Chapter 2 ‗Seeing and Possessing’: Voyeurism in Hardy’s...
Transcript of Chapter 2 ‗Seeing and Possessing’: Voyeurism in Hardy’s...
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Chapter 2
‗Seeing and Possessing’: Voyeurism in Hardy’s Novels
There is the supremacy of sight in the “sensory hierarchy” which has its origin in the
ancient Greek and Christian tradition (Synnott 207). The dominance of sight over the other
senses is indicated in the ancient philosophical equation of sight and reason which is found in the
writings of Plato and Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC), the equation of God and light in the Judaeo-
Christian tradition and in Freud’s theory of physiological development. However, the focus of
this chapter is not on the tradition lauding the sight, but, on the other hand, on the nature and
destabilizing impact of the voyeuristic male gaze on women. With the development of cinema
and psychoanalysis as “mutually reinforcing discourses of sexuality,” for instance, fetishism and
voyeurism gained “normality” in the nineteenth century and were no longer seen as connected to
an individual’s mental aberration, though all these were in many cases, embedded with
patriarchal assumptions (Williams 46). The invention of photography in the nineteenth century
was a crucial event in this context in the sense that unlike drawings and sculptures of the nude
which were considered to be inspired by the artists’ imagination to a considerable extent,
photographs of the nude offered testimony of a “voyeuristic situation” as it achieved an
immediacy of impact by the inevitable physical presence of the observer as well as the object
being observed (Lucie-Smith, Censoring 44). As a democratic medium, photography played a
unique role by creating erotic images in the nineteenth century which attained “a huge
clandestine circulation” though the audience was almost entirely male (Lucie-Smith, Censoring
45).
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One of the chief ways the women are objectified in Hardy’s novels is through the use of
the voyeuristic gaze of the masculine subjects. The vulnerability of Hardy’s heroines to the male
gaze explains how power fixes their identity “in a mechanism of objectification” in which “the
fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be seen” testifies to the “hold of the power”
exercised over them (Foucault, Discipline 187). The women are exposed to a state of
“permanent visibility” as power is dis-individualized to a certain extent and, thereby, they have
the feeling that even the trees are watching them: the “automatic functioning” and mobilization
of the gaze (Foucault, Discipline 201). What the voyeurs want to achieve in an ideal situation is
an “exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance” which is “capable of making all visible, as long as it
could itself remain invisible” (Foucault, Discipline 214). And the voyeur figure stimulates the
reader to “engage his own sensations imaginatively in similar fashion” (Pease 156).
Freud’s analysis of scopophilia as a basic drive of human beings carrying erotic
potentials may help readers to use it as a point of reference in order to explain the emphasis
Hardy places on the unfolding of the voyeuristic impulse of his characters as a central feature of
their personality. The drive to see is considered by Freud as a precondition for the establishment
of a relation between the self and the world and as something that plays an important role in
awakening desire for the love-object. Freud’s theory of anatomical extension that distinguishes
the “sexual” from the “genital” (New Introductory Lectures 129) also helps readers of Hardy to
understand the voyeurs’ “organ-pleasure” (New Introductory Lectures 128) derived from their
obsessive engagement with the body-parts like the lips, eyes and mouth of, for instance, Tess and
Bathsheba, which is an activity that is obviously “sexual” but is not literally connected with what
is supposed to be the final and definitive organization of the sexual function (New Introductory
Lectures 129). The subject cannot reduce the sexual aim to the union of actual genitals as what
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Freud calls the overvaluation helps the subject to “turn activities connected with other parts of
the body into sexual aims” (On Sexuality 54). Voyeurism in Hardy’s narratives is fundamentally
projected as a preliminary sexual aim of the male members of a community that can gain self-
sufficiency by producing pleasure of its own 1. Freud argues that in such situations the eye takes
on the attributes of a sexual organ. There are many instances in Hardy’s narratives where the act
of seeing is described in absolutely sexual terms, where it serves a tactile function and becomes a
substitute of a sexual organ. After observing that the “[r]ays of male vision seem to have a
tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural districts,” the narrator, for example, makes the readers
see Bathsheba brushing her face with her hand because she feels “as if Gabriel had been irritating
its pink surface by actual touch . . .” (Hardy, Far 19). And thus the “[v]isual impressions”
functioning as “the most frequent pathway along which libidinal excitation is aroused,” play a
crucial role in the objectification of women in the patriarchal set-up of the nineteenth century
(On Sexuality 60).
Cicero (106 BC-43 BC) in De Oratore (55 BC) and Horace (65 BC-8 BC) in Ars Poetica
(19-18 BC) wrote about the primacy of the eye in the working of the artistic imagination and the
idea, as a philosophical concern, continued to be explored in the writings of John Locke (1632-
1704) and George Berkeley (1685-1753). The empiricists not only found the eye the most perfect
of all the senses but also philosophically, the most important one. The Scottish philosophers
including Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) and Archibald Alison (1757-1839) dealt with the
sensationalist concept of knowledge and in his Essay on Taste (1790) Alison extensively wrote
about the role of the eye in the mind’s development. This sensationalist preoccupation, the desire
to examine the sense of hearing, taste and touch was a matter of considerable importance in mid-
nineteenth-century psychology. The supremacy of the sense of sight over the other senses was
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already established in contemporary writings on philosophy, psychology and science of which
notable examples are the scientific writings of a popular writer like Hermann vonn Helmholtz
(1821-1894) who invented ophthalmoscope, an instrument which can be used to look into the
human eye, Alexander Bain’s (1818-1903) The Senses and the Intellect (1855), the texts of John
Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology (1855). It has been analyzed how
visualization in fiction was “endorsed by the findings of contemporary psychology and supported
by literary criticism” in Hardy’s time (Bullen 6). Voyeurism, as a term, has an overtone of sexual
“perversion” in a conservative system, but that suggestion is rarely manifested in the narratorial
comments and has a minor significance in Hardy’s novels. Furthermore, the line between
perversion and normal sexual activity is very thin and is often carefully manipulated for cultural
reasons. Apart from voyeurism, the simple act of seeing has great importance in any discussion
of the psychology of many of Hardy’s characters. Even ‗abstract ideas, concepts, and mental
propositions came to him [Hardy] most readily in the form of images’ resulting in his concern
with the ‗precise nature of these mental pictures’ (Bullen 10). What is more, the pictorial in
Hardy has moral connotations; they represent certain states of consciousness. The sunlight,
firelight, darkness—all these become emblematic—the dark nights of Jude, the darkness of
Bathsheba’s fir plantation or the obscurity of Egdon Heath—all bear the suggestion of some
“mental and moral perspectives” (Bullen 12). This is one of the ways in which the eye operates
in Hardy’s novels. In Hardy’s novels, particularly in Tess, which is replete with references to
pictures, there are a number of visual images of a self-reflexive nature and they deal with seeing
and imaging. One of the early chapters in Tess, for example, opens with a reference to a
“landscape-painter” (Hardy 18). In their first face-to-face encounter, Bathsheba is presented as a
portrait to Oak—as an object of visual contemplation with a “soft luster upon her bright face and
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dark hair” (Hardy, Far 9). What is generally meant by a simple act of seeing is a way of
comprehending the world freed of inhibition and a very calm acceptance of life in which the
question of sexual objectification and the gender divide does not seem to arise for, in such cases,
the narrator harps on grand narratives like nature and beauty in such a manner that they seem to
be alienated from the network of power-politics which actually defines people’s ways of seeing.
One such instance is found when through the eyes of the caretaker, the readers are given a
glimpse of Tess and Angel lying asleep in the deserted mansion and the imagery of flowers and
light, used in this description, evoke the sublimated emotional quality of the union: “A stream of
morning light through the shutter-chink fell upon the faces of the pair wrapped in profound
slumber, Tess’s lips being parted like a half-opened flower near his cheek” (Hardy, Tess 377).
The politics of the male gaze is carefully disguised in such moments when the eye is intended to
do nothing more than “reflecting” reality, thereby gaining a neutral status which renders it a
passive object. But there can be no act of seeing that is purely an anatomical fact and, therefore,
free from all its cultural connotations. Butler observes that the illusion of a sexuality before the
intervention of power structure is itself the creation of that power structure. Further, sex cannot
qualify as a prediscursive anatomical fact and by definition, can be shown to “have been gender
all along” (Butler 11, sic.). In that sense it is difficult to distinguish the simple act of seeing,
which is projected to be one of the “archetypal gestures of straightforwardness” and which is
actually a fantasy of a self-sufficient and value-free gaze, from the voyeuristic vision distinctly
loaded with the suggestions of the predatory male gaze (Levinas 172).
The readers are therefore more concerned with voyeurism which is directly related to the
predatory male gaze and the consequent objectification of women than with the mythical
simplicity of a pre-discursive act of seeing. Confirming this reading are the clues and hints
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ceaselessly supplied by the narrator, who, though sometimes apparently neutral, points out the
sexual implication of the act of seeing. That Oak’s gaze is not a mere anatomical fact but
something that makes Bathsheba sexually insecure is suggested in the narrator’s observation on
the effect of the gaze that makes her feel she is “an indecorous woman” (Hardy, Far 20).
Moreover, the narrator observes that Oak is aware of the power of his gaze and he withdraws his
eyes from Bathsheba “as suddenly as if he had been caught in a theft” (Hardy, Far 20). The
erotic dimension of voyeurism is suggested not only in the secret watching of the male characters
but also in the secrecy Bathsheba maintains when inspecting her own image. Absolutely
unconscious of Gabriel Oak who is watching her performance, Bathsheba surveys herself
“attentively,” parts her lips and smiles (Hardy, Far 9). That it is a secret auto-erotic practice in
which she “indulge[s]” (Hardy, Far 9) to observe herself “as a fair product of Nature in the
feminine kind” is evident when hearing the wagoner returning back she quickly wraps the cloth
over the mirror to put it back (Hardy, Far 10). Frustrated to find that the blinds of Eustacia’s
bedroom are closely drawn, the narrator follows Clym to see Eustacia standing before the
looking glass in her nightdress and all that she does with her hair before the beginning of the
toilet operations. Again, the reference to the looking glass is important as it implies the existence
of a voyeur. The mirror is a very important trope in all forms of erotic representations ranging
from the situations created by the designers of Japanese shunga to the erotic films of the Italian
director Giovanni Brass (1933-2010) like Miranda (1985) and Paprika (1991). Erotic writers and
artists have demonstrated almost limitless ingenuity in devising situations where the erotic object
can be watched. Very often the image of amatory endeavors is reflected in mirrors which imply a
strong voyeuristic element. In fact, in their actual performance, voyeurs use mirrors as it allows
them to grasp and manipulate the image without drawing the attention of the real person. The
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reference to John Milton’s (1608-1674) Satan in the description of Oak’s observation of
Bathsheba is suggestive because in Paradise Lost, Book IX the readers get an intense portrayal
of Satan’s voyeuristic impulse: “ . . . he [Oak] saw her in a bird’s-eye view, as Milton’s Satan
first saw Paradise” 2 (Hardy, Far 16). When Oak sees Bathsheba preening herself on her wagon
the libidinal implications of peeping are suggested by the presence of a cat who “affectionately
surveyed the small birds around” (Hardy, Far 9). In Hardy’s novels women are often identified
with birds and the cat’s gaze refers to the image of a predator, as is symbolic of the male gaze. T.
R. Wright observes how the memory of a biblical narrative is evoked to situate the voyeurism of
Angel and the sexuality of Tess in the context of an eroticized space in Tess:
In moving to Talbothays, then, as well as in falling in love there, Tess is seen to
be in tune with natural forces deeper than conventional social morality. . . .
