Angel's Gaze

Notes on Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles"


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?

Love and distance: further thoughts on Josephine Humphrey's "Rich In Love"

In The Lost, a chronicle of his search for relatives lost in the Holocaust, the writer Daniel Mendelsohn argues

"Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your pain or envy or, perhaps more than anything, your shame, who, at the crucial moment, can be too easy to cut out, to exile, to expel, to kill off."(130-131)

Lucy Odoms, the heroine of Josephine Humphrey's Rich In Love, claims to be rich in love; when her brother-in-law Billy McQueen tells her "You have a lot of love," she readily agrees, thinking to herself "that was me. That was the me"(160).

Lucy professes to love a lot of things. However, her love seems rather general and diffuse. Seconding Mendelsohn's point, her love might be attributed to the distance Lucy attempts to maintain between herself and the world. She doesn't admit to seeking distance. Instead, she speaks of her attachment to panoramic views and the therapeutic perspective they afford.

Her father shares her feelings on this matter. A demolition man who claims he can tell how a building will collapse from standing on its roof, he recalls a religious experience he had standing on the roof of a condemned hotel in Columbia, South Carolina, prior to its demolition. From this vantage, "he felt queerly lifted from his own life into a clan and qiet myth"(81).Later, together with his daughter on the roof of their house, he tells her "from above, the world looks, well gorgeous. The higher you go, the better it looks" (84).

Lucy's ex-boyfriend Wayne points out that she is "happy as long as [she] can see at least three hundred yards. That's when you're at your best. I think you're afraid something is going to sneak up on you"(138). Lucy argues for "the human need for vista," and confesses "without it, I am in danger of losing myself behind my own eyes...A person has to now and then break out of the head and heart, places that cannot over any length of time, support life"(132-133).

Proximity clouds one's view. However, when she suddenly grows close, literally and figuratively, to her brother-in-law Billy McQueen, her clouded vision of him plays a part in her falling in love with him. Sitting on the pier with him, she admits to having once suspected that he "had gotten Rae pregnant on purpose in order to marry her. But suddenly I could see that he was not that sort of person. I saw it only now because I had not been close enough to him before"(154). Of course, in this scene, "his face two feet from [hers] in the moonlight," Lucy is falling in love with Billy. Shortly, he will "recognize" her being rich in love. Of course, Lucy later discovers that Billy did indeed get Rae pregnant on purpose.

And, also, I think we discover that far from being rich in love, Lucy is scared of love. Love is a cloud that impairs vision and knowledge. She grows so blind, she isn't able to 'see' her she's grown blind. In the past, she's recoiled from intimacy with Wayne; in the past, when they grew close, "the feeling that I called 'blinders' assailed me, and I had to get free"(161). Shortly after falling in love with Billy, she meets Wayne again and they begin to make love. Lucy claims that "'blinders' did not come"(161). Yet, she never really sees Wayne during the course of their love-making. Instead, she's wrapped up, however unconsciously, in a vision of Billy while making love to Wayne. Reversing the sleeping beauty motif, love lulls her to sleep, and, asleep in love, she begins to dream away rather than live her life.

So, proximity might bring about awareness and antipathy. Yet, it might also bring about a clouding of vision. This clouding of vision may bring about love. This in turn may induce dreams and a further clouding of vision.

Alice Munro's short-story Face

The unnamed narrator of Alice Munro's story "Face" is born with a birthmark covering almost the entirety of one side of his face. According to the narrator, who in turn is relying a great deal on his mother's account of these matters, this causes his father to reject him. His father takes one look at him in the hospital nursery and tells his mother "What a chunk of chopped liver" and threatens "You don't need to think you're going to bring that into the house"(New Yorker, September 8, 2008, p.59).

The boy actually grows up in this house for nine years, living in proximity to a father whose "most vivid quality was a capacity for hating and despising"(59). He internalizes a warped view of himself, remarking at one point, "Of course, a production like myself was an insult that he had to face every time he opened his own door"(59). Accordingly, he and his mother go out of their way to keep the fact of his face hidden, not only by keeping the boy out of the way of the father, but also by keeping the fact of his face hidden from the boy. On one level, this is done by strategic placing of mirrors. On another, it's done by keeping the boy hidden from the world at large. All for his good, or so the boy believed and the man remembering does as well. He's to be seen but not too clearly. Gradually, he loses sight of what he looks like; he minimizes the mark on his face, believing "that half my face was a dull, mild sort of color, almost mousy, a furry shadow"(64).

Of course, as the story argues, love is based on sight. Whether it originates in the physical or finds a home there, it is dependent on the body.

The little boy in the story longs to be loved. His mother can't. She's dependent on him. The fact of his face serves her as an explanation of why her marriage has failed; she's failed to produce an acceptable son to the father. She binds with the child as his self-sacrificing protector. As the son recalls, "She had been devoted to me-not a word either of us would have used, but I think the right one-till I was nine"(60). On his side, he remains loyal, defending her decisions when he can, pleading ignorance of her motives when he can't.

Seeking love, the little boy develops crushes on various older women he happens to come across. However, when he's about four, he develops a friendship with a little girl about his age, Nancy, who lives with her mother in a gardener's cottage on the grounds of his home. In reality, this is proves to be a childhood love of sorts. Living in an isolated area, estranged from parental figures, the two children develop a love between them that proves profound. Although she clearly proves to be the love of his life, The narrator can't bring himself to call her this; instead, he's almost erased her but for a single incident with her that he refers to as "the Great Drama" of my life.

The narrator hedges and evades on the way to remembering this great drama, admitting during one such digression, "how I circle and dither around this subject," (61) yet gradually recalls an afternoon when both are eight years old and exploring in the cellar. They discover some old jars of paint and brushes with badly stiffened bristles. Loosening up an old brush with turpentine, the boy begins to write on the wall with paint. The little girl "had her back to me ad was wielding the paintbrush on herself"(63). Using a loud red paint, she's painting her face to match his face. She's "overjoyed, as if she had managed something magical"(64)and asks "Now do I look like you?"(63).

The little boy is horrified. He feels this as an insult. He wishes to be loved. But this means either not seeing him, or, only seeing him as he's come to see himself. The little girl's come to love him fully. She's come to love his birthmark. Her seeing it forces him to confront something he wishes forgotten. Loving him wholly, and as a body, she loves a part of himself he can't face.

This is a strange and heartbreaking story. It is most remarkable for it's form. Although it is a horrifying tale, it is told in a conversational style. We witness a man in the process of remembering a significant event, the one love of his life. Munro skillfully sketches a man's memory as it struggles and moves by indirection to an event he can neither bear to remember or forget.