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

Criticism, Fall, 1993 by Julie Grossman

The smug correspondence between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James about Tess attests as well to the way in which the novel suggested to its readers a link between the unnatural Tess and the unnatural Hardy. Indeed, Stevenson claims that the novel has "no earthly connection with human life or human nature; and to be merely the ungracious portrait of a weakish man under a vow to appear clever, as a ricketty schoolchild setting up to be naughty and not knowing how." Admitting personal contempt for Hardy, Stevenson goes on to vent his "anger" about Hardy's book: "Not alive, not true, was my continual comment as I read; and at last - not even honest! was the verdict with which I spewed it from my mouth. I write in anger? I almost think I do." Stevenson's hostility, that he "spewed" forth a response to the novel, repudiates critical distanote, just as Henry James exposes his own Victorianism in his response to Tess herself as "vile": "But oh yes, dear Louis, she is vile. The pretense of sexuality is only equalled by the absence of it, and the abomination of the language by the author's reputation for style."(6)

Hardy himself must have anticipated harsh responses to Tess; Michael Millgate makes this point in his biography of Hardy: "Hardy, for all his attentiveness to the public reception of his work, was a poor judge of the impression any given narrative was likely to make upon the sensibilities of others. It seems extraordinary, scarcely credible, that he should not have known the trouble he was likely to provoke by allowing his stories to drift into waters well known to be dangerous" (305). Millgate suggests here that passivity and submissiveness went hand and hand with a hostile defensiveness about his position as an artist. Millgate goes on to say that although Hardy responded to critics often with "superficial co-operativeness," the novelist maintained "fundamental resentment of the implicit challenge not just to his literary judgment but to his achieved status as an artist and professional" (306). Hardy's biographer's portrayal interestingly mirrors Hardy's characterization of Tess's ostensible passivity alongside her awareness of herself as an object of public vision. Hardy may even have chosen the subject - the controversial subject of male victimization of a sexually charged woman - precisely in order to displace imaginatively his ambivalence about writing novels onto an analogous and finally transcended "story" of victimization. Tess of the d'Urbervilles explores not only various roles for the observer-voyeur - as do all of Hardy's novels - but also what it means to be a viewer viewed. Tess's guilty awareness of her status as the object of male desire is a displaced representation of the narrator's guilty imprisonment of Tess as image. Her self-conscious desire to melt into the landscape is a similarly displaced rendering of Hardy's own wish to elide the physical act of representation and to become himself a disembodied designing eye.

The novel repeatedly challenges the ways men contain the kind of force Hardy invests in Tess, a force that Hardy subtly characterizes as artistic. In a suggestive scene at Talbothays, Angel watches Tess at breakfast. She responds curiously: "having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her, [she] began to trace imaginary patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger with the constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched."(7) While Tess feels the "constraint" of being watched, her tracing interestingly follows that "consciousness." She begins to trace after she becomes aware of being watched. The art of tracing here functions as a female escape from the chains of male vision. Here, Tess is the artist on trial, the viewer viewed. Moved to make images by Angel's observation of her, she feels nonetheless entrapped by his gaze.(8)