SOURCE: Shumaker, Jeanette Roberts. “Abjection and Degeneration in Thomas Hardy's ‘Barbara of the House of Grebe.’” College Literature 26, no. 2 (spring 1999): 1-17.

Thomas Hardy's Gothic tale, “Barbara of the House of Grebe” (1891), dramatizes the horrid consequences of belief in the Victorian myth of degeneration. Only months after writing Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Hardy creates another tragedy in the less well-known “Barbara”; this time tragedy stems from dread of the lower class and of sexually assertive women of any class.¹ The theory of degeneration situates the hatred of the working class and women seen in “Barbara” within the pseudo-scientific debates of the late-Victorian era. Hardy shows how belief in the myth of degeneration could ruin relationships and lives.

Recent studies of degenerationism in history and literature do not discuss Hardy's short stories, but their ideas illuminate “Barbara.” Degenerationism posited that groups such as the urban poor, the insane, prostitutes, criminals, and homosexuals adapted to immoral, polluted cities by taking on characteristics of their environment; as a result, they became physically stunted and mentally depraved. Degenerates were thought to pass on their flaws to their children through a kind of Lamarckian evolution that increased aberrations with each succeeding generation. Facial and bodily deformities might be warnings of degeneracy. But the most dangerous degenerates carried no marks: these decadent artists and writers might seem free from any “taint,” helping them to spread their degenerate thinking to the general population through their works (Spackman 1989, 9).² Like a disease, degeneracy was thought to be gradually spreading through late-Victorian societies, imperiling their future. Protection of “the race” against decadence was sought through the ostracism of those who weren't respectable, as well as through vigilance about literature and art.

In the 1850s, French psychiatrist Benedict-Augustin Morel developed the theory of degeneration to explain cretinism. An Italian follower of Morel, Cesare Lombroso, applied degenerationism to criminals in a widely read book (Pick 1989, 178-79). Lombroso argued that the “born criminal” is an atavistic throwback to an earlier, more vicious type of human (Hurley 1996, 93); in a later book, Lombroso drew on other studies written from a degeneratist perspective, linking the prostitute to the Hottentot woman as atavistic types (Gilman 1985, 98). Racism, classism, and sexism intertwined in studies such as Lombroso's: “For the colonial mentality that sees ‘natives’ as needing control easily shifts that concern to the woman, in particular the prostitute caste” (Gilman 1985, 107). While degenerationism rationalized imperialism, scientific theory helped sell degenerationism to the educated classes. Evolutionary theory, physics, and medicine suggested models of entropy that made degenerationism seem plausible to Victorians (Hurley 1996, 65).

Increasingly, degenerationism made sense to the affluent as there was “a growing sense in the last decades of the century of a lack of synchrony between the rhetoric of progress, the confident prediction by the apostles of laissez-faire of ever-increasing prosperity and wealth, and the facts … of poverty and degradation at the heart of ever richer empires” (Greenslade 1994, 15).³ In the 1880s, English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley argued that modern Britain was oscillating between progress and decadence; its development might end up being either regenerative or degenerative (Pick 1989, 209; Hurley 1996, 66). If crowding in cities continued to spread moral and physical degeneration throughout the population, British society might decay rather than evolve. Maudsley popularized degenerationism for middle-class readers by associating it with both common sense and typical fears (Arata 1996, 16). Through the myth of degeneration, “the conventional and respectable classes could justify and articulate their hostility against the deviant, the diseased, and the subversive” (Greenslade 1994, 2). No longer would the respectable need to feel guilty about the misery of the urban poor. In other words, degenerationism explained poverty and crime in a supposedly scientific manner rather than as ethical problems needing redress (Pick 1989, 10).

Nevertheless, degenerationism was used to justify a variety of middle-class responses to social problems, including philanthropy (Arata 1996, 17). However, the affluent most often used degenerationism to prove that mass democracy and particularly socialism were dangerous (Pick 1989, 218). Dread of democracy and socialism grew from memories of a century of riots and revolutions in Britain, Europe, and America. It was feared that in the future, widespread degeneracy might lead to mob rule under the guise of democracy or socialism, destroying the middle and upper classes.

Widely translated books about degeneration such as Max Nordau's drew heavily upon nineteenth-century literature for examples of degenerates, including aesthetes (Arata 1996, 28-9). Nordau's ideas about fictional degenerates were then used by London journalists, for example, to explain the accusations of homosexuality against Oscar Wilde (Arata 1996, 3). As for fiction itself, degenerationism influenced novelists such as Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling (Arata 1996, 13), Bram Stoker and Robert Louis Stevenson (Hurley 1996, 30), and Emile Zola (Pick 1989, 4). Degenerative motifs appear most commonly in Gothic novels, as degenerationism “is a ‘gothic’ discourse, and as such is a crucial imaginative and narrative source for the fin-de-siecle Gothic” (Hurley 1996, 65). In the case of “Barbara,” degenerationism is an imaginative source for Hardy's treatment of disfigurement and wife abuse.

ABJECTION

The popularity of degenerationism during Hardy's era can be explained ahistorically as well as historically. Abjection explains the appeal of degenerationism from the ahistorical perspective of psychoanalysis. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection describes the abject as “the not-I” (Kristeva 1982, 2). The abject is associated with moral and physical decline as well as with death. Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection explains racial, class, gender, national, and religious hatreds that recur throughout history in new guises. Degenerationism is one manifestation of the tendency to label “others” as abject; degenerationism was used by some well-heeled Victorians to justify acting upon their hatred of those whom they saw as abject.

