The Columbia History of the British Novel

information, stimulating them to desire. It opens the world to inspection but at the same time marks a separation that the observer often spends much of the narrative trying to overcome. It might be taken as a metaphor for -544- the characteristic Hardy method of narration, simultaneously engaging and distancing. The window, or some version of it that enhances or requires detached vision, is often the conduit through which energy and passion come to disrupt the lives of his protagonists. A complete list of «window» moments in Hardy would consume all the space available for this chapter. Here are some few examples: Colonel DeStancy in A Laodicean as he peers at Paula Powers during her gymnastics session; Angel Clare catching Tess unawares rising from sleep at a moment 'when a woman's soul is more incarnate than at any other time,' and spying the 'red interior' of her yawning mouth; Anne at the beginning of The Trumpet Major as she watches the troops from whom her lover is likely to be chosen enter the town; the barber Percomb spying on Marty South in The Woodlanders preparing his rape of the lock, or Winterborne overseeing and protecting Grace and in effect killing himself; Swithin St. Cleve in Two on a Tower gazing at the heavens through his telescope and feeling the nauseating reflex of their vastness; Farfrae watching Henchard at the mayor's banquet and entering the mayor's life fatally through the window; Knight, in A Pair of Blue Eyes, staring into the fossils' eyes as his life hangs quite literally in the balance; the remarkable window scene in Far from the Madding Crowd at the harvest home banquet, in which Bathsheba and then Boldwood are inside the window at the same table at which Gabriel Oak sits without.

The scene in Desperate Remedies in which Cytherea Graye watches her father fall to his death is one of those breathtaking moments that give weight to even the thinnest and most compromised of Hardy's fictions. Its handling anticipates the themes and strategies that characterize Hardy's career-long search for a proper perspective, narrative orientation, and social position. The very awkwardness of its introduction (an awkwardness familiar even in Hardy's more mature fiction) signals a moment of central significance. Cytherea 'unknowingly stood, as it were, upon the extreme posterior edge of a tract in her life, in which the real meaning of Taking Thought had never been known. It was the last hour of experience she ever enjoyed with a mind entirely free from a knowledge of that labyrinth into which she stepped immediately afterwards.' Like so many of Hardy's characters to follow, Cytherea 'unknowingly stood.' The narrator is deeply interested in that condition of unknowing that precedes self-consciousness about seeing or being seen. But the fall from innocence here is a fall without the traditional moral implications of intention and complicity. While the scene -545- registers literally the fall of her father to his death, it focuses more directly on the effects on Cytherea of what she accidentally sees, for which she is utterly unprepared. Cytherea falls, in that innocent moment of seeing, into knowledge, and, in particular, into knowledge of her own vulnerability to forces and observations over which she can have no control and for which she is not responsible. It is, assuredly, no accident that the fall is accompanied by a fall in social position, and henceforward it will be impossible for Cytherea ever to be unself-conscious about being observed or about her class status.

The sequence is written entirely from the outside so as to emphasize how things-and particularly Cytherea- appear. Just before the fall, the narrator pauses to talk about how Cytherea responds physically to emotion and thought: her eyes 'possessed the affectionate and liquid sparkle of loyalty and good faith,' they sparkle 'during pleasant doubt.' She gives an involuntary 'minute start,' and exerts 'ecstatic pressure' on the listener's arm when she tells a secret. The details suggest an observer who always knows more than Cytherea means to tell about herself, and a Cytherea consistently unwary and innocent, hence vulnerable to the detective eye. The narrator observes Cytherea with a calculated minuteness and particularity altogether distinct from the nature of her own observations as she, unprepared, «glances» out the window from the theater of the local entertainment she is attending. The interest is in observing her observing, and the strategy not only emphasizes her vulnerability by specific reference to her unpreparedness, but it dramatizes that vulnerability by the narrative self-consciousness of its own minute watching.

