Objects or Subjects? Pictoriality and Domesticity in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

In his entry for 1 July 1892, Hardy notes: “The art of observation […] consists in this: the seeing of great things in little things, the whole in the part – even the infinitesimal part.” His novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles stages the heroine’s struggle to comply with the Victorian ideal of feminine morality, as she strives for redemption after her initial “downfall”. One of the key features of that ideal was domesticity, embodied in the figure of the Angel in the House – a figure which Tess is desperately trying to impersonate throughout the novel. In that sense, the presence of household objects in Tess could be read as the presence of “little things”, insignificant details, hinting at “greater things” – that is, the struggle for domesticity. Yet the proliferation of objects leads the reader to see them also as a part of the aesthetic aspirations of the novel, which is fraught with pictorial reminiscences, such as genre paintings or still-lifes, in which objects play a key role, to the extent of sometimes becoming the sole subject of the picture. This study aims at exploring the way Hardy questions the frontier between subject and object by blurring the characteristics of animate and inanimate, the two being united in the motionless world of painting. Hardy’s novel leads one to wonder whether the way he lends a voice to what is ordinary, sometimes barely noticeable and perhaps almost insignificant, necessarily implies a reification of the human figures. In a word, can the object be a subject?