SOURCE: Grossman, Julie. “Thomas Hardy and the Role of Observer.” ELH 56, no. 3 (autumn 1989): 619-38.

[In the following essay, Grossman examines the observers in Hardy's novels and notes that the observer role is the key link between Hardy's narrative technique and the stories that unfold.]

A seer's spirit took possession of Elizabeth, impelling her to sit down by the fire and divine events so surely from data already her own that they could be held as witnessed.

—Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Elizabeth-Jane's observations are an extended metaphor for divining the truth. This “discerning silent witch” is Hardy's most objective observer; she propels the narrative with her keen insight.¹ Hardy likens her depth of vision to a diving power, suggesting that Elizabeth-Jane's peculiarity lies in her exemplary talent for observing things the way they really are. She is a perfect starting and ending point for a discussion of the importance in Hardy's characters observe other people tells us essential things about the way Hardy thinks that we operate in the world. The recurrence of the observer role, and its multiple versions, reveals not only how Hardy's characters act, but why they act. The implications of observation are psychological. Ultimately, the notion of observation is an integral part of Hardy's art, for, as the poet says of himself in a poem called “Afterward,” “He was one who had an eye for such mysteries.”²

It is at times difficult to understand the narrative technique in Hardy's novels. The point of view vacillates between his observers and an omniscient narrator. As I hope to show, there is an inextricable link between selective omniscience, where the voice enters into the minds of different characters, and what, unknown to them, these character's observations tells us about seeing and experience. It is my contention, indeed, that the observer role is the key link between Hardy's narrative technique and the stories that unfold.³ While critics have focused too much on inconsistencies in Hardy's use of point of view, it is nevertheless important to understand how Hardy incorporates the use of what we call Jamesian “reflectors” into a traditionally Victorian framework of narrative omniscience. Hardy's anticipation of a modern narrative technique goes along with a post-Victorian realism that, like James's, takes into account the psychological relationships between seeing and understanding, observation and meaning.

An examination of the observers in Hardy's novels will not only elucidate the link between observation and Hardy's realism but also help us to understand Elizabeth-Jane's critical role in The Mayor of Casterbridge. Because the distinction blurs between observer and observed, the landscape is not only colored by the consciousness of the observer, but the act of observation also invests a power in the looker to control, or alternatively, to explode the picture that he sees.⁴ The way the characters externalize this power separates the observer role into four categories: the objective observer, represented most appropriately by Elizabeth-Jane; “seeing” observers who profit from what they observe, represented by Gabriel Oak and Grace Melbury; voyeurs, represented by Boldwood, Giles, and perhaps Marty; and exploitative observers, represented by Troy, Fitzpiers, and Alec D'Urberville. Categories such as these are of course always in danger of collapse if they are applied too rigidly; their purpose here is to provide a framework for mapping out Hardy's exploration of observation as a paradigm for understanding.

I

With the curious exception of Elizabeth-Jane, whom I will return to later, there is usually some erotic content to scenes where Hardy's observers look at one another. Webster's defines a voyeur as “one whose sexual desire is concentrated upon seeing sex organs and sexual actsman unduly prying observer usually in search of sordid or scandalous sights.” This kind of sexual perversity in Far from the Madding Crowd and The Woodlanders seems to indicate sexual repression. Boldwood and Giles Winterborne do not entirely conform to the dictionary definition of a voyeur, but they do substitute observation for sexual activity. They cannot realize their sexual identities, and their own desires but those of Bathsheba and Grace as well. Neither Boldwood nor Giles really “sees” the woman he loves.

Troy and Fitzpiers represent another category of sexual aberration, the exploiters who not only look but successfully attain sexual gratification. Their observations are calculated toward the end of capturing their women, their prey. Gabriel Oak and Grace Melbury exemplify observers who really “see” and are also sexually aroused by what they see; Grace Melbury, however, lives in an ironic and antipastoral world (as compared with Gabriel's world) and thus the virtue of “seeing” in The Woodlanders is problematized. In Far from the Madding Crowd there is a clear difference between Gabriel's observation of Bathsheba on horseback and Troy's “peeping” at Bathsheba at the circus. The language describing Gabriel's vision of Bathsheba becomes alive with its “rays of male vision.”⁵ Gabriel pays homage to Bathsheba's beauty. His admiration is neither abnormal nor injurious; it merely expresses his attraction to her and foreshadows his patient waiting for her. His observations are thoughtful; what he sees represents a fair understanding of Bathsheba. He names her his “cold-hearted darling” (97), his objective acknowledgement of both her vanity and her allure placing him above Boldwood and Troy, the other male observers in the novel.

While Gabriel looks at Bathsheba's face and is “very regardful of its faintest changes” (173), Hardy tells us the following about Boldwood:

The farmer had never turned his head once, but with eyes fixed on the most advanced point along the road, passed as unconsciously and abstractedly as if Bathsheba and her charms were thin air.

