HARDY FORUM ARCHIVE H0043 5/11/00 "HARDY AS VOYEUR" ============================================= From ???@??? Mon May 01 07:55:41 2000 Date: Mon, 01 May 2000 16:27:59 +1000 From: David Cornelius Subject: Thank you Thank you for the responses on Hardy's views on marriage and the suggestions for further reading. I apologise for asking my second question as it seemed to meet with polite silence. However, it seemed to me to be an important issue in understanding the writer. Regards, David Cornelius ** David Cornelius 5 Caltowie Place Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia. dcorney@midcoast.com.au Carpe diem! ** ========== From: "Alan Shelston" Subject: Re: Thank you Date: Mon, 1 May 2000 11:21:45 +0100 Dear David, Well, I tried to prompt others about H as voyeur , but will have a go myself. ,I think you define an element that is certainly there in the way Hardy 'looks at' women. In many instances 'looks at' seems to be the right term, whether it is 'at' Bathsheba atop her cart, Tess in the dairy, etc., etc. The classic example of course is Elfride in her wet underthings in A Pair of Blue Eyes. 'Voyeuristic' might seem over the the top, and fgiven the connotations of the term this is a problem, but I think Hardy certainly looks at women with curiosity as well as admiration in his work. It may seem simple minded, but I think there are simpler explanations about Hardy's way of 'seeing' women than Freudian castration theories about the women in his life. For Hardy, like many young men in his social position (e.g. Lawrence), the female body, under all those clothes which both accentuate and conceal the female form, was forbidden territory throughout his formative years. And this leads him to wonder what women are physically like, and then what female experience must be like. Not being Tiresias - and it is to the point that Eliot has this obsession - he can only look on and speculate. The paradox is that this leads to his marvellous sympathy with the isolated woman - most obviously in Tess but most of all in the case of Sue - who has always seemed to me much more effectively understood by her creator than Jude himself. Lawrence noted the quality of Hardy's female characterisation of course. There, I have put my head over the top of the parapet. Alan shelston ========== Date: Mon, 01 May 2000 21:53:44 -0400 From: Rosemarie Morgan Subject: Re: Thank you What wonderful discretion, Alan! The question - how DID Hardy get to know so much about women, and such intimate, sensual knowledge too?- is partly answered, I think, by the contingencies of his childhood which required him to share a bedroom with his beloved younger sister Mary (close in years) and possibly even a bed (suggests Millgate). This was certainly not uncommon practice in small, congested Victorian households. I don't think anyone needs much more information than that - given the dressing and undressing which must have taken place over the years, the physical interests of young, sexually-maturing beings, and the occasional accidents of contiguity in bed at night! This is, after all, the same young man -- the ardent poet -- who observes in his notebook that once, on some unspecified occasion, a woman rising from the grass had left behind her a distinctly female scent upon the earth where she had been sitting. With every good wish, Rosemarie ========== From: "Alan Shelston" Subject: Re: Thank you Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 09:15:54 +0100 Dear Rosemarie, I have not got back to you on this. But encouraged to extend the thread by your excellent 'Editing Hardy', which I have just received, I will. Yes. Sharing bedrooms would have one of the factors in H's formative sexual consciousness. But there comes a point at which children of different sexes have to be separated, and I think that helps my point. That's the context of The Turn of the Screw, I have always thought, but of course Miles, like others of his social class, is sent away to (single sex) school at this point. So, incidentally, is Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. It would have been different for the young Hardy, for whom where contiguity and contiguity would have been mutually self-reinforcing. The larger context of this is perhaps about what realist fiction has to keep secret, and can at best only infer. As George Eliot says, 'Falsehood is so easy; truth so difficult. Incidentally Virgin Suicides is all about this, to bring us up to date. Discreet enough?!!! ========== Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2000 11:25:14 -0400 From: Rosemarie Morgan Subject: Re: Thank you Thanks Alan, for the observations -- just one addendum: it is said (by locals in my old home town of Swanage) that incest was rampant in South Dorset. One story goes that the coastal village of Langton Matravers practised, for several generations, a form of endogamy (partly caused by warring with neighbouring marble-stone-mining village of Worth Matravers), which eventually led to the dire problems caused by in-breeding and a decline in the local population. I'll say no more for fear of turning TTHA Forum into the National Enquirer! cheers Rosemarie > >Yes. Sharing bedrooms would have one of the factors in H's formative sexual >consciousness. But there comes a point at which children of different sexes >have to be separated, and I think that helps my point. ==========