The Medusean Eye in Thomas Hardy
The eye in Thomas Hardy’s fiction is often felt as a menace, like the “oval pond” in Far from the Madding Crowd, glittering “like a dead man’s eye”. The unblinking eye can be an “evil eye”, full of voracity, endowed with a Medusean power, the power to petrify or to kill. Indeed eyes do kill in Hardy...
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| Publicat a: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/fathom, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
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FATHOM
2018
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| Accés en línia: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumari: | The eye in Thomas Hardy’s fiction is often felt as a menace, like the “oval pond” in Far from the Madding Crowd, glittering “like a dead man’s eye”. The unblinking eye can be an “evil eye”, full of voracity, endowed with a Medusean power, the power to petrify or to kill. Indeed eyes do kill in Hardy’s stories: Mrs Yeobright is killed by the “bad sight” of her daughter-in-law looking at her from a window and not opening the door – the “small black eye” of the live adder later regarding her being a duplicate of Eustacia’s “ill-wishing” dark eyes. At what point does the gaze, which normally makes manifest the “positive, dynamic and productive dimension of desire” (Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy and Desire: Conceptions of the Self, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, back cover) turn Medusean? Jacques Lacan’s concept of the unspecularizable “object-gaze” will help us to understand this, and throw a new light on the fictional use which Hardy made of “the evil eye” – a superstition known in Dorset as “overlooking”. |
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