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Hardy's 'Tess' and "The Photograph": images to die for - Thomas Hardy
Criticism, Fall, 1993 by Julie Grossman
Two of the central concerns in Hardy studies are the unstable treatment of women in his novels and Hardy's peculiar relation to his audiences. In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, these two critical problems are intertwined and mutually illuminating. For just as Hardy sought to shield Tess from her detractors, so too does he use her to shield himself from his critics. In this essay I argue that Hardy thematizes his identification with Tess in the novel through the various ways in which male characters, the narrator, and a hypothetical observer view Tess as an image. Hardy's strangely unmediated expression of love for Tess is thus only one sign of his uncanny identification with her as a "fellow" rejector and fatality of a scrutinizing public.(1) By incorporating his own position as an object of public vision into his representation of Tess, and then by representing their escape from that role into metaphoric and literal states of corporeal dissolution, Hardy transforms an unsatisfactory image of himself as assaulted by his audience into a vindicated and empowered force beyond the critical gaze of the public.
In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Hardy repeatedly shifts between fixing the image of Tess as a particular object of male vision and permitting her to defy the male gaze by escaping into an all-powerful incorporeal conception of femininity.(2) As Hardy succeeds in liberating Tess's image from oppressive social definitions of her, her imagined freedom achieves a projection of his own wish to escape the repeated trauma of feeling himself objectified as an image for the public eye to look down upon.
Traditional feminist accounts of Hardy's representation of Tess focus on Hardy's and/or the narrator's manipulation of her story for sadistic pleasure. Tess appears to these critics as the helpless object of a cruel male gaze.(3) Recent feminist readings of Hardy, without looking away from important observations about the subtly exploitative practices of male narration, look beyond cliches about Hardy's "glib antifeminist generalizations"(4) and toward explaining Hardy's blurring of the categories of female sexuality. For example, in a discussion of shifting representations of women in the late nineteenth century, Patricia Ingham writes of the narrators in Hardy and their "attempts at interpretation [which] evoke the ambiguities of a language in transition" (74). Penny Boumelha, in her excellent reading of Hardy's treatment of women, historicizes his novels in the context of contemporary sexual ideology, and suggests that the "radicalism of Hardy's representations of women resides ... in their resistance to reduction to a single and uniform ideological position" (7). I would like to situate my reading of Tess alongside recent feminist criticism by exploring Hardy's representation of Tess as it reflects on Hardy's attitude toward writing novels.(5) The images used for Tess and the subsequent disintegration of the female image - as in Hardy's famous field-woman passage - set up an alliance between Tess and the novelist as victimized objects of a public gaze.
My reading attempts not to deny or erase traditional feminist responses to male appropriation of Tess as image, but to do two other things. First, I will suggest ways in which Hardy counters the mastery of the male gaze through Tess's intermittent subversive gestures. Although, as many critics have noted, the anti-feminist generalizations of the narrator may well represent an unsettling aspect of Hardy's attitude toward women, the novel casts Tess as an example of the imprisonment of women by an empowered male gaze. Second, I will show how Hardy uses the victimization and release of his female protagonist as a projected instance of his own desired escape from being looked at and from becoming objectified as just another reproducible image. My intention is not (merely) to recover Hardy from criticism that he is anti-feminist, nor (merely) to impugn Hardy's hidden motive of exploiting the image of woman to fulfill his narcissistic desires. I want to argue, rather, that very complex relations obtain between Hardy's attitude toward female power and his desire both to be and not become a public image.
1
Tess's victimization by male observers in the novel reflects Hardy's own ambivalence toward becoming a target for society as a public image. When Tess of the d'Urbervilles was first published in book form in 1891, critics themselves assumed a link between the 'unnatural' Tess and the grotesque figure of the novel's author. Contemporary reviewers expressed anger at a representation of female sexuality that challenged a traditional view that female desire either did not exist or else was wholly subservient to valorized male aggressiveness. This anger is couched in a language of euphemistic horror, a language which disguises the real threats unsettling critical discourse. The critic writing for The Quarterly Review (April, 1892), for example, expressed dignified indignation: early on, the critic comments that "Mr. Hardy has told an extremely disagreeable story in an extremely disagreeable manner." Later in the review, we read that "It is absolutely no argument for a novelist who, in his own interests, has gratuitously chosen to tell a coarse and disagreeable story in a coarse and disagreeable manner.' The paralyzed syntax suggests bewilderment; the monotone disguises a fear of the "gratuitous." The charge against Hardy that he depicts sexuality without apparent reason, cause, or justification is itself a justification for evading a confrontation with the social causes of sexual oppression, causes easily elided by opting for euphemistic name-calling, for righteous indignation, for a judgment of "gratuitousness."
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