(143)

Boldwood is by nature oblivious to the presence of women. When he does acknowledge Bathsheba's femininity, his perception of her is a striking contrast to Gabriel's perception of Bathsheba on horseback, which Hardy describes in sensuous language:

The girl, who wore no riding habit … dexterously dropped backward flat upon the pony's back, her head over its tail, her feet against its shoulders, and her eyes to the sky. The rapidity of her glide into this position was that of a kingfisher—its noiselessness that of a hawk.

(65)

Gabriel perceives her in evocative and poetic terms, which suggests not only his arousal but his awareness of his own desire. He is not a cooly “objective observer” like Elizabeth-Jane, whose observations as the controlling center of consciousness in The Mayor of Casterbridge do not generally have sexual implications. Gabriel's observations of Bathsheba suggest his sexual arousal; there is some sense of exploitative observation here, based on Bathsheba's “feel[ing] that Gabriel's espial had made her an indecorous woman without her own connivance” (69). But because Bathsheba is intuitively aware of her own attractiveness, her captivating performance on horseback is invitation to observe her. There is a psychological symbiosis between them rather than a purely sexual desire on Gabriel's part. Bathsheba feels violated, not sexually, but because, as J. Hillis Miller has noted, “Gabriel has been stealing from her that sovereignty over herself she has thought she has been enjoying in secrecy and security.”⁶ Only when Bathsheba is able to compromise her sovereignty will she and Gabriel be able to form a union based on love mutual respect.

Although Gabriel is aroused, it is important that he is also in this scene “amused” and “astonished.” This is one example of Gabriel's objective detachment, which enables him to enjoy fully and harmlessly Bathsheba's unconventional exhibition. His distance enables him to see Bathsheba clearly and consider his course based on what observation teaches him. In addition, his competence in assessing and dealing with natural disasters (the fire, the storm, the loss of his flock, the bloated sheep) represents the external complement to his competent insight into her nature.

If Gabriel's detached yet interested observation of Bathsheba reveals something of his moderation, Boldwood's detached observation represents his excessiveness. Boldwood's immediate obsession with Bathsheba indicates repressed emotions that explode at the slight provocation of a playful but misguided valentine. Boldwood's occasional observation of Bathsheba from a distance is awkward:

Boldwood looked at her—not slily, critically, or understandingly, but blankly at gaze, in the way a reaper looks up at a passing train—as something foreign to his element, and but dimly understood. He saw her black hair, her correct facial curves and profile, and the roundness of her chin and throat. He saw then the side of her eyelids, eyes and lashes, and the shape of her ear. Next he notices her figure, her skirt, and the very soles of her shoes.

(167)

Boldwood's repressed sexuality is manifest in the point of view that filters through the narration. He does not see Bathsheba as a whole. His vision is a striking contrast to Gabriel's vision of the gliding kingfisher. Here the object of vision is colored by Boldwood's unconscious. Confused, he grapples with what he observes. Boldwood catalogues her features and rejects her sexual allure by opting for a geometrical account of her femininity. In contrast to Gabriel's intuition and self-confidence, Boldwood doubts his own assessment: “Was she really beautiful?” he asks himself (168). Boldwood is a voyeur even though he becomes obsessed with Bathsheba from afar without ever really seeing her. “The great aids to idealization in love,” Hardy tells us, “were present here: occasional observation of her from a distance, and the absence of social intercourse with her—visual familiarity, oral strangeness” (175). Though Boldwood may not desire this, “visual familiarity” becomes the substitute for sexual fulfillment.

Boldwood's obsession with Bathsheba can be understood as a channel for his repressed sexuality. The danger of his repression is characterized by his dark abode: he lives in detached seclusion. Hardy gives a revealing account of how “the celibate would walk and meditate of an evening till the moon's rays streamed in through the cobwebbed windows, or total darkness enveloped the scene” (170). Boldwood's voyeurism symbolizes a substitution of perverse arousal characterized by obsession, distance, and darkness for natural sexual energy. In the chapter “Boldwood on Meditation—Regret,” Boldwood's voyeurism suggests again that his obsession with Bathsheba is an unconscious attempt to avoid his feared sexuality:

He was still in the road, and by moving on he hoped that neither would recognize that he had originally intended to enter the field. He passed by with an utter and overwhelming sensation of ignorance, shyness, and doubt. Perhaps in her manner there were signs that she wished to see him—perhaps not—he could not read a woman.

(173)

Boldwood's observations here suggest that his obsession precludes his having a relationship with Bathsheba. Though his actions and insistence imply that he wants her to accept his proposal, Boldwood's observations and the voyeur's distance he keeps from Bathsheba reveal an inability to confront Bathsheba's femininity and a repression of his desire for her. His exclusively voyeuristic relationship with Bathsheba reveals his inability to understand or to act upon his own desires, and because of this serious deficiency, Boldwood lacks the “seeing” power of Gabriel commands.

With Troy we get the first exploitative observer. Troy's “look” becomes symbolic of his real sexual power. Gabriel looks with goodhearted detachment; Boldwood looks with repressed curiosity; Troy looks with erotic mystery:

He looked hard into her eyes when she raised them for a moment; Bathsheba looked down again, for his gaze was too strong to be received point-blank with her own.

