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

Criticism, Fall, 1993 by Julie Grossman

We see this dynamic at work in Hardy's field-woman passage:

But those of the other sex were the most interesting of this company of binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object set down therein as at ordinary times. A field-man is a personality afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she has somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated herself with it. (74)

The field-woman actualizes a happy male and female fantasy about "naturalized" women who are agents of their own dissolution into the landscape. Women are no longer marginalized - as Hardy images it - since they are the agents of their assimilation into the landscape. Margins are erased because the field-women, like Tess, wish to leave their bodies and to melt into the "essence of [their] surroundings." This will to disembodiment suggests not only a male fantasy of essentialized "natural" womanhood, but also a female fantasy of acting on her desire to escape becoming "an object set down ... as at ordinary times."

Hardy's representation of Tess incorporates not only his identification with her as victim of social injustice, but also the possibility of escape from entrapment through corporeal dissolution. Certainly, this identification is seriously qualified by Hardy's status as a working professional novelist: Tess is of course herself an image of the novelist's creation. The alliance between them is thus based on and limited to the issue of creative power. More specifically, Hardy invests in Tess the power to create alternative selves to escape the extant identity cruelly defined for her by "blighted" social conventions.

A connection between the willed dissolution of the fieldwoman and artistic self-creation is suggested by Joan Grundy's discussion of Impressionism in Tess. Grundy makes an interesting leap from discussing Talbothays as a particularly Impressionistic series of scenes in the novel to imputing the status of Impressionist artist to Tess: "Not only in Tess's person, however, but in her experience too, do we find the Impressionist vision. Tess's experience often has the effect of making her appear to live like an Impressionist painter, or to see what he sees. The radiance of the landscape without is reflected in the landscape within, and vice-versa. Landscape and heroine are one" (62). Grundy goes on to connect the "phases" by which Hardy charts Tess's experiences with the succession of momentary impressions caught by Monet in his series of Haystacks (1890-91), Poplars (1891-92), and Rouen Cathedral (1892-93). Grundy further discusses moments," mirroring the Impressionist engagement with the ephemeral colors and outlines of visual images. As Grundy has suggested, Tess resembles an Impressionist artist whose objects of vision are so blurred that the artist becomes a part of the scene she/he records. The field-woman as artist is thus imaginatively merged with the "photospheric" external reality.