consequence.
Hardy's sympathies are, finally, with the intensities of sexual passion, with the recklessness and the excesses that his prose never allows one to -552- forget for a moment and that his stories invariably punish with the forces of shame and convention. Just as Henchard's irrational energies both for restraint and for ambition mark him as doomed and irresistibly attractive as novelistic subject, so Tess's sexuality is honored by the text that kills her for it. Both move through their novels on the edge of advanced social standing; both, but particularly Tess, are trapped in the energies of sexuality. But for each, the primary narrative question is that of class. Ambition and sexuality threaten class hierarchies, so the migrant farm worker becomes mayor, the peasant girl marries a clergyman's son. Their dignity is in the integrity of their 'crimes,' their power to stand against the forces that will condemn them, the deep internal struggles that are made all the more difficult by the intensity of their passions as they try to internalize the conventions that will destroy them. When Tess finally succumbs to her passion for Angel, the narrative comments:
In reality she was drifting into acquiescence. Every see-saw of her breath, every wave of her blood, every pulse singing in her ears, was a voice that joined with nature in revolt against her scrupulousness. Reckless, inconsiderate acceptance of him; to close with him at the altar, revealing nothing, and chancing discovery; to snatch ripe pleasure before the iron teeth of pain could have time to shut upon her; that was what love counselled; and in almost a terror of ecstasy Tess divined that, despite her many months of lonely self-chastisement, wrestlings, communings, schemes to lead a future of austere isolation, love's counsel would prevail.
Tess bears in her own consciousness the narrator's constant imagination of the consequences of passion, even in the midst of passion-Hardy's persistent awareness of the disparity between «natural» law and human conventions, the inevitability of doom to any «reckless» acquiescence in the 'natural.' It is not only Tess's desire that drives this narrative, it is the desire of the narrator who knows too much. Clearly, there is no «guilt» in Tess's ultimate acquiescence, but there is the inevitability of shame and of the imposition upon her of society's demand that there should be guilt. At the denouement, Hardy characteristically reestablishes the perspective of distance and disengagement at the point at which society imposes its violent punishment for guiltless violation of its rules of respectability. The moments of violence-the deaths of Alec and of Tess-are presented through strategies of visual distancing: the widening red spot on the ceiling observed by the landlady of the house -553- at which Alec and Tess are staying; the remote prospect of the black flag that Angel and Liza-Lu observe from the top of the Great West Hill looking back at the town and the octagonal tower where Tess is executed. Such distancing here is particularly important because Angel and Liza-Lu represent another violation of the categories of class that proved so expensive to Tess.
Desperate Remedies, however extravagantly silly it may sometimes seem, anticipates much of Tess's story. The younger Cytherea succumbs, perhaps innocently, to Manston's approaches, as Tess does to Alec's; her false marriage to Manston can be taken to parallel Tess's false «marriage» to Alec; like Tess, Cytherea assumes that her false relation to Manston makes alliance with her true love, Edward Springrove, impossible, although there is no law, literal or figural, that bars the connection; and she keeps Springrove away even after it is clear that her marriage to Manston is invalid. While watching is a key element in the novel, the crucial fact about Cytherea is that, like Tess, she has fully internalized the social judgments, so that she herself does the watching. Interestingly, Hardy's first published novel tells that story twice, for Cytherea Aldclyffe, too, had been seduced by a false lover, and as a consequence left the man she truly loved, the younger Cytherea's father. Aldclyffe explains that she had done so because she knew that Mr. Graye, 'had he known her secret… would have cast her out.' Whether internally or externally, the judgment of the community is embedded in the revelations of observation, and these determine the directions of Hardy's narratives, which return obsessively to the questions of guilt, respectability, and class from the very beginning of his career.
