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

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1996 by John Plotz

b. Justice

The judicial circuit too becomes a postfacto accomplice to deceit and its credibility suffers accordingly. One can easily imagine Hardy finding ways to take the notion of a judicial circuit in stride, to treat it as part of Wessex proper, and not an alien invasion: there are many magistrates in his books, there is some justice done at London, even several royal visits to Wessex that do not imperil social stability. But after the tragically wrong object-choice of affection made by Anna, Edith and Charles (literally an object choice, since the sex appeal rests not in people but in a machine), the judicial circuit too becomes a culpable machina ex machina.

We are well warned of its malign nature by the first mention of Charles's place in the grand (vocational) scheme of things:

Who would have supposed him to be Charles Bradford Raye,

Esquire, stuff-gownsman, educated at Wintoncester, called to the

bar at Lincoln's-Inn, now going to the Western Circuit, merely

detained in Melchester by a small arbitration after his brethren

had moved on to the next county-town? (248)

Charles's work has to date literally been a career, from Wintoncester to Lincoln's Inn to Melchester to the Western Circuit, an education and profession formed on the fly. And a life shaped to take advantage of that fact: he reminds himself at one point that romance is completely permissible because his migrations will keep him out of the reach of any girl who wants to track him. (Hardy explains with a wonderful neologism: "the interspace of a hundred miles--which to a girl of her limited capabilities was like a thousand--would effectually hinder this summer fancy from greatly encumber-ing his life" [253].) The reader knows that Charles, like a fiddler of the (urban) reels, can keep himself in exactly the sort of circuitous motion he so loves to see simulated (in the "leisure-activity" of which the new age turns out to have a boundless supply) on the roundabout.

The irony here bears stressing, for it bridges the apparent gap between--to borrow Elaine Scarry's terms--play and work (93). Lucetta calls the sowing machine in The Mayor of Casterbridge "a sort of agricultural piano" (238), a phrase that captures perfectly the "interspace" it occupies between the worlds of work and of play. The roundabout figures both work and play as well, for in its purposeless whirl, the purposive movement of Charles on the circuit returns in fetishized form. It is only when Charles sees that whirl served up as a star commodity, as an entertainment, that he can properly taste its delights. The roundabout's aesthetic appeal is founded on a displaced identification with Charles's perpetual circuitousness.(12)

Moreover, the profession in which Charles is firmly entrapped necessitates, it turns out, a wife who will "convey," a wife educated enough to "move" with the times and so keep Charles on his inexorable spiral, out on the circuits and then up into the mobile coils of power.(13) At the story's end, therefore, when Charles imagines himself in a galley, "the fastidious urban . . . chained to work for the remainder of his life, with her, the unlettered peasant, chained to his side" (268), it is the restricted mobility that galls him most: how he might have moved with a lettered wife, with that indefinable something her letters had--how little circulation on the circuit he can hope for now.