[In the following essay, Mitchell offers a poststructuralist approach to Hardy's fictional heroines, concluding that the feminist reader of Hardy will necessarily feel ambivalent about his representations of women.]

What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.

—Budd Boetticher, Hollywood director of B Westerns

The heroines of Hardy's early novels are presented primarily as objects of erotic interest not only for the narrators and for the male characters … but also for the implied reader/voyeur. … What they think or feel seems not to matter; the focus of attention is on the feelings they arouse in a variety of men.

—T. R. Wright, Hardy and the Erotic

How does a female reader—particularly a modern feminist reader—read Thomas Hardy? Does she applaud his feminism? Deplore his sexism? The question of Hardy's representation of women has perturbed literary critics since the turn of the century. Just as mainstream critics remain unsure about Hardy's formal virtuosity (citing him with equal conviction as both a great literary artist and a crass technical bungler), feminist critics seem undecided whether to accept Hardy with distaste or to reject him with reluctance. Like Hardy himself, many remain ambivalent; Katherine Rogers reaches the fairly typical conclusion that “These novels show the tenacity of sexist assumptions even in so humane and enlightened a man as Hardy.”¹ He is noted both for his revolutionary protests against social conventions that restrict women's freedom—Sue's repugnance for being “licensed to be loved on the premises” comes to mind—and for the blatantly sexist remarks that are scattered throughout his oeuvre like some kind of sexist graffiti. Hardy's feminism (or lack of it) can be assessed partly in the approach his inscribed reader is invited to take toward his strong, interesting female protagonists, particularly as they are visualized. The question bears reexamination, especially in light of recent feminist film theory: how is Hardy's reader encouraged to “see” his heroines?

Such theory has far-reaching implications for the study of nineteenth-century novels and their female readership, simply because traditional realist film inherited the narrative conventions of traditional realist fiction. Annette Kuhn, describing classic Hollywood cinema, remarks that “All films are coded: it is simply that certain types of film are coded in such a way as actually to seem uncoded. … This of course is one of the pleasures of the classic realist cinema: an address which draws the spectator in to the representation by constructing a credible and coherent cinematic world, which at the same time situates her or him as a passive consumer of meanings which seem to be already there in the text.”² The viewer of a Hollywood film and the reader of a Victorian novel, in other words, are in much the same viewing position, that of a “passive consumer” of the “obvious” meanings inherent in a seemingly uncoded fictional world.

Laura Mulvey's well-known article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” subjects this viewing position to a searching analysis. Mulvey discerns “three different looks associated with the cinema: that of the camera as it records the profilmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of each other within the screen illusion.”³ These positions have obvious parallels in those of the narrator, the reader and the characters of a novel. According to Mulvey, all three are constructed as male subjects, who together watch the woman, the sexual object. “Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on both sides of the screen” (419). In addition, Mulvey locates in the female figure “a deeper problem” for the male viewer. “She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure” (421). According to Mulvey, the male viewer responds to this unconscious anxiety by means of two strategies, namely voyeurism and fetishism. Voyeurism, the devaluation and subjection of the woman via the gaze, is associated with sadism (of a controlling male protagonist, with whom the cinema audience pleasurably identifies) and with narrative (“Sadism demands a story”). On the other hand fetishism, the overvaluation of a feared object so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous, “can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone” (422). This “fetishistic scopophilia” applies to moments of spectacle or iconicity in the film, moments in which the woman's visual presence draws attention to itself and “tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (419). Such moments, termed “extradiegetic” by film critics because they seem to lie outside the movement of the narrative, occur during close-ups or musical numbers in films, and in passages of description and portraiture in novels.

Is there any place in this scenario for the female spectator? According to Mary Ann Doane, a female viewer confronted with the classical Hollywood text has basically “two modes of entry: a narcissistic identification with the female figure as spectacle and a ‘transvestite’ identification with the active male hero. … The female spectator is thus imaged by its text as … a hermaphrodite. It is precisely this oscillation which demonstrates the instability of the woman's position as spectator. … The female spectator identifies doubly—with the subject and the object of the gaze.”⁴ In her “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’” Laura Mulvey speculates that the pleasure derived in this manner is an uneasy one: although the female spectator may secretly enjoy the “trans-sex identification” that has become second nature to her in Western culture, she also “may find herself so out of key with the pleasure on offer, with its ‘masculinisation,’ that the spell of fascination is broken.”⁵ This unstable, oscillating, bisexual subject position is also (interestingly) characteristic of the female novel reader; Doane's and Mulvey's observations are strikingly reminiscent of Jonathan Culler's well-known account of “Reading as a Woman”: “Reading as a woman is not necessarily what occurs when a woman reads: women can read, and have read, as men. … To ask a woman to read as a woman is in fact a double or divided request.”⁶