Using the developmental perspective that characterizes psychoanalytic approaches like Kristeva's, we can see abjection as a lifelong process. Abjection appears early in human development, as the child struggles to create a sense of identity in the face of his or her fear of death. Repulsion towards the mother as nauseatingly linked to decay and death motivates the child's rejection of her. Her exclusion lets the child deny the threat of death, and it fosters the child's narcissism (Kristeva 1982, 13). Labeling the mother as abjectly “other” helps the child erect a sense of self in spite of his or her dread of death. Throughout the human lifespan, the danger to the psyche posed by awareness of death continues to be dealt with through projecting the abject onto a variety of “others.”

Kristeva observes that “There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (1982, 1). As the potential for decay exists “inside” of the body, bodily fluids, taboo foods, and sexual acts are sometimes viewed as abject; so are symbols of moral decay such as sins. Marginalized groups, too, are labeled abject since they threaten contagion from “outside.” Such groups may include women, the homeless, the disabled, and Jews. What or who is labeled abject varies according to the prejudices of those who project the abject onto the “other” to suppress recognition of it inside themselves. Despite the variability of regarding what is categorized as abject, the process of labeling the “other” as abject is both universal and ancient, according to Kristeva.

Hardy's story can be understood through considering the intersection between abjection and degenerationism. Both degenerationism and abjection marginalize “others” to build up the confidence of the fortunate (Hurley 1996, 79). In addition, abjection involves revulsion against that which one associates with decay. In late-Victorian England, the decay that triggers the abjective response takes the forms of moral and physical degeneracy. In Hardy's “Barbara,” the abject degenerates are working-class men and upper-class women by turns, as classism and then sexism fortified by belief in degenerationism are critiqued.

THE DEGENERATE WORKING CLASS HERO

“Barbara” is set late in the eighteenth century. Handsome yet poor, Edmond Willowes elopes with a young aristocrat, Barbara Grebe. Barbara's parents had been pressing her to marry rich Lord Uplandtowers; she runs away with Edmond to escape their arguments. But after several weeks of marriage, Barbara begins to regret the match when she grasps its cost in social terms: her friends greet her coldly now that she is the wife of a nobody. At this point Barbara's disgruntled parents forgive the couple and then send Edmond abroad, as though sensitive to Barbara's growing ambivalence towards him.⁴ Barbara guiltily hides her snobbery towards her absent husband for over a year until Edmond is maimed while saving strangers from a fire in Italy. His severe disfigurement horrifies Barbara, causing her to reject him.

Barbara had married Edmond because of his exceptional beauty; once accustomed to that loveliness after marriage, she began to search for the revolting qualities that her prejudices tell her he must have as a working man. Those “low” qualities would give her an excuse for distancing herself from him to avoid “contamination” by his degeneracy. “The biologising of class differences was encouraged by the fear of contagion and infection” (Greenslade 1994, 22). Barbara responds to the maimed Edmond as though she fears “catching” his ugliness like a cold—ugliness that symbolizes his low status that she has already “caught,” to a certain extent, as his wife.

Barbara's overreaction to Edmond's disfigurement implies that, as an aristocrat, she had secretly attributed dreaded qualities to Edmond for a long time. Her gradual revulsion is implied through the narrator's mocking description of her declining interest in Edmond after their wedding, and later through her lack of interest in his affectionate letters from Europe. Edmond's disfigurement increases her distaste as his looks prove that her doubts about him are correct. Persecuting groups tend to attribute to their objects of hatred “disabilities and deformities that would reinforce the polarization against the victim, were they real” (Girard 1986, 18).⁵ In Barbara's mind, Edmond's repulsive origins are what scar his once lovely face; she projects abjection and degeneracy upon him—poverty, loathsomeness, and death. Barbara “had just that same sense of dismay and fearfulness that she would have had in the presence of an apparition … he was metamorphosed to a specimen of another species” (Hardy 1928, 556). Maimed, Edmond is an “apparition” indeed: Barbara's fear that he is a monster has come true. To Barbara, Edmond was of “another species” in the sense of belonging to Disraeli's other, impoverished England even before his accident. As the narrator reminds us at the story's end, Barbara refuses to see that Edmond's nobility of spirit, if not of birth, has been proven by his heroism during the fire. Sadly, his disfigurement causes her to project her fears about the degenerate working class onto him to the point of self-deceit about his character.

For the affluent, degenerationism “offered a displacement and transference of guilt” (Greenslade 1994, 2). By regarding the disfigured Edmond as a degenerate, Barbara transfers her guilt about her dissatisfaction with their marriage onto him. She need not feel guilty about loathing him if his repulsive looks prove that he actually is unworthy of her. During their last interview, Edmond reinforces her opinion by acting as though he agrees with her transference of blame onto him.

