if he was in love with
her stepmother he was not in love with Pansy. Was she to cul-
tivate the advantage she possessed in order to make him commit
himself to Pansy, knowing he would do so for her sake and not
for the small creature's own--was this the service her husband
had asked of her? This at any rate was the duty with which
she found herself confronted--from the moment she admitted to
herself that her old friend had still an uneradicated predilec-
tion for her society. She asked herself with dismay whether
Lord Warburton were pretending to be in love with Pansy in or-
der to cultivate another satisfaction and what might be called
other chances. Of this refinement of duplicity she presently
acquitted him; she preferred to believe him in perfect good
faith. But if his admiration for Pansy were a delusion this
was scarcely better than its being an affectation.42

As this passage shows, James has substituted mental for physical action
in his narrative. Isabel's conclusion that Warburton is not pretending
to love Pansy in order to court Isabel is an action, as surely as Huck's
running away is, and it can be said that the real importance of close
narration is its usefulness for narrating mental action.

There is an important difference between James's and Dickens' nar-
ratives; this difference, clearly, is not in their use of close narra-
tion but in their use of the histor. It is not that James has no histor,

for even in this chapter of The Portrait of a Lady the narrator refers to

 

himself as "I" and emphasizes and explains what Isabel would not empha-
size or explain to herself. The difference is that Dickens uses the his-

tor in the section from Bombay and Son as a structural part of the narra-

 

tion in the same way that he does for close narration: he uses the nar-

rative to help him make units-~in this case chapters and parts of

114

chapters--in which narrative and structural boundaries coincide (i.e.,
the beginning and ending of the chapter are the beginning and ending of
the narrative treatment.) The two paragraphs by the histor, then, mark a
structural change, the end of the chapter and the end of the episode.
The histor does not seem to have this kind of a structural signifi-
cance to James. In fact, in his famous Preface (of 1909) to the New
York edition of The Golden Bowl, James says that rereading his works has
made him realize that
Anything, in short, I now reflect, must always have seemed to
me better--better for the process and the effect of represen-
tation, my irrepressible ideal--than the mere muffled majesty
of irresponsible "authorship". Beset constantly with the
sense that the painter of the picture or the chanter of the
ballad (whatever we may call him) can never be responsible
enough, and for every inch of his surface and note of his song,
I track my uncontrollable footsteps, right and left, after the
fact, while they take their quick turn, even on stealthiest
tiptoe, toward the point of view that, within the compass,
will give me most instead of least to answer for.43
Although there is a theoretically problematical conflation of author and
narrator here, we can with some confidence assume that the quotation
marks around "authorship" and the reference to the "chanter" as well as
the "painter" mean that James would accept a discussion of this passage
as it relates to his narrator. There is then, for James, a sense in
which the histor cannot "answer for" or represent enough in the text to
make every word ("every inch . . . and note") resonant with multiple
meanings. This is because, for James, the histor's perspective is in-
eradicably associated with that of the author and cannot, as Hardy's
histor can, be fictionalized in a way that allows for both the meaning
of his words and the meaning of his perspective, the location of which
determines the kind of reliability to be found in the words. James rec-

ognizes that authorial absence is merely ostensible, but it is clearly

his desire to avoid making authorial or omniscient commentary important

115

to his narration for mimetic reasons: "It's not that the muffled majesty

of authorship doesn't here ostensibly_reign; but I catch myself again

 

shaking it off and disavowing the pretence of it while I get down into
the arena and do my best to live and breathe and rub shoulders and con-
verse with the persons engaged in the struggle that provides for the
others in the circling tiers the entertainment of the great game."
James's own description of close narration in this Preface shows
that, even if the forms of this kind of narrative had not changed very
much since Dickens, the authorial aims had. His purpose, he says, has
"constantly inclined to the idea" of presenting "the particular attach-
ing case 2123 some near individual view of it; that nearness quite hav-
ing thus to become an imagined observer's . . . close and sensitive con-

tact with it."44

His novels, then, are not his "own impersonal account
of the affair in hand, but . . . [his] account of somebody's impression
of it--the terms of this person's access to it and estimate of it con-
tributing thus by some fine little law to intensification of interest."45
His emphasis, then, is on the identity of that observer who provides "a
certain indirect and oblique view of my presented action." It is impor-
tant, as always with James, to make certain of what he means: in this
case, by "indirect and oblique view" he is not referring to the narra-
tion, which is, "on the contrary, any superficial appearances notwith-
standing, the very straightest and closest possible," but to the rela-
tions between the observer and the story he or she is narrating. What
makes it oblique, of course, is that the perceiver is as much the sub-
ject of the narration as the perceived is--or, as James says of The Gold-
en Bowl:

The thing abides rigidly by its law of showing Maggie Verver

at first through her suitor's and her husband's exhibitory vi-
sion of her, and of then showing the Prince, with at least an

116
equal intensity, through his wife's; the advantage thus being
that these attributions of experience display the sentient
subjects themselves at the same time and by the same stroke
with the nearest possible approach to a desired vividness. It
is the Prince who opens the door to half our light upon Mag-
gie, just as it is she who opens it to half our light upon
himself; the rest of our impression, in either case, coming
straight from the very motion with which that act is per-
formed.46
By his own testimony, what makes James's close narration stand out is
the larger, aesthetic context which it serves: he sought and used a num-
ber of techniques which provide that "oblique and indirect view" of the
action. Close narration, then, fits into a rubric of possibilities of
means for presenting not only the action but the particularities of the
perceiver. The critical acclaim which James deserves is most just in
consideration of his ideas about the role the observer takes in deter-

mining the nature of truth rather than in consideration of his narrative

technique, especially for those novels written before The Golden Bowl

 

(1904).

By the 1890's, close narration was commonplace. Jude the Obscure

 

and The Well-Beloved are dominated by it and its concomitant assumption
that the mind is the scene of significant action. Every important novel
from the decade is largely narrated close to one or more of the charac-

ters, even novels like George Moore's Esther Waters, whose narrative

 

texture is much less complex than that of Dombgy and Son, The Portrait

 

of a Lady, or Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Two more examples outside of
Hardy, one from Oscar Wilde and the other from.Kate Chopin, and one more
from Hardy--The Well-Beloved--will show the extent to which close narra-
tion was naturalized, as it were, in British and American fiction and
how essential the internal life of the characters was to the presenta-

tion of the novels' events.

117

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) has so much close narration in it
that it is fair to say that the novel itself is narrated close to Dorian.
This is not to suggest that the novel has no other narrative perspective,
but, as close narration does not carry the requirements of exclusivity
with it which may be imagined for other means of presenting stream of
consciousness, all narrative points of view seem rather to merge into
one which operates from inside the characters' heads--and especially
from inside Dorian's. Every climax of recognition which shakes Dorian
and every scene in which he suffers is narrated close to him; Wilde's
concern, obviously, was with the effect which such a life has on Dorian,
and that effect, just as obviously, is mental. When there is a conflict
or discrepancy between inner and outer worlds, then that reality is an
interior matter. This passage, which occurs while Dorian is still actu-
ally young and beautiful and while the picture is only beginning to show
the effects of living, narrates not only Dorian's recognition that his
actions affect him powerfully but also his breaking of the mirror (which
objectively confirms his unchanging beauty) that Lord Henry had given
him. One way that we know that this passage is close to Dorian is in
the content; for us and for the narrator, Dorian is responsible for his
own ruin:

Once, someone who had terribly loved him, had written to
him a mad letter, ending with these idolatrous words: "The
world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The
curves of your lips rewrite history." The phrases came back
to his memory, and he repeated them over and over to himself.
Then he loathed his own beauty, and flinging the mirror on the
floor crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel. It
was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth
that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life
might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him
but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best?
A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly
thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.

It was better not to think of the past. Nothing could al-
ter that. It was of himself, and of his own future, that he

118

had to think. James Vane was hidden in a nameless grave in
Selby churchyard. Alan Campbell had shot himself one night in
his laboratory, but had not revealed the secret that he had
been forced to know. The excitement, such as it was, over
Basil Hallward's disappearance would soon pass away. It was
already waning. He was perfectly safe there. Nor, indeed,
was it the death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his
mind. It was the living death of his own soul that troubled
him. Basil had painted the portrait that had done everything.
Basil had said things to him that were unbearable, and that he
had yet borne with patience. The murder had been simply the
madness of a moment. As for Alan Campbell, his suicide had '
been his own act. He had chosen to do it. It was nothing to
him.

A new life! That was what he wanted. That was what he was
waiting for. Surely he had begun it already. He had spared
one innocent thing at any rate. He would never again tempt in-
nocence. He would be good.47

The portrait is one way Wilde has of reflecting the truth about Dorian's
self-serving denials and promises, for just after he blames his beauty,
his youth, the picture, and Basil Hallward, and just after Dorian denies
complicity in Alan Campbell's death, he finds "no change" in the por-
trait "save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the

mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite,"

48

and on the hand brighter
blood. The fact that Wilde uses an external means of characterization
like the portrait in such an internal novel emphasizes his interest in
the relations between inner and outer conditions of existence, between
the internal and external ramifications of moral and immoral acts. In a
way, the portrait replaces the histor as our guide to Dorian's evolution,
or devolution, from innocent beauty to egregious immorality.

Like The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Well-Beloved can be said to be

narrated close to its main character. The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a

Temperament (1897) is Hardy's last novel to be published in volume form.

 

It is an odd book: once very popular, now it is mostly ignored; extreme-

ly personal and probably heavily autobiographical, it was called "short

49

and slight" by Hardy himself. The novel is, as it claims to be, a

119

sketch of the kind of temperament which spends its life in pursuit of
the Well-Beloved, the ideal woman whose changeability is her constancy
and whose fleshly tabernacle is essentially irrelevant to her worshipper.
Specifically, it is the story of a sculptor, Jocelyn Pierston, who, upon
returning to his native "isle," promises to marry Avice but jilts her
for Marcia, who shortly returns to her parents; when Avice dies twenty
years later, he falls in love with her daughter Ann Avice; twenty years
later, she dies, and he falls in love with her daughter Avice, who
elopes with Marcia's son to avoid marriage with him. When he recovers
from the nearly fatal illness which follows, he no longer appreciates
beauty; this means that the ideal no longer exists for him to love or
create. His inconstancy is, he believes, loyalty to the ideal goddess
who flits from the body of one woman to another; to the histor, his in-
fatuations are the result of sexual attraction--"as the scientific might
say, Nature was working her plans for the next generation under the
cloak of a dialogue on linen"—-no matter how chaste the eventual rela-
tionships may be (Pt. II, Ch. vi; p. 92). Hardy presents Pierston's
sense of his own constancy close to him and Pierston's unconscious moti-
vations in the voice of the histor.

Even though, as we have it from the histor, the Well-Beloved is a
fantasy and Pierston's love for her based, in a way, on dishonesty,
there is no evidence at the end that Pierston finds emotional health or
a deeper reality; instead, Hardy seems to suggest that modernization on
the peninsula and in the world of art introduces a shallowness and hol-
lowness ("gourd-like") which were not there before:

His business was, among other kindred undertakings which
followed the extinction of the Well-Beloved and other ideals,
to advance a scheme for the closing of the old natural foun-

tains in the Street of Wells, because of their possible con-
tamination, and supplying the townlet with water from pipes, a

120
scheme that was carried out at his expense, as is well known.
He was also engaged in acquiring some old moss-grown, mul-
lioned Elizabethan cottages, for the purpose of pulling them
down because they were damp; which he afterwards did, and
built new ones with hollow walls, and full of ventilators.

At present he is sometimes mentioned as "the late Mr. Pier-
ston" by gourd-like young art-critics and journalists; and his
productions are alluded to as those of a man not without ge-
nius, whose powers were insufficiently recognized in his life-
time. (Pt. III, Ch. viii; pp. 217-18)

There is a kind of irony here, recognizable to readers of Hardy's other
novels, which makes this passage seem regretful; this sadness, which is
associated with the "pulling down" of the Elizabethan cottages and the
presumption in the art world that Pierston died unappreciated, suggests
that he has lost something genuine in the loss of his ideals. The key
to the loss is in the image of the well, for this "closing of the old
natural fountains in the Street of Wells, because of their possible con-
tamination, and supplying the townlet with water from pipes, a scheme

that was carried out at his expense,"

is an act so significant, so mean-
ingful, that it is almost allegorical. It symbolizes most clearly the
end of Pierston's creativity because,
During the many uneventful seasons that followed Marcia's
stroke of independence [of returning to her parents] . . .,
Jocelyn threw into plastic creations that ever-bubbling spring
of emotion which, without some conduit into space, will surge
upwards and ruin all but the greatest men. (Pt. I, Ch. ix; p.
49)
The wells, the "old natural fountains," are the "conduit into space" of
Pierston's emotions.50 To change over to city water, as it were, is to
trade "that peculiar and personal taste in subjects" because there is a
possibility of some unnamed "contamination" for ideas and emotions which
are piped in from the outside (Pt. III, Ch. iv; p. 171). The "expense"
for Pierston is his originality: he stops creating his art, he loses

faith in the Well-Beloved; he stops originating his own ideas, emotions,

and thoughts. That Pierston's rejoining of the community costs him his

121

creative wells of emotion and the imagination to transform his native
stone into images of his dreams makes it seem that giving up the Well-
Beloved is a tragic mistake, no matter how "subjective" a "phenomenon"
she is (Pt. I, Ch. ii; p. 11).

From Pierston's perspective, however, the end of the novel is come
ic--the struggle is over and order is established: "Robinson Crusoe lost
a day in his illness: I have lost a faculty, for which loss Heaven be
praised!" (Pt. III, Ch. vii; p. 210). In spite of the placement of the
histor's slightly regretful description of Pierston's change at the end
of the novel, the very amount of narration close to Pierston or from.his

perspective makes us look at the events of the novel in the way he does.

The narration from Pierston's perspective is so consistent and the histor

in general so muted that almost nothing that happens in this novel takes
place outside of Pierston's awareness or, if he is unaware of his own
feelings, outside of his consciousness. Hardy narrates a handful of
events of which Pierston is ignorant, like Anne Avice's attempts to con-
vince her daughter to marry him and Avice and Leverre's elopement, but
literally everything else that takes place in this novel is narrated as
it enters Pierston's mind. This means that the important events are all
mental, they are acts of Pierston's consciousness and functions of his
personality; and even when Hardy uses the histor to narrate things which
Pierston is not aware of, or does not think of, or forgets, the subject
is still his consciousness.

Even the descriptions of setting are descriptions of Pierston's
consciousness. Partly this is because most are narrated close to him,
so what is narrated is his impression of the landscape, but the analogy
between "the old natural fountains in the Street of Wells" and "that

ever-bubbling spring of emotion" extends to Pierston's mind and the

122

"isle" itself. Pierston is returning to his home after over three years'

absence:

What had seemed usual in the isle when he lived there al-
ways looked quaint and odd after his later impressions. Mere
than ever the spot seemed what it was said once to have been,
the ancient Vindilia Island, and the Home of the Slingers.

The towering rock, the houses above houses, one man's doorstep
rising behind his neighbor's chimney, the gardens hung up by
one edge to the sky, the vegetables growing on apparently al-
most vertical planes, the unity of the whole island as a solid
and single block of limestone four miles long, were no longer
familiar and commonplace ideas. All now stood dazzlingly
unique and white against the tinted sea, and the sun flashed
on infinitely stratified walls of oolite.
"The melancholy ruins

Of Cancelled cycles," . . . [sic]
with a distinctiveness that called the eyes to it as strongly
as any spectacle he had beheld afar. . . .

He stretched out his hand upon the rock beside him. It
felt warm. That was the island's personal termperature when
in its afternoon sleep as now. He listened, and heard sounds:
whir—whir, saw-saw-saw. Those were the island's snores--the
noises of the quarrymen and stone-sawyers.

Opposite to the spot on which he sat was a roomy cottage or
homestead. Like the island it was all of stone, not only in
walls but in window-frames, roof, chimneys, fence, stile, pig-
sty and stable, almost door. (Pt. I, Ch. i; pp. 3-4)

That this passage is narrated from Jocelyn's perspective and close to
him allows Hardy to show Pierston's sensitivity to beauty and "ideas" in
the external world and to imply a fundamental unity in all things, con-
scious and unconscious.

Pierston's characterization of the sounds of quarrying as the sounds
of a sleeping island sets up an important equation between his sculp-
tures, which are the images from his dreams, and the blocks of limestone
cut from the island. Because Pierston carves statues from stones his
father cuts, we can say, following the analogy, that the raw materials
for his dreams are at least based in memory and tradition:

While the son had been modelling and chipping his ephemeral
fancies into perennial shapes, the father had been persistent-
ly chiselling for half a century at the crude original matter

of those shapes, the stern, isolated rock in the channel . . . .
(Pt. II, Ch. i; p. 55)

123

The past is geological in this novel, layers "Of Cancelled cycles" super-
imposed on others; memory is a "substratum" of the mind (Pt. III, Ch.
iii; p. 168). Memory is not petrified, however permanent it may be, be-
cause the island is asleep, not dead. Just as the blocks of limestone
come from the sleeping island, so Pierston's images of the Well-Beloved
are carved from dreams; the part of Pierston's mind that produces the
"crude original matter" of his art is, in a way, asleep. For this rea-
son, the external world has a kind of instability to him--a goddess mi-
grates from one human body to another-~and his dreams and impressions
can blot out that world.

The most spectacular example of this perceptual distortion takes
place at a party, when Pierston learns of the death of the original
Avice. Hardy's narration of these consciousness-dominated and conscious-
ness-created moments in Pierston's life give them great importance, con-
sidering how few moments are narrated at all. This passage, which de-
scribes Pierston's gradual integration of the meaning of Avice's death
to him, illustrates how sympathetically Pierston is treated in this nov-
el as well as how predominant mental reality is to this sensitive and
creative dreamer. The letter Pierston reads secretly at the table stirs
up vivid memories for him that overwhelm the trivial dinner party; this
moment also marks the migration of the Well-Beloved from Nichola Pine-
Avon to the dead Avice. The letter presents Avice's death simply and
directly:

You will be sorry to hear, Sir, that dear little Avice Caro,
as we used to call her in her maiden days, is dead. She mar-
ried her cousin, if you do mind, and went away from here for a
good-few years, but was left a widow and came back a twelve-
month ago; since when she faltered and faltered, and now she
is gone. (Pt. II, Ch. ii; p. 71)

Pierston's reaction is presented in a contrasting richness of narration

124

close to him:

By imperceptible and slow degrees the scene at the dinner—
table receded into the background, behind the vivid present-
ment of Avice Caro, and the old, old scenes of 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. The handsome marchioness in gera-
nium-red and diamonds, who was visible to him on his host's
right hand opposite, became one of the glowing vermilion sun-
sets that he had watched so many times over Deadman's Bay,
with the form of Avice in the foreground. Between his eyes
and the judge who sat next to Nichola, with a chin so raw that
he must have shaved every quarter of an hour during the day,
intruded the face of Avice, as she had glanced at him in their
last parting. The crannied features of the evergreen society
lady, who, if she had been a few years older, would have been
as old-fashioned as her daughter, shaped themselves to the
dusty quarries of his and Avice's parents, down which he had
clambered with Avice hundreds of times. The ivy trailing
about the table-cloth, the lights in the tall candlesticks,
and the bunches of flowers, were transmuted into the ivies of
the cliff-built Castle, the tufts of seaweed, and the light-
houses on the isle. The salt airs of the ocean killed the
smell of the viands, and instead of the clatter of voices came
the monologue of the tide off the Beal.

More than all, Nichola Pine-Avon lost the blooming radiance
which she had latterly acquired; she became a woman of his ac-
quaintance with no distinctive traits; she seemed to grow ma-
terial, a superficies of flesh and bone merely, a person of
lines and surfaces; she was a language in living cipher no
more. (Pt. II, Ch. iii; pp. 72-73)

Hardy's close narration seems most effective when his characters
are most visionary—-in this instance, in which figures representing so-
cial power and prestige fade under the influence of twenty-year-old mem-
ories, and in a passage from earlier in the novel, in which Pierston
feels, unconsciously, that he should not marry Avice:

It was a presence--an imaginary shape or essence from the hu-
man multitude lying below: those who had gone down in vessels
of war, East Indiamen, barges, brigs, and ships of the Armada--
select people, common, and debased, whose interests and hopes
had been as wide asunder as the poles, but who had rolled each
other to oneness on that restless sea-bed. There could almost
be felt the brush of their huge composite ghost as it ran a
shapeless figure over the isle, shrieking for some good god

who would disunite it again. (Pt. I, Ch. ii; pp. 12—13)

The "huge composite ghost" of shipwreck victims charges "The evening and

125

night winds . . . with a something that did not burden them elsewhere"--
a communality, a society, forced upon individuals, unnaturally, by their
environment. At this moment Pierston is thinking of marriage, and it is
the misery of communal identity that he fears.

From these passages, in which Pierston imagines the island "in its
afternoon sleep," the dining room as "real no more, dissolving under the
bold stony promontory and the incoming West Sea," and the wind as a "com-
posite ghost, . . . a shapeless figure" running "over the isle, shriek-
ing for some good god who would disunite it again," it is obvious that
Pierston's perspective, however imaginative, is invested with the autho-
rity normally reserved for that of the histor. We allow Pierston, in
his perceptions, the same kind of poetic licence we allow Hardy's histor
in his descriptions, even though we know from the histor that Pierston's
conviction that his Well—Beloved exists is preposterous. Because his
fantasies are so extravagant we can easily recognize how they distort
his perception; for this reason, and because of the sheer amount of nar-
ration close to Pierston, the reader, responding conventionally to con-
ventional signals, trusts in the essential validity of his perceptions.

There are, for instance, no descriptions in The Well-Beloved of any of

 

the characters from a perspective so cosmic that they appear as flies on
a billiard table, as they do in TE§§_(Ch. XVI, p. 136). Hardy's vision
of the relative insignificance of the individual in the mass of humanity
or in the universe of nature takes this characteristic form.bere, but
the perspective is Pierston's, not the higggr's, and Pierston's view of
the pedestrians in Rome as ants is immediately followed by the identifi-
cation of two, to Hardy, of humanity's most significant individuals,
Shelley and Keats:

The streets below were immersed in shade, the front of the

126
church of the Trinita de' MOnti at the top was flooded with

orange light, the gloom of evening gradually intensifying upon
the broad, long flight of steps, which foot-passengers inces-
santly ascended and descended with the insignificance of ants;
the dusk wrapped up the house to the left, in which Shelley
had lived, and that to the right, in which Keats had died.
(Pt. III, Ch. i; p. 147)
This is the kind of statement which readers of Hardy are accustomed to
associate with validity and authority. That the perspective is Pier-
ston's does not change the association, so the effect of statements like
these from Pierston's perspective, and the very predominance of this
perspective, is to lend credence to Pierston's point of view.

Pierston's perspective, however, is not as reliable as that of the
histor. Upon analysis, The Well-Beloved is much more complex than it is
on first acquaintance; the most notable difference is that Pierston
makes mistakes in his perceptions and his conclusions which are not ap-
parent during a first or fast reading of the novel. There are important
distinctions between Pierston's and the histor's evaluations. Hardy
never uses the histor, for example, to validate Pierston's perception of
the women he loves--to the histor, Pierston's love affairs are "profes-
sional beauty-chases" (Pt. I, Ch. ix; p. 50). Hardy never uses the his-
525 to validate Pierston's faith in the Well-Beloved; his belief is a
matter of psychological analysis-~Pierston's Well-Beloved is, he says,
"a subjective phenomenon" (Pt. I, Ch. ii; p. 11). Mest important, how-
ever, are the small mistakes Pierston makes, which are never corrected
by the histor; there are dozens of these, and their artistic value be-
comes obvious.

One very revealing sequence, for instance, shows how thoroughly
Pierston has blinded himself to Ann Avice's own person in his conviction

that she is "the exponent of the Long-Pursued" (Pt. II, Ch. vii; p. 97).

In this specific example, moreover, his selective and sometimes obtuse

127

grasp of the external world is also apparent. In the first, rather re-
markable passage, Pierston abstracts the sound of Ann Avice's voice from
its content so that he can invest it with his own meaning:

. . . she attracted him by the cadences of her voice; she
would suddenly drop it to a rich whisper of roguishness, when
the slight rural monotony of its narrative speech disappeared,
and soul and heart--or what seemed soul and heart--resounded.
The charm lay in the intervals, using that word in its musical
sense. She would say a few syllables in one note, and end her
sentence in a soft modulation upwards, then downwards, then
into her own note again. The curve of sound was as artistic
as any line of beauty ever struck by his pencil--as satisfying
as the curves of her who was the World's Desire.

The subject of her discourse he cared nothing about--it was
no more his interest than his concern. He took special pains
that in catching her voice he might not comprehend her words.
To the tones he had a right, none to the articulations. By
degrees he could not exist long without this sound. (Bk. II,
Ch. vii; p. 97)

Less than one page later, Pierston does not even hear that voice as it
argues with another--Ike, Ann's husband. Because it does not occur to
Pierston that Ann Avice is married, he does not wonder who this couple
is or why they are exactly where he thought she would be:

Turning at length, he hastened homeward along the now deserted
trackway, intending to overtake the revitalized Avice. But

he could see nothing of her, and concluded that she had walked
too fast for him. Arrived at his own gate he paused a moment,
and perceived that Avice's little freehold was still in dark-
ness. She had not come.

He retraced his steps, but could not find her, the only
persons on the road being a man and his wife, as he knew them
to be, though he could not see them, from the words of the
man--

"If you had not a'ready married me, you'd cut my acquain-
tance! That's a pretty thing for a wife to say!"

' The remark stung his ear unpleasantly, and.by-and-by he
went back again. Avice's cottage was now lighted: she must
have come round by the other road. (Bk. II, Ch. vii; pp. 98-
99)

To be absolutely fair to Pierston, we cannot be sure that Ann Avice says
anything for him to overhear, and this is exactly the point: we have no
way to tell whether Pierston hears her or not. What stimulates the

husband's response, of course, is being told in effect that he is no

128
longer the dwelling-place of Ann Avice's Well-Beloved.
Pierston meets this couple again under similar circumstances, but
this time he even suspects, momentarily, that the woman is Ann Avice:
Drawing near his own gate he smelt tobacco, and could discern
two figures in the side lane leading past Avice's door. They
did not, however, enter her house, but strolled onward to the
narrow pass conducting to Red King Castle and the sea. He was
in momentary heaviness at the thought that they might be Avice
with a worthless lover, but a faintly argumentative tone from
the man informed him that they were the same married couple
going homeward whom he had encountered on a previous occasion.
(Bk. II, Ch. viii; p. 106)
In this case, again, the point is Pierston's awareness and not the events
he perceives, since we have no way of knowing what "really" happened or
whether Ann Avice said anything. The last event in this series makes it
clear that Pierston ignores the evidence of his senses to preserve the
integrity of his fantasy. In this case, he knows she is meeting someone

and he follows her:

A crunching of feet upon the gravel mixed in with the articu-
lation of the sea--steps light as if they were winged. And he
supposed, two minutes later, that the mouth of some hulking
fellow was upon hers, which he himself hardly ventured to look
at, so touching was its young beauty.
Hearing pe0ple about-~among others the before-mentioned
married couple quarrelling, the woman's tones having a kinship
to Avice's own--he returned to the house. (Bk. II, Ch. ix; p.
111)
The little love-scene between Ann Avice and her "lover" is purely a
product of Pierston's imagination; Ann and her husband quarrel when they
meet.

This is, finally, the heart of the purpose of presenting an indi-
vidual and particular perspective--so that we can see how meaning is
generated by the perceiver. Hardy has been interested in what people
read into what they experience and by what means people remember experi-

ences since he showed Cytherea Graye associating her father's death with

shafts of sunlight: "Emotions will attach themselves to scenes that are

129

simultaneous--however foreign in essence these scenes may be--as chemical
waters will crystallize on twigs and wires" (Desperate Remedies Ch. I,

No. iii; p. 11). What makes Desperate Remedies more Victorian than mod-

 

ern is its use of external, objective correlatives to suggest the inter-

nal lives of its characters. What makes The Well-Beloved more modern

 

than Victorian is that the subject of the narrative is the processing
consciousness, the "chemical waters," of Jocelyn Pierston. The two nov-
els, like all of Hardy's fiction, are contiguous with each other, but
they belong to different genres, and the failure of each has to do with
how well it fits the exacting extremities of genre. Desperate Remedies
is so thoroughly a shallow thriller that to analyze it is to enrich it.
The Well—Beloved is not a novel to satisfy popular tastes: it is about
an artist who has problems of artistry, but for that, as a kind of meta-
novel about stopping creating, it well rewards post-Jamesian critical
analysis and attention.

Kate Chopin's 1899 The Awakening shows how thoroughly ingrained
close narration and its assumptions about the sphere of a novel's action
were by the end of the century. Chopin was strongly influenced by Euro-
pean literatures, as James was, and the quality of her prose makes hers
a more attractive novel from which to select passages than, for example,
George Moore's Esther Waters, the close narration of which borders, some-
times alarmingly, on the trite. Chopin's sensitivity to the effects of
memory and mood make this passage not only a rich one for analysis of
close narration but also, of course, an evocative one for its orchestra-
tion of personal and universal symbols. Taken from the very end of the
novel, as Edna prepares to commit suicide and then as she succeeds at it,
this passage so closely presents Edna's consciousness that it sometimes

lapses into present tense; Chopin has so closely identified her

130

narrator's voice with Edna's that she seems not to be describing Enda's
consciousness at all but the world around her:

The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming
with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is
seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring,
inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along
the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in
sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above,
reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water.

. . . when she was there beside the sea, absolutely alone,
she cast the unpleasant, prickling garments from her, and for
the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air, at
the mercy of the sun, the breeze that beat upon her, and the
waves that invited her.

How strange and awful it seemed to stand naked under the
sky! how delicious! She felt like some new-born creature,
opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.

The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled
like serpents about her ankles. She walked out. The water
was deep, but she lifted her white body and reached out with a
long, sweeping stroke. The touch of the sea is sensuous, en-
folding the body in its soft, close embrace.

She went on and on. She remembered the night she swam far
out, and recalled the terror that seized her at the fear of
being unable to regain the shore. She did not look back now,
but went on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she
had traversed when a little child, believing that it had no
beginning and no end.

Her arms and legs were growing tired.

She thought of Leonce and the children. They were a part
of her life. But they need not have thought that they could
possess her, body and soul. How Mademoiselle Reisz would have
laughed, perhaps sneered, if she knew! "And you call yourself
an artist! What pretensions, Madame! The artist must possess
the courageous soul that dares and defies."

Exhaustion was pressing upon and overpowering her.

"Good-by--because, I love you." He did not know; he did
not understand. He would never understand. Perhaps Doctor
Mandelet would have understood if she had seen hime-but it was
too late; the shore was far behind her, and her strength was
gone.

She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up
for an instant, then sank again. Edna heard her father's
voice and her sister Margaret's. She heard the barking of an
old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree. The spurs of
the cavalry officer clanged as he walked across the porch.
There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled
the air.51

By ending her novel in the perspective of Edna, who, presumably, dies as

the novel ends, Chopin does not allow for a distancing, objective

131

perspective such as would be provided by the histor. This leaves the
novel in Enda's hands, as it were, and insists on her perspective as the
salient one for the proper understanding of her story. The summary of
her life, then, is the series of memories and feelings, however tempo—
rary and local of Edna and to the moment. This rather anarchic abandon-
ment of the relative stability of the voice of the histor marks the nov-
els of experimentalists like Chopin and James (whose The Portrait of a
Lady_ends in the local but continuing perspective of Casper Goodwood).
Dickens, certainly, and Hardy and Wilde return to a locus outside the
limited and particular ones of their characters in order to end their
novels.

One way to look at all of this is to see that Dickens was a genuine
genius, whose narrative experimentation prefigures all the innovations
in narration except those which violate standard novelistic punctuation
and sentence structure, that is, everything up to the most extreme forms
for presenting stream of consciousness. Another possible conclusion to
draw is that Henry James's early contribution to the development of nar-
rative was in the elegant simplicity of his idea to stOp the action al-
together while Isabel Archer sits and thinks; in a way, we can say that
it is the directness of the relation between the action and the narra-
tion in that scene which makes it stand out as a landmark to later read-
ers, just as Chopin's leaving her novel without returning to the continu-
ing world of the reader and the narrator and the surviving characters
makes her novel important. Another is to say that different writers in-
terpret close narration in different ways, just as do different writers
of stream of consciousness; for Dickens, the situations in which he
wished to present the characters' thoughts and feelings as well as their

perspectives led him to take up their voices, their vocabularies and

132

idiosyncrasies as well as their more general styles. For James, the
novelist's situation included the possibility, at least theoretically,
of completely submerging the sense of a narrator in the flowing words
which represent the flowing impresSions of a marginally relevant charac-
ter. For Dickens, a narrator was essential and, if the narration got
close enough to a character, it became, as it does for Esther Summerson
in Bleak House, first-person. For James, it seemed possible to present
by way of narration what would not be spoken, but what would be only
felt or thought in passing. For Hardy, both narrative situations were

possible--and, beginning with The Woodlanders, necessary.

 

Chapter Four: Close Narration in Hardy's Major Novels

Any of Hardy's novels can be analyzed by reference to close narra-
tion, because the close narration of any of his novels can be seen to be
related to the narration of all of them and to his ideas about the nature
of consciousness, to the boundaries of structural units within the novel,
to the roles played by the minor characters, and to the identity of the

main characters. With the exception of Desperate Remedies and The Well-

 

Beloved, the most valuable novels to discuss, for critical purposes, are

Hardy's major ones, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native,

 

The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess, and Jude. There is, of

 

course, a great deal which can be said about the other novels: all of
Hardy's novels open up under analysis of this kind, and a look at the
close narration of each of them allows for an organized way to think of
Hardy's presentation of his characters. Limiting the discusszon to Har-
dy's major novels is the most practical way to proceed, because a dis-
cussion of the close narration of all of Hardy's novels would be enor-
mously bulky, and most of the results would be too particular to the

novel at hand to make them worth the effort or space.

A. Far from the Madding Crowd

 

Far from the Madding_Crowd is Hardy's first important use of close

 

narration in his novels, if we wish to use the narration to understand
the integrity rather than the failure of the novel. The characters

133

134

presented by means of close narration are Gabriel Oak, Bathsheba Ever-
dene, Farmer Boldwood, and Sergeant Frank Troy; instances of narration
close to them occur in groups, so that events are dramatized rather than
presented by isolated patches of close narration scattered here and
there. Bathsheba and Gabriel each get relatively thorough presentation,
especially compared to the protagonists of earlier novels. They share
the center of consciousness in the novel in a way which suggests that
there is no single "main" character but a pair of perceiving minds in
Hardy's conception of this story. Joseph Warren Beach handles this
split in the focus of the novel between Bathsheba and Gabriel by divid-
ing the plot from the setting, so that "As Bathsheba is undoubtedly the
central actor in the drama, so Oak is the central feature of the picto-
rial composition, the poem, to which the drama was attached."1

A glance at Gabriel's passages of close narration, however, reveals
that he is presented not from the outside, which "pictorial composition"
suggests, but from the inside. Gabriel's close narration occurs at four
points in the course of the novel, which become points of intense emo-
tional excitement in his life. The first cluster of passages close to
him takes place at the beginning of the novel, when Gabriel loses his
sheep and must go to work for wages. Hardy is concerned that we accept
as valid Gabriel's perspective, in spite of his comic face and dress,
since it serves as a kind of index for the just estimation of the behav-
ior of the rest of the characters; the most important passage from this
group of instances of close narration is a description of what Gabriel
can see, his perspective, and of what he is thinking. His younger sheep
dog has just run his entire flock over a cliff:

His first feeling now was one of pity for the untimely fate of
these gentle ewes and their unborn lambs.

135
It was a second to remember another phase of the matter.
The sheep were not insured. All the savings of a frugal life
had been dispersed at a blow; his hopes of being an indepen-
dent farmer were laid low—~possibly for ever. . . .
"Thank God I am not married: what would she have done in
the poverty now coming upon me!"
Oak raised his head, and wondering what he could do, list-
lessly surveyed the scene. By the outer margin of the pit was
an oval pond, and over it hung the attenuated skeleton of a
chrome-yellow moon, which had only a few days to last--the
morning star dogging her on the left hand. The pool glittered
like a dead man's eye, and as the world awoke a breeze blew,
shaking and elongating the reflection of the moon without
breaking it, and turning the image of the star to a phosphoric
streak upon the water. All this Oak saw and remembered. (Ch.
V, p. 41)
Oak is "central" in the "composition" of this novel, but not as Beach
imagined it--as phrases like "The pool glittered like a dead man's eye"
make clear--since Gabriel's centrality is obviously that of the perceiv-
er and not that of the perceived (or "pictorial").

Hardy does not get close to Gabriel again until the sheep-shearing
episode in Bathsheba's barn (Ch. XXII). This event marks a moment of
happiness for Oak, and Hardy narrates with some detail not only his tem-
porary freedom from worry that makes up the center of this episode but
also Gabriel's unhappiness which begins and ends the scene. The last of
Oak's perspective that we get until after Bathsheba has married Troy is
his watching Boldwood take her out of the barn and into the sunlight.
The third group of passages close to Gabriel marks a new phase in his
life, one that puts him in direct opposition to Troy (Ch. XXXV through
Ch. XXXVII). The climax of this new phase in Oak's life, however, does
not come until the night of the storm which threatens Bathsheba's crops
and which ruins Boldwood's ( in Ch. XXXVII). The importance of this
climax is emphasized by the presence and intensity of the storm. Once

the emotional energy has peaked and dissipated, for Gabriel and for the

storm, Hardy moves the novel away from Oak again and does not return to

136

him until the end, after Boldwood has shot Troy, when Gabriel moves
again into the center of the action surrounding Bathsheba.

The principle underlying Hardy's use of narration close to Gabriel
seems to be that, when Gabriel's consciousness is stirred by external
events and people, it dominates the content of what he perceives. Part
of our sense of Oak's unselfish devotion to Bathsheba is a result of the
close narration, for except for his despair at the loss of his sheep and
his surprise at the outcome of Troy's return, all of the passages of nar-
ration close to Gabriel describe him thinking about Bathsheba.

Like Gabriel's, Bathsheba's instances of close narration occur in
groups. The first group illustrates Bathsheba's intense love for Troy
before she marries him and her confusion about her duty to Boldwood (Ch.
XXXI through Ch. XXXII). This is, in fact, fairly late in the novel;
Hardy stays outside of Bathsheba's perspective until she begins to real-
ize fully the consequences of her actions--in this case, her playful
toying with another's, Boldwood's, emotions. The second constellation
of passages of narration close to Bathsheba describes her when, faced
with Fanny Robin and her baby, she begins to regret her marriage to Troy
(Ch. XLI and Ch. XLIII); this section ends as Bathsheba goes to her
knees, humbled and ready to begin the long process of healing which will
prepare her to appreciate Gabriel's true nobility. The last group of
narration close to Bathsheba, then, really only one isolated instance,
dramatizes her finally-awakened interest in Oak (Ch. L1).

The most important single instance of this narration close to Bath-
sheba shows her trying to learn the truth about Troy and Fanny; as a
look at the scene as a whole shows, this section also has the purpose of

presenting Bathsheba realizing her need for Gabriel, first, and then

137

learning humility, a lesson that has been coming since she was first in-
troduced, sitting on her wagon and admiring herself in her mirror. Bath-
sheba first identifies the standard against which we compare her--Gabriel
Oak--and then she tries to emulate him:

She suddenly felt a longing desire to speak to some one strong-
er than herself, and so get strength to sustain her surmised
position with dignity and her carking doubts with stoicism.
Where could she find such a friend? nowhere in the house. She
was by far the coolest of the women under her roof. Patience
and suspension of judgment for a few hours were what she wanted
to learn, and there was nobody to teach her. Might she but go
to Gabriel Oak!--but that could not be. What a way Oak had,
she thought, of enduring things. Boldwood, who seemed so much
deeper and higher and stronger in feeling than Gabriel, had

not yet learnt, any more than she herself, the simple lesson
which Oak showed a mastery of by every turn and look he gave--
that among the multitude of interests by which he was surround-
ed, those which affected his personal well-being were not the
most absorbing and important in his eyes. Oak meditatively
looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special
regard to his own standpoint in the midst. That was how she
would wish to be. But then Oak was not racked by incertitude
upon the inmost matter of his bosom, as she was at this moment.
Oak knew all about Fanny that she wished to know--she felt con-
vinced of that. If she were to go to him now at once and say
no more than these few words, "What is the truth of the story?"
he would feel bound in honour to tell her. It would be an in—
expressible relief. No further speech would need to be ut-
tered. He knew her so well that no eccentricity of behavior

in her would alarm him. (Ch. XLIII, pp. 337-38)

Bathsheba's regrets are only beginning, for she imagines that her pain
will disappear as soon as she talks to Gabriel; it is as if she imagines
that he will save her. She decides to ask him for the truth, and she
goes to his house; still full of pride, however, she feels that she can-
not be humiliated in front of him:
Alas for her resolve! She felt she could not do it. Not for
worlds now could she give a hint about her misery to him, much
less ask him plainly for information on the cause of Fanny's
death. She must suspect, and guess, and chafe, and bear it all
alone. (Ch. XLIII, p. 339)

Having come to this decision, she still waits and watches Gabriel, who

now

138

appeared in an upper room, placed his light in the window-
bench, and then--knelt down to pray. The contrast of the pic-
ture with her rebellious and agitated existence at this same
time was too much for her to bear to look upon longer. It was
not for her to make a truce with trouble by any such means.
She must tread her giddy distracting measure to its last note,
as she had begun it. With a swollen heart she went again up
the lane, and entered her own door. (Ch. XLIII, p. 339)
Finally, Bathsheba is so distraught that some kind of expression is nec-
essary, some kind of crisis required to end it. She is at her lowest
point. Humiliated and out of control, she emulates what is idealized in
Oak in this scene, his dignity-—something Bathsheba has been trying to
do since she realized that he "meditatively looked upon the horizon of
circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the
midst." It is a kind of irony that Gabriel has dignity on his knees,
while Bathsheba seems merely to be attempting to escape her own chaotic
consciousness:
Bathsheba became at this moment so terrified at her own state
of mind that she looked around for some sort of refuge from
herself. The vision of Oak kneeling down that night recurred
to her, and . . . she seized upon the idea, resolved to kneel,
and, if possible, pray. Gabriel had prayed; so would she.
(Ch. XLIII, p. 342)

Just as the scene in the storm is Gabriel's most intense moment,
this scene, with Fanny laid out in the parlor, is Bathsheba's. That
Bathsheba is at her lowest and most humiliated is represented by her
finally being forced to her knees by the crushing of her pride. Gabriel,
of course, is elevated during his climactic moments of awareness, so
elevated, in fact, that he seems god-like with his lightening rod and
the "shouting" sky and his perception that "love, life, everything human,
seemed small and trifling in such close juxtaposition with an infuriated

universe" (Ch. XXXVII, p. 287). He does not seem god-like in this way

in Bathsheba's perspective; the picture of him which appears as she

 

 

139

struggles with her pride is one of conventional piety. In the voice of
the histor, this presentation of Oak would be nothing but a blatant ap-
peal to the most stereotypic of Christian ideals; from Bathsheba's per-
spective, however, it presents not only the image of her salvation and
how abject she has become, but how domestic and comfortable Oak is among
the everyday activities of civilized, indoor life.

Hardy's use of close narration to present Farmer Boldwood's con-
sciousness is important because it engages Hardy in what can only be
called a sympathetic depiction of insanity, an engagement which echoes
his treatment of Clym Yeobright and Sue Bridehead. Moreover, Hardy not
only devotes passages of narration close to Boldwood, he also describes
events from his perspective. This close treatment of and attention to
Boldwood's emotions begin as he is stunned by receipt of the Valentine
and serve to show how he is obsessed by thoughts of Bathsheba, to the
exclusion of normal concern for his farm and even his appearance. The
most interesting of these passages occurs relatively late in the story,
after Troy has run away, when Boldwood rationalizes events and motiva-
tions to suit his own desires: in other words, Hardy narrates his mis-
perceptions. Boldwood is far from Oak's sober kind of sanity when he
imagines that Bathsheba, having been deeply disappointed in her marriage
to Troy, will be able to force her affections and passions to obey the
rules of commerce:

How long he might have to wait he had not yet closely consid-
ered. What he would try to recognize was that the severe
schooling she had been subjected to had made Bathsheba much
more considerate than she had formerly been of the feelings of
others, and he trusted that, should she be willing at any time
in the future to marry any man at all, that man would be him-
self. There was a substratum of good feeling in her: her self—
reproach for the injury she had thoughtlessly done him might

be depended upon now to a much greater extent than before her
infatuation and disappointment. It would be possible to

140
approach her by the channel of her good nature, and to suggest
a friendly business-like compact between them for fulfilment
at some future day, keeping the passionate side of his desire
entirely out of sight. (Ch. XLIX, p. 382)
Subtly but very clearly, Hardy shows Boldwood's unrealistic ideals in
his belief that he can force his own acknowledged passion into these
same commercial patterns.
To Hardy, obviously, such dispassionate and "business-like" han-
dling of sexual passions is impossible, and Boldwood's denial of the
strength of his passion is evidence of his worsening instability. More
evidence can be found in his fantasy that he can "annihilate the six
years of his life as if they were minutes--so little did he value his
time on earth beside her love," especially when we set that beside his
"little care . . . for anything but as it bore upon the consummation" of
his courtship of her. Boldwood is no wild-eyed, raving maniac; he is not
melodrama's madman. In this close and sympathetic portrayal of him and
his perspective, he is shown reasoning sequentially, given the assump-
tion that the outcome will be what he wants it to be:
Six years were a long time, but how much shorter than never,
the idea he had for so long been obliged to endure! Jacob had
served twice seven years for Rachel: what were six for such a
woman as this? He tried to like the notion of waiting for her
better than that of winning her at once. Boldwood felt his
love to be so deep and strong and eternal, that it was possi-
ble she had never yet known its full volume, and this patience
in delay would afford him an opportunity of giving sweet proof
on the point. He would annihilate the six years of his life
. as if they were minutes--so little did he value his time on

earth beside her love. He would let her see, all those six
years of intangible ethereal courtship, how little care he had
for anything but as it bore upon the consummation. (Ch. XLIX,
pp. 384-85)

Boldwood's last instance of close narration occurs as he recognizes Troy

at his Christmas party:

Even then Boldwood did not recognize that the impersonator of
Heaven's persistent irony towards him, who had once before

141

broken in upon his bliss, scourged him, and snatched his de-
light away, had come to do these things a second time. Troy
began to laugh a mechanical laugh: Boldwood recognized him
now. (Ch. LIII, p. 433)
This passage of narration close to Boldwood, however, is brief and, ar-
guably, more like the histor than Boldwood, and we are more concerned
with him as Gabriel sees him, still sympathetically but outside his per-
spective. His identification of Troy is the last image we get from him,

since all the rest of the events which matter to him, his trial, convic-

tion, and stay of execution all take place only peripherally to us.

B. The Return of the Native

 

Going by close narration alone, The Return of the Native "belongs"
to Eustacia; she is more frequently and extensively presented by means of
her own perspective than any other character in the novel. This novel

is different, then, from Far from the Madding Crowd in that the voice of

 

one character is allowed to predominate. The close narration of The Re—
turn of the Native also differs from that of the earlier novel in that
Hardy expands his use of close narration beyond the few central charac-
ters--Eustacia, Clym, Diggory Venn, Mrs. Yeobright, and Wildeve--to in-
clude Captain Vye, Eustacia's grandfather, Charley, the young man who
works for Captain Vye and loves Eustacia, and even the man hired to drive
the rented fly at Diggory and Thomasin's wedding. More striking, howev-
er, than this simultaneously tightened focus on Eustacia and broadened
inclusion of voices outside the ring of principal players is the congru-
ence between the division of the novel into Books and the grouping of
instances of close narration.

Books First and Third are narrated almost completely outside the

142

characters' consciousnesses. The beginning of The Return of the Native,

 

it will be remembered, is the site of a £22£_d2_£2££s_for the histor, and
Hardy stays outside of the characters' perspectives as they are all in-
troduced and appear in pairs based either on love or, more often, enmity.
The single instance of narration close to Eustacia in Book First shows
her disenchantment with Wildeve as soon as he is free of Thomasin's
claims (Bk. I, Ch. xi; p. 116).

Book Third, "The Fascination," describes Clym's face, Clym and Eu-
stacia's wedding, Clym and Mrs. Yeobright's estrangement, and the gam-
bling for the guineas Mrs. Yeobright intended for Thomasin and Clym.

The first instance of narration close to Clym occurs in Book Third and,
if the novel ended with Book Fifth, it would be his only one. Clym is
the only character the depiction of whose consciousness would be affected
in this way, as all the other important characters who get close narra-
tion are dead by the end of Book Fifth except Diggory Venn, who is made
unimportant by his rejoining society. If any single passage had to exem-
plify Clym's thinking, however, this passage would do. It shows that
the real focus of his thoughts is his mother and that, like Jude's, his
thinking can be characterized by its intermittency--that is, things oc-
cur to him, and then he forgets them. Like Jude, Clym has perceptions
of great wisdom and insight at times, but the wisdom and insight do not
stay with him:
In spite of Eustacia's apparent willingness to wait through
the period of an unpromising engagement, till he should be es-
tablished in his new pursuit, he could not but perceive at mo-
ments that she loved him rather as a visitant from a gay world
to which she rightly belonged than as a man with a purpose op-
posed to that recent past of his which so interested her. Of-
ten at their meetings a word or a sigh escaped her. It meant
that, though she made no conditions as to his return to the

French capital, this was what she secretly longed for in the
event of marriage; and it robbed him of many an otherwise

143

pleasant hour. Along with that came the widening breach be-
tween himself and his mother. Whenever any little occurrence
had brought into more prominence than usual the disappointment
that he was causing her it had sent him on lone and moody
walks; or he was kept awake a great part of the night by the
turmoil of spirit which such a recnognition created. If Mrs.
Yeobright could only have been led to see what a sound and
worthy purpose this purpose of his was and how little it was
being affected by his devotion to Eustacia, how differently
would she regard him! (Bk. III, Ch. iv; pp. 236-37)

Only the last sentence in this passage is technically close, although
the entire passage is narrated from Clym's perspective. The last sen-
tence also has interest because it seems to be the only thing that Clym
thinks with which the narrator might disagree.

