The eye turns involuntarily

Notes on Hardy's Tess

There's a lot of watching and being watched in the opening chapters of Tess.

The narrator opens chapter II by minutely looking over the Vale of Blakemoor and then gradually telescoping downward. His is a view from a lofty, God-like perch looking over the valley that is Tess's home. Although 'he' claims that "It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the summit of the hills that surround it,"(12), it soon moves down and toward the human.

It would seem to be a masculine gaze focusing on the female. Even before the narrator's eye settles its focus upon women, it reads the landscape as female. Here as in other places in the novel, Hardy establishes a connection between landscape and the girl are one. The adjectives applied to the landscape could as easily be applied to the narrator's unfolding conception of Tess. The Vale of Blakemore is secluded, engirdled, untrodden(12); in it, "the fields are never brown and the springs are never dry"(12); like Tess, it "is of historic, no less than topographic interest"(12).

Eventually, the narrator's eye finds the women coming out for the Ceralia and among those, focuses on the younger ones "under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm"(14). This is an invasive eye. Although nobody seems to be about but him, the narrator notes the difficulty with which the young girls manage to "dissociate self-consciousness from their features" and tells us "they were genuine country girls, unaccustomed to many eyes"(14). It would apparently be his eye causing their discomfort. Other than the Ceralia participants, there is nobody about at the outset of the event. His self-confessed artist's eye comes to land on Tess: "To almost everybody, she was a fine and picturesque country girl, and no more," but he is among the discriminating few who "would look long at her in casually passing by, and grow momentarily fascinated by her freshness" (16). He ends up staring. Mesmerized, or so he would have it.

A similar vision opens chapter XIV. The godlike perspective of the narrator's vision is made explicit here. The passage begins with the description of an August morning over which the sun's God-like gaze rests. Like the sun's metaphoric gaze, as in chapter two, the narrator gaze is intent and voyeuristic. It looks at it's object without the consent or knowledge of the object. Here as at the opening of chapter II, it objectifies and excuses its concentration: looking at the young women reaping at the opening of chapter XIV, it claims to turn "involuntarily to the girl in the pink jacket, she being the most flexuous and finely-drawn of them all"(88). The narrator's gaze is sexual: Tess's "embrace" of a corn sheaf is "that of a lover;" it focuses on that "bit of her naked arm....visible between the buff leather of the gauntlet and the sleeve of her gown. It is also an artists: the naked bit of arm becomes "feminine smoothness" that is invariably "scarified by the stubble, and bleeds"(88). Hardy's gaze reduces the whole of a rural landscape, first to a woman reaping, then to just a bit of that woman, ultimately rendering her into an image for the central trope of the book: edenic feminity and its inevitable destruction in a blighted world.

Hardy's gaze is ostensibly in the service of 'saving' Tess. It sees beyond the surface and the material. It is recording a history with the intent of presenting her to the world as an instance of what the book's subtitle argues is "a pure woman." Yet, it often bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Alec's gaze. Like the narrator, Alec's eye goes where it wills; "there was a singular force in the gentleman's face, and in his bold rolling eye"(40). While Hardy literally establishes his position in relation to her by often viewing her from a height, Alec affects a more figurative mastery. Accompanying her about the yard on their first meeting, he at first puts food into her hand but ends by insisting on feeding her with his own hand, like a baby or a helpless farm animal. She is his art object and he is the artist that carefully controls it. During their walk, he opens by handing her flowers and directing her where to put them and "when she could affix no more he himself tucked a bud or two into her hat"(40). And, as the narrator does throughout the novel,Alec routinely looks at Tess without her knowledge. On their first meeting, during lunch, he "watched her pretty and unconscious munching through the skein of smmoke that pervaded the tent"(42). Throughout the novel, he is always watching her from behind a hedge or a corner or the draperies of his mother's bed.

When Tess eventually leaves Blakemore to take up residence in the Vale of Little Dairies, "the sense of being amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes upon her, sent up her spirits wonderfully"(103). The invidious eyes referred to are presumably Alec's?

In observing and describing Tess, the narrator often mentions what would seem two contradictory aspects of her bearing: her unconsciousness and modesty. Her modesty causes Angel to all but misses her till the end of their first encounter: "She was so modest, so expressive, she had looked so soft"(18). She is not woven into the social world with it's measuring eyes, and when she dances, she "enjoyed dancing a measure purely for it's own sake"(19). Ironically, far from drawing attention away, Tess's modesty draws it: "she seduces casual attention in that she never courts it"(88).

It is an unconsciousness on her part that seemingly compells attention. Thus, in the lunch scene cited above, she "unconsciously munches" and Alec watches mesmerized. Likewise, after being decorated by Alec on their first meeting, she rides home in a carriage with other passengers "with an inward and not an outward eye"(44). When someone finally tells her "you be quite a posy...Then she became aware of the spectacle she presented to their site".

I return to the narrator's observation of Tess and the girls in the Ceralia. According to the narrator, these girls experience "a difficulty of arranging their lips in this crude exposure to public scrutiny" and their "self-consciousness...showed that they were genuine country girls, unaccustomed to many eyes"(14). What draws eyes is an unconsciousness that promises a genuine or natural self. Yet, this eye inevitably would seem to "corrupt" that genuine expression to the extent it's dependent on the object's unconsciousness.