In her pitilessness, Barbara denies the implications for herself of Edmond's abjection as a supposed degenerate. To see this truth, Barbara would have to recognize the presence of the abject within herself, rather than projecting it onto Edmond. When one sees abjection inside oneself, one knows that “all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded” (Kristeva 1982, 5). Barbara is afraid to see an inherent lack or vulnerability in herself, so she cannot accept the embodiment of it in her mutilated husband. Tied to a husband, who signifies entropy and death, she fears that they will take her over. Abjection and the abject are “safeguards” against such fears, that, if acknowledged, may “annihilate” the self (Kristeva 1982, 2). “These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty” (Kristeva 1982, 3). Edmond's burns disrupt the border between the inside and outside of his body, showing his skeleton. This makes him symbolize the erupting bodily fluids that signify the dedifferentiation of death. Kristeva describes the significance of broken skin such as Edmond's as “It is as if the skin, a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one's ‘own and clean self’” (1982, 53). In seeing Edmond as abjectly degenerate, Barbara refuses to accept that the entropy which she associates with the lower orders will erupt from her too at some unpredictable moment; she avoids seeing that all humans of every class must degenerate into the abject through accident, deprivation, disease, aging, or death.

BARBARA AS ART COLLECTOR, EDMOND AS AESTHETIC OBJECT

Upon his arrival in Italy, Edmond had ordered that a statue of him be made for Barbara. At that time, he gloried in being an admired aesthetic object. After the fire, his depression over losing his looks heightens when he realizes that Barbara valued him for his beauty alone. Edmond had taken a traditional “feminine” position that he comes to regret: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves” (Berger 1972, 47). What this says about women applies to Edmond too, as the subservient spouse in a cross-class marriage that feminizes him. After the fire, Edmond says to Barbara, “Can you bear such a thing of the charnel-house near you? … Your Adonis, your matchless man, has come to this!” (Hardy 1928, 556). Infected by Barbara's prejudice that ties the worth of a working-class husband to beauty, Edmond can't see his own value as a self-sacrificing, scarred hero.

Like the stereotypical upper-class male of her time (and others), Barbara possesses a sense of the erotic that rests on beauty. That is how her class and gender prejudices intersect, causing her to feminize her working-class husband. Barbara's shallowness in desiring a gorgeous consort is consistent with her youth and her babyish facial features that the narrator describes more than once. As the narrator points out, perhaps Barbara's emphasis on a lover's beauty is not that different from how most of us feel; perhaps we would act as cruelly as she does towards a newly ugly spouse whom we hadn't seen for over a year (Hardy 1891, 552). In Tales of Love, Kristeva writes, “As soon as the other appears different from myself, it becomes alien, repelled, repugnant, abject—hated” (Kristeva 1987, 222). Hardy dramatizes this process of alienation through the burns that ruin Edmond's face, justifying Barbara's sense that he has always been inadequate.

Years later, when Barbara worships Edmond's statue after marrying Uplandtowers, she compensates for her guilt about having rejected Edmond the living man as abjectly degenerate. Early in her marriage to Edmond, Barbara's guilt had been about her repugnance at her husband's “low” ancestry, but after his accident, it is additionally about her looks and health being much better than his. Her guilt intensifies when, after her remarriage, she finds out that Edmond had been as unhappy after their separation as she had feared, and had died lonely and ill years previously. At that point, his naked statue arrives and her obsession with it starts, perhaps as a result of survivor guilt.

What is unusual is that Barbara is a female aristocrat who collects a male art nude. One reason that Uplandtowers is angry at Barbara's infatuation with Edmond's statue is that she has dared to usurp the aristocratic male position of collector of erotic art. Whereas upper-class men could buy beautiful prostitutes, upper-class women had no such option, nor were they thought to need it. Barbara's possession of Edmond the beautiful man and then of his lovely statue can be seen as extensions of the sexual prerogatives of the upper class male of which Uplandtowers feels robbed.

Usually, nineteenth-century art nudes had provided a way for rich men to objectify and own lower-class women. In such representations of naked women, “the subject is aware of being seen by a spectator” for his pleasure (Berger 1972, 49). This representation creates the reassuring illusion that working-class women like to be dominated by upper-class men. Hardy's story transposes genders, yet otherwise adheres to such a representation.⁶ Edmond presumably had hoped that Barbara's love would be solidified through the pleasure of gazing at his statue and imagining that he gazed back in approval of her ownership of him.⁷

But it is not simply Barbara's ambition to experience “masculine” privileges that underlies her obsession with Edmond's statue. Her attachment to the statue is a way to compensate for the lovelessness of her marriage to Uplandtowers: “The Pygmalion-like episode of the statue suggests that an ideal aesthetic image is preferred to a living body, or to the quotidian banality of sexual intercourse” (Ebbatson 1993, 93). That sex with Uplandtowers is not quotidian, but threatening, is suggested by Barbara's fear of him. She can control the statue of her first husband in a way that she cannot control Upland-towers; Barbara is freer to feel sexual pleasure through contemplation of the statue than in the arms of her living husband.

Also pertinent to explaining the statue's appeal for Barbara is the idea that “To seduce is to die as reality and reconstruct oneself as illusion” (Baudrillard 1979, 69). That is what happens when Edmond dies and Barbara replaces him with his perfect image. Edmond's image seduces her as his living beauty once did until it began to become too familiar through marriage. Barbara takes the voyeuristic experience of art ownership to an extreme when she repeatedly kisses Edmond's statue. Reflecting upon the statue, Barbara can revel in her pleasure over her former husband's beauty without having to think about his significance as an abject member of the working class.