The rest of The Return of the Native, Books Second, Fourth, Fifth,

 

and Sixth, "belong" to the characters in a way that Books First and Third
do not. Book Second, for example, is Eustacia's: she has at least one
instance of close narration in every chapter but the two located at
Bloom's End which do not treat her. The inStances of narration close to
Eustacia in this Book suggest that her consciousness is stirred to life
by the news and then the presence of Clym. The mumming excites her quite
a bit, and Hardy details not only her feelings during the planning but
also her inner reality as the play is in performance. The most impor-
tant feature of the narration close to Eustacia is that the ideas ex-
pressed in it are strictly limited to what she can know. Such absolute
localization does not permit references to important future events ex-
cept as she can guess them. Thus, in the course of the novel much of

the content of these passages turns out to be a realistic mixture of the
trivial and the significant, the misunderstood and the clear-sighted.

On Eustacia's way home from the mumming, for instance, Hardy avoids ref-
erence to the characters' futures and avoids summarizing by the histor

by turning our attention to the conclusions, however trivial and

144

ultimately irrelevant, which Eustacia draws:
Yeobright, if he had the least curiosity, would infallibly
discover her name. What then? . . . What was the use of her
exploit? She was at present a total stranger to the Yeobright
family. The unreasonable nimbus of romance with which she had
encircled that man might be her misery. How could she allow
herself to become so infatuated with a stranger? And to fill
the cup of her sorrow there would be Thomasin, living day af-
ter day in inflammable proximity to him; for she had just
learnt that, contrary to her first belief, he was going to
stay at home some considerable time. (Bk. II, Ch. vi; p. 171)
By using narration close to her, Hardy gives the same weight to Eusta-
cia's thoughts that her infatuation with Clym is an idealization of him
and that Clym and Thomasin might fall in love. The profound and the
trivial are presented with equal emphasis because they have equal sig-
nificance to Eustacia, regardless of their individual significance to
Hardy or to us.

"Book Fourth: The Closed Door" roughly parallels "Book Second: The
Arrival" in its frequency and intensity of close narration. In it Eu-
stacia and Mrs. Yeobright quarrel, Clym damages his eyes and takes up
furze-cutting, Eustacia dances with Wildeve, and Mrs. Yeobright crosses
the heath to visit Clym, is not admitted, and dies. Book Fourth differs
from Book Second, however, in that Eustacia's consciousness does not
dominate as it did in Book Second; there is no single dominating con-
sciousness in this Book, since there are instances of narration close to
Mrs. Yeobright and Diggory Venn as well as Eustacia. In fact, since
Diggory's single instance of close narration is short and relatively in-
considerable (Bk. IV, Ch. iv; pp. 317-18), the Book describes the pres-
sures on Clym as the two women struggle to get from him what they need.
The sympathetic presentation of these Opposing sets of desires begins in

the first chapter of this Book and, really, the two women compete against

each other--and against Thomasin, who is completely out-classed--for the

145

rest of the novel, past the ends of their lives. Compared to Mrs. Yeo-
bright, when the two women are paired off against each other, Eustacia
seems shallow and self-absorbed. When it is clear that it was a mistake
to have married Clym, Eustacia imagines "how all those Budmouth ones who
should learn what had become of her would say, 'Look at the girl for
whom nobody was good enough!'" (Bk. IV, Ch. iii; p. 305). Eustacia's
too great concern for the opinions of others is presented here in con-
junction with two other equally characteristic qualities: her early, and
sound, impulse to attempt to change unsatisfactory conditions ("She cast
about for any possible course which offered the least improvement in the
existing state of things, and could find none") and her over-willingness
to give up if she cannot immediately effect the desired change ("'Two
wasted lives--his and mine. And am I come to this! Will it drive me
out of my mind?‘ . . . To Eustacia the situation seemed such a mockery
of her hopes that death appeared the only door of relief if the satire
of heaven should go much further" [Bk. IV, Ch. iii; p. 3057.)

Eustacia's intermittent will to die appears rather whimsical, es-
pecially in Book Fourth, against Mrs. Yeobright's unblinking view of
things. Understanding as she does the general truths before taking in
the particulars, Mrs. Yeobright's perspective, though seldom presented
in strictly close narration, is an important one in the novel. As she
is on her way to visit Clym and Eustacia, her view of him working as a
furze-cutter becomes a vision of human insignificance on the heath; Mrs.
Yeobright's perception can be regarded as objective here, since she does
not yet know that the worker she sees is her son:

The silent being who thus occupied himself seemed to be of no
more account in life than an insect. He appeared as a mere

parasite of the heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour
as a moth frets a garment, entirely ingrossed with its products,

146

having no knowledge of anything in the world but fern, furze,
heath, lichens, and moss. (Bk. IV, Ch. v; p. 328)

Much of our sympathy for Mrs. Yeobright comes as a result of Hardy's
presentation of her perspective; she is never shown to be misperceiving
and her voice is so close to that of the histor that she borrows some of
his reliability. In our last view from her perspective, for instance,
we have no sense that her thoughts are trivial, her feelings selfish, or
her vision different from that of Hardy:

In front of her a colony of ants had established a thorough-
fare across the way, where they toiled a never-ending and
heavy-laden throng. To look down upon them was like observing
a city from the top of a tower. She remembered that this
bustle of ants had been in progress for years at the same
spot--doubtless those of the old times were the ancestors of
these which walked there now. She leant back to obtain more
thorough rest, and the soft eastern portion of the sky was as
great a relief to her eyes as the thyme was to her head.

While she looked a heron arose on that side of the sky and
flew on with his face towards the sun. He had come dripping
wet from some pool in the valleys, and as he flew the edges
and lining of his wings, his thighs, and his breast were so
caught by the bright sunbeams that he appeared as if formed

of burnished silver. Up in the zenith where he was seemed

a free and happy place, away from all contact with the earthly
ball to which she was pinioned; and she wished that she could
arise uncrushed from its surface and fly as he flew then.

(Bk. IV, Ch. vi; p. 343)

-The expansiveness of her perception and the reliability in her gen-
eralizations set her in sharp contrast to Eustacia, for whose feelings
we are accustomed to have sympathy, but whose ideas are intermittently
good and bad, profound and trivial, and for whom there can be a large
discrepancy between the importance of an action and its consequences.
Hardy's treatment of Mrs. Yeobright's knocking, for instance, makes an
interesting contrast to that of the mumming. Both knocks are narrated
outside Eustacia:

"God, how I envy him that sweet sleep!" said Wildeve. "I
have not slept like that since I was a boy--years and years

ago."
While they thus watched him a click at the gate was audible,

147

and a knock came to the door. Eustacia went to a window and
looked out.

Her countenance changed. First she became crimson, and
then the red subsided till it even partially left her lips.

"No," she said, "we won't have any of this. If she comes
in she must see you--and think if she likes there's something
wrong! But how can I open the door to her, when she dislikes
me--wishes to see not me, but her son? I won't open the door!"

Mrs. Yeobright knocked again more loudly.

"Her knocking will, in all likelihood, awaken him," contin-
ued Eustacia; "and then he will let her in himself. Ah--lis-
ten."

They could hear Clym moving in the other room, as if dis-
turbed by the knocking, and he uttered the word "MOther."

"Yes--he is awake--he will go to the door," she said, with
a breath of relief. (Bk. IV, Ch. vi; pp. 336-37)

After Wildeve has left, Hardy treats Eustacia with a short passage close
to her:
When he had quite gone she slowly turned, and directed her at-
tention to the interior of the house.

But it was possible that her presence might not be desired
by Clym and his mother at this moment of their first meeting,
or that it would be superfluous. At all events, she was in no
hurry to meet Mrs. Yeobright. (Bk. IV, Ch. vi; p. 338)

Considering the results, Eustacia's decision in these chapters to stay
in the garden and not to answer the door is quite quick, unemotional,
and undramatic. Her feelings do not seem to be tumultuous or intense:
she thinks of what is "possible" and she is "in no hurry to meet Mrs.
Yeobright." Her decision is made without agony and, after Clym seems to
awaken, with very little self—questioning; it is a simple matter of
preference and a mistake concerning the condition of Clym's conscious-
ness.

"Book Fifth: The Discovery," full of wildly strong emotional crises,
has few important passages of close narration. This Book sees Clym's
despair at his mother's death, his realization that Mrs. Yeobright had

come to visit him, his split with Eustacia, her return to her grandfa-

ther's house, Wildeve's visit to her there, Eustacia and Wildeve's plan

148

to escape, their drowning, and Clym's blaming himself for the deaths of
both his mother and his wife. Instead of extended passages of narration
close to the characters, Hardy uses the objective correlatives of Clym's
blindness and the storm at the end of the Book to suggest emotional con-
ditions. Hardy stays with Eustacia until her curious loss of self-aware-
ness during the storm. He describes her depression at the beginning of
the Book, and the voice gets close to Eustacia when she considers sui-
cide using her grandfather's pistols (Bk. V, Ch. iv; p. 398), when Wild-
eve answers Charley's inadvertent signal (Bk. V, Ch. v; pp. 403-4), and,
briefly, after she has run away, when she realizes that she does not
have the means of escape (Bk. V, Ch. vii; pp. 421-22). The passage nar-
rating Eustacia's reaction to the signal to Wildeve is the most interest-
ing, because, in introducing it by describing Eustacia's state of mind,
Hardy is explicit that she has reached some kind of level, some aware-
ness, that allows her to see herself objectively. Because of her adver-
sities, she has achieved the kind of self-consciousness signified in
Hardy by a fissure in the personality of the character:
Had she not by her situation been inclined to hold in indif-
ference all things honoured of the gods and of men she would
probably have come away. But her state was so hopeless that
she could play with it. 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 out-
side herself, observe herself as a disinterested spectator,
and think what a sport for Heaven this woman Eustacia was.
(Bk. V, Ch. v; p. 405)
The narrator's position suggests validation and support for Eustacia's
experience here: she is, "like other people at such a stage" of having

' not a

lost without the necessity of losing, "a disinterested spectator,‘
depressed or suicidal individual with a hopelessly local and biassed
perspective. This, then, suggests that all of Eustacia's suffering has

brought her to this level, and that what she thinks, "what a sport for

149

' is in fact an enlightened perspective.

Heaven this woman Eustacia was,’

While "Book Sixth: Aftercourses" does in fact give this novel an
ostensible happy ending, with a wedding, Diggory and Thomasin are not
characterized by means of narration close to theme-Clym is. He has one
instance of close narration in three of the four chapters in the Book:
in the first, in which he is worried that Thomasin is attempting to make
herself attractive to him; in the third, in which Clym believes that he
should marry her; and in the fourth, in which Thomasin and Diggory marry
and Clym commences his open-air preaching. In this Book Hardy is at
pains to show the effects of Clym's experience on him, for, regardless
of whether or not Diggory and Thomasin marry, Book Sixth "belongs" to
Clym in the same way the Book Second does to Eustacia. There are two
important changes in Clym which make him different from the young man
who had just returned from Paris. The first is that "His sorrows had
made some change in his outward appearance; and yet the alteration was
chiefly within. It might have been said that he had a wrinkled mind"
(Bk. VI, Ch. i; p. 455). The other effect on Clym of his "sorrows" is
that he is still, essentially, blind; although Hardy tells us that Clym
reads "books of exceptionally large type" (Bk. VI, Ch. i; p. 456), we
see in this last Book that Clym's "Understanding" is still, as it were,
"Darkened."2 He "sees nothing" of Thomasin's interest in Diggory and
does "not specially observe" the particulars of her behavior (Bk. Vi,
Ch. i; p. 437.and p. 460).

Accounting forywhat exactly Hardy meant by "a wrinkled mind" is a
little more difficult than showing instances of Clym's blindness. Ob-
viously, Hardy is suggesting that Clym has been prematurely aged by his
experience. What Hardy chooses to emphasize by close narration, however,

is that "His passion" for Eustacia "had occurred too far on in his

150

manhood to leave fuel enough on hand for another fire of that sort, as
may happen with more boyish loves" (Bk. VI, Ch. i; p. 460).3 Another
"wrinkle" marks his continuing obsession with his mother; this time
there is no doubt that it is a problem which will never be resolved.
The passage begins close to Clym and ends, in the voice of the histor,
with a clear reminder of the irrationality of Clym's thoughts:

Throughout this period Yeobright had more or less pondered
on his duty to his cousin Thomasin. He could not help feeling
that it would be a pitiful waste of sweet material if the ten-
der-natured thing should be doomed from this early stage of
her life onwards to dribble away her winsome qualities on
lonely gorse and fern. But he felt this as an economist mere-
ly, and not as a lover. »His passion for Eustacia had been a
sort of conserve of his whole life, and he had nothing more of
that supreme quality left to bestow. So far the obvious thing
was not to entertain any idea of marriage with Thomasin, even
to oblige her.

But this was not all. Years ago there had been in his
mother's mind a great fancy about Thomasin and himself. It
had not positively amounted to a desire, but it had always
been a favourite dream. That they should be man and wife in
good time, if the happiness of neither were endangered there-
by, was the fancy in question. So that what course save one
was there now left for any son who reverenced his mother's
memory as Yeobright did? It is an unfortunate fact that any
particular whim of parents, which might have been dispersed by
half an hour's conversation during their lives, becomes sub-
limated by their deaths into a fiat the most absolute, with
such results to conscientious children as those parents, had
they lived, would have been the first to decry. (Bk. VI, Ch.
iii; pp. 468-69)

The next two paragraphs are close to Clym; what is presented in them are
not strong feelings but thoughts and resolves. This is the kind of

death Clym suffers-~death of his feelings. The Hand of Ethelberta is

 

strikingly different from Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of

 

 

the Native, even though it comes in between them, because Ethelberta is
not passionate, and the narration close to her, which constitutes all
the close narration there is in the novel, presents her thoughts,

schemes, and resolves just as it does for Clym at the end of The Return

 

151

Of the Native. Such treatment has the odd effect of presenting the con-
sciousness of these two characters without enlivening them; Ethelberta,
in fact, is not even very likable in her novel, and neither, at the end
of his, is Clym.

Clym's last instance of narration reinforces our sense that the
"wrinkle" of his loyalty to his mother and her perspective is the most
important one. Not only does he feel responsible for her and Eustacia's
deaths, and not only does he desire to carry out to the letter what he
imagines her wishes to have been, but he also idealizes her: he now be-
lieves that she was right all along. This is fully as sympathetic a
picture of insanity as Boldwood's, and it is more completely presented:

Yeobright sat down in one of the vacant chairs, and remained
in thought a long time. His mother's old chair was opposite;
it had been sat in that evening by those who had scarcely re-
membered that it ever was hers. But to Clym she was almost a
presence there, now as always. Whatever she was in other peo-
ple's memories, in his she was the sublime saint whose radiance
even his tenderness for Eustacia could not obscure. But his
heart was heavy; that mother had not crowned him in the day of
his espousals and in the day of the gladness of his heart.
And events had borne out the accuracy of her judgment, and
proved the devotedness of her care. He should have heeded her
for Eustacia's sake even more than for his own. "It was all
my fault," he whispered. "O, my mother, my mother! would to
God that I could live my life again, and endure for you what
you endured for me!" (Bk. VI, Ch. iv; p. 483)
Except for a short coda, which describes Clym preaching, from outside
his perspective, this is the end of the novel. This is the first time
that Hardy has allowed an expression of individual consciousness so near
the end of a novel. Even though the chapter is entitled "Cheerfulness
Again Asserts Itself at Blooms-End, and Clym Finds His Vocation," put-
ting so much narration close to Clym so near the end causes Clym's sadly
"wrinkled mind" to overshadow in significance both "Cheerfulness" assert-

ing itself and his long-awaited reentry into the world. Hardy preserves

the tone of this passage close to Clym by resisting his usual impulse to

152

comment on the state of Clym's mind in the voice of his histor. His

losses, then, are what we remember of Clym.

C. The Mayor of Casterbridge

The Mayor of Casterbridge is about how knowledge and communication

 

determine the interactions of people. The world described in this novel
is social rather than natural; and when Henchard leaves Casterbridge at
the end he is leaving society and humankind as well as Elizabeth-Jane

and Farfrae. Essential to Henchard's personality at the beginning of

The Mayor are his directness of approach when he wants something (whether
information, action, or object) and his clumsiness with urban and sophis—
ticated forms of communication. His abandonment of humankind is a long
process, represented by his loss of the power to make himself believed
and the loss of his usual direct and straightforward style. Such losses
leave him without defense in Casterbridge's highly verbal society, where
an absence of defense is a condemnation, and where the passing on of in-
formation makes a good defense (Henchard does not plead his case to
Elizabeth-Jane and she rejects him; the furmity-woman is guilty of her
misdemeanors but saves herself by charging Henchard.) Hardy illustrates
Henchard's decline in every available way, from his changing jobs, to

his lodgings, to the imagery surrounding him; equally consistent and of
supreme importance is Henchard's decline in his resources for direct
communication with others. When he tries to tell Farfrae about Lucetta's
lack of chastity he is reduced to reading him her letters; when he and
Elizabeth-Jane run the little seed shop, he is not able to confront her
directly on matters which concern him greatly--the expense of the muff

she says she bought, the number of books she suddenly owns, the real

153

status of her relationship with Farfrae. Henchard hates the idea that
Donald might be courting Elizabeth-Jane:

Time had been when such instinctive opposition would have
taken shape in action. But he was not now the Henchard of
former days. He schooled himself to accept her will, in this
as in other matters, as absolute and unquestionable. He dread-
ed lest an antagonistic word should lose for him such regard
as he had regained from her by his devotion, feeling that to
retain this under separation was better than to incur her dis-
like by keeping her near. . . .

Henchard was, by original make, the last man to act stealth-
ily, for good or for evil. But the solicitus timor of his
love--the dependence upon Elizabeth's regard into which he had
declined (or, in another sense, to which he had advanced)--de-
naturalized him. He would often weigh and consider for hours
together the meaning of such and such a deed or phrase of hers,
when a blunt settling question would formerly have been his
first instinct. (Ch. XLII, pp. 350-51)

 

What changes in Henchard is his attitude--now he is afraid of "an antag-
onistic word" and stymied by "the meaning of such and such a deed or
phrase."

As Henchard gets less and less able to.communicate directly with
humanity, Hardy spends more and more of each chapter describing the
events of the story from Henchard's consciousness. This begins slowly,
as does Henchard's isolation, when he takes a job in Farfrae's yard and
when he begins to drink again (in Oh. XXXII). The intensity of the close
narration increases until Henchard's perspective dominates the chapters
at the end of the novel. For Elizabeth-Jane, however, for whom the is-
sue is secrecy, communication which is withheld from her, the narrative
attention begins with her and loses intensity as the novel progresses
and as she learns what was withheld. Once she enters Casterbridge and
begins to act, the narrative perspective is basically hers (Ch. IV
through Ch. IX), so that what she can hear and see, and therefore con-
clude, determine what is narrated. Elizabeth-Jane's consciousness is

less and less central to the novel after Lucetta moves to Casterbridge;

154

this exclusion is so thorough that even when she learns of Henchard's
lie to Newson, the perspective stays with Henchard and not with Eliza-
beth-Jane. Even though her perspective is the central one at the begin-
ning of the novel, it is not until after she has forgiven Henchard his
deceit, after her wedding and reinstallation into Casterbridge society,
that Hardy returns to it.

There is a great deal of close narration in this novel compared to
any of Hardy's that precede it, some instances of which are quite exten-
sive and many more instances in which the narrative perspective and the
knowledge allowed to the reader are limited to that of one or another
character. Henchard's perspective dominates the novel; after him, in
descending order of importance, speaking of the narration, are Elizabeth-
Jane, Lucetta, Farfrae, Susan Henchard, and JOpp (Lucetta's nemesis).
There is too much close narration in The Mayor to discuss it all com-
pletely, so it is best to look to the larger context and focus on what
is most important. Structurally, Hardy's use of close narration divides
this novel into four major sections. First, however, the novel is in-
troduced: the origins of the situation are established from Henchard's
and then from Susan's perspective (Ch. I through Ch. IV). The first
section is Elizabeth-Jane's and narrates her arrival in Casterbridge
(Ch. V through Ch. X). The second section is told from the perspectives
of all four major characters and presents the competition between Hen-
chard and Farfrae (Ch. XIV through Ch. XXV). The third section, which
is the story of Henchard's fall from power, is narrated again from the
perspectives of the four major characters, but Henchard's perspective
begins to replace that of the others (Ch. XXVII through Ch. XXXVI). The
last section is Henchard's and describes the process of his resignation

from society (Ch. XXXVII through Ch. XLIV). The last chapter, much of

155

which is told from Elizabeth-Jane's perspective, is a conclusion: even
though the perspective is Elizabeth-Jane's, it is less specific to the
situation of finding Henchard's body and will than general about her
recovery and prosperity.

The first section of the novel, told generally from Elizabeth-Jane's
perspective, begins with her first view of Henchard and ends in Hen-
chard's office; the narrative remains with Henchard after Elizabeth-Jane
leaves at the end of their meeting. Casterbridge is described close to
Elizabeth-Jane or from her perspective, as are Henchard, Farfrae, and
the regulars at the Three Mariners. Early in the interview between
Elizabeth-Jane and Henchard, at the end of the section, Hardy leaves
Elizabeth-Jane's perspective: there is one passage of narration close to
Henchard in which he assumes that Elizabeth-Jane is his own daughter.
What he deduces from her last name is not Elizabeth-Jane's true paterni-
ty but

that the transaction of his early married life-at:Weydon Fair
was unrecorded in the family history. It was more than.he
could have expected. His wife had behaved kindly to him in
return for his unkindness, and had never proclaimed her wrong
to her child or to the world. (Ch. X, p. 76)
The success of keeping the reader uninformed, with Henchard, of this bit
of information depends mostly, of course, on Susan's (and Hardy's) using
the same name for both children. The introduction of a passage of nar-
ration close to Henchard, however, draws attention to his feelings about
it and his conflicts, since the passage occurs in a section dominated by
Elizabeth-Jane's perspective, and she, of course, assumes correctly that
she is Newson's child.
The second section of close narration goes from Elizabeth-Jane and

Farfrae's meeting at the granary (in Ch. XIV) through Lucetta's decision

"to break away from Henchard" (in Ch. XXV, p. 204). During these pages,

156

Henchard alienates Farfrae and, after Susan's death, alienates himself
from Elizabeth-Jane. Elizabeth-Jane, Henchard, Lucetta, and Farfrae all
have close narration in this section, which divides into two units at
Lucetta's arrival in Casterbridge. From Henchard's point of view, the
most significant event in the first half of this section is the compet-
ing celebrations put on by himself and Farfrae; to Elizabeth-Jane, it is
the death of her mother. Hardy treats each event with narration close
to that character, but as Henchard is beginning to take over the center
of Hardy's attention, the first subsection is really most concerned with
Henchard's and Farfrae's growing competition. Just as Henchard makes
the celebration and, later, the harvest, an arena of competition, so
does he also regard Susan, and, most important, Lucetta and Elizabeth-
Jane as objects in his war against Farfrae. In this light, the entire
second section of the novel can be seen to begin with the threat of Hen-
chard's loss of Elizabeth-Jane to Farfrae, as his anger shows when he
finds her dancing with Farfrae at the younger man's celebration. Lucet-
ta's entrance divides this section into two because, as object in this
war, she represents Farfrae's first major victory.

Also underlying this entire section is the devastation of Elizabeth-
Jane's emotional and social life. The narration close to her in this
section reveals that Elizabeth-Jane has acute self-consciousness only in
emotional crises. Sitting up with her dying mother, Elizabeth-Jane no-
tices her own consciousness; demoralized by what seems to be Farfrae's
inconsistent and disloyal behavior, she looks to the attractiveness of
her own person to explain it. The passage illustrating this latter
event is interesting for its independence from any scene in which it
udght be enclosed. In other words, this entire scene of Elizabeth-Jane

looking in the mirror (which is an act of self-consciousness in Hardy)

157

and thinking about her appearance and his motives has no other purpose
or action and is completely presented close to her. This is unusual,
short as it is, for close narration in any author writing before Hardy's
time and it is unusual in Hardy. The stimulus for the thoughts which
are presented in close narration is that "the news" that Farfrae plans
to stay in Casterbridge reaches her "At length." Her reaction to the
news passes quickly, in two sentences, and Hardy moves her thoughts be-
yond her response, which is not really located in time, to this scene,
which is:

A man following the same trade as Henchard, but on a very small
scale, had sold his business to Farfrae, who was forthwith
about to start as corn and hay merchant on his own account.

Her heart fluttered when she heard of this step of Donald's,
proving that he meant to remain; and yet, would a man who
cared one little bit for her have endangered his suit by set-
ting up a business in opposition to Mr. Henchard's? Surely
not; and it must have been a passing impulse only which had
led him to address her so softly.

To solve the problem whether her appearance on the evening
of the dance were such as to inspire a fleeting love at first
sight, she dressed herself up exactly as she had dressed then-—
the muslin, the spencer, the sandals, the parasol—-and lOoked
in the mirror. The picture glassed back was, in her opinion,
precisely of such a kind as to inspire that fleeting regard,
and no more--"just enough to make him silly, and not enough to
keep him so," she said luminously; and Elizabeth thought, in a
much lower key, that by this time he had discovered how plain
and homely was the informing spirit of that pretty outside.
(Ch. XVII, p. 128)

Hardy turns everyone's attention to Lucetta once she moves to Cas-
terbridge. She dominates the rest of this section of the book, not so
much because the narration close to her is so extensive, but because the
narration close to Elizabeth-Jane, Henchard, and Farfrae presents them
thinking about her or it presents what they think about each other
either in or as a result of her presence. Her arrival into Casterbridge
is also an arrival into the lives of Elizabeth-Jane and Henchard; their
awareness of her is presented in narration close to them. Once Farfrae

joins their triangle, the relationships among these characters become

158

quite complex. Hardy's narrative reflects this rapidly escalating com-
plexity because, essentially, everything that happens in the rest of
this section occurs in the mind of one or another of this group of four.
Hardy distinguishes among the characters, by means of close narration,
in the amount and kind of knowledge each one has; the discrepancies be-
tween what the different characters know are very large at times and
make this complicated situation quite intricate and unstable for them.4
There is a slight shift in Henchard's presentation, for the others have
secrets to keep from him; this section is the beginning of the end of
his role as secret-keeper. He maintains control over Lucetta, however,
as Susan did over him, and it is not until the end, when Elizabeth-Jane
knows the secrets about Newson, that all his power is gone. He still
has almost all of his secrets at this point, but the other characters
are beginning to collect their own. Because what these characters do
not know limits their ability to observe the complex situations in the
novel and act appropriately, secrecy and power seem identical in Caster-
bridge. Whether it be one of ignorance or drunkenness, any limitation
to a character's consciousness in this novel results in error and unhap—
piness. As these four characters appear in interaction with each other,
their situation becomes more and more knotted; and the environment to
which they react-—which is, essentially, their mental environment--
changes constantly as information is withheld or exchanged.

Summary of this second section of The Mayor of Casterbridgs_is dif-

 

ficult; its major unifying factors are the frequent shifting of narra-
tive focus from one character to another and the only partial awareness
from which each character suffers. Elizabeth-Jane, Henchard, Lucetta,
and Farfrae are presented as they disturb the consciousnesses of each of

the other characters. As each new action makes the knots more difficult

159

to untie, the lack of knowledge increases, as does the importance of
knowing. The perspective of each character, then, is at least partially
determined by the other characters, and none is independent of the oth-
ers, though in many ways they are all isolated-~perhaps dangerously iso-
lated--from each other. Each individual perspective, then, limited by
knowledge, can offer only a partial perception to the perceiving charac-
ter; and knowledge withheld by another character is the limiting factor.

In the third section of close narration in the novel Henchard moves
from magistrate, in which function he hears the testimony of the old
furmity-woman, to bankrupt, sitting as unwelcome guest in his old house
reading to Farfrae Lucetta's letters to himself (Ch. XXVII through Ch.
XXXVI). This section marks the shift of narrative focus from Elizabeth-
Jane to Henchard. It also marks Henchard's increasing loss of control
over the effective social means of communication and the consequent in-
creasing intensity of his inner life. Language becomes less and less
useful, to Henchard and to the other characters, as more indirect means
of communication surface. Even Henchard never abandons language com-
pletely, but he controls it imperfectly, at best, as his will shows.
Henchard's is not the only consciousness presented in this section, how-
ever, and in spite of the decline in his fortunes, he is still a part of
the circle made up by Elizabeth-Jane, Lucetta, Donald, and himself. The
tenuousness of the Farfraes' marriage concerns him, narratively speaking,
as much as it does them.

The scene in which Henchard struggles indirectly with Farfrae, by
attempting to use Lucetta's own forms of language against her and as a
means of revenge on Farfrae, gets several different narrative treatments
from Hardy. This scene, in which Henchard comes to get Lucetta's let-

ters from the safe and stays to read them to Farfrae, takes two chapters

160
(Ch. XXXIV and Ch. XXXV), and is presented directly, in dialogue narrat—

ed by the histor, and indirectly, as Lucetta overhears it and as Farfrae
summarizes it for her. None of the narration of the scene is complete

by itself. The first form.which this part of the story takes is mostly
made up of what Henchard and Farfrae say to each other between Henchard's
reading of the first three letters. Then the histor, suggesting that
Henchard's loss of verbal efficacy is evidence of good in him, says:

The truth was that, as may be divined, he had quite intended
to effect a grand catastrophe at the end of this drama by
reading out the name; he had come to the house with no other
thought. But sitting here in cold blood he could not do it.
Such a wrecking of hearts appalled even him. His quality was
such that he could have annihilated them both in the heat of
action; but to accomplish the deed by oral poison was beyond
the nerve of his enmity. (Ch. XXXIV, p. 284)

Lucetta's perspective of the telling of the scene goes beyond Henchard's
plan not to destroy the letters, even though the narration of the scene
downstairs stops. Lucetta's concern is with Donald's knowledge and her
part of this ends only when it is clear that her husband does not know
who the author of Henchard's letters is. A little of the narration
close to Lucetta is interesting here for its emphasis on the linguistic
nature of Lucetta's secret and its telling:

The usual time for Donald's arrival upstairs came and
passed, yet still the reading and conversation went on. This
was very singular. She could think of nothing but that some
extraordinary crime had been committed, and that the visitor,
whoever he might be, was reading an account of it from a spe-
cial edition of the Casterbridge Chronicle. At last she left

' the room, and descended the stairs. The dining-room door was
ajar, and in the silence of the resting household the voice
and the words were recognizable before she reached the lower
flight. She stood transfixed. Her own words greeted her in
Henchard's voice, like spirits from the grave.

Lucetta leant upon the banister with her cheek against the
smooth hand-rail, as if she would make a friend of it in her
misery. Rigid in this position, more and more words fell suc-
cessively upon her ear. (Ch. XXXV, p. 285)

 

Words are "like spirits from the grave" in this novel, as Henchard finds

161

out from the furmity-woman and as Elizabeth-Jane finds out from Hen-
chard's will.

Compared to sections two and four, this section, section three, has
a simple narrative surface. As far as the plot is concerned, however,
section two is quite simple compared with three and four: in section
three, almost all of the events occur in the world in which the charac-
ters live, while in section two they occur in the minds of the charac-
ters. Section four is different from.both of these in a variety of ways.
For one, the perspective is almost exclusively Henchard's, just as it is
Elizabeth-Jane's in section one. For another, Hardy uses this section
to clear up the complexities in relationships that were set up in the
second section, so, in this fourth section, Henchard and Farfrae wrestle,
the skimmington takes place and Lucetta dies, Henchard lies to Newson
about Elizabeth-Jane, then leaves Casterbridge, comes back for the wed-
ding and leaves again to die.

This section documents the ultimate estrangement between the verbal
world of Casterbridge-~in which Henchard needs to tell Farfrae that his
wife is dying and Newson that Elizabeth-Jane is alive in the next room--
and Henchard's isolated world of "nameless apprehension" and "unspeak-
able" grief (Ch. XL, p. 327). Henchard's powerlessness is represented
by his inability to convince Lucetta's household that Farfrae went to
Weatherbury and Farfrae that Lucetta is dying. Henchard's own part in
his isolation is represented by his lie to Newson that Elizabeth-Jane is
dead. Hardy devotes a great deal of close narration to this lie and to
Henchard's attempt to justify it to himself, showing him guessing about
future events, wondering about consequences, and justifying himself to
himself. The passage as it appears in the text is interspersed with

comments from the histor summarizing Henchard's reasons for lying,

162

Newson's reasons for believing him, and Henchard's reasons for not cor-
recting the wrong done; they are omitted here to isolate Henchard's per-
spective:

Henchard heard the retreating footsteps of Newson upon the
sanded floor, the mechanical lifting of the latch, the slow
opening and closing of the door that was natural to a baulked
or dejected man; but he did not turn his head. Newson's shad-
ow passed the window. He was gone.

Then Henchard, scarcely believing the evidence of his sen-
ses, rose from his seat amazed at what he had done. . . . He
had expected questions to close in round him, and unmask his
fabrication in five minutes; yet such questioning had not come.
But surely they would come; Newson's departure could be but
momentary; he would learn all by inquiries in the town; and
return to curse him, and carry his last treasure away!

. . . Newson's back was soon visible up the road, crossing
Bull-stake. Henchard followed . . . . The coach Newson had
come by was now about to move again. Newson mounted; his lug-
gage was put in, and in a few minutes the vehicle disappeared
with him.

He had not so much as turned his head. It was an act of
simple faith in Henchard's words-~faith so simple as to be al-
most sublime. . . .

Was Elizabeth-Jane to remain his by virtue of this hardy
invention of a moment? "Perhaps not for long," said he. New-
son might converse with his fellow-travellers, some of whom
might be Casterbridge people; and the trick would be discov-
ered. . . .

He watched the distant highway expecting to see Newson re-
turn on foot, enlightened and indignant, to claim his child.
But no figure appeared. Possibly he had spoken to nobody on
the coach, but buried his grief in his own heart.

His grief!--What was it, after all, to that which he, Hen-
chard, would feel at the loss of her? Newson's affection,
cooled by years, could not equal his who had been constantly
in her presence. . . .

He returned to the house half expecting that she would have
vanished. No; there she was--just coming out from the inner
room, the marks of sleep upon her eyelids, and exhibiting a
generally refreshed air. (Ch. XLI, pp. 338-39)

Henchard's assumption that "surely" the questions to "unmask his fabri-
cations" will follow the lie and that Newson will "return to curse him"
continue to draw attention to the hostility of the linguistic world to
Henchard. What is represented in this passage is a series of Henchard's
thoughts: Henchard wonders whether the lie will work and imagines its

discovery; as Newson does not return, Henchard guesses what must have

163

happened and, to justify his act, discounts the sincerity of Newson's
affection for Elizabeth-Jane.

MOre than half of the narration close to Henchard occurs in the
chapters between his perspective of the skimmington (it barely registers
on his consciousness) at the beginning of Ch. XL and his return to Gas-
terbridge for Elizabeth-Jane's wedding in Ch. XLIV. The less power Hen-
chard has in Casterbridge, the more his consciousness dominates the nar-
rative so that, at this point, in the last section of the novel, his acts
lose virtually all their efficacy. His thought, however, gains efficacy,
for good or ill; the highly abstract idea, for instance, that another
form of himself exists (his double in Ten Hatches Pond) prevents him
from committing suicide, because it seems to him like the future taking
its form in the present while the present still exists. His lie to New-
son is ineffective in his campaign to keep Elizabeth-Jane's loyalty, but
his knowledge that Newson has returned has the effect of motivating him
to leave Casterbridge. His failure to defend himself against Elizabeth-
Jane's angry outburst at the wedding party is a failure of consciousness
as well as one of action, since the same justifications that convinced
him (and us) would also convince her.

Henchard's last chapter of close narration, Chapter XLIV, the next
to the last one in the novel, is devoted almost exclusively to him and
to his relationship with Elizabeth-Jane. His return to Weydon Priors,
the site of the fair, is not handled close to him, but his thoughts are
expressed as he talks aloud. After he leaves there, the narration moves
him quickly through travelling and finding work and continues in summary
until Henchard hears of Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae's wedding. His mind
is aroused by this news, for which he has been listening and waiting,

and close narration provides the means by which his excitement is

164

presented:
What if he had been mistaken in his views; if there had been
no necessity that his own absolute separation from her he
loved should be involved in these untoward incidents? To make
one more attempt to be near her: to go back; to see her, to
plead his cause before her, to ask forgiveness for his fraud,
to endeavour strenuously to hold his own in her love; it was
worth the risk of repulse, ay, of life itself. (Ch. XLIV, pp.
370-71)
The rest of the chapter, including his purchase of the goldfinch and his
meeting with Elizabeth-Jane, is narrated close to Henchard or from his
perspective. Henchard's last instance of narration--an act of his con-
sciousness which replaces the external, social act of defending himself
to Elizabeth-Jane--prepares us for his death, for in "not sufficiently
valu[ing] himself to lessen his sufferings," Henchard annihilates him-
self. He knows on what terms life is lived in Casterbridge, and he
shuts his lips "up like a vice, and uttered not a sound":
How should he, there and then, set before her with any effect
the palliatives of his great faults-~that he had himself been
deceived in her identity at first, till informed by her moth-
er's letter that his own child had died; that . . . his lie
had been the last desperate throw of a gamester who loved her
affection better than his own honour? (Ch. XLIV, p. 377)

The last chapter, XLV, is a return to Elizabeth—Jane's perspective,
but it does not have the limitations of her personal biasses; it seems
detached, in fact, from the situation narrated--that of her discovery of
and grief at Henchard's grim death. It seems rather to have a structur—
al purpose, that of assuring the audience that the new order has asserted
itself and the carnage is at an end, like the last scenes of Jacobean
revenge dramas. This contributes a great deal to the sense that so many

critics have that this novel is mythic in its cyclic presentation of

kings--in this case, mayors--and their rivals.

165
D. The Woodlanders

 

In The Woodlanders, close narration can no longer be regarded as an
isolated technique used occasionally to present the perspective of a
character at the peak of emotional or intellectual excitement. There
are very few chapters which have no close narration at all in them in
this novel, and even these are so firmly associated with the perspective
of one or more of the characters that they maintain the general narra—
tive attention to the inner worlds of the characters even though the
voice is external to them. If close narration presents the inner worlds
of the characters, then Grace Melbury, Giles Winterborne, Edred Fitz-
piers, George Melbury, Marty South, and Felice Charmond all have inner
worlds, interior and private and rarely expressed to the others. Cen-
tral as the characters' perspectives are, however, the histor is strong
in this novel as well: as the voice for the environment in which these
active consciousnesses operate, the histor is necessary for Hardy's viv-

id presentation of the outside world. A full reading of The Woodlanders

 

requires that both kinds of perspectives and both worlds be taken into
account.

In general, as The Woodlanders progresses, more and more of the

 

novel's narration is close to the characters; the further we go in this
novel the more interior it becomes--the bulk of the narration begins
with Barber Percomb, looking in as Marty works, and it ends with Grace,
locked in Giles's cottage and in the hotel at Sherton Abbas separated
from the woodlanders who are outside. Rather loosely structured sec-
tions can be discerned in the novel as characters are grouped or isolat-
ed for close narration. The most loosely structured of the sections is

the first; in it Melbury, Marty, Giles, Grace, and Fitzpiers all get

166

close narration. This section lasts until Fitzpiers decides to marry
Grace (in Ch. XXII). This is nearly halfdway through the novel; such a
long exposition establishes all of the preconditions necessary to the
outcome of the novel: from Marty's sacrifices; to Melbury's "exaltation"
in his own "inferiority" to Grace (Ch. IV, p. 36); to Giles's loss of his
leasehold; to Grace's fastidious and, to her, bewildering attraction to
Fitzpiers; to Fitzpiers' habitual philandering. The image or thought of
Grace unifies all these particular bits of close narration into a "sec-
tion" of the novel; with rare exceptions, the narration in this first
half of The Woodlanders presents the circle of characters around Grace
as they think and wonder about her.

The second section of the novel defined by Hardy's use of close
narration, focussed around Fitzpiers the way the first is focussed around
Grace, begins with Grace believing Fitzpiers' story about Suke Damson's
molar (Ch. XXIV) and ends when Fitzpiers hides in Felice Charmond's
house, having abandoned Grace (Ch. XXXVI). It is, then, the narration
of Grace and Fitzpiers' marriage. With the exception of one passage
close to Giles as he bitterly reacts to Grace's asking if he has forgot-
ten her (Ch. XXV, p. 212), this section begins concentrated on Grace and
Fitzpiers as they marry, as he is attracted to Charmond, and as Grace
realizes the mistake she has made in marrying him. This narrative focus
broadens, after Fitzpiers spends the night away from.bome, to include
Mr. Melbury and Mrs. Charmond, who find themselves caring more about the
Fitzpierses' marriage than either Grace or Edred seems to. This is the
only point in the novel that we get close to Felice and the last one
that we get close to Melbury. Fitzpiers' has to do with his attraction
to Felice. This sympathetic, close portrayal of Charmond and Fitzpiers'

love affair gives it emphasis, for it is realized nearly as vividly as

167

that of Grace and Fitzpiers. There is truth in Grace's insight, narrat-
ed close to her, that she, Felice, and Suke are all equal in their rela-
tionship with Fitzpiers:

It was well enough, conventionally, to address either one of
them in the wife's regulation terms of virtuous sarcasm, as
woman, creature, or thing. But life, what was it, after all?
She had, like the singer of the Psalm of Asaph, been plagued
and chastened all the day long; but could she, by retributive
words, in order to please herself, the individual, "offend
against the generation," as that singer would not? . . .

In their gestures and faces there were anxieties, affection,
agony of heart--all for a man who had wronged them--had never
really behaved towards either of them anyhow but selfishly.
Neither one but would have well-nigh sacrificed half her life
to him, even now. The tears which his possibly critical situ—
ation could not bring to her eyes surged over at the contem-
plation of these fellow-women whose relations with him were as
close as her own without its conventionality. She went out to
the balustrade, bent herself upon it, and wept. (Ch. XXXV,
pp. 313-14)

Suke and Felice are as much a part of Grace's marriage as her father is.

The Woodlanders, then, begins with narration presenting the perspec-

 

tives of the whole community of consciousnesses concerned with Grace and
Fitzpiers and their marriage. As the perspectives are established, as
they define themselves as habitual for the characters, as the characters
achieve emotional stasis, these perspectives lose centrality and, in the
last two sections, only Grace and Giles get close narration. Their pe-
riod of illusory happiness, after Fitzpiers has left and before they
find out that a divorce for Grace is impossible, makes up the third sec-
tion of the novel marked out by the close narration (Ch. XXXVIII and Ch.
XXXIX). 'This section has none of the diffuseness of the first two sec-
tions and, though it is quite short considering the length of the first
two sections, this section offers fully as rich a presentation of Grace
and a much richer presentation of Giles than the novel has offered up to
this point. Hardy leaves Giles behind after this section, and it is the

only one in which Giles has an equal voice in the narration. Because

168

the narrowing of the narrative focus continues through section three,
Grace is obviously the center of attention in this novel. The third and

fourth sections of The Woodlanders, together comprising less than one

 

quarter of the novel, make up for their brevity by the intensity and
depth of the presentation of her.

The fourth section is Grace's alone; it begins the night of the
storm after she has turned Giles out of his cottage (Ch. XLI) and ends
as she wonders what to do about her past and potential relations with
Fitzpiers, the day her dress is caught in the man trap (Ch. XLVII).

Much of the close narration in this section has to do with Giles's dying,
but Grace's consciousness, as she realizes his condition and finally de-
cides to fetch Fitzpiers, is the significant one. If Dickens had been
writing this section, he would have narrated, at the very least, Giles's
delirium close to him, representing his gradual loss of awareness of the
outside world and underscoring his virtuousness and selflessness. In a

Dickensian The Woodlanders, Grace would be changed by Giles's death and

 

never be fooled by the selfish and inconsistent Fitzpiers again--or Fitz-
piers would be made worthy. As Hardy does it, however, Grace and Fitz-
piers remain their usual selves and the "visionary world in which [Giles]
was mentally living" is never represented further than: "he never for a
moment recognized her, continuing his rapid conversation to himself and
seeming to look upon her as some angel or other supernatural creature"
(Ch. XLII, p. 379). His death, too, replete with Dickensian possibili-
ties, is quite modest in its narrative effects: "Winterborne never re-
covered consciousness of what was passing; and that he was going became
soon perceptible also to her. In less than an hour the delirium ceased;
then there was an interval of somnolent painlessness and soft breathing,

at the end of which Winterborne passed quietly away" (Ch. XLIII, p. 387).

169

Hardy's interest in Giles, as a perspective from which to describe his
story, like his interest in the perspectives of all the other characters,
has been replaced by his interest in what Grace perceives.

What can be discovered by looking at the way the close narration
divides up this novel, then, is that Grace, "conjectural" as she is, is
not really available for detailed consideration until relatively late in
the novel (Ch. V, p. 42). The other characters, on the other hand, with
the exception of Giles, are made transparent early on and then set aside,
still part of the story but offering no new insights and leading to no
new avenues. Their shift to the periphery of the narrative attention
coincides with what seems to be a loss in their potential for change or
growth; at the same time that they lose their relevance to Hardy's nar-
ration, their roles in their society and their patterns of behavior and
thought become established and predictable. The last note in the novel
is one of stasis, of changelessness, as Marty swears eternal loyalty to
the irrevocably unresponsive Giles; Marty's last speech underscores the
importance of stasis and immutability in this novel by making the last
element in the treatment of the characters their incapacity for change.
While Fitzpiers' emotional variability makes him seem on the surface to
be too inconsistent to be predictable, and thus too changeable to be
narratively abandoned when he is, his flightiness and the very lack of
persistence in him are qualities that do not change--that is why his
perspective loses importance as soon as he falls in love with Felice; it
is not the object of his love that is so significant here, it is that he
falls in love so soon after his wedding. Melbury is left behind long
before the end, too, left with a deep mistrust of his own perception;
the implication from the absence of narration close to him is that he

loses faith in his judgment permanently and ends up feeling, as he does

170

against Mrs. Charmond, "as inferior as a savage with his bow and arrows
to the precise weapons of modern warfare" (Ch. XXIX, p. 257).

Giles differs from the other characters who get close narration and
who then get dropped because he is not really a part of the community
structured around or the communal opinion concerning Grace, except, of
course, to Melbury; as an outsider to the community, as peripatetic,
with no leasehold, he is like Grace, someone on whom the community thinks
and acts. Giles's close treatment, however, is like Fitzpiers': the oth-
er characters are shown arriving at stasis, but, like Fitzpiers, Giles
is a character who does not change; the narration close to him illus-
trates his essential consistency and, once that is clear, his perspec-
tive is no longer central. MOre important for determining his close nar-
ration than his nearly mythic role as an image of reliable nature and as
a disenfranchised member of the community, however, is his personality.
He is "one of those silent, unobtrusive beings," who are silent and un—
obtrusive because they live so completely in their own worlds (Ch. XXXIX,
p. 345). In his habitual reticence--"lost in his thoughts as usual"--
Giles is a great deal like Michael Henchard is at the end of The Mayor
of Casterbridge, so involved with his own busy mental life that external
and social communication is awkward and insufficient (Ch. XXVI, p. 223).
Giles's self-involvement causes him to make important mistakes in his
dealings with others: it causes him unwittingly to bid against Melbury
at an auCtion, to misconstrue as sincere an invitation to breakfast from
the Melburys, and even to put off reading the terms of his leasehold un-
til it is too late.

Close narration is necessary for Hardy to show Giles's thoughts and
feelings since it is out of character for Giles to express them openly.

The narration close to Giles shows him in intensities which he never

171

shares with the other characters; it is a measure of his isolation and
loneliness, as well as a measure of the number and importance of events
in his life in which he is out of communication with others. This is
most noticeable in the third section of the novel marked out by close
narration, when the concentration of the narrative treatment on him is
greatest. In this section we see him: remembering slights and surprised
at Melbury's permission to court Grace again (Ch. XXXVIII, pp. 333-34);
vowing not to woo her out of respect for her breeding (Ch. XXXIX, p.
345); thinking about Mr. Melbury's letter saying that a divorce is im-
possible (Ch. XXXIX, p. 349); upset because he allowed himself to kiss
Grace (Ch. XXXIX, p. 351); and saddened that she trusted in the divorce
plans (Ch. XXXIX, p. 352). All of these feelings and decisions, like
his early affection for Grace (Ch. VII, p. 59), his "self-derision" at
being left outside by Grace's family (Ch. VI, p. 51), and his hope that
Mrs. Charmond might honor his "moral right" to the lapsed lease (Ch. XV,
p. 124), are never communicated. His death, nearly as silent and unob-
trusive as his life, is uncharacteristically voluble only for a time.
Because his delirium has a listener, Grace, there is no sense of unex-
pressed or pent-up feelings; because his volubility is delirious, the
flow of his words has little impact on Grace's consciousness, since she
is more concerned with whether he will die than the sense of his mono-
logue; for these reasons it is peripheral to Hardy and is not narrated.

