relentless indifference to what the human sees. But his and his characters' observations of the human always risk the limitation of the observer's perspective, and the self-consciousness of the observed. Seeing does not necessarily empower, but it frequently wounds. -536-
Self-consciousness in seeing is often imaged in Hardy by moments when the visual is framed quite literally, by windows. (Spying, an activity abundantly present in almost all of Hardy's novels, serves also to «frame» the visual.) Such framing can be taken as representative of Hardy's own writing, for while it provides an opening between two otherwise alien, distinct, and unself-consciously isolated worlds, it also implies incompleteness of connection. One can see through windows, even hear through them, but only rarely-although this too happens in Hardy's work-can one touch through them, only rarely can one directly affect or resist what appears in the frame. The world is not so much experienced through the frame as represented; the window gives access without necessitating engagement. Seeing, like writing, implies the absence (or distance) of what is seen or described. While windows seem to focus the visual world, and perhaps suggest a misleading relevance to the viewer, they often allow in more than the viewer wants and they cannot entirely contain the multiplicity and dangers of the material from which they ostensibly distance the viewer. The lives of Hardy's characters are as frequently disrupted by their own acts of observation as they are by being spied upon. In any case, like so much of Hardy's writing, the framed scene both represents and evades, makes vulnerable and protects, implies and circumvents, approaches contact and resists it. Hardy's writing is in many ways an elaborate strategy of containment and protection, usually about characters who struggle like their narrator to contain and protect themselves, but who, unlike Hardy's narrators, are not convinced of the futility of the effort. The persistent instances of framed vision, of spying, of almost naturalistic observation that parallel these strategies suggest that full protection is not possible. For vision is uncontrollable, like sexual energy; it is a vehicle of both suppression and desire, like writing itself.
The persistence of framed images of opening and containment tends to confirm J. Hillis Miller's shrewd argument that Hardy's 'goal seems to have been to escape from the dangers of direct involvement in life and to imagine himself in a position where he could safely see life as it is without being seen and could report on that seeing.' Hardy, says Miller, sought 'to protect himself and to play the role of someone who would have unique access to the truth.' Such ambitions largely determine both Hardy's strategies of representation and, very often, the subjects of his narratives. -537- But the revulsion from engagement is the other side of an intense ambition and sexual desire. Hardy's fictions flirt with the ideal, most peculiarly and schematically in The Well-Beloved (1892; 1897), where the protagonist pursues an ideal lover who is always, in the flesh, inaccessible, through three generations. The ideal is a persistent motif in Hardy, but his platonic and self-consciously childish fantasies (Jocelyn, the Shelleyan hero of The Well-Beloved, sees himself, as Hardy saw himself, as perpetually a child) are not only idealized but ironized. In The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), Christopher Julian, another artist-figure protagonist who is in love with Ethelberta, is described by his sister: 'I should say you were a child in your impulses, and an old man in your reflections.' The ideally named Knight of, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Angel of Tess of the d'Urbervilles are responsible for the deaths of Elfride Swancourt and Tess herself. Idealists end up being murderers. Angel tells Tess (as Jocelyn was to feel about his lovers), that 'the woman I have been loving is not you,' but 'another woman in your shape.'
The quest for the ideal that characterizes so many of Hardy's plots (the inverse, of course, of their consistent patterns of frustration in which lovers never quite consummate their relationships) is an aspect of the intense sense of the time-bound character of the physical world that the prose so movingly (if sadly) celebrates. The frustration plot is a dramatization of Hardy's sense of the cost of passion, and this is not merely psychological and romantic, but social. Failures of physical love are consistent with narrative anticipation of loss and failure, a condition Father Time, in Jude the Obscure, almost laughably articulates: 'I should like the flowers very much,' he says, 'if I didn't keep on thinking they'd be all withered in a few days.' Even in the extremes of youthful passion Hardy's characters are beset with premonitions of fading flesh and dying romance. But the fear is a reflex of the desire. Hillis Miller insists that in Hardy's work there is always some barrier and distance between the lovers and that, like Jocelyn, Hardy seems to worship the goddess in the lover rather than the lover herself. Distance provokes desire (hence, for example, Jude's exhaustless passion for the elusive Sue), but proximity crushes it.