The dynamics of looking and reading that these theorists describe apply particularly well to a novelist like Hardy because of what Judith Bryant Wittenberg refers to as his “spectatorial narrator.”⁷ Hardy is undoubtedly one of the most scopophilic novelists in the nineteenth century, and his vivid visualizations of figures as well as landscapes contribute to his reputation as a representative of high realism (a designation that remains unaltered by his mythological/romantic tendencies). The pleasure derived from reading a Hardy novel comes primarily from its air of solid “reality”; like the audience of a realist film, the reader of a Hardy novel is encouraged to “escape” into the narrative, suspending all disbelief and all critical sense in favor of an avid interest in the characters and their world. Feminist critics have noted, however, that this world seems real, is recognizable, partly because it parallels the patriarchal world we know, especially in its tacit assumptions about gender. As Elaine Showalter points out, citing Irving Howe's analysis of The Mayor of Casterbridge, traditional criticism uncritically posits both a male narrator and a male reader of Hardy's novels. Howe's praise of the opening scenes of The Mayor [The Mayor of Casterbridge] runs as follows: “To shake loose from one's wife; to discard that drooping rag of a woman, … through the public sale of her body, as horses are sold at a fair; and thus to wrest, through sheer amoral wilfulness, a second chance out of life—it is with this stroke, so insidiously attractive to male fantasy, that The Mayor of Casterbridge begins.”⁸ Such a statement no doubt reveals more about Howe's fantasies than it does about Hardy's; nevertheless, Hardy's narrator does seem to share a male perspective with his implied reader. The gaze shared by these two entities, in particular, is ineluctably gendered, as I shall show, and looking is their predominant activity. The “vision” Hardy shares in this way is intensely personal, undoubtedly a contributing factor in the plethora of criticism extolling the reader's sense of “knowing” Hardy through his novels.

What makes Hardy's vision so personal, I would submit, is the eroticism that informs it, so that the relation that constantly applies is a literary recapitulation of the dynamic that occurs in representational visual art between a male artist and his viewer. Art critic Sarah Kent describes this dynamic as “a complex interaction … focused on the nudity of the female model. Intimacy is created through sexual rivalry—perhaps a sublimated form of homosexuality—in which the model appears to be the subject of the conversation when she is, in fact, only a form of currency in a male centred exchange.”⁹ Hardy's females are not literally nude, but they are similarly exposed to the shared gaze of an overtly male narrator and a projected male reader. The look these entities share is compounded of curiosity, longing, affection, fear, contempt and adoration; in short, it is the look of desire of a defensively alienated, ambivalent male. Many theorists have held that the male gaze at women in Western culture is always of this type, sight being an erotic perceptual mode eminently suited to the somatophobic male psyche. With its automatic distancing of subject from object, looking provides a position from which it is possible to “possess” a woman without having to deal with her “in the flesh.” The obsessive looking of pornography is an obvious instance of this, but all representations can be said to partake of such “safe” distancing between viewer and object. Helena Michie, in discussing Jocelyn Pierston's infatuation with women who are “copies” of each other in The Well-Beloved (an overt instance of such distancing), observes that “Eroticism lies in representation; a painting that stands for a woman, a woman that stands for another is a less direct and therefore a less terrifying confrontation of female sexuality.”¹⁰