The Woodlanders is especially important for understanding Hardy's

 

use of close narration for two reasons: the first is that the two most

important characters in the novel are inarticulate: Giles is always in-
articulate, it is a part of his personality, and it is explained by his
self—absorption and the intensity of his inner life; Grace is inarticu-

late because she spends the novel motivated by passions which she does

172

not understand and of which she is often unconscious. In situation af-
ter situation she finds herself unable to express or define how she
feels. Often, this is because what she feels is sexual: "'O Giles,‘
said she, 'I know--I know! But--I am a woman, and you are a man. I
cannot speak more plainly. I yearn to let you in, but--you know what is
in my mind, because you know me so well'" (Ch. XLI, p. 371). Her feel-
ings for Fitzpiers have so much to do with sexual attraction that not
only can she not explain herself to the Melburys but she feels guilty
about the feelings themselves: "That Fitzpiers acted upon her like a
dram, exciting her, throwing her into a novel atmosphere which biassed
her doings until the influence was over, when she felt something of the
nature of regret for the mood she had experienced--could not be told to
this worthy couple in words" (Ch. XXII, p. 189). As Harvey Curtis Web-
ster points out, Fitzpiers is Hardy's "focal point" for the "action" of

the laws of sexual selection in The Woodlanders; Grace, however, is also

 

controlled by these biological forces whose presence in her conscious-
ness seems so inexplicable and undefinable to her.5 Dale Kramer is an—
other reader who finds a Darwinian kind of sexual attraction motivating
Grace: "It is not Grace's conscious volition or any extension of ac-
quired quality stemming from experience that brings about the reunion
with her husband. It is the animal quality of sexual need, indicated by
the excitement engendered in her during their nocturnal rendezvous and
the incident with the man-trap. To help clarify the sexual nature of
Grace's attraction to Fitzpiers, Hardy added Melbury's last speech to
post-first edition texts of the novel: 'Let her take him back to her bed

if she will!‘ . . . ."6

Grace's feelings for Fitzpiers are nothing more
than a biological impulse operating below the level of her consciousness;

this is probably the most important form that nature takes in Grace's

173

mind or in the mind of any Hardy character. As "Nature . . . working
'her plans for the next generation under the cloak of a dialogue on lin-

en,"

these biological forces control the consciousnesses of the charac-
ters and cause them to select partners because of sexual attraction in

spite of the permanence of marriage, the transitory nature of such feel-
ings, and all the other intellectual reasons for not selecting that par-
ticular partner (The Well-Beloved Pt. II, Ch. vi; p. 92). Sexual selec-

tion, the kind of brutal process that Darwin describes, is part of the

internal world of the characters in The Woodlanders, as it is for many

 

of Hardy's characters.
The second reason that The Woodlanders is especially important for
understanding Hardy's use of close narration is that, in this novel, Har—
dy realizes with unaccustomed clarity and vividness both the outer world
of the mind's environment and the inner world of the thinking, feeling,
and at least partially engaged consciousness. The outer world here is
more than the woods; it includes the biological and social laws that
pattern the environment and require an external, "omniscient" voice to
describe. Clearly, there is no deep-seated or intrinsic antipathy be—
tween nature and humanity in this novel; humans, whether isolated or
"among the depraved crowds of a city slum," are just as influenced and
modified by abstract, impersonal forces as the trees are:
On older trees still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like
‘ lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which

makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the
depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the
curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; the lichen ate
the vigour of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death
the promising sapling. (Ch. VII, p. 59)

The most important similarity between the trees and the people, however,

is their degree of unconsciousness of the patterns in the "web" of which

they make up a part (Ch. III, p. 21). Grace and Fitzpiers are no more

174

aware of the biological basis for their affections than the trees are of
who plants them, but these two characters, especially, are conscious and
feel themselves separate from the outside world. The inner world of one
of the conscious characters does not have the same general unconscious—
ness found in the world outside it; characters who are conscious, there-
fore, justify their perception by seeing their own kind of consciousness
in the world outside them and explain the inexplicable to themselves by
calling it "love" or "loyalty" or "nerves." Showing how consciousness
Operates on what is not known and what is vaguely felt is the most im-

portant use of close narration in The Woodlanders, an operation that is

 

rarely described by the histor, and even then metaphorically, as if from
that character's perspective.
Examples which show the effects of unconscious forces on the per-
ception of the characters abound in this novel. Many have to do with
sexual attraction and are presented close to the characters or from
their perspectives. Felice Charmond, for instance, has a moment, after
seeing the damage done to Melbury and Grace by her affair with Fitzpiers,
in which she realizes the effect on her and the nature of her affection
for him:
She had never so clearly perceived till now that her soul was
being slowly invaded by a delirium which had brought about all
this; that she was losing judgment and dignity under it, be-
coming an animated impulse only, a passion incarnate. A fas-
cination had led her on; it was as if she had been seized by a
' hand of velvet; and this was where she found herself-~over-

shadowed with sudden night, as if a tornado had passed. (Ch.
xxxn, p. 281)

For Melbury, insight into his own folly is less sudden and thorough than

Felice's into hers; the distortion his perception causes is presented

more directly in the voice of the histor, as if Melbury does not com—

pletely realize the difference between what he sees and the "outer

175

landscape" itself:
The scene to him was not the material environment of his per-
son, but a tragic vision that travelled with him like an en-
velope. Through this vision the incidents of the moment but
gleamed confusedly here and there, as an outer landscape
through the high-coloured scenes of a stained window. (Ch.
XXXII, p. 277)

MOre examples of this kind would leave the impression that Hardy is more

single—mindedly concerned with the general contrast between inner and

outer worlds than is true: while the existence of an inner world, sepa-

rate from but not independent of the outer one, is one of the central

assumptions of this novel, the various inner worlds of particular char-

acters and their different means of maintaining them are more central to

it; right at the heart of The Woodlanders, however, is one consciousness,

 

one inner world--Grace's. The effect of sexual selection on her percep-
tion is most carefully presented, but there is so much lost in the sepa-
ration between her "modern nerves" and "primitive feelings" that she
seems sometimes to be two creatures or two consciousnesses, one inside
her and one (the "primitive" one) outside her (Ch. XL, p. 358).

As Ian Gregor says, "the most vivid drama of the novel takes place
within the consciousness of Grace Melbury"; that drama is narrated from
her perspective.7 There is in fact so little authorial commentary on
the events of Grace's internal arena of action that it is possible to
misread key passages, which are close to her or from her perspective, as
descriptions of the outer world originating from the histor. Here, for
example, is what "modern nerves" feel like:

Not a sound came from any of the outhouses as yet. The tree-
trunks, the road, the out-buildings, the garden, every object
wore that aspect of mesmeric passivity which the quietude of
daybreak lends to such scenes. Helpless immobility seemed to
be combined with intense consciousness; a meditative inertness

possessed all things, Oppressively contrasting with her own
active emotions.

176

There is no way that the world in The Woodlanders can be said to have

 

"intense consciousness"; Grace, however "active" her "emotions" are,
does have this kind of awareness as well as, at this moment, "Helpless
immobility." Her already bifurcated personality is further stressed by
her barely acknowledged doubts about the wisdom of marrying Fitzpiers;
these doubts, in fact, have kept her awake, they are the activity of her
emotions, they are the reason that she is up at dawn in the first place.
In a very important way, Grace is unaware of her own mind here, and un-
aware of the extent to which her perception distorts what she sees. It
is she who is meditatively inert, for she cannot decide what to do about
her promise to marry Fitzpiers. This moment of doubt, and her subse-
quent witnessing of Suke Damson's departure from Fitzpiers' house, lead
her away from marriage, but once in his presence she becomes even more
obviously mesmerized and passive; she believes his story about Suke's
painful molar and marries him.

After Grace has run away from Fitzpiers and is hiding in Giles's
cottage, Hardy shows what "primitive feelings" are like. This is anoth-
er instance in which the voice might seem to be that of the histor; the
perspective is Grace's, however, and that she seems "almost to be apart
from herself" is an important clue to the identity of the "invisible
colourless thing . . . shrieking and blaspheming at every corner of the
walls":

The wind grew more violent, and as the storm went on it was
difficult to believe that no opaque body, but only an invisi-
ble colourless thing, was trampling and climbing over the roof,
making branches creak, springing out of the trees upon the
chimney, pOpping its head into the flue, and shrieking and
blaspheming at every corner of the walls. As in the grisly
story, the assailant was a spectre which could be felt but not
seen. She had never before been so struck with the devilry of
a gusty night in a wood, because she had never been so entire-

ly alone in spirit as she was now. She seemed almost to be
apart from herself--a vacuous duplicate only. The recent self

177

of physical animation and clear intentions was not there.
(Ch. XLI, pp. 371-72)

"The recent self of physical animation and clear intentions" is outside
in the storm, on the roof. The outer world of the histor does not have
monsters like this one; for the histor, the worst "monster" of the woods
is the man trap Timothy Tangs sets, describable in objective, historical,
and mathematical terms:
The sight of one of these gins, when set, produced a vivid im—
pression that it was endowed with life. It exhibited the com-
bined aspects of a shark, a crocodile, and a scorpion. Each
tooth was in the form of a tapering spine two and a quarter
inches long, which, when the jaws were closed, stood in alter-
nation from this side and from that. When they were open the
two halves formed a complete circle between two and three feet
in diameter, the plate or treading—place in the midst being
about a foot square, while from beneath extended in opposite
directions the soul of the apparatus, the pair of springs,
each one having been in its prime of a stiffness to render
necessary a lever or the whole weight of the body when forcing
it down, though rust had weakened it somewhat now. (Ch. XLVII,
p. 425)
This monster, endowed with a "soul" as it may be, has none of the vital-
ity that Grace's monster has; it belongs in the world outside, in the
world of the histor. The specters, ghosts, monsters, and abstract forms
that live in the inner worlds of these characters are native to the
characters and usually defined in their terms. When the world seems in-
explicable or supernatural, the voice of the sober, analytical histor
has been drowned out, as it were, by the intense, imaginative, self-ab-

sorbed one of the character, and it is the internal world which is de-

scribed.

E. Tess of the d'Urbervilles

The close narration in Tess of the d'Urbervilles does not divide

 

the novel into anything resembling sections or parts. More than any

178

Hardy novel before it, Tgégfs story is told within a relatively small
range of narrative distances, whose extreme boundaries are represented
by close narration and by the histor; that is, most of TE§§_is narrated
in a voice less distinctive than those of the characters or histor, less
local than the characters and less universal than the histor. Most of
this narration is what Dorrit Cohn calls "psycho-narration," which de-
scribes the central processes and the consciousnesses of the characters
from an omniscient perspective.9 "Consciousness" is a word that appears
again and again in this novel, alone and in opposition to "automatic,"
"mechanical," and words that describe the presence or absence of "will."
By its very predominance, this "psycho-narration" makes up the matrix in
2235 against which other narrative forms contrast; the most fruitful way
to regard it is as the middle ground, the evidence or action of transi-
tion between narration close to the characters and narration from the
detached, commenting histor. To regard the narration of $222.1“ this
way is to facilitate explanation for the sharply uneven distribution of
close narration and the histor throughout the novel.

The histor is extremely important in this novel and is sometimes as

fully characterized a persona as the histor in Under the Greenwood Tree

 

or The Trumpet-Major. The descriptions of the interior of the house,
for example, "whose interior features are so well known to all travel-
lers through the Froom Valley," that Angel and Tess choose for their
honeymoon, is the occasion for personification of the histor:

As all visitors to the mansion are aware, these paintings rep—
resent women of middle age, of a date some two hundred years
ago, whose lineaments once seen can never be forgotten. The
long pointed features, narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so
suggestive of merciless treachery; the bill-hook nose, large
teeth, and bold eye of the other, suggesting arrogance to the
point of ferocity, haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams.
(Ch. XXXIV, p. 277)

179

MOst important, the histor seems to dominate the impression left by the

novel on most readers, who quote and analyze and argue about the impor-

tance and seriousness of such passages as the last paragraph:
"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals, in
AEschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the
d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknow-
ing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to the
earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time, abso-
lutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently. As
soon as they had strength they arose, joined hands again, and
went on. (Ch. LIX, p. 508)

Ian Gregor argues in the right direction when he insists on the larger

context of the whole paragraph rather than accepting as final the first

sentence alone:
How often the opening sentence of that paragraph has been
quoted in isolation, and made to serve as "the conclusion" to
the novel, whereas Hardy, true to his practice, makes his con—
clusion multiple in emphasis. . . . For him, it is the four
sentences taken together which constitute a human truth, by
catching in varying lights our condition, flux followed by re-
flux, the fall by the rally; it is this sense of continuous
movement which suggests that the fiction which records it
should be described as "a series of seemings".10

.As unilateral and univocal as the histor might seem, the content of his

commentary cannot be regarded as simple or single-minded.

A number of interesting things can be said about Hardy's use of
close narration in Tess of the c'Urbervilles. For one, the only charac-
ters treated by this means are Tess, Angel Clare, Mr. Clare (Angel's
father), Joan Durbeyfield (Tess's mother), and Mrs. Brooks (the house-
keeper in Sandbourne who discovers Alec's murder.) The perspectives of
Mrs. Durbeyfield and Mr. Clare are unimportant over the long run, but
that of Mrs. Brooks is not. Another reason that the narration in this
novel is interesting is that looking only at the narration close to Tess

and Angel makes them seem isolated, from each other and from everybody

else. Tess is different from The Mayor and The Woodlanders in that the

 

180‘

only inarticulate character in this novel is Tess, who is made so by the
secret of her past with Alec; she is not naturally reticent like Giles
or stymied like Henchard. The secret and her frustrated attempts to
tell it to Angel are the source of some of the narration close to Tess,
especially as she is deciding to marry him, but the secret is told in
the middle of the novel and the bulk of the narration close to her oc-
curs after that. MOst of Angel's close narration appears in the last
part of the novel, "Phase the Seventh--Fulfilment," but Hardy maintains
his perspective or our sense of it throughout. The first passage of
close narration in this novel is Angel's, for instance; he regrets not
dancing with Tess (Ch. II, pp. 16-17), and much of our sense of Tess at
Talbothays is Angel's view of her. Excluding that of the histor, the
central consciousness in this novel, however, is Tess's; it is best,
therefore, to begin with her.

The first three Phases of Igggf-"The Maiden," "Maiden No MOre," and
"The Rally"--"belong" to the histor; of the characters, the conscious-
ness most represented is Tess's, but Hardy leaves the defense of her
case in the hands of the histor rather than to Tess. This allows Hardy
to explore Tess's feelings of guilt while he independently analyzes the
nature and extent of the guilt itself; that is, Tess feels guilty, and
even unnatural, for her liaison with Alec, but the histor has a list of
separate and complex points to make about the actual degree of her par-
ticipation in the liaison, the generalized, communal nature of her be-
trayal by her family and heredity, and the distinction between natural
and social laws in sexual relationships. The novel really does not be-
come Tess's until she decides to marry Angel in "Phase the Fourth--The
Consequence" (beginning in Ch. XXXI, more than half-way through the

Phase.) Tess stays at or near the center of narrative attention until

181

the narration close to her stOps, after she and her family have moved to
the churchyard at Kingsbere (Ch. LII, p. 464, the end of "Phase the.
Sixth--The Convert"), although the closeness of the narration gradually

" as Alec tries

diminishes beginning about half-way through "The Convert,
to convince Tess to take him back. The center of the novel, then, for
Tess, takes up the last third of the Fourth Phase, all of the Fifth, and
the first two chapters of the Sixth (Ch. XXI through Ch. XLVI).

The Fifth Phase, "The Woman Pays," begins with Angel's reaction to
Tess's confession and ends with Tess, unable to summon the courage to
approach Angel's parents, face to face with Alec, who is in the guise of
a Christian. The fact that the intensity of the narration close to Tess
does not diminish immediately after her trip to Emminster but continues
for a couple of chapters, as Alec relinquishes his spiritual aspirations,
lends support to the histor's assertion that, in spite of all that Tess
has suffered and will suffer later, "the greatest misfortune of her life
was this feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment
through her estimating her father-in-law by his sons" (Ch. XLIV, p. 384).
Unlike her betrayal by Alec, her wedding, the murder, and her execution,
none of which is narrated close to her, and all of which might seem to
be great misfortunes, this failure to get help, this "loss of courage,"
is treated as one of the most important events of her consciousness as
well as of her public life.

In analyzing this scene, it soon becomes clear that Tess is at her
peak in Flintcomb-Ash, ironic as that may sound. Even though her life
is at its most barren and conditions at their worst, her virtue, intel-
ligence, and sensitivity are at their most worthy. Because Tess is sen-
sitive, she has "felt," she knows that the importance of things lies in

their meaning. Looking down on the Vale of Blackmoor, for example, on

182

her way to visit the Clares in Emminster, she thinks it beautiful: "Yet
it was in that vale that her sorrow had taken shape, and she did not
love it as formerly. Beauty to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in
the thing, but in what the thing symbolized" (Ch. XLIV, p. 378). The
predominance of the symbol over the "thing" makes her inner world the
salient one, just as it makes the events of her consciousness the impor-
tant ones: "as the mileage lessened between her and the spot of her pil—
grimage, so did Tess's confidence decrease, and her enterprise loom out

more formidably. She saw her purpose in such staring lines, and the

landscape so faintly, that she was sometimes in danger of losing her way"

(Ch. XLIV, p. 379). It is the "staring lines" of her "enterprise," then,
that deserve our attention, and not the faint landscape or the petty
small-heartedness of Felix and Cuthbert Clare or Mercy Chant. This is

reinforced by what Hardy chooses to narrate close to Tess. First, Hardy

uses close narration to show Tess's fear of "good" people and the se-

vere look in [their] eyes": "Such a good man" as Mr. Clare "might be
prejudiced against a woman who had chosen Sunday" as the day to pay such
an important visit (Ch. XLIV, p. 379). The effort Tess puts into ring—
ing the Clares's doorbell is considerable, and the mental labor involved
is described in great detail. The focus is on her "nerves":

She nerved herself by an effort, entered the swing-gate,
and rang the door-bell. The thing was done; there could be no
retreat. No; the thing was not done. Nobody answered to her

- ringing. The effort had to be risen to and made again. She
rang a second time . . . . The wind was so nipping that the
ivy-leaves had become wizened and grey, each tapping inces-
santly upon its neighbour with a disquieting stir of her
nerves. A piece of blood-stained paper, caught up from some
meat-buyer's dust-heap, beat up and down the road without the
gate; too flimsy to rest, too heavy to fly away; and a few
straws kept it company.

The second peal had been louder, and still nobody came.
Then she walked out of the porch, opened the gate, and passed
through. . . . A feeling haunted her that she might have been
recognized (though how she could not tell), and orders been

183

given not to admit her.

Tess went as far as the corner. She had done all she could
do AhL-the explanation was that they were all at church, every
one. . . . It was, therefore, only necessary to wait till the
service was over. She would not make herself conspicuous by
waiting on the spot, and she started to get past the church
into the lane. (Ch. XLIV, pp. 380-81)

Tess recognizes her brothers-in-law by their voices and Mercy Chant by
their conversation. Once they take her boots, assuming that they belong,
as Chant says, to "Some imposter who wished to come into the town bare-
foot, perhaps, and so excite our sympathies," She is completely demoral-
ized and gives up (Ch. XLIV, p. 383). Without the aid of the Clares,
Tess cannot withstand Alec's influence or her own desires to murder him.
This is, of course, not the only event in Tess's life which is
treated with the use of close narration. When Tess is first introduced,
after the May Day dance, she is shown sad that Angel did not choose her
as a dancing partner, guilty at being extra work for her mother, and
shocked at the news of her father's illness (Ch. III, pp. 18, 19, 20).
Tess reacts strongly to her mother's wish that she had succeeded in get—
ting Alec to marry her (Ch. XII, pp. 103-4); like Jude, she has a moment
in church when she believes that the composer of a hymn understands the
way she feels (Ch. XIII, pp. 106-7). Tess's wondering whether or not to
tell Angel about her connection to the ancient d'Urberville family is
narrated close to her (Ch. XIX, p. 163), as are her attempts to tell him
about Alec and the baby (Ch. XXXI, pp. 245-46 through Ch. XXXIV, p. 284).
Angel's sleepwalking scene is limited to Tess's perspective, and her
decisions to act and not to act are narrated close to her (Ch. XXXVII).
The economic pressures on Tess are often narrated as they impinge on her

thoughts and plans: the thought of finding work if she does not marry

Angel is some incentive for her finally to accept him (Ch. XXXII,

184
p. 258); much of the chapter that ends with her sleeping in the woods

and breaking the necks of all the injured birds is narrated close to her
and describes her attempts to find work before reaching Flintcomb-Ash
(Ch. XLI).

The last we see of Tess's perspective is the description of the
Kingsbere church, where the d'Urberville vaults are and where Joan, Tess,
and the children camp: as Joan says, "Isn't your family Vault your own

freehold?" (Ch. LII, p. 462). To Tess, meaning is apparent in every

' even in the domestic paraphernalia:

"thing,'
Tess gazed desperately at the pile of furniture. The cold sun-
light of this spring evening peered invidiously upon the
crocks and kettles, upon the bunches of dried herbs shivering
in the breeze, upon the brass handles of the dresser, upon the
wicker cradle they had all been rocked in, and upon the well-
rubbed clock—case, all of which gave out the reproachful gleam
of indoor articles abandoned to the vicissitudes of a roofless
exposure for which they were never made. Round about were de-
parked hills and lepes--now cut up into little paddocks--and
the green foundations that showed where the d'Urberville man-
sion once had stood; also an outlying stretch of Egdon Heath
that had always belonged to the estate. Hard by, the aisle of
the church called the d'Urberville Aisle looked on impertur-
bably. (Ch. LII, p. 461)

Having gone inside the church to muse on the long-dead d'Urbervilles,
Tess sees Alec, who is what he appears to be, the ghost of her own past
and of her parents' dreams:

She musingly turned to withdraw, passing near an altar-tomb,
the oldest of them all, on which was a recumbant figure. In
the dusk she had not noticed it before, and would hardly have
noticed it now but for an odd fancy that the effigy moved. As

' soon as she drew close to it she discovered all in a moment
that the figure was a living person; and the shock to her
sense of not having been alone was so violent that she was
quite overcome, and sank down nigh to fainting, not however
till she had recognized Alec d'Urberville in the form. (Ch.
LII, p. 463)

This scene is a vivid foreshadowing of Tess's ritual sacrifice on the
altar at Stonehenge, "an altar-tomb, the oldest of them all." Alec

makes explicit, by stamping on the floor over the vault, by his "The old

185

" and by putting the conflict between them in social

order changeth,
terms ("Mind this; you'll be civil yet!") that this is a key scene in
Tess's consciousness (Ch. LII, p. 464). Alec's boast that "The little
finger of the sham d'Urbervilles can do more for you than the whole dy-
nasty of the real underneath" is his victory over her, and her "Why am I
on the wrong side of this door!" is another articulation of her surren-
der at Stonehenge: "It is as it should be . . . . I am ready" (Ch. LVIII,
p. 505).

After Tess dies, as it were, at Kingsbere, in her "own freehold,"
Angel comes into his own, narratively speaking. He has important pas—
sages of close narration before this, especially in "Phase the Fifth--

" the center of the narration closest to Tess, but his

The Woman Pays,
perspective is the means by which the story of Tess's escape from Sand-
bourne and eventual capture on Stonehenge are narrated. Angel's regret
at his irrational assumptions about sexual virginity are narrated close
to him, so that he seems to have gained in sympathetic qualities in his
change of heart about Tess. The effect of this transfer of narrative
attention from Tess to Angel is to emphasize what is lost when Tess
"spiritually ceased to recognize the body before [Angel] as hers--allow-
ing it to drift, like a corpse upon the current, in a direction dissoci-
ated from its living will" (Ch. LV, p. 484). It suggests a kind of numb-
ness in her, an absence of consciousness, a will so passive that it

loses its own perspective. Angel's consciousness, on the other hand,
seems enlivened, and if words of emotion may signify what is new about
Angel's consciousness, then "Tenderness was absolutely dominant in Clare
at last" (Ch. LVII, p. 493) and, like the house in which he and Tess

hide, "within was affection, union, error forgiven: outside was the in-

exorable" (Ch. LVIII, p. 498).

186

Angel's last instance of close narration shows him pitying Tess and
waiting with the men who have come to get her for her to awaken. The
symbolic significance of Tess as a primitive sacrifice and of the eerie
"silvered" faces and hands of the men and the "green-grey" "glistening"
of the stones is muted somewhat by its origination in Angel's perspec-
tive:

When they saw where she lay, which they had not done till then,
they showed no objection [to waiting], and stood watching her,
as still as the pillars around. He went to the stone and bent
over her, holding one poor little hand; her breathing now was
quick and small, like that of a lesser creature than a woman.
All waited in the growing light, their faces and hands as if
they were silvered, the remainder of their figures dark, the
stones glistening green-grey, the Plain still a mass of shade.
(Ch. LVIII, pp. 504-5)
Their waiting for Tess to awaken on her own is an act of kindness and
dignity, but it is also a means of allowing her capture to seem natural,
so that the "masculine" sun, which in this novel is "a golden-haired,
beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in the vigour and in-
tentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him"
(Ch. XIV, p. 109), is the same sun that "made a spot [On Tess's skir§7
like a paint-mark set upon her" (Ch. XXXIV, p. 277), and shines at the
end "upon her unconscious form, peering under her eyelids and waking her"
(Ch. LVIII, p. 505).ll By having the sun wake Tess, Hardy makes her sur-
render seem natural and inevitable, because the imagery in this novel
relates the sun to mastery of the female by the male and to the insig-
nificance of the individual will.

Our acceptance of the natural inevitability of her surrender, how—
ever, is also dependent on our faith in the reliability of Angel's per-
spective. That Tess is made passive by her murder of Alec is obvious;

it may be less clear that Hardy takes the same care to show that Angel

is made active as a result of his coming to love the flesh-and-blood

187

Tess. Hardy's concentration on his consciousness in the last Phase

shows Angel thinking, planning, scheming, forgiving,.loving--more active
intellectually and emotionally than he has been before. He finds the
house in which they hide, he finds provisions; he works out the scheme
for escape and times the resting and walking periods; he recognizes
Stonehenge and waits, awake and conscious, while Tess sleeps. Her uncon-
sciousness and his wakefulness as day dawns on Stonehenge symbolize the
quality of each character's mental life: Tess is so tired that she can-
not go on any further; Angel is living for the future. All this activi-
ty makes Angel's perspective trustworthy; he is so active and energetic,
in fact, that he is sometimes indistinguishable from the histor. Angel's
"reward," then, for surviving the events of this novel, is an enlarged
perspective, one approaching the comprehensiveness of that of Hardy's
narrator, but Phase the Seventh does not abandon the local perspective

of the characters to the large perspective of the histor entirely. Even
though Tess's perspective disappears at the end of Phase the Sixth, and
even though Angel's perspective takes in too much to be truly local, the
particular perspective is emphasized in this last Phase--by a peripheral
and nearly extraneous character, Mrs. Brooks.

" alone

As soon as Tess leaves Angel, "cOncentrated on the moment,
in the dining room of The Herons, Hardy turns his attention to the house-
keeper, Mrs. Brooks (Ch. LV, p. 484). She is, first, "deeply material-
ized, poOr woman, by her long and enforced bondage to that arithmetical

' so her perspective is a good example of Hardy's

demon Profit-and-Loss,‘
use of a perspective that is so biassed and local that it affords a kind
of objectivity (Ch. LVI, p. 485). Mrs. Brooks has only monetary inter-

est in "Mr. and Mrs. d'Urberville" except for a curiosity, "reinvigorat-

ed" by Angel's visit, to hear what the visit is all about. She follows

188

Tess upstairs, therefore, and what she hears and can see through the key-
hold is what is narrated. She sees Tess leave the house and waits for
Alec to ring; the spot on the ceiling is her discovery, as is the "fancy"
that the stain is blood (Ch. LVI, p. 488). Mrs. Brooks does not discov-
er Alec's body: fearful that there has been violence, she waits in the
drawing—room, noting lucidly that "the breakfast--a substantial repast
of coffee, eggs, and a cold ham--lay spread upon the table untouched, as
when she had taken it up, excepting that the carving knife was missing,"
as a workman looks into the bedroom (Ch. LVI, p. 489). Obviously, this
turn to Mrs. Brooks's perspective serves a number of practical purposes:
it gets Tess and Angel out of Sandbourne without Hardy having to narrate
it at length, it explains how and when Alec's body is discovered, infor-
mation Tess and Angel could not have, and it allows Hardy to stay out of
Tess's consciousness and to avoid discussion of her state of mind. It
also has the effect of offering an individual characterization of what
will, in a few chapters, become abstract social necessity; in other
words, the social order Tess is executed to protect is more than her ab-
stract enemy--it is the particular livelihood of men who walk "as if
trained" (Ch. LVIII, p. 504) and the particular perspective of Mrs.
Brooks, who is de-materialized into curiosity by her encounter with Tess,
Angel, and Alec.

Hardy uses the perspective of a peripheral character to narrate key

scenes in others of his novels: Desperate Remedies, The Return of the Na-

 

‘Eiys, £225, and The Well-Beloved. Anne Seaway, for example, is a periph-
eral character whose role becomes quite important simply because of the
importance of her perspective, but Hardy also uses Owen Graye, Cytherea's
brother, and John Raunham, Miss Aldclyffe's vicar, to review the clues

to the mystery and to describe Cytherea's legal difficulties. The most

189

interesting of the narrators in The Return of the Native who speak from

 

outside the circle of the most involved characters is Charley, the young
man who prevents Eustacia from shooting herself with her grandfather's
pistols. In his way, Charley contrasts with Clym, Wildeve, and Eustacia
in the selflessness of his love and in his preference not to "use it all
up," whether his affection or the time allotted to holding her hand (Bk.
II, Ch. iv; p. 150): while he wants to divide up the time he can hold
Eustacia's hand to make it seem to last longer, Clym and Eustacia, as
the histor says, might be said to endanger their "mutual affections" by
burning them up "at a fearfully prodigal rate" (Bk. IV, Ch. i; p. 284).
The driver of the rented fly after Thomasin and Diggory's wedding serves
a function like that of Mrs. Brooks. As the heath-dwellers celebrate
the wedding,
The driver of the fly turned a supercilious gaze upon them; he
even treated the wedded pair themselves with something like
condescension; for in what other state than heathen could peo-
ple, rich or poor, exist who were doomed to abide in such a
world's end as Egdon? (Bk. VI, Ch. iv; pp. 478-79)
He is a part of the world outside Egdon Heath and the interior and pas-
sionate lives of the main characters. He is part of the movement of the
novel away from the heath and towards a larger perspective.

It is interesting that there would be such a peripheral narrator as

one of these in The Well-Beloved, Hardy's most tightly-controlled and

 

closely-narrated presentation of an individual consciousness. The vari-
ations from Pierston's perspective are so isolated and rare that they
can be counted and listed, so the use of Ruth Stockwool's perspective to
narrate the third Avice's elopement with Henri Leverre is quite striking
(Pt. III, Ch. vi; pp. 192-93). Such a clear change in the narrative fo-
cus adds to the significance of the event itself because it emphasizes

the existence of a world outside of Pierston's consciousness which is

190

independent of, or even inimical to, his desires. It also allows Hardy
to narrate the event without divulging its significance, which is not
presented until Pierston finds out the truth of Avice III's behavior for
himself.

MOst important for this discussion, however, is Hardy's use of the

landlord in the Christminster lodgings in Jude the Obscure. It is impor-

 

tant, like Hardy's use of the perspective of Mrs. Brooks, for its shift
of attention outside the tight enclave of main characters towards the
mundane world of commerce, convenience, and opinion. Much shorter than
Mrs. Brooks's eavesdropping on Tess and her discovery of Alec, this land-
lord's reaction to the deaths of Little Time and the other children is
put in the context of other elements of the outside world:

The jury duly came and viewed the bodies, the inquest was held;
and next arrived the melancholy morning of the funeral. Ac-
counts in the newspapers had brought to the spot curious
idlers, who stood apparently counting the window-panes and the
stones of the walls. Doubt of the real relations of the cou-
ple added zest to their curiosity. Sue had declared that she
would follow the two little ones to the grave, but at the last
moment she gave way, and the coffins were quietly carried out
of the house while she was lying down. Jude got into the vehi-
cle, and it drove away, much to the relief of the landlord,

who now had only Sue and her luggage remaining on his bands,
which he hoped to be also clear of later on in the day, and so
to have freed his house from the exasperating notoriety it had
acquired during the week through his wife's unlucky admission
of these strangers. In the afternoon he privately consulted
with the owner of the house, and they agreed that if any ob—
jection to it arose from the tragedy which had occurred there
they would try to get its number changed. (Pt. VI, Ch. ii;

pp. 409-10)

The jury, whose interest in the case is based on legal requirements, and
the "idlers," whose curiosity is stimulated by newspaper accounts and

rumors that Jude and Sue are unmarried, offer perspectives on the couple
which are already familiar in this novel: Jude and Sue always seem to be
confronted and obstructed by the processes of law and rumor. The land—

lord, however, like Mrs. Brooks in her "long and enforced bondage to

191

that arithmetical demon Profit-and-Loss," becomes a participant in the
drama because the "eanperating notoriety" attending Jude and Sue
threatens to attach itself to him as well. His perspective, then, be-
cause he is so self-absorbed and self-protective, affords a kind of ob-
jectivity to his view of Jude and his family. His attention to their
concerns is more profound than the legal and idle curiosity which moti-
vate the other community members involved, and Hardy's use of close nar-
ration to describe it suggests an inner world for this character, a man
Sue meets by chance in a large city; it suggests that he has a story, as
Jude does, as Sue does, as Tess does.

These external, peripheral characters, then, serve two important
functions so far as the narrative is concerned. They give a personal
quality to the perspective of the rigorous social necessity that appears
in these novels also as an abstraction and as sets of rules and laws
that must be served. These characters imply, by their ultimate irrele-
vance in the lives of the main characters, that outside the intense cir-
cle of mutual feeling and destiny which encloses Hardy's main characters,
especially the conscious, sensitive ones, are numbers of other potential
characters, who have perspectives and inner worlds, and who are driven
by the same desires and hurt by the same cruelties that the main charac-

ters are.

F. Jude the Obscure

 

Jude the Obscure is like The Well-Beloved in that it is nearly com-

 

 

pletely limited to the perspective of only one character, Jude; it is
also like Tess in the absolutely essential role in the narration played

by the histor. The way the novel is structured makes it appear that the

192

distinction between the perspectives of the histor and the individual
character is as strong as ever. In general, the narration of J2§g_moves
from inside his perspective to outside it: much of the narration of the
beginning of the novel is frequently and extensively close to Jude; by
the end, narration from Jude's perspective is rare--the instances are
sometimes many chapters apart. Unlike 2332) there is no character like
Angel to replace what is lost when Jude's consciousness stops being the
locus of the narrative perspective. While Sue gets some close narration,
more than any other character except Jude, she does not have the neces-
sary reliability, especially at the end, to allow Hardy to offer her per-
spective as the true one; Sue's consciousness is too rarely presented,

as well, so she seems only infrequently accessible, especially after the
family leaves Aldbrickham (in Pt. V, Ch. vi). Because neither Jude nor
Sue is inarticulate and because neither feels the pressure to conceal
emotions from the other, their dialogue is not driven inwards; because
they are both thoughtful and literate, this dialogue can contain many of
the allusions and comparisons that appear to be natural to Hardy's de-

scriptions. Dialogue in Jude the Obscure, therefore, does a great deal

 

of the work that Hardy's close narration and histor have done in the
past. Sue and Jude discuss matters at length and in detail; Hardy is
not so dependent in this novel on close narration to depict their inner
lives. Both characters express themselves very well, and so long as
they are talking, regardless of whether or not there is close narration,
their presentation does not seem external.

The perspectives of Jude, the histor, and, to a lesser extent, Sue
are the source of almost all of the important narration in the novel.
The short little paragraph close to the landlord in Christminster has

none of the significance to the plot or large practical value offered by

193

the sections in Tess and The Well-Beloved narrated by Mrs. Brooks and

 

Ruth Stockwool. Arabella and Phillotson each get a little bit of narra-
tion close to them--Arabella as she totes up Jude's potential as a hus-
band "when he should begin to get frightened a bit, and stick to his
trade, and throw aside those stupid books for practical undertakings"
(Pt. I, Ch. ix; p. 66); Phillotson as he falls in love with Sue, noting
how excellent her teaching is and how transparent each feels to the oth-
er (Pt. II, Ch. v; pp. 123-24)--but these passages are constituted of so
few out of so many words that their effect over the long run is incon-
siderable. The description of Jude, Sue, and Little Time at the Agri-
cultural Fair, however, is mostly narrated from Arabella's perspective;
as he does at other places, Hardy uses Arabella's pragmatic insights
about love and sex to say that Sue loves Jude as much as she can, that

' Jude loves Sue a great deal more than this, that both take care to en-
gage the child's attention, and to hint that the couple is right not to
marry, since they are so obviously happy with each other, while Arabella
and Cartlett see the fair "in the antipathetic, recriminatory mood of the
average husband and wife of Christendom" (Pt. V, Ch. v; p. 357).

The effect of Sue's close narration is considerable, on the other
hand, greater perhaps than the narration itself may warrant. In part,
this is because of her importance as a character in the novel: because
of the complexity and unpredictability of many of her feelings and moti-
vations, she deserves closer attention than, for example, does the less
conjectural Arabella. Another part of the importance of Sue's close
narration rests in its placement in the novel: all of it is found in
Parts Fourth and Fifth, and its presence draws attention away from the
absence of Jude's perspective; there is so little of it, however, that

it cannot be said to substitute for the personal perspective lost when

194

Jude's is withdrawn. Finally, narration close to Sue is important in
this novel because it presents her at her least intellectual and rea-
soned; her irrational sensitivities would be masked by her verbal SOphis-
tication were it not for these passages, because she is not always as
rational and objective as her speech would make her appear. This is not
to say that Sue is habitually dishonest about what is on her mind, only
that by the time they are expressed, her feelings have often become
slightly better organized.

The first of these passages contrasts Sue, "the ethereal, fine-
nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to
fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial relation with Phillotson, pos-

sibly with scarce any man,‘ as she reacts to that passionate kiss on the

road (Pt. IV, Ch. iii; p. 263). For Jude, the kiss is "a turning-point
in [his] career" which convinces him to give up his relatively modest
ambitions for being a curate because he feels his sexuality makes him
unworthy to be "a propounder of accredited dogma" or "a law-abiding re-
ligious teacher" (Pt. IV, Ch. iii; p. 261). He even burns his books be-
cause of the kiss and his feelings for Sue. In contrast, she seems
childish and self-delusive as she returns to Phillotson,

with tears in her eyes for having run back and let him kiss
her. Jude ought not to have pretended that he was not a lover,
and made her give way to an impulse to act unconventionally,
if not wrongly. . . .
"I have been too weak, I think!" she jerked out as she

. pranced on, shaking down the tear-drops now and then, "It was
burning, like a lover's--O it was! And I won't write to him
any more, or at least for a long time, to impress him with my
dignity! And I hope it will hurt him very much--expecting a
letter to-morrow morning, and the next, and the next, and no
letter coming. He'll suffer then with suspense--won't he,
that's all!--and I am very glad of it!"-- . . . . (Pt. IV,
Ch. iii; pp. 262-63)

Hardy's histor, nearly sarcastic in his "as she pranced on, shaking down

the tear-drops now and then,‘ emphasizes that in her self-pity Sue is

195
taking unfair advantage of Jude, whose self—scrutiny is admirable, how-
ever much his conclusions are exaggerated.

When Sue feels jealous of Arabella, however, there is no self-de-
lusion or dishonesty on Sue's part, and the histor loses this critical,
sarcastic tone. The chapter in which Arabella comes and fails to tell
Jude about Little Time's imminent arrival--and in which Sue finally per-
mits sexual relations between herself and Jude--also shows how important
Sue's dialogue is to any understanding of her, for even though the sin-
gle-minded depth of her jealousy of Arabella is dramatized in narration
close to her, this flash of emotional intensity is insufficient alone
for explaining why she allows their relationship to become a sexual one
(given that she is "quite unfitted by temperament and instinct to fulfil
the conditions of the matrimonial relation"), why she agrees to marry
Jude this time, or why she goes to visit Arabella herself the next morn-
ing. All of this complexity in her actions is presented by means of di-
alogue or the histor, or sometimes as Jude understands her; the simple
bases to the actions, and perhaps the most powerful, are presented close
to her. Jude insists that he will go out to meet Arabella:

There was that in his manner which she knew it would be
futile to oppose. She said no more, but, turning to her room
as meekly as a martyr, heard him go downstairs, unbolt the
door, and close it behind him. With a woman's disregard of
her dignity when in the presence of nobody but herself, she
also trotted down, sobbing articulately as she went. She lis-
tened. She knew exactly how far it was to the inn that Ara-

‘ bella had named as her lodging. It would occupy about seven
minutes to get there at an ordinary walking pace; seven to
come back again. If he did not return in fourteen minutes he
would have lingered. She looked at the clock. It was twenty-
five minutes to eleven. He might enter the inn with Arabella,
as they would reach it before closing time; she might get him
to drink with her; and Heaven only knew what disasters would
befall him then.

In a still suspense she waited on. It seemed as if the

whole time had nearly elapsed when the door was opened again,
and Jude appeared. (Pt. V, Ch. ii; pp. 318-19)

196

Mistaken as she is in this fantasy about Jude's meeting with Arabella,
it is not completely absurd for Sue to fear that Arabella will do what
she can to "entrap" Jude (Pt. V, Ch. ii; p. 318) or that Jude is "desert-
ing" her for a woman whom he regards as his wife: "If she was my wife
while she was away in Australia with another husband she's my wife now"
(Pt. V, Ch. ii; p. 319). The key to understanding Sue is in her dia-
logue, not in her close narration, which is too infrequent to do any-
thing but to suggest the depth of emotions whose complexity is already
apparent. The key to Jude, however, is in the narration close to him;
the novel is so thoroughly his that, except for that of the histor, a
discussion of any perspective other than Jude's soon threatens to be
little more than a digression.

The narration close to Jude is partially responsible for making him
so thoroughly the center of this novel, but it is not evenly distributed
throughout the book. In fact, there is a sharp division half-way

through Jude the Obscure: in the first three Parts, Hardy seems con-

 

cerned to show Jude's consciousness as it identifies him in and as it is
shaped by the world outside it. As in the case of Sue's close narration,
Jude's articulate and learned conversation and his intelligent and sen-
sitive partner dilute the primacy of close narration for presenting his
inner life-—they also make this division in the novel considerably less
noticeable. The break represented by the shift in narrative location is
not absolute in that Jude's consciousness does not disappear from the
novel the way Tess's does. The change in narrative focus does have its
effect, however. For one thing, Jude seems to stop evolving as a char-
acter when he gives up his ambitions for Christminster and the church.
Another important difference between these two halves, which divide the

novel more or less at the site of Sue's first instance of close

197

narration, the openly passionate embrace on the road from Marygreen, is
the locus of the action: the first half of the novel takes place, by and
large, in Jude's consciousness: the events are mental, as are the labor,
the conflicts, the actions, and the reactions. The second half of £225.

the Obscure takes place in the world in which Jude lives. He is still

 

nearly as much the center of the action as before; it is the setting, as
it were, that has changed. "At Marygreen," "At Christminster," and "At
Melchester" are set, essentially, in Jude's consciousness; the rest of
the novel, however, is set "At Shaston," "At Aldbrickham and Elsewhere,"
and "At Christminster Again."

Looking at Jude's most extensive passages of close narration one
after the other gives an interesting profile, a shape almost, to his
story. Many of these are among the most famous passages from this novel
and will not require extensive quotation because of their familiarity.
They mark the major events in the movement of Jude's mental life, and
each one is "a turning-point in Jude's career" (Pt. IV, Ch. iii; p. 261).
Particular narrative attention is paid: to Jude's despair that there is
"no law of transmutation" for translating Greek or Latin into English
(Pt. I, Ch. iv; p. 31); to his decision to study religious texts after
the "polytheistic fancy" of his prayer to Diana (Pt. I, Ch. v; p. 36);
to his dreams and ambitions of future brilliance in Christminster, just
before he meets Arabella (Pt. I, Ch. vi; pp. 39-41); to his decision to
meet Arabella one Sunday rather than translating his new Greek Bible (Pt.
I, Ch. vii; pp. 47-48); to his first night in Christminster as he thinks
of his past and imagines the ghosts of his intellectual and theological
forebears (Pt. II, Ch. i; pp. 91-94); to his growing affection for Sue
as he attends her church to be near her, though he does not know of her

more subversive allegiances (Pt. II, Ch. iii; pp. 106-8); to his first

198

meeting with Sue, during which he also hears that Phillotson is still a
schoolmaster (Pt. II, Ch. iv; pp. 116-18); to his application to the
"academic dignitaries" for advice on getting into Christminster as a
student and his realization that his intellectual aspirations are a
"dream" (Pt. II, Ch. vi; pp. 133-37); to his giving up of his newly
formed clerical ambitions for a modest future in the church and his in—
vitation from Sue to join her in Melchester (Pt. III, Ch. i; pp. 153-55);
to his feelings for Sue as she announces her plans to marry Phillotson
and her desire that Jude give her away in the ceremony (Pt. III, Ch. vii;
pp. 203-5); to his first meeting with Sue after the wedding, as they
neet to visit the dying Drusilla, and his lingering feelings of degrada-
tion from his "midnight contiguity" with Arabella (Pt. III, Ch. ix; pp.
224-25); to his acceptance of his love for Sue as he gives up even his
modest ambitions for a life in the church and as he burns his books (Pt.
IV, Ch. iii; pp. 261-62); to his discovery of the bodies of his dead
children (Pt. VI, Ch. iii; pp. 404-5); and, finally, to his last visit
to Sue, as he waits for her in the church at Marygreen (Pt. VI, Ch. viii;
pp. 468-69). A listing such as this is different from a listing of the
major events of the novel because these events occur inside Jude's con-
sciousness and are mental actions. There are only two such comprehen-
sive and important actions after Jude gives up his last intellectual am-
bition and after he puts his books in the bonfire, his discovery of the
children's bodies and his last visit to Sue; all the rest occur in the
first half of the novel.

Of these fourteen major events in Jude's consciousness, eight have
to do with the Christminster dream and his intellectual aspirations, in-
cluding those that also have to do with Arabella; the rest describe Jude

as he thinks about Sue and his children. In general, Sue comes to

199

replace the Christminster dream in Jude's consciousness as the focus of
his thoughts. The two "dreams"--of an exalted life in Christminster and
a happy life with Sue--together make up what is most important in Jude's
inner world; as the first diminishes, the second grows. Our sense that
Jude's consciousness does not just cease to exist the way Tess's does,
even though the close narration seems to, is corroborated by the last
instances of narration close to Jude, which are focussed on Sue. After
he is finally convinced that Sue will not come back to him, Jude fills
his inner world with curses instead of dreams which, because he speaks
them aloud, do not seem any the less inside his awareness for not being
narrated close to him. Part of Tess's surrender, her readiness for
death, is explained by the absence of narration close to her--she becomes
passive and seems to act without a will. Jude, on the other hand, re-
mains a presence in spite of his desire to die, so he curses his exis-
tence rather than making himself absent frOm it.

Jude's story, as it is told by the narration close to him, is of
one whose dreams are so essential that they are the substance of "the
little cell called your life" (Pt. I, Ch. ii; p. 15). His dreams col-
lapse--he learns that there is no "magic thread of fellow-feeling" be-
tween birds and people (Pt. I, Ch. ii; p. 11), that his intellectual am-
bitions are nothing but a dream (Pt. II, Ch. vi; p. 137), that it is
"glaringly inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of becoming the sol-
dier and servant of a religion in which sexual love was regarded as at
its best a frailty, and at its worst damnation" (Pt. IV, Ch. iii; p.
261)--and he creates other dreams to take their places, he finds other
ideals to love. Jude's efforts to maintain an inner world in which cus-

toms are not at odds with desires or hopes with what in The Woodlanders

 

is called "the intractability of circumstances" are heroic (Ch. XII,

200

p. 105). His dreams are at odds with reality, however, in such a way
that they cannot survive, no matter how much effort Jude puts into the
fight: the decision is not in his hands. He does all he can do, he even
reduces and curtails his dreams every time they are challenged. The
fate of his inner world lies in the world outside, in the impermeability
of the "sphere" of the Christminster scholars (Pt. II, Ch. vi; p. 138),
in society's unwillingness to accept the sexual origins of love, and in
"the outcome of new views of life . . . the coming universal wish not to
live" (Pt. VI, Ch. ii; p. 406). In the economic world of Darwinian laws
of survival and fitness and in the philosophical world of Schopenhauer-
ian pessimism the voice of the individual fades into silence, it cannot
express the enormity that reality is in this novel, the histor is re—
quired for that; all Jude can do is narrate his own inner world, and his
voice is drowned out by humanity in its massive form, cheering its own
progress and performing (in Arabella's case) the act that will guarantee
the survival Of the species; Jude's voice is also silenced by cowardice
in its individual form, as Sue, in an agonizing attempt to take part in
the same processes at which Arabella is so natural, forces herself back
out of individuality and into social conformity. Jude's voice persists
until the end, even though the narration close to him does not, so Har-
dy's final focus on the processes of sexual selection contrasts Jude's
willful self-annihilation with the undifferentiated mass of people that
make up the crowd in which Arabella produces her bogus and perfectly un-
necessary love-potion. The instinct to procreate, in other words, is
set against Jude's "wish not to live," his desire to erase his own exis-
tence; this same contrast appears in the person of Sue, for whom procre-
ation is annihilation.