(215)

Troy, like Fitzpiers in The Woodlanders, can outstare anyone—a sign of his powerful desire to master the object he observes. Troy acts on his own deep sexual desire, and like Hardy's other sensualists (notably Alec D'Urberville and Fitzpiers), he fails to engage in a mutually giving loving relationship.⁷ By interpreting Bathsheba as an object, he invests himself with the power to exploit her. Gabriel's visions are realistic. Observation gives him a sober and positive education. Troy, as Hardy tells us, is impulsive and hedonistic. At the circus, the narrative describes Bathsheba through Troy's “peeping” eyes (403). Troy looks at this “Queen of the Tournament” (403) and is suddenly aroused by his own imaginative picture of her. “He had not expected her to exercise this power over him in the twinkling of an eye” (403). His erotic observation invests Bathsheba with an erotic power over him. She unconsciously manipulates Troy by her conversation with an unidentified man in the tent; she inspires in him a “sudden wish to go in, and claim her” (407). Bathsheba ostensibly charms Troy with her mysterious feminine allure, but his volatile sexuality absorbs this power so completely that he transforms her into an object for him to possess. At the circus, Troy's impulsiveness moves him to act on his sexual desires. He cuts the cloth of the tent to satisfy them, and what he sees arouses him further:

A warmth spread over his face … Troy took in the scene completely now … Troy found unexpected chords of feeling to be stirred again within him … She was handsome as ever and she was his.

(406-7)

Her power over him activates his imagined omnipotence. The language describing Boldwood's vision of Bathsheba is graphic in a geometrical sense, whereas Troy's vision is graphic as an expression of his lascivious fantasizing:

Troy scrutinized her cheek as lit by the candles, and watched each varying shade thereon, and the white shell-like sinuosities of her little ear … For yet another time he looked at the fair hand, and saw the pink finger-tips, and the blue veins of the wrist, encircled by a bracelet of coral chippings which she wore: how familiar it all was to him!

(407-9)

The attention to parts reminds us of Boldwood's fixation with Bathsheba's “correct facial curves.” But whereas Boldwood's attention to part is due to a repressed sexuality, Troy, the sensualist, is aroused by sensual details. His observation excites him enough to reclaim Bathsheba.

Troy treats Fanny and Bathsheba cruelly; in a Victorian moral context, he must be punished. Troy's death is followed by Boldwood's imprisonment; the exploitative sensualist and the repressed deviant are eliminated. Interestingly, Hardy symbolizes the final union of Bathsheba and Gabriel by giving Bathsheba the role of observer. Like Gabriel's, her looking is an affirmation that moves her destiny forward. She goes to Gabriel's house and observes him through the window. She sees him pray and, moved by his example, she goes to Fanny's coffin and emulates him:

The vision of Oak kneeling down that night recurred to her, and with the imitative instinct which animates women she seized upon the idea, resolved to kneel, and, if possible, pray. Gabriel had prayed; so would she.

(358)

“Seeing” engenders action and the “looks” motivated by goodness triumph.

II

In Far from the Madding Crowd, J. Hillis Miller's paradigm of the observer's “distance and desire” is resolved in the happy compromise between Bathsheba and Gabriel.⁸ In The Woodlanders, however, we get a different kind of compromise and pejorative variations on the role of observer. Edred Fitzpiers may be the most villainous of Hardy's characters, and Hardy subtly represents Fitzpiers' villainy through the doctor's deviant practice of secret observation. The most practiced of hidden observers, Fitzpiers is no more threatening than he is successful. This seems an appropriate evolution for the role of observer if we consider the sullen nature of the novel as a whole. In The Woodlander, the community bonds no longer vitalize; rather, Gabriel's world is a world where individuals are alienated from nature, and constrained and unconsoled by social conventions. Voyeurism becomes a way of representing a modern sense of detachment and unfulfilled desire. Moreover, in a world characterized by passive regard, langour, and paralysis, exploitative observation provides a model for success. Fitzpiers, though selfish, self-satisfied, and morally objectionable, becomes Hardy's hero.

In this late novel, the difference between active and passive observation becomes much more important. Fitzpiers acts on what he sees, but his incentive is instant gratification. Hardy acknowledges that this strong though reprehensible man is a survivor, complicating a simple, conventionally Victorian reading of supposedly unquestionable standards of moral conduct. There is a positive value in Fitzpiers's dogged determination to survive and to win back Grace, which he eventually does. Fitzpiers's perseverance wins out over Giles's well-intentioned paralysis. Giles's genuine love for Grace is not enough to bring on a happy resolution; he lacks the assertiveness to act on what he sees. Hardy's belief in Darwinian evolution, Daniel Schwarz persuasively claims, demand that “those with strong sexual desires and few scruples manipulate and prey upon the weak in the interests of their own emotional gratification,” although Hardy's manipulators, I would argue, are less available for judgment than Schwarz suggests.⁹ The happiness even of survivors is either impossible or seriously qualified. Indeed Fitzpiers's survival depends on his villainy. He is heroic by virtue of acting out his desire for self-gratification and sexual mastery. Grace survives, though her resignation to continuing her marriage with Fitzpiers is not quite consolatory, since she is aware that his infidelity will probably continue. The novel replaces the resolution and affirmation of Gabriel's world with the resignation and compromise of a Fitzpierian world where everybody is implicated in and affected by the secret observings of one another.