The gaze, then, is supremely important in Hardy's novels, which readily translate into film. They are “cinematic” in every sense, as critics have noted in dozens of books and articles on vision and perspective in Hardy's work. In Hardy's case the fictional “eye” could easily be a camera, and the questions of whose eye it is and what it sees are easily answered: the eye is Hardy's own (he himself observed that “A writer … looks upon the world with his personal eyes” [Orel 110]), and what it mainly sees is women. It is no accident that there is so much spying, particularly in the early novels (Gabriel Oak's and the Reddleman's activities are obvious instances), or that the characters spied on are female. Gabriel spies on Bathsheba numerous times in the opening chapter of Far from the Madding Crowd, and while the erotic aspects of such looking are downplayed by touches of humor, the voyeuristic titillation these incidents afford is unmistakable: when Bathsheba looks in the mirror as Gabriel watches from behind the hedge, for instance, the narrator ingenuously remarks that “The change from the customary spot and necessary occasion of such an act—from the dressing hour in a bedroom to a time of travelling out of doors—lent to the idle deed a novelty it did not intrinsically possess” (1.5). “Novelty” here is obviously a Victorian euphemism for “eroticism,” as the “dressing hour in a bedroom” suggests. This is not what Mulvey would term a “scopophilic” scene, a cinematic close-up, but rather an event, an action, in the midst of which the voyeur “catches” the woman. In such instances, according to Mulvey, “Pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control, and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness” (422).

This is certainly the case in this instance, as the narrator casually makes the condemnatory remark that will cling to Bathsheba throughout the novel: “Woman's prescriptive infirmity had stalked into the sunlight” (1.5). It is the female character who is judged to be guilty (and guilty on the basis of her castrated sex—she is demonstrating woman's prescriptive infirmity), even though it is the male character who is conducting himself in a way that could be seen as morally questionable. This scene, and the others like it (such as Gabriel's spying on Bathsheba as she feeds the cows and as she does gymnastics on horseback), are characteristic examples of the viewing paradigm Mulvey describes, in which the male character, the male narrator and the male reader all engage in the activity of watching—and judging—a female character. Such looking is always erotic, and always implies power and control of the viewing subject over the viewed object. Nor is Hardy unaware of this dynamic; his narrator complacently observes that “Rays of male vision seem to have a tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural districts; she brushed hers with her hand, as if Gabriel had been irritating its pink surface by actual touch” (3.20). Gabriel does suffer some guilt—after he mentions her unconventional horseback riding to Bathsheba, he “withdraw[s] his … eyes from hers as suddenly as if he had been caught in a theft”—but the narrator makes it clear that it is his telling, rather than his looking, that is amiss (“His want of tact had deeply offended her—not by seeing what he could not help, but by letting her know that he had seen it” [3.21]). “What he could not help” is debatable, as Gabriel stations himself to watch for Bathsheba through the loophole in the wall of his hut rather than out in the open where she could have seen him; however, the important point is that the right of the male to observe and judge the female in this way is an unquestioned ideological “given” in Hardy's fictional ethos.

When the woman looks in Hardy's novels, on the other hand, she embodies no such power and control, nor does she participate in any such shared dynamic with the narrator and the reader. The male object of her gaze is not similarly objectified or eroticised, as he is in Charlotte Brontë's novels, for example (Jane Eyre confesses that “My eyes were drawn involuntarily to [Rochester's] face; … I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking—a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony”),¹¹ because Hardy's women characters do not function as erotic subjects even when they exercise the power of the gaze. Instead of identifying with such a character and sharing her point of view (a potential mode of entry for a female reader of Hardy), the reader again is invited to share the perspective of the male narrator, and to “look at her looking.” We watch Eustacia as she watches for Wildeve in The Return of the Native, for example, in the following way:

Far away down the valley the faint shine from the window of the inn still lasted on; and a few additional moments proved that the window, or what was within it, had more to do with the woman's sigh than had either her own actions or the scene immediately around. She lifted her left hand, which held a closed telescope. This she rapidly extended. … The handkerchief which had hooded her head was now a little thrown back, her face being somewhat elevated. A profile was visible against the dull monochrome of cloud around her; and it was as though side shadows from the features of Sappho and Mrs. Siddons had converged upwards from the tomb to form an image like neither but suggesting both.

