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

Indeed the image of the woman is appropriated and destroyed under the guise of sympathy and nostalgia. While the narrator cries in pain, what he witnesses is a "spectacle," a performance engineered to give pleasure to the spectator. Again, as in Far from the Madding Crowd's experiments with the shifting roles of exhibitionist and voyeur, this poem registers a similar dynamic with the added technological twist of mechanical operation. For the film theorist Christian Metz, photographic mechanics revise Freud's model of perception since absence is now a condition for voyeurism - though it still allows for prior exhibitionist spectacle: "What defines the specifically cinematic scopic regime is not so much the distance kept, the 'keeping itself' (first figure of the lack, common to all voyeurism), as the absence of the object seen."(18) For Hardy's lover, absence is always desirable. Further, the creepiness of this poem lies in what Metz identifies as the "unauthorized" looking, now possible through photographic technology. Unlike the complicitous role-playing between Bathsheba and Troy when they play with swords, cinematic voyeurism is unauthorized scopophilia - the actor (the speaker's beloved) is no longer present as exhibitionist; therefore, she is not complicit in being looked at. The image-product of mechanical operation transposes Freud's dynamic into a new model of voyeurism:

The cinema manages to be both exhibitionist and secretive. The exchange of seeing and being-seen will be fractured in its centre, and its two disjointed halves allocated to different moments in time: another split. I never see my partner, but only his photograph. This does not make me less of a voyeur, but it involves a different regime, that of the primalscene and the keyhole. For this mode of voyeurism (which by now is a stable and finely tuned economic plateau) the mechanism of satisfaction relies on my awareness that the object I am watching is unaware of being watched. 'Seeing' is no longer a matter of sending something back, but of catching something unawares. (Metz, 95)

The unauthorized thrill of watching an image of reality suggests a violence done to that reality, the potential rape of the reality which was secretively (in the case of Hardy's speaker here) turned into an object for the lover's indiscriminate and aggressive desires. Though these desires are displaced onto an image, a false reality, the wish to annihilate the image is itself a real manifestation of harmfully released megalomaniacal masculine power.

The disgust and pain the narrator feels when he throws her photograph into the fire is also a sado-masochistic joy: the flame "gnawed at the delicate bosom's defenceless round." The woman is experienced by the poem's speaker as an object of "delicate" fineness, as a receptacle for the erotic desires of a lonely speaker who has been looking through old drawers to stir "the silence of night's profound." His need to watch secretively, "furtivewise," constitutes a ceremony figured through descriptions of mastication which further compromise the ostensibly mundane, harmless aim of the burning, the "casual clearance of life's arrears." Painfully alternating between the active wish to watch her burn and the passive resignation that it is beyond his control to help her, the speaker becomes extremely tense: "... compelled to heed, I again looked furtivewise/ Till the flame had eaten her breasts, and mouth, and hair." The voyeuristic attention he pays to her body parts is followed by the swallowing of those erotic details by the flames. Thus, the aggressive desires of the watcher are projected onto the flames. The speaker's desire is transformed into passive agency. Even the photograph as a physical object is delineated in terms of its passively coming into being, eliding the act and art of taking the picture: "And nothing was left of the picture unsheathed from the past/ But the ashen ghost of the card it had figured on" (my emphasis). The author of the photograph is erased and the photograph is spoken about as if it spontaneously appeared on its mounting.