Abstract
In a number of characteristic poems Hardy deploys the image of the window in a mode which serves to explore the notion of the threshold and ways in which the window-pane may be construed as suspending or pausing narrative, leading to immobility and entrapment, and thereby problematising issues of space and time, identity and alterity. In these texts the window separates inside/outside whilst simultaneously connecting them, converting presence into absence, distance into proximity, with the result that, as Maurice Blanchot suggests,
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, tr. E. Haldane and G. Ross (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), 155.
- 2.
Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence, tr. L. Davis (New York: Station Hill Press, 1978), 43.
- 3.
Elaine Scarry, Resisting Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 49.
- 4.
Jane Rendell, ‘Thresholds, Passages and Surfaces’, in The Optic of Walter Benjamin, ed. A. Coles (London: Black Dog, 1999), 182.
- 5.
Sheila Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 72.
- 6.
David Michael Levin, The Philosopher’s Gaze (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1999), 43, 51.
- 7.
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 151.
- 8.
Otto Bollnow, Human Space, tr. C. Shuttleworth (London: Hyphen Press, 2011), 151, 152, 154.
- 9.
Ranciere, ‘The Truth’, 151.
- 10.
Ibid., 151.
- 11.
Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, ed. J. Gibson (London: Macmillan, 1976), 315–17. Subsequently cited as CP.
- 12.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, tr. B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 172.
- 13.
The poem appears to refer to an incident in Cornwall when during their courtship Hardy and Emma Gifford passed the home of her former suitor, William Sergeant, who was dying of TB.
- 14.
John Hughes, The Expression of Things (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2018), 101.
- 15.
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, tr. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 156.
- 16.
Ibid., 206, 200.
- 17.
Ibid., 195, 198.
- 18.
Ibid., 75.
- 19.
The Philosopher’s Gaze, 280.
- 20.
Thomas Keegan, ‘Windows: Of Vulnerability’, in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. B. Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 127.
- 21.
Sheila Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 66.
- 22.
Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Desire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 41.
- 23.
Cited in Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), 76.
- 24.
Ibid., 94. See also Carolyn Burdett, ‘The New Woman’, in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. P. Mallett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 363–73.
- 25.
Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, 1985), 58.
- 26.
Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 231.
- 27.
Ibid., 270.
- 28.
Paul Zietlow, Moments of Vision (Cambridge MA.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 211.
- 29.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 386.
- 30.
The Return of the Native, ed. S. Gatrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 271.
- 31.
Ellen Anne Lanzano, Hardy: The Temporal Poetics (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 113, 114.
- 32.
Annie Ramel, ‘The Medusean Eye in Thomas Hardy’, The Thomas Hardy Review XIX, ii (2017), 79, 84.
- 33.
Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Desire, 171, 172.
- 34.
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, tr. A. Smock (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 172.
- 35.
Louisa Hall, ‘An Alternative to the Architectural Elegy’, Victorian Poetry 50(2), (2012), 208.
- 36.
Ibid., 210, 213.
- 37.
Ibid., 224.
- 38.
Georg Simmel, ‘Bridge and Door’, in Simmel on Culture, ed. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 173.
- 39.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, tr. H. Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), 84.
- 40.
Trudi Tate, ed., Women, Men and the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 4,6.
- 41.
Berger, Thomas Hardy and Visual Structures, 139.
- 42.
Hilary Thompson, ‘Time and its Countermeasures’, in Modernism and Theory, ed. S. Ross (London: Routledge, 2009), 96.
- 43.
Jacques Derrrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, tr. C. Lindsay (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 58.
- 44.
Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (London: Verso, 1998), 104.
- 45.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Complete French Poems, tr. A. Poulin (St Paul: Graywolf Press, 2002), 25, 35.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ebbatson, R. (2024). ‘The Face at the Casement’: Window Patterns in Hardy’s Poetry. In: Perception, Class and Environment in the Works of Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40110-7_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-40109-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-40110-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)