Thomas Hardy and Desire

Conceptions of the Self

Jane Thomas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230224636
• eBook ISBN: 9781137305060
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on a broad concept of desire, informed by poststructuralist theorists this book examines the range of Hardy's work. It demonstrates the sustained nature of his thinking about desire, its relationship to the social and symbolic network in which human subjectivity is constituted and art's potential to offer fulfilment to the desiring subject.

1

House and Home: Nostalgic Desire and the Locus of Being

O Giles, you’ve lost your dwelling-place, And therefore, Giles, you’ll lose your Grace.

(TW, 2005: 99)

Over a century before Lacan formulated his theory of the ‘manque-à-être’¹ Thomas Hardy was engaging directly with a modern sense of alienated being. The nostalgia for a lost plenitude, a satisfaction of ontological yearning, is most poignantly expressed in the poetry and fiction through the trope of homes and homelessness, in particular the lost childhood home which functions as a powerful metaphor of desire or the ‘want-to-be’ for the adult self. Hardy’s work demonstrates how the alienated modern subject strives to create a ‘vital space’: a sense of harmony or an imagined integrity and security within the self. Being at home is equated with ‘being-at-home’ and nowhere is this more poignantly realised than in the remembered or oneiric childhood home.² For the nostalgic Hardy subject, however, this past or childhood home is often closed or else, as Julian Wolfreys notes, inhabited by an alien or spectral element that renders it ‘unheimlich’ (Wolfreys, 2009).

This chapter will explore the conceit of ‘home’ – in particular the lost childhood home – in a selection of Hardy’s poems; his first published essay ‘How I Built Myself a House’ (1865); The Woodlanders (1887); Jude the Obscure (1895) and the short story ‘The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion’ (1889–90). In each of these texts, ‘home’ can be seen to function as a signifier of yearning for an illusive plenitude that is permanently lost to the nostalgic adult, one in which desire is endlessly displaced. The corollary of this is the image of the house built, occupied or relinquished by the adult seeking to realise his or her desire for an actual and metaphysical dwelling for the self in the present.

In Hardy’s work, houses are revealed as structures of desire: temporary, contingent dwellings or ‘vital spaces’ that shelter but also constrain, subject as they are to the rules and signifying systems that dictate not only their shape and function in a particular place and time but also the nature and duration of the tenancy of their occupants. Homes, homesickness and homelessness function as plot devices and also as metaphors for ontological yearning and the desire for a lost sense of being-at-home that so many of Hardy’s modern subjects experience.

The son of a master mason and a builder, in the ‘old-established’ sense of a constructor of dwellings,³ Hardy trained and practiced as an architect from the age of 16 until his marriage to Emma Gifford at 34, after which he embarked on life as a professional author. He designed a number of dwellings including his own – Max Gate – in 1885, whilst also overseeing the ‘restoration’ of various religious edifices.⁴ Significant among these was the crumbling church of St Juliot in the parish of Boscastle where he met Emma Gifford, the woman who was to share that home with him after more than a decade of married life spent in temporary accommodation in and around Dorset and London. Throughout his career as a writer, Hardy was intellectually and personally intimate with the theory, practice and metaphorical significance of built space. He was an avid reader of Ruskin and Pater, turning to the former for his thoughts on architecture, church restoration and the art of Turner and taking from the latter a heightened interest in ‘the deeper reality’, and the imperative that drives the artist towards the perfect embodiment of idea in form.⁵ In common with both writers, Hardy establishes a close, metaphorical relationship between the house or home, the self, and that which is ‘other’ to it and from which the dwelling appears to offer shelter.

