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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).