For a time . . . the two lovers inhabit an Edenic world of unrestrained natural
instincts. The garden through which Tess creeps as ‗stealthily as a cat’ to listen
‗like a fascinated bird’ to Angel’s harp ‗had been left uncultivated for some years’
and is now ‗rank with juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen’. (113)
The description of the garden in Tess as an eroticized space that stimulates T. R. Wright to be
reminded of the Garden of Eden also brings back the cultural associations of the Fall. The
concept of the Fall has been significant in erotic representation as it enables painters and
spectators to fulfill both their voyeuristic intentions and pay “appropriate tribute to the Judaeo-
Christian condemnation of nudity” and sexuality (Lucie-Smith, Erotica 157). So the cultural
associations of the Fall generate curiosity about Tess’s sexuality beneath the covering of the
ideology of restraint. And in a subtle way it fuels the voyeuristic impulse of the readers familiar
with the message of the biblical narrative. Thus, numerous strategies including a unique
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exploration of imagery, the biblical associations and the manipulation of the gestures of the
characters allow the narrator to continue drawing attention to the voyeuristic and sexual
implications of the act of seeing and the readers, as an effect of this, become conscious of the
discursive construction of the male gaze and its multiple manifestations.
In Hardy’s novels, apart from the male characters, the narrator functions as a voyeur who,
for instance, while writing about Tess, unconsciously reveals his desires and daydreams. In a
conservative, patriarchal society some women are projected as purely idealized and innocent
creatures so that they can be desired and owned at the same time. Primarily, Tess falls into that
category and, therefore, is an archetype. The theme of a betrayed country maiden is a regular
motif in country lore and mythological tales in which readers are expected to be sympathetic to
the woman in danger. The narrator uses this convention but at the same time secretly regulates
the personality of Tess according to his requirements as a voyeur obsessed with Tess’s sexuality
and keen on appropriating Tess through her eyes, mouth, and flesh. Not only her lips but the
subtle movements in her mouth do not escape the narrator’s attention: “her rosy lips curved
towards a smile” (Hardy, Tess 43), “her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and
then” (Hardy, Tess 21). The eyes are described in surprisingly minute details: “. . . the ever-
varying pupils, with their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and grey, and violet . . .” (Hardy,
Tess 172). Emphasis is also placed on her hair: “. . . Tess stood there in her prettily tucked-up
milking gown, her hair carelessly heaped upon her head . . .” (Hardy, Tess 184). The narrator’s
intention to possess Tess sexually is evident in the frequent use of the phallic imagery of
pricking, piercing and penetration and his fantasy enacts a violation, which gives him a position
almost similar to the lovers at the hands of whom Tess suffers. The narrator, secretly obsessed
with Tess, criticizes Angel for neglecting the “corporeal presence” of the woman in the
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postconfession state: “ . . . Clare’s love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to
impracticability” (Hardy, Tess 240). The narrator’s gaze and that of Angel’s are sometimes
collapsed into each other’s and when the narrator refers to the “bouncing handsome
womanliness” or the “curves” of Tess’s mouth and adds that a “small minority . . . look long at
her” to find themselves “momentarily fascinated by her freshness, and wonder if they would ever
see her again,” the readers are stimulated to feel that, on such occasions, the narrator vicariously
satisfies his own voyeuristic impulse as an incarnate being but conceals his direct participation
through placing himself behind the screen formed by the other male characters or a “small
minority” (Hardy, Tess 21). Before her sexual encounter with Alec, Car Darch is depicted in the
following manner: “ . . . she had bared her plump neck, shoulders, and arms to the moonshine,
under which they looked as luminous and beautiful as some Praxitelean creation, in their
possession of the faultless rotundities of a lusty country girl” (Hardy, Tess 70, emphasis added).
Commenting on this section of the text, Peter Widdowson says: “In late twentieth-century terms,
the above descriptions would surely amount to ‗soft’ pornography, or at least to accurate
representations of the titillatory visual devices employed therein” (“Moments” 95). What
Widdowson identifies as the “titillatory visual devices” are used to designate the voyeuristic gaze
of an unspecified observer who is supposed to be the narrator himself disguised under cover of
moonshine (“Moments” 95). Dissolving one’s tangible and concrete identity into an abstract
movement in nature is an attempt on the part of the knowing self to transform itself into a
transhistorical consciousness that endows him with authority and power.
The narrator’s voyeurism is also evident in The Return where with minute details he
describes what he imagines to be the way Eustacia caringly handles, coils and uncoils the mass
of her hair, which fell from the crown of her head about the shoulders and over the white
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nightgown. The narrator places himself as a voyeur when Eustacia goes up to her bedroom in
darkness, hears the “rustles” that suggests that Eustacia is undressing and also listens to the
“heavy breaths” of the woman (Hardy, The Return 52). Eustacia’s act of dressing and undressing
has preoccupied the narrator’s imagination to such an extent that the third chapter in Book Fifth
is entitled as “Eustacia Dresses Herself on a Black-Morning.” During the conversation of
Bathsheba and Boldwood in Far the narrator directly adopts the role of a voyeur and goes into a
lengthy description of Bathsheba’s facial expressions: how she allows a very small smile to creep
over her serious face, the white row of her upper teeth and keenly cut lips suggesting “an idea of
heartlessness,” which is, however, “contradicted by the pleasant eyes” (101). This description
coming from the narrator reinforces Bathsheba’s own projection of herself as a temptress: “O, I
am wicked to have made you suffer so!” (Hardy, Far 102). The contrast between a selfless
celibate and a coquettish young girl, which Bathsheba constructs as an effect of her
internalization of the patriarchal assumptions of womanhood, is carefully developed in the text
so that the voyeur-narrator can give indications about Bathsheba as a stereotype enchantress,
thereby manufacturing the need for sexually occupying her in his own fantasy.
In Hardy’s novels the narrative act is itself a voyeuristic act. Penny Boumelha observes
that the narrative act not only delineates but also reenacts the physical humiliation of Tess: “ . . .
the repeated evocations of a recumbent or somnolent Tess awakening to violence, and the
continual interweaving of red and white, blood and flesh, sex and death, provide structuring
images for the violence Tess suffers, but also repeat that violence” (“Tess of the d‟Urbervilles:
Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form” 47-48). It is through repetition of these images of violence
that the subject as a knowing self also reinforces his identity as an oppressor. Butler argues that
the rules structured along matrices of compulsory heterosexuality and gender hierarchy function
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through repetition. The identity of an empowered “I” is a rule-generated identity which depends
on the “repeated invocation of rules” which condition the process of identity-formation (Butler
197-98). There are shifts between the narrator’s dispassionate observation that delineates Tess as
a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, thereby rendering her absolutely passive and
inconsequential and an extremely close observation that captures the texture of her hair and the
grain of her skin, thereby turning her into a sexual object. Similarly, the deployment of visual
devices like the filmic long-shot (the farm-girls picking swedes at Flintcomb-Ash) and the close-
up (the depiction of Tess’s mouth) identifies Tess sometimes as an abstraction and sometimes as
someone who is tangible and can be immediately possessed in physical terms. When Tess is
involved in the harvest at Marlott, milks cows at Talbothays and toils on the upland fields at
Flintcomb-Ash she is “a figure which is part of the landscape” (Hardy, Tess 272). The sense of
diminution implied in this observation is also evident when walking along the endless roads of
Wessex, she seems to be an insignificant figure in the landscape. However, the narrator’s
omniscience and meditative reflections are sometimes undercut by both his erotic obsession of
Tess and his awareness of the “elusive” nature of her sexuality. After climbing to the top of
Egdon Heath Tess gets her first view of the Valley of Great Dairies and the readers who see the
valley with her share her close association with the natural scene and follow her down the slope
into the valley. But ironically, all of a sudden, she is alienated from them: “Not quite sure of her
direction Tess stood still upon the hemmed expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-
table of indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings than that fly” (Hardy,
Tess 110). Tess here is reduced to a fly while a moment earlier the narrator was, in fact, sharing
the view of the environment with her. This technique of zooming in and zooming out enables the
narrator to manipulate the readers’ point of view. The readers are forced to readjust their
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feelings, to view things from various perspectives; and more specifically this complicates their
awareness as observers of Tess’s physical movements. But the structure of the response
generated by this complex act of “narrative voyeurism” is simple: Tess is either viewed as an
insignificant abstraction or a sexual object vulnerable to the male gaze. In both the cases she is
robbed of her subjectivity.
In Hardy’s narratives sometimes the point of view is not single but multiple reinforcing
the intensity of the voyeuristic act. Oak, for instance, glances over the hedge, sees the wagon and
catches a glimpse of the sight of Bathsheba that is “just beneath his eyes” (Hardy, Far 9). The
topographical location of Oak which constructs the narrative gaze also includes the country
animals like sparrows and blackbirds as onlookers, thereby implying nature’s participation in the
gaze. The voyeur-narrator sometimes “appoints” a character to observe and analyze the erotic
gestures and activities of other people which, in an indirect manner, also satisfies his own
voyeuristic intentions. One such character is Elizabeth-Jane in The Mayor who is aware of her
status as a voyeur as she admits that Donald Farfrae and Lucetta do not want to be observed by
anyone and who, in the first two-thirds of the novel, is used as a point-of-view from which
events are analyzed. Since for the readers she is the most “reliable intelligence within the novel,”
Michael Millgate calls her “the reader’s representative within the novel’s world” (“The Role of
Elizabeth-Jane” 362). She can expose and interpret the contrived story of Lucetta but like the
narrator she watches her from a position of sympathetic detachment. Acting as the surrogate for
the narrator who “being out of the game, and out of the group, could observe all from afar, like
the evangelist who had to write it down,” Elizabeth-Jane not only functions as a representative of
the voyeur-narrator in observing the erotic unfolding of the Lucetta-Farfrae relation but also
guides the readers to pick up certain clues and get a certain direction through the narrative
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(Hardy, The Mayor 138). Though there are characters like Oak and Elizabeth-Jane in Hardy’s
novels who function as interpreters by seeing events from within more clearly in comparison
with the other protagonists, there is no denying the fact that “. . . it is the narrator himself whose
eye is most penetrative and most agile, and it is the narrator who attributes most meaning to what
he sees” (Bullen 256).
It has been observed that in the narratives of the stag films voyeurism was incorporated
as part of the strategies for “arousing their characters” and for “matching” the gaze of the
characters with that of the spectators as the device of point of view was of considerable
importance in the construction of early voyeur narratives (Williams 68). Because of the use of
verisimilitude in realist novels, the readers are deceived into “seeing” the object in the text and
thus the voyeurism of the narrator and/or that of the characters in Hardy’s novels, can be
reinforced by the similar impulse of the male readers who consume both the text and the woman
in it and that of the female readers who often internalize the misogynistic values. The mediations
and manipulations of realist narration, which are marked not only by the “authenticity” of the
omniscient narrator but also by the transparency of narrative modes in transmitting events,
therefore, locate and position the reader into a patriarchal/gendered reading 3. The technique of
sliding into and out of the consciousness of Tess creates an intimate relation between Tess and
the readers because, on several occasions, they see things through her eyes. When Tess first
meets the religious sign-painter, the readers feel with Tess that someone is coming up behind her
but they are, similarly, not sure of his identity: “As she walked, however, some footsteps
approached behind her, the footsteps of a man; and owing to the briskness of his advance he was
close at her heels and had said ‗Good morning’ before she had been long aware of his
propinquity” (Hardy, Tess 84). Denied the scope of knowing anything more than what Tess
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knows, the readers share her emotion and such closeness contributes to their voyeurism as they
are situated in a physical proximity with the woman 4. It is not that the readers cease to be
voyeurs in these moments but are so close to Tess that they may also fail to maintain the distance
needed for the production of voyeuristic pleasure. Sometimes the readers are more distinctly
involved in the perception of other male viewers who look at Tess. For instance, when Angel
returns to Talbothays from a visit to his parents in Emminster the readers enter the house with
him and hear the sounds he hears: “Sustained snores came from the cart-house, where some of
the men were lying down; the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs arose from the still further
distance” (Hardy, Tess 171). With Angel they see “the red interior of her [Tess’s] mouth as if it
had been a snake’s” and then they also feel Tess with him as he holds her: “Tess’s excitable heart
beat against his by way of reply . . . . Having been lying down in her clothes she was warm as a
sunned cat” (Hardy, Tess 172). In these instances, the narrator does not always remain with
Tess’s perspective; he often focuses on Angel’s viewpoint, thus creating the opportunity to show
Tess from the outside. When the narrative is not impersonal and is not seen through Tess’s eyes,
the readers are given the view of how other people—mostly how the male lovers of Tess look at
the woman. The voyeuristic gaze which implies a sense of power renders the body more directly
into a passive object and reinforces the sexual power structures. The power of the gaze is based
on three assumptions: a person derives pleasure from the act of looking at an object, the person
performs no other sexual act at the time of looking and the object of the gaze can be overvalued
or devalued. Laura Mulvey identifies three instances of the explicitly male gaze in the structuring
of narrative cinema: the look of the camera which is inherently voyeuristic and usually “male” in
the sense that the filming has been done by a man; the look of the male characters within the
narrative which is structured in a way so that it can transform women into objects of their gaze,
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and, finally the look of the male spectator that imitates the first two looks and is facilitated by the
previous two positions 5. One example of such a complex relationship of looks is found where
Bathsheba stands before a mirror and she is observed not only by some sparrows and blackbirds
but also by Oak who is the male protagonist and also by the readers. Bathsheba looks at her own
reflection in the mirror, Oak looks at Bathsheba, and the readers see Oak looking at Bathsheba
seeing herself in the mirror. The presence of Oak as an onlooker satisfies the voyeuristic impulse
of the readers and it would not be irrelevant to note that in the history of erotic art, the presence
of an onlooker within a composition has special value as he acts as a “transitional element, a
point of identification” (Lucie-Smith, Erotica 104).