In Jude, then, each character can be said to be represented by his

202

Well-Beloved, in which the relative briefness of the novel allows for a

 

more intense presentation. The effect of this concentration is to in-
crease the size and importance of passages of close narration, though

their number may be smaller than in a novel like The Woodlanders or The

 

Return of the Native, in which many characters get close narration all

 

through the novel.
Some passages, in Jude, for instance, seem quite modern for their
strict limitation to a character's perspective, but to concentrate on
such passages is to undervalue the importance of Hardy's other pole of
narrative attention, the histor. The histor's and the character's per-
spectives are not antipathetic or opposite, however, in any real sense.
The value of both, and of alternating back and forth between external
and internal perspectives, can be seen in this scene, in which Jude, new
in Christminster, attempts to assuage his loneliness by going to church
and by thinking about Sue. The choir sings "Wherewithal shall a young
man cleanse his way?" and Hardy shows Jude's and then the histor's in-
terpretation of the relevance of that hymn to Jude's life:
It was the very question that was engaging Jude's attention at
this moment. What a wicked worthless fellow he had been to
give vent as he had done to an animal passion for a woman, and
allow it to lead to such disastrous consequences; then to
think of putting an end to himself; then to go recklessly and
get drunk. The great waves of pedal music tumbled round the
choir, and, nursed on the supernatural as he had been, it is
not wonderful that he could hardly believe that the psalm was
not specially set by some regardful Providence for this moment
‘ of his first entry into the solemn building. And yet it was

the ordinary psalm for the twenty-fourth evening of the month.
(Pt. II, Ch. iii; p. 107)

Jude has chosen this church because Sue attends it; the next two para-

graphs show how Jude and then the histor relate his love for Sue with

H.

his religious "ecstasy .

The girl for whom he was beginning to nourish an extraor-
dinary tenderness, was at this time ensphered by the same

201

or her voice, which can be narrated in dialogue or monologue, or in
close narration. Sue stops her voice: "A quick look of aversion passed
over her face, but clenching her teeth she uttered no cry" (Pt. VI, Ch.
ix; p. 480). Sue's last act in £2d£_is to prevent herself from crying
out. Jude's last action in the novel is his quotation, in competition
with the cheers outside, of the solitary despair he finds in £22, Iden-
tified unambiguously with the crowd--the species--Arabella also spends
the last chapter of the novel engaged in talk. Her voice, however, is
the same as it always has been, shrewd, unromantic, and self-serving.
Allied as she is with the world outside the minds of Jude and Sue, Ara-
bella replaces the histor's usual summary and commentary; the outside
world is so well represented at the end of this novel, in the cheering
crowd, in Arabella and the widow Edlin, that Hardy seems to have felt no

need to add the voice of the histor.
C. Conclusion

Because Hardy's use of close narration is a part of his presenta-
tion of consciousness, it does not form a pattern of its own, indepen~
dent of his other means of representing consciousness. A few tentative
conclusions, however, can be drawn about Hardy's narrative. There is
more and more close narration, in general, as time goes by; the clearest

progress can be seen beginning with The Mayor of Casterbridge, since

 

Hardy's achievements in his art are more continuous--less erratic--and
there are no radically inferior novels after that one. In Tess, Jude,

and The Well-Beloved, Hardy concentrates his narrative attention on a

 

few characters rather than spreading it over many characters and over

the full course of the novel, except in the much shorter Th3

203

harmonies as those which floated into his ears; and the
thought was a delight to him. She was probably a frequenter
of this place, and, steeped body and soul in church sentiment
as she must be by occupation and habit, had, no doubt, much in
common with him. To an impressionable and lonely young man
the consciousness of having at last found anchorage for his
thoughts, which promised to supply both social and spiritual
possibilities, was like the dew of Hermon, and he remained
throughout the service in a sustaining atmosphere of ecstasy.

Though he was loth to suspect it, some people might have
said to him that the atmosphere blew as distinctly from Cyprus
as from Galilee. (Pt. II, Ch. iii; p. 107)

The last part of this passage shows Jude's more honest appraisal of his
feelings once out of church and faced with the decision of whether or
not to introduce himself to her:

Jude waited till she had left her seat and passed under the
screen before he himself moved. She did not look towards him,
and by the time he reached the door she was half way down the
broad path. Being dressed up in his Sunday suit he was in-
clined to follow her and reveal himself. But he was not quite
ready; and, alas, ought he to do so with the kind of feeling
that was awakening in him?

For though it had seemed to have an ecclesiastical basis
during the service, and he had persuaded himself that such was
the case, he could not altogether be blind to the real nature
of the magnetism. She was such a stranger that the kinship
was affectation, and he said, "It can't be! I, a man with a
wife, must not know her!" Still Sue gag his own kin, and the
fact of his having a wife, even though she was not in evidence
in this hemisphere, might be a help in one sense. It would
put all thought of a tender wish on his part out of Sue's mind,
and make her intercourse with him free and fearless. It was
with some heartache that he saw how little he cared for the
freedom and fearlessness that would result in her from such
knowledge. (Pt. II, Ch. iii; pp. 107-8)

Clearly, this scene, copied here nearly in its entirety, has as its pur-
pose the presentation of Jude's feelings for Sue and their rather com-
plex relation to his religious ideals. Hardy's use of both narrative
voices seems to suggest that neither is independently sufficient for
presenting the truth about Jude's inner world, which seems to form it-
self around objects or events in the outside world which are there only
by chance or there for a reason other than the one Jude suspects.

Close narration in Hardy's novels has a variety of purposes. It

204

demonstrates and dramatizes the existence of a character's inner world.
It articulates the subjective, engaged perspective which Hardy felt to
be necessary for a truly sympathetic understanding of his people. It
presents the mental activity of a character whose experience has been
complicated and deeply-felt enough to require secrets or to cause se-
quential, independent reasoning. It makes actions out of thoughts and
feelings, so that the making of a decision, the struggle against indeci—
sion, wondering, self-scrutiny, self-questioning, and talking to oneself
are all acts in a world of causes and consequences. Finally, close nar-
ration determines, by the space allotted to it, what is significant in a
character's inner world; the lack of close narration determines what is

peripheral. The novels range in content from Desperate Remedies, in

 

which the emphasis is on what happens to people, especially, here, to
thinking people, and how events control their minds and actions; The

Well-Beloved, at the other extreme, is about how Pierston's mind con-

 

trols his actions and even his perception of reality. The real issue is
not how much close narration Hardy uses in any particular novel, but
what there is about that novel that generates close narration. In The

Mayor of Casterbridge and The Well-Beloved it is what the characters do

 

 

not know: the close narration shows their mistakes and misperceptions.

In Far from the Madding Crowd the The Return of the Native, the close

 

 

narration shows the characters at their peaks of emotional excitement
and, for those who misperceive, it shows how they arrive at their mis-

perceptions. In The Woodlanders, Tess, and Jude, the necessity of the

 

individual perspective for an understanding of the effects of natural
and social laws on sensitive, thoughtful people seems to be behind the

use and organization of the close narration.

Chapter Five: Hardy's Conception of Conscious

Hardy's conception of consciousness seems to dominate the narrative
of his novels, both in the kinds of specialized narration which he uses
to present the perspectives of his characters and in the fact that, again
and again, what is described is what the characters think, how they feel,
what their mental characteristics are, what is at the "centre" of their

consciousnesses (The Woodlanders Ch. III, p. 19). Moreover, Hardy's

 

sense of human consciousness determines which characters are sympatheti-
cally treated and which are not: the absence of consciousness appears
with the villainous qualities of his antagonists; its presence, the hero-
ic qualities of his protagonists; its degree or intensity suggests how
heroic the protagonists are.

It is difficult to summarize Hardy's conception and presentation of
consciousness precisely because it is so central to his fiction. Gener-
alizing about it is mostly unprofitable because Hardy's real insights in-
to the ways in which people think and perceive are in the details and
particulars of his observations rather than in the generalities and the-
ories. It will be most useful to explore a few particular forms which
can demonstrate both the diversity which Hardy's presentation of con-
sciousness could take and the concentration of observation and idea pres-
ent in each of those forms. For the sake of order, I will limit my dis-
cussion to the consciousnesses of some of the characters and leave the
discussions both of consciousness outside of individual minds and of the
relevance of Hardy's two perspectives until later. For now, therefore, a

205

206

sense of the range of Hardy's thought on this subject can best be had

by a look at the following major areas: the first coming to consciousness
of a character and the qualities of characters' consciousnesses, that is,
the different kinds of minds, and two types in particular--the witch-fig-
ure and the split self. The themes of consciousness--knowledge and se—
crets, "dimly seeing" and the reality behind corporeality, and the "half-
somnolent condition of most of humanity-~will be taken up in the next

chapter.
A. "Taking Thought"--First Coming to Consciousness

The simplest thing that can be said about Hardy's fiction, encom-
passing all of it, is that all of his novels are the stories of people
who are forced by circumstances to think for the first time about them-
selves and the consequences of their actions (and, since thoughts are
acts in Hardy's view, these characters are thus made self-aware because
they are forced to think for the first time of the consequences of their
thoughts and emotions.) Hardy calls this "Taking Thought," and it is the
most basic act of consciousness in his world.1 Hardy defines the problem
in Desperate Remedies and continues with it unvaryingly through 1222,

Jude, and The Well-Beloved. It is explicit for Cytherea in Desperate

 

Remedies:.

Why the particulars of a young lady's presence at a very medi-
ocre performance were prevented from dropping into the oblivion
which their intrinsic insignificance would naturally have in-
volved--why they were remembered and individualized by herself
and others through after years--was simply that she unknowingly
stood, as it were, upon the extreme posterior edge of a tract
in her life, in which the real meaning of Taking Thought had
never been known. It was the last hour of experience she ever
enjoyed with a mind entirely free from a knowledge of that lab-
yrinth into which she stepped immediately afterwards--to con-
tinue a perplexed course along its mazes for the greater

207

portion of twenty—nine subsequent months. (Ch. I, No. iii;

This first moment of self-awareness is just as explicit for the first
Avice in The Well-Beloved as it is here. Because Avice is not one of the
central characters of the novel, the description of her is more diffuse.
From Pierston's perspective, we learn that Avice's "accents were those
of one who had for the first time become conscious of her womanhood, as
an unwonted possession which shamed and frightened her" (Pt. I, Ch. i;
p. 7). And that "Avice had been transformed into a very different kind
of young woman by the self-consciousness engendered of her impulsive
greeting" (Pt. I, Ch. ii; p. 8). Though unfocussed and unemphasized,
Avice's coming to consciousness takes place when she spontaneously kisses
Jocelyn and sees his fastidious reaction.

Although it can be both explicitly narrated and central to the plot,
as in the case of Cytherea, and also indirectly present, however periph-
eral, in the case of Avice I, "Taking Thought" sometimes happens "off-

stage,"

as it were, outside of the narrative. Angel, for one example,
is a character whose first coming to consciousness is both an essential
part of his characterization and is not narrated. It occurs between the
time he sees Tess dancing at the beginning of the novel and the time he
begins to notice her at Talbothays, at some point or period which is not
narrated. In this passage, narrated close to Angel, his idealism concern-
ing Tess's virginity is contrasted with the pessimism that is almost in-
evitable in characters who have "Taken Thought":

"What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid
is!" he said to himself.

And then he seemed to discern in her something that was fa-
miliar, something which carried him back into a joyous and un-
foreseeing past, before the necessity of taking thought had

made the heavens gray. He concluded that he had beheld her
before; where, he could not tell. A casual encounter during

208

some country ramble it certainly had been, and he was not
greatly curious about it. (Ch. XVIII, p. 155)

"Taking Thought" is merely the beginning of things for Angel, as it is
for Cytherea and the others of Hardy's protagonists. Clearly, it does
not make the character necessarily wise; nor, as in this case, does "Tak-
ing Thought" make a character less idealistic.

Marty South is another example of a character whose "Taking Thought"
is narrated as fact rather than process; she has become conscious by the

time we meet her at the very beginning of The Woodlanders. It is as Bar-

 

ber Percomb is looking in at Marty working that Hardy takes the oppor-
tunity to describe her. Note that it is the quality of her mind and the
effect of the environment on her mind, and then on her face, which is
really the object of description:
Her face had the usual fulness of expression which is developed
by a life of solitude. Where the eyes of a multitude continu-
ously beat like waves upon a countenance they seem to wear
away its mobile power; but in the still water of privacy every
feeling and sentiment unfolds in visible luxuriance, to be in-
terpreted as readily as a printed word by an intruder. In
years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the neces-
sity of taking thought at a too early period of life had forced
the provisional curves of her childhood's face to a premature
finality. (Ch. II, p. 8)
Marty could not be the sympathetic and loyal center of morality for this
novel if she had not already "Taken Thought," for "her sense of comrade—
ship" and her "humanism" (Ch. XLVIII, p. 443) show how "the great web of
human doings" that stretches "from the White Sea to Cape Horn" is an
emotional and spiritual interconnectedness, not merely one of circum-
stance or the laws of nature or causality (Ch. III, p. 21).
The process or the result of awakening is the story which Hardy
narrates, in one form or another, in all his novels. It may be argued

that Avice's coming to consciousness is essentially irrelevant to The

Well-Beloved, but a more careful consideration makes it clear that it is

209

finally irrelevant only to Pierston. By the end of his career as a nov-
elist, Hardy was so completely concerned with peOple's consciousnesses-—
and with their coming to consciousness--that nearly all of the characters
go through or have gone through this process, regardless of their prox-
imity to the main characters and plot. The exceptions are notable, and
most clearly presented in characters who do not change or whose changes
are illusory. Arabella, for example, is not subhuman for being "a come
plete and substantial female animal," but she is essentially animalistic
rather than spiritual, and her true vocation seems to be associated with
red meat, particularly pigs (Pt. I, Ch. vi; p. 42).3 That is, she is
human, not a pig herself, but she is associated with pig-breeding, pig-
slaughtering, and pig-marketing as long as Jude knows her. That she is
also associated with eggs and ale merely demonstrates the heights to
which she can rise; certainly they do not suggest progress on her part,
as "Taking Thought" does, for she ends up selling pigs again with her
father in Christminster in a "miserable little pork and sausage shop"
(Pt. VI, Ch. vii; p. 459). As far as central characters go, however,
the unconsidering ones like Arabella, Alec, and Lucetta are exceptional
rather than normal for not having "Taken Thought." Even among the three
Avices, for instance, each is described as having a different kind of
coming to consciousness. Avice I is made self-conscious by the contrast
between her impulsive embrace and Jocelyn's and her mother's convention-
al repression; Ann Avice begins to grasp the mysteries of art and what
happens to the natural materials of life after they are transmuted by
thought (Pt. II, Ch. xii; p. 131); and Avice III is modernized into con-
sciousness like Sue, Grace, and Fancy as a result of her education and
deracination (Pt. III, Ch. i; pp. 153-54).

Hardy's typical symbolizing or generalizing mode of thinking made

210

the first moment of consciousness--or "moment of vision"—-emblematic for

him of consciousness itself, especially by the time of A Pair of Blue

 

Eygg; but from the very beginning Hardy's vision of the importance of
the operating mind goes beyond the merely emblematic into what is for
him the more realistic day by day grappling with details and making of
decisions. In other words, Hardy presents the action of the conscious
mind at work in two ways: by detailed presentation, like close narration
or attention to natural and architectural environment; and by symboliz-
ing, like Henry Knight's look at history as he hangs on the face of the
Cliff With No Name, or like Elfride waiting for the horse to decide the
direction she will take. The way to find Hardy's treatment of conscious-
ness in any of the novels, then, the way to organize the myriad in-
stances and examples, is to look both for vivid, emblematic events (and
their concomitant themes) and for the masses of details (which we usual-
ly think of as the "realistic" parts of the presentation). Such a search
will turn up that novel's particulars of Hardy's constant consideration
of the forms and effects of consciousness.

For example, Jude's epiphany as a result of his experience in Farm-
er Troutham's field is the touchstone for his entire novel, since it is
the coming to consciousness of a hyperconscious (or, as Hardy puts it,
"supersensitive") character." There can be no denying the overarching
importance of this event for Jude. He begins the experience surrounded
by the past and completely unconscious of it, because it has been oblit-
erated by the tilling, and because the field represents the kind of past
which leaves no record except in the memories--the minds-~of those who
know it:

The fresh barrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings

in a piece of new corduroy, lending a meanly utilitarian air
to the expanse, taking away its gradations, and depriving it

211

of all history beyond that of the few recent months, though to
every clod and stone there really attached associations enough
and to spare--echoes of songs from ancient harvest-days, of
spoken words, and of sturdy deeds. Every inch of ground had
been the site, first or last, of energy, gaiety, horse-play,
bickerings, weariness. Groups of gleaners had squatted in the
sun on every square yard. Love-matches that had populated the
adjoining hamlet had been made up there between reaping and
carrying. Under the hedge which divided the field from a dis-
tant plantation girls had given themselves to lovers who would
not turn their heads to look at them by the next harvest; and
in that ancient cornfield many a man had made love-promises to
a woman at whose voice he had trembled by the next seed-time
after fulfilling them in the church adjoining. But this nei-
ther Jude nor the rocks around him considered. For them it
was a lonely place, possessing, in the one view, only the qual-
ity of a work-ground, and in the other that of a granary good
to feed in. (Pt. I, Ch. ii; p. 10)

The histor knows of this past, which means that for Hardy it exists, re-
gardless of Jude's ignorance of it and regardless of its intangibility.

Jude's emotional condition at the beginning of the scene is one of symr

pathetic oneness with the forms of nature in this world which, according
to the histor, is haunted by human betrayal and mutability.

Troutham's interruption and his punishment of Jude's communion with
the birds snap forever that "magic thread of fellow-feeling" which unites
"his own life with theirs" (Pt. I, Ch. ii; p. 11). This change in
Jude's mental existence is the beginnings of consciousness for him, it
is a separation from nature, and, with his isolation reinforced by the
permanence of his break from Phillotson, the moment is marked by a comp
prehensive and organized perception of the world, narrated close to Jude:

Jude went out, and, feeling more than ever his existence to
be an undemanded one, he lay down upon his back on a heap of
litter near the pig-sty. The fog had by this time become more
translucent, and the position of the sun could be seen through
it. He pulled his straw hat over his face, and peered through
the interstices of the plaiting at the white brightness, vague-
ly reflecting. Growing up brought responsibilities, he found.
Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought. Nature's logic
was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one
set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his

sense of harmony. As you got Oder, and felt yourself to be at
the centre of your time, and not a point in its circumference,

212

as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a
sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed
to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and
glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it,
and warped it.
If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not
want to be a man. (Pt. I, Ch. ii; pp. 14-15)
Because he is young and "natural," awareness is new to him, consciousness
is intermittent; as the histor immediately afterwards says: "Then, like
the natural boy, he forgot his despondency, and sprang up. During the
remainder of the morning he helped his aunt, and in the afternoon, when
there was nothing more to be done, he went into the village."

In keeping with the complexity of the entire novel, this emblematic
scene takes in Jude's relationships to his family and his personal past
as well as those to nature and the history of Wessex. His consciousness
is formed in conjunction with his deracination, both from society (his
family and Phillotson, in this instance) and nature. Jude is Hardy's
clearest presentation of the comprehensiveness of mind and the determin-
ism of perception, for this novel is the biography of a consciousness,
beginning as it does with the beginnings of awareness and the formation

of his unconscious ideals and concluding as it does with their destruc-

tion. The Well-Beloved is the novel most dominated by the consciousness

 

of a character (except Our Exploits at West Foley and, presumably, The

Poor Man and the Lady, which were written in the voice of one of the

 

characters), but it is not the most thorough presentation; it is, as Har-
dy said, "The Sketch of a Character." ggdg_is the only novel Hardy
wrote in this biographical form, for most of his characters come to con-
sciousness as adults instead of as children; only occasionally does a
character "Take Thought" even in adolescence.

The very nature of the emblematic event in Hardy allows him to use

a single event which affects a character--and the consciousness which

213

results from this event--as a representative for the more generalized

phenomenon of "Taking Thought." Often this emblematic event can be inter-

preted as sexual experience, as in the case of Avice Caro, whose "woman-

hood" is awakened; but it is not her impulsive greeting which makes her

self-conscious, it is
Ch. i; p. 7). Tess's
sexual encounter, but
tion when compared to
scribes her change as

to her parents' house

Jocelyn's and her mother's reactions to it (Pt. 1,
story, too, might be thought to originate with a
this disappears as a central element in her matura-
the real source of her change: thought. Hardy de-
taking place during the time following her return

and the death of her baby, but he implies in the

narration that it is the contemplation of her own death that takes the

adolescent Tess "from simple girl to complex woman." In a passage shared

by the histor and Tess, Hardy shows that, for Tess, part of conscious-

ness is the perception that the past and the future exist in the present.

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the
revolution of the year; this disastrous night of her undoing
at Trantridge with its dark background of The Chase; also the
dates of the baby's birth and death; also her own birthday;
and every other day individualized by incidents in which she
had taken some share. She suddenly thought one afternoon,
when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was yet
another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of
her own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a
day which lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the
year, giving no sign or sound when she annually passed over it;

but not the

less surely there. When was it? Why did she not

feel the chill of each yearly encounter with such a cold rela-

tion? She had Jeremy Taylor's thought that some time in the

future those who had known her would say: "It is the -th, the
'day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died"; and there would be noth—

ing singular to their minds in the statement. Of that day,

doomed to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she

did not know the place in month, week, season, or year.

Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to com-

plex woman.

Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face,

and a note of tragedy at times into her voice. Her eyes grew
larger and more eloquent. She became what would have been
called a fine creature; her aspect was fair and arresting; her
soul that of a woman whom the turbulent experiences of the
last year or two had quite failed to demoralize. But for the

214

world's opinion those experiences would have been simply a
liberal education. (Ch. XV, pp. 124-25)

For the histor, Tess's experiences up to this point in the novel, before
she goes to Talbothays, have merely educated her: her face becomes ex-
pressive, like Clym's and Marty's, and "her soul" is undemoralized: the
truth of the matter, according to the histor, is that Tess's experiences
would be "simply a liberal education" if it were not "for the world's
opinion."

This passage is crucial in this novel and in Hardy's canon for its
vision of the newly conscious Tess as undemoralized and liberally educat-
ed, for we are accustomed to think of consciousness in Hardy as essen-
tailly painful and debilitating. Tess is certainly not made light-heart-
ed by her change: she thinks about the anniversary of her own death ly-
ing "sly and unseen among all the other days of the year," but she is
deepened and enrichened by these experiences and by these thoughts. That
Tess's troubles do not begin with Alec's domination of her supports J.
Hillis Miller's point that there is no original act, no beginning, which
sets off the sequence of events which befall Hardy characters." In this
case, Tess's change is the result of her encounter with Alec, which is
one result of the death of their horse Prince, which is one result of
her father's having learned of the history of the Durbeyfield name,
which is one result of her parents' lax behavior in what seems in this
novel to be a difficult and demanding world. It is clear, however, that
Tess is different as of this moment, in which she thinks beyond her
beauty to her death. She has "Taken Thought," even though Hardy does
say it in so many words. She begins the novel, at the May Day dance, as
"a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience" (Ch. II, p. 13),

and now, as a teenager, she is a "complex woman" who has "Symbols of

215
reflectiveness" in her face.

Cytherea Graye, of course, has a similar perception about the rela-
tive insignificance of the individual human life. She contrasts the per-
spective of the individual who lives that life against the perspective
of the individual for whom that life is "but a thought," a function of
that individual's consciousness-~in her words, "my memory." Cytherea
contemplates the effects which her own death will have on those who will
blame her for her choice of Edward over Manston (after she has already
married the latter):

"And perhaps, far in time to come, when I am dead and gone,
some other's accent, or some other's song, or thought, like an
old one of mine, will carry them back to what I used to say,
and hurt their hearts a little that they blamed me so soon.
And they will pause just for an instant, and give a sigh to me,
and think, 'Poor girl!' believing they do great justice to my
memory by this. But they will never, never realize that it
was my single opportunity of existence, as well as of doing my
duty, which they are regarding; they will not feel that what
to them is but a thought, easily held in those two words of
pity, 'Poor girl!' was a whole life to me; as full of hours,
minutes and peculiar minutes, of hopes and dreads, smiles,
whisperings, tears, as theirs: that it was my world, what is
to them their world, and they in that life of mine, however
much I cared for them, only as the thought I seem to them to
be. Nobody can enter into another's nature truly, that's what
is so grievous." (Ch. XIII, No. iv; pp. 278-79)
She offers the philosophical generalization that "Nobody can enter into
another's nature truly" as an explanation for why it is that others are
only thoughts to us; this seems to oppose directly the histor's general-
ization in Tess that "But for the world's opinion those experiences would
have been simply a liberal education." That is, in the one case Hardy
emphasizes the essential loneliness of people which is caused by the
fact that each human consciousness is isolated and impenetrable; in the
other, he shows the powerful effect which the thoughts of others can

have. While these two positions might at first seem contradictory and

lead to the conclusion that this is another of Hardy's philosophical

216

inconsistencies, the condition described in Desperate Remedies is one of

 

nature and in Tess one of society. In fact, Owen Graye is the voice of

"the world's opinion" in Desperate Remedies, and Cytherea's speech is

 

made to him, so that, while the histor describes "the world's opinion"

in Tess, Cytherea addresses it in her novel. These two passages, pub-
lished in 1871 and 1891, are two different articulations of the same per-
ception: that what is momentous to the individual is a passing thought

to others.

This is probably the most important "Thought" which Hardy characters
can "Take," and it means that they have a kind of consciousness and sen-
sitivity which sets them apart from.the rest of the world. One reason
that Angel seems such a sympathetic character to us is that he, too, has
this insight. His sensitivity to the solipsistic nature of perception
and consciousness is on Tess's behalf, even though he does not know of
her own struggle between personal desires and what she conceives as her
duty. The passage is narrated close to Angel:

Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss;
but a woman living her precious life--a life which, to herself
who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as
the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the
whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her
fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only
.came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particu-
lar year in which she was born.

This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the sin-
gle opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an un-
sympathetic First Cause--her all; her every and only chance.

'How then should he look upon her as of less consequence than
himself; as a pretty trifle to caress and grow weary of; and
not deal in the greatest seriousness with the affection which
he knew that he had awakened in her--so fervid and so impres-
sionable as she was under her reserve; in order that it might
not agonize and wreck her? (Ch. XXV, pp. 198-99)

When Angel first meets Tess, at the May Day dance, she is "but a tran-

sient impression, half forgotten" (Ch. V, p. 48), and he is "not greatly

curious" about having seen her before when he first notices her at

217
Talbothays (Ch. XVIII, p. 155); his "Taking Thought" and his sensitivity

resulting from loving her make Angel able to imagine Tess's perspective.
This, clearly, is the histor's position on Tess's personal integrity,
and, indeed, Hardy's as well, but the perspective here is indubitably
Angel's; this passage is part of a longer one in which he is shown decid-
ing whether or not to stay on at Talbothays and let his love for Tess
develop. "Taking Thought" means recognizing both what is the perspective
of society and what is the perspective of the individual--whether that
thinker be the individual in question or another—~and also recognizing
the difference between them. "Taking Thought" means a simultaneous
awareness both of oneself and of one's "time" (Jgds_Pt. I, Ch. ii; p.
15). From this point of view, to take thought is to approach the per-
spective of the histor.

Because Owen takes society's side in the argument with Cytherea,
her eventual choice of social good over individual pleasure is her own,
for Owen's lameness is an apt representation of his power of thought and
force of personality, and he cannot be imagined to be responsible for
Cytherea's decisions. Although she argues for the fulfillment of person-
al desires, Cytherea adopts the social mores of marital fidelity, reluc-
tantly but none the less completely, just as she later accepts social
disapprobation for her failed marriage, even where there is no blame.
Tess, in a similar way, surrenders herself to a justice which does not
seem to have its basis in nature but in social morality. In both cases,
Hardy describes one part of this action--this surrender to social mores--
as an absence or death of individual morality. The characters theme
selves choose to surrender to social law, to the common good, and the
result of that choice is a diminution of the self, of the individual,

particularly of the "moral nature" or "moral sense"7: "It might almost

218

have been believed that a transmutation had taken place in Cytherea's
idiosyncrasy, that her moral nature had fled" (Ch. XIII, No. iv; p. 277).
For Tess, Hardy narrates close to Angel that "his horror at her impulse
was mixed with amazement at the strength of her affection for himself,
and at the strangeness of its quality, which had apparently extinguished
her moral sense altogether" (Ch. LVII, p. 492). It is not Tess's murder
of Alec which destroys her "moral sense"; nor is it her going to live
with him as his wife. It is her surrender, her body's surrender of her
"moral sense" and her consciousness's surrender of her body: "he had a
vague consciousness of one thing, though it was not clear to him till
later; that his 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" (Ch. LV, p.
484). Angel's "original Tess" is her "moral sense"; it is lost in her
excessive and idolatrous love for Angel as well as in her obliteration
by Alec.

This point, that Tess and Cytherea surrender parts of themselves in
the conclusions to their novels, is easier to understand by looking at
their moments of literal unconsciousness. For both of these characters,
the beginnings and endings of their struggles with what is called in
Desperate Remedies the "labyrinth" of thought are marked by moments or
fits of unconsciousness (Ch. I, No. iii; p. 9): for Cytherea they are
when she faints at her father's death (Ch. I, No. iii; p. 10) and at Man-
ston's return (Ch. XX, No. ii; pp. 426-27); for Tess, they are in The
Chase with Alec (Ch. XI, pp. 89-90) and on Stonehenge with Angel (Ch.
LVIII, p. 504).8 For both these characters, being conscious, to have
"Taken Thought," is not a permanent condition. For Cytherea, it ends,

as it does in thousands of novels, in marriage. Tess, by far the more

219

important character, is different. She surrenders, like Sue, Jude, and
Jocelyn; she tries to give up her consciousness. For Tess, the way out
of consciousness is a return to a more natural condition; for Cytherea,
as for Sue, it is a return to the institutions of society. Both are
movements away from individuality.

Tess's two moments of unconsciousness, in The Chase and at Stone-
henge, make her party to her own sacrifice, for without them there would
be very little ambiguity in her innocence. To be specific, there has
been some discussion of whether Tess is raped or seduced by Alec.9 If
she had been awake there would be no question: she would have resisted
or not. That she falls asleep shifts the attention away from the act
itself to the way guilt is determined. It is safe to assume that the
first sexual act between them takes place at least in some sense against
Tess's will (which is separable from the body in this novel), but her un-
consciousness is an emblem of her surrender, of her return to unthinking
nature, in which sexual instincts meet no resistence. It is no condemna-
tion of Tess to say that her liaison with Alec is natural, however unat-
tractive he may be to us; Hardy is clear that the social disapproval lev-
elled against Tess is based on superficial grounds. It is another mat-
ter, however, to dismiss her surrender at Stonehenge as natural, since
she has "Taken Thought," and lived a conscious life. Her sleepiness at
Stonehenge is as natural as her sleepiness in The Chase, and according
to the histor as inevitable, but the loss of consciousness here has no
positive form: it has no relation to sexual instincts, it serves only

society and social order.

220

B. The Qualities of Consciousness

An outline of Hardy's conception of consciousness, then, must in-
clude not only the first instance of "Taking Thought," usually imminent
in the text for at least one of the central characters, and usually for
the most central of the characters, but it must also take into account
the inculcation of external social mores as well. It is rare in Hardy
for society to be a mass or group of individuals separate from or hostile
to his central characters, though we are accustomed to think of his he-
roes as isolated and embattled individualists. There are instances when
a character may be so detached from the community that he or she can see
it with some objectivity; Pierston, for one example has a perception of

humans as busy and oblivious ants (The Well—Beloved Pt. II, Ch. i; p.

 

147), and Jude and Sue, for another, are interrupted in their restora-
tion of the lettering of the Ten Commandments by the representatives of
a superstitious group (Pt. V, Ch. vi; pp. 362-66), or, more important,
they are pushed back into one room in their house at their household
auction in Aldbrickham (Pt. V, Ch. vi; p. 368). Most of the important
incursions of society into the lives of the characters, however, are in-
cursions into their consciousnesses rather than into their practical en-
vironments; and compromises are made by the character rather than demand-
ed by society. Jocelyn makes himself conventional at the expense of
beautiful art and emotional depth; Sue and Tess both accept and adopt
conservative social ideas after having evolved out of them. This is a
surrender on their part and it is all the worse because the sexual com-
ponent makes it seem personal and intimate. Even though Sue's surrender

seems somehow much more violent and physical than Tess's, in spite of

221
the fact that it is Tess who dies, the underlying truth is that the acts

of surrender for both characters take place, most importantly, in their
minds. In this same way, Cytherea's resistance to Manston's sexual de-
sires is seriously compromised by her fainting just as he finally re-
strains her. This is an important point, because although Hardy's indi-
viduals and societies seem opposed to each other, they are not in fact
Opposites or the two parts of a dichotomy. Society in its deadliest form
arises in Hardy from inside the individual, and society itself is the
mental environment, the values and ideas against which the sensitive and
thoughtful characters struggle. The scOpe of consciousness in Hardy,
then, extends into a conception of collective as well as individual iden-
tity.

Nature, too, is not Opposite to humankind, although because of the
"deadly war waged between flesh and spirit" from the Preface to £222_
many readers have thought so. There is a kind of consciousness in Hardy
that extends to much of vertebrate nature as well. Many readers have
mistakenly concluded that a vision of conscious nature occurred to Hardy

late in life, when he was writing The Dynasts, but evidence of it can be

 

found in the assemblage of characters and animals in Under the Greenwood

 

Tree. This novel also shows more clearly than Desperate Remedies both

 

Hardy's preference for an interesting individual consciousness in a char-
acter and his respect for what might be called the collective conscious-
ness of nature and communities of humans who share traditions and emo-
tional attachments.

In some ways, this warm little novel takes Hardy as far as he will
ever go in presenting the mental variousness of humanity. His early re-
viewers noted this variety but read it only as diversity among Hodges;

the social and cultural similarities of the characters, however, seem to

222

me to emphasize rather than to qualify the mental differences among them.
The characters in this novel serve as universal figures, made so by im-
ages and allusions in the text, but also as images of human consciousness
which appear in essentially unchanged form throughout all of Hardy's
Wessex and post-Wessex novels. That is, because of the extreme range of
kinds of consciousness in this novel, and because of the archetypical
quality of the characters, they exist in very similar and particular
forms in the rest of Hardy's fiction. For these reasons, Under the
Greenwood Tree has a mythic quality which places its action some time,
in its mock-epic way, just after consciousness (rather than sin, in Har-
dy's mythos) has entered the world. That the novel is set in immediate-
ly post-lapsarian Wessex can be demonstrated easily by reference to the
Biblical and Edenic images in it, but these details are less important
than the novel's general tenor of innocence--or, more precisely, of re-
membered innocence. The fall is not completely tragic in Hardy's myth-
ology, not completely painful, because part of consciousness is the mem-
ory of innocence in humanity and the sense of community with animals.
The most notable aspect of Hardy's presentation of consciousness in this
novel is the sheer number of very intelligent, stupid, sensitive, or in-
sane people there are. Almost every character has a sharply distinct
personality, and all of these odd characters are odd by virtue of their
mental rather than physical forms.

Among the very intelligent are Fancy Day, her father Geoffrey, and
Elizabeth Endorfield. Geoffrey Day has an intelligence, a mentality,
that is described in a way that seems to call for explication. The Mell-
stock choir discusses it directly; to them he is "clever" and so "close"
that his "dumbness is wonderful to listen to" (Pt. II, Ch. v; p. 93).

His essential personality Hardy sums up with respect to style and habits

223

of thought: "There was in him a quiet grimness which would in his moments
of displeasure have become surliness, had it not been tempered by honesty
of soul, and which was often wrongheadedness because not allied with sub-
tlety" (Pt. II, Ch. vi; pp. 98-99). Clearly, Hardy has such a precise
conception of Day's consciousness that he requires the use of the histor
to describe it, but the most striking aspect of Hardy's description of
Geoffrey Day's intelligence is the description of his appearance, which,
again, is phrased in terms of thought. First, Geoffrey looks as if he
were thinking--"always looking down as if trying to recollect something
he said yesterday" (Pt. II, Ch. vi; p. 98). And the appearance of his
face suggests important and meaningful variation from the normal interi-
ority of the "head" and exteriority of the face:
The surface of his face was fissured rather than wrinkled, and
over and under his eyes were folds which seemed as a kind of
exterior eyelids. His nose had been thrown backwards by a
blow in a poaching fray, so that when the sun was low and shin-
ing in his face people could see far into his head. (Pt. II,
Ch. vi; p. 98)
He has an extra set of eyelids, so that his eyes are more interior than
usual, but the position of his nose allows "people" to see inside his
"head" when sunlight strikes him directly in the face. This description
of Day's symbolic face corresponds to Hardy's description of other char-
acters whose mental condition blurs the normal distinctions made by age
and gender, Clym Yeobright, little Father Time, Jocelyn Pierston, and
William Dare.
There are other characters, too, who seem to be unusually bright or
educated--quite a large number, really, considering the small size of
the community made up by Mellstock and Yalbury. As a matter of fact,

notable intelligence is so widespread in Mellstock that it extends be-

yond humanity into the animal world, and this is the key to this novel.

224
Reuben Dewy's horses and Geoffrey Day's dogs, and even his bees, all

seem to have more complex thought processes than some of the characters
are imagined to have. Geoffrey's dogs are presented not only as intel-
ligent and expressive, but sensitive to his efforts of thought as well:
"The keeper resumed his gun, tucked it under his arm, and went on with-
out whistling to the dogs, who however followed with a bearing meant to
imply that they did not expect any such attentions when their master was
reflecting" (Pt. IV, Ch. iv; p. 170).
The real thinkers among the animals, however, are the Dewy's horses,
Smiler and Smart, and two separate incidents show the depth of what can
only be called their "consciousnesses." In the first, Reuben and Smiler
meet Dick and Smart on the road, and the two men discuss Dick's chances
with Fancy. Both horses mistake Dick's "clinching period at the end" of
his thoughts for "the close of the conversation" and prepare "to move on"
(Pt. II, Ch. viii; p. 112). But Smart can distinguish between Dick's
"whipping at [his] flank in a fanciful way" and gestures "in connection
with going on" (Pt. II, Ch. viii; p. 114). Later, however, on the way
home, Smart is caught unawares when Dick surprises him by touching him
with the whip; and on Smart's neck, not far behind his ears.
Smart, who had been lost in thought for some time, never dream-
ing that Dick could reach so far with a whip which, on this
particular journey, had never been extended further than his
flank, tossed his head and scampered along with exceeding
briskness . . . . (Pt. III, Ch. ii; p. 127)

Even these animals are a part of the mythology of this novel, for they

represent intelligent--or at least mental--animals all over Wessex.

Even "though he understood English but imperfectly," Gabriel Oak's dog

George joins him in threatening the Weatherbury rustics against gossip

(Ch. XV, p. 123); and in A Pair of Blue Eyes there is a pig "who went

out of his mind": "'As clean out of his mind as the cleverest Christian

225

could go. In early life 'a was very melancholy, and never seemed a hope—
ful pig by no means'" (Ch. XXIII, p. 261).

Superior thinking ability is not the only kind of notable intelli—
gence in this small but complex community. Jane Day is Mellstock's and
Yalbury's malcontent; her problem is not a philosophical disillusionment
with innocence and ideals, however, as Shakespeare's Jacques' is, but "a
queerness in her head" which suggests psychological maladjustment (Pt. V,
Ch. i; p. 194). Thomas Leaf is another figure whose mind is so inade-
quate that he is nearly insubstantial, as his name and manner suggest.
Using Leaf's voice, Hardy compares Geoffrey Day, into whose head one can
see when the sun is low, with Thomas, who has "no head" at all, and who
seems transparent to Day: ""A do look at me as if 'a could see my
thoughts running round like the works of a clock'" (Pt. II, Ch. v; p.
93). Leaf's problem is not represented as psychological but intellec-
tual; his failure is one of capacity, and when he is not at the peak of
excitement his condition is one of "nothingness" (Pt. V, Ch. ii; p. 211).

He is called "simple,"

affectionately, by the villagers, "not with any
sense of humiliating Leaf by disparaging him . . . because it was an ac—
cepted thing that Leaf didn't in the least mind having no head, that de-
ficiency of his being an unimpassioned matter of parish history" (Pt. II,
Ch. iii; p. 76). Although his clean clothes and subservient manner make
him likable to his fellow characters, the story that he tells the morning
of Dick and Fancy's wedding about the man who makes a fortune from ten
pounds certainly suggests that he is not among the generously endowed
(Pt. V, Ch. ii; pp. 210-11). The point, however, is still the same: what
is important about Leaf is the condition of his mind, the quality of his

consciousness.

There are those who are less sympathetically treated, like Jane Day

226

and Thomas Leaf's mother--"'Every morning I see her eyes mooning out
through the panes of glass like a pot-sick winder-flower'" (Pt. II, Ch.
iii; p. 77)--but their purpose is more to suggest a range of intellectual
and emotional capability rather than to symbolize or illustrate any par-
ticular idea Hardy has about the nature of their perception. In the way
that Shakespeare was concerned to show the breadth of society by juxta-
posing laborers and royalty, as well as others of less extreme rank, Har-
dy is concerned to present the broad range of human and sometimes natu-
ral intelligence. Like Smart and Smiler, Fancy, Elizabeth, and Geoffrey,
Leaf is sympathetically treated because intelligence has a positive exis-
tence in Hardy--independent of the degree or quality of that intelli-
gence--which refers to the larger and less finely graduated phenomenon

of consciousness itself.

The intelligence of Elizabeth Endorfield, like that of Geoffrey Day,
is one of the interesting ones. Her purpose in the plot is merely to ad-
vise Fancy to starve herself until Geoffrey withdraws his disapproval of
Dick; that is, she is a part of the novel so that Hardy can advance the
plot of Dick and Fancy's marrying. She has, however, qualities which
make her very important to Hardy and to a discussion of this kind. She
is "an exceedingly and exceptionally sharp woman in the use of her eyes
and ears" and is regarded with some suspicion by the villagers who do
not know her well (Pt. IV, Ch. iii; p. 166). Endorfield's role in the
story occurs on two levels: the scene in which she gives Fancy the
"charm," the advice, has most to do with an exploration of kinds of
minds, of kinds of consciousnesses (this scene makes up most of "Autumn":
"Fancy in the Rain," or Ft. IV, Ch. iii; pp. 165-68); and, second, what
is of importance in this scene and in the sequence in which Fancy uses

"The Spell" (the title of the next chapter) is that she chooses to

227

become a part of the village and its hierarchy by aligning herself with
Dick--and with the "witch" Elizabeth.

"Mind" is the subject of Fancy's and Elizabeth's discussion: the
most obvious example is the purported reason for Fancy's consultation of
Elizabeth--how to make Geoffrey change his mind about Dick. Another ex-
ample of the centrality of the concept of mind is that the scene is in-
terior and, as Fancy goes outside and home, she turns "her attention to

the external world once more,"

as if to make explicit that inside the
Endorfield cottage is the interior world (Pt. IV, Ch. iii; p. 168).
Three other factors intensify this effect. First, the idea of stopping
eating is later made to seem as if it were Fancy's by the fact that Har-
dy does not narrate it in this scene; he has Elizabeth whisper it in
Fancy's ear so that, because it is not narrated, we are kept in igno-
rance of it. Second, Fancy has the feeling that Elizabeth can read her
mind, which has the effect both of making the consciousnesses of the two
women seem less separate and of reminding us of the superstitious or
supernatural overtones to the scene. Finally, Fancy's only passages of
close narration occur in this scene; we learn, close to Fancy, that Eliz-
abeth can read her mind and that she is "desperate about Dick" (Pt. IV,
Ch. iii; p. 167).

Fancy knows that Elizabeth is not a witch; we know this because
this description of Elizabeth's "distinctly Satanic" and less-than-Satan-
ic qualities is from Fancy's perspective:

She was shrewd and penetrating; her house stood in a lonely
place; she never went to church; she wore a red cloak; she al-
ways retained her bonnet indoors; and she had a pointed chin.
Thus far her attributes were distinctly Satanic; and those who
looked no further called her, in plain terms, a witch. But
she was not gaunt, nor ugly in the upper part of her face, nor

particularly strange in manner; so that, when her more intimate
acquaintances spoke of her the term was softened, and she

228

became simply a Deep Body, who was as long-headed as she was
high. (Pt. IV, Ch. iii; pp. 166-67)

It is, Hardy says, one of the things which "Fancy was revolving . . . in
her mind" as she was deciding whether to ask Elizabeth for her opinion
(Pt. IV, Ch. iii; p. 167). All of these little details in the novel re-
fer to forms of consciousness, acts of the mind. They are connected to
the development of the plot by Fancy's decision to ask Elizabeth Endor-
field's advice and her shift in attitude from pragmatic scepticism at
the beginning of the scene, when we see that she credits Elizabeth with
nothing more than being "as long-headed as . . . high," to conventional
superstition at the end, in which, from Fancy's perspective, Elizabeth
is called "witch" (Pt. IV, Ch. iii; p. 168). This act on Fancy's part
is, more than any other, Hardy's way of showing Fancy's identification
with the Mellstock society. Fancy has "Taken Thought," as her indeci-
sions and secrecy reveal, but this agreement with local and superstitious
opinion suggests that she seeks to join the community and give up her
individual and separating consciousness.

It is important that we see Fancy as fundamentally Mellstockian
rather than urban (or modern) because, in this pastoral comedy, this he-
roine must give up considerable financial expectation and potential so-
cial mobility to satisfy the demands of the genre. If we believed that
she had been educated and finished to the point that she belonged in a
more advanced society or a more modern world than Mellstock, as do Grace
Melbury and Sue Bridehead, then we would be forced to regard her marriage
to Dick (or her education) as tragic, or at the very least as ironic. As
a villager, however, she is part of Dick's own progress, and her native
intelligence is merely one more factor in her favor, as Elizabeth's is

to her. Fancy's exceptional intelligence neither sets her nor keeps her

229

apart from her community. Like Grace and Sue, Fancy is made different
from the others by her education and environment; unlike them, she is
still similar enough to return, to be changed back. Under the Greenwood
3:22.13 the narration of the community's absorption of Fancy's complex
mind and talents; the story of her coming to marry Dick is the story of
her re-education, as well. Step by step, throughout the course of the
novel, she relinquishes her pride, her expectations, her father's finan-
cial investment in her future, and her accomplishments and finished man-
ners. Fancy's re-education is a process of intellectual conformity with
the views and habits of the villagers, and one illustration of this re-
education is this scene with Elizabeth Endorfield; another is her deci-
sion to use the marriage rituals which her mother used rather than the
new ones she learned about at school. Fancy is not, however, completely
obliterated, as Tess and Sue seem to be. In the matter of the church
music, it is clear that her assimilation causes changes in the community,
as Mellstock loses its traditional musicians and as the musicians lose
their positions of leadership. Fancy's absorption into the community
seems, ultimately, to be good for her and for the society, although
Dick's naive assumption that they are completely honest with each other
makes the ending of the novel rather ambiguous. Such absorption is not
always so happy in Hardy's novels; there seems nothing good in Sue's.
Incidental as she may be to the logical and emotional centers of
the novel, Elizabeth Endorfield has a critical effect on the lives of
the characters. Endorfield is the archetype in Wessex for a kind of char-
acter which may be described in several ways, depending upon what fea-
tures are considered most important. Hardy's own phrase "Mephistophelian
visitants" has been picked up and used; in this pattern, Endorfield is

the type for Sergeant Troy, Diggory Venn, William Dare, Baron Von Xanten

230
(of The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid), Richard Newson and Donald
Farfrae (who combine to take this role), Dr. Fitzpiers (who is more like

Faust than Mephistopheles), and, from The Dynasts, the Spirit Sinister,

 

the Spirit Ironic, and the Spirit of Rumour.10 In another scheme, Eliz-
abeth is one of the "typical ballad" characters who have "a thoroughly

rationalized 'mythology' to sustain them"; Under the Greenwood Tree, Far

 

from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Woodlanders, and

 

Tess and, "with some reservations," Jude and The Trumpet-Major all take

 

part in a narrative tradition much older, and less "literary," than the

novel.11

The presence of a witch and the power of magic in Hardy's fic-
tion can also be explained by reference to consciousness in general and
to the unreliable nature of perception in particular; for this reason it
is somewhat misleading to call this character a "witch." This character
is often regarded as a witch by the other characters, but there is sel-
dom any doubt that Hardy sees him or her as merely unusually intelligent.
The witch of Endor--one possible source for Endorfield's name--is an en-
during symbol in Hardy of the superstitious interpretation of natural

phenomena. Referring to World War I in 1922, for example, in the Apology

to Late Lyrics and Earlier, fifty years after Under the Greenwood Tree,

 

Hardy contrasts the "backwards" belief in this kind of witch-figure with
modern, truth-seeking Darwinism. He says that "when belief in witches
of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory and 'the truth that shall

make you free, men's minds appear . . . to be moving backwards rather

than on."12
The advantage to Hardy of allowing these characters their witch-like

qualities is that the magic worked by these very intelligent people

serves the artistic aims of his novels by implying that the strict causal

231

logic of literary realism cannot account for all events and actions.
This is one reason that these characters are so common. Their very com-
monness introduces another terminological problem, because many of these
characters are men, and many have importance in their novels beyond their
association with superstitions. "Witch-figure," then, is a provisional
term, limited only to this study; it is also understood that Gabriel Oak
can be a witch-figure, as Elizabeth-Jane can, as can Susan Nunsuch. This
is not to suggest that the term is inappropriate in any large way, only
that "witch" must be read broadly. There are quite a number of witch-
figures in Hardy, considering the fact that he is usually considered a
realistic novelist, and their presence has been discussed by reference
to "folkways," traditional art forms, and religious images.13 Susan Nun-
such's incantation and spell make up a good example of Hardy's use of
the traditional image of a witch; Hardy juxtaposes Susan's voodoo and
Eustacia's unrelated agony to enhance the supernatural and mythic with-
out sacrificing realistic probabilities (Bk. V, Ch. vii; pp. 420-25).
Allowing for all these sources for Hardy's unusually perceptive
characters, the witch-figures, the most notable thing about them is that
their special knowledge can always be explained by natural as well as
supernatural means. This ambiguity is present even for those characters
whose auras of the supernatural are instrumental in their stories. The
Baron Von Xanten, for example, has power over Margery Tuck which "was
curiously like enchantment, or mesmeric influence. It was so masterful
that the sexual element was almost eliminated. It was that of Prospero
over the gentle Ariel. And yet it was probably only that of the cosmop-
olite over the recluse, of the experienced man over the simple maid"
(The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid, Ch. VIII, p. 355). The ambigu-

ity is also obvious for those characters like Eustacia and

232

Elizabeth-Jane, whose special qualities make the references to the super-
natural connotative and allusive. Elizabeth-Jane, for example, is not
supernatural even when Hardy describes her directly as "This discerning
silent witch" who divines truth by looking in the fire. The entire par-
agraph is worth quoting in full for its clear presentation of what Hardy
thinks of when he describes a character in these terms. The power of
Elizabeth-Jane's imagination, acting on what she already knows about Lu-
cetta and Donald, is at the center of Hardy's interest:

A seer's spirit took possession of Elizabeth, impelling her to
sit down by the fire and divine events so surely from data al-
ready her own that they could be held as witnessed. She fol-
lowed Lucetta thus mentally-~saw her encounter Donald somewhere
as if by chance-~saw him wear his special look when meeting
women, with an added intensity because this one was Lucetta.
She depicted his impassioned manner; beheld the indecision of
both between their lothness to separate and their desire not
to be observed; depicted their shaking of hands; how they
probably parted with frigidity in their general contour and
movements, only in the smaller features showing the spark of
passion, thus invisible to all but themselves. This discern-
ing silent witch had not done thinking of these things when
Lucetta came noiselessly behind her and made her start. (Ch.
XXIV, pp. 196-97)

The fact that Lucetta can surprise Elizabeth-Jane in the midst of her
thoughts shows how very natural, rather than supernatural, her perspi-
cacity is.