Grace's first look at a sleeping Fitzpiers, where silent watching gives way to an intensely climatic meeting of the eyes, adds a twist to the act of secret observation:

Approaching the chimney her back was to Fitzpiers, but she could see him in the glass. An indescribable thrill passed through her as she perceived that the eyes of the reflected image were open, gazing wonderingly at her. Under the curious unexpectedness of the sight she became as if spell-bound, almost powerless to turn her head and regard the original. However, by an effort she did turn, when there he lay asleep the same as before.¹⁰

The thrill Grace experiences as she watches the doctor is her imaginative exploration of the “specimen of creation altogether unusual in that locality” (175). She is at a safe enough distance to play with her own fantasies about the “mysterious influence of his state.” The mirror image of him accentuates the distance between them and the same time it displaces or distorts the original. Fitzpiers looks vulnerable in his sleep, but the illusion of his innocence is complicated by her sense that his eyes are open. This trick, this minor deception, foreshadows his gross deception of her later in the novel. Grace's sudden awareness that he is awake transforms the illusion of his harmlessness into the shocking sense of his power over her. Grace is now “spell-bound,” frozen by the play of Fitzpiers' eyes. She is, as Bethsheba was for Troy, the object of his desire and is fascinated by her own compulsion to remain still. Like Troy, Fitzpiers knows how to make good on his “looks.” Grace's innocent observation is overtaken by his mastery of the art. He quite insidiously pretends to be asleep, successfully acting out his role as the consummate exploitative observer.

Fitzpier's most characteristic scene of secret observation takes place in his room, as he watches passersby cross the swing gate. Fitzpiers plays the ironic observer, but his amused commentary on those who pass becomes lewd and viciously disengaged. He watches Suke Damson, the “hoydenish maiden of the hamlet” (198), “[rubbing] herself in the grass, cursing the while” (161), and ends his observation with a demonic “Ha! ha! ha!” He is able to translate his secret observations to action on “Old Midsummer Eve” when he amorously and successfully pursues Suke. That Fitzpiers is so excited by the act of pursuit is typical of the exploitative observer role: his fascination is in the distance between himself and his object; the power that propels him to act comes out of this distance. Not surprisingly, Fitzpiers loses interest in all three of his sexual objects (Felice, Suke, and Grace) once he has mastered them. Thus there is heavy irony in Grace's decision to take Fitzpiers back, effectively fueling his perverse cycle of seduction and abandonment.

Fitzpiers has a peculiar fixation with windows: “He walked from one window to another, and became aware that the most irksome of solitudes is not the solitude of remoteness, but that which is just outside desirable company” (174). It is this “just outside” position that satisfies Fitzpiers. When he watches Grace in the woods, it never occurs to him to identify himself: “The surgeon was quite shrouded from observation by the recessed shadow of the hurdle-screen, and there was no reason why he should move till the stranger had passed by” (189). Later in this scene, when Grace stirs up the embers of Fitzpiers's fire, a metaphor for his sexual arousal, he reveals himself: his “illumined face” (190) makes her scream just as his open eyes had immobilized her several scenes earlier. In both cases Fitzpiers's observations create the climate for Grace's submission through his having imagined mastering Grace as he lasciviously watcher her. Grace is overpowered: “He was actually supporting her with his arm as though under the impression that she was quite overcome and in danger of falling” (190). It is significant that here in the woods, in perfect contrast to Fitzpiers's powerfully erotic and inexorable stares, she tells him that “poor” Giles “had not much perseverance” (191).

Marty, another observer on the scene, watches two birds tumble into hot ashes beside her and sees an analog to Grace and Fitzpiers's disastrous relationship. She concludes ironically, “That's the end of what is called love” (192). But whereas her detached observation calls attention to her own sense of victimization, Giles's passive observation suggests his paralysis.¹¹ Like Boldwood, Giles is out of touch with his sexual identity. Consequently, he can do no more with Grace than exercise voyeurism. Though both Boldwood and Giles are sexually repressed, their voyeurisms symbolize different responses to repression. Where Boldwood substitutes the energy of obsession for sexual impulses, Giles never allows himself to become stimulated. He denies his own energies and escapes from sexuality (and from Grace) into the anxiety of unconscious passivity. Even his devoted righthand man, Creedle, criticizes Giles' passivity: “all lost—through your letting slip she that was once your own!” (229). And as Giles watches Grace in Sherton Abbas, Hardy adds ironically, “Meanwhile the passive cause of all this loss still regarded the scene” (229). Giles watches Grace from afar, but when she is right up close, he doesn't see her; she has to call to him three times before he responds. In an earlier scene, Giles calls to Grace from a tree, “thinking that she might not see him” (140). At first, Grace does not respond to Giles's feeble exhortations because she means to break things off with him for good. When, however, she realizes that she really wants to answer Giles's call, it is too late. He has given up. She gazes “straight up” to him but he responds in a very curious way:

While she stood out of observation Giles seemed to recognize her meaning; with a sudden start he worked on, climbing higher into the sky and cutting himself off more and more from all intercourse with the sublunary world. At last he had worked himself so high up the elm, and the mist had so thickened, that he could only just be discerned as a dark grey spot on the light grey zenith.