In the case of infantile sexual life, Freud observes that the operation of components, from
the very beginning, creates the context of treating other people as sexual objects. Among these,
he includes cruelty, exhibitionism and the instinct of scopophilia. However, these instincts, Freud
says, are observed in a child as “independent impulses” as they “do not enter into intimate
relations with genital life until later . . .” (On Sexuality 104). A voyeur who obtains sexual
gratification from viewing others in a state of undress or engaged in sexual acts is supposedly
male and voyeurism which is considered to be an extension of normal male sexuality including a
“strong visual component” is culturally associated with male pleasure and the objectification of
the female body (Levay, and Baldwin 502). It often happens that the voyeurs feel drawn to
women as much for their partly or fully unclothed bodies as for the postures they assume when
they are the object of the look. The way Bathsheba unknowingly puts her body on display during
a horse ride renders her an object ready to cater to the demands of a voyeuristic gaze. From a
voyeur’s perspective, Bathsheba is encouraged to be awkward, to pose. But what is stressed here
is the bold unselfconsciousness of Bathsheba’s position because something is revealed in
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people’s faces when they don’t know they are being observed and never appears when they do.
Since Bathsheba does not know that she is not exposed to a voyeur’s gaze, her expressions are
private which enhances her value as an erotic object. There is also an element of transgression in
her unwomanly pose that enhances the erotic value of the object: it is a position and manner of
riding that is, according to the narrator, “hardly expected of the woman” (Hardy, Far 18). Thus
the display of one’s body, the transgressive or unconventional manner of displaying and the
unselfconsciousness of the object can stimulate voyeurs and create a suitable context for
objectification.
In sexual objectification the whole existence of a woman is reduced to sexualized body-
parts and the voyeurs, obsessed with the physical fragments of the sexual object, develop the
habit of viewing the object as a combination of fragmented parts 6. In The Return people take
special interest in Eustacia’s hands. In the eighth chapter of Book Fourth Wildeve takes her hand
unexpectedly and kisses it. He also caresses her hand and to hide the caress, asks: “What light is
that on the hill?” (Hardy, The Return 236). The narrator in Tess repeatedly seeks to infiltrate Tess
through her eyes: “ . . . his [eyes] plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with their
radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and grey, and violet . . .” (172). A similar attempt is made
through her flesh: “A bit of her naked arm is visible . . . as the day wears on its feminine
smoothness becomes sacrificed by the stubble, and bleeds” (Hardy, Tess 94). Tess’s lips are said
to be “infatuating” and “maddening” to a young man “with the least fire in him” (Hardy, Tess
152). The lips and teeth of Tess are “forced upon” Angel’s mind with “persistent iteration”
which also suggests that the moment the self treats the other as a mere possession the other
ironically begins to exercise a power over him (Hardy, Tess 152). Thus, the voyeuristic gaze that
divides the woman’s body into fragments actually operates as a strategy of appropriation and
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containment in such instances. It dissects the female body, treats it as a passive object, and
degrades it by dividing it into fragments without paying any attention to the response of the
woman. One of Bathsheba’s employees describes her appearance while horse riding which is
indicative of his voyeuristic gaze drawn to the particular body-parts of the woman. He follows
her quick breath and the accompanying movement of her bosom as the narrator comments that
“ . . . the novelty of her [Bathsheba’s] engagement in such an occupation had almost as much to
do with the magnetism as had the beauty of her face and movements” (Hardy, Far 74). The
farmers at the Corn Exchange observe the “keenly pointed corners” (Hardy, Far 73) of
Bathsheba’s red mouth when she “defiantly” turns up her face to argue a point with a tall man
and that gesture appears to them as something connected to the “alarming exploits of sex”
(Hardy, Far 74). This of course is an observation of a male onlooker more concerned with the
erotic suggestions of her facial gestures than with her arguments. Bathsheba comes to collect the
lost hat from Oak and then “enough” of her left hand is “shown bare” (Hardy, Far 18). It makes
Oak wish that the event had happened in the summer, “when the whole would have been
revealed” (Hardy, Far 18). The narrator supports Oak’s position by saying that “the desirability
of her [Bathsheba’s] existence” is unquestionable (Hardy, Far 18). In perfect collaboration with
Oak as a voyeur, the narrator then goes on to describe the graceful figure of the woman, and the
harmonious proportions of her face. Seeing the “contours of her figure in its upper part,” the
narrator assumes that the woman “must have had a beautiful neck and shoulders” and also
stresses on the unavailability of those parts to the male gaze: “ . . . but since her infancy nobody
had even seen them” (Hardy, Far 19).
This is what Marcel in his critique of Cartesianism from a phenomenological perspective
describes as “thinghood,” an approach that reduces an individual to an object instead of viewing
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him/her as a personal centre of subjectivity. As the voyeur’s is not the “other-oriented mode of .
. . thinking” he pays more attention to things as they appear to his separated self and less to the
search for what they are in themselves (Wild 16). As long as voyeurs find someone’s body
attractive they fail to see it disinterestedly and that is the root cause of the objectification of
bodies and even Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) who insists that the body’s beauty cannot be
understood unless we separate perception from desire notices the difficulty of appreciating the
human form in a disinterested manner (Nehamas 8). The voyeur’s need to become actively
engaged with another person in sexual and psychological terms cannot be satisfied by
disinterested contemplation though he sometimes seeks to ensure a disinterested contemplation
in order to construct a globalizing look empowered by transhistorical reason.
Chris Bongie in his study Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism and the Fin de siècle
(1991) demonstrates how exoticization operates as an ideological tool of control in the colonial
and imperialist power politics. The lands and people of a distant country were exoticized before
they were brought under colonial surveillance. The same principle has been exhaustively used in
the field of patriarchal dominance. In Hardy’s novels, significantly enough, the women are
transformed into alien and exotic creatures that enhance their value as sexual objects in the male
imagination. Voyeurism provides a “ . . . means by which many nineteenth-century writers could
cross social boundaries to obtain first-hand experience with what was considered the dark and
mysterious Other” (May 416). It is through the transformation of women into the “other” that the
voyeurs in Hardy’s narrative ensure their sexual objectification. While describing Eustacia’s
beauty the narrator indulges in “fancy” and compares the darkness created by the shadow of her
hair that closes over her forehead with the “night-fall extinguishing the western glow” (Hardy,
The Return 53). Her eyes are depicted as full of “nocturnal mysteries” (Hardy, The Return 53).
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The under-lid of her eyes which is “much fuller” makes her appear as if she was in a reverie
(Hardy, The Return 53). Concentrating on her mouth the narrator observes the geometric
precision of the closing line of her lips and remarks: “One had fancied that such lip-curves were
mostly lurking underground in the South as fragments of forgotten marbles” (Hardy, The Return
54, emphasis added). When Eustacia rejects the reddleman’s plea to allow him to marry
Thomasin Yeobright the narrator observes her mouth in a way that associates her with an exotic
figure with mysterious natural forces: a laugh uncloses her lips while the sun shines into her
mouth which is like a tulip and as an effect of that she blushes scarlet. In the seventh chapter of
Book First entitled “Queen of Night” she is depicted as an obscure identity, an enigma. This
mystery, which is essentially erotic, is also intensified through references to pagan goddesses.
Her presence evokes the exotic images of the motion of the sea, music and Bourbon roses,
rubies, and “tropical midnights” (Hardy, The Return 54). When Eustacia for the first time
appears before Clym she is in the “fantastic guise” (Hardy, The Return 113) of a Turkish knight
and the “sparkle of her eyes” is “visible between the ribbons which covered her face” (Hardy,
The Return 112). At this moment, Eustacia is compared to the Queen of Love, a “mysterious
emanation” who appeared before Aeneas (Hardy, The Return 113). Consequently, Clym seems
to “fall into a reverie” (Hardy, The Return 113). He goes on gazing at her but cannot find a way
out of her enigmatic sexuality. The way Eustacia is transported to a mythical past and the way
her appearance is projected as more a product of an exotic and alien space than that of
contemporary reality is suggestive, not only of the patriarchal notion of the unknowability of the
woman, but also of the colonial aspiration of the voyeur-narrator to possess female sexuality
after manufacturing the logic of possession through exoticization and mystification of a woman’s
beauty. Clym’s face generates unending curiosity among its watchers including his cousin
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Thomasin and Eustacia. In their first encounter Eustacia cannot properly see his face in the dark
and, thus comes back home and starts dreaming in which Clym’s face plays a major part: “She
was dancing to wondrous music, and her partner was the man in silver armour . . . the visor of his
helmet being closed. . . . blushingly looking up she saw him removing his casque to kiss her. At
that moment there was a cracking noise, and his figure fell into fragments like a pack of cards”
(Hardy, The Return 93, emphasis added). Her desire is enhanced by her failure to see the face in
the dream and finally in the chapter entitled “The Two Stand Face to Face” Eustacia gets the
chance to clearly see Clym. But what she has seen in the dream gets reversed in actual situation.
Now Clym’s face is a spectacle that both readers and Eustacia are in a position to observe.
Eustacia, on the other hand, is dressed as a Turkish knight and wears the visor; now it is her face,
which is made obscure and the “charm of her emotions” is “disguised” and “the power of her
face” is lost (Hardy, The Return 114). Thus it is the presence of the woman which is finally made
obscure, enigmatic and full of mystery and uncertainties. To serve their own purpose the voyeur-
narrator and the masculine subjects try to essentialise the women and project them as unreal and
enigmatic creatures.
The elusiveness of the heroine is also an important aspect of male voyeurism as it fixes
her position as a source of never-ending mystery. Why Bathsheba blushes looking at her own
image, for example, is a matter of speculation. The elusiveness of the heroine is once again
suggested when Oak meets Bathsheba for the fourth time. In his hut he finds his head on her lap
and her fingers unbuttoning his collar. She tries to withhold her identity and teasingly says:
“Now find out my name” (Hardy, Far 23). Then she withdraws. After her departure, Oak finds
himself enslaved by her image and starts idealizing the “removed object” (Hardy, Far 30). Thus
the carefully constructed elusiveness stimulates the fantasy of the voyeurs. The narrator also
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exploits the erotic potential of the act of unveiling to satisfy the voyeuristic impulse of the
readers. At the end of the second chapter entitled as “Night—The Flock—An Interior—Another
Interior” in Far the woman lifts the woollen veil tied round her face to reveal that she is
Bathsheba. The act of lifting the veil is also repeated at the end of the sixth chapter entitled “The
Fair—The Journey—The Fire.” Oak’s sense of shock notwithstanding, the idea of eroticism is
latent in the image of unveiling which will develop in Oak’s intimacy with the woman, as much
a manifestation of his erotic longing as his devotion to any given task which is a central
ingredient of his personality. This is undoubtedly an erotic moment both for Oak and for the
readers when Bathsheba drops the cloak and tumbles strands of black hair over the red jacket and
Oak instantly acknowledges her as the “heroine” in the context created by the yellow wagon,
myrtles and looking glass (Hardy, Far 17). Such projection of women which is possible through
discursive practices like exoticization destroys the myth that the subject or the object has a
preexisting formation. Projected as alien beings, the women seem to be worthy of being
possessed as sexual objects and in that sense they legitimize the masculine desire and make the
elaboration of the masculine paradigm possible. In order to be the “reflector and guarantor” of a
masculine subject-position, Butler argues, the women remain what men are not and thus
“establish the essential function of men” (Butler 61). Bathsheba is also placed as the other in
terms of her class position and that too is related to the politics of eroticization. Oak’s sexual
imagination acquires unprecedented intensity as he thinks of his position as servant with
Bathsheba as his master. His desire for Bathsheba who belongs to the upper stratum of society
involves a disruption in the hierarchical set up of the society and that transgressive gesture adds
to the intensity of his sexual fantasy.