The passage of close narration which accompanies the agreement be-
tween Elizabeth-Jane and Lucetta to live together, technically at their
third meeting, introduces the interesting pattern of imagery relating
the two wOmen to witchcraft and conjuring. They agree to meet, as they
have always met accidentally before, at the cemetery, "old as civiliza-
1

tion,‘ where Susan Henchard is buried. Elizabeth-Jane sees Lucetta, and

Her presence so exceptionally substantiated the girl's ut-
most hopes that she almost feared her good fortune. Fancies
find room in the strongest minds. Here, in a churchyard old

as civilization, in the worst of weathers, was a strange woman
of curious fascinations never seen elsewhere: there might be

233

some devilry about her presence. However, Elizabeth went on

to the church tower, on whose summit the rope of a flag-staff

rattled in the wind; and thus she came to the wall.

The lady had such a cheerful aspect in the drizzle that

Elizabeth forgot her fancy. (Ch. XXI, p. 164)
The sentence in close narration is the one which describes Lucetta as a
"woman of curious fascinations never seen elsewhere." Lucetta is not
Satanic in any way to anyone but Elizabeth-Jane, and it is not to the
histor that "there might be devilry about her presence." Later clarify-
ing into a view of Elizabeth-Jane as a kind of witch whose consciousness
is not bound by spacial limitations like most human consciousnesses, the
imagery describes Elizabeth-Jane's qualities, not Lucetta's. This is
made clear by the use of close narration which, in this case, presents a
"fancy" of Elizabeth-Jane's mind.

The image of the witch emphasizes Elizabeth-Jane's intelligence and
thoughtfulness without making her appear evil or extraordinary at all.
In fact, this description of her as a witch is a great deal more sympath—
etic than one describing another quality of her mind:

Any suspicion of impropriety was to Elizabeth-Jane like a red
rag to a bull. Her craving for correctness of procedure was,
indeed, almost vicious. Owing to her early troubles with re-
gard to her mother a semblance of irregularity had terrors for
her which those whose names are safeguarded from suspicion
know nothing of. (Ch. XXX, p. 248)
Probably the most interesting thing about this description of Elizabeth-
Jane is that it occurs in the chapter immediately after the one in which
Henchard saves her and Lucetta from the bull which threatens them. For
such a repetition to occur so quickly suggests that the bull is a sym-
bolic figure, controlled by "The premeditated human contrivance of the

' even when

nose-ring" which is "too cunning for impulsive brute force,‘
the bull has been stimulated by the "red rag" of "suspicion of impropri-

ety" (Ch. XXIX, p. 238). The bull, of course, is an image for Hardy's

234

harrassed human being, in this case both Henchard, whom we are accustomed
to think of as a "netted lion," as a somehow wrongly domesticated natu-
ral animal, and also Elizabeth-Jane, whom we are not (Ch. XLII, p. 349).
There is no essential contradiction, however, in these metaphors which
link Elizabeth-Jane both to witches and to animals. Even though Hardy's
witches seem supernatural because of the strength of their mental powers,
such powers do not signify a separation from or a denial of natural or
physical ones.

The "real" witch-figure in The Mayor of Casterbridge is not Eliza-

 

beth-Jane but Fall, the weathercaster. The fact that his name is Fall
and that at his cottage Henchard feels "like Saul at his reception by
Samuel" uncovers the connection between Hardy's witch-figures and seers
and his conception of consciousness (Ch. XXVI, p. 214). Fall, like Eliz-
abeth Endorfield, is merely intelligent; and the two are connected to
Hardy's personal vision of Eden and the fuman fall from grace in the way
in which their knowledge is described: they belong to an earlier world
and have a less restricted, more comprehensive kind of knowledge. Humans
once shared general consciousness in Hardy's mythos, but, having evolved,
are more and more isolated, both from nature and from each other. That
Elizabeth Endorfield is a witch-figure means that she does not suffer
from this isolation. This is why she tells Fancy that "little birds"
told her about Fancy's problem with Dick and her father (Pt. IV, Ch. iii;
p. 167); in the same way, Fall tells Henchard that he had a "Feeling"
that he was coming to consult him (Ch. XXVI, p. 214). In Under the

Greenwood Tree, which is just this side of Eden, Elizabeth's superior in-

 

telligence is less bound by the limitations of human consciousness than
that of any other character in Mellstock and Yalbury. That the weather-

caster Fall's name might portend Henchard's fall from power and fortune

235

does not preclude it from also referring to an earlier condition of hu-
man consciousness, the one before the fall. Elizabeth Endorfield and
Fall also share a reference to Samuel and Saul, who meet after Samuel's
death, through the industry of the witch of Endor, and after all of the
witches are supposed to have been driven out (1 Samuel 28:7-19). Of
whatever variety, Hardy's witches take their places in their stories as
particular forms of consciousness, as kinds of minds. They can read nat-
ural signs; little birds tell them things; they can judge the weather.
This communal consciousness seems unavailable to most of the characters
who have "Taken Thought"; Tess's and Jude's life-long concern for the
welfare of animals seems to be an indication of this communality, though
it is at best only a vague memory or longing for it to them.

This ancient kind of intelligence which Elizabeth Endorfield and Mr.
Fall have is what sets Gabriel Oak apart from the other characters in

Far from the Madding Crowd. The most obvious examples of it are his

 

abilities to tell time and predict the weather by natural signs; another
is his immediate intuitive sympathy for Fanny Robin: "He fancied that he
had felt himself in the penumbra of a very deep sadness when touching
that slight and fragile creature. But wisdom lies in moderating mere
impressions, and Gabriel endeavoured to think little of this" (Ch. VII,
p. 58). As in his treatment of Elizabeth-Jane and Eustacia, Hardy does
not really attempt to make Gabriel seem supernatural; most important are
Oak's inherent nobility and intelligence and the fact that, like the old
barn at Weatherbury, his virtues include endurance. His ancient way of
knowing things endures as well, not only in his cleverness but in the
intellective processes of his dog George, in his associations with Sam-
son, MOses, and other ancient figures, and in the "Arcadian sweetness"

of his flute playing (Ch. VI, p. 45). During the trio performance of

236

Gabriel, Bathsheba, and Boldwood at the shearing-supper, "The shearers
reclined against each other as at suppers in the early ages of the world
. . ." (Ch. XXIII, p. 179). Even though Gabriel once gestures like
"Elymas-the-Sorcerer" (Ch. VII, p. 59), his intelligence is clearly prac-
tical rather than supernatural. Oak's virtues have earthly, however
precious, associations: they are "as metals in a mine" (Ch. XXIX, p.
215).

Giles Winterborne has this same instinctive--almost geological--
knowledge when he plants and tends trees, but he lacks Gabriel's endur-
ance in Hardy's presentation and would never have the strength to stand
at dawn, as Boldwood sees Oak, "on the ridge, up against the blazing
sky, . . . like the black snuff in the midst of a candle-flame" (Ch.
XIV, p. 116). The actual possession of the "spreading" consciousness is
more rare in Hardy than is a kind of instinctive memory of it or a long-
ing for it ("'I'll try to think,‘ she observed rather more timorously;

'if I can think out of doors; my mind spreads away so'"--Far from the

 

Madding Crowd Ch. IV, p. 32.) It is this desire for a feeling of unity
in humanity, something he thinks existed in the past, that causes Jude
to look to stone masonry, and especially medieval restoration, for his
means of support. Phillotson, too, lonely and isolated, turns to arche-
ology and to the study of the Romans in England for the same reason.
Sue's isolation is so extreme that she can find no real connections, in
the present or the past; this leaves her so weak that, even though she
may be right about the necessity to reject institutions which endure in
rigid defiance of reality, she has not the strength to stand personal

loss.

237

It may be useful to summarize the general phenomenon of conscious-
ness and to extend in this way the society found in Under the Greenwood
EIES.t° the rest of Wessex. To look at all of Hardy's novels is to see
an imaginary countryside peopled with characters of extremely diverse
and deliberately specified degrees of intellectual capacity. Besides
the very intelligent there are also quite a large number and variety of
the mentally impaired; these characters range from the permanently im-
paired like Thomas Leaf and Grandfer Cantle to the temporarily dimin-
ished, as Jude is when he is drunk. A character may go mad, like Bold-
wood and Manston, and perhaps like Clym and Tess and Sue; a character
may spend some mad moments, like Angel, Jocelyn, and Cytherea; or a
character simply may be mad, like Jane Day. Interestingly, there are
very few incorrigibly bad characters like Joseph Pennyways, the dishon-

est bailiff at weatherbury in Far from the Madding Crowd. MOst of the

 

villains in Hardy's novels, when they are characters rather than abstrac-
tions like chance or circumstance or the human condition, have pasts--
emotional histories--which account for their ignoble or opportunistic
behavior; Manston, for example, and William Dare, the least mitigated of
Hardy's antagonists, abandoned and unguided as children, have as their
main flaw an arrogant lack of moral responsibility rather than any kind
of inherently violent or criminal tendency. For those "villains" whose
flaw is cowardice, like Henry Knight and Angel Clare, Hardy provides a
change of heart at the end so that they are deepened and strengthened by
their experience.

All of Hardy's characters can be discussed and classified according
to the qualities of their consciousnesses, for this is as much a part of
the information that Hardy always gives as their names. The rest of the

descriptive material varies from novel to novel, and from situation to

238

situation, but if the characters are individualized, the kind of mind
they have is described. Many of the best examples of this come from the
locals in Wessex, whose collectivity makes any identification or individ-
uation important, since to name one is to separate him or her from the
community. In one interesting passage from Two on a Tower, Hardy can be

seen emphasizing "personality" and "distinctive units of society" as

" some characters:

criteria for naming, or "particularizing,
There now crunched heavier steps outside the door, and [Swith-
in's] grandmother could be heard greeting sundry local repre-
sentatives of the bass and tenor voice, who lent a cheerful
and well-known personality to the names Sammy Blore, Nat Chap-
man, Hezekiah Biles, and Haymoss Fry (the latter being one
with whom the reader has already a distant acquaintance); be-
sides these came small producers of treble, who had not yet
developed into such distinctive units of society as to require
particularizing. (Ch. II, p. 17)

In another example, Margery Tuck of The Romantic Adventures of a Milk-

 

Maid, a novel which begins, quite literally, in the dark, is described
in terms of intelligence and ideas: "She was one of those soft natures
whose power of adhesiveness to an acquired idea seems to be one of the
special attributes of that softness" (Ch. IV, p. 323).

It has often been noted before how Hardy's physical description of
characters duplicates impressionism in painting: what Hardy narrates is
less the description of the physical appearance than that of the mind or
personality of the character or the impression of what the perceiver,
influenced by the limitations of particularity, can see. The best exam-
ple of this last one, of course, is Barber Percomb's look at Marty South:

In her present beholder's mind the scene formed by the girlish
spar-maker composed itself into an impression-picture of ex-
tremest type, wherein the girl's hair alone, as the focus of
observation, was depicted with intensity and distinctness,
while her face, shoulders, hands, and figure in general were a
blurred mass of unimportant detail lost in haze and obscurity.

(Ch. II, p. 9)

Even though Hardy seems to be concerned here, as he so often is, with

239

visual effects and references to painting, this passage is less a de-
scription of Marty than it is a presentation of Percomb. The scene is
described as forming "in her present beholder's mind," not even in his
sight; and it is Marty's hair--its color and length--which interest the
barber, not "her face, shoulders, hands, and figure in general." In
short, Hardy's interest here is in Barber Percomb's consciousness.
General conceptions of intelligence and sanity apply most clearly
for Hardy characters who are not central to the novels, and therefore
who merit narrative description rather than dramatization of their per—
sonalities. For most of the characters who occupy the greatest part of
Hardy's attention, the psychological and intellectual quality of self—
alienation is the salient factor in their consciousness; it is important

in Desperate Remedies and Under the Greenwood Tree and quickly becomes

 

 

absolutely essential in the later novels. Self-consciousness and self-
awareness are two of the principal and least destructive forms of self-
alienation in Hardy, and when he concerns himself with the problem of
consciousness, as he imagines a character, Hardy concerns himself with
self-alienation and self-consciousness. A listing of Hardy's major
characters will show a listing of characters who first come to conscious-
ness and then who find themselves split, so that they can see themselves
as objects or entities independent of their consciousnesses. This is
always what images in mirrors mean in Hardy--not merely guilt or vanity,
as is usually assumed of Bathsheba, for example, because of Gabriel's
piqued condemnation of her, but self-alienation, consciousness. The
paradigmatic example comes from that novel of barely- and recently-awak-

ened consciousness, Under the Greenwood Tree:

 

Some circumstance had apparently caused much grief to Charley
just previous to the entry of the choir, and he had absently
taken down a small looking-glass, holding it before his face

240

to learn how the human countenance appeared when engaged in

crying, which survey led him to pause at the various points in

each wail that were more than ordinarily striking, for a thor-

ough appreciation of the general effect. (Pt. I, Ch. ii; p. 8)

Sometimes this image of the reflected self is quite direct, as when

Tess is moved to consider the day of her death while looking in the mir-
ror "at her fairness"; when Jocelyn sees his ghostly reflection and comes
to an awareness of his age; or when Boldwood faces his insubstantiality
and "nervous excitability" after he gets Bathsheba's valentine (Ch. XIV,
p. 114).14 Sometimes the image is quite vivid and goes beyond the mere
reflection of the viewer, as when Henchard-~that "self-alienated man"
(Ch. XLV, p. 380)--looks down in Ten Hatches Hole and finds his own
double:

While his eyes were bent on the water beneath there slowly
became visible a something floating in the circular pool formed
by the wash of centuries; the pool he was intending to make his
death-bed. At first it was indistinct by reason of the shadow
from the bank; but it emerged thence and took shape, which was
that of a human body, lying stiff and stark upon the surface
of the stream.

In the circular current imparted by the central flow the
form was brought forward, till it passed under his eyes; and
then he perceived with a sense of horror that it was himself.
Not a man somewhat resembling him, but one in all respects his
counterpart, his actual double, was floating as if dead in Ten
Hatches Hole. (Ch. XLI, p. 342)

This vision is horrifying to Henchard because he can reasonably expect
to see either his own reflection in the pool or the body of another per-
son; that it is not his reflection but his embodiment explains his con-
fusion and superstitious acceptance of it as real. But these reflected
images, and these gazings into mirrors, are more than signs of self-ali-
enation; they are the act of alienation itself. A Hardy character look-
ing in a mirror is a consciousness contemplating its detached presence,
its double, in the outside world, like Charley watching himself cry.

These acts of consciousness signify a kind of perception which, like

24!

"Taking Thought," means self-consciousness to Hardy.

This same doubling of the self is the basis for the belief in a
Well-Beloved, and a desire to reunite with the self is the motivation
for the search for it. This is why Pierston, for whom the moon is a
symbol of the Well-Beloved, thinks of her as "his wraith in a changed
sex" (Pt. III, Ch. ii; p. 158).15 This is why Edward Springrove's search
for his Well-Beloved is his search for "Echoes of himself," for "the in-
definable helpmate to the remoter sides of himself" (Ch. X, No. iv; pp.
200-201). Hardy's insight that the search for the Well-Beloved is in
reality a search for another part of one's own self is a constant in his
fiction, appearing as it does in character after character whose self-
alienation appears as an image in a mirror or a search for the double.
Angel rejects Tess because her apparent duplicity makes her unfit, he
believes, to be his ideal, his "wraith in a changed sex":

"I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you."

"But who?"

"Another woman in your shape." (Ch. XXXV, p. 293)
He is wrong, however, to reject her, since she is his double here: they
have even committed the same crime. Angel's rejection of Tess is his
rejection of himself; his self-consciousness is self-alienation here.

Ian Gregor points out the form.which this split takes for Clym:

". . . Clym, in going against his mother and marrying Eustacia, is almost
willing his own self-destruction, driving a splinter between 'the right

and the left hands of the same body.'"16

It is not, however, that Clym
and his mother are merely two halves of a whole; he is so much a part of
her that leaving her for Eustacia makes, as Gregor puts it, a "rent . . .

"'7 The damage done to Clym by his estrangement from

in Clym's nature.
and rebellion against his mother is vividly presented by Hardy in such a

way that we can see the inner world of Clym's pain by what he sees and

242
hears in the outer world of the heath:
The wet young beeches were undergoing amputations, bruises,
cripplings, and harsh lacerations, from which the wasting sap
would bleed for many a day to come, and which would leave
scars visible till the day of their burning. Each stem was
wrenched at the root, where it moved like a bone in its socket,
and at every onset of the gale convulsive sounds came from the
branches, as if pain were felt.18
It is inevitable, then, that Clym and his mother will not meet again as
fully conscious beings. Because Mrs. Yeobright is a part of Clym from
which he severs himself, she exists to him after this only as potential
happiness and peace, and she appears to him only as a knock in his
dreams. His self-alienation is symbolized by his estrangement from his
mother, and her death makes this alienation permanent.

Rivalry, too, is often presented as a splitting or doubling of the
self, and this is why Hardy's characters often seem to appear in pairs.
Edward Springrove and Manston even join together at one point, in the
struggle over Cytherea:

They flew together like the jaws of a gin. In a minute they
were both on the floor, rolling over and over, locked in each
other's grasp as tightly as if they had been one organic being
at war with itself . . . .

Two characteristic noises pervaded the apartment through
this momentous space of time. One was the sharp panting of
the two combatants, so similar in each as to be undistinguish-
able; the other was the stroke of their heels and toes, as
they smote the floor at every contortion of body or limbs.
(Ch. XX, No. ii; p. 427)

This suggests that Manston, and not Cytherea, is Edward's missing other.
Cytherea'is the center of a different set of doubling, since Cytherea,

of course, is really both Miss Graye and Miss Aldclyffe. Farfrae and
Henchard compete, as Edward and Manston do, for survival. Pierston, too,
sometimes seems split into several characters; he has complex familial

relationships to both his rivals, Isaac Pierston, who shares his name,

and Henri Leverre, who is the son of the woman he intended to marry at

243

the beginning and finally succeeds in marrying at the end.
Desperate Remedies is notable for its nearly chaotic schemes of

split-up characters, and The Well-Beloved notable for its rigidly archi-

 

tectural plan of repetitions. These blatant forms of doubling do not
occur consistently throughout Hardy's fiction, although the characters
often appear in groups which draw attention to particular aspects of
their identities. Dick Dewy's role, for example, as Fancy's suitor is
shared among Dick, Farmer Shiner, and Parson Maybold in the same way
that the function of a character in the plot determines grouping in oth-
ers of Hardy's novels. Similar in form are: Stephen Smith-Henry Knight-
Lord Luxellian; Gabriel Oak-Farmer Boldwood-Frank Troy; Clym Yeobright-
Damon Wildeve-Diggory Venn; Eustacia-Mrs. Yeobright-Thomasin; and Grace
Melbury-Felice Charmond-Suke Damson. One way to look at these charac-
ters is to see them as the lovers or suitors to the Beloved. Sometimes
Hardy seems to multiply the suitors in order to validate their excesses
and to emphasize the Beloved's extreme attractiveness and the power of
sexual instincts. When the Beloved appears as a multiple character, how-
ever, the effect is less one of architectural symmetry than it is a hint
of the persistence of the ideal in the world. For Ethelberta-Picotee
and Tess-'Liza-Lu, the first appearance of the ideal is muddier, as it
were, than the second, which is a clarification and a purification of
the first. Hardy also occasionally pairs up characters so that their
opposition to one another emphasizes their salient qualities; Edward
Springrove-Aeneas Manston, Giles Winterborne-Edred Fitzpiers, Angel-Alec,
and Sue-Arabella all demonstrate a contrast between spiritual and earthly
natures.

This is not to suggest that all of the characters in all of these

splittings, doubling, or triplings are self-alienated. Sometimes one

244

member of the group seems to exist as a part of it simply because of a
lack of self—awareness; Arabella, for one, and Suke Damson, for another,
and all of the characters associated generally with artificiality and
exclusively with animals and instincts contrast with the self-aware and
sensitive members of their groups. Picotee and 'Liza-Lu seem refined
beyond the self-alienation which is emphasized in Ethelberta and Tess.
Usually, too, in a group of three characters, all are not equally indi-
vidualized and narrated; often, in fact, one of these characters is so
minor a personality as to be incidental. This is particularly true in
Under the Greenwood Tree. Though Arthur Maybold's shyness and ambitions
make him potentially an interesting character, the only character whom
we know to be self—alienated is Fancy, because she and Dick are the only
characters narrated very precisely at all. Dick seems fairly simple and
straightforward, but Fancy shows the signs of what Hardy thought of as
modern nervousness, and these signs are so essential a part of her char-
acter that we are led to suspect that they will not disappear in her
marriage to Dick. This is why she has a secret at the end--so that there
is a part of her which is not subsumed in her marriage to Dick, no matter
how optimistic the reader.

When Hardy wrote directly about the split in the consciousness of
his characters, especially his "modern" ones, he usually conceived of it
as a split between some kind of reasoning or judging faculty and some
kind of imaginative or fanciful or spiritual one. In this sense, Hardy's
conception of the internal conflicts--the "self-combating proclivity of
the supersensitive"--which his major characters face changed very little
over the years (EE§s_Ch. XXXVI, p. 311). Usually, however, Hardy is
concerned with presenting how various states of feeling and thought are

experienced and with making distinctions between them. In this, his

245

general development is a movement from simple to complex. In Despgrate
Remedies, except for Edward Springrove's search for a Well-Beloved, the
most that can be said for the complexity of consciousness in the charac-
ters is that there is a split between "Reason" and "Fancy," between
judgment and the emotions or the imagination. This is so conventional
an idea that Hardy need not have been deliberate in so presenting it.

By the end of the novels, however, by Tess, Jude, and The Well-Beloved,

 

"reason" has become something like "awareness," and "fancy" and the emo-

tions have become unconscious forces which differ in their nature as the

situation and emotional condition of the characters change. Unconscious

forces can be heredity, memory, and ideals, as well as sexual attraction,
"an emotional void in Henchard that he unconsciously craved to fill,"

and "The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet plea-

sure somewhere, which pervades all life, from the meanest to the highest"
(The Mayor Ch. XXII, p. 169; Eggs Ch. XVI, p. 134).

Speaking generally, then, of all of Hardy's novels, it can be said
that his fiction is about the consciousness, the mental life, of an in-
dividual and the environment in which that consciousness Operates. Each
novel focusses at some time upon the acts of this consciousness as it is
distinct from the physical world: it may be by way of demonstrating the

first act of consciousness, the "Taking Thought,"

of a character; it may
be by describing the self-alienation, the "self-combating proclivity" of
the most sensitive of the characters, the protagonists. Each novel
places that consciousness, however isolated, in the context of society
and nature, which are both important functions of that consciousness as
well as sources for it because their force arises from within the char-

acter, as a result of thought or feeling. In the very simplest terms

Hardy ever provided, the sense--the meaning--of the individual in the

246

conscious world is carried by two conceptions: society, which is a
thought (Dick's horse "Smart"), and nature, which in Hardy is a feeling

(Reuben's horse "Smiler").

Chapter Six: The Themes of Consciousness

In February 1887, a month before The Woodlanders came out, Hardy

 

believed that "because we are in a somnambulistic hallucination . . . we
think the real to be what we see as real" (gigs, p. 186)--a thought that
articulates the nexus between two of Hardy's three most important themes
of consciousness. The first is that there is a radical difference be-
tween what is real and what is corporeal--"the material is not the real—-
only the visible, the real being invisible Optically" (gigs, p. 186).
The second is that, conscious as we are, our awareness is shallow and
incomplete; we are aware only or ourselves and only of the present; we
are, to use a different image, sleepwalking, our minds in a dream of our
own making whiCh has only tangential connections to reality:

Each individual is conscious of himself, but nobody is con-

scious of themselves collectively, except perhaps some poor

gaper who stares round with a half-idiotic aspect.

There is no consciousness here [in London] of where any-

thing comes from or goes to--only that it is present. (Life)

pp. 206-7)
The relation these two ideas share in Hardy's mind is one of cause and
effect: the result of our incomplete consciousness, the result of our
only partial wakefulness, is that we believe the superficial to be true.
The third of these themes of consciousness is related in a slightly dif-
ferent way, for Hardy's characters show that whatever degree of con-
sciousness is possible for them, even the most wakeful are not conscious

enough to guarantee themselves survival: the aspirations of all Hardy's

conscious characters are limited by lack of knowledge. Like the

247

248

railroad, knowledge (in the form of education) in Hardy is an image for
change: the railroad represents social evolution and education repre-
sents human evolution, which, to Hardy's mind, was the development of
consciousness.1 Hardy uses knowledge, particularly in the forms of know-
ledge of secrets and of classical education, to demonstrate how some peo-
ple are more highly conscious--more sensitive--than others. This un-
equal distibution of a high degree or sensitivity of consciousness ap-
pears in very practical as well as very abstract terms in Hardy's fic-
tion. It means, for example, that characters are controlled by what

they do not know; it means that knowledge, ignorance, and secrets have
power over individual lives. These three themes make up a constant dis-
cussion in Hardy's novels of the limitations of particular conscious-
nesses. The theme of knowledge and secrets is the first of the three to

dominate a novel and is most thoroughly presented in The Mayor of Caster-

 

bridge. Even a cursory look at any of the other novels, however, shows
that it is always present and always central. In the same way, the
themes of the corporeal and the real and the "somnambulistic hallucina-
tion" of perception appear in all of the novels, even though they are
not always emphasized and thoroughly developed. The problem of reality

and corporeality is most vividly presented in The Woodlanders and that

 

of imperfect or partial perception in Ends.

This chapter will necessarily be elliptical. A full study of the
themes of consciousness in Hardy's fiction would require so much space
that its inclusion in any other study is impossible.2 Hardy's interest
in the meaning and effects of consciousness was so great and so thorough-
ly integrated into his very conceptions of humanity, nature, and society
that it is ubiquitous. Such an intensive study would have to take into

account not only the changes in Hardy's thinking which occurred over the

249

years but also how much and what part of this conception was deliberate-
ly presented by Hardy and how much was, as it were, unconscious. This
current chapter is limited to the three most important of these themes--
the power of knowledge and secrets, the "somnambulistic hallucination"
of perception, and the two worlds of the real and the corporeal--and,
regrettably, to only a very few of the most basic and clear-cut instances
of their operation. The complex dichotomy between the real and the cor-
poreal is so important a part of Hardy's discussion of perception that

it will be treated separately, in the second half of this chapter. The
other two themes are really two forms of the same idea: that there are
reasons for such imperfect perception as exists even in the most sensi-
tive, thoughtful, and intelligent. Hardy's use of metaphorical and sym-
bolic patterns in the construction of these two themes hints at his vi-
sualization of this idea. The terms which this idea takes-~secrecy and
knowledge, drunkenness and sobriety, blindness and vision, and dreaming
and waking-~will be handled in the first part of this chapter. The con-
cerns of the previous chapter-~intellectual and emotional capacity, "Tak-

ing Thought, and the fissure in the modern personality--are obviously a
part of Hardy's presentation of the characteristics and importance of

human consciousness. In the next chapter, this discussion will be con-
cluded, and Hardy's two perspectives (of the individual and of some ob-
server with a cosmic detachment) and his two conceptions of the interre-

lations between the individual consciousness and the world will illus-

trate the last of these themes.

250

A. 1. "Half-Somnolence": Knowledge and Secrets

In the context of this general discussion of Hardy's conception of
consciousness, a theme which has to do with knowledge and secrets pre-
sents particular problems, partly because the interest in the effects of
secret knowledge has a very long and rich history in Judeo-Christian cul-
ture. The use of this theme necessarily entails myriad complex associ-
ations, and, in a way, Hardy seems more interested in the complexity
which is associated with this idea than he does with the associations
themselves; specifically, Hardy relates a high degree or level of con-
sciousness to the presence of secret knowledge in a character. This is
particularly true in his early novels, when Hardy seems more interested
in narrating the effects of consciousness--or, in this rubric, the ef-
fects of knowledge. In his later novels, Hardy was concerned with the
experience and meaning of consciousness as well as its effects, so his
presentation gradually becomes more and more intrinsic to his depiction
of character. For example, there is a complicated mish-mash of secrets,

subplots, and parasitic characters in The Hand of Ethelberta and The

 

Mayor of Casterbridge; in Tess, however, there is an organized explora-

 

tion of the guilt which comes of knowledge and a sympathetic presenta-
tion of the difficulty of knowing the true origin and fair distribution
of that guilt.

The Hand of Ehtelberta concerns itself exactly with the obligations

 

of knowledge and the precariousness of secrecy, since, in this novel as
in the others, what is secret is the truth. Characters, in other words,
do not merely have knowledge; they must have knowledge of something-~the

truth. Like The Well—Beloved, The Hand of Ethelberta is interesting to

 

Hardy scholars because of its artistic protagonist, and, just as Hardy

makes clear his associations between emotional depth and artistic

251

productivity in his last novel, he presents in The Hand of Ethelberta

 

his analysis of the sources and forms of fiction. There is a talent for
story-telling, according to the basic premise of this novel, but success
at telling stories depends on the reputation of the teller as well as on
the teller's ability to sound truthful.3 Hardy's explicit position

seems to emphasize the appearance of truth in narration: in support of a

 

point Ethelberta has already made, the histor says, "A modern critic has
well observed of De Foe that he had the most amazing talent on record
for telling lies; and Ethelberta, in wishing her fiction to appear like
a real narrative of personal adventure, did wisely to make De Foe her
model" (Ch. XVI, p. 127). But the point of the climax of this novel,
when Ethelberta makes a story of her own life, is that the impetus to
tell stories is more than a desire to sound truthful--it is the desire,
ultimately, to be truthful, to tell the truth. Telling stories is the
exposing of secrets; it is the imparting of knowledge. Keeping secrets
is the hiding of knowledge, is lying, and, in Hardy, it always entails

serious social danger. The Hand of Ethelberta is one of Hardy's more

 

interesting analyses of the effects of knowledge and secrecy, then, be-
cause it illustrates what is for him the connection between art and
truth; his more thorough and characteristic presentation of the problems

of knowledge and secrecy, however, occurs in The Mayor of Casterbridge.

 

Both novels show clearly the conflict which arises in the character who
has both a public and a private life, but The Mayor shows more clearly

than Ethelberta that, in Hardy's world, knowledge is strength and igno—

 

rance is weakness. Secrets, however, are another matter: if the know-
ledge and ignorance are of secrets, then over the long term knowledge is
Faustian in that it dooms the knower; ignorance offers protection. The

effects of knowing depend on whether or not what is known is secret.

252

It is Farfrae's knowledge, for instance, of grain, commerce, and
technology which is the basis for his success in Casterbridge; his know-
ledge gives him power, eventually even political power. Farfrae's know-
ledge is not based on others' weaknesses; it is as practical and mundane
as his world of commerce is. Like Elizabeth Endorfield's, Farfrae's
judgment is so good that it seems supernatural, but to the histor there
is no mystery:

Whether it were that his Northern energy was an over-mastering
force among the easy-going Wessex worthies, or whether it was
sheer luck, the fact remained that whatever he touched he pros-
pered in. Like Jacob in Padan-Aram, he would no sooner humbly
limit himself to the ringstraked-and-spotted exceptions of
trade than the ringstraked-and-spotted would multiply and pre-
vail.

But most probably luck had little to do with it. Character
is Fate, said Novalis, and Farfrae's character was just the
reverse of Henchard's, who might not inaptly be described as
Faust has been described--as a vehement gloomy being who had
quitted the ways of vulgar men without light to guide him on
a better way. (Ch. XVII, p. 131)

Farfrae's knowledge is not of a Faustian kind, but Henchard's is; Far-
frae's dealings in the world are based on pragmatic knowledge, Henchard's
on secret knowledge.

Just as the key to Farfrae's role in The Mayor is knowledge--the
knowledge of technology in agriculture and knowledge of the world out—
side Casterbridge--so Henchard's secrets provide the key to his role.
His secrets are not of essential importance in and of themselves, in
spite of their potentially criminal or immoral content: it is not really
the fact that Henchard keeps secrets which interests us; it is in the
exchange of knowledge for secrets that our attention is drawn to their
significance. In this very mercantile novel, a novel of the marketplace,
the warehouse, and of public ritual, knowledge is one more form of cur-

rency, of what people trade for power and prestige, for what they want;

their secrets, on the other hand, are their debts. Henchard is privy to

253

a few secrets which are really the "burden" of others, but, characteris-
tically, he has something that hs_must hide from others.4 This secrecy
contaminates all of his emotional investments and dominates all of his
relationships. There are the secrets of his sale of his wife and child;
the secrets of his remarriage to Susan, his pretence in courting her,
and his affair with and abandonment of Lucetta. There is the secret of
Elizabeth-Jane's illigitimacy, the secret of Henchard's visit to the
weathercaster, the secret of Newson's visit and Henchard's lie to him,
and the secret of the goldfinch.

Taken all together, Henchard's secrets have a powerful presence in
the novel; they add up to a quality of his personality. All of this
secrecy, for example, is the primary source of our sense of Henchard's
profound isolation (a sense which is reinforced by the fact that the
preponderance of close narration presents Henchard's perspective.) The
reason that secrets isolate Henchard is that they form too unpredictable
a basis for his relationships with other characters. This is especially
true of the women, Susan, Lucetta, and Elizabeth-Jane; and the temporary
or erratic quality of the love between Henchard and each of these women
mirrors the instability of the secrets themselves. Jopp and Newson, too,
are related to Henchard in the secrets that they share with him, that
they keep from him, and thathe keeps from.them. Farfrae, interestingly,
is different from all other characters in this matter because Henchard
shares a little from most of his secrets with him. Farfrae knows about
Susan and, though he does not know her identity, he also knows about
Henchard's affair with and feelings for Lucetta. Clearly, then, if
knowledge is a kind of currency in this novel, the arena of human rela-
tionships is the marketplace.

In Hardy's world, knowledge and secrets can put people in one of

254

three positions in regard to others. First, ignorance, having secrets
kept from a character, can make that character helpless. Wise, self-ed-
ucated, and intelligent, (all powerful virtues to Hardy), with "the se-
rene Minerva-eyes of one 'whose gestures [beam] with mind,'" Elizabeth-
Jane is essentially defenseless against the whims and moods of Henchard,
Lucetta, and Farfrae until she has the knowledge of the entirety of her
story (Ch. XLV, p. 380). Second, having a secret to keep can be a posi-
tive source of debilitation in Hardy. Attempting to keep her past a
secret makes it impossible for Lucetta to have the strength to survive
public knowledge; and a secret in his past makes it impossible for Hen-
chard to keep his office, first, and then his family. Both are weakened
by having a secret which becomes the basis of others' knowledge; it is
as if secrets make characters vulnerable to fatal collapse while igno-
rance exposes them merely to pain. Finally, one character may know of
another character's secret. The relationship between those who have
knowledge and those who have secrets is a symbiotic one: for every char-
acter who has a secret to keep, there is at least one more, like the
furmity-woman, who knows that secret; for every character who is debili-
tated by secrecy, there is another whose good fortune is due to knowledge
of that secret. Jopp's power over Lucetta is based on his knowledge of
her secret relationship with Henchard, just as the furmitydwoman's power
over Henchard is her knowledge of his secret crime. The skimmington has
the fatal power that it does because it has Jopp's knowledge and Lucet-
ta's debilitation as its origin, not because the characters are particu-
larly superstitious, and only partly because Newson anonymously and un-
wittingly donates money. This power and good fortune which comes of
knowing another's secrets, however, is not ennobling. JOpp is no hero

for his treatment of Lucetta, and Henchard's collection of letters from

255

her does not give him the strength to expose her to Farfrae.

The unattractive power of knowing another's secrets, the helpless-
ness of having secrets held against one, and the weakening caused by
keeping secrets are all a part of what are to Hardy the destructive pos-
sibilities of knowing. He just barely avoids this potentially tragic
aspect of knowledge in Under the Greenwood Tree, a novel as dominated by
secrets as any of the others, but the threat of exposure is otherwise a
constant and serious undercurrent of motivation in his fiction. Its ef-
fects can be seen thoughout his novels. This threat, of course, makes
Desperate Remedies the murder mystery that it is, and the labyrinth,
which Hardy uses as a metaphor for thought, is in fact the process, how-

ever gradual, of exposing the guilty by the innocent. In A Pair of Blue

 

Eyss, Elfride Swancourt's secret and its discovery contribute to her de-
mise. The secret itself-~that she has loved before--hardly seems sig-
nificant to us, and it is difficult to be sympathetic to Henry Knight's
demand for such emotional virginity. The act of secret-keeping, however,
is a mistake that weakness makes, and Knight's disappointment that El-
fride is not candid with him is much more understandable. This particu-
lar plot of secrets and their exposure is repeated in 2333) after having
been made considerably more complex. In the later novel, the emphasis
shifts from whether or not the heroine has committed a crime to whether
or not the heroine is responsible for the crime (which has indubitably
been committed.) In the change from A Pair of Blue Eyes to Tess, this
plot also changes the emphasis from the effects of keeping the secret
(interpreted as a lack of candor) to the secret itself; that is, al-
though Angel believes that Tess "had practiced gross deceit upon him,"
the real source of his disillusionment is that Tess is not the ideal

that he thought she was (Ch. XXXVII, p. 323). One reason that Tess is

256

so much more compelling than A Pair of Blue Eyes is that the secret is

 

sexual rather than merely romantic in nature. It is also the reason
that Alec's influence over Tess is so much greater than Stephen Smith's
is over Elfride: the fact that the knowledge is sexual makes it of the
most intimate kind.

Lucetta's secret, kept from Donald and from Casterbridge, is sexual
in origin in this same way, but, for a number of reasons, it lacks the
power to engage our sympathy in the way Tess's secret does. Not the
least among them are that Lucetta is shallow and unconsidering (never
having "Taken Thought"), that she cannot be said to be Henchard's sexual
victim as Tess is of Alec, and that she is really only afraid of expo-
sure and not concerned, as Tess is, with the meaning and extent of her
guilt. The most important reason, however, that Lucetta's secret final-
ly matters only to her and not to us or to any of the other characters
is not psychological, it is structural: LuCetta, her secret, and her
death are essentially peripheral to Henchard and the rise and fall of
his fortunes.

There is another aspect of knowledge in Hardy than that of the
tragic; there is a kind of knowledge which is not parasitic, which does
not depend on the secrets and weaknesses of others for its source. This
secret is of the truth about the world, and, though it can be as painful
as the knowledge that the world is not fit for the most sensitive of us
to live in (as Jude learns), it can also be the source of some kind of
harmonious understanding of nature; this is the knowledge of the work-
ings of natural forces. Father Time, Marty South, and Giles Winterborne,
for instance, seem to have a kind of instinctual or inherent knowledge
that makes chaotic nature legible.5 The characters who derive actual

strength from their knowledge, however, the ones who survive, learn some

257

"secret" of living which makes their perception truer. Gabriel Oak, for
instance, is one who learns and benefits from living; and Elizabeth-Jane
is in possession of
the secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited op-
portunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the cun-
ning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of
those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to
everybody not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have much
of the same inspiriting effect upon life as wider interests
cursorily embraced. (Ch. XLV, p. 385)
The fact that Arabella is one of these characters mitigates her culpa-
bility as a survivor somewhat, although it does not of course make her
any the less crass. She seems to have access to and control over a
whole world of ideas and events to which Jude is almost perfectly obliv-
ious. In a very basic way, Arabella knows and understands the secrets
associated not only with slaughter but also with birth. She is not de-
bilitated by her secrets, but then exposure holds no serious threat for
her: that her dimple—making is only moderately successful seems irrele-
vant to her; that Jude is shocked at her other artificialities is less
important to her than adulterations in the beer. MOst important, she
seems able to turn the threat of exposure to her own advantage; her
greasy fingerprints on Jude's books lead to a public humiliation of Jude
rather than Arabella, since she pretends that he has "ill-used" her to
the churchgoers of Alfredston (Pt. I, Ch. xi; pp. 80-81).

Because Elizabeth-Jane and Farfrae are more sensitive than Arabella,
Hardy shows a more typical attitude about secrets in the scene in which
they both recognize the damage they have suffered at the hands of those
who had knowledge which was denied to them. Although Elizabeth-Jane's
general circumstances are beginning to change for the better, she is

still ignorant of the fact that Newson is her father; she has much of

her story still to learn. For Farfrae, however, the worst is already

258

over. The context for this scene is that Henchard, fearful and suspi-
cious of the purpose of Elizabeth-Jane's long walks, is spying on her:
Could he have heard such conversation as passed he would have

been enlightened thus much:-- . . .
She ". . . I wish to get a glimpse of the sea every day."

BER-’"IS it a secret why?"

She (reluctantly).--"Yes."

Hs_(with the pathos of one of his native ballads).--"Ah, I
doubt there will be any good in secrets! A secret cast a deep
shadow over my life. And well you know what it was."

Elizabeth admitted that she did, but she refrained from
confessing why the sea attracted her. She could not herself
account for it fully, not knowing the secret possibly to be
that, in addition to early marine associations, her blood was
a sailor's. (Ch. XLII, p. 352)

Not only is it clear that Farfrae's objection to secrets is valid, how-
ever melodramatic; we can also see that, regardless of her ignorance,
Elizabeth-Jane acts in accordance with and is, in fact, controlled by a
secret of which she is not conscious.

Reminiscient of the script and stage directions of the theatre, in
which there is no real "narrator" at all, Hardy's odd narrative form
here reinforces the artificial intensity suggested by the phrase, "with
the pathos of one of his native ballads," and the universalization of
character suggested by the use of "He" and "She" instead of "Elizabeth-
Jane" and "Donald" and by the ostensible, hypothetical nature of what is
narrated ("Could he have heard such conversation as passed he would have
been enlightened thus much"). Like Lucetta's secret, the story of Eliz-
abeth-Jane's illigitimacy and her true paternity is not really at the
heart of The Mayor of Casterbridge. It is treated lightly here, in a
very detached way, and both Donald and Elizabeth-Jane recover completely
from the effects of their ignorance. Furthermore, these two characters
seem absolved of blame for their part in Henchard's fall, even Farfrae,

partially because they are characters against whom secrets are kept.

Their positions of ignorance lend them a kind of innocence or naiveté

259

which is not granted to Henchard, who must be regarded as one who uses
secrets against others as well as having secrets to defend.

None of these characters has complete (or completely reliable) con-
sciousness: the secrets kept against Farfrae, Elizabeth-Jane, Lucetta
and Henchard and the secrets these characters keep are signs that none
of them can perceive well enough, as Matthew Arnold phrased it, "[to see]
life steadily, and [to see] it whole."6 Their own secrets prevent them
from seeing steadily and others' secrets cause them to see only frag-
ments of what is there. Because of the instability of secrets, the qual-
ity of the characters' perception varies considerably in this novel,
from complete ignorance and blindness to clear-sighted and sober thought-
fulness. There is a general pattern in which the characters move from
ignorance or misperception to knowledge and clear-sightedness, though
Henchard's change is less distinct than those from.whom secrets are kept
because, in general, as a secret-keeper, he moves from concealment to
exposure. (His perception is unsteady and his actions, as a consequence,
oscillate: he cannot, for example, seem to make up his mind after he has
gone to see Fall the weathercaster.) Henchard's is the story of the
painful effects of consciousness; Elizabeth-Jane's is the story of the
effects of ignorance and the gaining of more complete consciousness.
Elizabeth-Jane's education in life makes hers a story of coming to terms
with pain; Henchard's debilitation makes his a story of gradual with-
drawal into the private world of his own consciousness.

The first two chapters of the novel narrate the act which brings
Henchard to consciousness. The fact that he is drunk when he sells Su-
san and the first Elizabeth-Jane to Newson signifies that he suffers
from a partial, unreliable form of consciousness. It does not mean that

Henchard is operating without consciousness: his "temper,' we learn

260

later, is "artificially intensified" by alcohol (Ch. V, p. 41); certain-
ly, Henchard's personality does not seem dulled by it. Intoxication is
fairly unusual in Hardy but important in a discussion of this kind be-
cause it shows the impairment of an otherwise operant mind. Jan Coggan,
for instance, seems by the repeated private "twirl" of his eye and Gab-
riel's preference for him to be the most conscious or advanced of the
rustics, but his drinking classifies him as one of the rustics rather
than one of the financially independent landowners (a group to which
Gabriel comes to belong.)7

Accenting this difference between Gabriel Oak and Jan Coggan is the
scene in which Joseph Poorgrass brings the dead Fanny Robin and her
child back to Weatherbury for burial. Hardy makes use of the inebria-
tion of Jan, Joseph, and Mark Clark to show the general quality of their
thought. Metonymically, he focusses attention on their eyes to empha-
size that it is their perception which is at issue and which is dimin-
ished--flawed, in fact--as a result of the dulling of their minds. To
pay attention to the ways their eyes look to Oak also has the merit of
illustrating their perception from outside it. Jan Coggan looks "indef-
initely" at Oak when he enters the Buck's Head, "one or other of his
eyes occasionally opening and closing of its own accord, as if it were
not a member, but a dozy individual with a distinct personality" (Ch.
XLII, p. 329). One of the best jokes in the novel, "the affliction
called a multiplying eye," is Joseph's formulation of the effects of
drinking alcohol (Ch. XLII, p. 330). Hardy narrates at length the in-
creasing inebriation of the three men, especially as it affects their
conversational and reasoning powers; he is interested most particularly,
however, in how the alcohol affects their perception, so his habitual

point of reference is their eyes. By the time they are thoroughly drunk,

261

they sit in darkness-—"and the eyes of the three men were but sparkling
points on the surface of darkness" (Ch. XLII, p. 329).

While Hardy is concerned with the immediate effects of their drink-
ing on these three men's thought and perception, he uses their inebria-
tion as a kind of symbol of their more everyday intellectual primitive-
ness. Jan Coggan is most nearly Gabriel's equal, so his general inca-
pacity is less obvious than that of the other men, Joseph Poorgrass es-
pecially, but Hardy groups Jan, Mark, and Joseph together in this scene
in opposition to Gabriel, who is, above all things, sober. Joseph Poor-
grass's moralizings and generalizations are the object of comedy and,
together with his inebriation, serve as an illustration of his general
dimness. This very scene, for instance, in which Joseph fails to get
Fanny to her own funeral, begins in a fog so dense that "The air was as
an eye suddenly struck blind" (Ch. XLII, p. 323). Joseph's blindness
parallels his fear ("The hollow echo" of the fall of a drop of water
"reminded the waggoner painfully of the grim Leveller." "His spirits
were oozing out of him quite" [Ch. XLII, pp. 324-257), and that he is
frightened by what he imagines encourages him to stay and get drunk with
Mark and Jan. Gabriel's sobriety, which in this scene consists both in
his abstinence and his calmness, is contrasted with Jan's drunkenness
and Joseph's fear. The same sobriety of character contrasts with the
willful or obedient somnolence of the other men, at the harvest supper/
wedding feast (at which Troy convinces Bathsheba's workers to drink
brandy) and after it (when Oak saves Bathsheba's grain from the storm.)

There is a similar contrast between sobriety and drunkenness in :22.

Mayor of Casterbridge, where the distinction in social classes is even

 

more clearly marked. Henchard's drunkenness at the beginning and after

his bankruptcy mark him in the social hierarchy as a journeyman or day

262

laborer and as a denizen of Mixen Lane, respectively. Drinking is much

more serious in the potentially anarchic urban setting of The Mayor of

 

Casterbridge than it is in the relative stability of agricultural Weath-

 

erbury, but in Casterbridge inebriation does not rob characters of the
will or the means to action. Henchard is able to act decisively and ef-
fectively while he is in this state of diminished consciousness, however
antisocial these actions may be. What is lost is credibility and, in
this novel, a respect for social conventions and order. For Jude, the
matter is different again: each time that Jude gets drunk he repeats de-
structive actions which he or a member of his family has performed be-
fore. The repetition of the actions gives them symbolic significance.
Whether suicide, formalized church prayer, or conjugal relations with
Arabella, each of these actions becomes a kind of ritual or reflects an
actual social ritual which is preserved in society but fatal to individ-
uals like Jude or Sue. In this novel, complete, unmediated conscious-
ness leads a character to a rejection of absolute social rules, particu-
larly those concerned with marriage and education; intoxication leads to
submission to them. Jude is right to call Sue "creed-drunk" when he
sees her for the last time at Marygreen, and he is right about the ef-
fect of drunkenness on individual idealism: "'we've both remarried out
of our senses. I was made drunk to do it. You were the same. I was
gin-drunk; you were creed-drunk. Either form of intoxication takes away
the nobler vision'" (Pt. VI, Ch. viii; p. 471).