(140)

Three times Graces calls to him, but Giles hasn't the will to answer her. His initial observation of her aborted, he escapes his sexuality and chooses solitude. Unlike Gabriel, he cannot learn from or act on what he sees; unlike Fitzpiers, he cannot be aroused by what he sees; he simply climbs a tree. Immersing himself in a fog safely detached from what really matters. And Grace is left “lingeringly [gazing] up at his unconscious figure” (140). Giles is unaware of Grace's real presence; he doesn't “see” Grace just as Boldwood didn't “see” Bathsheba. Neither Giles nor Boldwood wants the woman he claims to love.

Passivity in these male characters seems to indicate confused sexual identities, and Hardy clearly censures Giles's inaction toward Grace. In his novels, it is better to do anything that to do nothing. The author interrupts the action here with one of his rhetorical comments: “Had Giles, instead of remaining still, immediately come down from the tree to her, would she have continued in that filial, acquiescent frame of mind which she had announced to him as final?” (141). Hardy strongly suggests that Grace was really asking for Giles to assert himself; the novelist tell us that

the probabilities are that something might have been done by the appearance of [Giles] on the ground beside Grace. But he continued motionless and silent in that gloomy Niflheim or fogland which involved him, and she proceeded on her way.

(141)

Giles is unable to fulfill either of their desires. He, like one in “that gloomy Niflheim,” will die unfulfilled amidst the mist and darkness. Fog, darkness, sleep, blindness: these are the metaphors for characters who are not conscious enough of their desires to act on them.¹² A man must work to find (to “see”) his path of destiny if he is ultimately to fulfill it.

Hardy makes a clear opposition between Fitzpiers's and Giles's fate, when together the men watch Grace draw her bedroom curtains. Though she simply draws the curtains, her action is labeled as “Grace's exhibition” (168). Like Bathsheba's exhibition on horseback, Grace's movement invites a response from each of her male observers. But while Fitzpiers recognizes the erotic possibilities of the scene (“She's charming, every inch of her!”), Giles represses his attraction and acquiesces passively, “So she is … But not for me” (167). Grace Melbury is caught between these two equally unsatisfactory lovers, as her observations of them indicate.

We have already seen how Fitzpiers's masterful lechery vitiates Grace's own observations. He renders her helpless. Late in the novel she again becomes a helpless observer, this time as a result of her desperate frustration with Giles. As Grace awaits word from her father on the possibility of a divorce from Fitzpiers, she observes, through the window, Giles working in the orchard fields. She is aware of his commitment to detachment: “she could see in his coming and going an air of determined abandonment of the whole prospect that lay in her direction” (351). Her distance from Giles then incites her desire. Giles unwittingly “could not have acted more seductively” (351). Grace is “tantalized” by watching Giles's physical competence as he works. Her imaginative impression of that competence obscures the fact of his deeper emotional incompetence. Grace loves Giles, but in her fruitless observation of him she is reduced to a curious combination of Giles's passivity and Fitzpiers's secret eroticism.

Grace's observation can also be seen as symbolic of the confusion between social propriety and individual desire. Grace is finally able to transcend the social boundaries when she exhorts Giles, “Come to me dearest! I don't mind what they say or what they think of us anymore” (375). Grace acknowledges her unconscious wishes, but Giles fails again to respond to Grace's call. Her observation is active but fruitless. In a deeply ironic world, we are all entangled by each other's “looks” and actions and “seeing” becomes, in a sense, irrelevant, or at least, unconnected to positive resolution. Her happy destiny has been forestalled by the perverse action and inaction of Fitzpiers and Giles respectively. Giles looks at Grace but cannot pursue her; his voyeurism deadens the plot. Fitzpiers looks at Grace and twice pursues her successfully; his observations insidiously further the plot. Neither technique of observation will affirmatively propel the lives of these characters.

In the final scene between Grace and Giles, her hidden observation of him is awkward; watching Giles through the window again, Grace sees him gazing vacantly at the revolving skinned carcass of rabbit, a fitting projection of his own destiny. Gabriel's observation acts as a positive fate-fulfilling homage to the woman he really “sees.” His union with Bathsheba is represented as one of mind and body. This kind of synthesis is unavailable in The Woodlanders. Gabriel's view is multifaceted, both desiring and objectively thoughtful, and it is sanctioned by Hardy. For Grace, positive, celebratory passion is deflated. Hardy's ironical postscript to failed love is to have Giles, formerly “Autumn's brother,” turned feeble and weary, tapping at his own window for morsels of food.

Fitzpiers and Grace's relationship survives, although their reunion is highly conditioned by everyone's conviction that he will continue to be unfaithful to her. Fitzpiers's secret leers suggest the darker side of the real world where exploitation works and “seeing” does not necessarily and aggressively fulfills it; this makes him a survivor. But if he uses Grace because of her sexual allure, he does not see her as a whole individual. Rather than recognizing the other in Grace, Fitzpiers treats her as an object, masterfully demonstrating the exploitative enterprise that will make him the model of success in a modern world.