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The male voyeuristic gaze causes tension in a patriarchal society and can have a
destabilizing effect in the lives of women. As an effect of the male gaze Lucetta, for instance,
becomes hypersensitive to the act of being seen. After marrying Lucetta, one evening Farfrae
kisses her hands and Lucetta remarks: “See—the blinds are not drawn down, and the people can
look in—what a scandal!” (Hardy, The Mayor 183). When Bathsheba appears in the cornmarket
for the first time she is overburdened with the awareness of devouring eyes. In this context, one
may refer to the insistence on the presence of an implied observer as one of the peculiarities of
sexual representations in art. In erotic representations it is almost always felt that even in a
natural setting or in an empty room, in spite of the implicit privacy, there must be someone
observing the erotic object from some hidden position (Lucie-Smith, Erotica 157). Bathsheba is
shy of being in a conversation with Boldwood for she is “afraid” that “they will notice” them
(Hardy, Far 102). In another intimate moment with Troy, she says, “ . . . my workfolk see me
following you about the field, and are wondering. O, this is dreadful!” (Hardy, Far 139). When
she is alone in the circus tent she feels that “many eyes were turned upon her . . .” (Hardy, Far
262). The women in Hardy’s narratives are not only subjected to the voyeuristic activities of the
narrator and the major male characters but also that of the peasants, workers and the community
as a whole. At the beginning of Tess there are some “strangers” who “would look long at her in
casually passing by, and grow momentarily fascinated by her freshness . . .” (Hardy 21) and after
her first visit to Trantridge Tess becomes conscious of the “spectacle she presented to surprised
vision: roses at her breast; roses in her hat; roses and strawberries in her basket to the brim”
(Hardy 47). These watchers include the man with the red paintpot, the Amazonian sisters Car
and Nancy Darch and Farmer Groby who reappear both in Casterbridge and Flintcomb-Ash that
reminds Tess of her days in Trantridge. The eyes that surround Tess represent the moral views
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and codes of persons around her, which she shares and sometimes resists. In private moments, as
in the Chase with Alec, or at Wellbridge, or when she is with Angel in a deserted mansion, Tess
feels that the eye of the community does not cease watching her. Tess is quite conscious of this
watching and the reason for her move to Talbothays is “the sense of being amid new scenes
where there were no invidious eyes upon her . . .” (Hardy, Tess 109). On the road to Flintcomb-
Ash she covers half her face to avoid the look of the admirers but all is in vain. The male gaze is
so widely dispersed that women find themselves, surrounded, almost everywhere, as it were,
with voyeuristic eyes. Charles P.C. Pettit thus observes: “Wherever Tess goes it seems that the
eyes and ears of all are upon her, and the pressure of all these watchers hems her in, constrains
her freedom and limits the expression of her individuality” (185). Even the natural world seems
to be involved in this preoccupation. Tess asks Angel whether the trees have inquisitive eyes or
not. Significantly, this has been theorized in a different manner by Sartre who in Being and
Nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology (2009) observes that what the subject
“apprehend[s] immediately” when he/she hears the “branches crackling behind” him/her “is not
that there is someone there”; it is that he/she is “vulnerable” and that he/she has “a body which
can be hurt” and that when he/she is seen he/she is without “defense” (282). When the Cricks
return unexpectedly to Talbothays Tess remarks, “But I wasn’t really sitting on his knee, though
it might ha’ seemed as if I was, almost!” to which Richard Crick replies: “Well—if so be you
hadn’t told us, I am sure we shouldn‟t ha‟ noticed that ye had been sitting anywhere at all, in this
light, . . .” (Hardy, Tess 197, emphasis added). Moreover, watching becomes all the more
irresistible because the same pair of eyes reappears with their knowledge of the previous
watching and the knowledge of the past. Buber has explained the role of this systematization of
foreknowledge in his analysis of the unilateral nature of the “I-It” mode of relation which is a
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realm of causality and objectification. Belonging to the “I-It” mode of relation, the knowing self
identifies the other as a fixed identity on the basis of his knowledge of the past, thereby
transforming him/her into an object. This continuous reenactment of the previous experiences of
watching, as argued by Buber, consolidates the position of the empowered knowing self as a
rule-generated identity.
The male gaze is not static; it is attentive to the response it produces and thus it
apparently creates a sense of reciprocity. It is from her blush that Oak gets an idea of
Bathsheba’s response to Boldwood’s attention: “Gabriel, to whom her face was as the uncertain
glory of an April day, was ever regardful of its faintest changes, and instantly discerned thereon
the mark of some influence from without, in the form of a keenly self-conscious reddening. He
also turned and beheld Boldwood” (Hardy, Far 97, emphasis added). Oak’s astoundingly close
observation of the facial reactions of the woman enables him to guess her attitude to the other
male characters. This sense of reciprocity however is in the service of male hegemony as it
enables Oak to keep a close vigil on Bathsheba. The women in Hardy’s novels live with the
painful awareness of being subjected to the male gaze as an instrument of torture: “She [Tess] . .
. having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her began to trace imaginary patterns on the
tablecloth with her forefinger, with the constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be
watched” (Hardy, Tess 124). This can also be illustrated with reference to the encounter of
Bathsheba and Troy in a dark plantation of trees on the night of the shearing-supper. As they
pass, she is thrown off balance and a “masculine voice” enquires if she is hurt (Hardy, Far 127).
In the light of the lamp, Bathsheba sees that the man is a soldier and that his spur has got
entangled in her skirt. He offers to disentangle her. Bathsheba tries to do it herself but cannot
look at his eyes because “his gaze was too strong to be received point-blank with her own”
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(Hardy, Far 128). Bathsheba pulls again and the young soldier says, “You are a prisoner
[prisoner of the gaze], miss; it is no use blinking the matter” (Hardy, Far 128). Instead of
considering the other as the master or the lord “in a dimension of height” which Levinas suggests
to be the only authentic way to recognize the other, Troy here treats the feminine other as a slave
and a degraded being (75). He proposes to cut her dress and Bathsheba agrees. To do that, he
unwounds a cord from the little wheel in the spur. The spur, a sharp pointed object on the heel of
a rider’s boot which is used to encourage a horse to go faster is an obvious sexual symbol. The
metaphor of the gaze is extended into the spur and acquires the suggestion of sexual dominance
and control. Though Bathsheba withdraws her own hand, the man touches it “by accident or
design” (Hardy, Far 128). And Bathsheba feels “vexed” (Hardy, Far 128). Troy’s shameless but
flamboyant appreciation of the beauty of the woman, their physical proximity and, above all,
Bathsheba’s position as a sexual subordinate (“prisoner”) in his statement are placed in the
context of his gaze which is so overpowering that Bathsheba feels threatened and wonders
whether “. . . by a bold and desperate rush she could free herself at the risk of leaving her skirt
bodily behind her” (Hardy, Far 128-29). But this thought seems to her “dreadful” (Hardy, Far
129). So she is literally behaving as a prisoner which is symptomatic of Beauvoir’s master-slave
dialectic where the woman has to “renounce her claims as sovereign subject” as she fails to
regard the man as inessential (691).
Boumelha in Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form (1982)
writes: “There is . . . a radical split in women’s consciousness between self-perception and
perception by others; it is this latter which gives birth to self-consciousness and to that concern
with the judgment of others which is common to the female characters . . .” (35). Women often
internalize patriarchal values in their negotiation with male dominance and power. Bathsheba’s
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engagement with herself in the mirror can be interpreted as more an expression of this tendency
rather than a naive narcissistic gesture, as implied by the narrator. The politico-sexual dimension
of a woman’s narcissism in a patriarchal society can be explained with reference to John
Berger’s theory of seeing. Berger thus argues that the social presence of man is different from
that of a woman in the sense that a man’s presence is characterized by a promise of power which
may be moral, physical, economic, social or sexual. The more he fulfills that promise, the more
striking he becomes as a social presence. Even when he is not capable of doing anything, he is
judged in terms of the power, which he is expected to exercise on others. A woman’s presence,
on the other hand, is culturally so defined that men treat this presence as a physical emanation.
Women are socially conditioned to continually watch themselves and their selves are split into
two: “And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two
constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman” (Berger 40). They survey
themselves because how they appear before men is a crucial issue that will define their identity
as objects. Berger therefore observes: “That part of a woman’s self which is the surveyor treats
the part which is the surveyed so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self would like to be
treated. And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself constitutes her presence” (40). The
women edit their own appearance as an “indication of how she would like to be treated” (Berger
41). The woman is therefore appropriated by the male gaze and simultaneously appropriates the
male gaze taking on the role of the male. That part of a woman who surveys is male and the part,
which is surveyed, is female. Women thus watch themselves from the perspective of the male—
as an object: “Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a
sight” (Berger 41, emphasis added). This objectification reifies the woman as a commodity.
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The pun on the word “sight” deserves the readers’ attention: on the one hand it refers to
the exoticization and eroticization of the woman and on the other hand her self-display as a
commodified object. This is one way of partly explaining this tendency in Hardy’s heroines who
develop the habit of watching themselves in mirrors. Berger observes that the function of the
mirror in the tradition of western painting is perhaps to help the women to treat them as sights. In
the history of Western painting it has been repeatedly evident that the male painter depicts
women nude for their pleasure and then puts mirrors in their hands so that they can morally
condemn the women. Beauvoir observes that the root of narcissism lies in a woman’s frustration
as a subject as her “aggressive sexuality remains unsatisfied” in a conservative patriarchal
society (Beauvoir 641). She also argues that in such a society a woman finds herself an object
since childhood which encourages her to identify herself with her body and prompts her to offer
herself to her own desires. Getting no social recognition as an individual, she is forced to give
“herself supreme importance because no object of importance is accessible to her” (Beauvoir
642). Thus, if there is any element of fictional self-sufficiency in regarding ownself in the mirror
that too is displaced by the male look which will pull Bathsheba, living a singular existence, into
a public mode of being where she recognizes herself as an object of the male gaze.
In his analysis of the “conditions and forces” defining the “formation of a dominant
model” (7) of an observer in the nineteenth century, Jonathan Crary shows that the “subjective
vision” was prioritized in that period in contrast to the “suppression of subjectivity” in notions of
vision in the seventeenth and eighteenth century (9). The concept of subjective vision involves a
destruction of the “objective ground of visual truth” epitomized in the technology of the camera
obscura in the seventeenth and eighteenth century (Crary 14). Vision was uprooted from the
“stable and fixed relations” and was given a new mobility, abstracted from any external
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“founding site or referent” (Crary 14). Knowledge of the constitutive role of the body in the
apprehension of the visible world exposed the “idiosyncrasies of the ‗normal’ eye” (Crary 16)
and the sense of touch was no longer perceived as a “conceptual component of vision” (Crary
19). This actually meant the “unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality
incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to perceived space” (Crary 19).