(1.6.62)

Here we are given neither a description of the object of Eustacia's attention—the object, indeed, is “far away down the valley”—nor admittance to her perceptions; the scene is recounted, like so many scenes in Hardy's novels, from the viewpoint of an amorphous, anonymous narratorial “spectator.” Eustacia herself, by a deft adjustment of narrative focus (“The handkerchief which had hooded her head was now a little thrown back. … A profile was visible”) becomes the observed object, even though it is she who is doing the looking. Mary Ann Doane, in investigating the phenomenon of the woman's gaze in classical cinema, finds that such a scopic adjustment is a standard device in such scenes. The female gaze on the cinema screen, according to Doane, is typically “framed” in some way (by the use of mirrors, eyeglasses, etc.) in order “to contain an aberrant and excessive female sexuality. For framing is the film's preferred strategy when it wishes to simultaneously state and negate. … The male gaze erases that of the woman.”¹² Eustacia's telescope is just such a framing device, and it seems safe to conclude that Hardy's reasons for its use are similar to those of the filmmakers Doane describes.

The vision of Hardy's heroines thus constructed is at once intensely erotic and intensely personal, evoking a strong sense of “knowing” these women; but the character we really get to know in his novels, and to know very intimately, is Hardy. Tess, in particular, elicits this intimate response; there is no male spy as such in Tess of the d'Urbervilles simply because the voyeur in that novel is Hardy himself in the guise of the male narrator. “Voyeur,” however, is not precisely the correct term, as in Tess [Tess of the d'Urbervilles] the voyeuristic spying of the earlier novels is succeeded by Mulvey's “fetishistic scopophilia” in which “the powerful look of the male protagonist … is broken in favor of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylized and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film” (423). The look of desire in such films, according to Mulvey (she is referring specifically to Josef von Sternberg's films starring Marlene Dietrich), is unmediated because “The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see” (424).

As Kaja Silverman points out in her excellent account of figuration and subjectivity in Tess, the male viewer in Hardy's penultimate novel is similarly elided because he, too, “does not see.” Quoting the well-known passage describing Tess's lips (“To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such insistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow”), Silverman points out that though it is ostensibly Angel's gaze that is turned upon Tess, the passage is less an account of Angel's perceptions than “an ironic admonition” to a young man who obviously does not have “the least fire in him.” The admonition, of course, is given by the narrator himself, who is able to “see” Tess accurately and who is revealed to be “the speaking subject, the one whose desires structure our view of Tess.”¹³ This is confirmed by the next few sentences of the “lips” quotation: “Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called [Tess's lips] off-hand. But no—they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness” (24.92). Tess is clearly one of the most erotic novels of the Victorian period; Tess herself, however, by virtue of such obsessive narratorial “looking,” is a sexual object rather than a sexual subject, a sort of nineteenth-century Marilyn Monroe, so that a female reader can only identify with her by means of what Mary Ann Doane calls “a narcissistic identification with the female figure as spectacle.” Nor can the female reader identify with the actively fantasizing narrator, other than by an extreme act of vicarious “transvestite” empathy. That female readers have managed this perceptual feat so successfully for so long is simply evidence of Jonathan Culler's assertion that “Women can read, and have read, as men.”

To give him credit, Hardy did attempt to go beyond the scopophilic objectification of his female characters in his last novel, Jude the Obscure. As we might expect, Sue Bridehead commands a different sort of attention than Tess, both from the male characters in the novel and from the reader. More intellectual than Tess, she is an effective mouthpiece for much of Hardy's polemic; more importantly than this, her physical appearance, her status as an aesthetic and sexual object, is de-emphasized. Jude first notes that she is “so pretty,” but then he reflects that “He had been so caught by her influence that he had taken no count of her general mould and build. He remembered now that she was not a large figure, that she was light and slight, of the type dubbed elegant. That was about all he had seen. There was nothing statuesque in her; all was nervous motion. She was mobile, living, yet a painter might not have called her handsome or beautiful” (2.2.104-5). This rather vague account (rendered, however, from the point of view of a “painter”) is obviously very different from the sensual details of Tess's “mobile peony mouth,” her “arm, cold and damp … as a new-gathered mushroom” or the “stop'd-diapason note which her voice acquired when her heart was in her speech.” The concrete details we are given in connection with Sue tend to be “cute” (and safely diminutive) rather than voluptuous, such as her “little thumb stuck up by the stem of her sunshade,” which reappears at intervals in the novel. It is clear that she does not function solely as a female object in Jude [Jude the Obscure.]; and yet, curiously, the reader seems to have no readier access to Sue's consciousness than to that of Hardy's other female characters. The reason for this, I would submit, is that none of Hardy's heroines, including Sue, functions as a fictional subject.