III

In The Return of the Native, another novel indicative of the modern consciousness, observation is once more a key to understanding Hardy's characterization. In this novel, seeing represents again the power to understand and to create fruitful love relationships. Each character does his or her share of hidden observation, and the manner in which this is done (or how Hardy describes it) enables us to understand the psychology behind their destinies.

In the first scene, we see Eustacia Vye spying through a telescope. She is safely distanced from the object of her desire, creating a fertile ground for imagining a romance with Clym Yeobright: “She let her joyous eyes rest upon him without speaking, as some wondrous thing she had created out of chaos.”¹³ Eustacia's eyes represent her witch-like power to cast spells on what she observes. She imagines an enchanting picture of Clym and as the “sparks … [rise] into her dark pupils” (53), Hardy suggests the threat of uncontrolled passion in Eustacia's supernatural seeing power. While Eustacia envisions escape from the dreary heath through the worldly eyes of Clym, he proceeds as a man blind to the desires of the woman he claims to love. Clym's blindness to Eustacia's misery, once she learns that he has no plans to leave Egdon Heath, is foreshadowed by his mother's criticism that he must be “blind” to marry the volatile Eustacia. Blindness is finally actualized; he develops a “morbid sensibility to light” (194).

Clym is like Boldwood in his desire to live in a dark place. Like Boldwood, he lives in seclusion in order to escape his sexuality. Clym's comfort in adoring his mother (at the expense of “seeing” his wife) is a kind of asexuality which culminates in the end in his becoming a preacher. Like Giles Winterborne's retreat into the fog, Clym's blindness represents a powerlessness to assert his masculine sexuality with the woman to whom he commits himself. Giles gives up fighting for Grace, and Clym too becomes complacent enough to accept his blindness and “stick to my doom” (201). Clym's contentment in his furzecutting job mocks his prior idealistic dreams to educate the world, the goggles over his eyes a perfect costume for repression. His literal reduction of vision corresponds to his repressed awareness of Eustacia's desires.

Clym's retreat into priesthood is an ironic end to his originally high and progressive moral aims. Clym receives a second chance to claim a woman other than his mother, but he is impervious to Thomasin's attractiveness until it is too late. Clym is unaware that he has an adversary in Diggory Venn (he doesn't observe her blush when Venn appears) and Clym is reduced at last to voyeurism, watching Thomasin from the window. His final vocation carries a heavy dose of irony: his preaching is not a moral victory but a substitution for his failure to see or to understand Eustacia. Clym's conviction is inadequate: “I have made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid?” (307). There is a beautiful irony here, since it is Clym's blindness that brings him where he is, and Hardy's subtle commentary on Clym perfectly attests to the need to regard observation as a method of understanding: “it was well enough for a man to take to preaching who could not see to do anything else” (315, my emphasis).

Diggory Venn is probably closest to Elizabeth-Jane in his effective observation from a distance. They are both sexually low-charged. Venn is self-aware like Elizabeth-Jane, and in face Hardy calls them both “perspicacious.” Their perspicacity lies in the ability to calculate what kind of action best suits what they observe. Venn's clever eye enables him to spy on and ultimately to master Wildeve as the reddleman gives up his red dye for Wildeve's widow. Called a “Mephistophelian visitant,” the reddleman's sudden and timely appearances set him up as a disinterested deus ex machina—though he curiously becomes Thomasin's suitor.

Venn's sharpness is directly contrasted with Clym's dull vision: “Venn's keen eye had discerned what Yeobright's feeble vision had not—a man in the act of withdrawing from Eustacia's side” (208). This “keen” observation enables him to “reconnoiter” successfully and to incite the other players in a way which will resolve the action of the novel. Venn's sharp eyes connect him with Thomasin in that they both have the power to see and to survive in the Heath at night.

The power of observation, as Hardy records it, is wonderfully apparent in the looking-glass scene between Clym and Eustacia. Clym has just discovered that his mother had visited his house the night that she died. Although Clym slept through Mrs. Yeobright's rapping at the door, he supposes that Eustacia intentionally turned his mother away, thus causing her death. In this scene, Eustacia looks at her own reflection. She sees Clym's face in the glass and is frozen, just as Grace was frozen by the awareness that Fitzpiers was watching her look at him. But here Eustacia and Clym continue to look at each other through the glass and his “death-like pallor flew from his face to hers.” The intensity of Clym's anger and of Eustacia's fear is beautifully caught in this momentary exchange of glances, through a looking-glass that aptly locates a perversity in how they communicate. Eustacia rightly accuses Clym of deceiving her “by appearances, which are less seen through than words” (256). The two are ill matched; she falls in love with her own vision and he falls in love with his vision of her. She doesn't see Clym's passivity and he doesn't see Eustacia's passion. Thus when Eustacia observes the villagers' dance, her sensuality invests power in her observation and “she beheld Wildeve” (203).