The camera obscura of the seventeenth and eighteenth century defined an observer as an
isolated being and sundered the act of seeing from the physical body of the observer as the
observer’s sensory experience was “supplanted by the relations between a mechanical apparatus
and a pre-given world of objective truth” (Crary 39-40). The space of the camera obscura was
actually a concretization of Descarte’s idea of the secure placement of the self within an interior
space as a precondition of having any knowledge of the outer world and the “calculable
penetration of light rays through the single opening of the camera” corresponded to the “flooding
of the mind by the light of reason,” not the “dazzlement of the senses by the light of the sun”
(Crary 43). In fact, this is also in keeping with Descarte’s theory of an orderly projection of the
world in which the images observed were detached from the sentiments and sensations of the
observer. Consequently, all those hardly had any corrupting influence on the objective reflection
of the images. In Descarte’s model incarnated in the camera obscura the observer was certain of
his own self in the sense that he was securely positioned in an empty space and his ultimate
purpose was to escape the uncertainties of human vision and the confusion of the senses. The
camera obscura as a technological device supported this project in its attempt to find a purely
objective view of the world as the foundation of human knowledge with the help of which the
world can be logically analyzed through a “progressive accumulation and combination of signs”
(Crary 48). And sensory evidence was rejected as inauthentic for its instability. The knowledge
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of the mind which was considered to be “immortal by its very nature” was also regarded to be
prior to the knowledge of the body (Descartes 74). The classic position of the voyeur, as it is
evident, for instance, in the voyeuristic activities of Oak and Troy in Hardy’s novels refers to the
voyeur’s need for an isolated space from which he can attempt to attain a glimpse of the object
without offering himself to any threat of exposure. This is also stressed in Descarte’s theory: a
secure placement of the knower in an interior space to have knowledge of the outside world.
In Far Oak’s act of watching Bathsheba on horseback on the third occasion can be
mentioned as a classic instance of voyeurism in which Oak peeps through the loophole in the
direction of Bathsheba’s approach and the latter who has no habit of riding, assures herself that
there are no onlookers and then drops backwards lying flat upon the pony’s back, her head over
its tail and her eyes up at the sky. She “seated herself in the manner demanded by the saddle”
after assuring herself that nobody watches her (Hardy, Far 18). What is more, the classic
symptom of voyeurism is found in the locational advantage of Oak as a voyeur: he is situated in
a site from where he can see the sex object but nobody can see him. Bathsheba is absolutely
unconscious of Oak’s presence and even of the erotic potential of her own bodily movements
and she is evidently embarrassed when she comes to know that Oak had seen her in her
masculine poses during the horse ride (Hardy, Far 17-20). Troy also secretly watches her at
Greenhill Fair “peeping from his dressing-tent through a slit” (Hardy, Far 262) and he looks at
her “through an opening into the reserved space at the further end” (Hardy, Far 265). He also
peeps through a hole, which he cuts in the canvas while talking to Boldwood. My Secret Life
(1888), a noted text on voyeuristic pleasure, and also the erotic writings of Marquis de Sade
(1740-1814) or Georges Bataille (1897-1962), suggest that one of the excitements of voyeurism
lies not in the experience of seeing what is kept hidden, but in seeing it while remaining
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concealed from the “actual participants” (Lucie-Smith, Erotica 104). The effort of the observer
to situate himself as a detached and disincarnate self apparently gives him the status of a
sovereign subject but in the end it is frustrated by the exposure of his participation as a voyeur in
the situation through sensuous experience. Descarte’s construct of visual consumption as a mode
of knowledge formation was challenged in the nineteenth century because the corporeal
subjectivity of the observer, in all its contingency and specificity was given priority in the
assessment of optical experience. Vision was no longer “subordinated to an exterior image of the
true or the right” (Crary 138). Sensation, as a “multiplicity of intangible psychic affects,” was
considered not directly accessible to manipulation and measurement as an “empirically isolable
entity” and the focus was on the “arbitrary or disjunctive relation of sensation to its external
cause” (Crary 145). There was no “real world” the eye could predicate, not only because of the
acceptance of the ineradicable sense of ambiguity, disorder and inconsistency central to the act
of seeing, but also for the fact that the intention of the observer governed the field of sight. Even
when photographers seek to reflect reality, they are haunted by the “imperatives of taste and
conscience” (Sontag, On Photography 6).
According to Kant who established the modern field of Aesthetics in the late eighteenth
century, beauty is not an inherent feature of things but something that conveys the feeling of
pleasure the observers experience (Nehamas 5). Though the classic position of a voyeur involves
an alienated space where the voyeur is securely positioned as it is found in the voyeuristic
activities of Oak and Troy, there is no doubt that their act of seeing is distorted by their intention
and motive as observers. Buber has observed that in the I-It mode of relation the I as the
knowing self is hyper-active in the sense that he observes, designates and fixes the location of
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the other as an object and is independent of the participation of the other: everything takes place
“within” him. Thus, it is a relation mediated by the I’s preconceptions, intentions and fancy.
Falling in love is primarily a solipsistic experience for Hardy’s voyeurs as the narrator
seems to disregard the tendency of lovers to achieve an objective understanding of each other’s
personality. Therefore in Hardy’s fiction love is fundamentally an obsessive engagement of two
individuals who fail to know each other owing to their inability to go beyond the periphery of
their private emotions. Here Sartre’s observation helps the readers to understand the basic
dilemma of Hardy’s characters: the self is incapable of apprehending for himself the self which
he is for the other, just as the self is incapable of apprehending, on the basis of the “Other-as-
object” which appears to him, “what the Other is for himself” (266). The actions of the women
are only important when they are seen with relation to and in the context of male voyeurism. The
male voyeurs are only engaged with their own desires and the woman is only an excuse for this
indulgence. While describing the gaze of Oak the narrator observes that the woman is just an
excuse as the will of the observer governs the field of sight: “In making even horizontal and clear
inspections we colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in”
(Hardy, Far 17). Mulvey in Visual and Other Pleasures (1989) writes:
. . . the sexualized image of woman says little or nothing about women’s reality,
but is symptomatic of male fantasy and anxiety that are projected on to the female
image. In this sense the image of woman that had circulated as a signifier of
sexuality could be detached from reality, from referring to actual women, and
become attached to a new referent, the male consciousness. The direction of the
gaze shifted, satisfyingly, from women as spectacle to the psyche that had need of
such a spectacle. (xiii-xiv emphasis added)
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Sexual bodies have a relative significance: they cannot exist as independent objects. To
derive the meaning of their presence they have to be related to each other. One’s body escapes
him/her in the sense that it is apprehended elsewhere and by others and, therefore, there is hardly
any “pure subject” to “claim the right of seeing without being seen” (Sartre 312). The female
body in Hardy’s novels is placed in the context of a situation where it gains its existence through
being known and interpreted by male viewers. Women in Hardy’s novels are constructed as
desirable objects in relation to the male viewer as a desiring subject. And the male viewer,
following Sartre’s analysis, does not see the woman as an object for the sake of the woman, but
for himself. Berger argues that, so far as the convention of painting women in the European
tradition is concerned, the women are meant to “feed an appetite” of the male onlooker as the
pictures are “made to appeal to his sexuality” (49). The need to find a “satisfactory form” to
“fill” an “increasing void within him [Oak]” creates the “widest scope for his [Oak’s] fancy” and
Oak imagines Bathsheba to be a beautiful woman (Hardy, Far 17). He secretly watches
Bathsheba as she comes everyday to milk the cow and this secret watching makes him obsessed
with Bathsheba because his feeling for her deepens “without any corresponding effect being
produced upon herself” (Hardy, Far 23). The narrator notes that, though Boldwood says that he
will give Bathsheba everything he possesses, he is not actually kind to Bathsheba and offers her
nothing but a love marked by “self-indulgence” (Hardy, Far 102). When Boldwood asks
Bathsheba whether he can “think” of her she replies, “Yes, I suppose you may think of me” and
it has a tremendous impact on Boldwood who “dropped his gaze to the ground, and stood long
like a man who did not know where he was” (Hardy, Far 102). Unwilling to dismantle the inner
balance of a dignified man like Boldwood, Bathsheba admits that she has not fallen in love with
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him but Boldwood, obsessed with his own response as a sovereign subject, prefers to stick to the
private world of sexual imagination.
Butler argues that in terms of pleasure, what is often required is an “imaginary
participation of body parts” that one might not actually possess and that pleasure may require
“imagining an exaggerated or diminished set of parts”: “. . . the phantasmatic nature of desire
reveals the body not as its ground or cause, but as its occasion and its object” (96). The
“imaginary condition of desire,” it is observed, “exceeds the physical body through . . . which it
works” (Butler 96). This argument can also be illustrated with reference to the way Clym’s
vision of Eustacia is shaped by the contours of his own desire. He creates fantasies about the
anonymous beauty on the hill. Only after a single meeting with her, he decides to marry her and
settle in Egdon. For Charley, too, Eustacia is a romantic vision. This, in the terminology of
Buber, is characteristic of the I-It mode of relation where the foreknowledge and the imagination
of the subject destroys the possibility of a direct relation between the I and the other. Thus the
voyeur’s gaze has been so successful that the gaze, rather than the “real”, becomes the standard
of the beautiful. Whenever as knowing selves we find someone beautiful we find ourselves
engaged in interpretation and while interpreting, we start seeing him/her in ways “that are
distinctly our own” and thus in trying to find beauty we create it on our own (Nehamas 132).
What Tess reveals about herself is smothered by what Alec finds in her. In the encounter
between Tess and Alec even the anger of Tess is depicted in an erotic light because the act of
opening her mouth to say “no” inflames Alec by revealing “the red and ivory of her mouth”
(Hardy, Tess 58). Alec’s “bold rolling eye” (Hardy, Tess 43) settles on Tess when they meet for
the first time and while forcing a strawberry through her lips he eagerly watches the unconscious
munching and is drawn to the physical features of Tess: “It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fulness
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of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was” (Hardy, Tess 45,
emphasis added).
In the light of Butler’s argument, it can be shown that in a “closed phallogocentric
signifying economy” women represent not only a linguistic absence but, both the male subject
and the feminine other, become the “masculine mainstays” of that system (13). Butler argues that
phallogocentrism offers a name to “eclipse the feminine” and this substitution is evident in the
suspension of Tess’s subjectivity in this part of the text (17). One such significance of the mirror
in a scene where Bathsheba delightfully inspects her own image lies in the fact that the mirror-
image becomes more important than the real and it even defines and regulates the real: “She
blushed at herself, and seeing her reflection blush, blushed the more” (Hardy, Far 9). The visual
image of a woman reflected in a mirror is a preferred target for the voyeurs as often their desires
move from women in reality to representations of women because they can co-opt and
internalize those representations in numerous ways. For that reason the image of a woman
reflected in a mirror is a more pliable object than the real woman standing before a voyeur’s
actual gaze. The voyeurs, preoccupied with their own feelings, fail to have an objective
assessment of the women and with the passing of time, they become even more possessive.
The possessive nature of Hardy as narrator which is expressed in the way he manipulates
and constructs landscape as a passive space is also evident in his treatment of female sexuality,
particularly in his voyeuristic engagement with Tess’s body parts. There are many male
characters in Hardy’s novels whose voyeuristic gaze also makes them obsessed with the physical
presence of women. One such character is Angel who, even while finding Tess as the “visionary
essence” (134) of womanhood, is “burdened inwardly by a waxing fervor of passion for the soft
and silent Tess” (151). The voyeuristic activity as an obsession becomes so intense that the
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narrator compares Oak’s amorous passion with his dog’s desire for food: “His dog waited for his
meals in a way so like that in which Oak waited for the girl’s presence that the farmer was quite
struck with the resemblance . . .” (Hardy, Far 23). Oak’s possessiveness is expressed when he
rebukes Bathsheba for leading Boldwood on by sending him the valentine. It is quite easy for
Bathsheba to feel that this man too, in a different way, takes excessive interest in her life. Oak is
envious of the other male suitors and while giving Bathsheba suggestions he actually analyses
situations from his own perspective and forgets to enquire what Bathsheba is thinking about the
men around her. According to Marcel when the subject thinks that the other can be reduced to his
idea of the other, it becomes impossible for him to “break the circle” he has begun “by drawing
round one’s-self” (Marcel, Being 105). As a knowing self, in Marcel’s terminology, Oak is not
“available” as he ignores the inner freedom or the subjectivity of Bathsheba as a consequence of
his attachment to his own observation. When Bathsheba tells Oak that she has no sweetheart at
all his delight knows no bounds as this reinforces his egoist position. Oak’s love for Bathsheba is
however not comparable to Boldwood’s obsession with the woman, which is destructive in
nature. When Boldwood addresses Bathsheba by name the latter has an “intuitive conviction”
that Boldwood’s appearance is the equivalent of “the reverberation of thunder” (Hardy, Far
100). Though she apologizes for having sent the valentine, Boldwood desperately wants to get
the assurance from Bathsheba that at least at some point of time in future she will love him.