This may seem like an absurd assertion, given the distinctive personalities of such characters as Bathsheba, Eustacia, Tess, and Sue; a close examination, however, reveals the subjectivity of these characters to be largely illusory, and the seeming absurdity to be a function of Hardy's persuasive realism. His female characters are seen almost exclusively from the outside, in terms of physical description, action and dialogue, a fact that has no doubt contributed to his reputation as a “balladeer” among novelists. Most of these characters, like Tess, are physically present in an immediate and very sensual way, which tends to obscure the fact that their point of view is explored only superficially. But Sue is also perceived from the outside rather than from the inside. We are never given access to her consciousness, so that she remains an enigma rather than a true subject. These elisions of female consciousness—which constitute another stumbling block to the female reader's appreciation of Hardy's novels—are at least partly a result of Hardy's consistent avoidance of the technical device of free indirect speech, a favored technique among nineteenth-century novelists and a key distinction between film and the novel. Even at crucial turns of the plot—points normally conductive to character revelation using this device—we are admitted only sketchily to the inner lives of his heroines. To illuminate the contrast between Hardy's handling of such moments and that of a more traditional Victorian novelist such as George Eliot, I would like to examine two passages of inner musing by two of their heroines who seem the most alike, Gwendolen Harleth and Eustacia Vye. In each passage the strong-willed heroine experiences a moment of disillusionment, Gwendolen when Herr Klesmer informs her of her lack of talent and Eustacia when she realizes that Clym is content to remain a furze cutter. After Herr Klesmer leaves, Eliot's narrator reports Gwendolen's state of mind in the following way:

The “indignities” that she might be visited with had no very definite form for her, but the mere association of anything called “indignity” with herself, roused a resentful alarm. And along with the vaguer images which were raised by those biting words, came the more precise conception of disagreeables which her experience enabled her to imagine. How could she take her mamma and the four sisters to London, if it were not possible for her to earn money at once? And as for submitting to be a protégée, and asking her mamma to submit with her to the humiliation of being supported by Miss Arrowpoint—that was as bad as being a governess; nay, worse; for suppose the end of all her study to be as worthless as Klesmer clearly expected it to be, the sense of favours received and never repaid, would embitter the miseries of disappointment. Klesmer doubtless had magnificent ideas about helping artists; but how could he know the feelings of ladies in such matters? It was all over: she had entertained a mistaken hope; and there was an end of it.¹⁴

This rather unremarkable passage is an utterly typical instance of how Eliot (as well as most of her contemporaries) handles the thought processes of the important characters in her novels. Writing before the “discovery” of the stream-of-consciousness novel, authors of realist novels tended to rely heavily on a “blend” of voices—the character's and the narrator's—to convey their characters' inner musings. This blend (labeled free indirect speech by formal critics) basically consists of a reporting of the character's thoughts in the narrator's voice, marked linguistically by the idiom, semantics and emotive punctuation of direct speech. In the above passage, for example, Gwendolen's thoughts are reported in ordinary indirect speech up to the sentence beginning, “How could she take her mamma and the four sisters to London,” after which point they are couched in free indirect speech, indicated by the questions (“how could he know the feelings of ladies?”), the vocabulary (“as bad as being a governess”; “Klesmer doubtless had magnificent ideas”), and the overall sense of despair evinced by the abrupt phraseology (“nay, worse”; “It was all over … ; and there was an end of it”). In such passages we are made aware not only of what the character is thinking and feeling but also of the narrator's opinion of such musings; in the above passage, for instance, Eliot's narrator (as she so often does with Gwendolen) stands aside with a sort of ironic pity. Overall, such passages yield freer and more intimate access to a character's consciousness than either ordinary direct speech (“‘How can I take my mamma and four sisters to London?’ thought Gwendolen”) or ordinary indirect speech (“Gwendolen wondered how she could take her mother and four sisters to London”).

Hardy tends to eschew this device in favor of precise and detailed descriptions of his female characters' physical qualities, an entirely different mode of “knowing” them. After Clym confesses to Eustacia that he intends to stay on Egdon Heath, for example, we are told that

When he was gone she rested her head upon her hands and said to herself, “Two wasted lives—his and mine. And I am come to this! Will it drive me out of my mind?”