It appears that, for Barbara, fixity is the statue's greatest appeal—a permanence available only to art objects such as John Keats's Grecian urn. Such fixity counteracts the horrible inevitability of Barbara's own decline into death that Edmond's disfigurement had conveyed. The statue's seeming invulnerability to decay reassures Barbara that she is safe from mortality's depredations.

Through her macabre interest in the image of a dead spouse, Barbara recalls the duke in Robert Browning's “My Last Duchess.” Though Barbara does not kill her spouse directly as the duke does, she does so indirectly by causing that depression which, combined with Edmond's burns, makes him susceptible to death from a slight illness. Both the duke and Barbara thrive on control of their spouses. This means control of the duchess's manner in the duke's case, and of Edmond's looks and demeanor in Barbara's. Such absolute control of a spouse cannot be achieved in life; it is only achievable through manipulating artistic representations of the deceased spouse. Ironically, both the duke and Barbara are much happier in their relationships with images of the dead than they were with their living spouses. Browning's and Hardy's analyses of such relationships reveal the murderous sterility of aristocrats' need for control.⁸

Hardy questions what collecting art means not only for the highborn, but for the middle class of his time and ours. He does this through creating a narrative frame in which a surgeon tells Barbara's tale as one of ten stories within A Group of Noble Dames. Told at a dinner of the Antiquarian Society, each of the legends of dead Dames represents an attempt by a different middle-class narrator to know, thus in a sense possess, the ladies involved through tale-telling.⁹ What do antiquarians do but collect and study remnants from the past—narrative remnants, in this case, of tragic lives. Because of class barriers, the amateur antiquarians would not be allowed the intimacy with the ladies in actual life that they are allowed through the mediation of art and history. That is also true for the readers of the tales, ourselves, positioned at one further remove from the mythologized ladies.¹⁰ Collecting the ladies' tales voyeuristically, we participate in Hardy's dissection of why people label “others” as abject degenerates.

THE STATUE GAME

Reacting to Barbara's obsession with Edmond's statue, Uplandtowers has the statue defaced and painted in lifelike hues so that it mimics the first husband's injuries from the fire. The Earl then places the statue in a wardrobe in front of Barbara's bed, surprising her with it by candlelight. He forces her to view the wrecked image during several successive nights. When the terrorized Barbara finally protests that she no longer loves Edmond but loves her new husband instead, Uplandtowers has the statue removed.

Through the statue game Uplandtowers punishes Barbara for being a degenerate who “fell” twice—in marrying below her to gratify her youthful passion for Edmond, and in being adulterous in that she desires his statue. Through disfiguring Edmond's statue, the Earl revenges himself upon Barbara for her two “falls,” and especially for having eloped with Edmond while Uplandtowers was courting her; it offends Uplandtowers that she preferred Edmond's beauty to the Earl's blood. More generally, Uplandtowers hates the female autonomy that such novel preferences as Barbara's demonstrate. In particular, he castigates her for her desire for Edmond as a living and dead man, passion that is forbidden to an upper-class woman.

Even more controlling as a spouse than Barbara was during her marriage to Edmond, Uplandtowers manipulates Barbara through her terror of the disfigured statue. Perhaps Barbara's horror comes in part from the realization that what Uplandtowers did to Edmond's statue, and what she did to Edmond the living man, Uplandtowers may do to her, now that she is the subordinate spouse. In a sense, Uplandtowers does disfigure her through a series of back-to-back pregnancies that eventually kill her. Ultimately, he does reject her, though less definitively than she did Edmond. Her hysterics at the sight of Edmond's mangled statue may come from anticipation of her doom as Upland-towers' consort.

Another reason for Barbara's fear of the maimed statue is that she wishes to deny her guilt over rejecting Edmond when he became disfigured. Paradoxically, she is afraid for a seemingly contradictory reason: though she knows that she should not have rejected Edmond after he lost his looks, she nevertheless continues to feel revolted by the thought of his ugliness that, for her, is a mark of his degenerate background. Uplandtowers shares her contempt for the class into which she “lowered” herself through marriage. The Earl's mockery of her desire for Edmond through the cruel statue game is a kind of private charivari intended to humiliate her into modesty and subservience. Through the Earl's description of the defaced statue in the closet as a “shrine” and through his laughter at Barbara's hysterical reaction to it, Uplandtowers attempts to humble Barbara (Hardy 1891, 568). Viewed through the lens of Kristeva's theory, the Earl's laughter can also be seen as a method of displacing abjection from himself (Kristeva 1982, 8).