In Lacanian theory there is an emphasis on the act of seeing and the act of being seen
which is closely associated with the way one uses images to construct his/her identity and the
identities of others as his/her objects of desire. In the first phase of his career, as argued by Sean
Homer, Lacan’s philosophical position was that of a phenomenologist and phenomenology deals
with the idea that objects do not “exist independently as things in the world separate from our
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perception of them”; in a later stage, this philosophical position “reduce[s] the external world to
consciousness alone” (19). Lacan argues that in sexual attraction, the desire of the observer fills
the images of the other with meaning but it is transferred to new objects in a process of ceaseless
displacement and thus leads to a “frustration inherent in the very discourse of the subject” as the
subject realizes that his “construct in the imaginary . . . disappoints all his certainties” (Écrits
46). Lacan also points out that a “fundamental alienation” marks the subject’s relation with his
construct of his own identity and the identity of the other (Écrits 46). The intention of the
observer is as important as the qualities of the object perceived but it often creates anxiety for the
voyeurs as they find a gap between what they intend to see and what they actually find in reality.
Sometimes the voyeurs knowingly disregard a fault in the personality of the object because they
choose pleasure over involvement and complexity though they are embarrassed after seeing the
event in the clear light of reason. Sometimes a voyeur like Oak persuades himself to think that
the object of his sexual gaze is more intelligent, engaging or sensitive than he has reason to
believe only because of the fact that he is unwilling to acknowledge the sexual elements in his
attraction but the more he wants to suppress them in subtle ways the more they dismantle his
project of masculine self-formation. Oak extends his hand to take that of Bathsheba but it slips
through his fingers “like an eel” (Hardy, Far 27). This gesture is symbolic of the unavailability
of Bathsheba because the voyeur’s imagination widens the gulf between Bathsheba as she
appears in reality and as she is conceived under the spell of male gaze. The observation that
becomes evident is that, for the voyeur, the fantasy and fiction is more real than the object itself.
This objectification implies the substitution of the real and, as its corollary, the alienation of the
voyeur from reality, from the reality of his/her own desire. Voyeurism implies an extreme form
of solipsism which confounds the voyeur’s own self and desire. However it should be kept in
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mind that the site of sexual fantasy and voyeurism is not something that is chronologically
placed “after” a self-sufficient reality because the boundaries between reality and fantasy
collapse in sexual matters and what often happens is that sexuality exclusively operates in a
space of the voyeuristic imagination of Hardy’s male characters that define the “real” for them.
The voyeur’s desire for sexual pleasure cannot be fully exhausted because as long as desire
persists, something always remains beyond its periphery (Nehamas 9).
Moreover, what disappoints the voyeurs is the instability of the images of women which
they produce according to their needs. Troy thanks Bathsheba for “the sight of such a beautiful
face” and then what he says reveals his awareness of the despair the possessive self experiences
after the thrill of possession fades away: “I am thank thankful for beauty, even when ’tis thrown
to me like a bone to a dog. These moments will be over too soon!” (Hardy, Far 128). One
symbolic manifestation of the short-lived intensity of the voyeur’s desire is found in Eustacia’s
act of blowing a stick with a live coal at its end to renew the dying embers of a bonfire of the
coal which causes a momentary irradiation visible in her matchless lips and cheek.
What is more, the voyeurs seek satisfaction by reducing the object of their desire to
sexualized body-parts but are finally disappointed because what often sparks their desire is not a
sexualized body-part but some physical and psychological features, for instance, a glance, of
which they become aware through the act of looking (Nehamas 55). In one sense what the
voyeurs know about a person is merely physical as it comes to them through the senses; yet, in
another sense, even a glimpse or a smile or a way of moving one’s hand or uncoiling the hair is
nonphysical as it unfolds “a character and a personality” (Nehamas 69). Alexander Nehamas in
his analysis of beauty in aesthetic representation observes that visual features are usually
informed by psychological characteristics: “Beauty inspires desires without letting me know
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what they are for, and a readiness to refashion what I already desire without telling me what will
replace it” (63). The narrator is conscious of these visual features of Tess informed by
psychological characteristics and therefore is frustrated to notice those features of Tess’s body
that are not in keeping with her sexualized image constructed in his own voyeuristic imagination:
“Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along to-day, for all her
bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her
ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and
then” (Hardy, Tess 21). The voyeur-narrator is shocked to find that the identity of a woman is so
multidimensional that it exceeds the limits imposed by the voyeur’s project of sexual
objectification. Buber thus observes that love is “blind” when it “does not see a whole being”
(The Writings 49). It does not escape the narrator’s attention that one day Tess is “pink and
flawless” and on another she is “pale and tragical” (Hardy, Tess 109). The complexity and
ambivalence in Tess’s representation is manifested in what is said about her last days at Marlott:
“When she was pink she was feeling less than when pale; her more perfect beauty accorded with
her less elevated mood; her more intense mood with her less perfect beauty” (Hardy, Tess 109).
The voyeur-narrator is shocked to find out the inadequacy of his imagination as it cannot help
him to fully explain Tess’s personality and he lacks any other device to get an access to her. In
spite of the self’s efforts to characterize reality, he, according to Marcel, is left “with no more
than its ghost” and is deceived by the “coherence of this ghost” when the self gets immersed in
“self-satisfaction and pride” (Marcel, Being 169). This actually refers to what Sartre calls
“ontological separation” by which he means a situation in which the self cannot know itself “in”
the other if the other is primarily an object for him, neither can he apprehend the other in his true
being, i.e., in his subjectivity (267). The voyeur-narrator is incapable of demonstrating what
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Levinas calls genuinely critical reason that attends to the distinctive and peculiar features of each
person.
One’s perception of the people he/she meets depends not only on their real features, but
also on what he/she thinks of them and how he/she interprets them in his/her fantasies. We not
only imagine conversing with people in our minds but also do things to them. We know what
they are actually like but at the same time we have pictures of them as we would like them to be.
In unconscious fantasy things rejected from conscious thought have an effect on the person who
is unaware of it. There is also conscious fantasy of which one example is daydream (Segal 4-8).
Fantasies deal with conflicts and anxieties in many ways by enabling characters to work them
through and test them against reality: both the reality of their own experience and that of the
external world.
The characters in Hardy also use fantasies to deny reality in various ways which on very
few occasions gives them a sense of relief but mostly creates irritation and a sense of inner
turmoil. Fantasies which have a crucial role in the inner lives of the characters of Hardy are
motivated by sexual needs and desires and are seen to be the effect of voyeuristic activities and
the erotic gaze. Voyeurism stimulates and is often accompanied with the steady progress of
sexual fantasy in Hardy’s novels. One instance of it is found in The Return where standing
before a closed window the male observer assumes that Eustacia is undressing and elaborately
describes what he imagines about the gestures and movements of the woman. The meeting of
Farfrae and Lucetta in The Mayor, for instance, demonstrates a very close and immediate relation
between the erotic gaze and fantasy. Farfrae comes to meet Elizabeth-Jane with a marriage
proposal but finds Lucetta there waiting to meet Henchard: “At last his eye fell upon the lady’s
and their glances met” (Hardy, The Mayor 122). Lucetta is aware of the implications of Farfrae’s
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gaze and says, “. . . you had better not look at me any longer” (Hardy, The Mayor 125). Farfrae
realizes that the thought of the woman will preoccupy his own mind in the coming days and
thanks her for “the pleasure of this visit” (Hardy, The Mayor 125). A voyeur has no access to the
present moment; he depends on his memory, on the knowledge of the past to ensure the
reenactment of the erotic moment in his fantasy. He mechanically repeats the one particular
moment in his fantasy and thus fails to stay connected with the present moment as a radical
break from the past. Buber explains this in the following way: “You have a present only insofar
as you have it, and you can make it into an object for yourself and experience and use it—you
must do that again and again—and then you have no present any more” (The Martin Buber
Reader 186). Thus, Farfrae’s growing infatuation with Lucetta is a consequence of his
negotiation with memory: the reenactment of the erotic gaze. That voyeuristic activity stimulates
erotic imagination or that they operate simultaneously can also be illustrated with reference to
what happens in the case of Elizabeth-Jane. Elizabeth-Jane’s eroticism in The Mayor lies in her
act of watching; in the way she observes the development of the Henchard-Farfrae relation or the
relation of Farfrae and Lucetta. Possessing “[a] seer’s spirit” (Hardy 131), Elizabeth-Jane in her
imagination follows the intricate trajectories of Lucetta’s encounter with Farfrae: “She depicted
his impassioned manner; beheld the indecision of both between their lothness to separate and
their desire not to be observed; depicted their shaking of hands; how they probably parted with
frigidity in their general contour and movements, only in the smaller features showing the spark
of passion, thus invisible to all but themselves” (Hardy, The Mayor 131, emphasis added). This
is not a reflection but a reconstitution of amorous situation through “depiction,” as a subjective
way of representing things from a voyeur’s perspective. Elizabeth-Jane is extremely animated in
her own world of imagination and as an observer she enjoys the whole act of fantasizing which
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turns out to be a sensuous mental process for her. Her voyeurism stimulates her fantasy. The
sudden exposure of Bathsheba’s left hand in Far immediately stimulates both Oak and the
voyeur-narrator to indulge in sexual fantasy. However, Oak’s curiosity to have a glimpse of the
uncovered body-parts of Bathsheba is, in the opinion of Marcel, an instance of problem rather
than of mystery which belongs to the realm of objects that can be possessed by the objectivizing
potential of the subject.
Sexual voyeurism is not passive observing in the sense that it, at least tacitly, and often
explicitly encourages whatever is going on to keep happening. This is evident when Oak sees
two women one of whom is middle-aged while the other appears young. He wants to see more of
the young woman as “he could form no decided opinions upon her looks” (Hardy, Far 16) and
indulges in fantasy: “. . . he felt himself drawing upon his fancy for their details” (Hardy, Far
17). Standing before a mirror Bathsheba looks at her own image with undivided attention and
this act of self-appraisal begets new waves of thoughts; it encourages Bathsheba to follow “her
thoughts seeming to glide into far-off though likely dramas in which men would play a part . . .”
(Hardy, Far 10). Here also the pleasure of looking, though directed at one’s own self, is
immediately followed by a spell of fantasy. Troy’s gaze exercises a deep influence on Bathsheba
and she derives pleasure in thinking about the event, which made her awestruck when it took
place. Preoccupied with thoughts about the stranger, she is delighted in the way she has been
praised and is aware that she should not have sulked away from him. Troy’s gaze and words
charged with sexual implications thus stimulate Bathsheba’s fantasy. Even when describing her
fantasy, the narrator focuses on the visual image: what the woman has actually “seen” or what
she is “seeing” in her fantasy.