Hardy broke into publishing in 1865 with a humorous sketch in Chambers’ Journal entitled ‘How I built myself a house’ in which the narrator describes how he and his wife moved from an inconvenient dwelling in the suburbs of London: ‘the sort of house called a Highly-Desirable Semi-detached Villa’, to a residence of their own design and construction, which ‘was to be right and proper in every respect’ and ‘of some mysterious size and proportion, which would make us both peculiarly happy ever afterwards’ (PW: 159). Despite their determination to the contrary, the narrator and his wife find themselves at the mercy of architects, builders and surveyors to the point where their own house, when built, bears little or no resemblance to their original plans. Among other things, the house can be read here as a metaphor for the subject driven by the desire to establish and shape the appearance and function of its inhabited space but constrained and frustrated by the systems or signifying systems that bring it into being. The house offers the illusion of control and integrity necessary to the sense of self. The move to the ‘Highly-Desirable-Semi-detached Villa’ demonstrates the energy of desire as it impels the subject into new and more commodious modes of being. It signifies the subject’s place in the present and the past and also offers a model of the self within the constraints of the Other. It signifies ‘home’, and yet, it is something the subject feels the constant need to reassess and sometimes reject or escape from. This is particularly true when the subject is ‘dispossessed’ either by gender, class or national origin.

Hardy’s adult ‘habitations’ are provisional loci of being which offer substance and structure to mental constitution and disposition but which fail to satisfy the deeper yearning at the heart of the self. His work is suffused with ontological desire for the oneiric or remembered childhood home, which represents an imagined space that is unconstrained by a consciousness of cultural proscription, moral sanction and human suffering.⁶ Remembering or revisiting the childhood home becomes an impossible attempt to re-member, recall or re-collect the culturally innocent self that existed before ‘the birth of consciousness’⁷ An important exception to this is Jude Fawley, information on whose childhood home in or near Marygreen is withheld from the reader and whose sojourn at the home of his waspish and begrudging Aunt Drusilla (to which he moves at the age of ten) is defined by rejection and disappointment.⁸ It is hardly surprising then that Jude is Hardy’s most intensely alienated and self-alienated character.⁹ In adulthood, Jude, Sue and Tess Durbeyfield experience a modern rootlessness and homelessness, as they strive against the odds to develop new ways of dwelling and being in structures that long predate them. It is Sue Bridehead – Hardy’s most pessimistic presentation of the limited powers of the self under the constraints of history and patriarchy – who experiences most acutely the oppression of the ‘houses of the past’.

Hardy’s early poem ‘Domicilium’, composed sometime between 1857 and 1860, begins with a description of the narrator’s birthplace: the first house to be built in an isolated spot between wild uncultivated heath and a managed landscape of gardens and copse (Hynes, III: 279–80). The poem’s latinate title, however, is richly suggestive of something more profound than simple nostalgia for a childhood home first settled by the narrator’s paternal grandparents.¹⁰ Hardy chooses ‘Domicilium’, meaning ‘habitation’; the place of dwelling, or ‘abode’ rather than ‘Domus’: more specifically the house or building in which one dwells.¹¹ For Uli Knoepflmacher this early home represents a specifically female place of origin: ‘the voice of the grandmother that finishes the narrative undercuts the cultivation of the would-be-poet who has given the name “domicilium” to what she, far more simply, calls “our house” ’ (Knoepflmacher, 1990: 1057). However, the grandmother’s voice has no independent existence outside the narrator’s imagination, and the place is more than ‘simply’ ‘our house’. It represents the impossible desire to give material substance to both the place of origin and the place of being: in Lacanian terms the pre-linguistic jouissance that precedes individuation but to which the adult narrator can never return.

The opening words of the poem – ‘It faces west’ – delineate not a house but a space of dwelling defined by an immaterial ‘veil of boughs’. The ‘roof’ and ‘walls’ of the dwelling materialise only in the third and fourth lines and even then are swiftly displaced by the vigorous ‘Wild honeysucks’ that climb up and over them. The narrator makes at least three attempts to ‘settle’ this wild space in both the present and the past, each time failing effectively to colonise or even realise the dwelling itself in words. The perspective of roof and walls, shrouded and smothered by trees and shrubs, swiftly gives way to the untrained, flourishing garden of ‘hardy plants’, a field and distant cottages with trees, before being lost in the ‘distant hills and sky’. In the third stanza the narrator returns to the house a second time, only to move immediately ‘behind’ it in both space and time. Here ‘the scene is wilder’, solely composed of ‘heath and furze’ on unlevelled ground, some ‘stunted’ thorn trees and an oak sprung from a seed dropped by a bird a century before.