Cytherea's distance from the scene she in turn watches (which becomes the real 'local entertainment') leaves her powerless to do anything but observe. Vision gives her detective power but does not, as in the dominant scientific model of the moment, in any way empower her to affect what she sees; and what she sees is narrated in such a way as to parallel her own condition. Her father, an architect, is standing unselfconsciously on the scaffolding of a church spire with four workmen to whom he is giving directions. His focus is on their work and not on himself or his circumstances: 'One idea above all others was conveyed to the mind of a person on the ground by their aspect, namely, concentration of purpose: that they were indifferent to-even unconscious of-the distracted world beneath them, and all that moved upon it. They never looked off the scaffolding.' Here again is the dominant -546- Hardyesque motif. Like Cytherea and like most of Hardy's later protagonists, they are insufficiently aware of their own vulnerability and the precariousness of their positions. Everyone in Hardy is either being watched or in danger of it; as Cytherea is not conscious of the narrator's detailed observation of her, her father and the workmen are unaware of her watching them. In later Hardy, even those who are wary of being observed end by being observed from an unexpected quarter. As the opening window scene announces the dominant preoccupation of Hardy with the perils of observation, so later in Desperate Remedies there is an almost parodic parade of spiers who, in effect, demonstrate the impossibility of going unobserved, of maintaining full concealment. Each of the observers, except the professional, has a large stake in preserving a dishonorable secret that will sustain his or her position in society. Anne Seaway, rightly afraid for her life, observes the villainous and beautiful Manston (who, accidentally observing himself in the mirror, is precipitated into action). Carefully concealed from observation, she follows him to a room where he has hidden the body of his true wife whose place Anne is falsely taking; then Anne tries to flee, only to discover that there is another observer of Manston hiding there, a detective. She follows the as-yet-unidentified detective, who follows Manston, who is bearing the body of his wife. Anne then discovers that the man she is following is being followed by another woman (who, it develops, is Cytherea Aldclyffe): 'Intentness pervaded everything; Night herself seemed to have become a watcher.' The absurdity of the scene does nothing to diminish the centrality of its images or the tensions it creates. Night in Hardy is indeed 'a watcher.' But so too is Day. Everyone has something to hide; everyone will be exposed: Miss Aldclyffe is discovered; Manston's secret is revealed; the detective is himself caught and knocked out; Anne's participation in Manston's conspiracy is made clear to the detective. This mad and melodramatic scene is, in the end, only an extension of that obsession with watching-that fear of exposure, that preoccupation with perspectives, that almost desperate need to locate a position from which one might observe unobserved and thus preserve one's respectability and status-that is thematically initiated in the opening scene, in which Cytherea watches her father fall, and that is repeated (sometimes in scenes almost as absurd) throughout Hardy's later work.

In that scene, the ambiguous benefits of being an unobserved observer are intimated because Cytherea is entirely unobserved by those -547- she watches (although she too quickly becomes an object of observation). Distance and impossibility of interference are registered by the way her father and the workmen appear to Cytherea: they seem 'little larger than pigeons,' and they make 'their tiny movements with a soft, spirit-like silentness.' At the moment when her father turns his attention to 'a new stone they were lifting,' Cytherea for the first time begins to register alarm: ''Why does he stand like that? the young lady thought at length-up to that moment as listless and careless as one of the ancient Tarentines, who, on such an afternoon as this, watched from the Theatre the entry into their Harbour of a power that overturned the State.' The expansion of the casual moment to mythic proportions-another characteristic move of Hardy's-heavily emphasizes the way observation will casually and surprisingly lead to a turn in one's own fortunes over which one has no power but the power of seeing it happen. While one cannot affect what one sees, what one sees can and almost invariably does affect the observer. The surprises inherent in observation increase the arbitrariness that is notoriously characteristic of Hardy's worlds, an arbitrariness that grows from the unintentional crossing of two or several lines of entirely independent action.

While Cytherea begins to be aware of her father's danger-'it is so dangerous to be absent-minded up there'- she can do no more than think it before her father 'indecisively laid hold of one of the scaffoldpoles, as if to test its strength, then let it go and stepped back. In stepping, his foot slipped. An instant of doubling forward and sideways, and he reeled off into the air, immediately disappearing downwards.' All this is narrated from the distant vantage point of Cytherea and thus goes on in silence, with a casual ordinariness that magnifies the horror of the moment. And the prose diverts from what Cytherea cannot see-the actual death of her father-to her, as she rises in a 'convulsive movement. Her lips parted, and she gasped for breath. She could utter no sound.' Even the reaction of the audience in which she sits recapitulates the narrative strategies of the novelist and the sequence of the central event. 'One by one the people about her, unconscious of what had happened, turned their heads, and inquiry and alarm became visible upon their faces at the sight of the poor child. A moment longer, and she fell to the floor.' The