The Earl's statue game shifts Barbara's position from victimizer to victim as it grinds her fears about Edmond's degeneracy into her psyche yet again. As the widow of a so-called degenerate, Barbara is one too, in her mind and in the Earl's. Through his defeat of Edmond's statue, the symbol of his dead rival, Uplandtowers “asserts the supremacy of the landowning class” over rebels like Barbara and Edmond (Ebbatson 1993, 103). Just as Edmond the working-class spouse was ruled by an aristocratic wife, so Barbara the aristocrat is manipulated by the crafty Lord whose name connotes his dominance. The narrator describes Barbara's relation to her husband after the statue game as abject, servile, and slavish, emphasizing that she accepts the lowly marital position that Edmond once held. Once Barbara is no longer the collector of art that idealizes members of the lower classes such as Edmond, she becomes an aesthetic object to be collected herself.¹¹

THE ABJECTION OF BARBARA AND THE DEGENERATION OF UPLANDTOWERS

In her study of female masochism in Gothic novels, Michelle Masse argues that Gothic heroines feel “the cultural, psychoanalytic, and fictional expectation that they should be masochistic if they are ‘normal’ women” (Masse 1992, 2). Defying this expectation when she weds Edmond and then when she resists the Earl's precedence as her husband, Barbara finally acts masochistic under the rigors of the latter's statue game. That game can be compared to the Gothic beating drama that Masse explores. Masse describes the Gothic dyad of male beater and female victim, in which romance requires female suffering and sacrifice. Surely, the Earl's repeated torments through the statue game are a kind of psychological beating of Barbara that results in her abjection. She learns to seek her beater's attentions, though they torment her. In the light of Masse's analysis, Barbara's sufferings become the expected results of a wife's culturally conditioned “natural” abjection as a “normal” female masochist.

The editors of The Graphic, the periodical for which “Barbara” was commissioned as part of A Group of Noble Dames, forced Hardy to remove the intimate details of physical abuse that dramatized the Earl's cruelty towards Barbara; those details remain absent from the story published in Noble Dames the book (Wing 1987, 82, 87).¹² However, George Wing posits that what remains of the brutality of Uplandtowers is “not more than a filament removed from so-called normal posture” (Wing 1987, 89). Wing is referring to an alleged Victorian norm of mild mental abuse of wives; such a “normal posture” may stem from widespread use of the myth of degeneration to justify placing “uppity” women in abject positions.

Like a stereotypical Gothic heroine, Barbara ultimately embraces her role as the Earl's abject victim. She experiences an intense absorption in her abjection that recalls her previous focus upon prostrating herself before Edmond's statue. Kristeva writes of the appeal of abjection that it can create “a jouissance in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant. One thus understands why so many victims of the abject are its fascinated victims—if not its submissive and willing ones” (Kristeva 1982, 9). Barbara is fascinated, submissive, and willing when she gives up her autonomy to Uplandtowers. Abjection appeals to her because it will save her from having to make further, perilous decisions that could cause her to feel the intense guilt and pain that she faced after Edmond was maimed. Not only does Barbara accept abjection as her punishment for rejecting Edmond long ago, but because abjection relieves her from the burden of self-determination.

To make Barbara experience herself as abject and degenerate, Uplandtowers takes on the role of the late-Victorian doctor battling the female patient for control of her psyche, a practice discussed in The Female Malady (Showalter 1987, 160). It is reassuring for Uplandtowers to pretend that Barbara's interest in Edmond's statue is a sign of mental disease, not the result of her unhappiness in their marriage. One reason she worshipped the statue was to defy the authority of Uplandtowers under the self-righteous guise of a grieving widow rather than the incriminating one of a shrewish wife; Uplandtowers reacts in a similarly sneaky manner to make his tyranny look benevolent. Uplandtowers hopes Barbara will be “cured” of her illicit passion for Edmond by the sight of his ghastly statue (Hardy 1891, 568).

But the “cure” frightens Uplandtowers as well as Barbara, for the sight of Edmond's disfigured statue causes her to experience “an epileptic fit” (Hardy 1891, 569). Epilepsy was associated with perversion by degenerationists such as Lombroso (Spackman 1989, 30). Barbara's desire for Edmond's statue proves she is unnaturally masculine and perverse, according to the Earl's conservative perspective. Hence, the Earl's “treatment” of Barbara's epilepsy can be seen as coming from a degenerationist point of view. However, the narrator comments that her “cure became so permanent as to be itself a new disease” when describing Barbara's consequent servility towards her husband (Hardy 1891, 570). In calling the “cure” a “disease,” the narrator uses black humor to question the discourse of medical mastery that Uplandtowers exploits for his own ends. The narrator sees the Earl's “treatment” of his wife as a sign of his perversion, rather than seeing Barbara's seizure as a sign of hers. A further irony is that the narrator is himself a member of the medical profession. His sarcasm suggests that nonprofessionals like Uplandtowers should avoid usurping the doctor's role. However, the narrator's denunciation of the Earl's homemade psychiatric “treatment” of Barbara may be a way to deflect his audience from criticizing his profession's similarly harsh methods for controlling so-called hysterical women.

Barbara's hysteria when Uplandtowers forces her to view the disfigured statue is her defense against the supposedly improper desire she had felt for Edmond, living and dead. The broken Barbara confesses to the inexorable Uplandtowers, “It fills me with shame—how could I ever be so depraved!” (Hardy 1891, 570). In the nineteenth century, doctors saw modesty as a defense against forbidden sexual knowledge or feelings manifested by the hysteric (Ender 1995, 50). Barbara becomes a stereotypically modest, submissive wife to avoid further hysteria, for hysteria's concomitant is the forbidden desire that marks a woman as a destructive degenerate (Gilman 1985, 105). Barbara cannot tell Uplandtowers what her hysteria means, because, as Ender explains about the hysteric, “she would show what she cannot show,” sexual desire that she is not supposed to feel, and sexual experience that she is not supposed to have had (Ender 1995, 19). Were Barbara to betray such desire, Uplandtowers might treat her even more cruelly. Hence, she exhibits the form of sexuality expected from a wife—passive acceptance of her husband's advances resulting in numerous pregnancies. Hysterical women were thought to be prone to miscarriages (Greenslade 1994, 139): Barbara starts to miscarry and to bear fragile infants under the terror of her husband's “cure” of her worship of Edmond's statue (Hardy 1891, 570).

