Like Alec and the narrator, Angel is a watcher. He is at many points in the novel positioned at a distance, as an observer. At Talbothays, he lives in the attic and sits apart at meals. In either spot, his figurative position above is mirrored by his literal position.
Tess continually discovers herself being watched by Angel. On the day when he first closely observes Tess during a meal, "owing to his long silence, his presence in the room was almost forgotten"(119). So forgotten, Clare stares at her as she speaks of the ways she escapes her body. Lost in his gaze, Angel ends up reducing Tess through abstraction; he ends up defining/praising her as a "genuine daughter of nature."
In part, this speaks to the fact that Tess is here speaking and acting without a sense of self-consciousness, with a freedom and honesty that society normally precludes. The irony is that while her honesty attracts Angel's gaze, his gaze quickly restrains Tess's honesty. Growing conscious of his gaze, she begins to feel "the constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched"(120).
In observing her unawares, Angel often converts Tess into an object, a piece of art. Thus, on the warm July afternoon, Angel chances upon her milking Old Pretty out in a far mead, and "the sun chancing upon the milking-side it shone flat upon her pink gowned form, and her white bonnet, and her white-curtain bonnet, and upon her profile, rendering it dazzlingly keen as a cameo"(150). In this scene, his vision renders her a picture and rather than interacting with her, he ends up studying her.
Many times, his observation has an intrusive quality. Upon returning from his visit home, Angel comes upon her at the top of the stairs at the dairy; "She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence...she was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth, as if it had been a snakes"(169). The last touch in that description once again hearkens back to Tess as an Eve figure, this time a fallen one. Likewise, Angel's gaze seems intrusive in the episode in the far mead referred to above, where he watches her unawares and observes her milking Old Pretty as "in a trance, her eyes open, yet unseeing"(150).
These episodes of Angel observing/defining Tess seem to share elements with similar episodes involving the narrator and Alec. As with these other watchers, Angel derives pleasure in watching her whiles she's not aware. This renders his gaze invasive. Like Alec's and the narrator's, Angel's gaze often reduces her. Sometimes it reduces by abstraction. At other times, it reduces her to body parts. Thus, the scene where Angel stares at Tess while she milks Old Pretty. In this scene, she's no longer the "visionary essence of woman"(130). Instead, she becomes simply a part. In this instance, Angel's gaze gradually telescopes in, and begins by focusing on her face, before gradually moving to her mouth, and ultimately resting on "her top lip" which he finds "distracting, infatuating, maddening"(151). His gaze ultimately compels him him to thoughtlessly embrace Tess, "the desire of his eyes"(151).
Yet, Angel's gaze doesn't seem quite as threatening somehow. Unlike with the narrator and Alec, Angel too is subject to gaze. Izz, Retty and Marian spend a great deal of time observing him without his knowledge. And, while he stares at Tess unawares, she also does the same. Thus, "He would sometimes catch her large, worshipful eyes...looking at him...as if she saw something immortal before her"(192).
Moreover, the primary object of his gaze seems to acquire some power once she escapes her home and moves to the Vale of Little Dairies. There, Tess becomes a subject, or at least a co-participant, of gaze. From the moment she enters her new home, Tess is give/finds a new outlook. From the summits ringing the vale, she quite consciously looks down and reflects upon what will be her new home. Unlike other trips where she's crossed summits without note, her trip to the Vale of Little Dairies is different. After a somewhat arduous journey, she "found herself on a summit commanding the long-sought-for vale"(102) which gives her a "bird's-eye perspective"(103). In the Var Vale, she shows herself to be a woman with powers, who looks out, observes, and acts upon the world.
In fact, at certain points, Hardy comes close to picturing Tess as a victimizer and Angel as an almost otherworldly child. Shortly after marrying Angel, Tess grows spooked by the carriage in which they are to leave the church. Angel attributes her qualms to the fact that "a certain D'Urberville of the sixteenth or seventeenth century committed a dreadful crime in his family coach"(214). Similarly, during their first supper alone, Hardy writes "such was their childishness, or rather his, that he found it interesting to use the same bread-and-butter plate as herself.
Angel never comes across as powerful. In fact, we learn that Angel has been victimized by a woman himself. In his youth, Alec "went to London to see what the world was like." In the big city, Angel "was carried off his head, and nearly entrapped by a woman much older than himself"(116). Thus, Angel comes to Talbothays "as to a place from which as from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world without"(153).
While he comes to Talbothays looking for a perch from which he might in a detached fashion study a world that threatens by "absorbing"(153). However, once there, his environment rather surreptitiously acts upon him, furnishing him with a new perspective: "he recognized his power of viewing life here from its inner side"(168). Angel is transformed by the environment and folks he observes. Ultimately, in contrast to Alec, Angel's observation of the world is not simply the prelude to his manipulation of it. While he may look at the world in hopes of altering it, his observation simultaneously alters him
Ultimately, what separates Angel is a power of sympathy born of his ability to transcend himself. While he observes from distance, studying those around him, in doing so, he frees himself from himself. He's as capable of studying, knowing and handling himself as he is capable of studying, knowing and handling others. While pursuing her, at one point:
her determined negative deterred his scrupulous heart. Their condition of domiciliary comradeship put her, as the woman, to such disadvantage by its enforced intercourse, that he felt it unfair to her to exercise any pressure of blandishment which he might have honestly employed had she been better able to avoid him.181
Even better, Angel attains true sympathy to the extent he realizes he can't achieve a perfect sympathy: he will never fully feel and know a woman's perspective. Shortly after marrying her, "looking at her silently for a long time....he thought to himself...'Do I realize solemnly enough how utterly and irretrievably this little womanly thing is the creature of my good or bad faith and fortune? I think not. I think I could not, unless I were a woman myself"(217-218).
The narrator never allows Tess to have a perspective on Angel that outstrips his own perception of the man. Before Clare, Tess "had not know that men could be so disinterested, chivalrous, protective, in their love for women as he"(192). At this point, the narrator corrects Tess's perception and, perhaps because he believes Tess incapable of shrewd observations, in a paternalistic fashion adds a few observations of his own. Despite the frame, one observation seems to highlight Angel's particular strength: "his love...was an emotion which could jealously guard the loved one against his very self"(192-193).
His ability to selflessly sympathize leads him to act very differently than Alec. He has the same privileges, but his scrupulous heart, his powers of sympathy, thought, and self-control make him a very different man. Or, so it would seem till events put him to the test. He seems to promise so much. If anybody would seem suited to handle Tess's secret, it would seem to be Angel. And, yet, he can't, at least not initially, and given his qualities, his failure to sympathize at a crucial moment seems all the more damning. If he could see Tess's perspective as a woman prior to learning her secret, why can't he see her perspective and understand her past?
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