To analyze intoxication in this way, however, threatens to give it
undue prominence as a signifier of diminished consciousness. It is ime
portant and, in this general way, is used consistently, but just as Har—
dy presents varying capacities in The Mayor by reference to the keeping

and telling of secrets, in Jude he makes the important metaphor the

263

dream, not the drink. There is a clear contrast in Jada between sobri-
ety and intoxication, both in religion and in gin, but the real dedica-
tion of this novel is to those who dream. Hardy is concerned in his
fiction to show the mental functioning of many characters, all of whom
operate at different and sometimes varying degrees of consciousness. He
uses inebriation to show how a generally conscious mind can be made less
conscious without any suggestion of devolution. He uses secrecy to show
how much under the control of others' consciousnesses we can be and how

knowledge can mean intensification or advancement in consciousness.
A. 2. "Half-Somnolence": "Dimly Seeing" and Dreaming

Poor eyesight is another practical manifestation in Hardy's fiction
of this general motif of the intermittent nature of awareness and com—
prehension; it is different from secrecy and drunkenness in that the
limitation in perception has its source within the body or mind of the
character. Blindness, of course, is an ancient symbol for the inability
to understand what should be apparent. It appears most obviously in the

metaphorical structures of Far from the Madding Crowd and in the symbol—

 

ic structure of The Return of the Native, but it remains important long

 

after these novels, in perhaps a more subtle form, in Hardy's use of

darkness and dusk and in Pierston's "dimly seeing" (The well-Beloved Pt.

 

III, Ch. iv; p. 179).

Blindness is used as an image again and again in Far from the Mad-

 

ding Crowd, in a completely obvious and direct way. The histor, for ex-

 

ample, contrasts Troy and Oak in showing the effects of Bathsheba's lack

of attention to consequences and to her not having "Taken Thought":

264
Her love was entire as a child's, and though warm as summer it
was fresh as spring. Her culpability lay in her making no at-
tempt to control feeling by subtle and careful inquiry into
consequences. . . .

And Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision,
whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus
contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the
blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine. (Ch.
XXIX, p. 215)

"Vision," here, of course, means "insight." In a more general statement,
Fanny Robin is described as she tricks herself into believing that the
distance to Casterbridge is less than it is:
Self-beguilement with what she had known all the time to be
false had given her strength to come over half a mile that she
would have been powerless to face in the lump. The artifice
showed that the woman, by some mysterious intuition, had
grasped the paradoxical truth that blindness may operate more
vigorously than prescience, and the short-sighted effect more
than the far-seeing; that limitation, and not comprehensive—
ness, is needed for striking a blow. (Ch. XL, pp. 305-6)
Taken together, these statements show how "blindness" encourages action,
for better, as in Fanny Robin's case, and for worse, as in Bathsheba's.
Both women are capable of doing what they normally would not because
they cannot see far (for Fanny) or deep (for Bathsheba.)

Clym.Yeobright shares characteristics with two groups of Hardy's
characters: he is an intense, intelligent idealist like Jude, Angel, and
many others of the essentially noble characters; he is also one of those
more ambiguous characters, like little Father Time, whose "modern per-
ceptiveness" has destroyed his beauty (The Return of the Native Bk. III,
Ch. i; p. 197). This destruction is, in its conception, quite specific:
it is a matter of thought imprinting itself on the physical form of the
thinker; Clym's blindness is one more instance of the destructive effect
of his mind upon his body, but his blindness is as much symbolic as it

is physical; it is in fact his mind, his "Understanding,' which is "Dark-

ened" ("A Lurid Light Breaks In upon a Darkened Understanding," Bk. V,

265

Ch. ii). Words pertaining to vision and blindness run through this nov-
el, as they do through Far from the Madding Crowd, and they all refer to
comprehension and perception. Clym's moments of vision and blindness
are more ambiguous and frequent than his literal blindness would suggest,
for he is never completely or permanently blinded, just as he is never
completely or permanently wrong or insensitive. His blindness repre-
sents a limitation in thought rather than an absence of it.8
In this way, blindness is like drunkenness and somnolence, for it
limits the ability to judge consequences. As he begins the process by
which a "Lurid Light Breaks in upon a Darkened Understanding," Clym
walks "the slow walk of one who has been awakened from a stupefying
sleep" (Bk. V, Ch. ii; p. 377). He finds in his conversation with Dig-
gory Venn that he is unable to keep his purpose in mind: he says, "I be-
gan saying that I wanted to ask you something, but I stray from subjects
like a drunken man" (Bk. V, Ch. ii; p. 379). 'These signs of Clym's er-
ratic intelligence, as he seeks to discover the secret of his mother's
death, suggest a kind of extremism in his consciousness, an instability.
Clym is one of Hardy's most clearly presented idealists; idealism is re-
lated to these signs of limitation in consciousness in that it is possi-
ble in a Hardy character only when the inner vision can predominate over
what Jude calls "the grind of stern reality" (Pt. VI, Ch. ix; p. 474).
Mrs. Yeobright connects idealism to blindness when she accuses Clym of
concocting his idealistic scheme to educate the heath dwellers in order
to justify his blind love for Eustacia:
"You are blinded, Clym," she said warmly. "It was a bad day
for you when you first set eyes on her. And your scheme is
merely a castle in the air built on purpose to justify this
folly which has seized you, and to salve your conscience on

the irrational situation you are in." (Bk. III, Ch. iii; p.
227)

266

Hardy relates idealism to dreaming and imagination, which allow a char-
acter to misperceive reality, for good or ill, by enrichening it from
that character's inner resources. Drunkenness and blindness diminish a
character's perception without replacing, with images from the inner
world, what has been lost from the outer one.

The extremities to which these accretions and limitations drive
Clym can be brought out most directly by comparing the way he comes to
. interpret his mother's last words with the way Elizabeth-Jane comes to
interpret those of Michael Henchard. Elizabeth-Jane respects Henchard's
last words "from her independent knowledge that the man who wrote them
meant what he said," not "from a sense of the sacredness of last words,
as such" (Ch. XLV, p. 384). Clym, however, is prostrated by his feel-
ings. He does not have "independent knowledge"; he is faced with a se-
cret. Where Elizabeth-Jane feels "deep and sharp" regrets "for a good
while," Clym says, "What's the moon to a man like me? Let it shine-~let
anything be, so that I never see another day! . . . I don't know where
to look: my thoughts go through me like swords" (Bk. V, Ch. i; p. 366).

' and it is his conscious-

Clym is "standing in the very focus of sorrow,’
ness which troubles him, not anything external to him; he is injured by
the sharpness of thoughts rather than that of swords. Because the pain
from his thoughts is so great, he does not "know where to look": when
Eustacia comes in to see him, his eyes, again, are emphasized--he is
"wide awake, . . . his eyes lit by a hot light, as if the fire in their
pupils were burning up their substance." Clym is consumed by his con-

sciousness of his mother's death as he is always consumed by his thoughts

and feelings; The Return of the Native, after all, is the novel in which

 

Hardy says that "thought is a disease of flesh," that thought is the

"parasite" of beauty, and that "mental luminousness must be fed with the

267
oil of life" (Bk. II, Ch. vi; pp. 161-62).

Like secrecy and drunkenness, blindness (including the more specif-
ic phenomenon of poor eyesight) means for Hardy a limitation of a char-
acter's potential, especially a diminution of the potential effective-
ness of that character's mind and perception. Another kind of limita-
tion is suggested by his use of sleeping and fainting, for they imply an
absence of consciousness rather than diminishment; like drunkenness and
blindness, however, sleep never means that a Hardy character is complete-
ly unconscious, only that he or she is less able to perceive the outside
world. This is because dreaming goes on under the sleep, and all of Har-
dy's sensitive characters are dreamers. Obviously, "dream" here refers
to ideals and waking fantasies as well as to sleeping ones; they are
the same in that the dream is the action of a character's consciousness
which blots out, as it were, most of what is perceived except that which
the consciousness itself produces. That these two kinds of dreaming are
essentially the same to Hardy can be demonstrated by referring to any
one of a number of sleeping dreams which Hardy characters have. Angel's
sleepwalking scene, for instance, is told entirely from Tess's point of
view; in this way, Hardy can present Angel's own lack of awareness of
the distortions in his perception--to him, his sleep that night is "deep
as annihilation"--as well as the content of his perception and the sub-
stance of the distortion itself--that is, Angel's grief for the "dead"
Tess shows more clearly than almost anything else could how much a prod-
uct of his own mind the Tess he loves is (Ch. XXXVII, p. 320). Like
Dick Dewy's memory of the Christmas dance with Fancy (in which "The room
became to Dick like a picture in a dream; all that he could remember of
it afterwards being the look of the fiddlers going to sleep as humming-

tops sleep, by increasing their motions and hum . . ." [Pt. I, Ch. viii;

267a.
p. 54]), Angel's sleepwalking shows that the apparent truth of waking

life-~that the fiddlers are asleep and that nothing has changed for An-
gel and Tess--is contradicted by the truth suppressed beneath the sur-
face--that the tops are made steady by their speed and that the Tess
whom Angel loved is dead.

Angel and Dick, therefore, are dreamers; they are dreamers in exact-
ly the same way, though not always to the same extent, that Edward
Springrove, Christopher Julian, Gabriel Oak, Clym Yeobright, Edred Fitz-
piers, Jude Fawley, and Jocelyn Pierston are dreamers. Even though
their dreaming makes them idealistic and impractical, dreaming is essen-
tially a sympathetic quality in these characters: it is a necessary part
of whatever heroic stature they have, for they are in the "small minori—
ty who have sensitive souls," unlike the others, those who do not "Take
Thought" or those who do not dream; these others are "mentally unquick-
ened" (EEEE! pp. 185, 186). For the reader of Hardy, this dreaming,
whether waking or sleeping, has two kinds of significance. The first is
that it makes these characters more spiritual, less mechanical, and, as
it were, mentally quickened. The second meaning to dreaming is that
consciousness which has been "awakened" is independent of external real-
ity in very important ways; those characters "who have sensitive souls"
have, in essence, two worlds in which to live--their own and that of na-
ture and society.

It is worth noting here again that these ways of differentiating
among kinds of degrees of consciousness-~secrecy, drunkenness, blindness,
somnolence and dreaming--are not original with Hardy; he takes them over
so wholeheartedly and uses them so frequently, however, that they are
inevitably idiosyncratic, especially in his best work. Hardy's use of

dreaming is more complex, less moral, and altogether probably more

268

original and insightful about human consciousness than his use of any of
the other means of presenting the specifics of a character's degree of

awareness, because he is clearer here than anywhere else that none of

these "sensitive souls" can be said to be completely unconscious or come
pletely aware at any time: in practice, consciousness in Hardy is inter-
mittent. Blindness is Hardy's best metaphor for this intermittency be-
cause all of his perceivers have moments of vision and moments of blind-

ness; that is, blindness is the best description of the flickering na—

 

ture of perception; dreaming, however, is Hardy's best means of narra-
Eign_of this idea because it shows how a character may look, for example,
at Christminster and see "The heavenly Jerusalem" (Pt. I, Ch. iii; p.

18) or may bury Tess in the midst of his own annihilation. All of Har-
dy's characters have moments of vision and moments of blindness, all of
them have dreams, and though these moments are finally irrelevant for
characters like Arabella, Thomasin, or Parson Maybold, they are critical
for the ones whose dream world makes up the preponderance of what they
perceive, for the characters whose inner worlds offer a refuge from the
outside one.

The rest Of Hardy's devices for describing, or narrating, degrees
of consciousness are idiosyncratic (rather than original) because their
importance really lies in the fact that they appear an_gass£3 For exam-
ple, instances of a character being "awakened" by an idea occur through-
out Hardy's fiction. Few of these individual awakenings are of much sig-
nificance to their characters or novels, but taken all together they
show a remarkable sensitivity on Hardy's part to different intensities
of attention and awareness. It is as if the degree of wakefulness is
something Hardy notes with his other necessities of scene: place, time,

locus of observation, character, and mood. Hardy is mostly concerned

269
with less than complete perception, and that is why all of these images
suggest limitation. In Jude, however, Hardy describes complete wakeful-
ness. As little Father Time travels to meet Jude and Sue for the first
time, his difference from the rest of humanity (and even of animal life)
is emphasized:
When the other travellers closed their eyes, which they did
one by one--even the kitten curling itself up in the basket,
weary of its too circumscribed play--the boy remained just as
before. He then seemed to be doubly awake, like an enslaved
and dwarfed Divinity, sitting passive and regarding his com-
panions as if he saw their whole rounded lives rather than
their immediate figures. (Pt. V, Ch. iii; p. 332)
The part of Father Time, of course, that is like a "Divinity" is his
consciousness, the part of him that can perceive more than what is ap-
parent, the part that can be more than merely physically awake.

Complete wakefulness, however, is rare in Hardy. Characters are
most often shown waking up with an idea or, more common yet, in one of
many different degrees of somnolence. One of Hardy's most illuminating
presentations of consciousness uses both the image of the spinning top
and the idea of the vagueness of the boundary between sleep and waking;
it occurs in The Mayor of Casterbridge as Elizabeth-Jane waits with her
dying mother. The histor begins this passage on consciousness with a
general statement suggesting the impact of this experience on Elizabeth-
Jane, and then, close to her, Hardy narrates what it feels like and what
Elizabeth-Jane thinks of when she falls asleep:

To learn to take the universe seriously there is no quicker
way than to watch--to be a "waker," as the country-people call
it. Between the hours at which the last toss-pot went by and
the first sparrow shook himself, the silence in Casterbridge--
barring the rare sound of the watchman-ewes broken in Eliza-
beth's ear only by the time-piece in the bedroom ticking fran-
tically against the clock on the stairs; ticking harder and
harder till it seemed to clang like a gong; and all this while
the subtle-souled girl asking herself why she was born, why

sitting in a room, and blinking at the candle; why things
around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to

270

every other possible shape. Why they stared at her so help-

lessly, as if waiting for the touch of some wand that should

release them from terrestrial constraint; what that chaos

called consciousness, which spun in her at this moment like a

top, tended to, and began in. Her eyes fell together; she was

awake, yet she was asleep.9
The spinning, of course, heightens the dramatization of her falling
asleep as well as the presentation of her intellectual response to this
crisis. The really interesting aspect of this passage appears in the
questions Elizabeth-Jane asks herself. This intelligent and thoughtful
character of Hardy's, faced with the death of her mother, asks herself
not only the usual questions of why she was born and why things exist as
they do, and not only the questions about the relationships between es-
sence and form, but also the questions concerning the origins and ends
of consciousness. One such end is suggested by the narrator's first
sentence--"To learn to take the universe seriously"--but this character
has already learned that. She begins this novel with the attitude that
"life and its surroundings" are "a tragical rather than a comic thing,"
that "moments of gaiety [ers] interludes, and no part of the actual
drama" (Ch. VIII, p. 63).

As she falls asleep, Elizabeth-Jane is in a state of awareness
which is both heightened and suppressed and which therefore distorts
perception in its search for meaning. This searching is obvious here;
it takes the form of the questions she asks. The distortion is only
slightly less apparent: by seeing that "things around her" seem to have
an existence independent of their corporeal ones ("they stared at her so
helplessly, as if waiting for the touch of some wand that should release
them from terrestrial constraint"), Elizabeth-Jane is seeing both the

physical world in which she sits and her dream world, in which she spins.

Between the clanging of the competing clocks and the helpless stares of

271

the "things around her" (not in her), Hardy shows her to be half—somno-
lent, her consciousness is both chaotic and subtle: "she was awake, yet
she was asleep." Hardy almost always presents sleep paradoxically, both
as a kind of absence of thought and as the presence of suppressed activ-
ity. This of course is why Angel remembers only the annihilation of his
sleep and not his sepulture of Tess. It is also one of the most sophis-
ticated of Hardy's narrative techniques, and one that it took him years

to perfect. Desperate Remedies is dominated by superlatives and ex-

 

tremes rather than more ambiguous conditions, in this matter as well as
in the others, and characters lapse completely in and out of conscious-
ness with disturbing frequency. Not only do they jerk back and forth
between fainting and stark wakefulness, but Cytherea even has supernatu-
ral visions as she sleeps. Even in this novel, however, Hardy tries to
describe what he calls in it at one point "a partially recovered, half-
dozing state" (Ch. XX, No. ii; p. 369) and, more gracefully, at another,
"a half-somnolent state" (Ch. XIII, No. viii; p. 273).

This half-somnolence is presented much less clumsily in Far from

the Madding Crowd, in which Hardy uses drunkenness to help in this pres-

 

entation of partial awareness and in which he dramatizes consciousness
as a dual existence. In this passage, which occurs in Oak's first night
in Weatherbury, Gabriel is not literally asleep; Hardy contrasts, how-
ever, the still and dark exterior of what would be the appearance of
sleep with the busy movement, "beneath" it, of the interior:

That night at Coggan's Gabriel Oak, beneath the screen of
closed eyelids, was busy with fancies, and full of movement,
like a river flowing rapidly under its ice. Night had always
been the time at which he saw Bathsheba most vividly, and
through the slow hours of shadow he tenderly regarded her im-
age now. It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination
will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness, but they possi-
bly did with Oak to-night, for the delight of merely seeing

272

her effaced for the time his perception of the great difference
between seeing and possessing. (Ch. VIII, p. 78)

Gabriel's imagination is the source of his dreaming images, and Hardy is
clear throughout the novel that Oak is a dreamer.10 Gabriel is differ-
ent from Bathsheba in precisely this quality; for, though she has the
disadvantage of not having "Taken Thought" until late in the novel, she
also does not have the romantic imagination that makes so many of Hardy's
heroes impractical. When she is married to Troy, Bathsheba "sometimes"
thinks of Gabriel
in the light of an old lover, and had momentary imaginings of
what life with him as a husband would have been like; also of
life with Boldwood under the same conditions. But Bathsheba,
though she could feel, was not much given to futile dreaming,
and her musings under this head were short and entirely con-
fined to the times when Troy's neglect was more than ordinari-
ly evident. (Ch. XLI, p. 316)

In the long run, not much is made of this potentially complex presenta-

tion of dreaming in Far from the Madding Crowd. Where it has its great-

 

est importance as a theme is in those novels which are most specifically
about degrees of consciousness and the conflict between the imagined and

the external worlds, The Return of the Native, The Woodlanders, Tess,

 

Jude, and The Well-Beloved.

 

The mentiOn of one passage from The Return of the Native will sug-

 

gest the greater understanding Hardy shows in handling this now extremely
complex, unpredictable and flexible idea. This novel shows in a number
of ways hOw the state of a character's mind determines the world in

which that character lives. Hardy names the first chapter of Book Third,
"'My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is,'" after Clym, but it is as true of the oth-

" Clym's blindness and idealism show

er characters as it is of Clym.
the particular forms of distortion endemic to his consciousness, just as

Eustacia's "burden" of a secret does hers (Bk. V, Ch. iii; p. 386). At

273

the center of it all, however, is Mrs. Yeobright's frustrated visit to
Clym and Eustacia, and the terms Hardy uses to present and assess the
scene are those of degrees of consciousness.

MOst significant is that Clym is asleep when Mrs. Yeobright arrives;
though he is clearly dreaming about her, he does not wake up to let her
in. Clym's dreaming prevents him from acting in the world outside his
own mind. It does not matter whether or not it is a coincidence that he
says "mother" just as she knocks, because he is too unconscious to let
her in. This deep sleeping and Clym's poor eyesight, which has caused
him to give up his reading for "the regulation thoughts" of a furze-cut-

ter, "to judge by his motions,’ suggest that Clym has devolved, as it
were, from an intelligent, thoughtful man to an insect, "a mere parasite
of the heath, . . . entirely engrossed with its products, having no know-
ledge of anything in the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss"
(Bk. IV, Ch. v; pp. 328-29). Clym's near-blindness is as apt a repre-
sentation of this "engrossed" attention to the "surface" of things as
are his dreaming, the sleeping cat, and the stupefied and "rolling drunk"
wasps. Blind and dreaming, Clym is a part of the unconscious world:
"There lay the cat asleep on the bare gravel of the path, as if bed,
rugs, and carpets were unendurable. . . . among the fallen apples on the
ground beneath [the tree] were wasps rolling drunk with the juice, or
creeping about the little caves in each fruit which they had eaten out
before stupefied by its sweetness" (Bk. IV, Ch. v; pp. 330-31).

By reversing the situation, Clym's dream in this scene illustrates
the essential isolated somnolence of Clym, Eustacia, and Mrs. Yeobright.
In his dream, Clym takes Eustacia to Blooms-End "to make up differences,"

the same reason Mrs. Yeobright visits Alderworth (Bk. IV, Ch. vii; p.

344). In his dream, he and Eustacia cannot get inside the house "though

274

she kept on crying to us for help." Clym's dream is an important reflec-
tion of the reality of this scene, in spite of what he says--"However,
dreams are dreams"--because it shows how thoroughly all these characters
are imprisoned in their own interior worlds. Mrs. Yeobright gets out-
side of herself long enough to make the effort to reestablish contact
with Clym, as Hardy shows by making her perspective so reliable, but af-
ter she leaves the house she is "as one in a mesmeric sleep" (Bk. IV,
Ch. vi; p. 339), back inside. her inner world, inaccessible to Clym and
Eustacia and even to Johnny Nunsuch, who finds her face inscrutable,
like "some strange old manuscript the key to whose characters is undis-
coverable" (Bk. IV, Ch. vi; p. 342).

Eustacia is also imprisoned into isolation, and Mrs. Yeobright's
"graven" sight of her face at the window is a fair image of Eustacia's
relation to the outside world (Bk. IV, Ch. vi; p. 339). Like Clym, Eu-
stacia is a dreamer: her "youthful dream," as she tells Wildeve, was
"wanting what is called life--music, poetry, passion, war, and all the
beating and pulsing that is going on in the great arteries of the world"
(Bk. IV, Ch. vi; p. 335). She has exchanged that dream for another; at
the dance in a neighboring village she finds a way to enliven her inner
world:

A clear line of difference divided like a tangible fence her
experience within this maze of motion from her experience with-
out it. Her beginning to dance had been like a change of at-

' mosphere; outside, she had been steeped in arctic frigidity by
comparison with the tropical sensations here. She had entered
the dance from the troubled hours of her late life as one might
enter a brilliant chamber after a night walk in a wood. (Bk.
IV, Ch. iii; p. 310)

As it is presented here, this dance is narrated as an interior event,

from within the enclosure of Eustacia's consciousness. She is as somno-

lent as usual when Mrs. Yeobright visits, all her passion is deep within

275
her: "Nobody could have imagined from'her bearing now that here stood
the woman who had joined with [Wildeve] in the impassioned dance of the
week before, unless indeed he could have penetrated below the surface
and gauged the real depth of that still stream" (Bk. IV, Ch. vi; pp. 332-
33).

Jude the Obscure makes essentially the same connections between se-

 

crecy, drunkenness, blindness, and somnolence that The Return of the Na-

 

tive does. Jude is more affected by external matters than Clym is, and
one way that Hardy shows this is by turning Clym's blindness into Jude's
drunkenness. Jude does not live in the "Kingdom" of his mind in the way
that Clym does because the outside world intrudes so much more frequent-
ly and effectively into Jude's imagination. Jude lives in both worlds,
almost simultaneously. Certainly, there are times when external reality
is far away or even inaccessible to Jude, as, for example, when he and
Sue hear of their divorces: "The proceedings in the Law-Courts had
reached their consciousness but as a distant sound, and an occasional
missive which they hardly understood" (Pt. V, Ch. i; p. 309). There are
times when the mercantile, meddlesome world is right outside their door:

Footsteps began stamping up and down the bare stairs, the
comers inspecting the goods, some of which were of so quaint
and ancient a make as to acquire an adventitious value as art.
Their door was tried once or twice, and to guard themselves
against intrusion Jude wrote "Private" on a scrap of paper,
and stuck it upon the panel.

They soon found that, instead of the furniture, their own
personal histories and past conduct began to be discussed to an
unexpected and intolerable extent by the intending bidders.

It was not till now that they really discovered what a fools'
paradise of supposed unrecognition they had been living in of
late. (Pt. V, Ch. vi; p. 368)

There are also times when the external reality causes a collapse of the

characters' internal, personal lives, as, for example, when Jude learns

how hard it is to learn languages:

276

What brains they must have in Christminster and the great
schools, he presently thought, to learn words one by one up to
tens of thousands! There were no brains in his head equal to
this business; and as the little sun-rays continued to stream
in through his hat at him, he wished he had never seen a book,
that he might never see another, that he had never been born.

Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked
him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his
notions were further advanced than those of his grammarian.
But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the crush-
ing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish
himself out of the world. (Pt. I, Ch. iv; pp. 31-32)

MOstly, however, Jude lives in a kind of condition in which both
worlds coexist, either in alternating flashes of truth and dream or,
more often, in superimposed layers of dream over fact. A few examples
will serve to hint at the rich patterns of flickering and fading reali-
ties that go to make up this novel. Hardy's presentation of Jude is
particularly modern in this sense: not only does Jude have important in-
sights about the events and people around him.which he loses as soon as
he has them, but Hardy also attempts to narrate the gaining and losing
of these insights. Jude realizes for a moment, for instance, that

It had been no vestal who chose that ndssile for opening her
attack on him. He saw this with his intellectual eye, just
for a short fleeting while, as by the light of a falling lamp
one might momentarily see an inscription on a wall before be-
ing enshrouded in darkness. And then this passing discrimina-
tive power was withdrawn, and Jude was lost to all conditions
of things in the advent of a fresh and wild pleasure, that of
having found a new channel for emotional interest hitherto un-
suspected, though it had lain close beside him. (Pt. I, Ch.
vi; p. 46)
He realizes, too, for a moment, that stonemasonry is just as "worthy" an
occupation as the study that goes on in the very best of academic envi-
ronments: "For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination; that
here in the stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that digni-
fied by the name of scholarly study within the noblest of the colleges.

But he lost it under stress of his old idea" (Pt. II, Ch. ii; p. 98).

In both of these cases, the loss of the insight depends on the

277

predominance of the ideal, as it appear to Jude, over the real: the
dream blots out the external world.

More interesting a phenomenon is that which allows Jude to see both
the external and the ideal simultaneously. This is especially clearly
presented when Jude sees the ghosts of Christminster's famous intellec-
tuals, artists, and statesmen populating the empty streets of the "ac-
tual" Christminster. The first time this happens, Jude is young, new to
the city, and so full of "the magnificent Christminster dream" (Pt. I,
Ch. vi; p. 46) that "When he passed objects out of harmony with [the
"general expression" of the city] he allowed his eyes to slip over them
as if he did not see them" (Pt. II, Ch. i; p. 91). The limitation on
his perception comes from within, but to him the ghosts are so real that
he finds himself speaking to them aloud (Pt. II, Ch. i; p. 94). The
second time this happens, he is with Arabella, having just returned from
his suicidal trip to see Sue. He sees the ghosts just as he had the
first time and, later, hears them laughing at him even though, as he
tells Arabella, "I don't revere all of them as I did then. ‘I don't be-
lieve in half of them. . . . All that has been spoilt for me by the
grind of stern reality!" (Pt. VI, Ch. ix; p. 474). The limitation now
seems to have come from the outside; now it is reality limiting his im-
agination. Interestingly, Hardy turns to intoxication to describe not
only Arabella's assessment of Jude's seeing ghosts--"Upon my soul you
are more sober when you've been drinking than when you have not!"--but
also Jude's means of dispelling his confusion concerning the two worlds
in which he lives. He describes the "fog" that comes "from the meadows
of Cardinal" College as fatal to him, as "death-claws . . . grabbing me
through and through"; and, even more pointedly, he quotes Antigone to

express the predicament of the two worlds, a predicament which his

278

drinking also expresses: "I am neither a dweller among men nor ghosts"
(Pt. VI, Ch. ix; p. 475).

Jude's "half-somnolent state" is depicted, like Clym's, with meta-
phors of sight and blindness, light and dark, sobriety and drunkenness,
and dreaming, which help preserve a distinction between what the charac-
ters perceive and what is there to be perceived.'2 There are many other
such metaphorical uses of natural phenomena, particularly,.for Jude,
nighttime and fog. Both of these are ways of representing what is to
Hardy the obscurity of external reality in the face of a powerful and
consistent inner Vision. Hardy uses fog, for instance, as an obstruc-
tion to Jude's vision at the beginning of the novel, when Jude is es-
pecially susceptible to the power of his imagination. This particular
event dramatizes his flash of despair after his connections to nature
have been broken in Farmer Troutham's field and his connections to soci-
ety broken by Phillotson's departure for Christminster: "Jude went out,
and, feeling more than ever his existence to be an undemanded one, he
lay down upon his back on a heap of litter near the pig-sty. The fog
had by this time become more translucent, and the position of the sun
could be seen through it" (Pt. I, Ch. ii; pp. 14-15). What he can make
out, through the recently "more translucent" fog and "the interstices of
the plaiting" of his straw hat, are the sun, a full look at which would
blind him, and the formulation of a harsh natural law:

Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought. Nature's logic
was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one

set of creatures was cruelty towards another.sickened his sense
of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the
centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference,
as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a
sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed
to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and

glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook
it, and warped it. (Pt. I, Ch. ii; p. 15)

279

There is, of course, little pointed significance to this single event;
the fog has exactly as much connotative impact as the "heap of litter"
on which Jude lies down. The point is that few of Jude's epiphanies
take place in broad daylight; most take place at night, at dusk, or in a
fog. Fogginess, darkness, and twilight all mean that the internal world
has primacy; the character's perception of external reality is obstruct-
ed and the perception of internal forces enhanced. This device is used

in the early fiction like Far from the Madding Crowd (when Joseph's imag-

 

ination takes over as he drives Fanny's coffin to Weatherbury from Cas-
terbridge) in the same way as it is used at the end, in Tess, Jude, and

The Well-Beloved.

 

Jude's first look at Christminster takes place at dusk, and his
first entrance into the city takes place after dusk. On the event of
that first glimpse from Brown House, Hardy emphasizes the preeminence of
Jude's internal world by referring repeatedly to the mist which obstructs
his view and by making Jude afraid of imaginary ghosts and monsters; Har-

dy again emphasizes Jude's personal perspective--as opposed to the "

ac-
tual" decrepitude and corruption of Christminster--when he first goes to
that city by showing it to be a place peOpled with the imaginary ghosts
of intellectuals. The dusk and the darkness are externalizations of
Jude's own state of partial awareness, just as Clym's blindness and Joce-
lyn's faith (in the Well-Beloved) are of theirs, and they allow Hardy to
specify, as it were, how much of the world that these characters see is
of their own making. The relative strength of Jude's personal perspec-
tive has two different effects on his life: it makes hiu1vulnerable to
those more at home in the world than be, such as Arabella and Vilbert,

and it allows him to think and feel in a logic which is more consistent

with his internal reality and less determined by external realities.

280

All of these different ways of presenting the distinction between a
character's perception and what is there to be perceived have this struc-
ture of conflicting (internal and external) realities as their basis.
Even though "a full look at the Worst" seems to be Hardy's preferred way
to confront the truth, he has a great deal of sympathy for those who re-
ject "the grind of stern reality," and its horrors, for whatever inner
world they can construct.13 Hardy hints, metaphorically, at the exis-
tence of a character's internal world when he puts that character in a
fog, at dusk, or in a dream; these metaphors show the character to be in
both worlds but only partially aware of the world outside because of the
strength of the inner vision. Characters whose inner worlds exist in
the absence of knowledge, because secret knowledge has been withheld,
are limited from without; characters whose inner worlds exist at their
expense are blind or drunk, and therefore vulnerable to forces pressur-
ing them out of individuality and back into social conformity. All of
these metaphors describe the character's perception of the realities.
Sometimes Hardy describes the inner world itself; usually it is beauti-
ful, intoxicating, colorful, brilliant, and warm, as Eustacia's is at
the dance, compared to the drab, sober, cold world outside. Of the many,
many examples describing this, perhaps the most evocative is Tess's "men-
tal cloud of many-coloured idealities, which eclipsed all sinister con-
.tingencies by its brightness" (Ch. XXXIII, p. 270), and which is basi-
cally the result of her love for Angel:

Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's
being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into
forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy
spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her-—
doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that they were
waiting like wolves just outside the circumscribing light, but
she had long spells of power to keep them in hungry subjection

there.
A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual

281
remembrance. She walked in brightness, but she knew that in
the background those shapes of darkness were always spread.
they might be receding, or they might be approaching, one or
the other, a little every day. (Ch. XXXI, p. 249)
For Tess, the outer world is the reality from which she finds some ref—
uge, but a faith in the value of the reality of the characters' inner
worlds lies behind all of Hardy's means of suggesting the existence and

source for them. The essential question for Hardy, then, has to do with

what kind of reality each of these two worlds has.

B. The Real and the Corporeal

Hardy's most important insights about the difference between an in-
dividual consciousness and the world at large are worked out in his re-
peated explorations of the idea of a distinction between the real and
the corporeal. At the heart of it, this idea comes from an understand-
ing which Hardy had of the changes in reality which are caused by
changes in perspective. Two extrinsic sources for this idea would cer—
tainly have reinforced Hardy's fundamental insight, which is based in
his deep sympathy for the isolated consciousness. The first extrinsic
source for this idea, obviously, is Plato, whom Hardy read and revered.
This influence is easy to identify. After reading Cratylus, for example,
he records in 1889: "A very good way of looking at things would be to re-
gard everything as having an actual or false name, and an intrinsic or

true name, to ascertain which all endeavour should be made."'4

Not only
does this add fuel to the fires of those who find meaning in the names
of Hardy's characters, but it also repeats in yet another way Hardy's be-

lief that there is meaning beyond the random and chaotic surface of

things. Hardy found this searching for intrinsic truth (a truth which

282

is independent of extrinsic corporealities) also in Goethe's late music

and in "The much decried, mad, late-Turner rendering" which
is now necessary to create my interest. The exact truth as to
material fact ceases to be of importance in art--it is a stu4
dent's style--the style of a period when the mind is serene
and unawakened to the tragical mysteries of life; when it does
not bring anything to the object that coalesces with and trans-
lates the qualities that are already there,--half hidden, it
may be--and the two united are depicted as the All. (Life, p.
185; January 1887)

Hardy's desire "to see the deeper reality underlying the scenic, the ex-

pression of what are sometimes called abstract imaginings" appear, of

course, in his own work as well as in his appreciation of others.

Before going on to discuss the conflict between the real and the
corporeal in his fiction, it is best to get out of the way the major ex-
trinsic source for this theme other than Plato. The "war between the
flesh and the spirit," Pauline as it is, is the moral version of the
philosophical and psychological problem which Hardy saw in the distinc-
tion between the real and the corporeal.‘5 This "war" is the split of
the self in Hardy between the body and the mind. Clym suffers this
split, and it shows in his face. Paula Power, whose name refers ex-
plicitly to Paul, is Laodicean because she will not commit herself whole-
heartedly to Christianity, and she is Laodicean because her sexuality
has been diluted by a strong intellectualizing will; that is, two quali-
ties of her personality--her spirituality and her sexuality--are both in
conflict with each other and also modified by this conflict. She is imp
portant for two reasons. The first is that Hardy had affection for her
in spite of the failure of her novel. In the 1912 addition to the Pre-
face, he finds

a compensation . . . in the character of Paula, who, on re-
newed acquaintance, leads me to think her individualized with

some clearness, and really lovable, though she is of that re-
served disposition which is the most difficult of all

283

dispositions to depict, and tantalized the writer by eluding
his grasp for some time.

The second is that her hesitating and faintly self-immolating nature
shows clearly the connection between Sue's insanity and Pauline thought.
The fissure between the body and the mind, which makes this Laodicean
character epicene both in her beliefs and in her attachments, is the
hallmark of a type of character in Hardy whose internal conflict takes
the form of a struggle between spirituality and sexuality; this type
shows up as Cytherea Graye, Fancy Day, Henry Knight, Bathsheba Everdene,
Ethelberta Petherwin, Clym Yeobright, Ann Garland, Paula Power, Swithin
St. Cleeve, Margery Tuck, Grace Melbury, Angel Clare, Jocelyn Pierston,
Jude Fawley, and Sue Bridehead.

While many of Hardy's formulations of the problem of the real and
the corporeal are dated in the Lifa from the late eighties, and while

The Woodlanders shows how important it was to him at that time, it ap-

 

 

pears in essentially the same form in all his novels. In Desperate Remy
edies, for example, both Cytherea and Edward can see the real in the cor-
poreal. Edward searches for a Well-Beloved who exists in more than phys-
ical form; that Cytherea's perceptiveness is the result of the strength
of her own inner vision is more obvious yet. Early in the novel, she
waits for answers to her advertisement for work:
At post-time in that following MOnday morning, Cytherea
watched so anxiously for the postman, that as the interval
‘ which must bring him narrowed less and less her vivid expec-
tation had only a degree less tangibility than his presence
itself. In another second his form came into view. (Ch. V,
No. i; p. 63)
This same near-preeminence of her own thoughts over the realities of the
external world appears in this comparison between Cytherea and Adelaide

Hinton, her rival for Edward. Although we cannot be sure that Hardy is

as unsympathetic to Adelaide as Cytherea is, the fact that her "thought"

Eh:—

284

has "life" implies that it is independent, in a way, from the thinker:
. . . Cytherea slipt out of church early, and went home, the
tones of the organ still lingering in her ears as she tried
bravely to kill a jealous thought that would nevertheless live:
"My nature is one capable of more, far more, intense feeling
than hers! She can't appreciate all the sides of him-~she
never will! He is more tangible to me even now, as a thought,
than his presence itself is to her!" (Ch. XII, No. i; pp. 240-
41)

Cytherea's ability to conceive of reality in such a way that it surpass-

es the power of corporeality over her perception is an aspect of her con-

sciousness which makes her special to Hardy, just as it is the result of

her complex consciousness and the fissure in her personality.

This is an idea about which Hardy was explicit with some frequency.
Ideas and feelings take on allegorical embodiments for those characters
who can see the reality instead of merely what is corporeal. Elizabeth-
Jane sees the "things around her" staring "at her so helplessly as if
waiting for the touch of some wand that should release them from terres-
trial constraint" (Ch. XVIII, p. 135). Elizabeth-Jane is probably the
one for whom "Expectancy sat visibly upon Lucetta the next morning,"
just as the perspective is probably hers while she and Lucetta are watch-
ing the market when the histor says: "In fact, what these gibbous human
shapes specially represented was ready money--money insistently ready--
not ready next year like a nobleman's--often not merely ready at the
bank like a professional man's, but ready in their large plump hands"
(Ch. XXII, pp. 174-75).

For George Melbury, reality is not so much seeing allegorical fig-
ures as it is living with them. As Hardy explains, Melbury's anxiety
takes up space and exists as a figure in much the same way any of the

characters do. The difference is that the anxiety is invisible; it is

"real" instead of merely "corporeal":

285
In truth a constrained manner was natural enough in Melbury
just now, for the greatest interest of his life was reaching
its crisis. Could the real have been beheld instead of the
corporeal merely, the corner of the room in which he sat would
have been filled with a form typical of anxious suspense,
large-eyed, tight-lipped, awaiting the issue. That paternal
hopes and fears so intense should be bound up in the person of
one child so peculiarly circumstanced, and not have dispersed
themselves over the larger field of a whole family, involved
dangerous risks to his own future happiness. (Ch. XXIII, p.
195)
Such hazard is more apparent, of course, when Melbury begins to realize
that Fitzpiers is not going to be as good a husband as he had hOped:
"That night carking care sat beside Melbury's pillow, and his stiff
limbs tossed at its presence" (Ch. XXIX, p. 258). In these instances,
the real has an existence independent of the corporeal; the corporeal
neither confirms nor denies what is true (what is "real").

Hardy appears to have also believed that it is possible to know in-
visible reality by some kinds of external evidence. The personalities
of many of his characters have a direct influence on how they look;
their minds are imprinted upon their physical forms. In February 1887,
for example, at the same time that be defined the optical invisibility
of the real in terms of the "somnambulistic hallucination" of existence
and at the same time that he distinguished between "a certain small mi-
nority" of those "who have sensitive souls" and "the mentally unquick-
ened, mechanical, soulless," he says that the "small minority who have
sensitive souls" and their "aspects" are "what is worth observing" (Life,

pp. 185-86). Their "aspects," presumably, are their faces and the way

they look. This idea appears as early as Desperate Remedies: "There is

 

an attitude-~approximately called pensive-~in which the soul of a human
being, and espcially of a woman, dominates outwardly and expresses its

presence so strongly, that the intangible essence seems more apparent

286

than the body itself," and that mood has to do with sexual interest.

Even though Hardy focusses his attention on the gender of his characters,
what is interesting in this passage is the replacement of the physical
and particular by the abstract:

Concentrated essence of woman pervaded the room rather than
air. . . .

The two rivals had now lost their personality quite. There
was the same keen brightness of eye, the same movement of the
mouth, the same mind in both, as they looked doubtingly and
excitingly at each other. As is invariably the case with wom-
en when a man they care for is the subject of an excitement
among them, the situation abstracted the differences which dis-
tinguished them as individuals, and left only the properties
common to them as atoms of a sex. (Ch. VIII, No. ii; pp. 136-
37)

This idea is familiar to readers of Tess: Izzy, Retty, Marion, and Tess
are "one organism called sex" in their attraction to Angel (Ch. XXIII,
p. 187).

It is in The Woodlanders, however, that Hardy's exploration of this

 

idea is the most clear and thorough. Much of the narrative of The Wood—
landers seems dedicated to expressing the idea that there is an abstract
principle which is manifested in the appearances of the external world;
to an educated eye or ear, that is, the real is discernible in the cor-
poreal. This, of course, is why the forest in Little Hintock seems so
very Darwinian: because the visible forms of nature express to Hardy a
principle, and this principle is the real which the corporeal is the
evidence of it. This passage is notable for its expression of the real
in the corporeal as well as its assumption of unity in human, animal,
and vegetable life:
They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled
through interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with
spreading roots whose mossed rinds made them like hands wear-
ing green gloves; elbowed old elms and ashes with great forks,
‘in which stood pools of water that overflowed on rainy days

and ran down their stems in green cascades. On older trees
still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as

287
everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what

it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds
of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled,
the taper was interrupted; the lichen ate the vigour of the
stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sap-
ling. (Ch. VII, pp. 58-59)
This kind of passage is also important for showing how the two worlds--
personal and historical-~exist for the histor as well as for Hardy's sen-
sitive characters. Even though the histor can specify the presence of
abstract principle in the mundane, external worlds of the characters,
there is still a distinction between the abstract principle and the con-
crete world, the real and the corporeal. This explains in part why it
is that neither world can be said to be false, regardless of the usual
Platonic or Pauline positions: if the histor can see them both, then the
best of the characters can be expected to see and exemplify them.both,
too.

Though they are certainly not among Hardy's most heroic characters,
Grace Melbury and Edred Fitzpiers are important in the way they illus-
trate Hardy's idea that there is a juncture, as it were, at which the
real and the corporeal meet. The unresolved ambiguities about their re-
lationship and the qualities of their faces (their "aspects") which make
description impossible are both loci for this juncture; the kind of re-
lationship they have and their faces have both a general, symbolic sig-
nificance and particular, local meaning. Neither kind of meaning is di-
rectly apparent: their corporeal features, for instance, reflect that
there is a reality but are only inadequately informative of it. Both
characters, too, have "quickened souls" (this is one explanation for Har-
dy's interest in their "aspects"), and the nature of the difficulties

which they encounter is a result of that quickening. Like others of Har-

dy's couples whose members are, as it were, meant for each other, Grace

288
and Fitzpiers are too deeply attracted to each other to live apart happi-
ly and too sensitive to live together happily. The unresolved status of
their marriage at the end of the novel, therefore, which points both to
the antiromantic reasons for their reconciliation and to the continua-
tion of the problems which separated them in the first place, is a neces-
sary outcome of the fact that both have this special perceptiveness, the
"quickened souls." At this point in Hardy's fiction, this conflicting
attraction and sensitivity translates into an inability to maintain emo-
tional fidelity at the same time that the characters are too similar not
to marry.

Their "quickened souls" are apparent from their first introductions
into the novel. Grace's description, which begins as Marty South "crit-
ically regarded Winterborne's companion," shows both how necessary Har-
dy's histor is to his presentation of this kind of character and with
what clarity Hardy conceived dual realities—~mental and corporeal--for
his sensitive characters:

It would have been difficult to describe Grace Melbury with
precision, either then or at any time. Nay, from the highest
point of view, to precisely describe a human being, the focus
of a universe, how impossible! But apart from transcendental-
ism, there never probably lived a person who was in herself
more completely a reductio ag_absurdum of attempts to appraise
a woman, even externally, by items of face and figure.

Speaking generally, it may be said that she was sometimes
beautiful, at other times not beautiful, according to the
state of her health and spirits. (Ch. V, pp. 41-42)

Having described her beauty as dependent upon "her health and spirits,"
Hardy goes on to describe her "simple corporeal presentment." What is
most important about her, however, is her "true quality," which is not
apparent from her complexion, "look," mouth, eyebrows, or "drapery":
What people therefore saw of her in a cursory view was very

little; in truth, mainly something that was not she. The wom-
an herself was a conjectural creature who had little to do

289

with the outlines presented to Sherton eyes; a shape in the
gloom, whose true quality could only be approximated by put-
ting together a movement now and a glance then, in that pa-
tient attention which nothing but watchful loving-kindness
ever troubles itself to give. (Ch. V, pp. 42-43)
Two things are clear here which are important. The first is that Grace,
"The woman herself," is so complex and her "true quality" so recondite,
so "conjectural," that an external, objective, even omniscient perspec-
tive is not the means by which to understand her; what is required is a
local, personal, sympathetic perspective, one which can approximate the
truth about "a shape in the gloom." The second point to be made is that
Grace's "corporeal presentment" does not hint at the reality of her per-
sonality; in fact, it may be said to contradict it in some says, for
what she looks like to the "cursory view" is "something that was not
she."

The introduction of Edred Fitzpiers, too, shows a similar complexi-

ty of narrative purpose. Like Christopher Julian (of The Hand of Ethel-

 

berta) and others of Hardy's dreamers, Fitzpiers is "not a practical man,
except by fits, and much preferred the ideal world to the real, and the
discovery of principles to their applications" (Ch. XVI, p. 135). The
relationships between his external and internal forms are even more prob-
lematical than Grace's, because not only are his looks ambiguous, but
the ambiguity itself may or may not exist. The role of the histor,
again, is to reveal rather than resolve this ambiguity; and once again
omniscience, as such, prevents the observer from the understanding which
is possible, presumably, only upon close and patient inspection:
Edred Fitzpiers was, on the whole, a finely formed, handsome
man. His eyes were dark and impressive, and beamed with the
light either of energy or of susceptivity--it was difficult to
say which; it might have been chiefly the latter. That quick,
glittering, empirical eye, sharp for the surface of things if

for nothing beneath, he had not. But whether his apparent
depth of vision were real, or only an artistic accident of his

290

corporeal moulding, nothing but his deeds could reveal. (Ch.
XIV, pp. 119-20)

It is interesting, really, that Hardy seems loathe to abandon the phreno-
logical meditations stimulated by the description of a character's face
and physique. Such a description is important in a novel like The Re-
turn of the Native, in which the physical is the means of finding the
real; passages like this one of Fitzpiers, however, in The Woodlanders,
in which Hardy establishes conflicting associations between the personal—
ity and face of a character, present problems to him. The convention of
reading character in face contradicts Hardy's insight, expressed most di-
rectly in this novel, that the corporeal reflects the invisible real at
best indirectly.l6
The most interesting use of this distinction, and sometimes con-
flict, between the real and the corporeal occurs in those vivid, symbol-
ic descriptions or passages in which hardy seems to abandon realism for
a "disproportioning . . . of realities to show more clearly the features
that matter in those realities" (gigs, p. 229; August 5, 1890). This is
the best explanation these is for little Father Time, Jude and Arabel-
la's child, whose presence in the novel can only be justified by refer—
ence to the meaning of his role. Father Time has both a thematic role
which is spelled out quite explicitly in the novel and a symbolic role--
the intuition of which depends upon the reader's sense of Hardy's fic-
tional purpose. For the former, we have the character's name: "though
he was formally turned into 'Jude,' the apt nickname" "Little Time" or
"Little Father Time" never leaves him (Pt. V, Ch. vi; p. 359). He is
"Age masquerading as Juvenility" (Pt. V, Ch. iii; p. 332), "his eyes
resting on things they did not see in the substantial world" (Pt. V, Ch.

iv; p. 337). Symbolically, he is history, both as a principle of the

.291

impersonality of the largest perspective and as an example of the "per-
sistence of the unforeseen" in the personal lives of the characters.17

It is as history, as "Age,"

as "little Time," that this character per-
ceives "the generals of life" instead of "the particulars" (Pt. V, Ch.
iii; p. 334). These "generals," what Hardy also calls "the universal,"

constitute, in Jude the Obscure anyway, the reality; the "particulars"

 

make up what is corporeal. Little Time's three most important acts of
perception are of the abstract rather than the particular or personal.
In spatial terms, "the house, the willows, the obscure fields beyond,
were apparently regarded not as brick residences, pollards, meadows, but
as human dwellings in the abstract, vegetation, and the wide dark world"
(Pt. V, Ch. iii; p. 334). His perception of time is as generalizing as
as his perception of space is: "I should like the flowers very very much,
if I didn't keep on thinking they'd be all withered in a few days!" (Pt.
V, Ch. v; p. 358). Finally, his murder of his siblings and his suicide
are perfectly logical, considering his perception of the source of Sue's
and Jude's problems: "I think that whenever children be born that are
not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to
'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about!" (Pt. VI, Ch. ii; p.
402). It is as Jude's and Sue's adopted child that he is the embodiment
of their personal pasts, including, of course, Jude's original liaison
with Arabella, and Jude's and Sue's helplessness when face with her vi—
tality and indirectness.