Uli Knoepflmacher notes how, at the exact mid-point of the poem, ‘Hardy’ turns to a female mediator, his paternal grandmother, to help him ‘explore his own origins’ (Knoepflmacher, 1990: 1057) and to return him to the ‘original maternal envelope’ (1056). However, this third attempt to settle the space of his origins is as much a failure as the first two. Not only does the grandmother take the child speaker away from the house, and ‘out to walk’, her gaze likewise moves beyond the house to the ‘uncultivated slopes’, the ‘narrow path shut in by ferns’ that leads away from it and the wild ponies on the hills. Even an act of ‘narrative transvestism’ (Osborne, 2008: 10) fails to grant the narrator access to what Knoepflmacher terms the ‘lost and obliterated […] heimisch […] maternal place’ (1056). Eschewing, for now, the gender essentialism and biographicalism of Knoepflmacher’s Cixousian reading of ‘Domicilium’, it is clear that the poem’s narrator remains outside and alienated from the desired homespace. The experience of the imagined child ‘in days bygone – / Long gone’ is subsumed in, and displaced by, the narrative of the imagined grandmother, which is itself placed back half a century: even before the child’s birth. Each attempt to approach and penetrate the interior of ‘our house’, through this ‘youthful discourse of desire’ (Knoepflmacher, 1990: 1058) – actually and metaphorically – further distances the narrator in spatial and temporal terms. Both grandmother and house are figurations that succeed only in dislocating the ontological desire they are deployed to satisfy. Neither manages to retain its presence in the face of the ‘Real’, symbolised here by encroaching nature: the ‘wilder heath’, the unreachable hills and unfathomable sky. If, as Lacan claims, the signifier is the subject’s way of achieving presence in desire (Lacan, 2006: 508) this presence is insinuated ‘against a background of absence, just as it constitutes absence in presence’ (496–7). Indeed, human presence is barely insinuated in ‘Domicilium’ except perhaps in the invitation to the reader to conspire in the fanciful anthropomorphising of the trees and plants, which ‘seem to sprout a wish / (If we may fancy wish of trees and plants) / To overtop the apple-trees hard by’, and even here it is placed in parenthesis. The fancied ‘passer-by’ on the ‘narrow path’ is obscured by ferns: precursors of the ‘tall firs / And beeches’ that now obscure the house. In addition, the narrator is twice dispossessed of the imagined grandmother in her own right. Not only is she introduced as ‘my father’s mother’, she is also, now ‘Blest with the blest’.

The bedrooms, are entered vicariously through a ‘child’ narrator conceived in the imagination of the remembered grandmother, who sees there not her younger self and her siblings but only snakes, efts and bats, and heathcroppers who formed ‘our only friends’. Four generations of the narrator’s family have failed wholly to ‘settle’ the wild otherness in which they seek to build a homespace. The precarious yet impermeable space of primal desire – the ‘domicilium’ – shapes itself in what Lacan calls ‘a synchrony of signifiers’ that comes together in a space of ‘subornation’ or unlawful bribery (Lacan, 2006: 495). The subject is subordinated to, bribed by, the signifier (the childhood home), which offers itself as a means of filling or colonising the fundamental space at the heart of being, only to lead away from its interior and on along the endless chain of further signification to the ‘heath’, ‘and last / The distant hills and sky’.

