Triangulated Passions: Love, Self-Love, and the Other in Thomas Hardy's the Well-Beloved
2002; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-1512
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
Resumo... but when I try to imagine faultless love Or life to come, what I hear is murmur Of underground streams, what I see is limestone landscape. W. H. Auden W. H. Auden's poem In Praise of faultless love reminds poet of seamless limestone landscape. Hardy's The Well-Beloved (1897), faultless love is vanishing ideal, and landscape of marble, metamorphic form of limestone, unveils connection between erotic and creative aspects of desire. Limestone, produced from conjugal melding of micro-organisms with calcium from shells, has its origins in beds of ancient oceans. The Well-Beloved, Jocelyn Pierston's birthplace is an island forged by nature from a solid and single block of limestone four miles long, where, as Hardy notes, Fancies ... seem to grow up naturally (9, 3). (1) The island emerges from creative process and brings forth the form of Pierston sculptor, whose first use of chisel that rock had instigated (139). (2) The island is itself natural work of art from which Pierston inherits artistic imagination that crystallizes his perception of feminine ideal and the peculiar characteristic of [its] always seeming same despite passage of (Ryan 182). Avice III underscores connection between Pierston and island from which he is carved when she visualizes him as a strange fossilized relic in human form, and narrator reinforces Jocelyn's kinship with island when he compares him to stone in purling brook (167, 58). (3) same way that accumulation of fossilized shells brought forth new limestone structures over time, the elusive idealization that artist his Love ... flitted from human shell to human shell, each time forging new configurations of feminine ideal (13). As this language of shells suggests, The Well-Beloved (1897) explores fully Hardy's morbid fascination with necrophilic love. (4) This fantastic little tale, as Hardy called The Well-Beloved, provides bizarre variation on Continental love triangle (Hardy, Life 304) and may have provided Hardy with literary forum in which to acknowledge what Michael Millgate calls a growing discrepancy between his increasing age and his undiminished-or even reawakened- sexual susceptibility, freeing novelist to examine lifelong love affair with his own feminine ideal--Tryphena Sparks (330). (5) As Hardy himself wrote, No man loves woman--only his dream (Literary 143). novel, first preconceived, though unvisualized, female ideal and then necrophilic love image shape Pierston's yearning for three generations of women from single family--Avice I, II, and III. first configuration of triangulated desire, disembodied female ideal stimulates Pierston's subjective desire, for he seeks to discover his feminine ideal incarnated in woman. From start, however, this female image becomes model and rival, as various real women unknowingly compete with his conceptual ideal. The idea of well-beloved' also creates rivalry within Pierston's psyche: lover in search of feminized perfection competes against his own artistic self; it is artist who can and does create ideal only in marmorial works of art. The manifestations of desire in Hardy's The Well-Beloved are triangulated. (6) Periodically disrupted, intersubjective, linear relationships generate patterns of action, reaction, and interaction amongst players. (7) The result of these momentary passionate interludes is narrative in which protagonist must continue repetition if passion is to be sustained. Hardy's novel, perfected image Jocelyn Pierston creates of his love of and for Avice I shapes his love for her daughter Avice II and granddaughter Avice III. His love for them is, in fact, wholly dependent upon vitalizing power of their remembered predecessor; and since, in sense, beloved is both present and absent, patterns of desire repeat themselves indefinitely because, while Avice II and III are living representative[s] of dead Avice I (99), they are not, and can never be, Avice I. …
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