In Return of the Native, there is a striking connection between hidden observation and how the plot and characters evolve. The novel is like a grand stage in a dream where characters appear and disappear by turns, looking secretly at and looking over the stage and each other. Masks and disguises abound. Simple light and simple darkness serve as indications of how clearly or confusedly the characters understand the nature of things.

IV

Elizabeth-Jane, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, is probably the closest to an observer who “sees” things as they really are. She is also probably the most perplexing of all Hardy's characters. Not only a gifted observer she is moved to act by what she sees. This, as we have seen, is an admirable quality for a Hardy character. But Elizabeth-Jane is also a very troubled young woman. The “crystalline sphere of a straightforward mind” (137) captures our interest because of her concurrent fragility. It is her vulnerability which makes her a hidden observer. Elizabeth-Jane's fear of yet again “tempting Providence to hurl … me down” (67) makes her keep her distance from others in the novel. But like Hardy, who professes to be detached from the action only to have his narrator interject with commentary, Elizabeth-Jane is in fact deeply involved with what happens. She is a sensitive character, subject to the pain of what she learns from her observations. She also, however, responds in an affirmative way to her thoughtfully considered observations. Elizabeth-Jane doesn't watch to gain sexual power as do real voyeurs. Rather, she has the low-charged insight and the strength against adversity that enable her to survive in Hardy's world.

Hardy attributes Elizabeth-Jane's observations to her “innate perceptiveness that was almost genius” (67). Elizabeth-Jane is acutely aware, however, of the cost of “seeing” clearly. To the extent that she is detached by her objectivity, she maintains her distance to shield herself from the “wreck of each day's wishes” (137) that she knows is inevitable. When she responds to her mother's letter by going to meet Farfrae at the granary, she hides from him, impelled “By some unaccountable shyness, some wish not to meet him there alone” (71). Elizabeth-Jane's sense of her vulnerability is apparent also in her reluctance to be “too gay”:

she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression.

(67)

Elizabeth-Jane builds a fortress of self-defense that makes her a survivor, but it also conceals from others the very sensitive woman beneath that “crystalline” exterior.

Elizabeth-Jane's rare asset and strength among Hardy's characters is her appreciation of irony. Irony represents the greatest distancing tool; it supports her self-defense and enables her to carry on with fortitude. Though Elizabeth-Jane goes unnoticed in the scene, she ironically observes the absurd theatrics of Farfrae's competition with Henchard over Lucetta: “How ridiculous of all three of them!” Her Hardyesque response to losing Farfrae is an ironic comment: She “wondered what unwished-for-thinking Heaven might send her in place of [Farfrae]” (137). So it is because she is out of the game that Elizabeth-Jane is able to observe circumstances with such perspicacity.

The criticism of Elizabeth-Jane's “emotional limitations” typifies certain critics' emphasis on her unwillingness or inability to “take full advantage of the opportunities for happiness which she now has.”¹⁴ This emphasis, I think, is misplaced. Perhaps the silence of her strength against adversity blinds us to what Elizabeth-Jane really has undergone, before and during the course of the novel: Her father is lost at sea; she and he mother are impoverished; her mother dies; her lover finds another; her stepfather discards her only after treating her alternately with cold indifference and captious criticism. She is treated as an object by not only Henchard, but by Lucetta and Farfrae as well. Learning of Henchard's distaste for Elizabeth-Jane, Lucetta decides that “Elizabeth-Jane would have to be got rid of—a disagreeable necessity” (119). Scenes later Lucetta resolves to use her as a “watch-dog” to lure Henchard back. It is no wonder that Elizabeth-Jane is well aware of a “sense of her own superfluity” (104). Farfrae's apparent unawareness of her love for him, his unconsciously callous agreement to let her remain in the house once he has married Lucetta, shows that he too is blind to Elizabeth-Jane's presence.

Elizabeth-Jane, like Grace Melbury and others, is the true Hardy heroine because she realistically accepts the had she is dealt, learns from what she observes, and acts accordingly. When she discovers that Lucetta has married Farfrae, out of pride, Elizabeth-Jane departs instantly. She leaves Henchard when he treats her badly. But whereas the exploiters, based on what they observe, act for immediate self-gratification, Elizabeth-Jane acts for humanity as well as her own pride. She races to protect Lucetta from the skimmity ride. She rushes to Jopp's house to care for Henchard when he is ill. After learning of Henchard's abject deception of her (denying her knowledge of her real father's existence), she turns Henchard away; it would be difficult to take seriously not only Elizabeth-Jane's strength but also her right to the central point of view in the novel if she didn't react emotionally to Henchard's betrayal. Nevertheless, “her heart softened towards the self-alienated man” (251). Though she knows that she probably should forget him, she goes in search of Henchard, responding to her intuitive drive to ameliorate the pain she knows he feels.