They return again, yet further disenchanted, in Jude the Obscure, which completes my argument for the centrality of «seeing» in Hardy in part because it is so little concerned (for a Hardy novel) with seeing and in part because the window returns so significantly as a metaphor and a closing image. Yet distanced seeing initiates the narrative: Jude first sees the distant Christminster as a cluster of shining spots in the remote distance, then as 'a halo or glow-fog.' The imagination of Christminster, especially as the home of his former teacher, Phillotson, inspires Jude to dreams of learning and of the university life that goes with it. The dream of five thousand pounds a year (forty-five hundred for charity!) once again connects vision with questions of class.
While Jude's story is thus initiated in Hardyesque fashion, the novel is not preoccupied with watching and spying as is Desperate Remedies. -554- Nor does the narrator, with Hardy's usual gorgeous and moving concentration, focus on the visible world with a vital sense of the significance of apparently trivial details, like the insects caught in Tess's white gown; or the marks of social discrimination, as in Far from the Madding Crowd, where he notes the identifying signs of different agricultural laborers seeking employment: 'Carters and wagoners were distinguished by having a piece of whip-cord twisted around their hats; thatchers wore a fragment of woven straw; shepherds held their sheepcrooks in their hands'; or the casual intersection of different forms of life, as in A Pair of Blue Eyes, in which Stephen spies on the unaware Elfride and Knight, and Mrs. Jethway watches them both. There, the striking light of a match
gave birth to dancing leaf-shadows, stem-shadows, lustrous streaks, dots, sparkles, and threads of silver sheen of all imaginable variety and transience. It awakened gnats, which flew towards it, revealed shiny gossamer threads, disturbed earthworms. Stephen gave but little attention to these phenomena, and less time.
Jude, it is true, learns to resee Christminster after his rejection, to understand that he is part of the city that is invisible and that
his destiny lay not with [the ensemble of the city's unrivalled panorama], but among the manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he himself occupied, unrecognized as part of the city at all by its visitors and panegyrists, yet without whose denizens the hard readers could not read nor the high thinkers live.
Jude's narrative, pressing him irresistibly among the working class, turns him into an invisible man.
His novel moves, then, from distant seeing to touching, from an attempt to establish the position of unobserved observer to a frank confrontation with the consequences of physical engagement-from scholarship to the working class. Before the final window scenes, there are several other important ones, given over not to protected seeing, unobserved observing, or even to Cytherea's sort of vision of her father's death. Windows seem to exist in Jude not for the distancing protection they provide in many of the other novels, but as passages from vision to touch. In the scene of the trapped rabbit, both Jude and Sue, through different windows, hear the animal's scream. The sound and his own sensitivity to pain lead Jude to leave his room and to put the rabbit out of its agony. But they lead him also to Sue's window, where she, ready -555- to respond in the same way and aware of Jude's sensibilities, is half expecting him. As they speak through the window, 'she let go of the casement-stay and put her hand upon his, her moonlit face regarding him wistfully.' Jude kisses her hand, and at the close of the interview, 'in a moment of impulse,' Sue 'bent over the sill, and laid her face upon his hair, weeping, and then imprinting a scarcely perceptible little kiss upon the top of his head, withdrawing quickly so that he could not put his arms round her.' The window, in the end, serves to protect from full sexual consummation, but the yielding to 'impulse,' a deadly act in Hardy's fiction, has already violated the strategies of distanced perception Hardy and his characters consistently use elsewhere.
Even more extravagantly, the window is the scene of Sue's fullest expression of her revulsion from touch. Instinctively, when Phillotson unself-consciously enters the bedroom where he and his first wife had slept but where Sue, refusing to be touched by Phillotson, now sleeps, Sue springs from the bed, 'mounted upon the sill and leapt out.' The impervious screen of the window is penetrated in Jude. The window, rather than a place of self-conscious observation, becomes a place of unself-conscious yielding to impulse. Jude risks violating distance and shattering the barriers of class and the conventions of sexual respectability. The consequence is, in a way, played out in Sue's last scene with Phillotson-perhaps the climax in Hardy's work of his exploration of the consequences of failing to maintain distance-when she begs him to let her cross the threshold to his room. Phillotson leads her through the doorway, 'and lifting her bodily kissed her. A quick look of aversion passed over her face, but clenching her teeth she uttered no cry.'