Julian Wolfreys notes how the poem’s latinate title ‘marks and remarks itself with distancing irony, historical anachrony and untranslatability (the loss, or breakdown, of communication)’. There is ‘something foreign’ at the heart of home, something ‘always unassimilable, irrecuperable, and other’. ‘ “Domicilium”: ‘a title in another’s tongue remains on the page as a boundary resistant to domestication, as well as a threshold one will never cross’ (Wolfreys, 2009: 6).¹² We might also note how the voice of the narrator’s long-dead paternal grandmother registers the impossibility of ever returning to the original, simple, ‘wild’ place of origin, for ‘change has marked the face of all things’. The familiar lineaments of home are challenged and redrawn by the imagined grandmother’s reminiscences which disrupt and displace the narrator’s experience of the place. The lost childhood home offers a fragile and finally intangible refuge from the unregulated potentiality of the Real which threatens the constitution of the self in the regulated world in which it seeks recognition.¹³

A companion poem to ‘Domicilium’ is ‘The Self-Unseeing’ in which the narrator ‘revisits’ a past dwelling either in reality or in the imagination, and conjures up a vision or memory of the inhabitants of the old homestead.¹⁴

Here is the ancient floor,

Footworn and hollowed and thin,

Here was the former door

Where the dead feet walked in.

She sat here in her chair,

Smiling into the fire;

He who played stood there,

Bowing it higher and higher.

Childlike, I danced in a dream;

Blessings emblazoned that day;

Everything glowed with a gleam;

Yet we were looking away!

(Hynes, I: 206)

Whilst the poem is open to a biographical reading,¹⁵ and one in which the revisited house is a material entity, it can also be read as another figuration of nostalgic, ontological desire. No walls are specified for this homestead. The ‘ancient floor’ suggests that of an actual dwelling, or the outlines or floor plan of one now demolished or merely imagined, which seems to offer the narrator a base or stage for the imagined dancing child-self. Access to, or through, this ‘dwelling’ is gained by means of a ‘former door’: one which no longer exists – except in memory – and which allows only the ‘dead feet’ to walk in.¹⁶ This line suggests that access to this past moment, and all it signifies in the present, is denied to the narrator. The woman who ‘sat here in her chair’ and the violin-playing man who ‘stood there’ are spectral presences. They do not acknowledge, or ‘see’ the ‘self’ who narrates the poem who, though inside the boundary of the house, remains outside this self-enclosed and self-sufficient figuration of the past and, indeed, outside and unacknowledged by his own spectral ‘childlike’ dancing other. The undefined walls of the dwelling and the ghostly door leave open the speculation that the ‘here’ and ‘there’ – which seem to give it a material presence – like the woman, the man and the dancing child, function only in the narrator’s memory or imagination.

The ‘Self-Unseeing’ of the title includes in its compass the smiling woman and the violin-playing man, enfolded with the child in this brief moment of domestic harmony, all of whom ‘unsee’, in the sense of looking away from or failing to take due note of its ‘gleam’ of significance at the time. The word ‘gleam’ is suggestive here of both the faintness and brevity of the moment of wholeness. It also suggests the transfigurative power of art: its ability to bring forth new manifestations of desire into the realm of knowledge. In 1877, early in his writing career, Hardy wrote: ‘I think the art lies in making [Nature’s] defects the basis of a hitherto unperceived beauty, by irradiating them with “the light that never was” on their surface, but is seen to be latent in them by the spiritual eye’ (LW, 1989: 118). The ‘gleam’, then, represents ‘the light that never was’, but which becomes apparent later to the ‘spiritual eye’, or the imagination, of the artis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction – Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self
• 1. House and Home: Nostalgic Desire and the Locus of Being
• 2. Desire, Female Amity and Sapphic Space
• 3. Sexual Desire and the Lure of the Erotic
• 4. Poor Men and Ladies: Aspirational Desire
• 5. As You Like It: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Expression of Desire
• 6. Art, Aesthetics and Masculine Desire: The Well-Beloved (1897)
• 7. ‘Scanned Across the Dark Space’: Poetry, Desire and Aesthetic Fulfilment
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index