Elizabeth-Jane is ultimately the deal observer for Hardy. Observation and understanding become one, converging in thoughtful action. She, like Hardy, is a realist. Her last thoughts in the novel coincide with Hardy's, that the best we can achieve in this world is a “cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment, of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody not in positive pain” (255)

A final note here on the narrator's role as observer may help to draw some conclusion about Hardy's interest in observation. Hardy's myriad references to what “a spectator would have seen” or “a beholder might have felt” suggest a real self-consciousness about his presence on the scene. At the risk of committing the biographical fallacy, I would suggest that this acute sensitivity to the observer role relates to his upbringing. Michael Millgate describes Thomas Hardy, the boy, as a silent unnoticed observer. Millgate pays much attention to Hardy's emotional dependence on his family, particularly his mother, and how this adversely affected his relationship with his first wife Emma. More importantly, Millgate characterizes Hardy perfectly as J. Hillis Miller's model of a hero who looks only at what he cannot have. Millgate makes the point that Hardy's curious combination of passive observer and detached dreamer contributed to his narrative technique: “Distance enforced a more absolute dependence on memory and it could actually enhance the imaginative recovery of past scenes and emotions.”¹⁵ And yet one cannot help thinking that this paradigm of “distance and desire” too easily reduces the art of Hardy's narrative to a facile comment about his early life in Dorset. That is, when we consider the later development of novelistic techniques, particularly in James and Conrad, we begin to understand Hardy more as a vanguard figure in the development of the modern novel.

Hardy desired to make his narrator objective and detached in order to invest more depth in what and how his characters “saw.” The interjections of an omniscient narrator are, however, curious. They seem to thwart his intention to portray characters who retard or push forward their own destinies. The interruption of the self-propelling process the characters engage in may be partly explained by Hardy's own nature. He simultaneously desires to remain unnoticed and to play a part in the action. An observer's hidden presence on the scene invests a power (omniscience, at first) in the onlooker. When, however, that power produces fantasies about others (Bathsheba for Oak, Grace for Fitzpiers, Grace for Giles), the power is short circuited by a recognition that one must act. It is Hardy's impulse, then, to interject his statement of truth in order to guide the reader. This is a kind of narrative response to the educational value of observation. If at times these authorial presences are disconcerting, they provide insights that do not detract from the characters or the plot. Rather, they relate the character to the plot psychologically and entangle us further in what Ian Gregor calls the “Great Web” of Hardy's fiction.

Perhaps we should know what Hardy tells us without his interference. And yet, like the criticism of recurent coincidences in Hardy's fiction, these remarks fail to appreciate how interdependent these elements are. The relationship between observation and understanding is a perfect example of this interdependence. It is one way of describing Hardy's prescient amalgam of a Jamesian narrative technique and a Lawrencian breakdown of the distinctions between external reality and the human unconscious. Looking at the world, for Hardy, determines that world as much as if not more than looking is determined by that world. The painful paradox for Hardy is that to “see” is not only to understand, but to believe that insight and understanding are positive values. “Seeing,” then, is misplaced in a world ironically characterized as unintelligible. This constitutes the ultimate and yet the very realistic detachment in true observation. An Elizabeth-Jane or a Hardy, destined to understand the pain of understanding, is also destined to survive, forever paying homage to “the doubtful honor of a brief transit through a sorry world” (256).

Notes

1. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886; reprint, New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1977), 132. I cite further passages parenthetically in the text.

2. Thomas Hardy, “Afterwards,” in The Wessex Selection of Thomas Hardy's Poetry, ed. John and Errin Wain (London: Macmillan, 1978), 179.

3. See Ian Gregor's The Great Web (London: Faber and Faber, 1974). Gregor makes a connection between Hardy and Henry James and links Hardy's technique of observation to the “unfolding” of his stories:

   In Hardy, we find a notion of form, which resides in the structuring power itself, rather than in that which is structured, a sense of form seen not as a result, a shape, more a process, a direction, a verb rather than a noun. Where James finds his key term in structure, Hardy finds his in story.

   (40)

4. See Robert Langbaum's “Lawrence and Hardy,” Hardy Annual 3 (1985): 69-90. The blurring of distinction that I suggest here is analogous to Langbaum's view that Hardy's novels represent the “[dissolution of] the distinction between fate and the characters' individual unconsciousness” (90).

5. Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 67. I cite further passages parenthetically in the text.

6. J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), 124.

7. See Langbaum (note 4), 87-88.

8. See Miller (note 6).

9. Daniel Schwartz, “Beginnings and Endings in Hardy's Major Fiction,” in Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy, ed. Dale Kramer (London: Macmillan, 1979), 27.

10. Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (1887; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 176. I cite further passages parenthetically in the text.

11. See Mary Jacobus's “Tree and Machine,” in Kramer (note 9), 116-35. Jacobus correctly notes that Marty's “oblique presence is itself expressive of disjunction rather than relationship, making her less a particular than an observer throughout the novel; even her attempted interventions in the mechanics of the plot misfire as completely as Tim Tang's man-trap” (121).

12. If, as Dale Kramer tells us, Giles has a “strong sex drive” (14), this is either repressed or irrelevant, since a man must not only know what he wants but carefully observe what he sees in order to reconcile his desires with reality, as Gabriel does.

13. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (1878; reprint, New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1969), 49. I cite further passages parenthetically in the text.

14. Schwarz (note 9), 25; Miller, 154.

15. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1982), 187.