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There are several references to the fantasy of women in Hardy’s novels which in spite of
being indicative of an assertion of the libidinal drive of the women in a conservative society are
finally appropriated by the cultural symptoms of male hegemony manifested in the narratorial
observations. This can be analyzed with reference to Eustacia’s fantasy which emerges as
consequence of what she hears about a smart and handsome young man who is coming to the
heath from Paris. It destroys her sense of time and she becomes oblivious of externals. The
morning is colourless but that five minutes’ listening fills her with “myriads of imprisoned
shapes” in such a way that she spends the whole afternoon staying with them (Hardy, The Return
87). On the chilly evening she stands on the heath waiting to have a glimpse of Clym, Clym bids
her good night and she has a dream comparable to a sexual adventure in which the visor of the
helmet disguises the man’s face and they dance together with “wondrous music” in the
background (Hardy, The Return 93). It would not be irrelevant here to mention that “having sex
in an unusual location” is a common content of sexual fantasies (Levay, and Baldwin 232). The
man talks in “[s]oft whispering” that excites Eustacia (Hardy, The Return 93). The visor of the
helmet is still closed. They come out of the mass of dancers, dive into a pool and find themselves
under the open sky with arched rainbows. Eustacia “blushingly” looks up and sees the man
removing his casque to kiss her (Hardy, The Return 93). When the dream ends with a cracking
noise and the figure of the man falls into fragments Eustacia cries aloud. In dealing with this
fantasy the narrator seems to suggest that the violence is not solely an accident or the imposition
of an external event but something that is central to the sexual drive. However, it should not be
forgotten that in his depiction of the fantasy, Hardy carefully reinforces the commonplace notion
that women’s sexual fantasies typically include more elements of romance and affection
compared with those of men. It is the stranger who takes the dominant role leading the woman to
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a particular place, whispering in her ear and finally removing the casque to kiss her. Eustacia
adopts a passive role suggested in her act of blushing as shame is the recognition of oneself in a
“degraded, fixed and dependent being” which one is for the other (Sartre 312). Shame comes out
of the awareness of what Sartre calls the third dimension of the body which reveals the
consciousness of one’s body not as one lives it for oneself, but as one who lives it with reference
to the knowledge of the other and Clym who occupies the position of the other is presented, in a
certain sense, as “the radical negation” of Eustacia’s experience, since he is the one for whom the
woman is not subject, but object (Sartre 252). Research has shown that the sexual fantasies of
men and women are often in keeping with the stereotypes of male and female sexuality. Men’s
fantasies are marked by the visualization of explicit sexual behavior and the adoption of a
dominant role whereas those of women “tend to include more . . . affection” and may involve
taking a comparatively “passive role in sex acts” (Levay, and Baldwin 233).
In her fantasy Eustacia shows her eagerness to respond to the stranger’s sexual moves
and though she blushes she does not at all feel any sense of guilt for her fantasies. The erotic
unveiling of the man has a deep impact on her. But that unveiling is carefully delayed to
intensify her excitement and as soon as she finds his face partially unmasked the dream ends. So
far as the erotic dimension of this particular situation is concerned, the veiled face is extremely
important as it encourages the observer to focus attention on the whole of the body rather than on
particular features. His costume is such that it contributes to the erasure of the facial features and
thus Eustacia’s attention is turned away from the nuances of expression and personality to the
actual physical being. The moment of her crying out is a metaphoric moment of sexual ecstasy.
Then she “became cooler” (Hardy, The Return 93). The phases of the dream which have their
origin in the “images and fancies” nurtured by Eustacia the day before creates a mental stage that
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is “at the modulating point between indifference and love” and in which the passions are “in the
hands of the weakest will” (Hardy, The Return 94). In a world where the church puts all sorts of
restrictions on sexual behaviour, women like Eustacia prefer fantasy as an intense psychological
experience that can give an outlet to their repressed sexual feelings. Patriarchal culture is neither
monolithic nor invulnerable. There are fissures through which women can begin to ask questions
and sexual fantasy is a potentially subversive space in this regard because the women who are
already transformed into objects in the public space try to retaliate and affirm their freedom by
rendering men into object in the interior space of fantasy. There is no doubt that Eustacia’s
repressed feelings find an outlet in her fantasy but by emphasizing her sense of shame,
describing her sexual emotion in negative terms, associating it with the absence of a rational
spirit and allowing no change in the dominance-submission pattern Hardy makes her appear “not
as a subject but as an object paradoxically endued with subjectivity” and weakens his own
tentative attempt to challenge male hegemony (Beauvoir 727).
The Mayor is one of those rare novels of Hardy where the author’s focus is more on the
exploration of the voyeurism and fantasy of the women than on the stereotypical presentation of
the male gaze and male voyeuristic instinct. It is true that the novel begins with an event
symptomatic of male fantasy and like other female characters Lucetta, too, finds herself
threatened by an all-pervasive and anonymous male gaze. But the most striking thing in this
novel is the narrator’s sustained emphasis on Elizabeth-Jane’s pleasure as a voyeur and the role
of voyeurism in her fantasy. In this novel, which is notable for its conscious restraint and
minimality of the issue of sexuality, Hardy keeps exploring the function of the eye in stimulating
the power of erotic imagination. In a real-life situation Elizabeth-Jane is conservative and
conventional, but in her imagination, she is quite responsive to sensuous and passionate matters,
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thereby undermining the stereotype of a chaste and intellectual woman that patriarchal society
constructs for women like her. In observing and recapitulating the “impassioned manner” of
Farfrae and their “shaking of hands” in her own imagination, Elizabeth-Jane searches for an
escape from the straitjacket society constructs for her and in this way she also confronts her own
unrequited sexual desire (Hardy, The Mayor 131). The narrator however cannot conceal his
conservatism in finding out an element of perversity in Elizabeth-Jane’s voyeuristic delight and
subsequent introspection that leads him to describe her as a “discerning silent witch” who like an
intruder enters the world of Lucetta and Farfrae (Hardy, The Mayor 131).
It has been observed that physical perfection is an ideological standard implying that “no
ideal women are present” (Isikoff 40). For, the idea of the ideal woman is only a fantasy of the
spectator. The intention of the voyeurs in sexual fantasy is so intense that it determines reality for
them according to their own preferences and desires. The narrator’s observation in Far that
“[n]ight had always been the time at which he [Oak] saw Bathsheba most vividly” suggests that
in his fantasy Oak fills the gaps, repairs many faults and invents visual features and qualities to
compensate for her actual inadequacies (Hardy 59, emphasis added). In The Return Eustacia, as a
voyeur, fashions her feeling of love for Clym out of her own needs which has hardly anything to
do with the actual qualities of the man. For a whole afternoon she entrances “. . . herself by
imagining the fascination which must attend a man come direct from beautiful Paris—laden with
its atmosphere, familiar with its charms” (Hardy, The Return 92). She exaggerates the
implications of the two words he says to her and also imagines him having a romantic voice and
those fabrications produce an inner energy visible in her outward appearance: “All emotional
things were possible to the speaker of that ‗good night.’ Eustacia’s imagination supplied the rest.
. . . She glowed; remembering the mendacity of the imagination, she flagged; then she freshened;
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then she fired; then she cooled again” (Hardy, The Return 92). The effect of overhearing a
conversation about Clym is overwhelming: “That five minutes of overhearing furnished Eustacia
with visions enough to fill the whole blank afternoon” (Hardy, The Return 86). In the darkness
she cannot see him but hears him say goodnight and it becomes the most “exciting” event in her
life: “On such occasions as this a thousand ideas pass through a highly charged woman’s head;
and they indicate themselves on her face . . .” (Hardy, The Return 92). Two casual sentences are
thus transformed in her imagination into an utterance inaugurating passionate feelings for him:
“She had loved him partly because he was exceptional in this scene, partly because she had
determined to love him, chiefly because she was in desperate need of loving somebody after
wearying of Wildeve. Believing that she must love him in spite of herself . . . and by stress of a
morbid imagination have actually brought about that event” (Hardy, The Return 112-13). That
night Clym comes into Eustacia’s dream with an undeniable force: “The perfervid woman was
by this time half in love with a vision” (Hardy, The Return 94, emphasis added). This is a case of
Eustacia’s failure to know Clym in his subjectivity, she treats him as nothing more than an object
of her desire which is an inadequate assessment of the situation.
In a similar way Boldwood creates in his imagination what he intends to create for,
though he does not know who has written a letter to him, the writer of the letter becomes, for
him, a real person. He imagines the hand of the woman having travelled over the paper “bearing
his [Boldwood’s] name” and thinks of the eyes of the girl, which watched the curves, which she
was forming on the paper and also hopes that, while writing the letter, the girl might have seen
him in her imagination (Hardy, Far 80). The narrator, however, does not forget the fact that
“[t]he vision of the woman writing” (Hardy, Far 81) who has a “misty shape” (Hardy, Far 81) is
merely a product of Boldwood’s fantasy: “The mysterious influences of night invested the writing
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with the presence of the unknown writer” (Hardy, Far 80, emphasis added). And “as a
supplement to the words written,” she has “no individuality” (Hardy, Far 81). The physical
presence of the letter in reality lends support to the intensely felt figure of the woman in the
fantasy: “ . . . when he awoke there was the letter justifying the dream” (Hardy, Far 81). When
Boldwood comes back to reality, he merely finds the actual presence of the letter but when he
remains in the world of fantasy, the girl takes a form and ceases to be an unreal vision. Without
getting any response from Bathsheba, Oak develops a feeling of obsessive love for her. But
Boldwood’s case, so far as his response to this letter is concerned, is a more extreme one where
he constructs the image of a woman out of nothing. Without getting the faintest suggestion about
the identity of the writer, Boldwood starts visualizing and describing her lips and mouth.
Boldwood starts imagining the mouth of the woman, the quality of the lips—whether they are
“red or pale, plump or creased” (Hardy, Far 80). He imagines how the lips curved and took a
certain expression at the time of writing and how the corners of the lips moved with “all their
natural tremulousness” (Hardy, Far 81). The “direct and full face” encounter between the self
and the other which gets privilege in Levinas’s theory of intersubjectivity has no place in a
voyeur’s space which is fundamentally a space of erotic imagination (Levinas 80). In such an
extreme instance of fantasy, the self is an “[e]goist without reference to the Other” and remains
absolutely for his own sake which marks the state of what Levinas calls enjoyment (Levinas
134).
For Lacan sexuality is symbolic, not biologically determined. He places sexuality in the
realm of “the symbolic” by insisting that the phallus itself is a symbol of the lack that constitutes
all subjects. Though it is true that the presence or absence of the phallus determines sexual
difference, the possession of phallus does not mean that one is complete or one escapes the
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constitutive lack. In fact, ironically the phallus is there only to represent the lack. And when
sexuality is not biologically determined, it is not ontologically definitive. It is only a
representation of the fundamental desire that constitutes us as subjects. When sexuality is in the
realm of the symbolic, it is also vulnerable to the fantasies of wholeness that characterize the
structure of people’s expectation and their identity. As symbolic subjects people are constantly in
search of “wholeness,” of something that will complete them. In that process, they build up the
illusion of a stable and static speaking subject with the assumption that sexuality can provide
fulfilment. But their fantasies around this notion only generate more and more anxiety and a
sense of unfulfilment. According to Lacan’s interpretation of male fantasy, as Jacqueline Rose
explains it, women are reduced to a fantasmic place and in that sense they do not exist (74-75).