Because of her passivity along with her production of children who are too weak to survive, Barbara could be labeled a neurasthenic as well as an hysteric. In the late nineteenth century, neurasthenia was an amorphous term for combinations of symptoms that eluded standard definitions of mental disease. Neurasthenics' characteristic passivity was thought to result from “a decrease in the wattage of the nervous system” (Gilman 1985, 199) caused by modern “turbulence” (Gilman 1985, 204). Previously, chronic passivity had been thought to result from masturbation (Gilman 1985, 200). However, by the late nineteenth century, “neurasthenia displaced masturbation as the means of presenting the interrelationship of degeneration, sexuality, and society” (Gilman 1985, 204). Neurasthenia thus became the illness “that paradigmatically revealed the degenerative effects of society” (Gilman 1985, 204).

From a Victorian perspective, Barbara's permanent passivity after Uplandtowers humiliates her can be seen not just as symptomatic of neurasthenia, but as the result of her forbidden onanistic pleasure in Edmond's statue. Seen so, her passivity comes from the “turbulence” of ambivalence created by the broken statue: she recalls her guilt over her rejection of the newly maimed Edmond; in addition, the defaced statue triggers her forbidden desire for Edmond simultaneously with her old, contradictory repugnance. Such conflicts that reflect class battles drive Barbara temporarily mad. Despite her degenerationist fear of the lower class, Barbara also suffers from paralyzing self-hatred because she desires one of its members. She finds a refuge from her searing conflicts in the numbness of neurasthenia. However, Hardy shows that Barbara's neurasthenia is caused less by her “degenerate” desire for Edmond than by the Earl's vengeful prodding of her opposing feelings.

Barbara's frequent, failed pregnancies suggest her new, abject status as a disgraced wife. Uplandtowers turns “the once radiant and passionate Barbara into a sickly woman condemned to a cowed life of repeated, unsuccessful pregnancies” (Wing 1987, 88). That all but one of Barbara's eleven babies dies bolsters Hardy's critique of her second marriage as debased. She is now the vehicle of feminine fluids and transformative powers that take her over in the name of patriarchal succession. As Edmond was disfigured as a result of being exiled due to class prejudices, so Barbara is disfigured by gender prejudices that compel her to become a monster of thwarted fertility.

Not only Barbara, but all women may be associated with death because of their “messy” childbearing capabilities (Kristeva 1982, 54). Through repeated bereavement Barbara dramatizes that association, mocking the Earl's attempts to create a dynasty that would make his name last. “Blood” loses again, as it did when Barbara chose Edmond over Uplandtowers. As the artist who tries to memorialize Edmond's beauty for all time through his statue fails, so the Earl fails to gain immortality through continuing his family name; Barbara unintentionally revenges herself upon Uplandtowers by producing a living daughter and dead sons. When Uplandtowers dies, his estate goes to a distant male relative, in another example of gender prejudices stealing from a woman—this time, from Barbara's daughter.

The drama of inheritance by “blood” is played out through the Earl's degenerate sexual pleasures. As well as voyeuristic pleasure, Uplandtowers gains a sadistic sexual pleasure directly from Barbara that is suggested by the number and frequency of her pregnancies. In reflecting upon his sexual satisfaction at Barbara's sufferings, we might consider Kristeva's contention that “The erotization of abjection … is an attempt at stopping the hemorrhage: a threshold before death, a halt or a respite?” (Kristeva 1982, 55). Through making Barbara an erotic object of abjection, Uplandtowers can draw thrillingly close to death while denying its threat. Unlike Barbara, whose contorted facial expressions, Gothic screams, fainting spells, and epileptic fits express her fears, Uplandtowers hides his feelings in the style of the stereotypical male aristocrat; we can only speculate that the fear of death motivates his displacement of the abject onto his wife and her dead husband. The Earl's coldness suggests that his fears are in fact so great that they have frozen him. His sexual relationship with Barbara is one of loathing that expresses his fear of sexuality's link with death.

Blood, as an abject bodily fluid associated with death, mingles with “blood” as the vehicle of class to explain how the Earl's prejudices stem from fear. The near sterility of his marriage as well as of his personality proves that his obsession with “blood” breeds the degeneracy in himself that he denies. Kelly Hurley argues that degenerationism creates “a gothic nightmare of heredity” in late-Victorian fiction (Hurley 1996, 67). This nightmare can be seen through the Earl's cruel treatment of his wife that stems from his injured sense of “blood” because she continues to favor a man of no family over him.

ABJECTION, DEGENERACY, AND THE GOTHIC

Hardy's story does not endorse the Earl's definition of Barbara as an abject producer of “unfit” progeny, nor does it support her horror at Edmond's injuries. The old surgeon who narrates the story uses sarcasm to dramatize his disapproval of the two aristocrats' views. Hardy's narrator employs dark humor that distances the reader from Uplandtowers and Barbara, bringing their opinions and actions into question. Wing notes the narrator's “defiant jauntiness” (Wing 1987, 89) and “grim playfulness” (Wing 1987, 81). Mocking his own discomfort with the story, the surgeon considers his tale “a little too professional” (Hardy 1891, 536). Like a surgeon's knife, the narrator's irony dispassionately dissects the twisted aristocratic mentality of Barbara and Uplandtowers.