This use of characters' children to represent an idea which these
characters have and which summarizes them can be regarded as Hardy's
method of presenting, in a nonrealistic way, the abstract form of the
-characters' relations with each other and with society; it is one of his

means of showing how abstract meaning can be found in the concrete world.

292
Hardy's nearly allegorical depiction of the real attempts to "bring" sym-

bolic meaning to the "object" described, meaning "that coalesces with
and translates the qualities that are already there,--half hidden, it
may be," so that both the object which the artist presents and the
"style" or means by which it is presented go beyond "The exact truth as
to material fact," "and the two ["object" and "stylefif united are depic—
ted as the All" (5135, p. 185); January 1887). A simpler example of
this than Father Time is Tess's child Sorrow: because of Tess's victimiz-
ation by Alec, her escape from him, and her resistance to the exclusivi—
ty of established church doctrine, the Sorrow is hers alone to bear and
to bury. In both these cases, the child has a universal and a particu-
lar role to play in the novel, as character and as idea. Sorrow symbol—
izes the effect of abstract principle on Tess's life.l8
Hardy uses creatures other than children in this same way; in Fag
from the Madding Crowd, for instance, the dog that helps Fanny Robin
reach the Casterbridge Union is an almost purely allegorical figure.
This dog would be completely allegorical if it were not for the fact
that Hardy is clear that some of its symbolic meaning.comes as a result
of Fanny's "poetical power": "Darkness endows the small and ordinary
ones among mankind with poetical power, and even the suffering woman
threw her idea into figure" (Ch. XL, p. 307). The perspective which
makes the dog symbolic is not only Fanny's, however; the first descrip—
tion is made while Fanny's eyes are closed:
"No further!" she whispered, and closed her eyes.
From the stripe of shadow on the opposite side of the
bridge a portion of shade seemed to detach itself and move
intgoésolation upon the pale white of the road. (Ch. XL,

This description seems carefully neutral; the neutrality changes after

Fanny has opened her eyes. The perspective is hers though the voice is

293
the histor's:

He was a huge, heavy, and quiet creature, standing darkly
against the low horizon, and at least two feet higher than the
present position of her eyes. Whether Newfoundland, mastiff,
bloodhound, or what not, it was impossible to say. He seemed
to be of too strange and mysterious a nature to belong to any
variety among those of popular nomenclature. Being thus as-
signable to no breed, he was the ideal embodiment of canine
greatness--a generalization from what was common to all.
Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart from
its stealthy and cruel side, was personified in this form.
(Ch. XL, p. 307)
Analysis of the "style" ("that coalesces with and translates the quali-
ties" of the object, in this case, the dog, "that are already there")
tells us that "the ideal embodiment of canine greatness" exists at least
as an "idea" that can be thrown "into figure"; it also shows Hardy's be-
lief that human tragedy can be mitigated by what seems to be sympathetic
nature. Something in nature, in other words, helps Fanny when she needs
it, and that something exists in nature, independent of perspective
(when human eyes are closed); the meaning of that something depends on
the mind of the perceiver. For Fanny, it is "softness" and "warmth"; it
is "Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect"; it is a "friend":
"In her reclining position she looked up to him just as in earlier times
she had, when standing, looked up to a man" (Ch. XL, pp. 306-7). This
dog seems so symbolic that even the fact that the man at the Caster-
bridge Union stones it away takes on a kind of general significance.
Another such juncture of the real and the corporeal, which takes
place in Two on a Tower, is instructive for its near absence of symbolic
overtones. Its structure is essentially the same: a character finds per-
sonal meaning in external nature. This figure, a child again, is a rath—
er amazing bit of psychological realism and demonstrates clearly Hardy's

sense of how consciousness interprets the world even without the know-

ledge or deliberation of the character. Bound by conventions in which

294

the idea of pregnancy is distasteful to readers, Hardy lets us know of

Lady Constantine's before even she is aware of it:
It was evening, and she was coming as usual down through the
sighing plantation, choosing her way between the ramparts of
the camp towards the outlet giving upon the field, when sud-
denly in a dusky vista among the fir-trunks she saw, or
thought she saw, a golden-haired, toddling child. The child
moved a step or two, and vanished behind a tree. Lady Constan-
tine, fearing it had lost its way, went quickly to the spot,
searched, and called aloud. But no child could she perceive
or hear anywhere around. She returned to where she had stood
when first beholding it, and looked in the same direction, but
nothing reappeared. The only object at all resembling a lit-
tle boy or girl was the upper tuft of a bunch of fern, which
had prematurely yellowed to about the colour of a fair child's
hair, and waved occasionally in the breeze. (Ch. XXXVII, pp.
271-72)

The child which Lady Constantine sees "in a dusky vista" does not exist,

but there is a child which she does not see, which is invisible to her,

and which is, in fact, real. It is because of the reality of her own,

invisible, child that the other seems visible to her.

These four instances of the real manifesting itself in the corpore-
al can be arranged according to their relative degrees of realistic or
allegorical presentation. The least realistic, in its presentation, is
Fanny Robin's "friend," and the most, probably, is Viviette Constantine's
"golden-haired, toddling child." The real and the corporeal find an
easy balance, where neither is obscured and neither dominates, only in
the instance of "Sorrow the Undesired--that intrusive creature, that
bastard gift of shameless Nature who respects not the social law" (his-
tor, Tess Ch. XIV, p. 120). Hardy finds his best means of presenting
the simultaneity of the real and the corporeal, however, in The Woodland-
ers, not in the images of the forest and Melbury's anxiety and "carking
care," which are instances of the predominance of the real, but in the

character of Marty South. She has the same kind of thematic importance

in the novel that Fanny's dog, Tess's baby, and little Father Time do,

295

but she is also realistic, like Grace and Fitzpiers. Having "Taken
Thought," Marty has more in common with characters like Cytherea and An-
gel and like Grace and Fitzpiers, who combine "modern nerves with primi-
tive feeling" (as Hardy says of Grace), than she does with Hardy's insen-
sitives, like Suke Damson and Timothy Tangs (Ch. XL, p. 358). At the
same time, Marty perceives the real in the corporeal: like little Time,
who recognizes the impermanence of the roses, it is Marty who identifies
"the end of what is called love":
the accident of two large birds, that had either been roosting
above their heads or nesting there, tumbling one over the oth-
er into the hot ashes at their feet, apparently engrossed in a
desperate quarrel that prevented the use of their wings. They
speedily parted, however, and flew up with a singed smell, and
were seen no more. (Ch. XIX, p. 168)
Hardy uses this perception of hers as a commentary on Grace's lack of
loyalty to Giles and her attraction to Fitzpiers. It is also Marty who
hears meaning in the wind sighing in the pines:
She erected one of the young pines into its hole, and held
.up her finger; the soft musical breathing instantly set in
which was not to cease night or day till the grown tree should
be felled--probably long after the two planters had been felled
themselves.
"It seems to me," the girl continued, "as if they sigh be-
cause they are very sorry to begin life in earnest—~just as we
be." (Ch. VIII, p. 73)

As the enunciations of one of Hardy's prophetic figures, Marty's in-
sights and perceptions speak to the universals of nature and human life.
Like Father Time, moreover, she represents the relations among the other
characters in the novel. Little Time stands for the consequences of ac-
tions begun by Jude, Sue, and Arabella, as well as more general forces
within the human world itself:

On that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness
and shadow which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all
the accidents, mistakes, fears, errors of the last. He was

their nodal point, their focus, their expression in a single
term. For the rashness of those parents he had groaned, for

296

their ill-assortment he had quaked, and for the misfortunes of
these he had died. (Pt. VI, Ch. ii; p. 406)

In her role as the representative of ideas originating in the other char-

acters, Marty is Hardy's witness to their acts. She witnesses George
Melbury's sleeplessness caused by his concern for Grace and his vow to
repay Giles's father through Giles, and Hardy narrates the particulars
of Melbury's plan for Grace and Giles as Marty overhears it (Ch. III,
pp. 16-19). Marty witnesses Grace's arrival from the outside world and
her meeting with Giles, and Hardy uses her inspection of Grace to de-
scribe her (Ch. V, pp. 41-43). The novel begins, essentially, with Mar-
ty: Barber Percomb searches for her in the unfamilar woods and tempts
her for the sake of Felice Charmond's beauty. The novel ends with Marty
as she demonstrates what is to Hardy an ideal kind of loyalty and love.
Hardy is explicit that Marty is an abstraction as well as a charac-

ter. Her last speech, the last paragraph of The Woodlanders, is the ar-

 

ticulation of what is surely Hardy's ideal of "loving-kindness." Her
personal love for Giles provides the context for this last speech, but
the particular quickly fades as Hardy's abstract and representative form
of the character takes on greater significance:

As this solitary and silent girl stood there in the moonlight,
a straight slim figure, clothed in a plaitless gown, the con-
tours of womanhood so undeveloped as to be scarcely percepti-
ble in her, the marks of poverty and toil effaced by the misty
hour, she touched sublimity at points, and looked almost like
a being who had rejected with indifference the attributes of

' sex for the loftier quality of abstract humanism. She stooped
down and cleared away the withered flowers that Grace and her—
self had laid there the previous week, and put her fresh ones
in their place.

"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! But I-dwhenever 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 plant-
ed; and whenever I split a gad, and whenever I turn the cider
wring, I'll say none could do it like you. If ever I forget
your name let me forget home and heaven! . . . But no, no, my

AA

297

love, I never can forget 'ee; for you was a good man, and did
good things!" (Ch. XLVIII, pp. 443-44)

If we are not to think of Marty as a pitiful creature, expressing and
pledging loyalty to Giles dead which she never did when he was alive, we
must see her as "abstract humanism," which honors (thinks of) and remem-
bers the individual because he "was a good man, and did good things."
Because she is unusually perceptive, Marty has important connec-

tions to Elizabeth Endorfield. Hardy deemphasizes the supernatural ele-
ments of the character and emphasizes Marty's closeness to nature. Mar-
ty can indeed predict the weather, but every one of her predictions is
based on observation of natural phenomena. In dramatizing Marty's
thought, Hardy provides the observations and the predictions, and the in-
ferences which Marty draws from them. In one key passage, for instance,
we see Marty as a kind of innocent, finding the truth in the mundane de-
tails of her work. It is worth noting, too, that it is psychologically
realistic for Marty to express her own heavy-heartedness knowing that
Giles wants to "bring things to a head" with Grace at a Christmas party
(Ch. IX, p. 78). Having just spoken to Grace and having seen Fitzpiers
as a rival for her, Giles decides to stop work for the day:

. . . "Here, Marty, I'll send up a man to plant the rest to—

morrow. I've other things to think of just now."

She did not inquire what other things, for she had seen him
walking with Grace Melbury. She looked towards the western
sky, which was now aglow like some vast foundry wherein new
worlds were being cast. Across it the bare bough of a tree

' stretched horizontally, revealing every twig against the even-
ing fire, and showing in dark profile every beck and movement
of three pheasants that were settling themselves down on it in
a row to roost.

"It will be fine to-morrow,‘ said Marty, observing them
with the vermilion light of the sun in the pupils of her eyes,
"for they are a-croupied down nearly at the end of the bough.
If it were going to be stormy they'd squeeze close to the
trunk. The weather is almost all they have to think of, isn't

it, Mr. Winterborne? And so they must be lighter-hearted than
we." (Ch. IX, pp. 78-79)

298
Marty's personal reasons for not feeling "lighter—hearted," while in evi-
dence, are nearly buried by the significance of the "western sky, . . .
aglow like some vast foundry wherein new worlds were being cast," and
the suggestion of a reciprocal foundry in her as she observes the birds
"with the vermilion light of the sun in the pupils of her eyes."

Even though Marty rather than Giles hears sadness in the sighing of
the pines and sees light-heartedness in birds whose only thought is the
weather, it is Giles who is the figure of nature in this novel. He, how-
ever, has a fundamental kind of weakness which dooms him to ineffectual-

'9 As "abstract humanism," Marty does not die

ity and an early death.
young; she is merely "doomed to sacrifice desire to obligation" (Ch. XX,
p. 174). She is, however, Giles's "true complement in the other sex":
Marty South alone, of all the women in Hintock and the world,
had approximated to Winterborne's level of intelligent inter-
course with Nature. In that respect she had formed his true
complement in the other sex, had lived as his counterpart, had
subjoined her thoughts to his as a corollary. (Ch. XLIV, p.
399)
In that she is unusually intelligent--on more than one occasion, her
thought is "nothing less than one of extraordinary acuteness for a girl
so young and inexperienced" (Ch. XXXIII, p. 285)--and in that she approx-
mates Giles's "level of intelligent intercourse with Nature," Marty ful-
fills the role of the witch-fgure in this novel. Even her deliberate
gestures, like the letter she writes Fitzpiers telling him that Felice
Charmond's beauty is at least partially dependent on Marty's own hair,
even this attempt to manipulate social relationships points up her basis
in the natural. Marty is, Hardy's histor says, only furthering some-
thing which has a kind of inevitability anyway; her letter, in other

words, is one small part of a larger, more comprehensive force: her let-

ter is "her long contemplated apple of discord" (Ch. XXXIV, p. 299). It

299

is "the tiny instrument of a cause deep in Nature" (Ch. XLV, p. 404).
Marty inhabits both the real world and the corporeal one as well;
this is why her smallest gestures have significance far beyond theme
selves, and this is why her attributes are abstractions rather than idio-
syncrasies or characteristics. Conceptually speaking, this real world
is not the same as the personal, private world that each conscious char-
acter has; in practice, however, it is often difficult to tell the dif-
ference between them, mostly because the real world to Hardy is percep-
tible by the mind, so to speak, rather than by the senses. Mental rath-
er than physical perception on the part of the characters is required be-
cause the meaning of the world resides in the real rather than the cor-
poreal. Although it would be unfair to Hardy's imaginative powers to
ascribe allegorical significance, especially in any really systematic
way, to all such appearances of the abstract in the realistic settings
of the novels, it is also true that the sense of the dual nature of per-
ception and reality is an abiding one in Hardy. At the beginning of The_

Mayor of Casterbridge, for example, the vivid detail in the description

 

of the signboard for the Three Mariners suggests something general about
human endeavor:

Hereon the Mariners, who had been represented by the artist as
persons of two dimensions only--in other words, flat as a shad-
ow-dwere standing in a row in paralyzed attitudes. Being on
the sunny side of the street the three comrades had suffered
largely from warping, splitting, fading, and shrinkage, so

' that they were but a half-invisible film upon the reality of
the grain, and knots, and nails, which composed the signboard.
(Ch. VI, p. 46)

It is especially easy to see the persistence of this idea throughout Har-
dy's fiction if one remembers the conventional ways of expressing it, es-
pecially the Platonic and Pauline versions of the distinction between

body and spirit or between the physical and the mental. What Hardy

300

seems to have done is to have conflated the Platonic assumption that the
world falsely seems to be real and the Pauline doctrine that the body
lacks the reality which is granted in Christian theology to eternal
things. When he states either idea directly, Hardy distinguishes be-
tween them. The complexity arises when Hardy is dealing with neither
idea in particular but with the distinction itself, between what is real
and what seems to be real. In general, when he is not laboring under
the influence of Plato or Paul, Hardy seems to have believed that reali—
ty differs from corporeality in that the former has meaning and the lat-
ter only evidence that meaning exists. It is by this means that Hardy
saw order in the world, and these terms are the most profitable for un-
derstanding Hardy's aesthetic, especially as it relates to principles of
realism and to the presentation of consciousness through narrative.

This is not to say that it is absolutely unprofitable to seek evi-
dence of Platonic and Pauline formulations of this problem in Hardy's
work. Examples of both abound in eVery novel, but so do their contradic-
tions. As a matter of fact, a better way to look at Hardy's characters
is to determine whether their problems come essentially from inside or
from outside them. Hardy's attitude about the source of the limitations
to a character's consciousness often seems more germaine to his formula-
tion of the real-corporeal split than any theoretical position he might
take from time to time. Clym, for example, is destroyed from.within his
own defenses, and that is why his body shows the imprint of his mind,
and that is why Hardy expresses his weakness as blindness, an alteration
of perception which is inherent to the perceiver. Jude's sexuality,
though clearly intrinsic to his basic nature, seems to him to be aroused
outside his consciousness, and he experiences it as an external (materi-

al) force:

301

In short, as if materially, a compelling arm of extraordinary
muscular power seized hold of him--something which had nothing
in common with the spirits and influences that had moved him
hitherto. This seemed to care little for his reason and his
will, nothing for his so-called elevated intentions, and moved
him along, as a violent schoolmaster a schoolboy he has seized
by the collar, in a direction which tended towards the embrace
of a woman for whom he had no respect, and whose life had noth-
ing in common with his own except locality. (Pt. I, Ch. vii;
p. 48) '

Other descriptions of Jude's predicaments, too, his drunkenness among
them, point to his environment as the source of his pain. These environ-
mental forces are held in unsteady balance by the strength of his con-
sciousness and by the vividness of his inner vision. Faced with Arabel-
la, however, Jude finds that his inner world has been invaded by what
seems to him to be alien and extrinsic. As Grace Melbury shows, however
material sexual desire may be, it works from.within the consciousness.

Hardy's last four novels—-The Woodlanders, Tess, Jude, and The Well-

 

Beloved--all show the effects of his thinking directly about how to por-
tray the essential reality as he saw it and how to show where meaning
resides. Very early in 1886, he recorded the statement that "My art is
to intensify the expression of things . . . so that the heart and inner
meaning is made vividly visible" (Eggs, p. 177). Whether Hardy's non-
realistic, near-allegorical elements in the last four novels are inten-
sifications of "the expression of things" or whether they are the mixing
of genres, Hardy provides a very important clue here for understanding

the most troublesome aspects of these last four novels. In The Well-Be-

 

123223 there is a kind of truth in Jocelyn's belief that the original
Avice persists in her daughter and granddaughter: children are, to Hardy,
the "expression in a single term" of their parents (Jg§g_Pt. VI, Ch. ii;
p. 406); paradoxically, this belief has the truth that it does because

Jocelyn believes it to be true--it is true because he thinks it is true.

302
We can say that Jocelyn is right or wrong in his faith in the Well-Be-

loved only if we make one or the other of the worlds (of reality-dwhat
is only mentally and personally perceptible--and of corporeality-dwhat
is only physically and objectively perceptible) a false one. That is,
when we assume that both worlds exist then we must also come to the con-
clusion that there is a well-Beloved so long as Jocelyn believes that
there is and that Jocelyn's Well-Beloved is an ideal, a fantasy, of his
own making. In a way, she is his best creation, the one of which all
his sculptures are only inferior copies.

It is just as important to read Jude the Obscure in this way as The

 

Well-Beloved. The usual reading, which organizes the novel around an
idea which opposes "reality" and "illusion," invalidates Jude's perspec-
tive, since the "reality" in this case is the corporeal world of natural
and social laws and the "illusion" refers to Jude's dreaming.20 Clearly,
Jude's idealism in education, love, and personal freedom meets its de-
struction in the hostile world outside him, but Hardy marshalls all the
best of his narrative repertoire to present, not the perspective of that
hostile world, but Jude's perspective, and Hardy provides evidence to
show that Jude should be right even if he is not. Jude deserves the ed-
ucation he dreams about, he deserves the personal freedom which he at-
tempts to seize against social conformity; he deserves, too, not to have
his family wiped out by the literalization of the ideas that children
have no place in so grim a world and that legal marriage is eternal mar-
riage. But there can be no doubt that Hardy presents the corporeal
world of Christminster and Wessex as having existence, regardless of its
lack of "reality" in Platonic or Pauline notions of the word; Hardy is
clear, in other words, that Jude misconceives the world and does not see

what is there. The fact that Hardy felt that this world has an objective

303

existence explains why he was never willing to give up his histor, no
matter how important the personal perspective became to him. Both
worlds exist simultaneously to Hardy, and the novels which attempt to
present that simultaneity, Tass_and £2223 are the novels most complexly
narrated by both the histor and close narration.

All of the themes presented in this chapter can be regarded as more
or less specific variations on Hardy's message that we live in two simul-
taneous worlds. People engage in secret-keeping and they drink as an ex-
pression of the always potentially predominant external world, the corpo-
real one. They dream and have moments of blindness as an expression of
the always potentially predominant internal world, which is the real one.
One final passage, from Tags, will show how the intensities of either of
these worlds can be measured in the particulars of Hardy's presentation
of characters' consciousnesses. The scene is the narration of the ef-
fects of Tess's confession to Angel of her earlier sexual relations with

Alec. The distinction which Hardy makes between the corporeal, "the sub—

stance of things,‘ and the real, "the essence of things, is also clear-

ly identified here with the distinction between "external things" and
Tess's and Angel's "brains":

Tess's voice throughout had hardly risen higher than its open-
ing tone; there had been no exculpatory phrase of any kind,
and she had not wept.

But the complexion even of external things seemed to suffer
transmutation as her announcement progressed. The fire in the

‘ grate looked impish--demoniacally funny, as if it did not care
in the least about her strait. The fender grinned idly, as if
it too did not care. The light from the water-bottle was mere-
ly engaged in a chromatic problem. All material objects
around announced their irresponsibility with terrible itera-
tion. And yet nothing had changed since the moments when he
had been kissing her; or rather, nothing in the substance of
things. But the essence of things had changed.

When she ceased, the auricular impressions from their pre-
vious endearments seemed to hustle away into the corners of
their brains, repeating themselves as echoes from a time of su-
premely purblind foolishness. (Ch. XXXV, p. 291)

304

This is one of Hardy's most important articulations of the theme of real-
ity and corporeality, because of the clarity with which he shows that
the perspective determines the distinction between them. This is one of
those events in which the corporeal world is charged with meaning, in
which the real meets the corporeal--in which "material objects around an-
nounced their irresponsiblity with terrible iteration." Because there
has been a change in the real--in "their brains" which previously were
blind but now, presumably, can see--there is a change in the corporeal,
in "external things."

Essentially, the perspective here is Angel's, but the passage is
not clearly close to Angel, and the references to "their previous endear-
ments" hustling "away into the corners of their brains" and, in the next
paragraph, to what Angel's face looks like ("His face had whithered")
certainly mean that the perspective is not completely limited to him.
The hallucinatory quality of the scene means exactly what Angel's sleep-
walking does: he is and has been living in a "somnambulistic hallucina-
tion," from which he does not awaken until he recovers from'his illness
in South America. Because Angel is dreaming, as it were, we can say
that his vision of reality is flawed: it is only for Angel that reality
changes when Tess confesses; everyone else concerned--the reader, the
histor, and Tess--already knew about Alec. We can see, then, in this
passage, that the personal perspective which Hardy was quite willing to
narrate is not identical to the real and that it can cause a character
to misperceive what is real. Finally, however, it must not be forgotten
that Angel's consciousness has been limited by external as well as inter-
nal factors, for he has had a secret kept from him. The scope of what
is reality to him.has been diminished by something outside of his con-

trol.

305

Even though Angel's personal perspective allows him to see things
which are not true, of Tess, for instance, we cannot deny it its own re-
ality. Like Jude and Jocelyn, Angel very much lives in a world of his
own making which is as internally consistent as possible, considering
the effects of chance and the external world. we can see that Angel is
wrong to judge and treat Tess as he does, that he is hypocritical to ac—
cept her forgiveness while condemning her for the same crime, that he re-
jects orthodox Christian ideals and maintains orthodox sexual ones, but
to deny the reality of the world he perceives is to ignore, for one
thing, all of the close narration by which Hardy dramatizes it. Even
the facts that Angel is wrong and that he comes to recognize his error
do not make his perspective any the less valid. Hardy's protrayal of
the inner worlds of his characters, however, involves more than close
narration; it also involves his presentation of the external world,
either as a force from which the individual consciousness is sharply dis-
tinct or in which this consciousness finds its own reflection. This

subject is discussed in the next, and last, chapter of this study.

Chapter Seven: Conclusion

The general movement of this dissertation has been from the surface
of the texts of the novels--their places in their historical period,
their fictional conventions, and their stylistic devices--to more and
more speculative ideas about what kinds of conditions might generate in
Hardy the particularities of these surfaces. The further we get from
the narration close to the characters and the histor, the harder it is
to speak unequivocally of Hardy's methods and ideas. To understand Har-
dy, however, it is necessary to find the unity in his work. For Hardy,
as for most authors, this unity is far more abstract than anything in
the text of the work, as it must be if it is to encompass all the con-
flicting and even contradictory elements of typical and atypical Hardyan
fiction: allegorical characters and realistic aims in mimetic fiction;
"close" and "cosmic" narration; the attempt to portray what the artiCu-
late and even what the inarticulate cannot say in a medium composed en-
tirely of words; transient moments of insight in a world where thoughts,
as acts, have profound and far-reaching effects; the effects of ignorance
and blindness on people's lives.

From the vantage point of many years and layers of criticism, we
can see that there is a kind of mythos in Hardy's conception of con-
sciousness. There was once a period, or a phase, in Hardy's mythology,
in which all nature shared the same consciousness. Then there was a
Promethean change: humans developed separate consciousnesses; they be-
came self-conscious; they began to need knowledge. Evidence of this

306

 

 

307

original period still exists, at the end only barely, in the natural
witch-figures whose intelligence and ways of knowing seem ancient and
comprehensive rather than classical and linguistic, in the processes of
the mind that mirror natural and biological processes in the world out-
side, and in the "mental liberty" that Hardy's characters find out of

doors at dusk (Tess Ch. XIII, p. 107). In The Dynasts Hardy seems to

 

have believed that a consciousness in the universe is a possibility that
exists in the future, a result of a species of universal evolution, but
hints of this idea can be found all through the fiction and clearly in

The Woodlanders. At their most essential level, there seems to be no im-

 

portant difference between Hardy's conceptions of consciousness in the
world and the "spreading" consciousness of the most enlightened and sen-

sitive characters (Far from the Madding Crowd Ch. IV, p. 32); they seem

 

indistinguishable:

The role of man in the universe is, for Hardy, comparable to
the role of will and intelligence themselves: it is a role of
emergent exoneration and supremacy. The word emergent is im-
portant. Man's exoneration is not to be taken for granted.
It is not to be rashly assumed by means of defiance, ambition,
or egotism. It materializes slowly, out of blight and despair.
It materializes so slowly and painfully, indeed, that one is
inclined to think that Hardy saw an analogy for this painful
vindication in the equally painful and agonized degrees by
which modern man had suffered the loss of his traditional dig-
nity in the teachings of Bacon, Montaigne, Galileo, Newton,
Locke, Lyell, and Darwin, and yet survived to declare a new
faith and worth for himself through a sublimation of his ego-
istic individuality into the instinctive wisdom and slowly
maturing intelligence of the natural universe itself. Some

' such allegory is conveyed by the stories of Clym Yeobright,
Michael Henchard, and Jude Fawley; it is implicit in Hardy's
children of nature--Gabriel Oak, Giles Winterborne, Marty
South, Diggory Venn, and John Loveday.l

Ian Gregor's tracing of Hardy's image of "The human race . . . as
one great network or tissue which quivers in every part when one point
is shaken, like a spider's web if touched" in all its various forms is

fundamental to an understanding of this similarity in the two kinds of

308

consciousness.2 The "web" illustrates both the existence of unity in
the world outside the consciousnesses of the characters as well as the
unity that works through those consciousnesses. The web is an image for
the desire some of Hardy's characters have for unity with humanity (as
in the case of Jude) and it is in fact the unity itself (as in the case
of Tess). That is, the image of the web is a part of a conception of
consciousness as something larger than the individual mind, something in
which the individual mind takes part. It is a conception of mind which
denies that each human is isolated in reality, whatever that person may
seem to be to him- or herself or to an observer who is limited by space
and time.

In the myth, then, the world was once conscious, in the way of ear-
ly people, dogs, horses, pigs, and bees. The world may become con-
scious again, it is potentially so now. But, in the present-day of each
of the novels, in the Wessex Hardy describes, only the people are truly
conscious, and only some of them; they feel isolated from each other and
alienated from themselves and nature. Consciousness almost always caus-
es pain; though the pain is not unmixed, it seems to be so great that
all of Hardy's sensitive characters attempt to escape from it, into soci-
ety, into nature, or, failing these, into perfect unconsciousness--death.
Society offers no refuge to those who are conscious and wish to escape
isolation, because individuation is a separation from community as well
as from nature. Society and nature share many characteristics from the
point of view of the individual; in fact, the essential difference is
between individuation and communality rather than between society and
nature. This difference is often expressed in the novels as a distinc-
tion between inner and outer worlds, the inner world representing the

individual and the outer one society or nature or both, depending on the

309

novel.

Just as we can posit a myth of the history of humanity in Hardy's
novels, there also seems to be a universality of experience for the in-
dividuals who have consciousness. At first they are not conscious; they
feel connected to nature, they have a place in the social structure.
Then, because of experience, they "Take Thought": social support and or-
der disappear, nature seems hostile, and this change necessitates "Tak-
ing Thought"; it is "the necessity of taking thought" that makes "the
heavens gray" and forces "childhood's face to a premature finality"

(Tess Ch. XVIII, p. 155; The Woodlanders Ch. II, p. 8). Once they have

 

"Taken Thought," they begin to feel themselves incomplete: they may feel
a "void" in themselves, as Gabriel and Henchard do; they may seek an
idealized other, some part of themselves, a "true complement in the oth-

er sex,‘ as Edward Springrove, Giles, Angel, Jude, and Jocelyn do (The

Woodlanders Ch. XLIV, p. 399); they may find themselves contemplating

 

their own body, their place in the outside world, as Cytherea and Ed-
ward, Charley Dewy, Eustacia and Clym, Henchard, Elizabeth-Jane, and Lu-
cetta, Grace and Fitzpiers, Tess, Jude, and Jocelyn do. These charac-
ters live in two worlds: one is the world of their thoughts-—their ide-
als, emotions, and the meaning that experience adds to place, time, peo-
ple, and actions; the other is the outside world, whose reality is prob—
lematical—-it is not real in the sense that it does not have intrinsic
meaning and may only indirectly represent the truth. At this point,
these characters either find or fail to find happiness, which, as D. H.
Lawrence saw, exists in Hardy only in the community, in the security
within the walls of the city.3 Those who rejoin the community marry and
and usually can be expected to live, in spite of Hardy's reputed pessi-

mism, happily ever after: Edward and Cytherea, Bathsheba and Gabriel,

 

310

Ann Garland and Bob Loveday, Thomasin and Diggory Venn, Elizabeth-Jane
and Farfrae, Angel and 'Liza-Lu; there are a few who can be expected to
find marriage painful, but these characters seek its communality anyway:
Dick Dewy and Fancy Day, Grace and Fitzpiers, Sue and Phillotson. Many
more lose their consciousnesses as best they can and die; only a few
survive alone, and their consciousnesses, like Clym's, have been irrevo-
cably damaged. None maintains individuation and also remains intact.

In this context, society and nature become part of the same commu-
nality from which the character is separated for a time. Because a con- .‘
sciousness can exhibit the actions of nature (feelings) and society
(thoughts), there is no completely trustworthy distinction between inner
and outer worlds, even at this abstract, mythological level. The social
and natural processes are identical, whether within or without a con-
sciousness; furthermore, the inner and outer worlds can be indistinguish-
able when a consciousness perceives and when it is communal. Since both
social and natural communality exist, and since all Hardy characters be-
long, intrinsically, to both, characters are opposed to either nature or
society only so long as they resist either deliberately. That is, for
example, nature operates through the individual with the same processes
that it does through the outside world; as long as natural forces oper-
ate, there is no radical discontinuity between the individual and the
natural world outside the character's consciousness. Society links the
individual to the mass of humanity by means of family, learning, tradi-
tion, order, and, at its best, mutual protection and survival. Percep-
tion connects the inner and outer worlds because it is the act that con-
sciousness takes in that world; by way of perception the inner world can
invest the outer one with meaning, overlay it with ideals, blur it, or

even blot it out.

 

311

There is a level, however, at which there is'a clear distinction be—
tween the inner and outer worlds, and that is at the level of the narra-
tion, in the distinction between the perspectives of the histor and the
characters. The continued presence throughout all of Hardy's novels of
both perspectives means that both worlds continue to exist; the atten-
tion to the perspective results in attention to inner as distinct from
outer worlds. There are novels in which Hardy's concern seems to be
with the world outside the characters' consciousnesses; these novels are
dominated by the histor, and they do not draw special attention to the
difference between what the characters perceive and what is presented as

real. Even in the most detached of these novels, The Trumpet-Major, how-

 

ever, Hardy finds a difference and finds its source or cause to be a mat-
ter of perspective:

The spectators, who, unlike our party, had no personal inter-
est in the soldiery, saw only troops and battalions in the con-
crete, straight lines of red, straight lines of blue, white
lines formed of innumerable knee-breeches, black lines formed
of many gaiters, coming and going in kaleidoscopic change.

Who thought of every point in the line as an isolated man,

each dwelling all to himself in the hermitage of his own mind?
(Ch. XII, pp. 119-20)

There is one novel--The Well-Beloved--that can be said to be dominated

 

by the voice of a character, but parts of The Mayor of Casterbridge, The

 

Woodlanders, Tess, and Jude are dominated by the perspectives of charac-

 

ters, and the location of the perspective determines the appearance of
the world. These parts of these novels narrate the inner worlds of
these characters. To these characters, then, and sometimes to the his:
.523, the mind is a "hermitage" and the world merely abstract patterns of
color and change.

Outside of either of these perspectives, there are fundamental cor-

respondences between the world inside and outside of the characters. Of

 

312

the myriad ways Hardy expresses this idea, the most important are: simi-
les comparing mental to natural phenomena, like thought and vegetative
growth, memory and geological formations, mood (or state of mind) and
topographical features, intensity of consciousness and landscape; refer-
ence to natural and social qualities in characters' names, showing the
kind of communality in their origins; the effect of the mind upon the
body of a character; and the ways in which the action of the conscious-
ness is determined by the world, the action of the world by the con-
sciousness of the character.

Hardy uses the geology, topography, and landscape of his setting to
describe his characters' consciousnesses so frequently that whole books
have been written about it.4 Hardy uses travel to suggest thought,
whether purposeful or aimless, whether directed or wandering, whether on
roads, railroads, or on barely- or nonexistent pathways. Two novels

present this technique most clearly, Tess and The well-Beloved, but it

 

is obvious in all the novels. Sometimes Hardy makes these comparisons
between the physical world and mind directly, in the voice of the histor:
"At times [Tess's] 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" (Ch. XIII, p. 108); "as if the words were the
mere torse of a many-membered thought that had existed complete in his
head" (Desperate Remedies Ch. XIII, No. ii; p. 270); "Fancy was . . .
singing the tips and ends of tunes that sprang up in her mind like mush-
rooms" (Pt. II, Ch. vi; p. 98). As Samuel Chew points out, the use of
these similes, and there are thousands of them, is as indicative of Har-

dy's ideas as their content:

313

If Meredith is an artist in metaphor, then is Hardy equally an
artist in simile. . . . The point to be made here is that just
as metaphor in the hands of Carlyle becomes itself a metaphor
of his transcendentalism, so is simile appropriate to Hardy,
for by his use of this figure of speech he suggests in every
page of his writings the intimate interrelation of human be-
ings and human affairs with the natural world around them. . .
It is easy to pass over single instances of these kinds with-
out stopping to analyze them; but as they occur again and
again there comes to be a growing impression of how each indi-
vidual life contains in little the characteristics of the
Whole, of how in any small series of events there are implica-
tions as wide as the universe.5

The majority of these figures are similes, but Chew's essential point is
valid even for those that are not. Some of these figures are more impor-
tant than others, clearly, often mostly because they occur again and
again in Hardy's fiction and become so symbolic by repeated use that

they require analysis. Absolutely central and obvious are those compar—
ing geology, topography, and vegetative growth to mental conditions.

Just as typical is Hardy's use of water-~a sea or stream, usually, to
refer to mental environment.

The "island" on which much of The Well-Beloved takes place, for in-

 

stance, is only called an island: it is in fact the top of a peninsula
and, to the histor, it "stretches out like the head of a bird into the
English Channel" and "is connected with the mainland by a long thin neck
of pebbles" (Pt. I, Ch. i; p. 3). To Avice and Henri Leverre, helpless
in the currents of the "Race," the rocks give the island a "grim wrin-
kled forehead" (Pt. III, Ch. vi; p. 199). At the political party in
which Pierston meets Nichola Pine-Avon for the first time, feeling
strongly that he is about to meet the Well-Beloved, Pierston is "like a
stone in a purling brook, waiting for some peculiar floating object to
be brought towards him and to stick upon his mental surface" (Pt. II,

' Ch. i; p. 58). All of the characters in The Well-Beloved are in a kind

 

of sea, in a fluid environment which influences their thinking. In

 

W

314

describing the predicament of Nichola Pine-Avon as the moral guardian of
"her long perspective of girls," Hardy hints at the nature of that sea:
She was another illustration of the rule that succeeding gen-
erations of women are seldom marked by cumulative progress,
their advance as girls being lost in their recession as ma-
trons; so that they move up and down the stream of intellec-
tual development like flotsam in a tidal estuary. And this
.perhaps not by reason of their faults as individuals, but of
their misfortune as child-rearers. (Pt. III, Ch. iv; p. 170)
Nichola Pine-Avon's descent into banality is a result of her social re-
sponsibilities to her children, and the process of limitation, Hardy is
clear, is that of censorship. Alfred Somers, too, Pine-Avon's husband,
loses something in his marriage and maturity: he loses "that peculiar
and personal taste in subjects which had marked him in times past" (Pt.
III, Ch. iv; p. 171). In other words, he loses his uniqueness, his in-
dividuality. Pierston does not lose his creative individuality and he
does not mature as his contemporaries and Pine-Avon and Somers do, be-
cause he remains "unanchored" in this sea of social responsibilities and
interactions (Pt. III, Ch. iii; p. 167):
By the accident of being a bachelor, he was floating in soci-
ety without any soul-anchorage or shrine that he could call
his own; and, for want of a domestic centre round which honours
might crystallize, they dispersed impalpably without accumulat-
ing and adding weight to his material well-being. (Pt. I, Ch.
ix; p. 49)
The sea, then, is society in its most basic form, an abstract mental en-
vironment whose influence is to add "weight" to the "material well-being"
of those who live in it. This is how society wreaks its damage in Hardy,
to continue this metaphor, by surrounding those who are particularly re-
ceptive to its effects with "weight" and banality. It rolls individuals
into a "composite ghost" desperate "for some good god" to "disunite it

again" (Pt. I, Ch. ii; p. 13).

Dozens of examples of this kind can be found in any of Hardy's

 

315
novels, hundreds, perhaps, in all of them. By suggesting that there is

no clear distinction between the consciousness of a character and the
world around him or her, especially the world of nature, that the two
worlds have the same features and processes, this metaphorical language
contradicts directly the characters' own sense that there is no continu-
ity between the content of their inner worlds and that of the intracta-
ble, unresponsive world outside. Though there are fewer passages assert-
ing the discontinuity of consciousness and the world, they are important
because they are key passages narrated close to the characters or from
their perspectives, or these passages appear in scenes in the novel that
are important for other reasons as well. Jude, for example begins the
novel feeling a continuity between himself and nature. The purpose of
the scene in Farmer Troutham's field is to dramatize the breaking of the
"magic thread of fellow-feeling" that unites "his own life" with that of
the birds (Pt. I, Ch. ii; p. 11). When Jude thinks, then, that his life
is a "cell," he is feeling that he is disConnected from the world around
him, the one to which he once felt he belonged ("All around you there
seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and
glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and
warped it" [Pt. I, Ch. ii; p. 15].) At the dance with Wildeve, Eustacia
finds happiness to be a warm, brightly lit room; this is a perception

of the same order, as is Grace's sense, as the day of her wedding ap—
praoches, that "The interim closed up its perspective surely and silent-
ly. Whenever Grace had any doubts of her position the sense of con-
tracting time was like a shortening chamber . . ." (Ch. XXIV, p. 205).
Bathsheba, too, has this experience when she asks Troy, "in a small en-
closed echo, as from.the interior of a cell," if he knows Fanny (Ch.

XLIII, p. 343).

316

In the sense that these characters find themselves enclosed and im-
prisoned by hostile circumstance, there is a radical discontinuity be-
tween the processes of the world and their own desires. Other moments
in these same characters' lives, however, show that the inherent insepa-
rability of body and mind is the basis upon which nature and conscious-
ness intersect. All of these characters find sexual instincts operating
upon their consciousnesses directly, so that their thoughts are changed
in accordance with their attractions; all of these characters have mo-
ments, as Eustacia does, when the inner and outer worlds seem.the same:

Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of
her mind and the chaos of the world without. . . .

. . . Extreme unhappiness weighed visibly upon her. Be-
tween the drippings of the rain from her umbrella to her man-
tle, from her mantle to the heather, from.the heather to the
earth, very similar sounds could be heard coming from.her lips;
and the tearfulness of the outer scene was repeated upon her
face. (Bk. V, Ch. vii; p. 421)

There is in Hardy a general association between tragic events and this
despairing sense of separation from the world; there is a concomitant,
general associatiOn between comic events and a sense of oneness with the
external world. There are many instances, however, in which nature re-
flects the tragic, as it does here with Eustacia, on in which the char-
acters transcend the boundaries impOsed by consciousness, as Mrs. Yeo-
bright does or as Tess does when she contemplates the stars ("I don't
know about ghosts, . . . but I do know that our souls can be made to go
outside our bodies when we are alive" [Ch. XVIII, p. 154]) or when she
listens to Angel playing his harp (Ch. XIX, p. 158).

The extent to which the consciousness can act upon nature is exemr
plified by the number of Hardy characters who die from thoughts or feel-

ings. Of the characters whose deaths are a direct result of excessive

feelings or obsessive thoughts are Miss Aldclyffe (Desperate Remedies),

 

317

Viviette Constantine (Two on a Tower), Geraldine Allenville ("An Indis-

cretion in the Life of an Heiress"), Lucetta (The Mayor of Casterbridge),

 

Marty South's father (The Woodlanders), and Barbara ("Barbara of the

 

House of Grebe," A Group of Noble Dames). The angina pectoris that

 

kills Ann Avice in The Well-Beloved is a heartache that finally is too

 

strong for a weak-hearted character. The most important of these deaths
by mind, however, are those of Henchard, Tess, and Jude; all of these
characters seem to will their own deaths by the absence of will to live.
Henchard, the most strong—willed of the three, seems to die like Jude of
defeat and the uselessness of living; Henchard's will survives him, in a
way, with instructions for treating his body: "that no man remember me"
(Ch. XLV, p. 384). Jude's will, too, his quoting from Job, is instruc-
tion for disposing of his effects, but, since all that Jude owns is the
day he was born, his "will" is the refusal to bequeath it and the come
mand that it "perish" (Pt. VI, Ch. xi; p. 488). Tess's absence of will
is not enough by itself to kill her; she has moments in which she is
"without volition" all through the novel, moments when she stops resist-
ing the flow of events (Ch. XLIII, p. 513). Because it is useless for
her to resist her capture, she is right not to try; in her case, there
is a correspondence between her consciousness, with its absent will, and
the course of events in the world outside her.

As a matter of fact, the only times in which Tess is at odds with
the world, especially the natural world, is when her consciousness is
most active. In this passage, which is critical for an understanding
both of the nature of consciousness in Hardy's novels and of the impor-
tance of the voice of the histor, Tess is shown to be simultaneously at
one and at odds with the world; she feels herself to be alien to nature

but she is in fact alien only insofar as her feelings make her different

318

from what she is. The most important evidence that Tess's consciousness
is not disconnected from "the actual world" is the "absolute mental lib-
erty" she seeks and finds when she goes out alone:

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 even-
ly 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. She had no fear of the
shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind--or rather
that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in
the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

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 psychologi—
cal phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The midnight
airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightlydwrapped buds and
bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A
wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weak-
ness 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.

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based
on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices anti-
pathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's
fancy-~a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified
without reason. It was they that were out of harmony with the
actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping birds in
the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren,
or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon her-
self as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Inno-
cence. But all the while she was making a distinction where
there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism she
was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted
social law, but no law known to the environment in which she

‘ fancied herself such an anomaly. (Ch. XIII, pp. 107-8)

Because Tess is mistaken about her true relationship with the world out-
side herself, the histor is necessary to describe what is true, not only
of the world but also of her consciousness; that is, even though close

narration is theoretically the device for the presentation of conscious-

ness, because she is unconscious of forces that determine her perception

 

319

of herself and the world, Hardy uses the histor to narrate the content

of what she thinks and feels. Obviously, it takes the histor to describe
what Tess looks like as her "flexuous and stealthy figure became an inte-
gral part of the scene," but behind this obvious fact is an important
point: that what Tess looks like is what she is, that her body is a part
of nature, it is her "fancy"--"phantoms and voices antipathetic to her,"
"a cloud of moral hobgoblins"--that is alien. Tess's unwavering and es-
sential alliance to the natural, here as elsewhere in the novel, means
that her consciousness is not isolated the way she thinks it is: this
isolation is "based" on nothing more than "shreds of convention."

It is necessary to emphasize the continuity between nature and con-
sciousness in Hardy's novels as the conclusion to this study, because
isolating the histor and close narration and isolating the themes of con-
sciousness, especially that of the real and the corporeal, artificially

' as Hardy says of Tess, "where there was no

spotlight "a distinction,‘
difference." The relation between nature as it is described in The Wood-
landers and the perceiving consciousness of the characters is as impor-
tant as it is in £322 or any of the other novels: consciousness and na-
ture are never completely independent of each other in Hardy. The land-
scape is so much a part of what the characters perceive that it becomes

a correlative for their minds. This is especially true when the charac-
ters Eisperceive nature, for then they show more clearly than ever the
content of their consciousnesses. Tess, in mistakenly believing that

she is alien to nature, shows how ghostly, how insubstantial and unreal,
social dicta are; by putting Tess at "mental liberty" at dusk, when her
inner world and outer world are balanced, Hardy affirms a unity in na-

ture and a place for Tess in that unity.

Similarly, Grace feels that nature, as she perceives it, is in

 

320

conflict with her educated and refined consciousness, which shows its
"cultivation" (Ch. VI, p. 49). The morning, for example, that she sees
Suke Damson coming out of Fitzpiers' cottage, Grace is awake because she
doubts the wisdom of marrying him. Her perception is indistinguishable
from what she perceives:
Not a sound came from any of the outhouses as yet. The tree-
trunks, the road, the out-buildings, the garden, every object
wore that aspect of mesmeric passivity which the quietude of
daybreak lends to such scenes. Helpless immobility seemed to
be combined with intense consciousness; a meditative inertness
possessed all things, Oppressively contrasting with her own ac-
tive emotions.
The key to understanding this passage and to identifying it with Grace's
perspective is in the meaning of "mesmeric passivity" and "Helpless im—
mobility . . . combined with intense consciousness." If Grace were de-
scribed from the outside, we would see that she is hesitating--thinking
both about marrying Fitzpiers and cancelling the wedding; she is so busy
thinking that she cannot sleep. This hesitation and the concentrated
thought beneath it are common features of Hardy's most conscious charac-

ters. In this state of intense mental activity they seem "rather duller

than usual" to the other characters (Desperate Remedies Ch. XII, No. iv;

 

p. 285); they are also so busy with their internal worlds that they find
the external one (usually the source of the difficulty which causes.so
much activity) to be oppressive, as Grace does here. What is more, they
find in their perception of the outside world the description of theme
selves, of their internal world. For Grace it is "mesmeric passivity"
and "Helpless immobility . . . combined with intense consciousness."
Under the same conditions--indecision about marrying Manston--Cyth-
erea Graye finds the outer world crushing and paralyzing to her ambition:
The stillness oppressed and reduced her to mere passivity.

The only wish the humidity of the place left in her was to
stand motionless. The helpless flatness of the landscape gave

 

321

her, as it gives all such temperaments, a sense of bare equal-

ity with, and no superiority to, a single entity under the sky.

(Ch. XII, No. vi; p. 254)
Cytherea is not paralyzed by the oppressive "landscape," of course; she
is thinking hard, perhaps even frantically. What she finally decides,
to marry Manston, is a decision in favor of passivity, of letting things
go on as they have begun. In this decision not to attempt to change the
course of events, Cytherea's consciousness is horizontal, as it were:
she has "bare equality with, and no superiority to, a single entity un-
der the sky." Clym Yeobright's decision to allow the plans for his wed-
ding to Eustacia proceed, against his intuition that it would be better
to postpone it, results in the same mistake for him that it does for
Grace and Cytherea, just as it is the result of the same conditions.
Clym's intense thought is masked by hesitation and indecision and a
sense on his part that external circumstances are too much for his high-
er ambitions: "There was something in its oppressive horizontality which
too much reminded him of the arena of life: it gave him a sense of bare
equality with, and no superiority to, a single living thing under the
sun" (Bk. III, Ch. v; p. 245).

There are three issues at stake here in these passages describing
Grace's, Cytherea's, and Clym's moments of marked indecision: the first
is that each has the kind of "temperament" which is oppressed by "land-
scape" in this way; the second is that they allow a decision to be made
in circumstances which militate against concluding the indecision, how-
ever painful they find it to be; and the third is that the decision in
each case has to do with marrying an intellectually unsuitable and phys—
ically irresistible other. To be quite blunt about it, Grace, Cytherea,
and Clym all base their final decisions on sexual attraction, on natural,

biological processes, on the laws of the outside world, just as Jude

 

 

322

does when he marries Arabella. All of Hardy's characters are "flattened"
by this aspect of the outside world, "the arena of life," Nature's
"plans for the next generation" (The Well-Beloved Pt. II, Ch. vi; p. 92).
Even though they have an inkling that their personal desires would be
better served by not marrying, all three of these characters find their
individual wills irrelevant in the face of the "oppressive horizontali-
ty," the "helpless flatness," the "mesmeric passivity" of nature. This
flattening of the characters and the passivity in which it results are
not the source of the problems these characters face. Their desires are
demonstrably natural and understandable; problems arise for them1when
such fleeting desires are made the basis for permanent relationships,
such as the ones society requires. The source of the problem in this
case is clearly social regulations, especially those concerning marriage.
Even this aspect of society is not strictly external to the characters'
consciousnesses, however, as Sue's capitulation shows.