But it is not any old barrier that Hardy imagines. The phenomenological analysis of Hardy requires a social component, 'social class.' Hardy's obsession with detached and distanced observation is related to the distances established by class; the only access to a higher social position is through observation-as Jude observes Christminster, as Tess, — 538- undetected, observes Angel's comfortable clerical family, as the dying Giles Winterborne observes Grace. The centrality to Hardy of framed seeing is an aspect of his very drive to narrative itself, which seems to have depended from the first on the primary 'barrier,' class, the stability of which is always threatened by sexuality and ambition. The Poor Man and the Lady (1869?), Hardy's first (and lost) novel, is largely incorporated in 'An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress,' which hinges on a romance impeded by class difference. A remarkably large proportion of Hardy's novels play variations on the relation between romance and class. Even
The power of sexuality to level class distinctions is a recurrent motif of the novels, and Hardy's Jude-like ambitions make him and his male protagonists susceptible to every Arabella. If the Avice of The WellBeloved is endlessly elusive, Tess Durbeyfield is imagined with extraordinary sensuous particularity. The failures of touching in her novel are dramatized precisely as failures to honor Tess's physical nature, even by Tess herself. Here it is not a matter of a fantasy of the ideal (or 'pure') woman in the woman but of the woman who in spite of herself insists on her humanity; idealization is the disaster. (In this respect, the narrative plays out precisely the tension that distinguishes Hardy's art more generally. That is to say, writing-the medium itself-both protects the narrator from the catastrophes of sexuality and insists on its irresistible attractiveness; it celebrates the physical and its indulgence and at the same time distances it from the narrator while leaving his creatures subject to its power.)
Sexual desire requires as antidote restraint from touching. But the difficulties of this are suggested, perhaps with unintentional comedy, by the figure of Colonel DeStancy in A Laodicean, who has sworn off women entirely but who is overwhelmed with desire once he observes -539- the lovely but, for Hardy, characteristically elusive Paula Powers exercising in her gymnasium. For Hardy, writing and art are the protections against the inevitable cost of his own desires, the potential for absurdity or worse that he dramatizes in most of his novels. The patterns of frustration that so regularly constitute the motive force of Hardy's narratives combine a strong sense of sexual energy and a romantic fear of consummation. Few other novelists so ruthlessly deny consummation to pursuing lovers. While Cytherea Graye of Desperate Remedies (1871) is at last united with her lover, she is one of the rare ones in the Hardy canon. The novels depend on the pattern, sometimes almost symmetrical in its structuring, of pursuit and frustration, and they regularly refuse the expected climax in comic union that is characteristic of most earlier Victorian novels. The almost absurd pursuit across Europe of Paula Powers by George Somerset and Colonel DeStancy is only an obvious version of the characteristic Hardy frustration plot. Misunderstandings, misperceptions, and accidents of timing decisively deny lovers their opportunities for consummation.
The examples are everywhere. Elfride Swancourt in A Pair of Blue Eyes loses her first tepid love, Stephen Smith, is rejected, in the manner of Angel Clare, by Harry Knight, then marries a third party whom she doesn't love and dies before her two lovers can return to her. Christopher Julian, having pursued Ethelberta through the entire novel, fails by moments to stop her marriage to the degenerate Lord Mountclere; in Two on a Tower, Lady Constantine dies at the instant that Swithin St. Cleve, recovering from the shock of finding her looking so old, returns to fulfill his promise to marry her; in The Trumpet Major (1880), the more mature and faithful John Loveday ultimately loses his love, Anne Garland, to his unstable brother, Bob. In 'An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress,' Geraldine Allenville, after a novella full of diversions and denials, flees to her lover, Egbert Mayne, only to die just before their relationship can be consummated; Giles Winterborne watches over Grace Melbury and dies before she can return to him, precisely because of an obviously excessive sense of respectability and propriety. These kinds of