The use of humor to unveil the meaning of a dark plot is not uncommon in Gothics. Judith Halberstam's ideas about Gothic fiction illuminate Hardy's story, though she does not specifically address it: “Gothic … is a textual machine, a technology that transforms class struggle, hostility towards women, and tensions arising out of the emergent ideology of racism into what looks like sexual or psychosexual battles between and within individuals” (Halberstam 1995, 33). Halberstam discusses the creation of monsters in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction as a result of the fear of decay associated with marginalized groups: “in the Gothic, crime is embodied within a specifically deviant form—the monster—that announces itself (de-monstrates) as the place of corruption” (Halberstam 1995, 2). In keeping with the myth of degeneration, “monstrosity was a combination of the features of deviant race, class, and gender” (Halberstam 1995, 4). Citing Franco Moretti, Halberstam sees nineteenth-century monsters as symbols of the proletariat (Halberstam 1995, 30).

Although Edmond symbolizes the danger to the upper classes posed by the proletariat, Hardy shifts our sympathy to him. Whereas Edmond's disfigurement makes him a monster in Barbara's eyes, the narrator's irony brings her perspective into question. Since readers don't have to look at Edmond's apparent monstrosity, we can see his nobility in saving strangers from a fire and in forgiving Barbara for rejecting him. We are also shown enough of the Earl's domestic life to know that Barbara's second husband is the real monster, not her first. The leaking of inner into outer characterizes monsters (Halberstam 1995, 7). Hardy's story moves from the physical leaking of bones into public sight on Edmond's scarred face to the partial unveiling of the Earl's secret cruelty. Through this inversion of expected monstrosities, Hardy questions the myth of working class and “fallen” female degeneration. However, Hardy's questioning is not unique. Some members of the Victorian middle class regarded the upper class as lazy degenerates. Hardy seems to fall into that camp through making Uplandtowers, not Edmond, the actual monster. Rather than abandoning the myth of degeneration, then, Hardy applies it to a powerful group, the aristocracy.¹³ This brings Hardy's story into the Gothic tradition of depicting decaying noble “blood” through skeptical middle-class eyes—here, a surgeon's. Perhaps Sade's observation that the rise of the Gothic is associated with the rise of revolution is pertinent both to eighteenth-century Gothic novels (Graham 1989, 260) and to Hardy's late-Victorian story that criticizes dynastic imperatives. Like Tess, “Barbara” draws upon the Gothic tradition to problematize the Victorian controversy over degenerate “blood.”

What Greenslade says of Tess, Jude the Obscure, and The Mayor of Casterbridge is also true of “Barbara”: Hardy's texts “take up the cudgels against the myths of degeneration … there is a commitment both to the complexities of human experience and to a concern with those sources of ideological power which shape the possibilities open to individuals: determinisms, not merely of biology, of course, but of money, class, status, education” (Greenslade 1994, 10). “Barbara” presents a complex picture of characters' motives, focusing especially upon the simple-minded belief in working-class degeneration shared by Barbara and Uplandtowers, and upon the painful abjection that belief forces onto Edmond and Barbara.

Several generations after Barbara and Uplandtowers die, Edmond's maimed statue is unearthed in their garden. The broken statue surfaces like a decayed corpse that no one recognizes as the symbol of the legions of working class men and of the women from all classes who have been regarded as abject degenerates. In Jude the Obscure, the corpses of Sue's and Jude's children, dead due to prejudice against their sexually “degenerate” parents, come to mind.

To me, reading “Barbara” over a century after Hardy wrote it, the buried, disfigured statue of Edmond suggests the victims of genocide—victims of the theory of degeneration later put into practice by men even more ruthless than Uplandtowers. Through arbitrarily emphasizing one element in a victim's identity, such men illustrate the workings of abjection and degeneration at their most frightening. Recent studies of degenerationism show that the disparagement of misfits that characterizes both of the Uplandtowers persists through Hardy's time into ours. British degenerationists, including socialists H.G. Wells and Karl Pearson, created the eugenics movement at the turn of the century (Pick 1989, 5). Eugenics fed not only Nazism but also fascist movements in Britain, France, and Italy (Pick 1989, 30, 218). In addition, eugenics was used to justify new laws against immigration in Britain (Pick 1989, 215). Eugenics arguments persuaded some American states to sterilize inmates of asylums and prisons during the first four decades of the twentieth century (Pick 1989, 238). Today a variant of degenerationism underlies the view that American society is decaying due to the influence of non-white immigrants; such fears in California, for example, stimulated the recent passage of laws that eliminated bilingual education and affirmative action. With an extraordinary ability to prophesy the future based on scrutinizing the past, Hardy allegorizes persecutors' attempts to escape the distressing sense of their own mortality through projecting it upon the supposedly degenerate members of the working class and the female gender (or of whatever marginalized race, nation, religion, or disability): ironically, the humiliation and death of the abject cannot save each newly defined “privileged” group from a similar fate.¹⁴

Notes

1. James F. Scott believes that “Barbara” and “The Doctor's Legend” are Hardy's most Gothic fictions (Scott 1963, 375). Another theme related to Gothicism that fits “Barbara” into the Hardy canon is psychological abuse of a wife by her husband (Wing 1987).