She cast about for any possible course which offered the least improvement on the existing state of things, and could find none. She imagined how all those Budmouth ones who should learn what had become of her would say, “Look at the girl for whom nobody was good enough!” To Eustacia the situation seemed such a mockery of her hopes that death appeared the only door of relief if the satire of Heaven should go much further.

Suddenly she aroused herself and exclaimed, “But I'll shake it off. Yes, I will shake it off! No one shall know my suffering. I'll be bitterly merry, and ironically gay, and I'll laugh in derision! And I'll begin by going to this dance on the green.”

She ascended to her bedroom and dressed herself with scrupulous care. To an onlooker her beauty would have made her feelings almost seem reasonable. …

It was five in the afternoon when she came out from the house ready for her walk. There was material enough in the picture for twenty new conquests.

(4.3.305)

The contrast in technique between this and Eliot's passage is obvious. Eustacia's thoughts and feelings are conveyed either directly (“Two wasted lives—his and mine …”; “But I'll shake it off,”) or indirectly (“She cast about …”; “She imagined …”; “To Eustacia the situation seemed …”). Within the latter mode, there are no indications of Eustacia's emotions or vocabulary: “mockery of her hopes,” “door of relief” and “satire of Heaven” (the most emotive of these indirect utterances) sound unequivocally like the dispassionate, observing narrator. And “observe” is exactly what this narrator does, inviting the reader to do the same. The sentence “To an onlooker her beauty would have made her feelings almost seem reasonable” encompasses a characteristic Hardyesque shift of perspective, from Eustacia's point of view to that of an unspecified, unobtrusive “onlooker.” Such unobtrusive refocusing is a device that occurs with great regularity in Hardy's representations of women characters, reaching its culmination in Tess of the d'Urbervilles, in which, as Kaja Silverman points out, the unspecified “onlooker” is invoked again and again. From this anonymous vantage point the narrator is free to distance himself from Eustacia and also to objectify her (her feelings “almost seem reasonable” from this purely external viewpoint, for example). When she emerges from the house, this viewpoint is still operational and her objectification is complete: Eustacia has become a “picture” which can only be interpreted from the outside. The sentences that follow simply elaborate on the details of this picture (“The rebellious sadness that was rather too apparent when she sat indoors … was cloaked and softened by her outdoor attire … ; so that her face looked from its environment as from a cloud, with no noticeable lines of demarcation between flesh and clothes” [305-6]).

The shift is subtle, but what has happened in this passage is a typical alteration of Hardy's narrative focus, from Eustacia's internal musing to her external appearance. The solid physical details of this appearance, so carefully and elaborately constructed and so freely interpreted by the observing narrator (the “rebellious sadness” is such an interpretation), produce the effect of “knowing” the character intimately, obscuring the fact that the consciousness being explored in such passages is not that of the female character at all, but that of the male observer. Ironically, this richness of detail in Hardy's descriptions of women has in fact helped to earn him the reputation of a novelist who portrays female characters with great sensitivity. Feminist critics, however, have noted that these portrayals are primarily physical; Rosalind Miles points out that “Hardy really is a lover of women in the fullest physical sense. E. M. Forster remarked that Hardy conceived his novels from a great height, but his females are drawn from very close up; there is an almost myopic insistence upon the grain of their skin, and texture of hair. Sound, scent, mouth, cheeks, downy plumpness—no detail of their physical presence is allowed to escape our senses.”¹⁵ This detailed portraiture is myopic in more than just a physical sense, serving to distract the reader's attention from what would otherwise seem a glaring omission of female consciousness.

That male consciousness is not elided in this way is a telling comment on Hardy's patriarchal bias; Jude, for instance, muses at length during Sue's and Phillotson's wedding in the following way:

By the time they were half way on with the service he wished from his heart that he had not undertaken the business of giving her away. How could Sue have had the temerity to ask him to do it—a cruelty possibly to herself as well as to him? Women were different from men in such matters. Was it that they were, instead of more sensitive, as reputed, more callous, and less romantic; or were they more heroic? Or was Sue simply so perverse that she wilfully gave herself and him pain for the odd and mournful luxury of practising long-suffering in her own person, and of being touched with tender pity for him at having made him practise it? He could perceive that her face was nervously set.

