Abjection and degeneration in Thomas Hardy's "Barbara of the House of Grebe"

College Literature, Spring 1999 by Shumaker, Jeanette Roberts

Also pertinent to explaining the statue's appeal for Barbara is the idea that "To seduce is to die as reality and reconstruct oneself as illusion" (Baudrillard 1979, 69). That is what happens when Edmond dies and Barbara replaces him with his perfect image. Edmond's image seduces her as his living beauty once did until it began to become too familiar through marriage. Barbara takes the voyeuristic experience of art ownership to an extreme when she repeatedly kisses Edmond's statue. Reflecting upon the statue, Barbara can revel in her pleasure over her former husband's beauty without having to think about his significance as an abject member of the working class.

It appears that, for Barbara, fixity is the statue's greatest appeal-a permanence available only to art objects such as John Keats's Grecian urn. Such fixity counteracts the horrible inevitability of Barbara's own decline into death that Edmond's disfigurement had conveyed. The statue's seeming invulnerability to decay reassures Barbara that she is safe from mortality's depredations.

Through her macabre interest in the image of a dead spouse, Barbara recalls the duke in Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess." Though Barbara does not kill her spouse directly as the duke does, she does so indirectly by causing that depression which, combined with Edmond's burns, makes him susceptible to death from a slight illness. Both the duke and Barbara thrive on control of their spouses. This means control of the duchess's manner in the duke's case, and of Edmond's looks and demeanor in Barbara's. Such absolute control of a spouse cannot be achieved in life; it is only achievable through manipulating artistic representations of the deceased spouse. Ironically, both the duke and Barbara are much happier in their relationships with images of the dead than they were with their living spouses. Browning's and Hardy's analyses of such relationships reveal the murderous sterility of aristocrats' need for control.8

Hardy questions what collecting art means not only for the highborn, but for the middle class of his time and ours. He does this through creating a narrative frame in which a surgeon tells Barbara's tale as one of ten stories within A Group of Noble Dames. Told at a dinner of the Antiquarian Society, each of the legends of dead Dames represents an attempt by a different middle-class narrator to know, thus in a sense possess, the ladies involved through taletelling.9 What do antiquarians do but collect and study remnants from the past-narrative remnants, in this case, of tragic lives. Because of class barriers, the amateur antiquarians would not be allowed the intimacy with the ladies in actual life that they are allowed through the mediation of art and history. That is also true for the readers of the tales, ourselves, positioned at one further remove from the mythologized ladies.lo Collecting the ladies' tales voyeuristically, we participate in Hardy's dissection of why people label "others" as abject degenerates.