Motion sickness: spectacle and circulation in Thomas Hardy's "On the Western Circuit."

fall, so timed that, of each pair of steeds, one was on the spring

while the other was on the pitch. The riders were quite fascinated by

these equine undulations in this most delightful holiday-game of our

times. There were riders as young as six, and as old as sixty years,

with every age in between. At first it was difficult to catch a

personality, but by and by the observer's eyes centered on the

prettiest girl out of the several pretty ones revolving. (246)

The most obvious comparison of roundabout to phenakistiscope here is in its commercial and voyeuristic potential. The delight afforded here is not the rider's sense of speed, but the fact that the London viewer (and the London reader of Hardy's stories as well) can see provincials slowed down, "quietized" by the mechanical contraption, a mechanization that paradoxically seems more natural (that is, pleasing in its smooth modulations) to him than their "natural movements." Moreover, the inventiveness that gives a sense of continuity is also clearly an arbitrary mechanical one, caused by the steady progression of pitching and springing horses at just the right rate to please the eye. The multitudes of individuals have become, by stepping onto this roundabout, part of its smooth mechanical function.

Only after its visual pace is established--it is significant that the eye of Charles, trained or overtrained by London, is set to catch that pace quickest of all those present--can one "catch a personality":

It was not that one with the fight frock and fight hat whom he had been

at first attracted by; no it was the one with the black cape, grey

skirt, light gloves and--no, not even she, but the one behind her; she

with the crimson skirt, dark jacket, brown hat and brown gloves.

Unmistakably that was the prettiest girl. (246)

The moment of selection rests on a double mistake. She is, literally, the third prettiest girl: he has run through the salient characteristics of each girl, only to settle on the hindmost. While the entire roundabout may not form a single coherent spinning image, it seems dear that these three are visually linked, like the quickly changing but coherent illusion produced by the spinning images (quite often horses) on a phenakistiscope.(8) In Muller's terms, the phantasm of the steam-roundabout has no basis in an enduring reality, but is instead constitutive of a new (internal) reality. Charles indeed sees a beautiful girl, but only out of manufactured optical effects. And when Anna's eyes "dance" from the motion of the steam roundabout, their "dance" picks out from the world a beautiful young man with whom she exchanges "that unmistakable expression" that is, like anything else in this "undulating, dazzling, lurid universe," manufactured in the eye of the beholder (248).

Only a few more of Charles's observations are pertinent: "Having finally selected her, this idle spectator studied her as well as he was able during each of her brief transits across his visual field" (246). We might say that what he actually studies is the fact of difference itself. The three girls with their varying accessories--frocks, capes, hats and skirts--create a set of homogenous differences ("infinite variation within the form") out of which one girl must become, by sheer force of contrast, the "prettiest." In each pass, Charles studies something a good deal more complicated than the lineaments of a single face, an irony that is made yet more obvious by the claim that "he had never seen a fairer product of nature, and at each round she made a deeper mark on his sentiments" (246). What has been constructed here is palpably not a product of nature; and the juxtaposition of the appositive, "his select county beauty" in the line above only reinforces the durability of this whirling simulation: together he, she, and the machine have made a new sort of sensation.