Hardy's 'Tess' and "The Photograph": images to die for - Thomas Hardy

"The Photograph" surveys evasive techniques to side-step authorship. First, the "free-standing particle" of the photographic image, liberated from its camera/photographer eye, creates the illusion of its spontaneous self-generation - the immaculate conception of the image absolves its inscriber. Second, although the image is erased, restored to its original blankness of the card it "had figured" on, this "counter-development" of the image - its disintegration and erasure - is achieved through elemental agency. The fire destroys the image "naturally," again exonerating the voodoo hand that sent the image into the fire. Finally, the power which is traded back and forth between the image, its original creator, its spectator, and its destroyer (its de-developer) is reconstitued in the female aura, the dissolved, now psychologically pervasive atmosphere of "She" who exposes the speaker sympathetically as "up to his old tricks again." While the spectator, as the new object of vision, is stripped of his negative-artistic power to dissolve images, that power is reestablished in the "sphere" of a viewer unavailable to be viewed. Read alongside Tess of the d'Urbervilles, "She" is what Tess becomes in the novel, a fantasy of the artist beyond reproach. In the novel, Tess's effectual social power is thwarted by the transfiguring male gaze into "unnatural" art, into grotesque "prestidigitation." As I have been arguing, however, Hardy suggests eruptive images of Tess which enable her to become the "She" in "The Photograph": Hardy incorporates an essentializing of Tess, "a figure which is a part of the landscape" (233), into a fantasy of liberating her from the male gaze by establishing her as a victim standing alongside himself as novelist. The "She" of the poem gains authority over the narrator the moment her body is imagined dissolved. Figures dissolved can no longer be contained as a public image by another. Hardy and Tess are artists vindicated. The act of inscribing images is transformed into and re-empowered as an agent existing in an acultural beyond. Artistic power is liberated from the claims of the public eye and Hardy is free to expose, to represent other beleaguered objects of public vision with impunity. He is free to pity them, to "smile at [them] sadly."

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The novel's representations of female resistance to male spectatorship reflect a larger cultural battle, one taken up, for example, by Edouard Manet within his medium. Tess elicited a critical response similar to the criticism of "Olympia's Choice" thirty years earlier.(21) For Manet's critics, "Olympia's Choice" was "neither true nor living nor beautiful"; "She does not have human form'; the painting "ne s'-explique pas" (Clark, 92). The aura of mystery and unnaturalness registered audience resistance to representations of female subversions of male power, specifically in this painting, of the male gaze. Manet's critics were unable to appreciate, as T. J. Clark convincingly argues, how the painter unsettled the categories of women by painting a courtesan who gazes aggressively and obliquely at her spectators so as to discompose the spectator who wishes to see generalized thus disempowered Woman. Both Manet and Hardy incited through their works similar charges that their representations of women were grotesque, unnatural, unfeminine, and finally, unreal. Because Tess's strength is not socially definable, because it is composed of conflicting male fantasies about women - including the male novelist's fantasy of a woman redeeming his own status as artist - her aura too is perceived as freakish.