   A third way “Barbara” fits into the Hardy canon is through questioning, as Jules Law says Hardy does in his novels, whether “the ostensible irreversibility of history is a socially or a naturally imposed constraint” (Law 1997, 248). For the working class hero of the story, prejudice conspires with accident to permanently deprive him of his beauty along with his wife's love.

   “Barbara” also fits into the Hardy canon through articulating the concern about gender prejudices seen in Tess and the concern about class prejudices later seen in Jude. In all three works those prejudices appear through a complex, romantic plot that involves the beloved's abjection.

2. Oscar Wilde's Portrait of Dorian Gray, for example, depicts degenerationists' fear of handsome aesthetes who hide their perversions.

3. Poverty and consequent social unrest threatened France and Italy more than Britain; as a result, degenerationism was more influential in France and Italy (Pick 1989, 177).

4. “Edmond's journey is not so much a means of forming his character as a kind of quarantine for a misfit, for a person who is still too uncouth to have access to the refined world of the aristocracy” (Marroni 1994, 35).

5. Girard continues by saying that “This tendency is clearly observable in racist cartoons” (Girard 1986, 18). He also comments that “Sickness, madness, genetic deformities, accidental injuries, and even disabilities in general tend to polarize persecutors” (Girard 1986, 18). Edmond's “accidental injuries” certainly do that with Barbara.

6. The exception is that Edmond is Barbara's spouse, whereas female nude models were generally not the wives of wealthy art collectors.

7. From a commercial perspective, the Italian sculptor of Edmond's statue hopes that it will display his talents to the British aristocracy; then the sculptor could profit from enshrining additional lower-class bodies as sexually charged art objects for wealthy connoisseurs to ponder.

8. George Wing also compares “Barbara” to “My Last Duchess”; however, Wing compares Uplandtowers to Browning's Duke as a fatally controlling spouse, whereas I compare Barbara to Browning's Duke for the same reason (Wing 1987, 89).

9. Francesco Marroni reports that Hardy believed that the strategy of using a surgeon to narrate the story would distance and protect readers from its horror. On the contrary, Marroni himself believes that strategy makes the story appear more real (Marroni 1994, 33).

10. Albert Guerard argues that Hardy's use of the unseen observer device, seen here through Uplandtowers, reveals the Lord's tendency to voyeurism (Guerard 1966, 115-17). Alexander Fischler connects Uplandtowers' voyeurism to sadism (Fischler 1949, 437). Echoing Uplandtowers, we readers view Barbara's passion for Edmond's statue voyeuristically. Through creating this parallel between the sadistically voyeuristic Uplandtowers and us, Hardy suggests that reading, as a form of mental art collection, may be seen as perverted. The Earl's voyeurism is part of what makes him a moral degenerate, and so we may be as well, in as unacknowledged a sense as he.

    In her classic study of film, Laura Mulvey argues that the voyeurism associated with the sadistic male gaze often creates a narrative of punishment and forgiveness for the heroine (Mulvey 1989, 22). Hardy critiques that stereotypical narrative through ruining Barbara rather than saving her.

    In an essay deriving from Mulvey's ideas, Judith Mitchell contends that Hardy's novels involve a classic melodrama plot of women torn between two inappropriate men; such plots are “protests against the cultural marginalization of the female” (Mitchell 1993, 185). “Barbara” can be seen in this light to a certain extent, as both Edmond and Uplandtowers are problematic husbands in different ways. However, Edmond becomes problematic due to Barbara's classism rather than his own flaws.

11. The shifting significance of Barbara's gender and class illustrates the discourse of positionality. As described by Susan Stanford Friedman in 1996, this discourse suggests that, depending upon a character's situation, either gender or class may be the more salient attribute.

12. A Group of Noble Dames is the only collection of short stories that Hardy wrote for a periodical. The Graphic was shocked by Hardy's frank treatment of wife abuse, childbirth, adultery and the dynastic rule of aristocrats; Hardy resented the fact that the magazine forced him to bowdlerize several of his stories, including “Barbara” (Seymour-Smith 1994, 393; Wing 1987, 77).

    The critical reception of “Barbara” and its collection was less than enthusiastic, until in recent decades Brady (1982), Wing (1987), Ebbatson (1993), and Marroni (1994) delved deeply into the story's dense meanings. For example, Hardy's fellow novelist George Gissing found the story “coarse,” while T.S. Eliot found “Barbara” written “solely to provide a satisfaction for some morbid emotion” (Seymour-Smith 1994, 393).

13. Paradoxically, Hardy enjoyed consorting with the titled and was obsessed with his own family's decayed gentility (Wing 1987, 93).

14. Ursula LeGuin's modern science fiction story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” deals with a similar theme of a child who, like Edmond, is seen by his society as a symbol of all that is revolting and degenerate. The child becomes a scapegoat whose abjection enables the happiness of the rest of the people of Omelas, as the abjection of the working class enabled the triumphant joys of the aristocracy in Barbara's England, and as that of third-world workers enables first-world prosperity today.

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