(3.7.209)

Except for the first and last sentences, this passage consists entirely of Jude's free indirect speech—endorsed, in this case, by the male narrator. The perplexed questions, the mournful chagrin, are a skillful rendition of Jude's mental processes at this crucial turn of events. Sue's perceptions, by contrast, are hardly ever rendered in this mode, even when she is alone and pensive (as she is when she buys the statuary, for example). The reader, like Jude, is left to “interpret” her thoughts from her actions and her dialogue, a fact that undoubtedly has much to do with the mystery that has always surrounded her character in the copious amounts of criticism it has occasioned.

We can see, then, that Hardy seems at once peculiarly intimate with and peculiarly dissociated from his female characters, creating an authorial distance from them that seems too close physically and too remote in other ways. His unwillingness or inability to explore the consciousness of his heroines has led to much critical bafflement as readers try to deal with the enigmatic personalities Hardy thus presents them with. Tellingly, his creations include no Lucy Snowe, Maggie Tulliver, or Dorothea Brooke with whom the female reader can readily identify; as Rosalind Miles points out, “Hardy women seem different from one another—Bathsheba is mistress, Fanny is maid, Tess is rounded while Sue is slight—but on closer examination they all prove to originate from one prototype. And the prototype, in its visual aspects at least, tends to be invidiously sexist, a mysterious, unpredictable and alien entity called woman, a dangerous signifier admitting of endless scrutiny (Miles remarks that Hardy “saw women as dangerous simply in being, to themselves as well as to men”).¹⁶

An analysis of the scopic elements of Hardy's novels on its own, in fact, points to the conventional patriarchal perspective of the rigidly differentiated, ambivalent male toward the castrated, castrating female other—which is why Laura Mulvey's analysis of the conventional (male) audience of the realist film fits Hardy so well. The angle of vision is from outside the female (hence we are not given her perspective) and obsessed with the female (hence we are given minutely detailed, fetishistic portraits of her). The look that is thus brought into play—the male look of desire, of curiosity, of control—is especially evident in the unobtrusive “shifts” of narrative focus I have described, which inevitably culminate in what Judith Bryant Wittenberg calls the “voyeuristic moment” (“the moment in which the seeing subject and the seen object intersect in a diegetic node that both explicitly and implicitly suggests the way in which the world is constituted in and through the scopic drive”).¹⁷

Is there no answer, then, to my opening question? Can the enlightened female reader of the late twentieth century no longer read or enjoy Hardy's novels? And if she can enjoy them, what kinds of pleasure might they afford? Clearly the old pleasure of immersion in the realist text, the uncritical acceptance of a fictional precoded reality, is no longer possible for such a reader, just as it is no longer possible for the viewer of a realist film. Of her own analysis of the phallocentric viewing paradigm inherent in realist cinema, Laura Mulvey readily admits that “There is no doubt that this destroys the satisfaction, pleasure, and privilege of the ‘invisible guest,’ and highlights how film has depended on voyeuristic active/passive mechanisms. Women, whose image has continually been stolen and used for this end, cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with anything much more than sentimental regret” (428). This loss of pleasure, of course, comes as no surprise to the postmodern reader, who is abundantly aware that the ideological examination of realism—in any of the arts—inevitably entails such a close analysis of representational structures themselves. And the losses are more than offset by the gains of such a process, presumably, as the reader achieves a dispassionate critical distance from patriarchal novelistic forms. One possible pleasure Hardy's female reader can undoubtedly derive from his texts, then, is the sheerly intellectual satisfaction of unravelling the ideological ambiguities of her former somewhat blinkered enjoyment, an exercise that is particularly rewarding with an author like Hardy, whose novels can be seen as excellent examples of Myra Jehlen's point that “A work may be … quite wrong and even wrongheaded about life and politics and still an extremely successful rendering of its contrary vision.”¹⁸