The conclusion, then, to all of this is that Hardy's true subject
of narration is consciousness, as it is defined from within and without
by character and narrator, by nature and society, by reality and corpore-
ality. In this world in which consciousness is the arena, thoughts and
feelings are actions and events are matters of the mind. Even so horri-
ble an event as the death of Jude's children is more important for its
origins in little Time's mind and its results in Sue's than it is as an
event in a city, house, or family. From the perspective of the individ-
ual, the essential human condition is one of isolation and loneliness.
No matter how moving this loneliness may be, however, it describes only
the condition of the individual, and not that of the world or of humani-
ty in general, as a mass. Hardy's pessimism, such as it is, is related,

then, more to his conception of consciousness than it is to his vision

 

 

323

of the world. Those characters who do not attempt individuality do not

 

suffer by being driven back into society and nature, into communality.

The best formulation can be found by returning to the myth of the human
getting and losing of consciousness. In the myth, the characters find,

as Fancy does, that living alone, away from society and nature, gives

them dreams, ideals, multiple possibilities, but the drive towards come
munality--the drive for sex in nature and the drive for power in society--
is too strong and too intrinsic to be resisted, whether for the good of

the individual or for that character's destruction.

 

NNNNN

 

 

NOTES FOR CHAPTER ONE

1 Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928, Com-
piled Largely from Contemporary Notes, Letters, Diaries, and Biographical
Memoranda, as well as from Oral Information in ConversatiOns Extendin
Over Many Years (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1962), PP- 148-49. This
single-volume work includes the two original volumes published in 1928
and 1930, respectively: The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891 and
The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928. Following standard critical
usage, I will refer to this volume as "the Life." As everyone knows by
now, Thomas Hardy was probably the actual author of these works.

 

 

Thomas Hardy, "The Dorsetshire Labourer," Longman's Magazine
(July 1883). PP. 252-69; rpt. in Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings, ed.
Harold Orel (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1966): p. 180.

 

 

3 Hardy, "The Dorsetshire Labourer," p. 180.
4 Hardy, "The Dorsetshire Labourer," p. 181.

5 Walter Allen, The English Novel: A Short Critical History (New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1954), p. 287.

6 See, for example, Merryn Williams, Thomas Hardy and Rural England
(New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1972). Hardy's concern with The Dor-
setshire Labourer" is one bit of evidence among many that he saw society
largely in economic terms and most often not, as do the authors Allen
lists, in terms of manners or etiquette. That Hardy does not usuall
present social life the ways Austen, Thackeray, Trollope, Eliot, and
James do is obvious, but it is also true that he shares many of their
concerns and ideas about it. George Eliot explored more thoroughly than
any of the writers Allen mentions the complex relationships among people
in groups, yet parallels to her techniques can be found everywhere in
Hardy. One very telling example is her use of the inns in Middlemarch
to delineate the status of the characters as they comment on the events
of the story (see Gordon S. Haight's Introduction to the novel [Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1956], p. vi.) Hardy uses precisely this same tech-
nique in The Mayor of Casterbridge with, in descending order of respec-
tability, the King's Arms, the Three Mariners, and Peter's Finger.

7 Lord David Cecil, Hardy the Novelist: An Essay in Criticism (Lon-
don: Constable, 1943), p. 19.

8 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, Vol. III of The Collected Works
of Thomas Hardy, The Anniversary Edition (New York: Harper Brothers,
1920), Pt. I, Ch. ii; pp. 12-13. All references to Hardy's novels and
The_Dynasts are references to this edition unless otherwise noted. Fu-
ture citations are incorporated into the text and cite chapter and page

 

 

 

 

 

324

 

325

number, as well as Part, Book, or Number where appropriate.

9 D. H. Lawrence, "Study of Thomas Hardy," in Phoenix: The Posthu-
mous Papers of D. H. Lawrence,g1936, ed. Edward D. McDonald (New York:
Viking Press, 1972), pp. 410-11.

'0 It is a sign of the social stability, as well as the fundamental
necessity of the business of farming, that the barn in Far from the Mad-
ding Crowd still stands and still serves its original function. And it
‘is a sign of the depth of the social disturbance in Jude the Obscure
that Marygreen's church has been torn down and that the handiwork which
Jude loves so much is as dead as fossilized fern leaves (Pt. II, Ch. ii;
p. 99).

11

 

 

 

Thomas Hardy, The Dynasts, 1912 Introduction.

'2 D. H. Lawrence, "Study of Thomas Hardy," p. 415: "What is the
great, tragic power in the book? It is Egdon Heath. And who are the
real spirits of the Heath? First, Eustacia, then Clym's mother, then
Wildeve. . . . What is the real stuff of tragedy in the book? It is the
Heath."

'3 A Pair of Blue Eyes Ch. XXX, pp. 348-49. The least important
manifestations of this idea about inner worlds are Hardy's explicit ref-
erences to it. Fanny Robin, for example, largely treated as an anony-
mous figure and therefore not individualized, even Fanny Robin has an
inner world. On her excruciating way to the poor house, "Her attitude
was that of a person who listens, either to the external world of sound,
or to the imagined discourse of thought. A close criticism might have
detected signs proving that she was intent on the latter alternative"
(Ch. XL, p. 303). Anne Garland, in The Trumpet-Major, has an inner
world, and for her, much of life has to do with concealing it from those
around her. By determined whistling and singing, she prevents the other
characters from knowing what is really on her mind. Elizabeth-Jane in
The Mayor of Casterbridge is "occupied with an inner chamber of ideas"
(Ch. XV, p. 109). In The Woodlanders, Grace Melbury refuses to tell
Giles Winterborne about—"her own inner existence," and Edred Fitzpiers,
too, has "inner visions" (Ch. V1, p. 48; Ch. XVII, p. 148).

14

 

See n. 11 for Ch. VI.

'5 See, for example, Robert C. Schweik's discussion of Hardy's in-
terest in the Victorian struggle with "the problem of how to reconcile
the conflicting claims of 'altruism' and 'egoism'--that is, how to adju-
dicate the conflict between a requisite conscientious concern for others
with personal desires for individual happiness" in "The Ethical Struc-
ture of Hardy's 'The Woodlanders,'" Archiv ffir das Studium der neueren
Sprachen und Literaturen, 211 (1974), p. 33.

'6 Robert C. Schweik discusses the histor of Far from the Madding
Crowd in the context of Hardy's stages of composition of the novel in
"The Narrative Structure of Far from the Madding Crowd," in Budmouth Es-
says on Thomas Hardy, ed. F. B. PiniOn’(Dorchester, Dorset: The Thomas
Hardy Society, 1976). PP. 21-38. Of some interest also are: Rama Ghose,
"Hardy's Asides and Commentaries in Tess," Visvabharati Quarterly, 38

 

 

 

 

326

(1972-73). PP. 112-18; John Sutherland, "A Note on the Teasing Narrator
in 'Jude the Obscure,'" English Literature in Transition, 17 (1974). PP.
159-62; Sharon Pearson Lazenby, "Hardy's Omniscient Narrator: Advocate
for Misjudged Individuals," 251, 34 (1973), 780A (Univ. of Illinois, Ur-
bana-Champaign.

'7 The general studies are: Joseph Warren Beach, "Bowderlized Ver-
sions of Hardy," PMLA, 36 (1921), pp. 632-45; Mary Ellen Chase, Thomas
Hardy from Serial to Novel (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1927;
rpt. New York: Russel and Russel, 1964); Dale Kramer, "A Query Concern-
ing the Handwriting in Hardy's Manuscripts," The Papers of the Biblio-
grephical Societygpf America, 57 (1963), pp. 357-60; F. B. A. Pinion, é
Hardy Companion: A Guide to the Works of Thomas Hardy and their Back-
grounds (London: St. Martin's Press, 1968); Richard Little Purdy, Thomas
Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954); Rob-
ert C. Schweik,“"Thomas Hardy: Fifty Years of Textual Scholarship," in
Thomas Hardy, After Fifty_Years, ed. Lance St. John Butler (Totowa, N.
J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), pp. 135-48; Carl Weber, "Thomas Hardy
and his New England Editors," New England Quarterly, 15 (1942): PP. 686-
87).

'8 Walter Alexander Raleigh, The English Novel: Being a Short
Sketch of its History from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of Waver-
ly, 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's, 1895), p. 147.

19

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Raleigh, The English Novel, pp. 147-48.

 

0 Raleigh, The English Novel, pp. 148-49.

2' Norman Friedman, "Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a
Critical Concept," PMLA, 70 (1955), pp. 1160-84; rpt. in Approaches to
the Novel: Materials for a Poetics, ed. Robert Scholes (San Francisco:
Chandler, 1961), p. 119.

 

 

22 [George] Kenneth Graham, English Criticism of the Novel, 1865-
1900 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 137.

 

3 Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), "On Literary Construction," Contem o-
rary Review (1895); rpt. in her The Handling_of Words (London: John Lane-
The Bodley Head, 1923). pp. 1-33.

 

 

4 Vernon Lee, "The Handling of Words," in The Handling of Words,
pp. 187—227. See section "D" for her ultimately disapproving evaluation
of Tess.'

25 Dale Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy (Detroit: Wayne
State Univ. Press, 1975), p. 78.

26 J. L. VanDevyvere, "The Mediatorial Voice of the Narrator in E.
M. Forster's Howard's End," The Journal Of Narrative Technique, 6 (1976),
p. 207.

27 Gerard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972). See, for exam-
ple, his direct assertion that a novel can be treated as the extension
of a sentence-~of a verb, in fact (p. 75).

 

 

 

 

 

327

28 Sthmith Rimmon, "A Comprehensive Theory of Narrative: Genette's
Figpres III and the Structuralist Study of Fiction," PTL: A Journal for
Desé?iptive Poetics and Theory of Literature, 1 (1976): p. 48.

29 Genette, Figures III, p. 229. I have translated all quotations
from this work which are used in this paper.

30 Genette, Figures III, p. 252. "Diegetic" refers to the histoire,
or, as I translate it here, "story."

31

 

 

 

 

See Genette's summary on pp. 255-56.

32 Genette, Figures III, p. 75.

 

33 Genette, Figpres III, pp. 251-52.

 

NOTES FOR CHAPTER TWO

1 Richard Stang, in his The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850-
1870 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1959), documents contemporary re-
viewers' objections to intrusions (pp. 95-97). An instance of an intru-
sion in a "first-person" novel is this one from.Charlotte BrontE's Jane
Eyre, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), Ch. XXVI,
p. 262:

 

Reader!--I forgave him at the moment, and on the spot. There
was such deep remorse in his eye, such true pity in his tone,
such manly energy in his manner; and, besides, there was such
unchanged love in his whole look and mien--I forgave him all;
yet not in words, not outwardly; only at my heart's core.

Two exceptions to this are worth noting here. The first, Wayne
C. Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
1961), makes the case that the current simplistic schemes for organizing
all narration do not reflect the variety and complexity to be found in
the actual texts. For another, different discussion of this same issue,
see Lionel Suisit's "authorized translation" of Roland Barthes's 1966
"Introduction 5 l'analyse structurale des recits" ("An Introduction to
the Structural Analysis of Narrative") in New Literary History, 6 (1975),
pp. 37-72.

In his important "Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a
Critical Concept," Norman Friedman uses the old (originally Platonic)
"basic distinction" between "telling" and "showing" to arrange possible
narrative forms as: Editorial Omniscience, Neutral Omniscience, "I" as
Witness, "I" as Protagonist, Multiple Selective Omniscience, Selective
Omniscience, The Dramatic MOde, the Camera (PP- 117-36). Even more im-
portant is Austin Warren's "The Nature and MOdes of Narrative Fiction,"
Chapter XVI in Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, 3rd
ed. (New York: Harvest Books-Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956). PP. 212-
225. Presenting itself as a summary of what is currently thought about
narrative, this chapter can nevertheless be seen to embody a kind of
typology of narration. There are "essayistic" and "lyrical" first-per-
son narration (p. 216). There is the third-person narrator, "the 'omni-
scient author' . . . the traditional and 'natural' mode of narration"
(p. 222). The "romantic-ironic" form of third-person narration ("epic
narration") "deliberately magnifies the role of the narrator . . . liter-
ature reminding itself that it is but literature" (p. 223). The "objec-
tive" form of third-person narration calls for "the voluntary absence
from the novel of the 'omniscient novelist' and, instead, the presence
of a controlled 'point of view'" (p. 223).

Howard Baker, "An Essay on Fiction wzth Examples," Southern Re-
view, 7 (1941), p. 395. The ellipses are Baker's.

 

328

329

4 Baker, "An Essay on Fiction with Examples," pp. 395-96. Baker
refers, of course, to Dostoevsky's The Possessed.

 

5 Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (New
York: Random House, 1971). Cited by P. N. Furbank, Introd., Tess of the
d'Urbervilles, the (hardbound) New Wessex Edition (London: Macmillan,
1975), p. 17.

 

 

6 Furbank, Introd., Tess, pp. 16-17.

7 Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (Lon-
don: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 266.

 

8 Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 86.

 

9 Tess, Ch. XIX, p. 160.

'0 Scholes and Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative, p. 243.

 

ll
12

J. Hillis Miller, "Narrative and History," ELH, 41 (1974). PP.

Miller, "Narrative and History," p. 457.

Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby; or, the New Generation (New York:
Capricorn, 1961), p. 148.

'4 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vaniry Fair: A Novel Without a Hero
(New York: New American Library, 1962): Ch. LXVII, p. 822. In the sec-
tion entitled "Before the Curtain," immediately preceding Chapter I and
dated "London, June 28, 1848," just like an introduction, Thackeray
calls his histor IIthe Manager of the Performance" (p. x).

15

 

 

Thackeray, Vanity‘Fair Ch. VI, pp. 64-65.

 

'6 Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin-
Riverside Press, 1956), Ch. XLVII, p. 492.

17

 

Dickens, Bleak House Ch. XXXV, p. 378.

 

'8 Dickens, Bleak House Ch. I, p. l.

 

'9 Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, in Barchester Towers and
.The Warden (New York: Random House-MOdern Library, 1936). PP- 726-27.

20

 

 

 

Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 188.

 

2' George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (New York: Random
House-MOdern Library, 1927): Ch. XXIX, p. 269.

22 George Meredith, Sandra Belloni (New York: Charles Scribner's,
1898), Ch. I, p. 50

23 George Meredith, The Egoist, Norton Critical Edition (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1979). p0 60

 

 

 

330

24 Miller, "Narrative and History," p. 467.

25 George Eliot, Middlemarch, Bk. II, Ch. xv, pp. 104-5. Miller
quotes this passage also in his discussion of the historicism in the
novel.

26

 

Eliot, Middlemarch, Bk. VIII, Finale, pp. 612-13.

27 Gerard Genette, Figures III, pp. 190-91.

 

28 Genette, Figures III, p. 206.

29 Genette, Figures III, p. 207.

 

30 Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage (1859-60), Ch. XLVIII ("How
They Were All Married, Had Two Children, and Lived Happily Ever After"
[London: Robert Hays, 1925], p. 482: "Dear, affectionate, sympathetic
readers, we have four couple of sighing lovers with whom to deal in this
our last chapter, and I, as leader of the chorus, disdain to press you
further with doubts as to the happiness of any of that quadrille."

3' There is nothing to be gained from a detailed discussion of this
point, since examples are merely particular uses and add nothing to in-
terpretation. One instance, from Two on a Tower, may be allowed for
clarity:

 

 

But Swithin St. Cleeve did not decease, as fact of which, in-
deed, the habituated reader will have been well aware ever
since the rain came down upon the young man in the ninth chap-
ter, and led to his alarming illness. Though, for that matter,
so many maimed histories are hourly enacting themselves in

this dun-coloured world as to lend almost a priority of inter-
est to narratives concerning those

"Who lay great bases for eternity
Which prove more short than waste or ruining". (Ch. X,
p. 78)

32 Quoted by Miller, "Narrative and History," p. 548.

33 Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp. 151-52.

34 These are collected and cited in C. H. Salter, "Hardy's 'Pedant-
ry,'" Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 28 (1973). PP. 145-48.

35

 

Salter, "Hardy's 'Pedantry,'" p. 146.

36 Specifically, Hardy uses learned vocabulary or allusion: for pre-
cision, scientific or relational; for a contrast "between the precise ex-
pression and something else more real or natural or human" (p. 151); for
"delight or humor or pathos in the fact of a simple or natural thing fit-
ting or requiring a complex description" (p. 152); for mocking "learning,
and particularly logic and philosophy, as useless or unreal" (p. 153);
for "the preservation of the earliest form of a word, which is appropri-
ate both to Hardy's wish to preserve the past and to his sense of the
brevity of the human life span" (p. 157), in Salter, "Hardy's 'Pedantry.'"

331

37 Ian Gregor, The Form of Hardy's Major Fiction (Totowa, N. J.:
Rowman and Littlefield; London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 89.

38
p. 26.
39
p. 27.
40
p. 31.
41
p. 33.
42 And, of course, there is the pretense that the place is real.
Hardy's concern with accurate natural description has led many of his
readers into "Hardy country" searching for places in his novels. Edi-
tions of his books have often been published with maps (Hardy himself
drew the one which usually serves as frontispiece for The Return of the
Native) and photographs (of views, roads, and buildings). There is a
very interesting and useful book of photography, Herman Lea's Thomas Har-
dy's wessex (London: Macmillan, 1913; rpt. Guernsey C. I.: Toucan Press,
1969), which describes every building, road, and area from Hardy's novels
that could be identified; it was written and photographed with Hardy's
knowledge and support. Hardy acknowledged the pretense in his 1912 Post-

script to his 1895 Preface to The Return of the Native, which deals di-
rectly with this subject:

Schweik, "The Narrative Structure of Far from the Madding Crowd,"
Schweik, "The Narrative Structure of Far from the Madding Crowd,"
Schweik, "The Narrative Structure of Far from the Madding Crowd,"

Schweik, "The Narrative Structure of Far from the Madding Crowd,"

 

 

To prevent disappointment to searchers for scenery it should

be added that the action of the narrative is supposed to pro-
ceed in the central and most secluded part of the heaths

united into one whole, . . . certain topographical features
resembling those delineated really lie on the margin of the
waste, several miles to the westward of the centre. In some
other respects also there has been a bringing together of scat-
tered characteristics. (pp. vii-viii)

43 David Lodge, "Thomas Hardy as a Cinematic Novelist," in Thomas
Hardy, After Fifty Years, ed. Lance St. John Butler (Totowa, N. J.: Row-
man and Littlefield, 1977), pp. 78-89; rpt. in his Working with Struc-
turalism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Liter-
ature (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 98.

44 Am "imaginative stranger," the histor says, "might" think about
the history of the barrow (Bk. I, Ch. ii; p. 13). "The imagination of
the observer," he says, instinctively prefers Eustacia's completion of
the geometry of the landscape to that of the heath people (Bk. I, Ch. ii;
p. 14). These observers are not treated as if they existed, but Hardy
does not draw attention to their only potential status. When Hardy de-
cides to explain the odd shapes of the heath-dwellers, he moves to a per-
spective which clearly shows how freely he creates perspectives for nar-
ration: "Had a looker-on been posted in the immediate vicinity of the
barrow, he would have learned . . . (Bk. I, Ch. iii; p. 15). When Eusta-
cia returns to the barrow, Hardy returns to what would have been Venn's

 

332

perspective, "Had the reddleman been watching" (Bk. I, Ch. vi; p. 59).
By this means Hardy stays outside of Eustacia, his histor expressing ig-
norance of her face and motivations.

45 Kramer, Thomas Hapdy: The Forms of Tragedy, p. 75.

46 Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy, p. 79. The quota-
tion, from The Mayor of Casterbridge, is also quoted by Kramer and comes

from Ch. VII, p. 56
47

 

Howard Baker, "An Essay on Fiction with Examples," p. 395.

48 J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance andl Desire (Cambridge,

Mass.: Balknap Press-Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), p. 72.

49 Furbank, Introd., Tess, p. 18.

50 Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire, pp. 151-52.

5' Daniel R. Schwarz, "The Narrator as Character in Hardy's Major
Fiction," Modern Fiction Studies, 18 (1972), p. 160.

52

 

Furbank, Introd., Tess, p. 18.

53 Two on a Tower Ch. I, p. 5. Jude the Obscure Pt. V, Ch. v; p.

348 and Ft. VI, Ch. x—i; p. 486.

54 This passage has been cited twiee already in this study: see p.
35 (of Chapter One) and p. 61 (of Chapter Two).

55 Barbara Hardy, Introd., The Truapet-Major, the (hardbound) New
wessex Edition (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 16.

56 This is J. Hillis Miller's idea. See his Thomas Hardy: Distance
and Desire, p. 2, and his Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels,
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 126-27.

57

 

 

 

 

1903 Preface to The Dyuasts, p. ix.

58 The relationship of the composition of The Well-Beloved to that
of the rest of Hardy's fiction is somewhat compliCated, espeCially when
Hardy's last novel is to be determined. The question is not merely
whether The well-Beloved or whether Jude is last, but how Tess, Jude,
and The Well-Beloved all post- and antedate each other. The Well-Beloved
was first published, serially, in 1892 in The Illustrated London News as
The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved; it was written in 1891 from.ideas re-
corded in the Life beginning‘in about 1884. In September 1889, Hardy
and Tillotson's agreed to cancel their contractual arrangement for the
serial publication of Tess, which at that time was called Too Late Be-
loved, and in February 1890 Hardy agreed to write something else, less
offensive, for them, which according to Richard L. Purdy was to be The
Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (Thomas Hardy} A Biblio oraphical Study, p.
94). Also in 1890, Hardyfi 'jotted down"_the' 'scheme of Jude; he began
to make notes for this novel, he says, be ginning in 1887 (Preface, Jude
the Obscure). By the end of 1892, the serial and the whole versions of

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

333

Tess, the serial version of The Well-Beloved, and a volume of short
stories, A Group_9f Noble Dames, had been written and published; and
Hardy was in the process of working out, as he says in the Preface to
Jude, the "outline" of the "narration" of that novel. Jude was out of
Hardy's hands by March of 1895, a heavily revised The well-Beloved by
January 1897, "and 'on a belated day' in that year" Hardy "seems to have
outlined and commenced the composition of The Dynasts as we know it"
(Purdy, p. 122).

59 "Art consists in so depicting the common events of life as to
bring out the features which illustrate the author's idiosyncratic mode
of regard; making old incidents and things seem as new," (Life, p. 225;
March-April, 1890).

60 Schwarz, "The Narrator as Character in Hardy's Major Fiction,"
pp. 158-62. Robert Schweik, however, in "The Narrative Structure 0f.EEE
from the Maddin Crowd," finds "no particular pattern" in the "authorial
generalizations (p? 32).

6' Schwarz, "The Narrator as Character in Hardy's Major Fiction,"
pp. 168-690

 

 

NOTES FOR CHAPTER THREE

' Hardy often uses "sensitive" to describe his thoughtful charac-
ters. Sue, for instance, is an "ethereal, fine-nearved, sensitive girl"
(Jude Pt. IV, Ch. iii; p. 263), and "sensitive souls" are "mentally
quickened" (Life, p. 185).

2 See Owen Barfield, History in English Words (New York: George H.
Doran, n. d.) and Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Nov—
el (New York: Stein and Day, 1966) for two relevant ways to look at this
idea.

 

 

3 Edouard Dujardin, Le monologue intérieur: son_apparitionllses ori-A
gines, sa place dans l'oeuvre de James Jayee et dans le roman conteape-
rain (Paris: Albert Messein, 1931), p. 31. Dujardin attributes the term
to Paul Bourget, who introduced it in his novel Cosmopolis (1893), pp.
32-3. I have translated all quotations from this work whiCh are used in
this paper.

 

 

 

4 Dujardin, Le monologue intérieur, p. 9.

 

Dujardin, Le monologue intfirieur, pp. 95ff.

6 Dujardin, Le monologue intérieur, p. 36. "Concealed dialogue" is,
in Dujardin's words, "dialogue dissimulés."

 

7 Dujardin, Le monologue interieur, p. 37.

 

8 Dujardin, Le monolpgue intérieur, pp. 37-8.
9

 

Dujardin, Le monologue interieur, p. 38.

'0 Dujardin, Le monologue int’erieur, p. 68.

 

1' Robert Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness in the Mbdern Novel
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1958), p. 4. The information
about William James also.comes from here, p. 1.

'2 Ch[erles] Bally, "Le style indirect libre en fran ais moderne,"
Germanisch-Romanische MOnatschrift, 4 (1912), pp. 605-6. I have trans—
lated all quotations from this work which are used in this paper.

13

 

 

Bally, "Le style indirect libre," p. 606.

'4 Richard Ohmann, "Generative Grammars and the Concept of Literary
Style," Word, 20 (1964), p. 435; rpt. in Readings in applied Transforma-
tional Grammar, ed. Mark Lester (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1976). Pp. 119-36.

 

334

335

'5 Barbara Hardy, Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination
(London: Athlone, 1975), p. 209, n. 1.

'6 Ganter Steinberg, Erlebte Rede. Ihre Eigeaart und ihre Formen
in neuer deutscherl_franzb§iCher und englischer Erzahliterature,MGOpping-
er Arbeiten zur Germanistik, Nos. 50 and 51, eds. Ulrich Muller, Franz
Hundsnurscher, and Cornelius Sommer (GOppingen: Alfred Khmmerle, 1971).
p. 61.

'7 Steinberg, Erlebte Rede, pp. 165-66. See also pp. 83-84, in
which Steinberg says that "in English there are 'would/should' + infini-
tive up to a certain degree and, in addition, the more scarce subjunc-
tive." The forms that erlebte Rede takes differ in each language. I
have translated all quotatiOns from this work which are used in this pa-
per except the passage from Ulysses, which Steinberg left in English.

'8 Steinberg, Erlebte Rede, p. 166. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York:
Random House-MOdern Library, 1961), p. 220.

 

 

 

Marguerite Lips, Charles Bally's student, did her dissertation
on this kind of narration, and she "confesses that she cannot explain
the form of the genuine question in [Erlebte RedeJ’with her development-
al theory" (Steinberg, Erlebte Rede, p. 55).

20

 

 

Steinberg, Erlebte Rede, p. 55.

 

2' Ibid. It is to be regretted that Steinberg does not cite the
places in the works of Austen, Flaubert, Eliot, Meredith, and Zola in
which erlebte Rede has been found. Instead, what he cites is where the
discussiOns of the erlebte Rede of these authors can be found.

22 Philip Stevick, "Naive Narration: Classic to Post-Modern," Med-
ern Fiction Studies, 23 (1977-78), p. 531.

 

3 Stevick, "Naive Narration," p. 534.

24 Robert W. Duncan, "Types of Subjective Narration in the Novels
of Dickens," Eaglish Language Notes, 18 (1980). P. 37.

25
p. 38.

26 Duncan, "Types of Subjective Narration in the Novels of Dickens,"
p. 41. The quotation about Flaubert, cited in Duncan, p. 36, is from
Stephen Ullmann's "Reported Speech and Internal Mbnologue in Flaubert,"
Ch. II of Style in the French Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1957). PP. 94-102).

27

 

Duncan, "Types of Subjective Narration in the Novels of Dickens,"

 

Miller, "Narrative and History," p. 456.

28 Miller, "Narrative and History," p. 456, n. 3.

29 Dickens, Bleak House, Ch. XI, p. 113. Duncan is right to regard
this kind of narration central to Dickens--he calls the "subjective" nar-
ration of dialogue "dialogue in the represented style," p. 39.

 

336

30 Genette, Figures III, pp. 206-7.

 

3' Dorothy Sayers, The Nine Taylors: Changes Rung on an Old Theme
in Two Short Touches and Two Full Peals (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
World, 1934).

32 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, p. 224.

 

33 Dujardin, Le monologue intérieur, p. 9; Bally, "Le style indi-
rect libre," p. 606.

34

 

Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness, p. 127, n. 7 (to pp. 33-34).

 

35 Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness, p. 23.

 

36 Humphrey, Stream of Consciousness, p. 9.

 

37 Humphrey's discussion of "indirect interior monologue" is on pp.
28-33 of his Stream of Consciousness. In a move that seems to lend sup-
port to Humphrey's insistence on strict terminology, Dorrit Cohn finds
ambiguity in the term "interior monologue." In her Transparent Minds:
Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1978), p. 15, she says: "At this point it becomes
clear that the term 'interior monologue' has been designating two very
different phenomena, without anyone's ever stopping to note the ambigu-
ity: 1) a narrative technique for presenting a character's consciousness
by direct quotation of his thoughts in a surrounding narrative context;
and 2) a narrative genre constituted in its entirety by the silent self-
communion of a fictional mind." What Humphrey says can be presented by
omniscient narration is what Cohn calls "psycho-narration."

38 For this reason I have also left out instances of close narra-
tion from the Old Curiosity Shop, Vol. II (Boston: Houghton Mifflin-Riv-
erside Press, 1922), see especially Ch. XXXIX, pp. 300-2 and Ch. XLVI,
pp. 355-56. Also from Disraeli's Coningsby (New York: Capricorn, 1961),
see Bk. I, Ch. iii; p. 23; Bk. III, Ch. i; p. 136; Bk. IV, Ch. ii; p.
187; Bk. VII, Ch. iv; pp. 440-41; and Bk. VIII, Ch. vii; p. 572 for rep-
resentations of Harry Coningsby's consciousness whenever he is overcome
by strong feelings of attraction to Sidonia and Edith Millbank. And
from Trollope's Barchester Towers, pp. 206, 207, 365, 434, 455, for the
occasional presentation of the thoughts and reflections of Dr. Grantly,
Dr. Stanhope, Mrs. Proudie, and Mr. Slope.

39

 

 

 

 

 

Dickens, The Old Curiosipy Shop Ch. LXIV, pp. 489-90.

 

40
p. 565:

Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, Chapter the Last [Ch. LXXIl],

 

The magic reel, which, rolling on before, has led the
chronicler thus far, now slackens in its pace, and stops. It
.lies before the goal, the pursuit is at an end.

It remains but to dismiss the leaders of the little crowd
who have borne us company upon the road, and so to close the
journey. '

337

4' Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, Vol. VI (Boston: Houghton Mif-
flin: Riverside Press, 1922), Ch. XIV, pp. 199-200. Subsequent refer-
ences to this novel will be made in the text.

 

2 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Boston: Houghton Mifflin-
Riverside Press, 1963), Ch. XLII, pp. 347-48.

 

3 Henry James, Preface to The Golden Bowl (New York: Popular Li—
brary, n. d. [7972]), p. vii.

44

 

James, Preface to The Golden Bowl, pp. vi-vii.

 

"5 James, Preface to The Golden Bowl, p. vi.

 

46 James, Preface to The Golden Bowl, p. vii.

 

7 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray in The Portable Oscar
Wilde, ed. Richard Aldington (New York: The Viking Press, 1946), Ch. XX,

pp. 387-88.
48

 

 

Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. XX, p. 389.

 

"9 Quoted by Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study, p. 95.

50 That Pierston's "ever-bubbling spring of emotion" is symbolized
by the "old natural fountains" is J. Hillis Miller's idea as well (213:
tion and Repetition, pp. 163-64). Miller also cites Proust's insight
that "it is not without significance that Jocelyn . . . makes his stat-
ues of blocks of stone cut out by his quarryman father from the rock of
his native isle" (Fiction and Repetition, p. 164).

5' Kate Chopin, The Awakening (New York: Capricorn, 1964), Ch.

 

 

 

 

NOTES FOR CHAPTER FOUR

I Joseph Warren Beach, The Technique of Thomas Hardy (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1922), p. 53. It is Beach's belief that Hardy began
with the setting in composing this novel, see pp. 50-51.

2 Bk. V, Ch. ii; p. 374, Chapter title: "A Lurid Light Breaks In
upon a Darkened Understanding."

3 It is interesting that Hardy repeats the image of Eustacia's bon-
fire: her grandfather also worries about her running him out of fuel.

 

4 Lucetta has a past to hide; she does not know of Henchard's past
friendship with Farfrae, nor of the basis of his present aversion to
Elizabeth-Jane; she never even learns of Elizabeth-Jane's love for Far-
frae. Farfrae knows of Henchard's past with Elizabeth-Jane and with Lu-
cetta, but he does not know that Lucetta is the woman Henchard said he
would marry or that Elizabeth-Jane is not Henchard's daughter and ther-
fore illegitimate; he does not learn until Lucetta's death that she was
Henchard's lover. Elizabeth-Jane does not know the reason that Henchard
dislikes her, the fact that she and Susan were sold to Newson by Hen-
chard, and the history of Lucetta's and Henchard's relations; she learns
Lucetta's story, but until the skimmington not that her partner was Hen-
chard. Finally, Henchard learns, first, who "Miss Templeman" is, that
she hired Elizabeth-Jane as companion, and that Lucetta loves Farfrae.

5 Harvey Curtis Webster, On a Darkling Plain: The Art and Thought
of Thomas Hardy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1947; rpt. London:
Frank Case, 1964), p. 167.

 

 

6Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy, p. 100. The quotation
is from Ch. XLVIII, p. 439.

 

7 Gregor, The Great Web, p. 168.

8 Ch. XXIV, p. 199 of the Anniversary Edition, my text for this
study, reads: "Helpless immobility seemed to be combined with intense
unconsciousness . . . ." Dale Kramer's authoritative edition of this
novel reads as I have quoted it here (Oxford: Clarendon Books, 1981),

Ch. XXIV, p. 158.
9

 

Cohn, Transparent Minds, pp. 4-12.

 

0 Gregor, The Great Web, pp. 196-97.

llJ. Hillis Miller organizes his very impressive essay, "Tess of
the d'Urbervilles: Repetition as Immanent Design," around these concepts,

 

338

339

tracing Hardy's use of red, metaphors of inscription,
of the sun (Fiction and Repetition, pp. 116-46).

 

and descriptions

NOTES FOR CHAPTER FIVE

I The expression "to take thought," in one or another form, is not

uncommon in the King James Version of the Bible. For instance, it is
used in 1 Samuel 9:5, not far from the story of the witch of Endor; Je-
sus is quoted using it several times in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew
6: 25, 27, 28, 34) and in interpreting the Parable of the Foolish Rich
Man (Luke 12: 22, 25, 26). In the Bible, it does not seem to carry the
connotations of wisdom, insight, and necessity that it does in Hardy.

This metaphor of "the extreme posterior edge of a tract in her
life" recalls D. H. Lawrence's similar conception of the wilderness of
personal freedom which he describes in "Study of Thomas Hardy" as occur-
ring "at the extreme tip of life" (p. 409). Lawrence suggests nowhere
that his image comes from Desperate Remedies. Even more striking a con-
sistency in imagery is Hardy"s description of Cytherea as "an exceptional
young maiden who glowed amid the dulness like a single bright-red poppy
in a field of brown stubble" (Ch. I, No. iii; p. 7). Lawrence's symbol
for maximum self-expression in the same essay, of course, is the poppy.

 

In his "Hardy and Education," Philip Collins traces Arabella's
self-satisfaction and other porcine associations to a statement John
Stuart Mill makes in Utilitarianism (1863): "It is better to be a human
being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatis-
fied than a fool satisfied" (in Thomas Hardy: The Writer and his Back-
ground, ed. Norman Page [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980], pp. 63-4).
The quotation by Mill can be found in Ch. II of Utilitarianism in Essen-
tial Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. Max Lerner (New York: Bantam, 1961),
p. 197. Norman Holland finds Arabella to be associated with Hebrew im-
ages for uncleanness ("Jude the Obscure: Hardy's Symbolic Indictment of
Christianity," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 9 [1954], p. 51), cited by
Leslie H. Palmer, who says that Hollandfi 'converts Arabella into the un—
clean animal of the Hebrews," in "The Ironic Word in Hardy's Novels,"
Tennessee Studies in Literature, 20 (1975), p. 123, n. 11.

 

 

 

 

4 "Thus the supersensitive couple were more and more impelled to go
away" (Jude Pt. V, Ch. vi; p. 367); "self-combatting proclivity of the
supersenSItive" (Tess Ch. XXXVI, p. 311).

5 Ian Gregor discusses the detached and close narration of this
passage, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase. Gregor gets sidetracked
into considering whether Hardy's use of close narration is "instinctual"
or "calculating," when what is important about his analysis is that one
cannot "make any extraction of ideas" (by "ideas," I think, Gergor means
the articulations of philosophical or speculative ideas), "however in-
sistently they seek to claim our attention, false to the manner of their
existence, which is a manner created out of a tension which is sometimes

339m

340

the tension between the narrative and the narrator" (The Great Web, p.
29). In other words, what is said close to Jude cannot be regarded as

a philosophical statement made by the histor. This passage has proved
difficult for other readers as well. The problem of whether Hardy's use
of close narration is deliberate or not is compounded in this passage

by its striking resemblance to a passage from the Life (pp. 15-16).

6 Miller, Fiction and Repetition, p. 141 (for the discussion of
Tess), p. 157 (for The Well-Beloved7i

 

 

 

7 Hardy repeats this trick very nicely, in a much less serious way,
in The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid when he shows Margery Tuck feel-
ing diminished by the granduer of the Baron's bedroom. Although this
bit of psychological realism is reason enough for its inclusion in the
story, it also serves the function of preparing us for her capitulation
to social convention in marrying Jim Hayward: "Everything here seemed of
such a magnificent type to her eyes that she felt confused, diminished
to half her height, half her strength, half her prettiness. The man who
had conducted her retired at once, and some one came softly round the
angle of the bed—curtains. He held out his hand kindly--rather patron-
izingly: it was the solicitor whom she knew by sight. This gentleman
led her forward, as if she had been a lamb rather than a woman, till the
occupant of the bed was revealed" (Ch. XI, p. 369).

8 The Well-Beloved also begins and ends with unconsciousness: the
metaphor for thought in this novel is divination rather than a labyrinth,
but the pattern is still the same--the novel begins with his return to
the sleeping island and ends both with his own rather catastrophic ill-
ness and with his closing of the island's natural wells.

 

 

9 David Lodge, for instance, thinks that there is no ambiguity and
that Tess is seduced. He offers as evidence: "She had dreaded him,
winced before him, succombed to adroit advantages he took of her help-
lessness; then, remporarily blinded by his ardent manners had been
stirred to confused surrender awhile" (Ch. XII, p. 104), "Tess, Nature,
and the Voices of Hardy," in Twentieth Century Interpretations of "Tess
of the D'Urbervilles," ed. Albert J. LaValley (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
PrentiCe-Hall, 1969). P. 82, n. 11. To another reader, of course, this
merely intensifies the ambiguity if it explains, as it could, how it is
that Tess stayed with Alec after the event in The Chase and how it is
that she lived in such proximity to him.

J. Hillis Miller makes the same point that I do: "To call it either
a rape or seduction would beg the fundamental questions which the book
raises, the questions of the meaning of Tess's expereince and of its
causes" (Fiction and Repetition, p. 116). Ian Gregor says that, since
it is unclear whether Tess was raped or seduced, the ambiguity must be
preserved and not be resolved (The Great Web, p. 183). In further sup-
port of the essential ambiguity of this event is the fact that, in the
first edition, Dieter Riesner says, Tess is "made irresolute in the se-
duction scene with alcohol," (my translation) in his "Zur Textgeschichte
von Hardys Romanen," Archiv ffir das Studium der neueren Sprachen und
Literaturen, 199 (1962), p. 399, n. 9.

'0 J. O. Bailey, "Hardy's 'Mephistophelian Visitants,'" PMLA, 61
(1946), p. 1180. Manston would also belong in this group.

 

 

341

1' Donald Davidson, "The Traditional Basis of Thomas Hardy's Fic-
tion," Southern Review, 6 (1940). PP- 162—78; rpt. in his Still Rebels,
Still Yankeesl and Other Essays (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press,
1957); rpt. in Hardy: A Collection of CriticallEssays, ed. Albert J.
Guerard (Engléwood cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 15.

'2 Allen Tate, "Hardy's Philosophic Metaphors," Southern Review, 6
(1940), p. 103.

'3 Ruth Firor, Folkways in Thomas Hardy (Philadolphia: Univ. of
Pennsylvania Press, 1931).

'4 Other interpretations of the mirror images are available, of
course, like Gabriel's condemnation of Bathsheba's posturing as vanity.
But as she sits stop a pile of furniture and house plants like self-
contained civilization accidentally and momentarily isolated in nature's
"leafless season," Bathsheba's playing into her mirror, on which Gabriel
secretly spies, is more than the evidence of "Woman's prescriptive infir-
mity" (Ch. I, p. 5). Her story is the story of her difficult and some-
times painful "Taking Thought," and, like her red jacket, her self-con-
scious admiration of her own beauty suggests not only the complex am-
biguities of her character but the nature of her change as well--i. e.,
from unconsidering to fully conscious and from worship of virginal Diana
(definitely antisocial in this context) to respect for natural Oak. Da-
vid Lodge is convinced that Hardy uses "mirrors to dramatise encounters
in which there is an element of guilt, suspense or deception," in "Thomas
Hardy as a Cinematic Novelist," p. 97. Since he does not explain his
terms, especially "suspense," it is difficult_to argue with them. The
other two, "guilt" and "deception," are not accurate enough to define
the situations in which characters regard reflected images, because not
all guilty or deceptive characters look in mirrors in Hardy, and not all
mirror images are of guilty or deceptive people. MOst such images do,
however, reflect the faces of those who have "Taken Thought" or who are
about to come to consciousness, just as many of these same characters
seem indecisive and hesitant, and just as they are habitually presented
with a fissure in their personality, by a split between their external
and interior forms: looking in a mirror is the interior self contemplat-
ing the exterior self.

15
16

 

 

J. Hillis Miller makes this point in Fiction and Repetition, pp.

 

Gregor, The Great Web, p. 91, quoting BK. III, Ch. iii; p. 223.

 

'7 Gregor, The Great Web, p. 92.

8 Gregor, The Great Web, p. 92, quoting Bk. III, Ch. vi; p. 247.

NOTES FOR CHAPTER SIX

1 Philip Collins, "Hardy and Education," p. 46.

Ian Gregor's The Great Web is an example of the scope such a
study requires. He traces consciousness and evolution, and "personal
and public, passion and work, man and nature" as they appear as separate
and joined "strands" in Hardy's major novels (p. 37). By the time of
Tess and Jude, these "strands" have become the "web": "the human body
estranged from itself, and, inseparably bound to it, the social body,
fractured by laws of its own devising."

 

Hardy's distinction between the realistic identity of the narra-
tor and the realistic effect of the narration is quite sophisticated
and, obviously, served him very well (since many readers have assumed
that Hardy's histor belongs to the real rather than fictionsl world.)

4 "Instead of starting towards [Clym] in sorrowful surprise, as
even Eustacia, undemonstrative wife as she was, would have done in days
before she burdened herself with a secret, she remained motionless,
looking at him in the glass" (The Return of the Native Bk. V, Ch. iii;
p. 386).

5 "The casual glimpses which the ordinary population bestowed upon
that wondrous world of sap and leaves called the Hintock woods had been
with these two, Giles and Marty, a clear gaze. They had been possessed
of its finer mysteries as of commonplace knowledge; had been able to
read its hieroglyphs as ordinary writing . . . . They had planted to-
gether, and together they had felled; together they had, with the run of
the years, mentally collected those remoter signs and symbols which seen
in few were of runic obscurity, but all together made an alphabet" (Ch.
XLIV, p. 399).

6 "To a Friend," in Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: Holt, Rine—
hart and Winston, 1953), p. 6, l. 12.

 

7 Jan Coggan's "twirling," evidence of internal world: Ch. VIII,

p. 69; Ch. XXXIII, p. 253; Ch. XVII, p. 463. He is also described as "a
crimson man with a spacious countenance and private glimmer in his eye"
(Ch. VIII, p. 63).

8 Hardy's comparison of Clym to the newly blinded Oedipus suggests
both Clym's excessive love for his mother and the wilderness into which
he is about to step. But his blindness refers to more than his emotion-
al attachments, since his intellectual limitations are more general than
that. Harvey Curtis Webster points out that Hardy learned from John
Stuart Mill's On Liberpy that freedom is the ability and willingness to

 

342

343

follow thoughts through to their logical conclusions (On a Darkling
Plain, p. 45). MOments of blindness, then, are moments in which charac-
ters are unable and unwilling to see the consequences of their thoughts
and actions. By the same token, Moments of Vision represent freedom in
thought and a perception of truth.

9 Ch. XVIII, p. 135-36. In some ways this passage may be regarded
as a transition between the general situation described in the sentence
which begins this paragraph, "The latter sat up with her mother to the
utmost of her strength night after night," and the quite specific situ-
ation begun with the next paragraph, "A word from her mother roused her";
in effect, this makes it a transition between two specific events, Susan
Henchard's writing of the letter to Michael Henchard which contains the
truth about Elizabeth—Jane's paternity and her explanation to Elizabeth-
Jane of the anonymous notes which forced a meeting between the young
woman and Donald Farfrae.

'0 Bathsheba stimulates Gabriel's imagination. After she has hired
him at Weatherbury:

 

. . . Oak walked on to the village, still astonished at the
rencounter with Bathsheba, glad of his nearness to her, and
perplexed at the rapidity with which the unpractised girl of
Norcombe had developed into the supervising and cool woman
here. But some women only required an emergency to make them
fit for one.

Obliged to some extent to forego dreaming in order to find
the way, he reached the churchyard . . . . (Ch. VII, p. 56)

'1 Eustacia's attitudes about rural Egdon Heath are well documented
in the novel. Ian Gregor points out Thomasin's attitudes which, by con-
trasting so sharply with Eustacia's, demonstrate how imaginative Eusta-
cia's Egdon is (The Great Web, p. 105).

'2 The partial or diminished consciousness which is signified in
this passage by the effects of heavy drinking and "his half-somnolent
state" is caused by "physical" and "mental pain": "Jude was in such phys—
ical pain from his unfortunate breakdown of the previous night, and in
such mental pain from the loss of Sue and from.having yielded in his
half-somnolent state to Arabella, that when he saw his few chattels un-
packed and standing before his eyes in this strange bedroom, intermixed
with woman's apparel, he scarcely considered how they had come there, or
what their coming signalized" (Pt. VI, Ch. vii; p. 458).

'3 "In Tenebris II," in The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed.
James Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1976), p. 168, l. 14. Jude Pt. VI,
Ch. ix; p. 474.

'4 Webster, On a Darkling Plain, p. 191, citing the life, p. 217.
According to Webster, it is also possible that Hardy found in reading
Hegel philosphical formulations which "caused him to think more inten-
sively about the reality of the apparent, upon the elusiveness of the
thing-in-itself" (p. 192).

15

 

Preface to the First Edition of Jude the Obscure (1895).

 

344

'6 Part of the reason that these phrenological meditations persist
in Hardy's fiction in spite of the difficulties they cause is that they
are as much a part of the history of the novel as any other narrative
lyricism like description of setting or what Ruskin called the "Pathetic
Fallacy."

'7 The Mayor of Casterbridge Ch. XLV, p. 386. That Time is history
is Ian GregorTs point: "In a phrase, [Hardy] is introducing with Father
Time the process of history into the lives of Jude and Sue . . ." (lha_
Great Web, p. 221).

'8 This is one explanation for Hardy's strange idea of having three
generations of women loved by the same man. To Jocelyn, of course, they
are essentially the same woman each time. There is a change, however,
an evolution, of the character through the generations, even from his
point of view. Avice I acquiesces in the attempts to make herself or-
dinary (Pt. I, Ch. ii; pp. 13-14); the second Avice is common. Avice II
begins to grasp the mysteries of art (Pt. II, Ch. xii? pp. 131-32); the
third Avice is refined and educated, she is "a still more modernized,
up-to-date edition of the two Avices . . . . A ladylike creature was she
--almost elegant. She was altogether finer in figure than her mother or
grandmother had ever been . . ." (Pt. III, Ch. i; p. 153). She is the
last of "The three Avices, the second something like the first, the third
a glorification of the first, at all events externally . . ." (Pt. III,
Ch. ii; p. 161).

'9 It is Giles's name, Winterborne, which suggests his weakness.
It is the same weakness that Clym has after the tragedy which kills Eu-
stacia and Wildeve: "Even supposing him capable of loving again, that
love would be a plant of slow and laboured growth, and in the and only
small and sickly, like an autumn-hatched bird" (Bk. VI, Oh. i; p. 460).
It is also the weakness in Henry Knight, "whose imagination had been fed
up to preternatural size by lonely study and silent observation of his
kind--whose emotions had been drawn out long and delicate by his seclu-
sion, like plants in a cellar" (Ch. XXX, p. 348).

As for Giles, it is sometimes difficult to separate the histor's
view of Giles from Grace's. To her, he is a personification of nature
and it is in her life that he is ineffective. Otherwise he is mostly
quite effective, especially disregarding the paperwork not done on his
property; he is without a doubt excellent at his job.

20 For example: Kathleen R. Hoopes, "Illusion and Reality in Jude
the Obscure," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 12 (1957). PP. ,54-57.

 

 

NOTES FOR CHAPTER SEVEN

' Morton D. Zabel, "Hardy in Defense of his Art: The Aesthetic of
Incongruity," Southern Review, 6 (1940); rpt. in his Craft and Character:
Texts, Method, and Vocation in Modern Fiction (London: Gollancz; New
York: Viking Press, 1957); rpt. in Hardy: A Collection of Critical Es-
says ed. Albert J. Guerard (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963),

pp. 37-80
2 Quoted by Gregor, The Great Web, p. 33, from the Life, p. 177.

3 Lawrence, "Study of Thomas Hardy," p. 409.

4 For example: Andrew Enstice, Thomas Hardy: Landscapes of the Mind
(New York: St. Martin's, 1979).

5 Samuel C. Chew, Thomas Hardy: Poet and Novelist (New York: Knopf,
1928; rpt. 1964). PP- 100-101.

6 The Woodlanders, ed. Dale Kramer, Ch. XXIV, p. 158.

 

345

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