Lacan’s widely quoted remarks such as, “the Woman does not exist” and that “there is no sexual
relation” are, according to Anna Geronimo, intended to demolish the myth of sexual fulfilment
and the idea that a site of wholeness can be found in the other (228). Hardy’s characters fantasize
baselessly and remain agitated both in body and spirit. The illusion of a stable and perfect
feminine other which the masculine subjects in Hardy presume in their quest for wholeness
finally disempowers them as they find it difficult to live in a space of fantasy for a long time and
when the unreality of the fantasy is exposed or forcefully brought to a material conclusion it once
again causes intense disappointment. The subject realizes that his fantasy does not empower him
to know the woman in her alterity, that is, as she “really” is. She is reduced to her status as an
object in the fantasy, as she appears to the male observer. Through the slow hours of shadow,
Oak can tenderly think of Bathsheba’s image and though Oak is “busy with fancies,” which are
“full of movement” as a voyeur he remains unsatisfied (Hardy, Far 58). The narrator admits that
the pleasure, which Oak gets from his fantasies and which is a pleasure of anticipation, not of
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accomplishment cannot “compensate for the pain of sleeplessness” (Hardy, Far 59). The sense
of the unattainable generated in the sexual fantasy stimulates the erotic feelings of those in
whose cases distance enhances desirability (Sontag, On Photography 16). But the delight of
fantasy seems unstable to Oak when he comes back to the world of reality and perceives the
“great difference between seeing and possessing” (Hardy, Far 59). T.R. Wright’s analysis of
Eustacia’s dream draws the readers’ attention to the sense of ambiguity at the centre of any
fantasy:
It is an extraordinary dream, symbolizing as it does the fall of man (and woman)
as a result of desire, which cannot be satisfied since the image upon which it fixes
fractures into fragments. What they are seeking remains unspecified, capturing the
vagueness and fluidity of all dreams. She wakes up to repeat her wish, insisting
that the mysterious helmeted figure was ‗meant for Mr. Yeobright’. (60)
The narrator’s description of Eustacia’s fantasy as “morbid imagination” also refers to the
fundamental sense of unfulfilment it generates and which, in an extreme state, ultimately leads to
profound unhappiness (Hardy, The Return 113). She has no “inward relaxation” which is needed
in which the self can abolish the sort of constriction which makes the self shrink into
himself/herself and deforms him/her (Marcel, Creative 34). The insatiable demands of the
unconscious, which are reinforced in fantasy and dreams, remain unfulfilled and thus cannot
achieve a reality in which the conflicts are harmonized. This is, in general, Hardy’s idea of
romantic love. It is how, in his opinion, “fascination” operates in infatuation, gets nourishment in
fantasies and shapes love relations. In sexual fantasies the achievement of the drive is less
important than the process of the drive, which reveals all the difficulty that characterizes the
subject’s relationship to the erotic object (Rose 60). The drive is a kind of searching out that
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which always goes beyond the actual relationship on which it turns. In the delineation of
Eustacia’s fantasy the narrator refuses to bring about a closure by emphasizing the arbitrary way
the dream ends. This is indicative of the fundamental incompleteness of fantasy that makes all
questions of “sexual satisfaction,” conventionally related to the final genital contact in a
heteronormative discourse, unnecessary.
Hardy, on the one hand, emphasizes the vastness of the universe in the context of which
the existence of an individual human being is really trivial and insignificant. It is also evident in
the use of nature, which remains unconcerned with the desires, joys or sorrows of human beings,
as a background of their activities in his novels. On the other hand he repeatedly harps on a
spark, a passionate inner life of individuals that can function even in extremely hostile situations.
When the stress is on the vast cosmic context individual human beings seem really negligible as
is evident in the depiction of Tess as quite insignificant in the end of the novel: a black flag is
raised from a tower signifying the execution of Tess in the backdrop of a horizon “lost in the
radiance of the sun hanging above it” (Hardy, Tess 384). However, there is an element of
“fascination” in a surge of vigour, in a momentary emergence of the unique and passionate
nature of people that play definite roles in the way they construct their own selves and the selves
of others in moments of fantasy. This is also evident in the representation of Eustacia’s
personality: “As Eustacia crossed the firebeams she appeared for an instant as distinct as a figure
in a phantasmagoria—a creature of light surrounded by an area of darkness: the moment passed,
and she was absorbed in night again” (Hardy, The Return 272, emphasis added). The description
of Eustacia “as a figure in a phantasmagoria” is basic to infatuated love where fantasy thus finds
a vital role (Hardy, The Return 272). Infatuation implies the reflection of the beloved
everywhere. Love, in Hardy is momentary, a sudden glimpse in the darkness, a sudden burning
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out. Lovers start seeing things in dreams, catch glimpses and hear voices only to guess at their
meanings and so exaggerate them in their imagination. The passionate radiance that surrounds
Hardy’s characters does not last long; infatuation does create a glow but with a shift of mood or
perspective, it fades and dies. In Tess the readers get a description of “brief glorification”
suggestive of this passionate upsurge of feelings: “Gnats, knowing nothing of their brief
glorification, wandered across the shimmer of this pathway, irradiated as if they bore fire within
them; then passed out of its line, and were quite extinct” (200). After her confession to Angel,
Tess feels that “he saw her without irradiation—in all her bareness . . .” (Hardy, Tess 228). So
not only is the fantasy unstable, love in Hardy’s novels marked by the sudden upsurge of
feelings, is often reduced to a fantasmic space which for its instability and elusiveness creates
disappointment. The self-alienation and self-fragmentation involved in the way Eustacia
mechanically offers a part of her body to Charley reveals Hardy’s perennial emphasis on the
“obsessive and delusory nature of sexual attraction” (Garson 70).
No discussion of fantasy in Hardy’s novels is complete without reference to his
condemnation of marriage as a social system. The ending of Tess contributes to the readers’
fantasy in its suggestion of the relation between Liza-Lu and Angel Clare as a man’s marriage
with his sister-in-law was a case of incest until the passing of the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act in
1907. The Mayor also begins with the public sale of the wife’s body. Irving Howe thinks that this
is “insidiously attractive to male fantasy” (Howe 366) and through it the readers are drawn into
“complicity with the forbidden” (Howe 367). The Mayor begins with a basic male fantasy that
develops against the context of a failed marriage, marriage that produces boredom, marriage that
has become a habit: a deadening habit of living together properly sanctioned by the authority.
Michael Henchard and Susan Henchard, in the beginning of the novel, walk wearily and
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absolutely indifferent to each other as there is a “stale familiarity” in their relation (Hardy, The
Mayor 6). So intensely is this sense of doubt embedded in the narrative that it casts its shadow
even on the seemingly happy marriage between Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane in the end. The
problem with voyeurism and fantasy is that nobody is satisfied with the “vision” of the person he
loves but paradoxically enough, even the sexual conquest, in the form of intercourse, in a
heteronormative context can never really extinguish the feeling of unrest in the mind of an
infatuated person. Sexual fantasy is marked by an inherent incompleteness and therefore it does
not end with an experience of sexual consumption. Moreover, Hardy’s masculine subjects
gradually realize the limitations of their projects of reducing the feminine other to an utterly
sexualized space and reducing the whole issue of eroticism to genital contact. Though Jude
makes love to Sue it cannot be ignored that for him she is at first more or less an ideal character,
about whose form he begins to weave curious and fantastic daydreams. He has a certain kind of
intellectual and spiritual assumptions about Sue’s personality which the experience of physical
love fails to diminish. In spite of the fact that voyeurism and sexual fantasy offer pleasure to
Hardy’s lovers which they could not have been able to receive in any other way, Hardy
consistently demonstrates the sense of unfulfilment which they generate. There are moments
when he seems to celebrate the intensity of a voyeur’s experience and the pleasure of sexual
fantasy when the readers are encouraged to compare these with the experience of loveless
marriages that ceaselessly produce disgust and disappointment in his novels. Hardy exposes the
limits of a voyeur’s fantasy but his criticism of marriage is equally harsh. Hardy himself was
childless and he generally denies his characters the pleasure of bringing up children which might
have added a different emotional quality to the love relations of married couples. Wessex had a
low birth-rate and Hardy’s heroines perish early—some of them do not marry and some die
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while giving birth to children. His depiction of weddings is also irregular and marked by a sense
of sheer indifference. Many prospective weddings do not mature because of misunderstanding or
the changes taking place in the inner lives of the characters. The elusive, deceptive aspects of
love, the fundamental emptiness of any sexual conquest and the inability of characters to go
beyond their private world of fantasy and obsession are what occupy Hardy as a close observer
of human relationships. When Sartre says that “. . . the Other can be for me only an image in
spite of the fact that the whole theory of knowledge which I have erected aims at rejecting this
notion of image,” it seems to express some of what the voyeur-narrator finally realizes (255). In
fact, this sense of separation and unfulfilment which the voyeurs and the masculine subjects in
general experience has deeper roots: there is an element of impersonality in the erotic relation or
relation involving voluptuosity which obstructs complementarity in love because the subject’s
voluptuosity aims not at the other but at the other’s voluptuosity and it is then no longer the love
of the other but the love of the love of the other 7. So in this relationship established between
lovers in voluptuosity, the masculine subject loves fully only if the feminine other loves him
because his voluptuosity delights in her’s and this state, designated by Levinas as trans-
substantiation, does not allow the subject and the other to be united. Admitting that voluptuosity
is simultaneously fusion and distinction, Levinas notes that love becomes synonymous with dual
egoism and in that sense, it explains both the complacency and the unhappiness of Hardy’s
lovers: “If to love is to love the love the Beloved bears me, to love is also to love oneself in love,
and thus to return to oneself” (266).
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Notes
1. Freud observes that apart from copulation, the ultimate sexual aim resulting in “a temporary
extinction of the sexual instinct” (On Sexuality 52-53), there are some preliminary sexual aims
like touching the sexual object and looking at it, which “lie on the road towards copulation” (On
Sexuality 53). Freud elucidates: “On the one hand these activities [touching and looking] are
themselves accompanied by pleasure, and on the other hand they intensify the excitation, which
should persist until the final sexual aim is attained” (On Sexuality 53). This remark implies that
the act of touching or looking at the sexual object can be seen as a preparatory phase for the final
act of copulation as they “intensify the excitation” and at the same time these activities can also
be regarded as self-sufficient and autonomous because they are “themselves accompanied by
pleasure” (On Sexuality 53). Thus there is a possibility that the appreciation of the sexual object
extends to his/her whole body and “tends to involve every sensation derived from it” (On
Sexuality 53). By “erotogenic” zones Freud means parts of the body, which may act as
substitutes for the genitals and behave analogously to them: “We can decide to regard
erotogenicity as a general characteristic of all organs and may then speak of an increase or
decrease of it in a particular part of the body” (On Metapsychology 73). In Hardy’s novels the
eye of the male voyeur functions as an “erotogenic” zone as it gains a tactile dimension and it is
primarily through the voyeuristic gaze that the masculine subjects attempt to objectify and
possess the women (On Metapsychology 73).
2. Standing transfixed under the spell of Eve’s mesmerizing beauty, Satan seems to forget his
plan for revenge and behaves like a rejected lover in Book IX of Paradise Lost : “She fair,
divinely fair, fit love for gods, / Not terrible, though terror be in love/ And beauty. . . .” (Milton
211, lines 489-91). The soliloquy of “bursting passion” reveals his sexual unrest and the nature
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of his unrequited desire (Milton 201, line 98). In this part of the soliloquy (Milton 210-11, lines
473-493), as an impact of Eve’s beauty, his thought lacks coherence and control. His thoughts of
the unsucked teats and apples may have been stimulated by the presence of the naked Eve.
Satan, as a voyeur, is so excited that he licks “the ground whereon she [Eve] trod” (Milton 212,
line 526). He describes Eve as a creature whom “all things living gaze on” and the language of
his sexual seduction bears the marks of the language of courtly love and that of libertine
seduction lyric (Milton 212, line 539). Living in a solitary confinement, Satan, as a voyeur
represents the solipsistic erotics of nonpropagation.
3. According to Judith Fetterly, the construction as normal and legitimate of the narrative point
of view is one of the most powerful means by which the reader is made to share the values of the
text: “. . . as readers, and teachers, and scholars, women [Fetterly is dealing specifically with the
women readers] are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept a
male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny” (107-08). This is in
extension of the arguments in Mulvey’s Visual and Other Pleasures (1989) regarding the
cooption of the female spectator in the male gaze.
4. In film this is called a point of view shot. The stealth associated with it is important for
increasing the tension of the sexual gaze. The irony or manipulation of the point of view shot
here is that the reader is both within and without Tess.
5. In fact, the “organization of the look” which became an aspect of film theory, was actually
anticipated by realist narratives to determine the meaning and implications of a scene or
situation.
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6. In one dominant strain of psychoanalytic film criticism, sadistic and voyeuristic male desires
are found to be at the centre of the cinematic narratives which through complex organization of
gaze transforms the women into fetishized objects.
7. Levinas argues that voluptuosity is such an intense state of intimacy that it attains a
“supremely non-public” character (265). In spite of being “direct like a spontaneous
consciousness,” it is intersubjectively structured and that is why it can function as “dual
solitude”: there is also a sense of impersonality in it which “prevents us from taking the relation
between lovers to be a complementarity” (265-66).