Also, we need to remember that Hardy's “scopic economy” is only one (albeit an important) aspect of his narrative achievement. If we examine his novels from the point of view of their “narrative grammar,” for instance—a term Laura Mulvey uses in “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’”—they appear in a wholly different light. For although the gaze in Hardy's novels is relentlessly male, the narratives themselves invariably place a female character at the center of the action in precisely the same way that Mulvey describes in the “woman-orientated strand” of melodrama in classical cinema: “Introducing a woman as central to a story shifts its meanings, producing another kind of narrative discourse. … The landscape of action, although present, is not the dramatic core of the film's story, rather it is the interior drama of a girl caught between two conflicting desires. The conflicting desires … correspond closely with Freud's … oscillation between ‘passive’ femininity and regressive ‘masculinity.’ … Now the female presence as centre allows the story to be actually, overtly about sexuality. It is as though the narrational lens had zoomed in … to focus on the figure of the princess, waiting in the wings …, to ask ‘what does she want?’”¹⁹ These “two conflicting desires,” according to Mulvey, are represented by the heroine's choice between the law-abiding “hero” (who represents her passive, feminine, socially acceptable self) and the exciting “villain” (who represents her active, masculine, regressive self). Ultimately, neither of these choices is adequate, because “although the male characters personify [her] dilemma, it is their terms that make and finally break her,” and the heroine is “unable to settle or find a ‘femininity’ in which she and the male world can meet.” In other words, there is no place for such a heroine either in the hero's masculine symbolic or in the villain's phallic, regressive rebellion against it. Hardy's novels, interestingly, can also be viewed in this way, as the “narrative grammar” of many of them follows exactly the pattern Mulvey describes, with a central heroine (Bathsheba, Eustacia, Tess, Sue) caught between two potential partners, neither of whom is entirely satisfactory. And, like Mulvey's melodramas, such texts can be viewed as implicit protests against the cultural marginalisation of the feminine, opening up an empathic narrative position with which the female reader/spectator can comfortably and pleasurably align herself.

Hardy's female reader, therefore, will undoubtedly continue both to applaud his feminism and to deplore his sexism, sensing simultaneously in his novels their “narrative grammar,” which empathizes so deeply with the plight of the culturally marginalized female, and their “scopic economy,” in which male consciousness is explored subjectively while female consciousness is quietly and systematically elided. The tension between these two aspects of Hardy's representation of women, in fact, makes his work one of the richest and most complex sources of feminist commentary in the realist novel. It is no wonder that Hardy's novels perplex and fascinate his female reader, yielding a peculiarly ambivalent kind of pleasure. In their representation of women, they function both as indignant condemnations of the ideological atrocities of patriarchy, and—ironically, paradoxically—as formidable examples of such atrocities themselves.

Notes

1. Katherine Rogers, “Women in Thomas Hardy,” Centennial Review 19 (1975): 257.

2. Annette Kuhn, “Real Women,” in Feminist Criticism and Social Change, ed. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (New York: Methuen, 1985), 268. In this paper I use “realism” in the same broad, general sense that Mulvey uses it, to refer simply to “the codes and conventions … that articulate a flowing, homogeneous coherent fictional time, space and point of view” (“Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative and Historical Experience,” in Visual and Other Pleasures, ed. Laura Mulvey, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989, 164, originally published in Discourse in 1985).

3. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Women and the Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), 427, originally published in Screen in 1975, hereafter cited in the text.

4. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940's (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 19, 117. See also Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 142.

5. Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946),” in Visual and Other Pleasures, 29, 33.

6. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 49.

7. Judith Bryant Wittenberg, “Early Hardy Novels and the Fictional Eye,” Novel 16 (Winter 1983): 152.

8. Elaine Showalter, “The Unmanning of the Mayor of Casterbridge,” in Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (London: Macmillan, 1979), 102.

9. Sarah Kent, “Looking Back,” in Women's Images of Men, ed. Sarah Kent and Jacqueline Morreau (New York: Writers, 1985), 59-60.

10. Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 112.

11. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 203.

12. Doane, Desire to Desire, 100.

13. Kaja Silverman, “History, Figuration and Female Subjectivity in Tess of the d'Urbervilles,” Novel 18 (Fall 1984): 10-11.

14. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 224. Subsequent references are to this edition.

15. Rosalind Miles, “The Women of Wessex,” in The Novels of Thomas Hardy, ed. Anne Smith (London: Vision, 1979), 31.

16. Ibid., 28, 27.

17. Wittenberg, “Early Hardy Novels,” 151.

18. Myra Jehlen, “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism,” in The “Signs” Reader: Women, Gender, and Scholarship, ed. Elizabeth Abel and Emily Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 192.

19. Mulvey, “Afterthoughts,” 35.